Working the Dead Beat

by Sandra Martin

  Having jumped into the precarious live theatre business, he embarked on another risky venture a few years later: opening a restaurant to feed his theatre patrons. He bought a six-storey dry-goods warehouse next door to the Royal Alex for $525,000 in cash, decorated it with antiques and stained glass that he had picked up for a song, hung out a blazing sign advertising ED’S WAREHOUSE, and opened for business on January 20, 1966. One critic described the decor as “Baroque bordello,” but the food was simple — roast beef and Yorkshire pudding — and the prices were cheap.

  Before long Mirvish had acquired more property along King Street and opened more restaurants. By the mid-1970s he had six eateries serving close to six thousand meals, from Italian to Chinese, on busy nights. They ran full tilt until the mid-1990s, when, faced with competition from a range of high-end restaurants and bars in the area, Mirvish began closing his places down. The last to shut was Old Ed’s in 2000; it now houses an antiques market.

  Two decades after buying and refurbishing the Royal Alex, Mirvish bought an even more famous theatre: the Old Vic in England. He’d never been inside — indeed, he’d never been to London — but he’d been warmed by tales of performing there by touring actors Sir Ralph Richardson, Sir John Gielgud, and Peter O’Toole. In June 1982 he offered £550,000 in a bidding war and was stunned to learn he’d bought the theatre.

  There was a big fuss about a foreigner buying up a national treasure, but Mirvish flew to London and held a press conference to defuse fears that he might be intending to move the Old Vic to Toronto, the way London Bridge had been transplanted to Arizona. He won over the hostile media when he declared, “They’re calling me a foreigner. But I’m really just a lad from the colonies.” The Queen rewarded him with a CBE — Commander of the British Empire — a gong that Mirvish typically translated as “Creator of Bargains Everywhere.”

  After spending almost $4 million sprucing up the ageing theatre to reclaim its high-Victorian splendour, he personally welcomed the Queen Mother at the reopening on October 31, 1983. Even though the Old Vic was celebrated for winning awards, the Mirvishes could never break even, and in August 1997 they put it up for sale. The deal — for an undisclosed price to the Old Vic Theatre Trust — was concluded in September 1998.

  His final foray into theatre-building was to turn the parking lot down the street from the Royal Alex into a new venue named the Princess of Wales, to accommodate Miss Saigon when it finished its West End run in London. The Mirvishes built a state-of-the-art facility with a huge stage and two thousand seats that cost $50 million, including the land and parking. The Princess of Wales, which opened on May 14, 1993, was the first privately built theatre in Toronto since the Royal Alex in 1907.

  For somebody who billed himself as cheap, Mirvish was a generous soul. Beginning in the late 1980s, he hung a sign on his store every Christmas that read YOU’VE GOT A DATE WITH A TURKEY and gave away more than a thousand frozen birds to the needy, and he shipped enough food to a Salvation Army shelter to give another two thousand people a turkey dinner. On his birthday he threw an annual party for himself outside the store on Markham Street, giving out presents to customers and hiring clowns and jugglers to roam the street entertaining the huge crowds that showed up for free pizza and pasta.

  Mirvish had a fixed rule that employees must retire at sixty-five — until he himself turned sixty-four. He immediately scrapped the rule and let people stay on the payroll as long as they remained productive. In 1986 he made a concession to his age — he was seventy-two — by bringing his son into the business. Nonetheless, he continued to spend mornings in the store, the noon hour at one of his restaurants, and the afternoon working on his theatre operations. Except on those nights when he was committed to ballroom dancing, he was in bed by ten p.m.

  He missed his eighty-ninth birthday party in 2003 because of a bout of double pneumonia, but organizers still served 25,000 free hot dogs and 20,000 bags of potato chips and presented large cheques to local causes. In May 2004 he made his first public appearance in more than a year when, sitting in a wheelchair, he received the Jane Jacobs Lifetime Achievement Award from the Canadian Urban Institute. A month later the Mirvishes made it a family affair when father, mother, and son were granted honorary degrees by the University of Toronto for their contributions to arts and entertainment. In all, Mirvish received more than 250 awards, including the Order of Canada.

  Friends and family gathered on June 29, 2007, to celebrate the Mirvishes’ sixty-sixth wedding anniversary at a garden party at their home. Less than two weeks later he died, aged ninety-two, at St. Michael’s Hospital, on July 11, 2007.

  Simon Reisman

  Free-Trade Negotiator

  June 19, 1919 – March 9, 2008

  THE CLOCK WAS ticking on the free-trade deal with the Americans. Negotiations had dragged on for nearly two years and were set to expire. With only ten days to go, Simon Reisman, Canada’s chief negotiator, still couldn’t get key American politicians to focus on a primary issue: the dispute resolution clause. So he cooked up a piece of theatre with Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Allan Gotlieb, Canadian ambassador to the United States.

  He stomped out of a scheduled meeting in Washington on September 23, 1987, and barked to the reporters waiting outside: “I am suspending negotiations.” Then he headed for the airport and a flight back to Ottawa, where his boss, Mulroney, was waiting to play his part in the drama.

  Mulroney phoned U.S. Treasury secretary James Baker and threatened to call President Reagan — the very man with whom Mulroney had sung “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” on a stage in Quebec City in March 1985. As Mulroney later recalled, he snapped at Baker: “You can do a deal on nuclear arms reduction with your worst enemies and you can’t do a free-trade deal with your best friends.” According to the prime minister, “Baker nearly jumped out of his skin, because he knew that Reagan would have raised holy hell on that issue immediately. That’s why they came around.”

  Reisman, wavy-haired, bespectacled, pugnacious, and short, looked more like a wrestler than a diplomat. A veteran not only of the Second World War but of the hard-fought Auto Pact deal with the Americans, he wasn’t afraid of a fight. Even when he wasn’t putting on an intimidating act to cow an opponent, he was a hard-boiled customer. That’s why Mulroney had picked him to make the case and hold the line in the free-trade talks. Having flirted with communism while growing up in the Jewish ghetto of Montreal in the Depression, he’d swung just as far to the right and was a fervent free-trade continentalist.

  Reisman had gone eyeball to eyeball often enough with the Americans to know how they worked. It was widely rumoured that during a tense conversation with U.S. Treasury secretary John Connolly in the early 1970s, he had ground his cigar into the American politician’s heirloom desk — a sacred piece of furniture that had once belonged to founding father Alexander Hamilton.

  Even people on Reisman’s side of the table called him abrasive and hard-line. “He was one tough bird,” Allan Gotlieb, ambassador to the United States throughout the free-trade talks, said after Reisman died of heart disease in 2008. “He was extremely direct and totally unfearful of the consequences of his comments. He was the diametric opposite of the namby-pamby civil servant.”

  Reisman had an ongoing conflict with Pat Carney, the minister of international trade. She took — and expressed — great umbrage that Reisman wasn’t keeping her in the loop. More than twenty years later she was still riled. “He wasn’t a team player. He was abrasive and difficult to work with because he didn’t like political direction or involvement,” she said in an interview. “Even though I was the minister responsible for the negotiations he would insist he wasn’t reporting to me. He was exasperating,” she said, while acknowledging that he “did know the file.”

  A former deputy minister of finance, Reisman had taken early retirement in 1975, at least partly because he himself was exasperated with the machinations of his politic
al masters. Reisman was not going to kowtow to Carney, especially since he knew he had the ear of the prime minister. After hearing Reisman’s complaints, Mulroney installed himself as chairman of that particular Cabinet committee, with the negotiating team reporting directly to him and not the minister.

  Reisman’s well-timed snit actually got the Americans’ attention and moved the talks along. Both sides signed the FTA on October 4, 1987. As Gottlieb writes in The Washington Diaries, 1981–1989: “The deal was done and completed at ten minutes before midnight” the night before the deadline. But it still had to be ratified on both sides of the border. That prompted a blistering public debate in Canada, fuelled by the pro–free trade Globe and Mail and the anti–free trade Toronto Star, and led to a hotly contested election in November 1988.

  Free trade with the U.S. had been a political hot potato since before Confederation. Lessening ties with Great Britain diminished the preferential trading relationships the colony (and then the dominion) had enjoyed with the mother country. Two national elections had been fought over the advantages (bolstering the economy) versus the disadvantages (loss of independence) of unfettered bilateral trade, or reciprocity, as it was often called.

  Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s Liberal Party had championed the pro side in 1891 and 1911 and had been roundly trounced by the Conservatives under Sir John A. Macdonald and then Sir Robert Borden. Those roles were reversed in the 1980s when Mulroney’s Conservatives raised the banner of free trade against the Liberals, led by newly minted leader John Turner, and Ed Broadbent’s New Democratic Party in 1988. This time the results were reversed as well, with the Conservatives winning the point — and the election — although with a reduced majority after Mulroney’s landslide in 1984.

  No matter how volatile, Reisman was a smart and shrewd negotiator who helped mould Canada into a modern economic player. He was a key figure in every significant Canadian trade deal from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in the late 1940s — the precursor to the World Trade Organization — the Auto Pact in the mid-1960s, and the Free Trade Agreement in the late 1980s. Before it was supplanted by the more problematic North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA (which included Mexico), in January 1994, the FTA was heralded as an economic and political success for Canada (and Mulroney) because it eliminated many barriers and exponentially increased business with our largest trading partner.

  SOL SIMON REISMAN was born in Montreal on June 19, 1919, the second of four children of Kolman and Manya Reisman. His father, a factory worker in the rag trade, had trouble supporting his family during the Depression. While working odd jobs, Reisman completed Baron Byng High School and made it into McGill University, despite its alleged Jewish quota. He graduated with an honours degree in economics and political science in 1941. He spent another year at McGill earning a master’s degree (graduating summa cum laude) and then enlisted in the Royal Canadian Artillery. He went overseas in November 1942, a month after marrying Constance (Connie) Carin. They had met through friends.

  Even his wife had problems with Reisman at first. “I disliked him immediately,” she said. “I didn’t like his forthright abrupt manner and I thought this was not the man for me, but it turned out I was wrong.” She was “busy” the first several times he asked her out, but, undaunted by these rebuffs, he told her to name a date when she would be free. She did, and so she learned about the warm man beneath the brusque, self-confident exterior. “He always said what he thought, and he was not suited for diplomacy. He would have been a terrible failure in external affairs, but he was good where he was.”

  After landing in England in 1942, he served as a troop commander with the 11th, 15th, and 17th Field Artillery in the Italian campaign and finished out the war in the liberation of Holland. While waiting to be repatriated, he studied for several months at the London School of Economics. After four years overseas, he returned home in 1946 and went to Ottawa. He was hired by the Department of Labour but moved before the year was out to Finance, to work under Mitchell Sharp in the economic policy division.

  Soon he was working closely with John Deutsch, director of the international economic relations division. Deutsch wanted to take him to Geneva as secretary to a twelve-man delegation working on preparations for an upcoming international trade conference. His wife had other ideas. “Either I go [with you] or we dissolve the marriage,” she told him, having no desire for another long-distance separation. He acquiesced “and we went on from there, for 65 years” and three children, a son and two daughters.

  Several months and many preparations later, delegates from nearly sixty countries met in Havana, Cuba, to establish what would become the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) in 1947. At the hearings Reisman noticed that Canadian prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King was especially interested in Article 24, a provision that would permit groups of nations to establish free-trade areas. Canada was facing a foreign-exchange crisis that winter, and King wanted to secure a secret free-trade deal with the U.S. as a potential solution. As it turned out, the crisis passed, King lost interest, and the U.S. Congress refused to ratify the Havana Charter, so Canada — and Reisman — had to wait another forty years to complete a continental free-trade deal.

  Back home, Reisman worked his way up through the civil service hierarchy. As deputy minister of finance from 1964 to 1968, he led the negotiations that resulted in the Automotive Products Trade Agreement (APTA) being signed by Prime Minister Pearson and U.S. president Lyndon Johnson in January 1965. Called the Auto Pact, the agreement removed tariffs on cars, trucks, buses, and automotive parts between the two countries, which greatly encouraged trade. Essentially the Auto Pact was a free-trade deal in the automobile industry. It bolstered the bottom line of the big American car manufacturers, greatly increased assembly-line jobs in Canada, and lowered the cost of purchasing automobiles.

  By 1968 the percentage of cars that were manufactured in Canada and sold in the United States had risen from seven to sixty percent, while forty percent of cars bought in Canada were made in the U.S. There were downsides: Canada didn’t develop an indigenous car industry and it was restricted from negotiating similar trade pacts with other countries, such as Japan. The Auto Pact was abolished after the World Trade Organization declared it illegal in 2001, but by then the FTA, negotiated by Reisman, and the subsequent North American Free Trade Agreement, which added Mexico to the mix, had made it largely irrelevant.

  Reisman gave up his job as deputy minister of finance in 1975 to take early retirement. The timing was good, as the federal government had recently decided to index civil service pensions to the consumer price index. But that wasn’t the only reason Reisman wanted to leave at the age of fifty-five.

  Pierre Trudeau had been re-elected the year before with a majority after having engineered the defeat of his minority Liberal government on a budget vote. Back in power, Trudeau reversed direction on his economic policy, causing John Turner, the finance minister (and Reisman’s political master), to resign in September 1975. A month later Trudeau implemented wage and price controls, although he had ridiculed Progressive Conservative leader Robert Stanfield for proposing the very same measures — sneering, “You can’t say, ‘Zap! You’re frozen!’ to the economy” — during the election campaign the year before.

  Reisman said he quit the government because he was fed up with a diminishing scope for “people of energy and a certain independence of mind” in the public service. Many believed that the real impetus had a lot to do with his antipathy towards the prime minister’s flip-flop on wage and price controls and his own loyalty to John Turner. When Turner later ran for leadership of the Liberal Party, Reisman acted as one of his unpaid economic advisors.

  After leaving the civil service, Reisman formed a consulting firm with James Grandy, another deputy minister who had bolted the government bureaucracy in 1975 with his indexed pension. Reisman and Grandy signed up a roster of clients that included Bo
mbardier Power Corporation and Lockheed. A ruckus erupted in the House of Commons over the firm’s dealings with Lockheed, which was in the process of negotiating a huge contract to supply airplanes to the federal government. As former public servants, Reisman and Grandy were violating conflict-of-interest guidelines, according to some critics. We aren’t lobbyists, Reisman insisted, explaining that there was a difference between peddling influence and peddling knowledge. Or, as he said to the Globe and Mail, “Some girls dance and some girls are whores . . . we just dance.”

  As a consultant, Reisman had a number of high-level assignments, including a commission investigating the auto industry in 1978 and serving as chief negotiator for aboriginal land claims in the western Arctic in 1983, one of the first pieces of legislation affecting aboriginals under the newly proclaimed Charter of Rights and Freedoms. But the biggest deal of his life materialized when Mulroney appointed him ambassador for trade negotiations and chief negotiator for Canada of the Canada–U.S. Free Trade Agreement in November 1985, at a per diem rate of $1,000.

  The two men knew each other personally from salmon-fishing trips in Quebec with the likes of Paul Desmarais and John Rae of Power Corporation. “He was a natural for us,” Mulroney said later, describing him as the “indispensable player” in the free-trade talks. “Simon was the star. He was the one who took the free-trade concept from infancy to maturity and made it whole.”

  Reisman slowed his pace somewhat in his eighties, but he was still salmon fishing in white water in July 2007 and attended a tribute dinner for Mulroney in Montreal to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Free Trade Agreement that October. “Free trade has created millions of jobs, raised our standard of living, and helped Canada balance our books and pay down the national debt,” Mulroney bragged. He then recapped Reisman’s career as a negotiator, ending with the FTA: “Not only was he our most experienced official, he was tough as nails and he succeeded brilliantly.”