It had been a decision by the Board to continue the work of the Canadian Centre for Entrepreneurship after it was shut down at the end of 1973 at the Canadian Federation of Independent Business.
Firstly, we helped Dr. Rein Peterson of York University develop a book called “Small Business, Building a Balanced Economy”. It was distributed to a membership at the time of about 35,000.
But our first blockbuster was a comic book called "Small Business…The Soul of the Community" and we ordered 200,000 of these for distribution to high school teachers across Canada.
The focus on high schools was because of all the phone calls I received in the 1970s to speak, and about half came from high school teachers. It was because the media always referred to me as a former teacher at Ryerson.
The amazing part of this story was that a District Manager in Ontario saw the booklet when his son brought it home from high school, and he immediately asked if he could have enough to give to his members. And that is how the bulk of the booklets were distributed by the field – to members who gave them to their children. I would never have believed how strongly members supported our efforts to change the attitudes of young people about careers in small business.
We then went into the production of a second booklet called "Small Business is Good Business" one of which I was especially proud. I came up with the name but used an outside consultant to do the quality writing of the content. We sent a mailer to all the school boards across Canada and sent packages of 40 to all those who showed an interest. The full 100,000 booklets went to teachers across Canada, in both languages.
My colleagues at Ryerson developed a booklet called “A Guide to Small Business Management” that they distributed to Community Colleges across Canada in French and English. They did all the writing, production and distribution. It was not very successful. However, they decided to go into a higher quality second edition, but as a partner of CFIB. By then we had a full-time Director of Education with a network of friends in the Community College system. It was blockbuster number two.
The final element in our education program was supporting quality educators in the universities and colleges, by helping finance their research and providing them with platforms at international conferences. Working with governments, we helped these academic leaders establish over a dozen entrepreneurship centres across Canada. And soon we began to see courses in entrepreneurship added not just to the curriculum of business schools, but professional schools like engineering.
Before a new idea takes hold, someone has to take leadership. The concept of making entrepreneurship a credible option for young people by introducing it into the teaching curriculum came from the CFIB. We then abandoned our education department in the 1980s, when every provincial government took on the task on their own.