Japan Slips, Safe Countries, Lottery Winners, Hollywood Puritans and the History of 911s.
February 19, 2023 Volume 4 # 40
We’re Number Four
Japan that is. It is in recession and it has slipped to number four in the world economy stakes, behind the US, China and Germany, Japan was number two in the 1980s.
Real estate went crazy, up 5,000%. A square foot of downtown Tokyo property was worth $140,000, 350 times the equivalent price in Manhattan. The Imperial Palace in Tokyo— pictured below— was said to be worth more than the State of California.
The bubble burst in 1989 and Japanese assets have been sinking ever since. Ordinary Japanese who bought houses in the boom are still stuck. Japan is still rich, just not as rich. Here is a chart of rich country rankings over the past 30 years.
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World’s Safest Countries
This according to something called the Global Peace Index, which measures things such as “societal safety and security, continuous conflict, and militarization”.
Speaking of Safety
An armoured car outside a Toronto bank in the 1920s, and gathering a lot of interest.
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Keeping up With the Jones’s
One of the worst things that can happen to you is your neighbours winning the lottery.
From the book “Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are” by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz:
“The data shows that your neighbor winning the lottery can have an impact on your own life. If your neighbor wins the lottery, for example, you are more likely to buy an expensive car, such as a BMW. Why? Almost certainly, economists maintain, the cause is jealousy after your richer neighbor purchased his own expensive car. Chalk it up to human nature. If Mr. Johnson sees Mr. Jones driving a brand-new BMW, Mr. Johnson wants one, too.
“Unfortunately, Mr. Johnson often can’t afford this BMW, which is why economists found that neighbours of lottery winners are significantly more likely to go bankrupt.”
Faster than a Speeding TGV
Well only two trains can outrun France’s amazing TGV. Japan may be number four in GDP but it is number one in trains. China puts the world to shame. Next month I will be travelling on that fast Italian train.
The Continent Of Slow Trains
Canada and the United States rely on road networks and planes. France has banned short flights. I did a TV documentary on train travel in Canada in 1982. Nothing has changed since then. The train from Montreal to New York, 596 km, takes 11 hours.
When Puritanism Came to Hollywood
A 1934 staged photo by photographer A.L. "Whitey" Schafer, mocking the Hays movie censorship Code by violating as many of its rules as possible in a single image.
Two Odd Maps that Caught my Eye
The back end of the 911 Series
I owned a 1977 911S. I’m prejudiced, but I like the first two series before it got wider.
Essay of the Week
Hugh Faulkner, who died in Switzerland in 2016 at the age of 83, was Canada’s culture Czar for four years at the height of the first Trudeau era, when many nationalist cultural polices were brought in, in particular Bill C-58, the law that did in Time Canada, which for 30 years had a Canadian section that included several pages of Canadian content. (And for which I was a stringer.) The bill passed in February of 1976. The big change was an amendment to the Income Tax Act that said advertisers could not deduct the cost of ads from their corporate taxes unless the magazine had 80 percent Canadian content.
The result: Time Canada folded and Macleans Magazine soon went to a weekly from a monthly.
“Bill C-58 had the intended effect of having a national Canadian weekly magazine, which at the time was a lot more important than it is today, because along with newspapers and TV that was where many people go their news,” said Peter Lyman, who was Mr. Faulkner’s Executive Assistant in Ottawa. “And on the television side it was the same deal. The tax change meant 100 to 200-million dollars a year in advertising gain for Canadain stations.”
The same rules affected the Canadian edition of Reader’s Digest, not just Time. At Macleans the journalists were over the moon. The young Secretary of State was the hero of Canadian content.
“Hugh was one of the few ministers who spoke out on the issue,” said the author Peter C. Newman, who was editor of Macleans at the time. “Faulkner was always approachable and there was never any doubt about where he stood.”
Mr. Faulkner also helped start the boom in tax sheltered films in Canada. It was another change to the Income Tax Act in 1974 that allowed investors to deduct 100% of the money they put into feature films, as long as those films were certified Canadian. He also started the Art Bank, where the federal government bought Canadian works of art and loaned them to government offices across Canada.
“Hugh spearheaded the passage of the Cultural Property Export and Import Act in 1975 to protect Canadian cultural property and archeological heritage,” said Mr. Lyman. “To this day, if you donate cultural works which are nationally significant to a bona fide museum, gallery or university, you can benefit enormously as the value of the claim can be deducted as an expense on your income tax.”
James Hugh Faulkner was born in Montreal in 1933. His father George was a doctor and during the Second Word War served in Burma with the Chindits, a special forces group that operated as guerillas deep behind Japanese lines. Dr. Faulkner was always armed and ready to fight while working as a doctor in the jungle. He was awarded a Military Cross. While his father was away at war, young Hugh Faulkner was sent to boarding school at Lakefield School, north of Peterborough. This connection would feature in his later political career.
After graduating from McGill, Mr. Faulkner worked for a while and earned a business degree from a school in Geneva. He worked in Britain, then knocked about Europe, spending a lot of time in Paris. By then he spoke pretty fluent French, not that common for English-Montrealers of his generation. He set off on a motorcycle for a while, and ended in Israel where he worked on two Kibutzes.
He was in Israel in 1961 when a friend offered him tickets to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi bureaucrat who was responsible for the death of millions of Jews, in particular Hungarian Jews. “His friend said I want you to watch Eichmann, to see how an ordinary human being can commit the most terrible crimes,” said his wife, Jane.
When he returned to Canada around the age of 30 he had a world experience far greater than most of his contemporaries.
Hugh Faulkner needed a job so he contacted his old headmaster at Lakefield and was taken on as an English and history teacher. Not only were his students excited about hearing about his experiences in Europe and Israel, but also some people in Peterborough who invited him to speak at the local Rotary Club.
“The next thing he knew he was the Liberal candidate in the upcoming election, with no chance of winning. The headmaster, a good Progressive Conservative, thought it would be a good opportunity for the older boys (the school didn’t accept girls until 1989) to experience democracy close-up,” said his wife, Jane Faulkner.
He was trounced in the first election in 1962, losing to the incumbent, Walter Pitman, a fellow schoolteacher, of the New Democratic Party. The next election was in 1963, when the minority Diefenbaker government was defeated and he came third again. In 1965 he won the Peterborough riding and the Liberals under Lester Pearson formed another minority government.
When Pierre Trudeau took over as leader in 1968, Mr. Faulkner won again in Peterborough in the June election that year. The next year he became deputy speaker of the House of Commons, and then in 1970 Parliamentary Secretary to the Secretary of State, Gerard Pelletier, a journalist and close friend of Pierre Trudeau. Mr. Faulkner took over as Secretary of State in November of 1972.
The Secretary of State was a powerful cabinet post in charge of many Crown Corporations and government organizations such as the CBC, the National Film Board, the Canadian Film Development Corporation (now Telefilm Canada) the Canada Council, Archives, all the national museums right down to the National Arts Centre. There were other responsibilities as well, including the Company of Young Canadians (CYC). According to Mr. Lyman, his former executive assistant, at one point he was given a choice between killing the CYC or the National Arts Centre. The Arts Centre is still there, the CYC is not.
“He was also instrumental in giving Bill Marshall (film producer and festival founder) and friends the grant to start the first Toronto Film Festival,” said Mr. Lyman. “I am not saying this just because I worked for him, but Hugh Faulkner was decent and principled person, maybe rare for a politician today.”
The Secretary of State was also responsible for Citizenship, now a separate portfolio. Mr. Faulkner over the re-writing of the Citizenship Act, which among other things allowed Canadians to have dual citizenship.
In the cabinet shuffle of September, 1976, he was briefly minister of Science and Technology. He was promoted to another major cabinet post, Indian Affairs and Northern Development, late in 1977 and stayed there until he and the Trudeau government was defeated in the election of May, 1979.
Many people leave politics and stay attached to it in one way or another for the rest of their lives, as lobbyists or pundits. Hugh Faulkner went on to three other careers: international businessman; executive and organizer of non-profit groups; and owner and operator of a successful vineyard.
“Hugh was an interesting guy and he had a fuller life post politics than many people who leave political life,” said Dick O’Hagan who was Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s press secretary in the second half of the 1970s.
As soon as he left Ottawa he went back to Montreal, where he wanted to stay to help in the 1980 referendum on independence. Mr. Faulkner was also part of a group that tried in vain to save the Montreal Star newspaper. He did some consulting work for Alcan Aluminium, whose president was impressed by his work and hired him a vice-president of occupational health, safety and environment. He then moved to India where he ran Alcan’s subsidiary there.
He moved to Geneva in 1987 to run Alcan’s operations in Europe. Two years later there was a change at the top and the new CEO decided to centralise operations in Montreal; Mr. Faulkner chose to stay in Geneva, working as `executive in residence’ at his old business school, the International Management Institute.
The Faulkner family moved to Paris in 1989, where Mr. Faulkner became secretary general of the International Chamber of Commerce. At one stage the chairman of the group, a member of Sweden’s Wallenberg family, asked Mr. Faulkner to fire a senior person. He refused and that ended that, though it led to another change in his life: making wine.
“Hugh had an ironclad contract for once, and so there was a large settlement. We used that windfall to buy a farm in the south of France,” said Mrs. Faulkner. That farm, Le Domaine de Grand Cros was a rundown vineyard that the Faulkners set about restoring. Today it is run by their son, Julian, who has an MBA in wine making from a school in Bordeaux. Then 25-hectare vineyard produces 300,000 bottles a year; red, white, rose and sparkling.
While working on his vineyard project, Mr. Faulkner became involved in several non-profit organizations. He was involved with Maurice Strong in the Rio Summit in 1992 and out of that Mr. Faulkner helped found the Business Council on Sustainable Development. It enlisted 50 CEOs from around the world to discuss environmental issues.
Mr. Faulkner also worked with with Sustainable Project Management, which he helped set up in 1994, and was involved with for the rest of his life. The object of the organization was to alleviate poverty in the developing world. In 2009 he travelled to Manila to inaugurate a recycling facility in a former squatter’s community.
Hugh Faulkner was one of 86 people who served as a cabinet ministers in Pierre Trudeau’s two ministries, the first from 1968 to 1979, the second from 1980 to 1984. With Mr. Faulkner’s death, there are 34 of them left alive. Unlike the gender parity of his son’s cabinet, there were only four women in all of Pierre Trudeau’s cabinets.
James Hugh Faulkner was born on March 9, 1933. He died in Rougemont, Switzerland on April 21, 2016. He is survived by his wife Jane, his daughter Antonia, his sons Julian and Adrian and his sisters, Claire and Susan.
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