Report on Business magazine editor Dawn Calleja.Daniel Ehrenworth/The Globe and Mail
Even at the best of times, there’s a paralyzing sort of fear that comes with editing a print magazine. Our lead time—the gap between when we send the book to press and when it actually lands in your home—is a torturous three weeks. A lot can happen in that time, which helps explain why I’ve spent the past 20 years, i.e. my entire tenure at Report on Business, in a state of perpetual anxiety. What if our cover subject gets fired (or worse) while we’re in lead-time limbo? What if a scandal erupts? What if the entire world order is suddenly upended (as seems more and more plausible in this era of Donald Trump and his cabinet of delusionists)?
But that long lead time is also part of what I love about the magazine business. It forces us to step back from the 24-7 firehose of news to assign stories that are either timely but not necessarily newsy (and therefore less likely to implode), or stories that offer readers some measure of escape from the constant stream of disheartening headlines.
This edition has both. For our cover story, Calgary-based reporter Emma Graney sat down with Nancy Southern, who has presided over ATCO Ltd. since 2003 (“Southern comfort”). Southern was keen to talk about why Alberta’s secessionist movement makes her hopping mad (even if she understands the roots of the separatist push) and how the Carney government’s new list of priorities dovetails perfectly with ATCO’s long—very long—list of business units.
There’s something delightfully unfiltered about Southern. Maybe it has to do with the fact that she leads a company her family controls. Or maybe, at age 69, she just feels she’s earned the right to speak her mind at a pivotal time for both her province and her country. Whatever the reason, I wish we’d hear the same kind of straight talk from more corporate leaders.
On the fun yarn side of things, we sent Sarah Treleaven to Wychwood Park (“Move fast, break things, alienate your neighbours”), a one-time artist colony that’s morphed into an exclusive enclave in Toronto. For more than a century, it has quietly managed its own affairs (with only the occasional tire slashing or legal dispute seeping outside its gated borders and into the press). Now, a cadre of move-fast-and-break-things tech execs have invaded the idyllic Park—and they’re looking to shake up a neighbourhood that is quite happy standing still, thank you very much.
This issue also features our seventh annual Women Lead Here benchmark (which once again includes ATCO, for the record). Sadly, there’s no chance of that particular feature getting shaken up over the next few weeks. As Deborah Aarts writes in “Playing the long game,” progress on gender equity among the top ranks of Canada’s largest publicly traded companies is incremental at best. But hey, we’ll take it.