04-01 Going for the Moon
“This place is going crazy”, as I tried to explain events to a reporter. “Five hundred companies joined the Canadian Federation of Independent Business in the last week alone.” What I didn’t bother explaining was that our salespeople in Ontario and Western Canada had just done 1,500 new business interviews to secure 500 new members….
04-02 A Saskatchewan Salute
Hiring staff for a new venture is a hit and miss process, and typically the founder does not have the time for proper research or psychological testing. In fact, we could best describe the Canadian Federation of Independent Business during the 1970s as a cabal of crusaders. More than half of those given jobs had…
04-03 Lobster with the Premier
Four Members of Parliament for Prince Edward Island. Phew. Time to get down to Atlantic Canada, meet the Premiers, speak at Rotary Clubs and help build our membership in Atlantic Canada. We wanted CFIB member Mandates landing on all their desks.I called Premier Campbell of PEI for a meeting, and to my great surprise, he…
04-04 The Donalda Club
It was the spring of 1974 when I received a call from MP Barney Danson of York North, Toronto to meet him for lunch at the Donalda Golf and Country Club. Over lunch, we composed a letter to Prime Minister Trudeau proposing the creation of a Minister of State for Small Business. Barney Danson made…
04-05 Being Truly National
I used to think that most of Quebec was bilingual, but once you move into rural Quebec, you discover they are unilingual French just as we are unilingual English in most of English Canada. It was a challenge of a lifetime building a truly national organization. We moved into Quebec with vigour in 1976, building…
04-06 Appearances are Deceiving
If I learned anything during my first ten years building the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, it is that nothing works quite like people assume things work. Does a Minister run his government department? Not necessarily. His Deputy Minister reports to him, but also to the Clerk of the Privy Council, the top bureaucrat, who…
04-07 Getting Religion … I mean Technology
Any business person that has converted from a manual system for recording sales and accounting information to a computer system knows that it is a life-changing event.At the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, getting rid of thousands of 3×5 cards and putting every bit of membership information into a digital format, changed our operations forever.There…
04-08 Wake up Canada … There’s No Free Lunch
One of the most aggressive campaigns to fight the explosive growth and intrusion of government was our Wake up Canada campaign which featured a Red Rooster on full-page advertisements in newspapers across Canada. It was January 1976. We were coming off price and wage controls to fight inflation, and CFIB disagreed with the fundamental premise…
04-09 Funding Business is Tough Business
One of the fundamental weaknesses of small-scale enterprises everywhere is being able to secure adequate capital, whether equity or debt, in relatively small amounts. Solving this challenge would become a lifetime goal of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. It is exciting to say that small firms play a dominant role in job creation and…
04-10 The Lone Wolf is a Dead Wolf
The story of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business is often retold as some kind of personal crusade. It was that to a point, but the idea that I did anything alone would not tell the story of the hundreds of people that came out of nowhere to help me. I would have died if…
04-11 Numbers, Numbers
1978 was a year of magic in the history of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. We achieved our membership goal of 50,000, making us the largest voluntary small business advocacy organization in the world relative to the size of our population. We started to build a policy and research capability with the appointment of…
04-12 A Look into the Future
It is scary and exciting to witness powerful forces of change. I saw for the first time a vision of what we now call the global economy in 1977 as part of my trip to the International Symposium on Small Business held in Seoul, South Korea. The Symposium was a gathering of world leaders associated…