View from World Headquarters for the Next Month
Camogli is a seaside town in Liguria, just south of Genoa. In fact it is part of Genoa, as is Portofino which is on the other aide of the Peninsula. It is filled with Italians, some local, some tourists. The buildings are in the trompe l'oeil stlyle, French for fooling the eye, with shutters and other features painted on.
People drive two hours from Milan to have lunch or dinner here, then drive home. It is unpretentious and warm, 17, on a day when it is minus six back home in Knowlton. There is a train station a 10 minute walk from our apartment that connects to cities and towns all over northern Italy. For example, Pisa is an hour and half away. Italian trains are dirt cheap. For example, it is four Euros and seven minutes to Santa Margherita and a healthy walk to Portofino.
Housing Wishes or The World Owes Me A Living.
This week both the left and the right companied that the federal government did nothing for housing in its latest budget. The right of centre National Post said the budget ignores the housing crisis. You might think that in a conservative newspaper, housing prices, and rents, might be seen as something driven by the market.
The federal government has some new savings plans but it doesn’t set interest rates and it didn't create the boom in housing prices. Canada has some of the most over-priced housing in the rich world. It is hard to build in low rise neighbourhoods.
On the left of centre CBC, a reporter on a panel moaned that his generation could never afford a house. Boo-hoo. He probably makes $100,000 a year and if he lives with another earner they should be able to eke out a down payment. Sitting at the other end of the panel was the former mayor of Calgary. It is municipal governments, not national governments, that make housing expensive by restrictive zoning laws. The CBC man could have asked the mayor a question, but the mayor was too busy dumping on an enemy of his, the right of centre woman premier of Alberta.
Housing prices have actually fallen of late, though still high. The CBC man could take a job in Sudbury, Saskatoon or Saint John. He might not get asked on panels though.
World Inflation
Why Greta Thunberg Should Like This Picture
Because without this, the world’s largest copper mine in Chile there is no this:
A solar farm in Sweden. It needs a lot of copper.
Copper is as important an element as Lithium for the electrification of the world. Goldman Sachs has a chart on how much copper is needed for a green world.
Canada’s Liberal government paints itself as hyper green. But early in its tenure, Justin Trudeau’s government declared a new national park to block a proposed copper mine. Citified greenies don’t like mines but they do like solar and wind. In theory.
Where Green Tech is Made
Almost nothing in Canada. And Zip in wind and solar. Talk, talk, talk.
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Dutch Flowers
Holland is the most densely populated country in Europe. Its 17.5-million people are squeezed into 41,850 square kilometres, a little smaller than the Canadian province of Nova Scotia. But The Netherlands is the world’s largest exporter of cut flowers. Where, you ask, do they find the space.
Essay of the Week
Neil Shaw was the Canadian outsider who ran the British firm, Tate & Lyle, the largest sugar company in the world when he was in charge. When he took over in 1980 Tate & Lyle was worth 60 million pounds; when he left 15 years later it was worth two-billion pounds.
For his work with the company and charities in Britain, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth in 1994, one of the last Canadians to receive a knighthood or other British honour after former prime minister Jean Chretien advised that Canadian citizens should not be given British honours.
His eldest son, David Shaw, says his father was successful because he was curious and he connected with people.
“He had no problem engaging with you regardless of walk of life. When you were talking to my father it was like you were the only person in the room. You got his undivided attention and it was his curiosity wanting to know what you were going to do.”
Neil Shaw, who has died at 93 after a long illness, was born in Montreal in 1929. His father, Major Leroy Shaw, was the general manager of the Travelers Insurance company. His mother, Fabiola McGowan, was a francophone in spite of her English name — a mixture of Irish and French, not uncommon in Quebec because of the shared Catholic religion. She made sure her children learned French.
“I was very fortunate because so many of my friends who grew up in Westmount don’t speak French. It has been one of my greatest assets. Particularly in Europe, I get great value out of my French,” Shaw said in a biographical sketch recorded later in his life.
Young Neil lived an upper-middle-class existence, attending Lower Canada College, a private school in Montreal. But when he was eleven years old, life changed dramatically for the family when Major Shaw became ill and had to leave the city. The family sold their house in Montreal, their country house at the Hermitage Club near Magog, Quebec, and moved to the village of Knowlton in the Eastern Townships. At first, they lived in the Lakeview Hotel, then moved to a modest house near the public school, Knowlton Academy, which was both a grade school and a high school at the time. To help make ends meet, two schoolteachers boarded in the upstairs bedrooms of the house.
Mrs. Shaw was known by the nickname Grand-mere in the family and to Neil’s friends in Knowlton.
Though life in Knowlton was a comedown for the Shaw family, Neil adjusted in a hurry. He made friends at school, rode his bicycle to the Boat Club in the summer and played hockey in the winter. He was very popular.
“He was good-looking, athletic and nice. What you saw was what you got,” said Joan McKinnon, a childhood friend who stayed close to him all her life. “You never took Knowlton out of Neil. It was always part of his life.”
After his mother’s death, Mr. Shaw commissioned a stained glass window above the door at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Knowlton. There will be a memorial for him at that church in June, and he will be buried in the local graveyard beside his parents.
Major Shaw died at the age of 69; he had married late in life and only had children in his early fifties. Neil was sixteen when his father died, and after graduating from high school, he went to work as a teller at the Royal Bank in Montreal — the president of the bank was a family friend — then switched to the Crown Trust.
In 1952, Neil Shaw married Audrey Robinson, a childhood friend from Knowlton.
In 1955 Mr. Shaw and his young family moved to Chatham, Ontario, where he worked in the sugar refinery owned by the Canada and Dominion Sugar Company.
At the time, sugar in eastern Canada was made from sugar beets, and along with tobacco, they were the biggest crops in the fertile farmland of southwestern Ontario.
“We lived in a company house right across from the refinery, and I can always recall big trainloads of sugar beets coming in to be refined,” recalled David Shaw, the eldest of five children.
Mr. Shaw was an executive assistant to a man he described as the “autocratic chairman of Dominion Sugar.” That relationship formed his attitude to working with people, which was being kind most of the time, and tough when needed. The senior management must have seen something in his work ethic because he rose rapidly in the company hierarchy. Tate and Lyle bought the company, and at the age of forty, Neil Shaw was in charge of a division. The man running the firm at the time was Saxon Tate, a member of the controlling family.
Shaw then worked for Redpath Sugar in Toronto – Dominion Sugar had merged with Redpath – but in 1963 he moved to London, to the corporate head office of Tate and Lyle, which owned 50 percent of Redpath. Shaw and his family moved back to Canada in 1966 when he became vice-president of Redpath Sugar, which still has a major sugar refinery on the Toronto waterfront, squeezed in between condos and a Loblaws and across the water from a recreational area called Sugar Beach. David Shaw recalls working there as a summer student, shifting giant bags of sugar.
From 1972 to 1980, Sir Neil was chief executive of Redpath, before moving back to Tate & Lyle in London to run the company overall.
“When he went over to the UK in 1980, Tate & Lyle was on the verge of bankruptcy,” said his son David. Britain was in the European Union. There was a problem with where the sugar came from. The Europeans relied on sugar beets, and the British made sugar from sugar cane. “The EU sugar dispute was one of the reasons they brought him over, and he actually turned the company around.”
Shaw threw himself into his work and British life in general. He was chairman of a group called Business in the Community, which was concerned about the welfare of workers and their sense of community.
“I see the loss of community in big urban areas of London. We have 20,000 employees in a big plant out in the East End. There was a time when all those employees lived within a few hundred yards of the plant. The company owned the houses, our employees all lived in them, and everybody knew what was going on. Sixty years later, they all drive in, work all day and drive home again and the local community is suffering,” he wrote while running Tate and Lyle.
Sir Neil was also involved in other charities in Britain, including the Scout Association and the Advisory Council for the Youth Enterprise Scheme.
He was unusual in the highest levels of business in that he did not have a university degree. Because of that, he said he looked for people with experience and common sense.
“If I send a young employee down to take on a project in a large plant in the East End of London, give him strong company support, and he succeeds in resolving the problem and motivating people, I’ll promote that person at Tate & Lyle much faster than someone who has got three degrees,” said Sir Neil.
He was honest enough to admit that one of the benefits of hard work was making money, even though, at the start of his career, the pay wasn’t that great.
“Money had to be important. When I had no money, and without anyone to help me out, I put five kids through private schools. It was not important for its own sake but as a means to be able to educate my kids and buy a house and do a few other things,” he said in his biographical sketch.
“I don’t think he was intellectually brilliant; I would say it was much more common sense; he knew how to deal with people, and he knew how to get things done through people, and those were his hallmarks,” said his son David. “He kind of lit up the room when he walked in. There was never anything negative. He always approached problems or hurdles with a positive attitude. If there was anything that got him through life and his career, it was his positive attitude.”
Along with his role at Tate & Lyle, Sir Neil was heavily involved in helping with the near collapse of Lloyd’s of London in the 1990s. He was named Chairman of the Association of Lloyd’s Members in 1992 and represented more than 8,000 underwriting members of the troubled insurance community.
Though he spent the pinnacle of his working career in England, he remained close to Canada.
“He was very down to earth and never made a big deal of his success,” said Dr. Bob Francis, who knew Neil Shaw for 40 years. Dr. Francis bought his house in Toronto, and Sir Neil invested in and served on the board of Medcan, the private medical clinic Dr. Francis started.
One of his hobbies was sailing both in Britain and in Florida, where he had a winter property near Vero Beach. After he retired, he bought a 56-foot Grand Banks boat and sailed what is known as the Great American Loop. It involves going up the eastern coast of the United States, eventually getting into the St. Lawrence river through New York State, then into the Great Lakes, down the Mississippi and back to Florida. He made that trip in 2014.
Neil Shaw was married twice: to Audrey Robinson, the mother of his children, and then to Elizabeth Mudge. Both women survive him.
Neil McGowan Shaw was born in Montreal on May 31, 1929. He died at home in Toronto on March 18, 2023. A brother Leroy Shaw pre-deceased him. He is survived by his five children, David, Michael, Cynthia, Andrea and Toni; thirteen grandchildren, one died before him, and twenty-one great-grandchildren for a total of 39 descendants.