IT IS 4:15 P.M. , Christmas Eve, at Maple Bay, a small harbour on the east side of Vancouver Island, forty miles north of Victoria. Light rain is falling. Nothing stirs in the mist over the water. Fishing boats and pleasure craft have tied up for the holiday season. The mountain at the entrance to the bay is hidden in a low cloud, obscuring the mouth of the harbour. Suddenly a watcher on shore hears the beat of diesel engines, and a vessel appears out of the fog, its radar scanner revolving atop the mast, heading for the docks at the head of the bay. It is a small ship such as the shore-watcher has not seen before. The silhouette is that of a wartime corvette assigned to hunt submarines. But instead of grey paint this ship has a pale green gleaming fibreglass hull. The superstructure is light gold,, set off with stainless steel railings and wide glass shatterproof windows. Two diagonal stripes, one dark green and one dark red, lend a rakish dash to the hull. Radio aerials stand against the sky above the high wheelhouse. The vessel slows down and then comes alongside one of the piers. A slight figure in yellow oilskins, rubber boots, and blue toque stands on the stern step until the dock is within a few feet, then jumps ashore, secures a line with a couple of turns, and races to do the same with the bow line. The captain, in an orange rainsuit, steps out of the wheelhouse, looks over the side at the lines, and shuts down the engine.
That description came from the log of a forty-six-foot motor vessel out of Canoe Cove named Cybele III. It was written during the boat’s shakedown cruise in the winter of 1980–81 by owner and skipper Arthur James Edward Child. In his shorebound manifestation, he was president and chief executive officer of Burns Foods, Alberta’s largest private employer. Here at sea, about an hour’s flight from Calgary by private jet, he was very different from the stalwart, square-looking, Dickensian gent who, besides riding hard herd on annual food sales of $1.5 billion, presided over the Canada West Foundation, the country’s most effective and most conservative think tank.
Closer inspection of Cybele III yielded telling clues to Child’s character. For one thing, instead of flying the Canadian maple leaf designated for small craft, this boat was proudly displaying the Blue Ensign (Union Jack in a field of blue), especially made for Child by the Annin flag company in Toronto. It was his gesture of protest against the Liberal party’s imposition of a new flag in 1965. During the same voyage, while docked at the Nanaimo Yacht Club, Child noted with satisfaction: “Club members who saw our ensign made very disparaging remarks about the Canadian flag.”
The boat also revealed a great deal about Child’s personality and work habits. First of all, he was very much in command, standing there in his wheelhouse, hugging himself against the chill of the day. He was never a noisy man, but his body language spoke for him. This vessel was built to his exact specifications right down to the walls of hand-rubbed teak in every cabin. His love of detail was exemplified by its engine room, which on most boats this size is a greasy pit into which the owner sends befuddled mechanics on annual inspection forays. Not on Cybele III. This engine room was fifteen feet wide, with ample space to walk around and poke at the two outsize 310-hp 6–71N Detroit diesel engines and the Onan generator, which produces 7,500 watts, making the ship independent of shore facilities. The carpeted engine room was as neat and innocent of bric-a-brac as Child’s desk back in his Calgary office.
There was another parallel between Child’s business life and his boat. He believed in the privilege of the proprietor, he privatized Burns and, typically, he not only owned his boat, but also bought a major interest in the Canoe Cove Manufacturing yard near Sidney, B.C., that had built her. Cybele III was an expression of Child’s personality, containing as it did the best of materials and equipment without a touch of hedonism or ostentation. The pleasure cruiser had style, but for the professional sailor only.
What the vessel’s utilitarian lines did not reveal was the romantic side of Child’s nature. This was not exactly what he’s known for in Alberta. One of his former associates summed up the more commonly held view of the man with the unoriginal comment: “When Art Child says, ‘Jump,’ you ask, ‘How high?’ on the way up.”
But here, cruising through Spieden Channel down to the San Juans, a very different Child was noting in his log:
Spieden Channel has vicious tidal currents, of no concern to a boat of our size but spectacular to behold, especially if the wind is going in the opposite direction. On a dark and stormy day, the tidal turbulence of Spieden Channel conjures up the adventures of Ulysses and his Greek sailors when they dared the Strait of Messina and faced the terrors of Scylla and Charybdis. On this sunny day, however, there were no monsters waiting for us on either side of the Strait.
As Cybele III nosed her thirty tons around Limestone Point into San Juan Channel off Orcas Island, Child took a moment to reminisce about his love of seafaring and why he chose this journey as a maiden voyage. He set down his private impressions in the ship’s log:
I grew up in the Thousand Islands, those southern outcroppings of the Precambrian Shield which choke the ten-mile source of the mighty St. Lawrence River as it emerges from Lake Ontario. In winter there was easy access to any island over the ice, but the real delight was the sparkle of the summer sun on the channels between the islands. The channels gave each island its separate privacy yet enabled small boys in small boats to explore any beach or cove. The Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence have a sheltered and mature beauty, in contrast to the wind-swept rocks of the Thirty Thousand Islands of Georgian Bay, whose bare shoulders make one want to stand tall against the elements, as do their lone pines defying the cold north winds. By contrast, as a victim of long frigid winters, I have enjoyed the warmth of cruising among the mangroves of the Ten Thousand Islands that protect the west coast of Florida southward from Marco Island. There the complete absence of human presence and the stillness of the clear water between the myriads of islets, mere footholds for mangrove trees and oysters, compel one to turn off the noise of the outboard motor and paddle silently between corridors of bright shiny green foliage.
The San Juan Islands have nothing in common with the island groups of the inland rivers and lakes, or the green hummocks along tropical coastlines. Broken off from the northwest corner of the state of Washington, and sheltered from the open Pacific Ocean by the massive barrier of Vancouver Island, the San Juans are like a husky group of individuals who just happen to have been thrown together. Some of the larger members of the group are big and mountainous; others are fairly flat and extensively farmed. The shores of most are rocky and forbidding, and large islands like Blakely have little habitation because only fir trees can cling to the mountainsides. The general impression of the San Juans is dark green, the colour of the dense growth of spruce and cedar and Douglas fir. The impression of dark forest and grey granite is heightened when there is rain and fog, which is most of the time, but on a sunny summer day the sailor’s spirits are lifted by the bright iridescent leaves and white flowers of arbutus trees and the glimpse of wildflowers where the forest opens at the water’s edge.
There are no wave-created beaches in the San Juans because the violent ocean is fifty miles away. But in any case the water would be too cold for swimming. The visitor is entranced by the deep and steep inlets of Orcas Island or the bays that hide behind many of the headlands. A school of porpoises may put on a show as you thread a channel, and every stretch of water is host to thousands of seabirds: ducks, herons, cormorants, coots, seagulls, and many others. The San Juans convey a vivid impression of lush forest growth and teeming wildlife above and below the water. Harbour seals and fishermen compete for the schools of salmon, and shellfish are everywhere for the gathering.
ARTHUR CHILD WAS the most interesting and certainly the most important non-oil businessman in Alberta. He turned seventy in 1980, but instead of entertaining thoughts of permanent retirement on his boat, he launched a five-year expansion designed to take Burns well past $2 billion in sales. He put in a daily average of ten hours behind his desk, including Saturdays and Sundays, and his company’s official biography insisted: “Arthur Child has no social or sports interests whatsoever. For the most part, his time is spent at his office, his home, or travelling on business. “
That was a gross distortion of Child’s eclectic mind and unusual background. After graduating from Queen’s University, he read early French literature at Laval; lived in Europe; taught himself German, Russian and Spanish; wrote a PhD thesis in economic history; studied at the Harvard Business School and wrote two books. He served as treasurer of the Canadian Authors Association (Hugh MacLennan was secretary), and in 1951 he helped save the group from financial collapse.
He has been a pilot, performing aerobatics in his own Tiger Moth, and he undertook several lengthy voyages as captain of his two previous Cybeles. His house had the largest private military library in the country. He took regular trips to Washington for private Pentagon briefings on the world situation, was a member of London’s prestigious Institute for Strategic Studies and believed strongly in applying military analogies to business. He admired Julius Caesar (“whose qualities of leadership applied equally well to business as to military matters”) but had little patience with modern management-by-consensus techniques. Child blamed the U.S. defeat in Vietnam on the fact that its officer corps relied on such fancy nonsense as systems analysis, decision models and management by objective. Officers, he contended, must be gentlemen, and their most essential skill is knowing how to die well. Child believed in leadership by example. That, and discipline. “If you read the history of India, you would see how discipline and organization and the demand for perfection enabled the Indian Army … to defeat native armies twenty, thirty times their size. Discipline, the desire for perfection, high standards, sound training … are all worthwhile principles in the military and in business.”
He made use of that military knowledge in reorganizing the Burns company when he arrived in 1966. The company had been founded by Patrick Burns of Kirkfield, Ontario, and Odanah, Manitoba, when Calgary was little more than a North-West Mounted Police outpost, and he got the contract for supplying meat to the railway gangs building a spur up to Edmonton. The Burns firm was sold in 1928 to Dominion Securities and eventually found its way into the portfolio of Howard Webster, the Montreal investor. It was losing $375,000 a month when Webster persuaded Child (who became chief auditor of Canada Packers at twenty-eight and in 1960 had moved over to rescue Intercontinental Packers in Saskatoon) to take over. Child fired fifty-seven of the ninety executives at head office, wrote off packing plants in Regina, Prince Albert and Medicine Hat, and diversified into restaurants (Murray’s), catering (Crawley & McCracken), groceries (Stafford Foods), vegetable oils (Canbra Foods), tanning (A.R. Clarke) and trading with Japan. By 1974 sales had tripled and profits stood at $4,571,000.
When he joined the company, Child sank all his savings into Burns shares so that by 1978 he owned 4 percent of its stock. That was the year he and Webster decided to go private by forming a new company (WCB Holdings) to buy up the public’s shares for $50 million. Writing in the Financial Post, Richard Osler speculated at the time that Child’s stake, which had moved up to 25 percent, was worth $10 million. The value of his investment multiplied many times since, and Child was delighted with his privatized status: “My friends who head up large public corporations invariably say to me, ‘Gee, I wish we could do that.’ Being private has a lot of advantages for any chief executive officer. Your business is your own. You don’t have to disclose anything to anybody; you don’t have analysts calling you every week, which is a bit of a bother. “
Unlike many of his Calgary colleagues, Child had spread his influence across the country, as senior vice-president (and substantial investor) in the Quebec-based La Vérendrye Management, which owned the Télé-Capital radio and television network and Brazeau Transport, the province’s largest trucking operation.
He was equally contemptuous of Pierre Trudeau and Joe Clark, believing that Brian Mulroney would bring sanity back into the political process. “People are quite happy to go their own ways,” he told me, defining the Calgary ethic. “We won’t let anybody take liberties, but we’re not looking for distinction as such. Business is fun to people out here. But we’re very realistic, very hard-nosed when it comes not only to our companies’ investments, but also to our own portfolios. No real estate operator, broker or anybody like that could even get the time of day from me. I make my own decisions.”
ART CHILD WAS a contented man. He was rich, had virtually no public profile, pushed his political ideas through the Canada West Foundation and his private impulses through half a dozen personal investment trusts. His name seldom surfaced in lists of
Alberta power brokers, yet he was as influential as any of them and more interesting than most.
It was aboard his boat that Child came closest to the essence of himself. As he wrote in the final entry of his log describing the maiden voyage to the San Juans: “While most ex-sailors or would-be sailors can only sit at home and dream of islands and blue water, Cybele III makes it possible for us to cruise a thousand miles of coastline—a far journey for the small boy who once ventured in his tiny skiff across the channels of the St. Lawrence.”
IT WAS TRUE that Child invested most of himself in his work and that he turned the once insolvent Burns Foods into a $2 billion corporation that became Alberta’s largest private employer. And it was true that while Child deliberately maintained no public profile outside his company, he also led a fascinating private life, worth describing now that he has passed away, at eighty-six.
An unpretentious gent with a wry sense of humour and a romantic’s soul, he was kind to strangers and ruthless with competitors. His chief vanity was to wear a red toupée that fitted his head so awkwardly he must have known it was a bad joke. He came daily to his office until six months before he died and was already well into his eighties when he experienced one of his greatest thrills.
He had been a skilful flyer, performing impressive aerobatics in his own vintage Tiger Moth, and when a visiting American fighter-jet pilot heard about his flying skills, he allowed Child to pilot his supersonic jet fighter. He started to lecture the octogenarian on how the ejection seat worked, but Child interrupted: “I won’t need that,” he gently cautioned. “At my age, if I get into trouble, I’ll just ride her down.”
— 1996