BC Business
The way former Conservative Party of Canada leader John Reynolds tells it, he was 27, living in Vancouver, married with three kids and vying to become the youngest-ever Canadian manager for Ethicon Sutures Ltd., a subsidiary of U.S. pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson. He was explaining to some of the company’s senior executives and top salespeople at a J & J convention in Hollywood, Florida, why he had been so successful in selling medical products in B.C., knowing that getting the job he wanted depended on his presentation.
“Why am I successful? Well, this company has a book,” Reynolds told the convention. “It tells you how to sell, and I follow it 100 per cent. I don’t believe I have any better ideas than the person who put that book together.” Reynolds got the job.
As the six-foot-three 66-year-old relates the anecdote from his modest Vancouver office at the blue-chip law firm Lang Michener – where Reynolds works as a “senior strategic advisor” – his point becomes clear: you don’t have to be especially creative or brilliant to be successful in life. You don’t even have to have gone to university. (Reynolds never did and says he doesn’t regret it.) What you do have to be is smart enough to learn from those who figured it out before you.
Indeed, if you want to work your way up the power ladder, you could do a lot worse than take a tip or two from the former salesperson turned MP, talk-show host, MLA, Speaker of the House, Environment Minister, MP again, Opposition House Leader, best buddy of Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Privy Council member. Reynolds says many politicians are like salespeople who don’t know when to close a deal: they keep on gabbing just because they like the sound of their own voice. “How many politicians get up and talk for an hour and a half when they should talk for 10 minutes?”
John Douglas Reynolds was born in Toronto on January 19, 1942, the son of a Woolworth’s manager. When he was five, the family moved to Montreal, where Reynolds would live until he was 17, working part time at a Birks jewellery store. Reynolds returned to Toronto in 1959 and got a job in a Woolworths store, where he was eventually promoted to assistant manager. But after two years he decided the job was not for him and he quit. “I wanted to be out more and doing something a little more sales-oriented.”
His parents had since moved to Winnipeg, where his dad had found a job working for Marks & Spencer. Reynolds, who had no clue what he was going to do with his life, decided to drive out and visit them. “I arrived in Winnipeg late one night,” he says. “My mom and dad were having a party with a bunch of their friends. One of the men worked for a company called Tuckett Tobacco, owned by Imperial Tobacco, which sold cigars. And he said, ‘You should come to our office on Monday; we’re looking for people. You get a car and everything else.’ So I visited them on the Monday and I got a job.” Reynolds became the company’s advertising representative for Manitoba and Saskatchewan.
But Reynolds quickly tired of the Prairie cold and returned to Toronto within the year. It was there, in 1962, that he met his first wife, Margaret, with whom he had five children (including Paul Reynolds, the London-based CEO of Vancouver securities firm Canaccord Capital). Reynolds worked for Rust Craft Greeting Cards for five years – first in Toronto, then in Winnipeg and Edmonton in senior sales positions – before finally making his move out to the West Coast. Reynolds had taken up a suggestion from his father-in-law that he get into the booming medical-supplies business, securing a job with Ethicon Sutures as its B.C. rep. He and his family arrived in Vancouver on Remembrance Day, 1967.
Reynolds’s conservative streak revealed itself even then. “You had to wear a hat from September until March, and an overcoat and a scarf. And suits had to be blue and shirts had to be white. They had a dress code,” he remembers fondly. “They did things you can’t tell people to do now. If you wore a beard or a moustache, you’d never get hired.” Reynolds recognized early on that the best way to deal with rules was not to rail against the system, but to use it and become part of it.
It was in the 1968 federal election campaign – the one gripped by Trudeaumania – that Reynolds got his first real taste of politics. He worked for losing Tory candidate Warren Lohnes, a mink rancher, in the Fraser Valley West riding. Two years later, after leaving Ethicon Sutures, he went to a Christmas party where he met Tom Goode, the Liberal MP for Burnaby-Richmond-Delta. “Some of us were giving Tom a hard time because of Trudeau and why things weren’t happening from a Western Canadian point of view,” he says. One of the other men at the party, insurance salesman John Copeland, approached Reynolds the next day and suggested he join the Conservative Party and help build up its membership. Reynolds agreed, becoming first the president and then the candidate for the riding. In the 1972 election, Reynolds won Burnaby-Richmond-Delta by 1,440 votes over NDP candidate Ken Novakowski; Goode came in third.
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Reynolds was re-elected in 1974 by 16,443 votes, a veritable landslide. “I think the only reason it happened was because I did what I said I would do. I went down and fought for capital punishment,” he says. “I fought for issues.” From that time on, Reynolds has proven a surprisingly durable politician with a knack for winning elections at both the provincial and federal levels, and he’s widely credited with helping save a deeply divided Conservative Party. One of Reynolds’s endearing qualities, at least as far as the media is concerned, is that, unlike many political and business leaders, he rarely shies away from controversy or ducks interviews. Province columnist Mike Smyth recalls once being on deadline, dialing Reynolds’s cellphone and finding he was in a swimming pool on Maui. Reynolds, as always, was still willing to talk. “I always valued any opportunity I had to talk to him,” Smyth says. “He was a good interview.”
This readiness to respond was something Reynolds learned as a rookie MP in the 1970s from John Diefenbaker, who instructed the member for Burnaby-Richmond-Delta to always “answer your phone calls, answer your mail.” The former prime minister also taught Reynolds how to cope when he got “scrummed” by the media as he emerged from the House of Commons. The first thing you do, the Chief told him, was to duck into the washroom and collect yourself: “Think: what was the question and what’s the quick 10- or 15-second answer, and don’t change it no matter how many different questions they ask you afterwards. You stick to your answer; you stick to the thing you want to get on television.”
That’s what the young MP did: he stuck to his story, and the television crews got their clip. “Young man, you’re a quick learner,” the appreciative Diefenbaker reportedly said. “You’ll go places.” But politics is a bruising business. Reynolds also had to learn how to be a quick mover – at least whenever he found his career path blocked. At a Vancouver tribute dinner two years ago, B.C. Premier Gordon Campbell pointed out that Reynolds has represented the Social Credit Party, the Progressive Conservative Party, the Reform Party, the Canadian Reform Alliance Party and the Conservative Party. “He’s been switching parties so often,” Campbell reportedly said, “he’s giving David Emerson advice.”
It was Reynolds who, at the request of Prime Minister Harper, made the initial phone contact with the Vancouver-Kingsway MP shortly after the 2006 election and persuaded him to switch allegiances. Reynolds himself, though, has never made an Emerson-style switch. While moving from MP to MLA and back again, he has always stuck with the right-of-centre party that was available to him. In 1977 he resigned from the Progressive Conservative Party – but only because under the leadership of Bob Stanfield and Joe Clark the party had moved to the left; Reynolds’s innate conservatism has been unwavering.
After splitting with Clark and the Progressives Conservatives, Reynolds took a job hosting the morning talk show on CJOR. He says he found it to be just what the doctor ordered: a relatively low-stress, highly paid job. “I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was different. I was making a lot more money than I did as a member of Parliament – four times as much,” says Reynolds. “So I was able to have a very good divorce, if you can call a divorce good. But financially it worked out well. The kids were looked after.” (Reynolds remarried in 1984 and with second wife Yvonne has two children.)
Reynolds says he had to work hard to develop a radio voice. Again, he had a good teacher: program director Bob Mackin, who told him that he should do some breath-control exercises every night for an hour by taking a deep breath and walking three paces. His voice changed immeasurably. Management changes, however, were afoot at the radio station – owned by entrepreneur-on-the-move Jimmy Pattison – and in 1981, he decided he was ready to make the next big leap.
He opened the Bakehouse Garden Restaurant, which operated on Granville Street for a couple of years, and then, as so often happens in Reynolds’s life, serendipity intervened. During his stint at CJOR, he had done an editorial on media bias, noting how, when Murray Pezim had been charged with securities violations, it was front-page news, but when the charges against the colourful mining promoter didn’t stick, it was reported on the back pages. So who should he meet shortly after leaving the station, walking down Georgia Street, but Pezim himself, who congratulated Reynolds for his commentary and suggested he might want to come to work with him.
Pezim ended up being Reynolds’s stock-market mentor. “I had an office in his office,” Reynolds says, “but I wasn’t an employee.” Raising some money through friends, Reynolds started a natural-gas company and became a director of International Corona Resources, which was responsible for the huge Hemlo gold discovery in Ontario. Reynolds also got to know some of the brighter lights of the B.C. business community, including Frank Giustra (ex-chair and CEO of Yorkton Securities and best known these days as the high-flying philanthropist pal of Bill Clinton) and Canaccord founder Peter Brown (who calls Reynolds “one of the best constituency politicians in the country”). After two years, Reynolds found it hard to resist getting back into politics, despite the inevitable drop in pay. “I liked it,” he says, “and I always felt I could do something.”
He was elected MLA for West Vancouver-Howe Sound in 1983, serving as Speaker of the house and then environment minister under premiers Bill Bennett and Bill Vander Zalm. In 1990, however, he resigned from the Vander Zalm cabinet after the charismatic premier vetoed agreed-upon emission-reduction rules for the pulp industry. “I felt it was lack of leadership,” says Reynolds. “It’s up to the government to set standards, and people should meet those standards. It doesn’t matter what it costs. . . . To me, money’s never the issue.”
Following the 1991 provincial election, Reynolds upped stakes and spent five years in Scottsdale, Ariz., where he had an office with Pezim and partner Art Clemiss. It was a state of semi-retirement, which Reynolds says he entered because he didn’t want to end up like his father, who retired at the age of 65 only to die a year later. “I golfed a lot. I built a house on a golf course,” he says. He kept somewhat occupied by helping take public a San Diego-based medical research company, one that was eventually taken over by Novopharm.
Certainly, all that southern sun seems to have smoothed out some of the rough edges. From 1997, when he returned to B.C. and was elected Reform MP for West Vancouver-Sunshine Coast, until 2006, when he served as co-chair of the Conservative Party’s winning federal campaign, Reynolds has always appeared a model of party loyalty and political consistency. “It shows that maturity works sometimes,” he says. According to Stockwell Day, whom Reynolds replaced as leader of the Canadian Alliance at a time of crisis, “If politics is the art of the possible, then John is the master artist.”
Despite Reynolds’s mastery of both politics and business, he has not escaped almost 40 years in the public eye unscathed. In particular, Reynolds’s dealings with some of the more questionable characters in Vancouver’s penny-stock world have caused controversy over the years; as Vancouver Sun reporter David Baines put it in a 2001 feature story, “several of [Reynolds’s] promotions have ended in embarrassing circumstances.” In 1991, while president of VSE-listed Silver Drake Resources, Reynolds was forced to scrap a plan to acquire soil-remediation technology from Mongi Ferchichi after it was revealed that Ferchichi had faked his academic credentials and was convicted of fraud. Reynolds admits it was an embarrassment but notes that it “didn’t cost anybody any money.” Baines also reported how Reynolds was involved with celebrated South Asian financial fugitive Rakesh Saxena over a junior stock deal that went awry (Reynolds acknowledges he did go and see Saxena “several times”).
For Baines, it’s no surprise that Reynolds has been successful in politics and stock promotion. Both require the same attributes: an ability to exude confidence, speak authoritatively in an engaging way and forge relationships with a wide range of individuals. “Reynolds is also a person who is incapable of blushing,” Baines says, adding that while he finds it hard to excuse Reynolds’s flaws, he nevertheless finds him a “very fascinating” individual. Reynolds, when asked whether he shouldn’t have been more careful of the company he’s kept, responds: “Every one of those people I met I’ve enjoyed . . . I don’t regret anything.”
In his current job with Lang Michener LLP, Reynolds has also come under fire from the likes of the National Union of Public and General Employees, who calls Reynolds “Exhibit A” in the new face of lobbying in Canada: “An elite group of influence peddlers who will simply float above or swim around the supposedly impenetrable walls of the Conservatives’ new Federal Accountability Act.” Reynolds, who has registered himself as an unpaid lobbyist for three groups – Science World, the Rick Hansen Foundation and Mayor Sam Sullivan’s initiative to fight drug addiction – insists that lobbying is not what he does at Lang Michener. He is hired to give strategic advice to clients on a range of issues, including how to go public and how to deal with various levels of government. The Lang Michener office in Vancouver, he notes, was responsible for half of all the new listings on the TSX last year.
Recently, Reynolds has been in the news for his involvement in the so-called Chuck Cadman affair. Three years ago, the dying Independent MP for Surrey North was allegedly offered a $1-million life insurance policy to vote against the Liberals’ budget and topple the government. The allegations have been firmly denied by Harper and the Tories. Reynolds says he finds it a “pretty strange story to come out right now,” and that offering inducements of that kind was something you just don’t do. But he does acknowledge he talked to Cadman on several occasions about his getting back into the Tory fold. “Cadman was a very good personal friend,” Reynolds notes.
Despite being an at-times fierce partisan, Reynolds also has a history of making friends and maintaining relationships across the political spectrum, including with former Liberal prime ministers Paul Martin and Jean Chrétien, former NDP premier Dave Barrett and former NDP cabinet minister Joy MacPhail. He remains friends with Senator Larry Campbell, a fellow board member at CY Oriental Holdings Ltd. (a China-based clothing company), despite a testy exchange last June over the former mayor’s opposition to Conservative plans for senate reform, in which Reynolds called Campbell a “hack” who had lost touch with ordinary British Columbians.
Reynolds has never been one to pull punches, and he’s especially harsh when criticizing the failure of business leadership and business’s lack of appreciation for the role of government. (On that note, he says the best book he’s read all year is Lee Iacocca’s Where Have All the Leaders Gone?)
“A lot of [business leaders] just talk about what the problem is. But how many of them pick up the phone, call their member of Parliament, call their member of the legislature, ask to go meet the cabinet minister who’s involved and follow the process?” Reynolds asks. “Most of them want to hire somebody to lobby for them.” He adds, “I always paid a lot more attention when the president of the company called me up and said, ‘I’d like to talk to you about my problem.’ ”
Businesspeople also need to learn to stop blaming the media, he insists. “Why blame the media? I’ve never blamed the media when I didn’t like their stories, and there’ve been a few I didn’t like.” Reynolds suggests that when a company faces a serious problem, its CEO should stand up and be counted, not hire a media person to stand in for them. “Go stand in front of the media and say, ‘We have messed up; we’re going to fix the problem – we’re sorry.’ ” As for which leaders Reynolds admires the most, he lists Jimmy Pattison, developer and VANOC chair Jack Poole and Chester Johnson, the former lumber executive and chair of BC Hydro. In the political field, Reynolds rates Diefenbaker “a hero” of a leader and describes Reform Party founder Preston Manning as “a very honourable guy.”
Reynolds says he will not get involved in the next Canadian election, whenever it might happen – unless Harper asks him to, of course. And despite his party allegiances, Reynolds believes that Ottawa – particularly the bureaucracy – still misunderstands Western Canada. “I still don’t think the West gets as strong day-to-day attention, no matter who’s in power.” He deplores the slow progress being made on helping the environment. “I think all these environmental issues can be solved. It just takes leadership,” he says. “And there’s a lack of it.”
In other words, Reynolds thinks both those in politics and business have their work cut out for them. Politicians need to be answerable on important issues, and businesspeople have to get to know their elected representatives – of whatever political stripe. “It’s not about big money anymore,” he insists. “It’s not about how you can buy your way in the door.” It’s all about the basics: learning from mentors and manuals, returning messages and making time for folks from all walks of life. And if anyone has proven the merits of “playing it by the book” – perfecting, over the decades, the art of old-fashioned retail politics – it’s John Reynolds.