COVER STORY PERFECTLY FRANK · He’d practise his slapshot in the barn so noisily the cows objected and stopped giving milk.’ On the campaign trail, McKenna’s terms of office

16 | Atlantic Business Magazine | March/April 2013

TO BE PERFECTLY FRANKFrom shale gas to civic responsibility, tough talk from New Brunswick’s favourite sonBy Alec Bruce

COVER STORY

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IT IS A BITTERLY BRIGHT winter afternoon in the kernel of Toronto’s financial district and Frank McKenna is waiting to hear from New Brunswick Premier David Alward. Some hours before, he had sent an email to the province’s chief elected officer, offering his help on a matter about which he prefers to speak, if only for this moment, circumspectly. “I’m just asking him if he wants me to use it in a speech, or an Op-Ed,” he says. “He might prefer just to use it himself. I don’t know yet. But I don’t want to overshadow him.”Photo credit Chris Young, chrisyoungphotography.ca


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and you’re there.

It’s an odd statement from a man who has spent the better part of 30 years happily eclipsing nearly everyone around him—first as a three-term Liberal premier of New Brunswick in the 1990s, then as Canadian Ambassador to the United States in the dawning decade of this century, and now as the globe-trotting, absurdly well-connected deputy chairman of TD Bank. Still, he seems genuinely concerned. He has what he deems is a good relationship with Alward, and he doesn’t want to jeopardize it by f lying off the handle into the public pepper pot. He says there’s too much at stake in his home province; too much to lose.

“What we are facing in New Brunswick is a structural, secular decline,” he says. “The problems we have don’t ebb and f low with the quality of our leadership. There is something more serious going on here. We face circumstances that combine to create a very negative outlook. The entire atmosphere is hugely challenging.”

There is, he says, a long-term debt, now hovering above $10 billion; a rolling annual deficit of more than $350 million. There is “perniciously high” unemployment; an aging population; an exodus of entrepreneurial know-how, innovation and durable, skilled jobs. Worse, perhaps, for a province that has always relied on its abundance of natural economic assets, resource industries are in decline.

“The resource base that remains can be exploited with fewer workers and more mechanization, so it can’t support the number of workers that it once did,” he says. “Yet, we remain a resource-based economy in a world where the Canadian dollar looks to be in a fairly constant state of parity with the U.S. dollar. So, this, too, is a peril.”

Sitting at a small conference table in his office on the fourth f loor of the TD Centre, he speaks with his hands, which punctuate the air with countless gestures meant to emphasize a point or authenticate a perspective. When he was a boy, growing up on a farm in tiny Apohaqui, New Brunswick, he bailed hay with those hands. Later, as a defence lawyer, politician, statesman, mover, shaker, seller of ideas, spinner of dreams, he learned to use them to more nimble and nuanced effect. Now, he raises a finger meaningfully as if to signal a change in the direction of his elocution.

“Even though I think our situation in New Brunswick is quite pessimistic, I don’t think that it is terminal,” he says.


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and you’re there.

“There are many places in the world that have faced dramatic challenges. In fact, adversity, itself, became the platform upon which they built sustainable economies.”

Look at Israel, he says. With its back to the sea and its face to the desert and surrounded by enemies, it has still managed to create one of the most technologically, and prosperous, societies on Earth. Look at Finland, he commands. With the fall of the Soviet Union, it lost its major market. But it set out purposefully to reinvent itself. Today, thanks to its cocoon of high-tech industries, it’s one of the few nations in Europe keeping its head above the f loodwaters of the continental sovereign debt crisis.

“And, if you look around us, you’ll see places like Massachusetts with virtually no resource base, but a very high-performing economy because, again, of knowledge,” he says. “Then, you’ll see other places where the resource base, itself, has created very strong economies . . . So, I believe here in New Brunswick, we are not without tools.”

He pauses and glances up. When, he wants to know, will this article about him appear in this magazine? “Not until March, you say,” he muses. “Right, well, this thing with Premier Alward should be public by then.”

He likes the timing, and timing is another thing Frank McKenna understands matchlessly well.

IN A 1965 NEW YORKER profile of college basketball phenom Bill Bradley, who later became a U.S. senator and Democratic presidential hopeful, the great American literary journalist John McPhee described the youthful forward-guard’s skills on the court as virtually heaven-sent. One shot, in particular, impressed him.

“That shot,” he wrote, “has the essential characteristics of a wild accident, which is what many people stubbornly think they have witnessed until they see him do it for the third time in a row . . . I retrieved the ball and handed it back to him. ‘When you have played basketball for a while, you don’t need to look at the basket when you are in close like this,’ he said, throwing it over his shoulder again and right through the hoop. ‘You develop a sense of where you are.’”

Many people have made the same mistake about McKenna—who stands about five-foot-nine and isn’t known for his jump shot—on the courts of politics and public policy. Time and again, they have watched him perform feats of political and diplomatic derring-do before and after his electoral victories and high-profile government postings, and time and again they have chalked these up to luck: tremendously, infuriatingly good luck to his critics; but luck, all the same. In fact, it’s his “sense of where you are”

During his time as premier of New Brunswick, Frank McKenna was known for his diligence in fostering relationships with the business community in order to encourage investment in his province. Here he is shown at a business networking event at Nova Scotia’s Fox Harb’r resort on July 27, 2006.


that has always been in play—and always played impeccably.

That was evident in 1971 when, in his early 20s, he chose the law as his profession. He had planned to acquire a graduate degree to complement his B.A. from St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, until a meeting in Ottawa with Allan MacEachen, veteran Liberal Member of Parliament at the time and one of the canniest back-room strategists this country has ever produced, changed his mind. The old dog, never at a loss for new tricks, told his “special assistant” that if he wanted a career in politics, he should earn an L.L.B. And so, the young scholar obtained one, matriculating second in his class from the University of New Brunswick in 1974.

In fact, it was his legal career that fused his preternatural talent for being at the centre of things with his genuine commitment to public service. He took on several high-profile cases from his shingled office in Chatham, New Brunswick, one of which was the indictment of local boxing legend Yvon Durelle, who had been charged with shooting and killing a man. The crusading attorney’s courtroom triumph

in 1977 made him famous and, not inconsequentially, beloved among a significant segment of the voting public in the province’s rural north.

Others have gone as far as to claim that McKenna’s ability to capitalize on the felicitous happenstances of his life—his talent for “making it look easy”—is not only part of his personal charm; it’s a deliberate calculation. Three years after his successful bid to represent Chatham in New Brunswick’s legislature, he became Leader of the province’s Liberal Party. A year after that, in 1986, he was preparing to upend the Progressive Conservative dynasty of Richard Hatfield, which had been in power for nearly two decades. In his 2001 book, Frank: The Life and Politics of Frank McKenna, Fredericton journalist Philip Lee observed how, “The portrait of Frank McKenna as a hard-working, clean-living farm lad was repeated time and again in media profiles.

“A Toronto Star reporter hushed that Frank McKenna’s childhood ‘was a Norman Rockwell scene, white clapboard farmhouse in a village called Apohaqui, He’d practise his slapshot in the barn so noisily the cows objected and stopped giving milk.’ On the campaign trail,

McKenna’s terms of office were marked by the sort of policy coherence that’s seen in government only rarely these days. He made job creation his number one priority, offering tax breaks to companies both large and small.

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McKenna kept his story simple: he was just an average New Brunswick boy who had a few breaks along the way. ‘I lucked out on some good cases, and then a seat came open and I ran,’ he’d say. ‘Then, when I got there, the leadership was open and nobody else wanted it, so I ran for that, and here I am. Now, nobody wants to be premier, so I’m running for that. I’ve just been at the right place at the right time so far. There’s nothing I’ve got that isn’t typical New Brunswick. I’m a typical New Brunswick boy, a little bit country and a little bit rock and roll.’ This official biography was a mask, and he wore it well. In fact, there was nothing average about McKenna’s life at all.”

Certainly, there was nothing average about his subsequent successes at the ballot box: Three majority wins between 1987 and 1995, the first of which was a clean sweep of every seat in the Legislative Assembly, only the second such achievement for a provincial political party in Canadian history.

In reality, McKenna’s terms of office were marked by the sort of policy coherence that’s seen in government only rarely these days. He made job creation his number one priority, offering tax breaks to companies both large and small. He worked directly (some say, meddled) with the private sector to get it the skills and resources it needed to prevail during tough times. He travelled the country to “sell” New Brunswick to corporations looking to establish satellite operations. He even installed a toll-free line (1-800-MCKENNA) in his office and invited business interests across North America to give him a call if they wanted to know more about his splendid corner of the world.

By and large, the measures worked. The provincial economy became more diversified, more productive, more innovative. Government finances improved. Most importantly, though, was a palpable shift for the better in people’s attitudes about themselves and their communities. It was as if McKenna had grabbed the zeitgeist, shook it by the neck, and ordered it to cheer up. He had seen the possibilities lurking beneath the collective conscious and tapped them.

Of course, not everything he did earned applause. “It’s hard to compare eras,” he says. “It’s like comparing hockey players from different eras. But the circumstances we faced then were pretty acute. We saw a series of very deep federal cuts to all of the provinces. At the same time, we had an unemployment rate that was in the middle-teens, much higher than it is

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today. We had an unfunded pension fund, which we inherited, at $1.6 billion, and a large pension deficit at the Workman’s Compensation Board. So, in many ways, the circumstances then were just as dire as they are today. I would say, perhaps, they were more dire.”

At times, he says, the medicine was bitter, indeed: “From totally restructuring health care, reducing bed counts dramatically, closing institutions to reducing the size of government with significant layoffs . . . We had frozen salaries for a period of at least two years. We had people in the streets, pretty much steadily, in protest.”

But his larger point is that those who find themselves in a position to make a difference in people’s lives have a duty to speak up and get busy, regardless of any personal or professional risks. It’s a principle he carried over into his one-year term (2005-2006) as Canada’s Ambassador to the United States, when he routinely urged his fellow citizens to be more sympathetic to their American “cousins”, even as he blasted the administration of President George W. Bush, in a speech near the end of his tenure to a Toronto business audience, for being “in large measure dysfunctional”.

As for New Brunswick’s current

“dysfunction”, McKenna is equally plain-spoken: “This isn’t just a problem of leadership in government. It’s also a problem of followership. Our citizens have to understand the full depth and breadth of the dilemma that we are facing, and they have to be prepared to face up to some inconvenient truths. It means that they have to become less reliant on government and more entrepreneurial. It means that they have to take responsibility for their own futures.”

It means they have to start paying attention to the signs of the times and recognize that the time for action is now.

MCKENNA PLACES HIS PALMS squarely on the table. He’s still waiting to hear from Alward about his proposal to go public with his opinions on one of the most controversial industrial opportunities in New Brunswick’s recent history. But as the shadows of the late afternoon begin to lengthen, he sees no point in appearing coy. “The way I look at it,” he says, “the real win comes when we take our indigenous shale gas in the province and hook it into the Canaport liquified natural gas (LNG) facility in Saint John.”

New Brunswick’s shale reserves could change the conversation about the province’s anemic economy forever. They could transform the region into a jurisdiction whose wealth rivals that of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Pennsylvania or North Dakota.

The global network of Frank McKenna (top left, moving clockwise): accepting his Diamond Jubilee Medal from Governor General David Johnston on September 28, 2012 in Ottawa; talking policy and economic opportunity with former U.S. President Bill Clinton; chatting with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair in Calgary on October 26, 2007.


His voice rises as his enthusiasm peaks. “We have in situ now, calculated by Corridor Resources Inc., 67 trillion cubic feet of gas. That’s bigger than western Canada. It’s a huge deposit! If 10 per cent is exploitable, that’s enough to create a revenue source for New Brunswick for decades to come. All in, it would result in about $15-20 billion in investment and 150,000 person years of work. And for governments, it would result in between $7-9 billion worth of royalties and taxes.”

In other words, he says, New Brunswick’s shale reserves could change the conversation about the province’s anemic economy forever. They could transform the region into a jurisdiction whose wealth rivals that of Alberta, Saskatchewan, Pennsylvania or North Dakota.

“What we need to understand is that just by the roll of the dice, we have landed in exactly the best position on the board at this moment in time,” he says. “We have a Canaport facility with massive storage and with a jetty, getting right into deep water. We have a port that’s ice free and has the capacity to accommodate the biggest vessels in the world. The West Coast can’t do that.”

More than this, he says, if New Brunswick manages to spearhead the construction of an oil pipeline from Quebec, carrying Alberta bitumen into Saint John, the combination (with native shale gas development) would be unbeatable: “We have the only LNG (sea) terminal in Canada, and it’s currently borderline economic. It’s set up to receive imported product. But the world has changed under our feet. Gas in Canada now is about $3.50 per thousand cubic feet (mcf). Gas in Europe is about $11 mcf. In Asia, it’s about $15. Fifteen proposals exist now in Canada to reverse LNG facilities for exporting. The reversal of that plant in Saint John would create an investment of between $2.5-10 billion, creating 900 jobs per unit, and four units could go there . . . And so, when you put it all together, you can see what we’re looking at.”

It is, perhaps, easier for McKenna than most to apprehend the outline of the big picture. Though he and his wife Julie summer in Cap-Pele, New Brunswick, he’s ensconced in Toronto. And when he’s not, he’s travelling an average of 175,000 miles a year representing TD’s interests all over the world, pressing the f lesh with renowned figures such as former U.S. President Bill Clinton, whom he considers a personal friend, and Wayne Gretzky. Still, though he may no longer be as close

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to his home province as he once was, he is never very far. “Businesses from New Brunswick contact me every week,” he says. “They are looking for introductions or just wanting to drop in. I am constantly in touch with New Brunswick businesses and individuals.”

That fact, perhaps, gives him the right to speak forthrightly. In any case, he doesn’t resist the temptation. He knows just how contentious an issue shale gas development has become in the province, where a vocal segment of the population worries about the potentially deleterious environmental effects of the technology.

“First of all, there are some people who are for this and, to them, it doesn’t matter what the damage or what the opportunities are,” he says. “I would park them. Then there are some people who are just dead against it and it doesn’t matter what you say. And you park them.”

He thinks the Alward government should focus on the majority—in whose company he counts himself—who believe that shale gas can be developed both profitably and responsibly. The key is effective communications, a discipline he knows all too well both from experience and bemused observation.

“We witnessed three or four years ago what happened when the public turned against a very major initiative,” he says. “That was the sale of NB Power (to Hydro-Quebec). Had that gone through, it would have resulted in a total transfer of risk, a lowering of the provincial debt, a lowering of power rates in New Brunswick and a greening of our power base. It would have changed the province’s balance sheet overnight. It would have made New Brunswick industry competitive overnight. It would have been an extraordinary asset. But it was poorly presented.”

To prevent a repeat performance over shale gas, he says, opinion leaders in the province must stand up and be counted: Teachers, doctors, nurses, educators; anyone who has skin in the game of preserving and enhancing New Brunswick’s quality of life. And that means just about everyone, including, presumably, McKenna himself.

Although he doesn’t say it, and might never admit it, the man whom one wag once described as the “tiny, perfect premier at the centre of the universe that is Canada’s picture province” is right in his element urging, nudging, canoodling change from the political wings. When he left the premiership, voluntarily, in 1997, he declared that 10 years was enough

time in office for any man or woman and vowed never to return. He hasn’t changed his mind.

“Let me tell you, I have had my arm twisted now five different times about running nationally,” he laughs. “You know, if my life was barren, I guess the thought would be more interesting. But, I find that my life is just rich with opportunity—more than I have time for. On the philanthropic side, I’ve been working in Haiti and Africa. For business, I just got back from the Middle East, where I stopped in to Abu Dhabi,

Qatar and Kuwait. I’ve just been asked to go over to Beijing, Singapore, Hong Kong and Seoul in March.”

And then there’s his beloved New Brunswick.

“I find I can just do so many more things now,” he says. “I can even help the government of the day in any way that I can, supporting its initiatives, opening doors.”

And sensing, with the timing of a Rolex, exactly where he is in the cosmos known as Frank McKenna. | ABM

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COVER STORY PERFECTLY FRANK · He’d practise his slapshot in the barn so noisily the cows objected and stopped giving milk.’ On the campaign trail, McKenna’s terms of office