Heroes Read online

  “I don’t think I’m secure enough to spend the kind of money my cousins do or live in houses like theirs,” Peter confessed. “I’ve always sort of felt, ‘Gee, look at all the money that person’s spending. I guess he knows he can always make it.’ A strong part of me keeps saying to myself, ‘My God, the money just came to me; maybe it could all disappear some day.’”

  HIS FATHER, ALLAN, was a stubborn character but no match for Sam, the autocratic chief of the clan who gradually shunted Allan off into looking after the family philanthropies, although he remained a senior vice-president of Seagram’s until 1975. A former colleague recalled being in Sam’s office just after the outbreak of the Second World War, when Allan came in decked out in the uniform of a private in the Canadian army. On his way to a ten-day reserve training course at St. Bruno, near Montreal, he shook Sam’s hand, executed a smart about-turn, marched to the door, saluted and was gone. Sam could hardly contain himself. “Ah, look at the fucking hero,” he exclaimed. “You’d think he’d just won the war. Christ, they get a few more like him and Hitler’s got a chance!”

  It was one of Sam’s eternal grudges against his brother that during the immediate postwar reconstruction period, when Allan donated a boatload of flour to a French city, he was decorated with the Legion of Honour. “How come he didn’t send the flour from both of us?” Sam asked anyone who’d listen. “He does everything else jointly, for Christ’s sake. Hell, he doesn’t know enough to get out of his own way, and now they give him the goddamn Legion of Honour.” Allan didn’t say a word, but he always wore the scarlet pip that denotes the French decoration proudly in his buttonhole.

  Sam had his revenge. His excommunicating Allan’s sons from Seagram’s hallowed halls triggered a primal feud that split the family into warring camps. Allan himself was quite content to play a complementary role in the distilling giant’s corporate affairs, but he never stopped hoping that Edward and Peter would be counted among its operating heirs. Instead, Sam chose specifically to exclude them, even before their abilities could fairly be appraised. Cousin Minda remembered being puzzled by the tension that began to build up between the neighbours on Belvedere Road. “When we were smaller, we thought our cousins would go into the company. Later, we knew how things stood.” Cousin Charles’s summary was more succinct: “Pop didn’t want them in the business.”

  The actual coup de grâce that drove Allan’s branch of the family out to pasture took place in the summer of 1952, shortly after Peter graduated from Yale. “The boys came to me,” Allan recalled, “Peter first. He started to cry and asked me, ‘How is it that I can’t get into the company?’ So I told him.” Sam and Allan had placed their Seagram stockholdings into Seco Investments, a private company controlled jointly by their family trusts, Cemp and Edper. But the ownership was not evenly split; Sam had 2.2 million shares and Allan 1.1 million. This two-thirds majority allowed Sam to issue instructions barring Allan’s children. The decision was taken during a memorable shouting match between the two men. “Sam was really mad at me,” Allan recalled, “and when Sam gets mad, he can go back four generations.”

  Even though he’d won, the fact that there had been some minor challenge to his supreme authority made Sam so angry that during the next twelve months, he refused to exchange a single word with his younger brother. “For a whole year,” Allan recalled, “he used to walk by my office, which was next door to his, and never stopped to talk.” No member of either family crossed the tailored lawns between the Belvedere mansions. Eight years later, Sam struck another blow. Having ejected Allan’s sons from any proprietary function in the company, he decided to strip them of half their holdings. Seagram’s was at the time selling on the open market for $28 per share. Sam set out to purchase 600,000 shares of Edper’s holding of 1.1 million at $26 per share, claiming that he was entitled to a “quantity discount” for such a large block. Peter and Edward accepted because the offer had been accompanied by what they read as a clear warning that their refusal would strip their father of his only remaining power base—the Seagram vice-presidency. This bold move raised Sam’s holdings to 2.8 million shares, which, with two subsequent two-for-one stock splits, brought him to more than 11 million shares of his family holdings. At the same time, Edper’s stake in Seagram was reduced to 500,000 shares, which, following similar splits, eventually left Allan’s family with only 2 million shares. Peter and Edward immediately sold them off, claiming with ill-concealed pride that “there are lots of better investments around.”

  SAM CALLED PETER into his office in the winter of 1969 to confront him with a large pile of press clippings, praising the rise of “the other” Bronfmans.

  “What the hell are all these?” Sam demanded.

  “I don’t know,” Peter replied. “I don’t ever answer reporters’ calls. What they write isn’t my fault.”

  “Your private office still connected to the Seagram switchboard?”

  “Yes. But we pay all the long-distance bills separately.”

  “Well, you better get off. Right now.”

  The last shreds of the umbilical cord between the two families had been cut.

  Peter was then forty. He and Edward had accomplished little. They’d put up an office building in Montreal at 2055 Peel Street, bought a few bowling alleys, purchased an interest in a minor printing house and sat around too frightened to take any risks lest they make a mistake. But now there could be no more excuses. Their uncle Sam’s brutal finality brought with it a flood of fresh perceptions. Suddenly, they weren’t nearly so afraid anymore, realizing that there was no easy way out, not in the middle of a life, that the power to change and grow resided within each individual, not in his external circumstances.

  Peter and Edward Bronfman conducted Edper’s operation with what they called “informed intuition,” perusing monthly budget sheets of their associated companies, interviewing prospective promoters trying to earn their finders’ fees. Harold Milavsky, president of Trizec, a major Edper holding, says, “Peter gets good people, trusts them and gives them their head. His secret is that once they’ve proven themselves, he allows them full authority as well as full responsibility. At Trizec, for example, we report to him only at quarterly directors’ meetings.”

  Peter came to maturity very late, and it wasn’t until years later that he finally managed to catch up with himself. “When I was twenty-four, I was acting like sixteen. I didn’t start working until I was well over twenty, so I didn’t have a very realistic view of what life was all about. At forty, I was still eight to ten years behind, doing and thinking things that people I know and respect were doing at thirty. But now I’m past my hang-ups and enjoying life.”

  The incident that finally began to liberate Peter Bronfman in his quest for identity was a conversation with his son, Bruce. Six years old at the time, Bruce wanted to know exactly what being a millionaire was all about. “I tried to explain it,” Peter recalls vividly. “I told Bruce about our family history, our business and asked him how he felt about being a millionaire.”

  Young Bruce considered the matter carefully and replied, “I’m very proud.”

  The answer deeply impressed Peter because it seemed such a healthy reaction. “Up in the castle where I grew up, the three things we never were allowed to talk about were money, other people and sex. What else is there?”

  THE EDPER GROUP of companies that Peter and his brother, Edward, founded was turned into an astonishingly diverse and successful $18 billion empire, employing sixty-four thousand people. When Peter died in 1997, the firm’s top executives trumpeted their late chairman’s ‘‘corporate statesmanship’’ and ‘‘selfless leadership.’’ Peter would not have had much patience with such sentiments. ‘‘I happen,’’ he once told me, ‘‘to have a very low threshold for bullshit.’’ What he meant was not so much to denigrate his corporate successes as to affirm his personal priorities. He spent most of his life becoming his own man, allowing the roaring boy deep inside to take command and cut himself l
oose from the constraints of his upbringing.

  Sam Bronfman, the dynasty’s father and Peter’s uncle, could make boys out of men, and with Peter he almost succeeded. Just after Peter graduated from Yale, Sam made it very clear that there was to be no place for him or his brother. Command of the giant distillery was ceded directly and exclusively to Sam’s two sons, Charles and Edgar. Allan’s reduced nest egg of Seagram stock was enough to provide his sons with seed money to start their own, initially tiny conglomerate. But Peter never forgot the slight.

  His conglomerate, which at different times has included such well-known firms as John Labatt Ltd., London Life Insurance Co., Brascan Ltd., Noranda Inc. and Royal LePage Ltd., took up most of Peter’s working time, but his heart and spirit were never in it. He attended only the occasional, compulsory corporate cocktail party. He would stand at the back of the room, hunched over in a penitent position, sipping his flat ginger ale, silently praying for relief.

  The business venture he enjoyed most was ownership of the Canadiens hockey team and the Montreal Forum from 1971 to 1978. His respect for the players knew no bounds. Only a few months before he died, he flew to Montreal for a private visit with a former star forward (Floyd Curry, suffering from Alzheimer’s). The Habs won four Stanley Cups during the seven years he owned the team. After he sold it to Molson’s and bought, through Labatt’s, the Toronto Blue Jays instead, the baseball squad won two World Series.

  Peter came to maturity only in 1985 after marrying his third wife, Lynda Carroline Hamilton, a Vancouver management consultant, who fulfilled his quest for security and love. He spent the best decade of his life in their country place, a converted one-room schoolhouse in Palgrave, Ontario, where his gentle nature was allowed to flourish.

  Peter died just one day short of being presented with the order of Canada in a special bedside ceremony by Governor General Roméo LeBlanc.Jack Rabinovitch, one of his best friends, reminded Government House that Bronfman had contributed to ‘‘aspiring young artists’’ and pronounced a moving eulogy of his pal. June Callwood, the Toronto social activist, praised ‘‘his inspiring decency, compassion and commitment.’’ But the most significant letter came from cousin Charles Bronfman, Mr. Sam’s son, the man whose inheritance Peter had so envied. “Peter,’’ Charles wrote, ‘‘is a man who has carved a place for himself in Canadian history. He well deserves the recognition of being included in the Order of Canada.’’

  Peter Bronfman had come home at last.

  —1996

  The New Wave: Navjeet Dhillon Goes Gold

  AN IMMIGRANT AND a new breed of Canadian entrepreneur, Navjeet (Bob) Dhillon, was born a Sikh forty-three years ago. Unlike his peers, he is a master scuba diver, expert spear fisherman and professional-level salsa dancer. Dhillon meets none of the preconceptions of his race or religion and prefers yoga and meditation to religious observance. He refuses to wear the traditional Sikh turban, owns a cigarette racing boat in which he sweeps across the Gulf Stream into Cuban harbours and is about as far removed from the usual taciturn, non-communicative Indian business leader as it is possible to be.

  As a businessman, he boasts that he will become North America’s first Sikh billionaire—and is three-quarters of the way there. His publicly traded real estate conglomerate snaps up apartment buildings in Saskatchewan, Alberta and Ontario, and on the side, he markets luxury beach lots in the Central American playground of Belize.

  A barrel-chested, perpetually tanned extrovert who lives in a palatial $2 million house on a mountainside overlooking Calgary, Dhillon justifiably describes himself as having “a triple A-type personality.” He has never been interviewed before, except for two-minute segments on business channels, and is inordinately reserved about his personal life, which he insists must remain private for religious reasons. Apart from his official shyness, his frantic schedule allows few quiet moments to discover balance in his life. “When I’m travelling alone on plane rides, that’s the only time I have for myself,” he told me. “on those four-hour trips from Toronto to Calgary, I can reflect on my future. I’m always writing notes to myself and sketching out business plans. But I do meditate, which gives me calmness.”

  HE ALMOST DIDN’T have a future. “I was diagnosed at one time with cancer, but I beat it,” he reveals. “I got my clean bill of health three years ago. I also beat racism in Alberta and the odds of a falling capital market. What drives me is the second wind in my life when I went through chemo. Now the stars are realigning. My personality is a fabric of my family, being an immigrant and conquering cancer.

  “If you ask me what religion I am, I would say I am a Sikh,” he says. “But if you ask me whether I am a real, practising Sikh, I would say that would be a false statement. I am more spiritual than religious. Sikhs were persecuted like the Jews. They’ve always been at war. For hundreds of years, we guarded the foothills of the Khyber Pass, beating off the invaders who came from the north. When you’re fighting for your life, generation after generation, you develop a survival instinct, as I have. The image of being Sikh is that it’s orthodox-oriented, but it actually is very liberal. You go to a Sikh temple, and they sing songs like the Southern Baptists and invite you in for a meal. When the Canadian Legion wouldn’t allow turbaned Sikhs into their halls, they didn’t realize that we’ve won more Victoria Crosses than any other group. Sir John A. Macdonald even suggested bringing in a Sikh battalion to protect Canada from the Americans.”

  Although he considers India to be his homeland, Dhillon was born in Japan. His grandfather Saproon Singh Dhillon had migrated from Punjab to Hong Kong at age sixteen. There he eventually became a trader and established the North China Shipping Co., which exported goods to Japan. That was where Dhillon was born in 1965. Six years later, the family moved to Liberia to tap the trading markets of West Africa. During the 1970s, when a bitter civil war erupted in that unstable republic, the family lost everything and sought refuge in Vancouver. It was not a happy time. Racial slurs were regularly directed at the youthful Bob as he walked to school.

  The family relocated to Calgary, which they found to be no more welcoming, and his mother was fired from her job at the post office strictly because of its racist attitude. “Now, this is a fact,” Dhillon insists. “We fought the case with the post office, a Crown corporation, and won. I don’t want to give you a story about someone hitting me in a bar or somebody calling me a Paki and pulling my hair—these are things that happen because some guy behaves like an idiot. I’m telling you about an institutional fact. My mom fought the case in court and was reinstated a year later.”

  The family soldiered on in Calgary. “It was tough getting a job,” Dhillon remembers. “There were only stereotyped positions available for the Sikhs, and it was really hard to break through the glass ceilings. For example, we were banned from any front-line positions in offices, and no oil companies would hire me.” With no obvious prospects, he decided to go into business for himself. In 1984, at age nineteen, he bought two houses, fixed them up and sold them for an $18,000 profit. That was his modest grubstake. For the next fifteen years, he bought and sold Calgary real estate worth about $150 million, a hectic pastime better known as flipping. “I worked out of the trunk of my car with a cell phone,” he remembers. “What drove me to work seventy hours a week or more was that my family had lost everything in Liberia after the coup, and I vowed it would never happen again. “

  His first success was to establish the grand-sounding Pan-Pacific Mercantile Group, which he hoped to spin into a major distributor of three dozen North American brands throughout South Asia. It never happened, but until recently if you ordered a Bloody Mary anywhere east of Hawaii, you’d have flavoured it with Tabasco sauce that was distributed by Bob Dhillon.

  He underwent a significant sea change in 1996 when he decided, at age thirty-two, to spend two years getting his executive MBA at the University of Western Ontario’s Richard Ivey School of Business. Larry Tapp, then the school’s dean and now a director of Dhillon’s
companies, described him as “a very direct, driven guy.” In May of his first year, he incorporated a numbered Alberta company that would become his main investment vehicle. “I used every available course at Ivey to formulate the strategy for Mainstreet,” he recalls. “Whether it was building a brand, running an efficient operation, financing growth or making a speech, I thought about the lessons in terms of what they meant for Mainstreet.” When he graduated, his company went public, and he began buying properties to hold instead of flip. Once back in Calgary, he moved his office out of the car trunk to the main floor of one his buildings, which was also used to store construction supplies.

  IN THE PROCESS of moving in new directions, Dhillon came up with every entrepreneur’s wet dream: a neglected yet accessible real estate niche that could profitably be filled without having to raise new capital. The building industry was polarized into local mom-and-pop-size operations running a few buildings and, at the other end, the giants—the Bronfmans, the Reichmanns, Brookfield, Trizec and others. In between was where Dhillon wanted to be. He became a consolidator of multi-family, mid- tiered residential rental properties, starting in Alberta, then moving west to Vancouver and east to Toronto. During the past seven years, Mainstreet Equity (of which he owns 41 percent) has mushroomed from 276 units to nearly 4,000, with a portfolio worth more than $300 million. The year 2000 was particularly stellar, with the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business magazine ranking his company at the top of its list of Biggest Profit Gainers, recording a stunning 15,791 percent increase.

  His technique is to buy buildings that require drastic repositioning, such as one in Calgary’s Forest Lawn area, which had sixty deserted cars and trucks in its derelict parking lot, holes in living-room walls and all the telltale signs of having been a druggie hangout. Dhillon invested $2.3 million, doubled the rents and turned a slum into a middle-class complex. His fix-ups do not break any luxury barriers. Expenditures are calculated to the nearest penny. (Replacing toilets with modern, low-volume fixtures, for example, reduces water consumption from 6 gallons per flush to 1.6; substituting 60-watt light bulbs with $20 fluorescent lights reduces annual electricity consumption from $30 to $8.) He doubles rents, and three-quarters of his pre-renovation tenants usually move out, but the increased cash flow covers the cost of the upgrades.