Why Mexicans Don't Drink Molson. Andrea Mandel-Campbell
But before Lindsay had a chance to imagine what it would be like to head Canada’s first and only “super major” mining company, his dreams were dashed by Brazil’s Companhia Vale do Rio Doce, cvrd, and its eleventh-hour all-cash offer for inco. Even before the world’s largest iron ore producer sealed the deal, it announced that it would delist inco from the Toronto and New York stock exchanges. As for Falconbridge, the Swiss–Anglo mining firm Xstrata swooped in with a $20.9 billion hostile takeover. The acquisition has launched what was, until recently, a little-known ferro-chrome business, with us$500 million in sales in 2001, into the elite Top Five of global mining companies with an enterprise value approaching us$50 billion. Just hours after assuming the reins, Xstrata cleared out Falconbridge’s Toronto head office of senior executives, including almost its entire board of directors. While Toronto will be the headquarters for the company’s nickel division, it will lose control over the former Falconbridge operations in seventeen countries, which are either being sold off or folded into the Xstrata empire.
Peter Munk, founder and chairman of Barrick Gold, the world’s leading gold producer and, together with Teck, the only sizable Canadian miner left, lashed out at the Canadian industry’s lack of leadership and vision. How, he wondered aloud, did the opportunity for a three-way tie-up between Teck, inco and Falconbridge, and the chance to forge a global powerhouse, turn into an auction of the country’s crown jewels? “This opportunity will never arise again in your generation and not in your children’s generation to put together a group like that,” Munk lamented. “That’s when you’ve got to have the determination and the balls and the courage.”4 Within days, two of Canada’s most historic, established companies were wiped off the map. “We are no longer a branch-plant economy,” surmised John Gruetzner, a Beijing-based Canadian business consultant. “We are a non-headquartered economy.”
Some people might say, so what? The nickel still has to be dug out from under the Canadian Shield, and somebody still has to forge the steel at Hamilton Harbour. Beer will always be brewed in Canada, even if it’s Coors or Budweiser. If that’s all Canadians aspire to, fine. But without head offices to hone management skills, to develop international networks and ultimately to make Canadians responsible for their own destiny, we become little more than “Mexicans with sweaters” — a quaint term coined by the American movie industry to describe Canadian film crews.
Just as U.S. corporations set up factories south of the Rio Grande to take advantage of cheap Mexican labour, Hollywood sends its film production north so that it can hire lower-paid Canadian sound technicians and camera operators. The high-paid “talent,” however — the star actors, directors, screenwriters and producers — are all still American. “Anybody who says head offices don’t matter is dreaming in Technicolor,” says Richard Haskayne, one of Canada’s foremost corporate tycoons and chairman of TransCanada PipeLines.
Just ask Francesco Bellini. Born in the central Italian town of Ascoli Piceno, Bellini immigrated to Canada in 1967 and received a doctorate in organic chemistry from the University of New Brunswick. When the U.S. pharmaceutical firm he worked for in Montreal decided to move its offices to Boston, Bellini opted to stay put, founding BioChem Pharma in 1986. The pharmaceutical start-up developed 3tc, the first anti-hiv compound drug, which became the most-prescribed aids treatment in the world. Yet, despite the firm’s tremendous success, it no longer exists; it was sold to Shire Pharmaceuticals of the United Kingdom in 2001 for $6 billion. Within two years, the company’s five hundred staff were fired and its once-impressive offices, located on a leafy high-tech compound in Laval, emptied. “They took the profit and destroyed the company,” says Bellini. Also gone is the estimated $5 million a year BioChem used to donate to various charitable causes. “When BioChem was here, I don’t know how much money I gave to local arts and the local university,” Bellini says in his thickly accented English. “Now it’s all gone.”
For Bellini, who dreamt of creating Canada’s first stand-alone pharmaceutical company, it’s a huge disappointment. But he feels he had little choice: when he wasn’t bending over backwards to convince skeptical local investors that a Canadian company was actually good enough to compete internationally, he was fending off stock market speculators who were pressuring him to cash in and make a quick buck. In 1998, several small bombs exploded outside BioChem’s offices. Bellini thought it was the work of aids or animal-rights activists. In fact, the culprits were short-sellers looking to push the company’s share price down so that they could buy the stock cheap and then cash in on their put options. “If you make a big discovery,” Bellini adds, “local investors will push you to sell it, to do a venture with an outside company, because they want the profit right away. They don’t realize that if you keep it, you can build something.” Bellini was finally convinced to sell the company when he couldn’t find anyone to replace him. Every potential manager he looked at “just wanted to ride the stock and get out.”
Despite Bellini’s frustration, the self-described “scientist–entrepreneur” couldn’t help but get back in the game. In 2002, he took the helm of Neurochem Pharma, which is developing a treatment for Alzheimer’s, pouring $25 million of his own money into the company. Bellini predicts it’s only a matter of time before his new venture suffers the same fate as BioChem. “I guarantee this company is going to grow very high and will be sold off — puff,” he says with a wave of his hand. “It’s like you have a good hockey team, and every time you go to the arena the people boo and tell you to get out — or they don’t come at all. Imagine playing to an empty arena.” It won’t affect Bellini, who has made a mint from the pharmaceutical business, but he worries about the big picture. “I win either way — I make my money and that’s it, I go fishing. The problem is for the local economy, which is going to suffer.”
It’s too bad, because if Canadians were just willing to stick it out and have the confidence to build something of their own, they could be world leaders. As Bellini points outs, one year after Shire sold BioChem’s vaccine unit, which at the time was one of the biggest in the world, for us$150 million, it was resold for approximately us$1.4 billion. “That shows we have good vision here, but we’re not willing to support it,” he says. It’s a quality that the Italian immigrant acknowledges has always distinguished him from his fellow Canadians. He mortgaged his house so that he could buy more shares in BioChem, but “a Canadian would never do that,” he admits. “I believed in what I was doing, and I believed that one day it would be a success. And for sure, I made a lot of money; my partners made money too, but much, much less. We could all have made a lot of money, the same amount, but I had a different attitude — you have to believe in yourself, and probably that’s what Canadians lack.”
But while Bellini is forgiving of his compatriots and grateful for the opportunity to pursue his dreams, Howard Balloch positively bristles at Canadians’ constant need to second-guess themselves. Canada’s former ambassador to China, Balloch left a twenty-five-year career in the civil service to open an investment boutique in Beijing. The crisply pressed, bow-tied diplomat is going head-to-head with bulge-bracket investment firms like Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch in one of the world’s most sought-after markets. “My goal is to build the best little investment boutique, and I don’t care who I’m up against,” he says. “I’m going to win.” What Balloch doesn’t understand is why so few Canadians seem to share his boundless confidence. “Where’s the belief that we can conquer the world? We’re every bit as bright, we have smart people from all over the world who come to live here, we speak a multitude of languages, and we have natural resources,” he charges. “What is it we don’t have that means we can’t compete? We should be on top of the world. We should be better than the Americans, faster than the Germans and more culturally conscious than the Japanese.”
After watching “the earth’s centre of gravity tilt” towards China in recent decades, however, there is one thing Balloch knows for sure: if Canadians continue to ignore these tectonic shifts, we will eventually fall through the cracks. The threat is all the more dangerous because it won’t be a calamitous collapse, like that of Argentina, but a slow, stealthy slide that will sneak up on us while we snooze, our bellies still uncomfortably full after gorging on a feast of oil sands and high copper prices. “Life is too easy, and Canadians are happy in their kind of graceful decline. We