CHAPTER 20: The benefits of higher education
At some level, all disciplines converge
I recently completed a Master’s Degree program at Osgoode Hall Law School, following my completion of a graduate diploma in Mining Law, Finance and Sustainability at Western Law School. I am not a lawyer. I was pleasantly surprised by my grades at Osgoode and I understand I will get my parchment in March.
My undergraduate years were spent primarily in Engineering Physics but in late third year I shifted into arts and started to study History, winning the History Medal at Royal Military College of Canada (RMC) and turning in the highest grades in the Faculty of Arts despite being an artsman for only about 15 months.
Post RMC I was offered a seat at King’s College, University of London, to study for a Master’s Degree in War Studies but the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) had other plans, so I had the head of that program, Dr. Wolf Mendl, send me the reading list and I studied that while serving as fighter pilot in the RCAF flying high performance jets.
I was also offered a chance to complete a Master’s Degree in History at Queen’s University in Kingston but that didn’t suit the RCAF either. I don’t recall applying to Queen’s but somehow was accepted, and to my surprise offered an Ontario Graduate Fellowship by the late Bill Davis.
If that is not odd enough, after serving a few years as a fighter pilot in the Royal I took a Master’s Degree in Business Administration (MBA) at what was then called University of Western Ontario Business School (now Ivey Business School).
During my MBA I became interested in Economics and Finance and concentrated my studies is those areas although I did take one course in Contract Law taught by the late Earl Palmer who at the time was assistant Dean of Western’s Law School. Understanding contracts was useful for my career in business. Despite the six year delay from RMC graduation in 1968 and beginning the MBA in 1974, my foundations in maths and physics allowed me some success in the MBA earning a spot on the Dean’s Honors List, leading to an offer of employment from McKinsey & Company, Inc.
Subsequently, I had a business career initially with McKinsey and later as Vice President, Corporate Development at Canadian General Electric Company Limited (CGE). I left CGE in 1984, started my own company called The Enfield Corporation Limited (“Enfield”) and acted as CEO of Enfield until 1989 when Enfield was taken over and I was thrown out. I then acquired control of a company called Algonquin Mercantile Corporation, later renamed Automodular Corporation when (in 1997) I shifted it into automotive parts after founding the modern Rexall Drug Store chain in 1991 and selling that chain to Daryl Katz’s “Katz Group” in 1996.
Two marriages and six children consumed most of my time until I retired in 2011 and had more time to advance my academic interests. In 2019, I took a graduate certificate in Advanced Valuation at the Stern School of New York University under famed valuation expert Aswath Damodaran. Law school beckoned and I went on to the Mining Law diploma at Western and the LLM at Osgoode. I have just applied to complete a PhD in Law at Western Law School and, if accepted, will start in October of this year.
Oddly, as my education progressed I found that the various disciplines converged. Understanding maths and physics made management science, economics and marketing a lot easier for me than for MBA students lacking that background. The MBA’s extensive coverage of economics and finance converged with my studies of geopolitical issues (based on the War Studies materials Dr. Mendl had kindly provided). A solid foundation in statistics made econometrics much easier to understand. Business, economics, finance, marketing and manufacturing are one side of society - the side that creates the goods and services we consume. Regulation of these activities sits on the other side of the same coin. The study of law makes sense (in my opinion) only if you have an understanding of the activities the law seeks to regulate or constrain.
While not studied at law school, I gained a deep understanding of corporate law and litigation during sixteen years of major commercial and corporate litigation arising from the takeover of Enfield, my ouster as CEO, and claims between the new owners and myself involving allegations of wrongful dismissal, libel, illegal takeover and breaches of fiduciary duty. For most of that sixteen years, I acted in person and in the result was successful in winning or settling (on favorable terms) all of the actions, after losing them in the lower courts but winning them on appeal.
In pursuing a PhD in Law, I plan to explore the over-regulation of business and the dangerous trend of regulators - empowered to issue regulations with the force of law when in the “public interest” - to define public interest1 in ways that reflect the ideology of the regulators rather than anything contemplated by elected representatives in Provincial legislatures or Parliament. Regulators then sometimes use their power as regulators to promote ESG, DEI and climate change narratives which are left wing ideologies, not legislated goals or rules. This weakens democracy and I expect to surface empirical support that the trend manifests itself in lower returns to investors and pension funds and weaker economic growth for Canada. My foundation in economics, maths, physics and corporate administration will be valuable assets as I move forward on this path.
“Public Interest” is undefined in the Securities Act or in any other Canadian legislation that I have read or seen.
I am truly in awe of your life's accomplishments. Someone like me cannot see how anyone could 'fit' all this into one life time. Congrats on your latest degree.
What a breath of fresh air!! I hope this work of yours culminates in jail time for all of arseholes now in power. Btw.. check out BTC.. not doing too badly.