Black ties
By Bernard Simon
FT
July 21 2007 01:24
A familiar face was missing one evening last month among nearly 200
of Toronto’s chattering classes. They had gathered at the fashionable
Grano restaurant to hear Gore Vidal muse on the future of Europe –
the latest event in the Grano Speakers Series, promoted as evenings
of stimulating discussion over a good meal. Before warming to his
advertised theme, Vidal took a few gratuitous swipes at the missing
guest. The novelist’s wheelchair had been lifted on to a small platform
in the middle of the restaurant, inducing, he said, "a Blackian moment
as I was raised above my humble station, translated to the Lords".
Lord Black of Crossharbour, Conrad Black, was not on hand to parry the
thrust. Normally a Grano Speakers Series regular, he was in Chicago,
as he had been since late March, defending himself against charges of
fraud and other crimes. The former press baron was found guilty last
week on four out of 16 counts and faces a lengthy prison term when
he is sentenced in November. It will probably be some time before he
returns to Grano.
His home town has been riveted by the trial. Having one of their
own on the world stage – whether on Fleet Street or in a Chicago
courtroom – helps satisfy a craving among Canadians to punch above
their weight. But while Toronto’s clubby, waspish society played
a big part in moulding Black’s character in the 1970s and 1980s,
the city has moved on. Apart from family and close friends, the man
whose empire once stretched from The Daily Telegraph in London to the
Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post and Canada’s National Post is
unlikely to be missed.
While Torontonians may have lapped up the saga of Black’s rise and
fall, he no longer has much relevance in Canada’s biggest city. What’s
more, the Grano event exposed an undercurrent of disdain towards the
peer and his wife, Barbara Amiel. For years, respect for Black’s
business achievements has been tempered by derision and distrust,
if not outright hostility. Even many of the power brokers who still
lunch at the stuffy Toronto Club would doubtless agree with the 1993
observation by Montreal billionaire Paul Desmarais, quoted in Tom
Bower’s recent biography of Black. "Conrad’s a little too big for
his boots," Desmarais said. "He’s behaving like a spoilt child."
In some ways, Black is not as "old establishment" as he is often
portrayed. Those who know him say that he is, at heart, less pompous
and more engaging than his verbose public utterances suggest. Nor are
his roots in Toronto. Both his parents came from prominent families
in the prairie city of Winnipeg, and he was born in Montreal. (Soon
after Conrad’s birth, his father George was persuaded to move to
Toronto to work for Canadian Breweries, part of the industrial empire
run by E.P. Taylor, a pillar of Toronto society who became a strong
influence on Black.)
In Hollinger’s heyday, Black and Amiel spent little time in Toronto,
preferring to hobnob with the rich and famous in New York and
London. Until legal and financial troubles drove him back, Black’s
appearances in Canada were confined largely to the launch of the
National Post in 1998, the Christmas parties he threw for the paper’s
senior staff, and the occasional fundraiser for Israel. He alienated
many Canadians further by renouncing his citizenship in 2001 to take
a seat in the House of Lords.
The increasingly distant relationship between Black and Toronto
says as much about the city as about the man. As Hershell Ezrin,
chief executive officer of the Canadian Council for Israel and Jewish
Advocacy, and at one time the top aide to a former premier of Ontario,
puts it: "There are other establishments now; it’s no longer just
the one that Conrad represents."
Bill MacDonald, retired senior partner at McMillan Binch Mendelsohn,
one of the city’s blue-blooded law firms, agrees: "I doubt you could
find any city in the world that has transformed so dramatically, so
peacefully and so prosperously." The addition of "Mendelsohn" to the
104-year-old law firm’s name two years ago offers a clue that Toronto
is no longer dominated by a handful of white, Anglo-Saxon families.
"That used to be the case maybe 35 years ago, but today’s it’s not
so," says Hilary Weston, a former lieutenant governor of Ontario
whose husband Galen’s business empire stretches from Selfridges, the
UK department store, and Ireland’s Brown Thomas chain, to Loblaws,
Canada’s biggest supermarket group.
The old Anglo-Saxon families – like the Westons, Eatons, Thomsons,
Jackmans and Bassetts – still control vast pools of wealth and play a
prominent role in philanthropy and culture, but Toronto’s undisputed
power couple these days is Gerry Schwartz, a Winnipeg-born Jew,
and his wife Heather Reisman. Schwartz controls Onex, a powerful
private-equity group; Reisman is chief executive of Canada’s biggest
bookseller, Indigo Books.
Many of Toronto’s new power brokers and society mavens have their
roots in a flood of immigrants, starting with Italian construction
workers and eastern European refugees in the 1950s and 1960s, but
broadening in recent years to include tens of thousands of Chinese,
Indians, Filipinos, Somalis and others from every corner of the
globe. With about 250,000 newcomers each year, Canada takes in more
immigrants relative to its population than any other industrialised
country. According to the 2003 United Nations Human Development Report,
Toronto has more residents born outside the country than any other city
except Miami. As Hilary Weston puts it with only mild exaggeration,
"the visible minorities have become the majority."
To its credit, Toronto’s old establishment is sharing power more
comfortably and graciously than elites in many other cities. When
I asked Senator David Smith, an eminence grise in Toronto politics,
to what extent the newcomers have gained real influence, he jumped
up from the chair in his office at Fraser Milner Casgrain, another
venerable law firm, where he was once chairman. "Come with me," Smith
insisted, proceeding on a brisk tour of Fraser Milner’s offices on
the 39th floor of First Canadian Place. As we walked, he jabbed his
finger at the nameplates outside the offices of the firm’s partners
and associates. They are as cosmopolitan a bunch as one can imagine –
Katarzyna Sliwa, Renata Rizzardi, David Tsubouchi, Sonja Homenuck,
to name a few.
Weston, born and raised in Ireland, argues that "the energy and
dynamism are coming from the new immigrants to this country." Asked
to compare Toronto with London, where she and her husband spend much
of their time, she observes that "it’s a much more open society. It’s
much more liberal, more all-embracing."
According to Vahan Kololian, a private-equity investor who was born in
Egypt to Armenian parents and arrived in Toronto in the early 1960s,
"London is an international city but [unlike Toronto], a lot of people
there are not set on becoming part of the fabric of the country."
As evidence of the fresh air blowing through Toronto society,
Weston cites the fundraising drive that she has spearheaded over the
past four years for a C$270m expansion of the Royal Ontario Museum,
one of the city’s cultural landmarks. Instead of turning to the old
establishment for a lead donor, she drove to Burlington, a dormitory
town west of Toronto, to extract C$30m from Michael Lee-Chin, a
Jamaican-born entrepreneur.
Lee-Chin asked Weston why she didn’t ask her husband to write a cheque
at their breakfast table. "If Galen wrote a cheque," she replied,
"it would be business as usual. But if you wrote a cheque, it would
be an inspiration to every immigrant, every new Canadian." The Michael
Lee-Chin Crystal, a striking Daniel Libeskind-designed, crystal-shaped
addition to the museum, opened last month. (The Westons did wind up
donating C$20m.)
The museum renovation is part of a cultural renaissance that has
helped give Toronto a more sophisticated and cosmopolitan air than it
had during the years when Black and Amiel preferred to spend most of
their time elsewhere. The city also boasts a new opera house – to which
Black contributed. A C$200m addition to the Art Gallery of Ontario,
designed by Frank Gehry, is nearing completion. Construction is due
to start soon on a downtown entertainment and condominium complex
that will house the Toronto International Film Festival. "It will be
possible soon for a singer to earn a living at home and not to have
to go abroad," says Richard Bradshaw, the UK-born director of the
Canadian Opera Company.
Ice hockey and baseball are no longer the only games in town. The
Toronto and District Cricket Association now fields 86 teams,
with names like Gujarat, the Lion Hearts, the Caribbean Limers and
Bangla. The India and Pakistan national cricket teams have played
matches at the SkyDome, normally home to the Toronto Blue Jays
baseball team.
Nonetheless, Peter Ustinov’s famous 1987 jibe that "Toronto is
New York run by the Swiss" still applies – for better and worse. It
remains one of the most pleasant and peaceful cities in north America,
despite timid, tax-and-spend civic leaders, a dearth of investment in
public infrastructure over the past decade, and a sometimes suffocating
political correctness. When a city councillor earnestly told a radio
talk-show host recently that "we know where the hotspots are", she
was not referring to clubs or crime, but to the parks where dog owners
are most careless about stooping and scooping.
Yet Black has had little in common with the new elite. "They don’t
know him, they don’t need him," says Patricia Best, a writer who
knows Black well. Hal Jackman, scion of a prominent Toronto family
and an old friend of Black, said after last week’s verdict that Black
"should have been a professor or a man of letters or a lecturer –
that was his calling". Had Black heeded such advice, he might now
be looking forward to the next event at Grano, instead of awaiting
a less agreeable fate in Chicago.
Bernard Simon is the FT’s Canada correspondent.