The Last Canadian Knight

by Gordon Pitts

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2017, Dalhousie University

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission from the publisher, or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, permission from Access Copyright, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 1900, Toronto, Ontario M5E 1E5.

  Nimbus Publishing Limited

  3731 Mackintosh St, Halifax, NS, B3K 5A5

  (902) 455-4286 nimbus.ca

  Printed and bound in Canada

  NB1296

  Cover photo: Courtesy of Sherman Hines

  Interior design: Peggy Issenman, Peggy & Co. Design

  Cover design: Heather Bryan

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Pitts, Gordon, author

  The last Canadian knight : the unintended business adventures of Sir Graham Day / Gordon Pitts.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77108-491-8 (hardcover).—ISBN 978-1-77108-492-5 (HTML)

  1. Day, J. Graham (Judson Graham), 1933-. 2. Businessmen—Canada—Biography. 3. Lawyers—Canada—Biography. 4. Nova Scotia—Biography. I. Title.

  FC2326.1.D39P58 2017 971.6’04092 C2016-908012-9

  C2016-908

  Nimbus Publishing acknowledges the financial support for its publishing activities from the Government of Canada, the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of Nova Scotia. We are pleased to work in partnership with the Province of Nova Scotia to develop and promote our creative industries for the benefit of all Nova Scotians.

  Foreword

  It is truly an honour to introduce an individual I have been privileged to call a mentor, sponsor, and dear friend. Yet I do so with trepidation, as Sir Graham Day is not unlike the tweed sports jackets he favours: depending upon the thread your eye chooses to follow, a different pattern emerges. So how best to set the stage for The Last Canadian Knight? Thankfully, one of the first lessons I learned at the Graham Day School of Championing Young People is never impose your views upon someone through lecture when an anecdote is much more effective and charming!

  The story begins in the spring of 2011. As a corporate partner at the law firm of Stewart McKelvey, I had worked as part of the team closing a transaction relating to the transformative reorganization of the Scotia Investments Group of Companies, the conglomerate built by the late Roy A. Jodrey. Graham was the chair of Scotia Investments Limited and I was its counsel. In effect, we crossed the Rubicon together—Project Rubicon being the name he had given the reorganization transaction.

  Late in the day, my office phone rings. Seeing that it is Graham calling, I settle in for what I anticipate will be one of our comfortable and familiar conversations. I lean back in my chair, swing my legs up onto my desk, cross my pump-clad feet at the ankles, and hit the speakerphone. We have moved from general conversation to specifics relating to post-closing matters when John Rogers, the firm’s CEO at the time, knocks and pops his head in. Well versed in Graham’s keen sense of fun, yet strict adherence to the principles of decorum, John cheekily suggests to Graham that I might not be exhibiting the appropriate amount of deference that an “audience” with the chairman of Scotia Investments would dictate. In short order, John captures my relaxed and unladylike pose on his phone’s camera and shares my moment of impunity with Graham—pump-clad feet on the desk and all!

  Fast forward to the spring of 2014. I am newly appointed to the role of Regional Managing Partner, NS, at Stewart McKelvey. This time Graham calls to advise that he and Ann are back from Florida and he would like to come for a visit. At the appointed hour, Graham arrives properly attired in a tweed jacket and tie with a present, the size of a shoebox, neatly tucked under his arm. He proceeds to explain that the present is a little token intended to celebrate my recent appointment, a role not previously held by a female. To my delight, the box contains a pair of shoes! At this point in the unveiling, with the formality that only an ace salesman schooled in the art of selling shoes could exhibit, Graham proceeds to kneel before me, remove the tissue and packing from each of the shoes, preparing them for me to try on, all the while with a twinkle in his eye and a smile on his face matching that of his generous spirit.

  Just over a year later, on August 1, 2015, I assumed the mantle of CEO and managing partner of Stewart McKelvey. As I approached my first day on the job, I recognized it would be important to set the tone as to how I intended to lead. I knew I needed to signal that I was approachable and keen to meet all of the five hundred or so lawyers and staff, and, most important, that I could be trusted. I found myself recalling Graham’s story of his first day in the shipyard of Cammell Laird and realized that I, too, needed to “walk the property.” The Halifax office was familiar territory, so I decided to begin my first day as CEO in our Saint John, New Brunswick, office. Next pressing matter: “what to wear?” No deliberations required: I would “walk the property” in my Sir Graham “power pumps.”

  My story, like many in the book, conveys the essence of Graham. Graham’s razor-sharp memory is a virtual library, cataloguing not only vast passages from his beloved classics, but also the minute details of every person, transaction, and situation he has encountered throughout his life. The photo of my “pump-clad” feet up on my desk was simply filed away until Graham found the appropriate opportunity to tie it to a career milestone.

  Graham’s ascension from corporate lawyer to Margaret Thatcher’s “fix-it man” to corporate boardroom titan was meteoric. Yet his genuine interest in the advancement of others, particularly women in business, is apparent in my own experience. My elevation from corporate lawyer to regional managing partner of Stewart McKelvey’s Halifax office was supported by his “guiding hand,” as he put my name forward to take on client roles and corporate board positions that would expose me to Atlantic Canada’s business elite—a tradition, I later learned, Graham carried on in honour of one of his guardian angels, Gordon Cowan, the managing partner of a predecessor firm to Stewart McKelvey.

  Graham’s own career took him to boardrooms around the globe, meeting with international business magnates. He was knighted by the queen in recognition for his service to British industry. Yet he has never lost the touch he learned from his introduction to business, selling shoes at Simpson’s.

  For those who know Graham, this book puts his many stories into context and validates what we already cherish about him. Like my story, it illuminates how many others have benefited from an individual so passionate and vested in the ideals of mentorship and sponsorship, long before those concepts were touted in business schools and leadership development curricula.

  For those who have not met Graham, this book captures his place in the history of the Thatcher era and the evolution of corporate governance while revealing an extraordinary individual who has contributed unselfishly to the cultural, educational, and economic prosperity of our province and country.

  Before being introduced to Graham by my good friend and former partner Mark MacDonald, I was counselled that I would never meet an individual quite like him. I never have. At his core is an unfailing belief in the duty of service to queen and country, yet he was raised and schooled in “the colonies.” He is battle tested and at the ready to lend his steely determination and decisive intellect to a small business start-up or large multinational corporation, yet he carries himself with the bearing and charm of a learned British gentleman. Above all, he is a protector of the values of loyalty, equality, and respect: the epitome of a Canadi
an knight.

  Lydia Bugden

  Chief Executive Officer and

  Managing Partner Stewart McKelvey

  Introduction

  It is a typical day in 1948 at Queen Elizabeth High School in central Halifax. Students are mingling noisily as they move from class to class. Far removed from this happy throng, a number of boys have gathered in the lavatory to play cards, read, and hang out. They are exiles, kicked out of their classes, and they have gathered as an irregular club of undesirables, labelled by the principal as the Shithouse Rats.

  One of them is a tall lanky fellow named Graham Day, and he is typical of the group: aimless and angry, contemptuous of most of his teachers, whom he dismisses as incompetents. He seems to have raw talent—he can readily cite the history of ancient Egypt, he can sing beautifully—but the rest of his school work is alienating. So he has joined the Rats in their boys’-room pack. “I was absolutely adrift,” he would recall in later life.

  Flash forward forty years. The scene is 10 Downing Street, London, the residence of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The Iron Lady is meeting with one of her most trusted lieutenants, the man she has mandated to turn around large state industries and transfer their ownership to the private sector. Privatization of Crown industries is a key thrust in the Thatcher Revolution that is shaking Britain in the 1980s by pulling back the role of the state in the economy. And that man beside her is Graham Day, the one-time Shithouse Rat.

  By now, Day has established enough credibility to escape Thatcher’s famously harsh grilling of subordinates. After the briefing, she asks a secretary how much time is left before Prime Minister’s Questions in the House of Commons. Satisfied that there is an interval, she wonders if Day would like a little drink. He requests sherry, and she wets the bottom of her glass with a touch of Scotch. And in a moment of rare relaxation, Thatcher kicks off her pumps and leans back in her chair.

  That simple gesture is a sign that Graham Day, once the ultimate outsider, once consigned to the boys’ lavatory, has moved dramatically to the centre of power. He belongs to the elite of Thatcher’s corporate managers, men she can trust to do the big tough jobs. He is a turnaround artist who would pull off the privatization of the shipbuilding industry, the Rover car business, and a big part of Britain’s power generation infrastructure. He would be a trusted advisor to the National Health Service. He would head the board of one of Britain’s signature companies, Cadbury Schweppes. He would be knighted for his services to Thatcher and to Britain—thus joining the ranks of that endangered species, the Canadian knight.

  A British cabinet minister once told him that he was instantly expendable: the Brits would rather “shoot the colonial” than one of their own. In the sharp-elbowed world of British commerce, he would not only survive; he would play a key role in transforming the British economy—indeed, the global economy—and his impact still resonates. He is possibly the most important Canadian business executive ever to have graced the British corporate stage—perhaps the global business stage. And he took his act back to Canada, where he would become one of the best directors to inhabit a boardroom.

  Oh, and there is another line in the Day resumé: as a young man, he was a singer and music director for Singalong Jubilee, one of the most influential career-making shows in Canadian television history.

  How did this happen? What kind of miraculous conversion lifted Graham Day from angry boy to powerful adult who sips sherry with prime ministers? In fact, there was no wholesale conversion. The traits that alienated his teachers at Queen Elizabeth High—energy, tough-mindedness, stubbornness, a heightened sense of fair play—became the underpinnings of Day’s success as a business leader. These traits just needed to be channelled. And something happened to Day that we all go through: he grew up.

  The Graham Day journey is a picaresque romp through modern British and Canadian business history, with sharp turns, defeats, and triumphs. It reflects hard-knocks maturity gained in a stormy, but ultimately successful, stint at Dalhousie Law School, and then as a small-town lawyer in Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. It demonstrates the value of a sense of humour as a management instrument that can lower the temperature and raise the quality of conversation.

  The breadth of the man is spectacular: a trouble shooter for Canadian Pacific, historically Canada’s most important company; a musical talent who played a part in discovering Canadian songbirds Anne Murray and Catherine McKinnon; an auto executive who saved a legendary car marque; a trusted advisor for major Canadian enterprises, including Canada’s most famous business families. It is reasonable to ask: could this all be the same man?

  But it is. He is not widely known in Canada because so many of his triumphs were earned abroad. In Britain he was a capitalist hero, but in Canada he has been an adroit background player, influential as a mentor of people and a director for companies such as Bank of Nova Scotia, Sobeys, and Moosehead beer—the grey eminence to whom company builders and executives turn for wisdom. He has used the Atlantic law firm Stewart McKelvey as his base of operations, and has served his beloved Dalhousie University, which played such a role in his maturity, as chancellor and benefactor.

  He could be viewed in the grand tradition of Canadian colonials who played starring roles on the British stage: brash entrepreneurs such as Sir James Dunn, Lord Beaverbrook, and Lord Thomson. But Day was different. He was the pioneer of a new tradition: Canadians who inject professional management into hidebound British institutions. Today, British recruiters pursue Canadians because, like Day, they bring an outsider’s perspective, and they are not Americans. Graham Day’s turnaround of a declining Liverpool shipyard paved the way for former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney to take on the equivalent role at the Bank of England, and Moya Greene, Newfoundland-born former CEO of Canada Post, who moved on to head the Royal Mail and guide it through a difficult privatization. Each went to Britain to head a fundamental pillar of the economy and a legacy institution. Like Graham Day, they would work at the politically charged intersection of the private and public sectors. Their recruitment was based on track records of success in Canada, but also the knowledge that implementing change was easier for outsiders with scant ties to British entrenched interests. It is harder to slot them into a certain class, accent, or regional pigeonhole. That was one of Day’s great assets.

  But the truly surprising aspect of Day’s story is that, at age sixty—still prime time for a business titan—and at the peak of his prestige in Britain, he gave it up, returning to Canada as part of a decades’-old pact with his wife Ann. His return was a gift to Canada and its institutions, from which they drew mightily.

  Graham Day has really never slowed down. He has played the same role for Canadian businesses, large and small, as he did for Margaret Thatcher. He has navigated his way through the shoals of change and generational succession at supermarkets, banks, and breweries. He has not always been successful: sometimes wrong, never in doubt, he likes to say. He still painfully recalls the Hydro One debacle: the privatization he lost. But he has never wavered in his belief that government should do governing and business should do business—and the two should rarely commingle. I say “rarely,” because Day’s pragmatism is another crowning trait.

  Now in his early eighties, Day says his was a career of serendipity, of being in the right place at the right time, of unintended adventures. Yes, but serendipity is what you do with it. As Napoleon allegedly said, bring me the lucky generals, not just the good ones. Luck is the product of the person and what he or she does with suddenly available opportunity. Sir Graham seized the day, and never looked back.

  Chapter 1

  Beginnings

  Graham Day was born on May 3, 1933, in the Grace Hospital in Halifax. His parents, for reasons unknown, believed their first and only child would be a girl. Caught unprepared by this baby boy, they had to come up with a name. The presiding doctor was Judson Vye Graham, so the child would be Judson Gra
ham Day.

  The baby, who would have a secure but plain upbringing in North End Halifax, was the son of a Canadian mother and an immigrant father from the East End of London. At the time of Graham’s birth, his father Frank worked in a furniture and appliance store owned by an uncle. Growing up in England, Frank Day had suffered from poor health since birth, including a bout of rheumatic fever. His family got him in a private school, giving him a better education than his siblings. When the First World War came, he attempted to join up, but flunked the medical. He found a job in the City of London—the financial district—as a runner, one of the army of messengers who delivered pieces of paper, including securities, among the banks and brokerages. He was in the employ of wealthy brothers, who took an interest in him and, aware of his health problems, offered him a job inside.

  They liked Frank and felt he needed a healthier vocation, so they sent him to agricultural college. They saw he was not getting better, however, and in another act of kindness paid his way to Australia, with its lure of a better climate. He worked on a sheep ranch in the middle of the continent, where he encountered snakes. Frank Day hated snakes. Graham remembers a picture of his father on horseback, armed with a pistol and a rifle, on the job at the sheep ranch. He was posing beside a dead snake roped over a branch. This was not Frank Day’s kind of life, and so that was the end of Australia for him. In Halifax, however, was this uncle with the furniture store. So Frank Day crossed the Pacific to Vancouver and made his way across the country to Nova Scotia.

  Graham’s mother, Edythe, came from a Nova Scotia family named Baker. Family lore has it that her grandfather, a young Dutchman named Willem Becker, from an affluent shipping family, had left home rather than accept his parents’ career choice of the Catholic priesthood. His granddaughter Edythe (or Edie) was born in Herring Cove, a semi-isolated community south of Halifax that was largely cut off in winter and spring but is now part of the Halifax Regional Municipality. Her father was a harbour pilot who guided ships into the port. A boat would chug out from Herring Cove to put pilots on incoming ships. The pilots would arrange their own shifts, and one day a certain Captain Pelham offered to take Edie’s father’s shift. Pelham’s pilot boat was cut in two by a large vessel and all hands were lost. Edie’s father, probably haunted by the tragedy, couldn’t go back on the pilot boats again, and found other marine jobs, such as navigating for the Portuguese fishing fleet and toiling for a ship supply company. Graham Day has a faded memory as a young child of accompanying his grandfather on the Bluenose, the famous racing schooner commemorated on the dime.