The Last Canadian Knight

by Gordon Pitts

  After delivering the crushing news that morning, it was time for MacDonald to head back to Halifax, and he had a couple of options. He could take the route up the South Shore, the way he had come. He decided instead on the other way around, skirting the northwest coast and passing through the Annapolis Valley on his way to the little town of Hantsport.

  “I placed a call to Graham and asked if he was available,” MacDonald says. “Graham” was Graham Day, who gave one of his familiar replies: “Yes, I am, young man.” (To Day, you were a young man even if you had bade farewell to youth long ago.) So Mark MacDonald ended up at the Day house for what he calls “a couple of hours of advice and psychotherapy.”

  Day was always there for MacDonald, just as he was for many people, including not a few young lawyers, past and present, at Stewart McKelvey. MacDonald didn’t go to Hantsport for any miracle cure. It was just to talk to someone who had been through all kinds of change. “He can talk with authority that, yes, the sun is going to come up tomorrow and probably it will shine. That was the way it was.”

  Ever since MacDonald met Day two decades earlier, the older man had been part of his decision making whenever he reached an important professional crossroads. So, when MacDonald left the law practice to become a ferryboat service operator, Day was there for him. When he took on full ownership of the company, Day was there again—as he was on the day of the ferry closing.

  Day does not practise mentorship so much as sponsorship. He becomes fully engaged in the lives of the people he backs. It is not just periodic advice, but a kind of pact. His interest does not stop at the going-away party. If his protegés leave the place where Day first found them, his support goes with them and continues through the phases of their lives. He is there for the good times and the bad.

  Mark MacDonald got through his day from hell, and in 2016 the provincial government invited him back to run the service between Yarmouth and Portland. The day we talked, MacDonald described how he had been messaging back and forth with Graham Day as they discussed the design of the new catamaran ferry the company was leasing from the US Navy.

  For Day, a giant on the international scene, coming home to Canada provided opportunities to thank the institutions and people that had contributed to his successful career. What better way to do that than to help develop new generations of leaders? He could provide the kind of guidance that had helped him escape a frustrated teenage existence and outgrow a humdrum law practice. He could offer his experience to places such as Dalhousie University, where he first learned the law; the Canadian military, where he learned the value of service; and the law firm that never employed him, but whose managing partner was so important in kick-starting his business career.

  Gordon Cowan, distinguished teacher, jurist, and one-time Liberal candidate, was heading a predecessor firm to Stewart McKelvey when he concluded that Day would never be content with small-town law, and pulled strings to get him into Canadian Pacific. It reflected a time-honoured tradition in those days, when senior Nova Scotia lawyers lent a hand to junior solicitors. It came out of a sense of obligation to the profession that went beyond making money. But this practice faded as the law became a much more blatantly commercial enterprise and there was less time for personal mentoring. Day, however, believed there was value in keeping the tradition alive. That became his mission, and it drove his support of young lawyers such as Mark MacDonald, Lydia Bugden, Jim Dickson, and a host of others.

  It was, in fact, Mark MacDonald who reconnected Graham Day with Gordon Cowan’s firm. As a young lawyer in the late 1980s, he happened to read that a Nova Scotian named Graham Day had been knighted by the queen. MacDonald was on the management committee of Stewart McKelvey, and proposed that its members explore whether Day might consider a working relationship with the firm.

  By this time, Cowan’s old Halifax practice had mushroomed into a regional superfirm: along with McInnes Cooper, one of Atlantic Canada’s Big Two. McInnes Cooper had a long history—it had acted for the White Star Line, whose new ship, the Titanic, sank in the North Atlantic in 1912—and it had employed George Robertson, another of Graham Day’s mentors. Stewart McKelvey’s predecessor firms had employed towering figures in Nova Scotia law—not just Cowan, but also his powerful rival for pre-eminence, Frank Covert, whose last name captures the spirit of his confidential services to empire builders such as Frank Sobey and Roy Jodrey.

  Day accepted the offer from Stewart McKelvey, and in January 1990 became the firm’s counsel, thus gaining a home base for his reimmersion into Canadian business life. As counsel, it would have been easy for Day to coast on his contacts and laurels as a rainmaker. But he dove more deeply into Stewart McKelvey’s DNA, taking a direct hand in influencing its culture and its continuity. His circle of contacts rippled wider as new lawyers entered the firm. In one instance, MacDonald recruited a young woman, Lydia Bugden, to the firm. After an interval, MacDonald knew he might be leaving Stewart McKelvey, and he felt it was imperative that she meet Day. “My reaction was: why would Sir Graham want to meet with me?” Bugden recalls. But she and MacDonald did the pilgrimage to Hantsport to lunch with the firm’s counsel at one of his favourite spots: the Grand Pré winery, on the edge of nearby Wolfville. From that time, Day became the invisible hand in helping her career along. “Graham works in mysterious ways,” Bugden says. “He has a plan, and the end result is more than you could possibly expect. And he has a keen interest in the advancement of women and women around boardroom tables.”

  The Day method is to have a talk with a young lawyer, perhaps at one of his famous lunches, and get a sense of what he or she is all about. Not long afterward, a call comes in with the offer of an assignment, a directorship, a new client. There is no immediate information on how the connection was made, but there is always the suspicion of Day’s invisible hand. Bugden had been with Stewart McKelvey for about seven years and had made partner, when she started to work on the files of the Jodrey family in the Annapolis Valley. Later, she was pulled into the massively complex and rewarding legal megaproject to reorganize the Jodrey holdings. In 2015, her skills were rewarded, as she became the CEO of Stewart McKelvey. “[Day] is such a visionary in how he approaches things,” Bugden says. “He always has an interest in what he calls ‘the great firm.’ We know client relationships are maintained and work comes our way because of Graham.”

  That work reflects a passionate interest in the progress of Atlantic companies big and small. Day is known to guide a small business new to the legal system by making an introduction to a lawyer. When an expanding Atlantic business wants to go global, it might assume it has outgrown the local law firm. There is a tendency to think it needs the expertise of a bigger law firm based in Toronto, New York, or London. Day has convinced companies that the required expertise resides within Halifax and the law firm he represents.

  The advice is not limited to law. Day’s acolytes find they can talk to him on just about any subject. They know their mentor has broad expertise not just in ships, but in cars, trains, chocolate eggs, and power stations. He knows the places to find great sushi, the operas of Puccini, and the on-base percentage of José Bautista—all fodder for the man’s restless curiosity. “You know the beer commercial, the one about the most interesting man in the world?” Mark MacDonald asks. “It’s that sort of thing. Without trivializing it, that is what it is all about.” MacDonald adds that Day’s authority emanates from the fact that “I don’t think there is anyone in the world with his experience.”

  Day’s return to Halifax also meant a reunion with another institution so influential in his life. Allan Shaw, his cohort on the Scotiabank board, was then also chair of the board of governors at Dalhousie University. Shortly after Day relocated to Hantsport, Shaw approached him to become the university’s chancellor. As a young man, Day had had rocky relations with the university hierarchy, but the place had been pivotal in his development as a lawyer and a leader, and now he appreciated t
he university’s positive influence on Maritime, and Canadian, society. He accepted Shaw’s proposal, becoming the university’s fourth chancellor in 1994.

  At the time, Dalhousie’s president, Howard Clark, was facing significant financial challenges and a difficult labour situation. In Day’s view, much is owed to Clark for establishing a solid financial basis on which Dalhousie could build. He credits Allan Shaw for leading structural reforms that, while maintaining a balance of interests, reduced the numbers on the board of governors and the senate, making them more effective bodies.

  Shaw and Day were both occupying their roles of chair and chancellor when Winnipeg-born historian Tom Traves became president. Day believes his most effective time as chancellor was in the first two years of Traves’s appointment, when he and Shaw were able to advise him on crucial governance issues. Those who know him say Day loved being chancellor, even though his old antipathy towards campus politics resurfaced at times. Eventually, he felt his role had become largely ceremonial. Day understands the importance of ceremony in an institution such as Dalhousie, but in 2001 he felt it was the right time to leave.

  The ties to Dalhousie remain strong, cemented by personal relationships and the fact that there is a scholarship fund in Day’s name in the school of management. It was the initiative of entrepreneur John Bragg, who encouraged many of Day’s business friends to contribute. Day himself has been adding funds and preparing for future provisions. The scholarships—up to $50,000—are available to students from Atlantic Canada who meet academic conditions and who might have an economic need. He also supports the law school’s annual Sir Graham Day Ethics, Morality, and the Law Lecture, a rich contribution to the intellectual life of the university. The funding enables top-flight international speakers to come to Dalhousie to deliver thought-provoking talks. A partnership with the CBC Radio program Ideas gives the lecture a national profile. Lydia Bugden marvels that, on a Friday night in Halifax, a town of lively pubs and restaurants, the lecture can draw a full house of mostly university students.

  Day’s payback obligations extend to his military experience. He never went to war. He never faced enemy fire or the emotional anguish of friends dying around him, but he is a military man in spirit and instinct. He believes in service, and military service is the highest calling he can imagine. He was a child during the Second World War, and as an eighteen-year-old yearned to go to Korea to escape his adolescent funk, but he knew his father would not consent. But he has done his part as a reservist, honorary regimental colonel, mentor to senior military people, and a father to a military leader.

  Part of his attachment springs from his respect for history, hierarchy, and tradition. He is not one who likes to use warlike analogies for business, as they trivialize life-and-death danger. Yet he can appreciate the parallels. He likes to formulate and articulate strategy, but he understands that he has to give rein to the people on the spot. Military and business campaigns are won on the ground by the men and women you equip and command.

  As a young lawyer in Windsor, Nova Scotia, Day was a member of the army reserves, and had a brief stint in the judge advocate general branch during the Cuban Missile Crisis. When he moved to Montreal in 1964, he transferred to the Victoria Rifles, but after two years, the pressures of his Canadian Pacific job forced him to leave the reserves.

  In Britain, he was close to military people and events, as his companies manufactured everything from nuclear and conventional submarines to wheeled vehicles to missiles to small arms. This brought him into regular contact with the Ministry of Defence and senior officers. Through the mid-1980s and early 1990s, Day served on committees that advised the defence establishment on resources and procurement. He would occasionally lecture at staff colleges, and he did finally get to Sandhurst—as a reviewing officer.

  His connection with the military became intensely personal on the day in 1983 when son Michael phoned to say he was joining the Canadian Forces. To some extent, Graham has lived the military life through his son’s impressive career. Michael feels he was fortunate to have a father who so knowingly understands his life and career choices. And, of course, there have been long telephone conversations about military strategy, for both are students of the discipline. “The Second World War for him looms huge,” Michael says, sitting in his home in Ottawa on a dark winter afternoon. “If you went down to my library, he’s responsible for about 50 percent of it, because he buys me books.” Michael’s house contains three thousand books on military history and politics, and Graham’s basement library in Hantsport is similarly adorned with military books, along with shelves of mysteries and thrillers, which he devours on airplane trips.

  Michael is always quick to add that his father had nothing to do with his decision to enlist—“with the exception that it was always seen to be an honourable profession and that that was a good thing to do.” That good thing continued after Graham returned to Canada and renewed his interests and connections. In May 2005, he was asked to become the honorary colonel of the West Nova Scotia Regiment, one of Canada’s oldest regiments.

  Several years later, the judge advocate general of the Canadian Forces, Major-General Blaise Cathcart, was looking for a new colonel commandant, one who would be not just a ceremonial figure, but a distinguished lawyer who could engage with the JAG mission, strategy, and outreach. He had read a magazine piece on Canada’s top lawyers and noticed Graham Day’s name. Cathcart and Michael Day knew each other, and Cathcart asked if Michael’s father might be interested in joining JAG. He certainly was. He took up the appointment in May 2011 and served for four years.

  At that time, Cathcart felt there was a lot of misinformation about military law and the work of the JAG branch, particularly regarding the controversial transfer of prisoners in Afghanistan to the local authorities. He concluded he needed help educating the public. He also could use someone to work internally with legal officers, and help advise Cathcart himself.

  In explaining military law, people in uniform often were tuned out by a sceptical public. But Day could talk to civilians, including lawyers, about how the system worked. In JAG, “you are serving two professions, the legal profession and the profession of arms,” Cathcart explains. “They come together at times, quite starkly when we are putting men and women in harm’s way. Having someone of Graham’s experience was invaluable.”

  A high point for Cathcart and Day was when the queen accepted to become colonel-in-chief of the JAG branch. Cathcart explains that the queen is very selective with the honours she takes. The JAG branch had actually been approached by the royal secretary, who asked if it would agree to the queen’s service. It certainly would! In June 2014, the two men were invited to Buckingham Palace for a private audience. Day was just finishing up his tenure with the JAG branch, and it was a special moment. Cathcart remembers Sir Graham’s comment to the queen was that she had knighted him in 1989 and here he was again. “You’re still working,” the queen drily observed. Day had to bite his tongue not to say: “And so are you, Your Majesty.”

  Day is someone who recognizes the human character in its varied manifestations. He supports and encourages leadership, wherever it appears. His backing of Acadian leaders reflects that open-mindedness; so does his sponsorship of women. He also feels that military leadership is a compelling preparation for leadership in other worlds, such as business.

  He is encouraging Michael in his transition to civilian life. Michael, like his father before him, is working with the Bragg family company as a member of the advisory board and, still young in his fifties, no doubt will seek other roles in the business world.

  Graham has helped others make such transitions. Vice-Admiral Greg Maddison had one of Canada’s most distinguished military careers, rising to the role of senior naval officer before retiring as vice-chief of the defence staff. The highlight was his key role in commanding the operations of Canada’s forces worldwide during the war in Afghanistan. But he faced the
common dilemma of defence leaders: how to find similar fulfilment in their post-military lives. He remembers getting a call from Graham Day, who was on the board of Canada Steamship Lines (now CSL). How would he like to be a corporate director?

  It arose from conversations between Day and his son about the potential for ex-military leaders in corporate roles. Canadian companies do not have a history of looking for leaders among retired officers, unlike those in the United States, Britain, and France, where leadership is leadership, wherever it is found, and the qualities are transferable. Day believes the Canadian attitude is an extension of how shabbily our military people are treated in peacetime.

  Graham Day is no longer on the CSL board, but Maddison remains. He feels it is a group with much of the same integrity he encountered in the Canadian Forces. “It was a pretty easy fit,” he says, and Day helped ease the transition through advice and mentoring. Day is often credited with helping guide CSL through a period of growth when it moved beyond the Great Lakes to become a global bulk shipping company. CSL once had an old-boys-network board, but as the company expanded and became more complex, its owners, the Martin family, decided to diversify with genuinely independent directors, such as Day. In turn, the new crew helped pull in other strong candidates, such as Maddison. Day had heard from his son that Maddison was very good in assessing talent. At the time, Day was on CSL’s human resources committee, which Maddison joined. He became the committee chairman after Day retired.

  Day continued to clear a path for the former senior soldier’s development. “He takes people through a level of experience and advice for a few years, and then bingo, you’ve got it,” Maddison says. He recalls that, soon after he retired from the forces, he began sitting down with Day to talk through his experiences, some in difficult situations in Afghanistan. Day would listen, then add his observations of Thatcher and other leaders in crisis situations. Maddison could see the parallels, and they would explore what they learned.