Canadian executive ‘best of the best’
Ronald W. Osborne, one of Canada’s most respected corporate titans, could take apart a complicated balance sheet as easily as he could belt out a country and western tune during karaoke.
An accountant by training, the 66-year-old was a rare breed of executive, one who could dive into minute details without becoming too swamped to see the broader picture.
One of the most sought-after corporate directors in the country, he brought his inquisitive eye to numerous major Canadian companies: Tim Hortons Inc.; BCE Inc.; Sun Life Assurance Co. of Canada; Air Canada; Shell Ltd.; Four Seasons Resort and Club; and most recently as chairman of the board of Postmedia Network Inc., the company that owns this newspaper. He also indulged his enthusiasm for the arts as chairman of Massey Hall and Roy Thomson Hall in Toronto.
An avid golfer who loved old Hollywood tunes, Osborne died suddenly at his Florida home on Monday.
“Ron was the best of the best: an extraordinarily effective corporate director and an even better person,” said Robert Prichard, chairman of law firm Torys LLP in Toronto.
“Ron was a force of nature: brilliant, remarkably diligent, a constant source of optimism and ideas tempered by deep experience and great judgment.”
British-born to working-class parents in Sussex, England, Osborne was educated at prestigious Cambridge University where he obtained a bachelor of arts degree in 1968. Four years later, he landed in Canada, where he became a member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario in 1972, and later a fellow of the institute in 1988.
The mild-mannered executive with “a backbone of steel,” according to former colleague Lionel Schipper, soon put his mettle on display. As president of media giant Maclean Hunter Ltd., which owned a stable of high-profile consumer magazines, broadsheet newspapers and broadcast assets such as Chatelaine, Maclean’s and Flare, Osborne had to fend off a hostile takeover bid launched in 1994 by cable giant Rogers Communications Inc. After a protracted hostile battle, which won Osborne high praise, a deal was finally inked for $3.1 billion.
“He struck a fair deal,” recalled Graham Savage, a director of Postmedia who was a senior executive at Rogers at the time of the unfriendly bid. “He was solid, thorough, ethical, he was hard-working and very intelligent. He had all the kinds of qualities you’d want in a CEO, a chairman or an executive.”
Although he had moved on to BCE in 1995 as president and chief executive of Bell Canada, Osborne remained in close contact with many of the executives and suppliers he had befriended at Maclean Hunter. In fact, he continued to organize an annual golf weekend at his cottage every summer.
Osborne applied his private-sector skills to Ontario Hydro in 1998. A year after his arrival at the Crown corporation, it was broken up into two companies by the former provincial Conservative government of Mike Harris. Osborne became president and chief executive of the for-profit electricity unit Ontario Power Generation Inc. A quick study, Osborne became an ardent student of nuclear power, but cost overruns and delays at the Pickering, Ont., nuclear power plant cost him his job in 2003.
For the next decade, the modest, unassuming accountant who laughed easily amassed a raft of boardroom appointments that would fashion him into a pillar of the Canadian business establishment.
“He was a quiet guy, he wasn’t the centre of attention at board meetings, but when he spoke, people listened,” recalled Schipper, who met Osborne when they both sat on the board of the Toronto Sun in the 1990s and later as directors at Four Seasons. Yet, he said, “everywhere you went with Ron, he stood out.”
Paul Godfrey, chief executive of Postmedia and a former director of OPG, called Osborne “the best corporate director I ever served with.” Godfrey, who brought Osborne to the board of RioCan Real Estate Investment Fund, said that although they knew each other for almost 30 years, he still marvelled at Osborne’s ability to “be a generalist who could pick up knowledge about almost any topic and always ask the most pertinent questions.”
As friends and colleagues reflected on Osborne, they remembered him equally for his business acumen and his humanity. More poignantly, Godfrey said the sudden death of his longtime friend “leaves a big hole on many corporate boards because Ron won’t be at the meetings any longer.”