Ottawa: a city in shock and unprepared
Ottawa is a quiet, boring town with a low crime rate. People who live there always say “It’s a great place to bring up children.” Crime is measured by something called the “Crime Severity Index". Crime rates generally rise from east to west in Canada, from peaceful Newfoundland and Labrador, to the west. Lethbridge, Alberta, tops the list with a score of 138.65; Ottawa is way down on the crime list with a score of 51.38.
Ottawa’s Police Service Board is into Community Policing, which translates into trying to solve problems rather than arresting people. That meant the city was totally unprepared for the mob that moved in from Western Canada. Surely these people would listen to reason and just go away? They didn’t. The Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, and the Ontario Premier, Doug Ford, are wearing this; they ignored things for weeks. But at the start it was really a civic problem, a quiet backwater that was not prepared for a lawless, political protest. It is a capital city with a small town police force.
Canadian City Crime Rates. Click for list.
The First Amendment?
One of the protest organizers appeared in court and her husband, who had flown in from Alberta, argued that her free speech rights were protected under the First Amendment. Sorry, wrong country.
Trudeau # 2 Brings in Draconian Law
Justin Trudeau brought in the Emergencies Act to clear the streets of Ottawa. Foreign papers are calling him authoritarian. The Economist’s lead editorial:
“Free speech No, Canada” (click on headline to read the editorial)
“Justin Trudeau has handled vaccine protests atrociously.”
And this doesn’t deal with the emergency measures. One criticism is freezing banks accounts of people who contributed to the protest. Wesley Wark, a Canadian historian with a Doctorate from the London School of Economics, called the measure “abhorrent” using something aimed at freezing accounts of terrorists being used against civilian protestors.
Unintended consequences
A broker at one of the big banks told me that nervous Canadian investors who live outside Canada have transferred tens of millions of dollars out of the country. And that is just one broker. I have heard other reports of Canadians who live in Canada moving their money to the United States. You know there will be mistakes. If your bank account is frozen because you share a name with someone on the government’s list, you can imagine how long it will take to get things fixed.
Back to 1970
What Justin Trudeau is facing is nothing when compared to what his father faced.
Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau brought in the War Measures Act - since renamed the Emergencies Act— after a British diplomat and Quebec cabinet minister were kidnapped. He was pilloried by the liberal intellectual class of which he was a member before being elected to Parliament in 1965. As a young reporter I covered a hall filled with angry professors, writers and journalists. I interviewed NDP (Canadian socialist party) leader, David Lewis, in the back of the room, framing him so we could see all the people in the meeting. This pissed off Claude Ryan, editor of the intellectual French-language Le Devoir, who came back and chastised me. Funny what you remember in life.
One of the excesses of the War Measures Act was the arbitrary arrest of more than 400 people thought to be sympathetic to the radical separatist cause.
One of them was my friend Nick Auf der Maur, a journalist given to spouting radical utterances, but hardly a revolutionary. It turned out to be advantage for him, since his arrest gave him cred with Quebec’s left, even though he turned right in later life.
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One Car in Ten sold in 2021 was some kind of Electric
There were 66.7-million cars sold last year around the world last year. The chart below counts plug-in hybrids, cars that can run on electricity for short distances, usually enough in the city.
Sticking to transport
A subscriber was driving down an interstate in Florida, in an electric car as it turns out, when his wife asked why they were so many transport trucks on the road.
“Wouldn’t it be more efficient to ship things by rail.” My friend reported the conversation and asked me to look into it. In simple terms, trucks can travel direct from one place to another. But they use a lot more energy than trains and spew a lot more pollution, of all types. This is one chart I came across.
Trains move a lot of bulk cargo— coal and wheat— but ships are much more energy efficient than trains, though ships are slower and take time to load and unload.
Trucks win in the real world because everyone is in a hurry. Just-in-time inventory makes things more efficient but doesn’t do much for air quality.
As an aside, trains move a lot of crude oil but that is political. Pipelines are much more efficient.
On the Road Again?
Zoom Down
As I am writing this, in another room the woman in my life is doing Pilates on Zoom. Sometimes the instructor she does it with is in Milan. The wonders of Zoom. But Zoom’s stock has not been a great investment. Many people pick tech companies because they get so much ink. I use Zoom, but I have never paid for it.
Short Attention Span
Big institutions like pension funds are obviously trading stocks like lunatics. So are ETFs, Exchange Traded Funds. Ninety per cent of the trading on stock markets is done by ‘the big guys’ the rest are retail investors. Reports always say `Investors decided to dump stocks/ buy stocks..” for a reason chosen by the news desk.
These days it doesn’t cost much to trade so professional traders move in and out.
-In 1960 the average stock was held for approximately 8 years; By 1980 it had dropped to 33 months; By 2000 it was just 14 months; By 2010 it was down to 6 months.
Now it’s even shorter: Amazon: Avg. Holding Period = 3 months Apple: Avg. Holding Period = 7 months. Facebook: Avg. Holding Period = 5 months JP Morgan Avg. Holding Period = 10 months.
The Joy of Eating Out This Week
One of my favourite restaurants in Toronto. I was there on opening day 36 years ago.
Essay of the Week
Cruising the news feeds one night this past week I came across an obit of Monty Gordon I wrote two and a half years ago. The Globe re-ran it, I assume because of the Olympics where Monty and the Canadian Bobsled team won a Gold Medal in the 1964 Winter Olympics. I usually don’t know the people I write about, but I knew Monty. By chance we ended up living in the same condo building in Toronto and we became even closer friends. He was a one-off and a wonderful man.
OBITUARY
Olympic bobsled champion Monty Gordon, 87, was ‘straight shooter’ in business world
FRED LANGAN
SPECIAL TO THE GLOBE AND MAIL
PUBLISHED AUGUST 16, 2019 UPDATED AUGUST 21, 2019
A farm boy from rural Ontario, Monty Gordon worked his way through university and in 1957 joined Nesbitt Thomson, a Montreal brokerage house, where his intelligence, hard work and infectious charm made him a star.
When Mr. Gordon told his family he was working in the stock market, his father Ernest Gordon, a dairy farmer, was pleased, assuming his son was buying and selling livestock. Monty Gordon always spoke highly of his father and mother Katharine, saying they were such hard workers. So was he, but off the farm.
Lloyd Lamont Gordon, who has died at 87, grew up on a farm near Harriston, in Western Ontario. He said only his mother ever called him Lloyd, and all his life he was known as Monty, although the more formal L. Lamont had more cachet in business.
After Harriston High School, where he was president of the student council, Mr. Gordon travelled 120 kilometres south to the University of Western Ontario in London. He earned a business degree and made connections that stayed with him all of his life. At university, Mr. Gordon was mixing with people from rich families, but the dairy farmer’s son had to support himself. He took on several jobs, including driving a taxi. He was also house manager of the Zeta Psi fraternity and is credited with getting it out of financial trouble by organizing successful Friday night parties.
After graduating, he and his university friend Vic Emery went to Europe in the summer of 1955 working their way across on Norwegian freighters, Mr. Gordon landing in Bergen, Norway, and Mr. Emery in Belgium. They met in Paris and toured Europe in an old beat-up car. The two had been in the naval reserve at university and found that donning their junior officer’s uniforms got them invited to some great parties. At the end of the trip, Mr. Gordon took a naval course in England.
That winter, they found themselves in St. Moritz in Switzerland, where they were introduced to the daredevil sport of bobsledding. Mr. Gordon joined the St. Moritz Tobogganing Club in 1956 and was a member for all of his life. He and Mr. Emery eventually formed the Canadian bobsled team. They practised at the bobsled run at Lake Placid, N.Y., 140 kilometres from Montreal.
In 1961 the team entered competitions in the United States and Europe and they raced in the 1962 Commonwealth Games in St. Moritz. The Canadian team won a gold medal with Mr. Gordon driving the four-man bobsled. In the 1964 Olympics, the Canadian team won a gold medal in the four-man bobsled event with Mr. Emery driving. Mr. Gordon competed, but his sled did not win a medal. He drove four-man and two-man bobsleds.
The bobsled team included many men who went on to successful business careers, including Mr. Emery, Gordon Eberts, Paul Levesque and Christopher Ondaatje, (brother of the author Michael Ondaatje) among others.
“Monty Gordon and Vic Emery were the driving force that propelled the rags-to-riches Canadian bobsled team to the Olympics,” Mr. Ondaatje said.
Mr. Gordon also raced sports cars on tracks near Montreal, and his accidents on the track earned him the nickname “Crash Gordon.” His crew of friends also rented a ski chalet in Saint-Sauveur, which at the time was the party capital of the Laurentians. In Montreal, in the late 1950s, Mr. Gordon shared an apartment on Ridgewood on the side of the mountain with Mr. Emery and Robin Korthals, who went on to become president of the Toronto Dominion Bank.
Back in Canada, Mr. Gordon started work at Nesbitt Thomson in a building at the corner of St. Peter and St. James, as the streets were known then. He worked on what is called the institutional side, that is trading stock for large clients such as insurance companies, banks and pension funds.
Mr. Gordon rose quickly at Nesbitt Thomson and became a director of the firm in 1964. He worked for Nesbitt’s office in New York and was instrumental in convincing his partners to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, something that was unheard of in Canada at the time. Nesbitt paid around half a million dollars for the seat, which allowed the firm to trade directly on the floor of the exchange, meaning they did not have to pay commissions to a U.S. dealer when buying U.S. stocks.
Paul Levesque, one of Mr. Gordon’s oldest friends who started working with him at Nesbitt Thomson in 1958, felt the reason for Mr. Gordon’s business success was that he was a straight shooter, got to the point and believed in what he was saying.
“It wasn’t difficult for Monty to convince someone of the pros and cons of a deal because he spoke so honestly and was so open,” Mr. Levesque said.
Mr. Gordon also helped the careers of many young people in the investment business. Hubert Marleau was a young man out of university with no experience, but Mr. Gordon hired him at Nesbitt Thomson.
"He was a very unusual person. He had dreams, and they were ambitious dreams," said Mr. Marleau, who later founded his own firm, Marleau Lemire. "When he bought the seat in New York he gave me the job of training the Nesbitt directors to make sure they passed the New York Stock Exchange exams."
On New Year’s Day in 1969, Mr. Gordon left a promising career at Nesbitt Thomson and started a brokerage firm in Montreal with his bobsled teammate, Mr. Eberts. The firm was called Gordon, Eberts Securities, and eventually became plain Gordon Securities. The firm was entrepreneurial, took risks and hired ambitious young salespeople and traders. One of their innovations in Canada was the “bought deal” in which Gordon would buy the newly issued shares of a company with the goal of selling it to investors for a profit.
Mr. Gordon and his firm eventually moved to Toronto in the late 1970s, and he left the firm to work on a string of entrepreneurial deals, from a startup drug company to a highway barrier firm. He had a magic touch, and a large group of followers always seemed ready to invest his businesses. Large brokerage firms also wanted him around, and for many years he was chairman of Sprott Securities.
Mr. Gordon was a familiar figure on Yonge Street walking every morning with his briefcase from his home to the Rosedale subway station to head downtown to work.
Lloyd Lamont Gordon was born in Harriston, Ont., on April 29, 1932. He died in Toronto on July 26. Mr. Gordon was married three times. He leaves his children Catherine, Deborah, James, Pamela, Jennifer and fourteen grandchildren.