by Gordon Pitts
But she had made a good impression. Day, now in his last year with Singalong, had been keen to hire her, and although it couldn’t happen that year, he knew the show would take her on. According to Murray’s account, that did happen two years later. She remembers Langstroth leaving messages at UNB that he wanted to meet her again. She ignored them. He managed to get a call into her dorm, and asked her to audition. Hearing the anger still burning from her first rejection, he assured her the audition would be a formality, and she was guaranteed a job. She sang “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling,” the white soul classic from the Righteous Brothers, and nailed it. She would join Singalong at $71.50 a show or, if she got to be a soloist, $99. It launched a superstar career—as well as a romance with Langstroth, who became her lover and eventually, after divorcing his wife, her husband.
Graham was also present at the audition of a raw talent, a young woman just out of high school at Mount St. Vincent Academy in Halifax. “She had hair down to her bum,” recalls Day, and possessed only a rudimentary knowledge of music. The first task was to cut that hair and find her some appropriate clothes to wear on TV. Day was in the control room with Pittson and the guitarist Fred McKenna, when Catherine McKinnon got her shot at Singalong. They asked her what she knew, and it seemed she was only confident about singing the “Jewel Song” from Faust and one verse of the folk classic, “What Have They Done to the Rain?” What she lacked in repertoire she more than made up for in sheer talent. They put her on TV, and Day convinced her to sing “Plaisir d’amour,” the first piece she sang on Canadian television. Catherine McKinnon went on to a long and glittering career, a star in the Canadian music universe, and Day helped her cut her first album. “She was very good—we rarely had to do a second take,” he recalls.
Fred McKenna was, of course, a mainstay of the show, terribly overweight at 350 pounds, blind, and seated with his guitar in his lap, improvising ways of playing musical instruments that overcame his physical limitations. He was also a musical archivist and researcher who was the knowledge bank for the show.
Marg Ashcroft was a nurse who auditioned and landed a spot on Singalong. She draws a picture of a Graham Day who was very much at ease in the laid-back Nova Scotia of the 1960s. He knew Ashcroft was juggling a job with raising kids and appearing on TV. On show days, he would drive in from Windsor and pick up Ashcroft at her home and drop her off at night. Day had a big patch of rhubarb, and was always bringing her some. She never dreamt he would be a global corporate leader, but she did see glimmers of ambition beyond rural law.
David Sobey didn’t see the big career coming, either. Sobey, the son of a grocer in Pictou County, had met Graham Day as a student at Dalhousie, where Day was taking some classes with Sobey’s future wife Faye. Sobey couldn’t believe it when he switched on the TV and saw his former schoolmate in the chorus of Singalong Jubilee. Day would continue to surprise David Sobey as he emerged in later years as an international business executive. Sobey didn’t do badly himself. He and his brothers would take their father’s grocery business and build it into a national supermarket force. They would call on Graham Day to be a steady anchor of wisdom on their boards. But, for David, that sober reputation was not what he expected when they first met in 1956: “He struck me more as a guy who I could have a lot of fun with.”
For Day, Singalong was the great redemption that carried him above the otherwise mundane repetitiveness of law practice in a small town. “The work was fine, but a lot of it was quite boring,” Day recalls. Then, one day in 1964, a manager at Halifax financial company Eastern Trust called Day to say the company would like to hire him. The salary would be around $10,000 a year. Day liked the idea. He had been a lawyer in Windsor for eight years, and had done about as much as he could with the practice. It was clear his life was about to change, but he had no idea how much.
In those days, older members of the bar served as guardian angels for younger members, particularly those who laboured outside of established firms. The esteemed Halifax lawyers George Robertson and Gordon Cowan used to send Day work to do. As Day prepared to join Eastern Trust, Cowan, the managing partner at a predecessor firm to Stewart McKelvey, phoned him up asking if Day could come see him.
The young lawyer was intensely curious as he entered the office. Cowan was, as usual, fastidiously dressed, with nothing on his desk but the paper he was dealing with. He got straight to the point: “I’ve been wondering how long you are going to waste your time practising law in Windsor.” Cowan had heard that Day was contemplating going to work for Eastern Trust. “I don’t think you should do that. I think you should go to work for Canadian Pacific in Montreal.” Cowan said he should expect a call from CP’s Montreal head office.
Day was thunderstruck. Here was the chance not just to be a corporate lawyer, but to be one for Canada’s biggest industrial company, the company that basically built Canada through its coast-to-coast railway. Cowan had taught at the University of Manitoba, and among his students were three of the transportation giant’s senior managers, including the executive responsible for the legal department, a rambunctious character named Ian Sinclair. A senior CP lawyer had been appointed to the Federal Court of Canada, and Sinclair needed a replacement. Cowan had someone in mind, and Day was that person.
He flew to Montreal for an interview with Sinclair and Jim Wright, who ran the legal department, the biggest corporate law contingent in the country. At one point, Sinclair asked him for the number of ownership shares in a ship. Day’s response: sixty-four, except in the United States. That was the right answer, the product of a single elective course in shipping at Dalhousie Law School. Later, as the go-to lawyer on shipping issues for CP, he would appreciate the question even more. And Ian Sinclair would loom large in his career.
Canadian Pacific was now prepared to hire this young country lawyer whose biggest assignment had been saving a backwoods lumberjack from an attempted murder conviction. He had a wife and three children and a steady law practice and another job offer close to home. It was a risk for both sides. Day was ready to take it, but he had his conditions. He remembers telling Wright he couldn’t do it for less than “twelve”—that is, $12,000 a year. Wright thought he meant “twelve” as in hundreds per month. So Day went to CP for $14,400 a year. It was the only salary discussion he ever had at CP. After that, his pay was reviewed annually and always increased.
With this lavish income in hand, he went home to tie up loose ends. He was ready to leave his safe, comfortable Nova Scotia life behind. His last task was helping record Catherine McKinnon’s breakthrough album, The Voice of an Angel. “We finished very early Sunday morning, and I flew to Montreal that day to join Canadian Pacific.”
Chapter 5
Troubleshooter
In 1964, at age thirty-one, Graham Day walked through the doors of Canadian Pacific’s headquarters in that Romanesque shrine to train travel, Windsor Station in downtown Montreal. He was joining the most important company in the country—the largest Canadian-owned industrial business—which had built Canada’s first transcontinental railway and, in the process, had acquired 25 million acres of land, including some of the most valuable in the country. Day loved the sense of working for a nation-building institution. He liked to use the adage, much quoted in histories and legal decisions, that Canadian Pacific took a geographical expression and created a nation.
By 1964, CP had amassed twenty-one thousand miles of track, but it was no longer just a railway. It was a vast shipping, hotel, and airline conglomerate, encompassing a telecommunications network, an oil and gas company, and much more, and with designs on further diversification. And there was all that land it continued to accumulate, including choice real estate at the core of the major Canadian cities. It was a conglomerate at a time when sprawling conglomerates were still very much in favour. In later years, markets would favour companies with a tight focus, but the fashionable thinking in the 1960s was that when one part of a conglomer
ate slowed down, other parts would offset that weakness with more positive performance. Wide diversification brought a margin of safety. In a landmark Supreme Court of Canada decision, it was deemed that CP could separate its expanding unregulated, non-rail businesses from the regulated, slower-growth railway part, thus augmenting the opportunities to add value.
Day’s father was ecstatic about the CP job, because he saw working on a railway as a job for life, which would delight any hard striver who had carried his family through the Depression. And Graham did not disagree. He loved almost the entire time he worked for Canadian Pacific. He felt that, in the 1960s, CP was as important as the Canadian government—maybe more important sometimes. It was generally careful with shareholders’ money and, for an employee, that stewardship was a motivation to do the right thing.
Since the last spike was driven to connect two strands of east-west rail construction in 1885, the company had been run by a series of individualistic, visionary, and often eccentric CEOs. When Day joined, the visionary tradition was continuing under Norris “Buck” Crump, a hard-nosed railway man out of western Canada who had reached the top of the greasy pole. Railroading was in his blood, but he also had a sense of his limitations, and was not afraid of drawing more talented people to his executive suite. He was the original practitioner of the management idea to surround yourself with people smarter than you.
Crump by then had found two talented seconds-in-command, both Manitobans, thus reflecting the value of that middle Canadian province for turning out people to excel elsewhere. They were a Yale-educated engineer, the highly professional Bob Emerson, and a 240-pound monster of a man, a hard-driving lawyer named Ian Sinclair. According to Lords of the Line: The Men Who Built the CPR, by David Cruise and Alison Griffiths, Crump managed amid creative chaos created by these two competing underlings. Crump, Emerson, and Sinclair would play big roles in Graham Day’s life.
Day would become part of the legal department, and that was his official status for most of his eight years at CP. In 1964, CP’s legal network consisted of its headquarters team and five regional offices, in Quebec, Toronto, Winnipeg, Calgary, and Vancouver. It employed some three dozen lawyers. The bulk of the work was domestic. The largest internal client was the railway, with hotels, shipping, trucking, the airline, and corporate activities making up most of the rest.
It was a terrific canvas for a young lawyer who had spent his career to that point doing real estate filings and other mundane tasks. But the family relocation to Montreal was daunting. The Days knew few people in the city. They moved in late fall, and didn’t see many neighbours during the hard Montreal winter. But Ann sensed things would be better because Graham needed something interesting, and CP had so many different departments. There would be no boredom factor. He was lucky to be a lawyer, enabling him to work in every area of the company, and around the country—and the world.
He got a sense of his varied mandates in the first assignment, to prepare a report on regulated grain freight rates. In reading the file, he had not the slightest idea how to proceed. On day two, he was accosted by a young man from the research department who asked whether he had a certain file on rates. He did. The researcher then volunteered that Day would have to undertake a regression analysis to determine the range of appropriate track usage and the cost factor. Regression analysis—a statistical tool to investigate relationships among variables—was strange territory for the history and theatre enthusiast, but people such as Graham Murray and Earle Gordon Withrow had taught him how to learn. At lunchtime, he went to the nearest bookstore to find something on the subject. Then he hauled out a basic adding machine, and over the weekend he captured the essentials and proceeded.
It taught him the unspoken principle of Canadian Pacific: you were handed an assignment and expected to produce a result. It was up to you how it got accomplished. Don’t kick problems upstairs, just go at it and get it done. It meant tremendous pressure on a still very green lawyer from the Annapolis Valley, but potentially great freedom. He learned to be a self-starter who didn’t require a lot of handholding. His talent for improvisation would come in handy in his later role as a global troubleshooter who often found himself alone in a foreign country with no rule book.
After the freight rate analysis, Day’s first truly big job was in shipping, where he would spend a lot of time. Canadian Pacific had its Empress suite of ocean liners, which it had accumulated during the heyday of transatlantic ship travel. But this world was fading in the 1960s, and Day got involved with selling off the passenger fleet (although CP would expand its commercial shipping). It was Day’s job to close the sale of the Empress of Britain to a Greek shipping company named Goulandris Group. There were tricky financial issues, but CP emerged recovering its entire sale price. The ship was handed over to its new owners in November 1964. Two days later, it was renamed Queen Anna Maria and dispatched to Genoa for a refit.
After that, Day’s jobs at CP were head-scratchingly diverse. A ship was lost at sea, and he would deal with it, as well as the hearings in Canada and the United Kingdom. He would contract the building of new ships in Japan and the Netherlands, and arrange for their charters. He established a Bermuda subsidiary for CP’s bulk shipping activities. He would contract the purchase of aircraft, including the stretched variations of the Douglas DC-8, CP’s workhorse long-distance carrier. He would take the lead in labour conciliation proceedings, and establish arbitration procedures. One big job was to arrange the acquisition by CP’s trucking subsidiary, Smith Transport, of a US trucking company. It came at a time when the US Interstate Commerce Commission banned railways from owning trucking firms. So, to work around the US law, Day established a trust based in Houston that would buy the trucking company.
Such varied work gave Day a wide window on the company, but it also meant a gruelling travel regimen. “No one in the CP law department, or for that matter within CP, had anything like the varied assignments I was given, certainly none had the international exposure,” he says. This was clearly not Windsor, Nova Scotia, and the life of a country lawyer.
For Ann, these were challenging times. After fourteen months in Montreal, the family moved to Toronto, where Graham became the regional counsel for CP’s eastern division. After four years in Toronto, it was back to Montreal. All during the time in Toronto, Day was on the road 80 percent of the time—and in 1967 it was close to 90 percent. There was a family joke that Ann and the kids lived in Toronto, but Graham just travelled. Like many couples of that period, the two had made a pact: he ran his job and she ran the home. That was the only way the marriage would work. He had to have his mind totally focused on work. You did not whine, Ann says. You just embraced it and got on with it. Life in the Day household—whether in Toronto or Montreal—was hectic, but Ann kept things under control. When Graham went to the office in the morning, he did not know where he would be the next day. “Not infrequently, I phoned home on Friday morning to ask: what is the state of the laundry? Seven or eight times out of ten, I would be out of the country that night.”
Meanwhile, Graham was getting an education in how a big company operated, as he observed the top CP managers. At the summit of the company, momentous changes were under way. Buck Crump, now chairman, had chosen Bob Emerson as his successor as CEO, so the issue was: what to do with Ian Sinclair? Big Julie—Sinclair’s nickname, modelled on the gambler-gangster character in Guys And Dolls—was dispatched to create and run Canadian Pacific Investments, the holding company for the burgeoning non-rail assets, now hived off in a separate unregulated entity. Emerson officially became president of the core company in October 1964.
According to Lords of the Line, Emerson had the outward appearance of the cool professional, but possessed internal warmth and sensitivity. The railway was streamlining operations, and the hard decisions about firings, layoffs, and track abandonment began to eat away at him. As a service provider in the company, Day did a lot of work for Emerson and liked
the man. On a Monday morning in March 1966, while still working in Montreal, Day arrived at the office. Crump’s secretary phoned, asking him to come down to the chairman’s office for a meeting. Emerson had been found dead on the floor of his garage by his driver, who had come round to collect him for the day’s work. In the office, “everything went very quiet,” Day recalls.
In fact, Bob Emerson had died two days earlier, on Saturday, but his wife had been out of town. Although there was a high proportion of carbon monoxide in his blood, Lords of the Line recounts, the coroner’s verdict was death by heart attack. Because of the unrelenting pressures of work, some assumed suicide, but Sinclair insisted this theory was bunk. The two men had been working on an issue on the day Emerson died, and Sinclair observed nothing wrong with his colleague. Sinclair was shaken by the death because, for all their rivalry, the two men had respect for each other.
Emerson had been popular, and morale plummeted throughout the company. Crump briefly reassumed the presidency, and in time the directors—some of them reluctantly—approved the appointment of the larger-than-life Sinclair as the tenth president of CP in April 1966. For Ian Sinclair, there would be no Crump-like sharing of power, for it was one-man rule. Some CP staffers would privately describe Sinclair as the “beast that walks like a man.” Newspaper columnist Allan Fotheringham once wrote that Sinclair was like “a linebacker who stumbled into the chairman’s suite by mistake.” Lords of the Line says, “Crump had been an all-powerful leader but a quiet and relatively self effacing one. Within a few years of succeeding Emerson, Sinclair’s image overshadowed the company to the extent that many people believed he actually owned it.”