The next big thing
Almost half a century after first being elected as a councillor, Paul Godfrey is still looking for ways to put Toronto on the map
Paul Godfrey likes to quote his mother, who once told him — among many philosophical pearls — that it’s better to be lucky than smart.
The late Bess Godfrey would surely have been delighted to know her son turned out to be both. Lucky, smart and more. Hard-working. Tenacious. Unafraid of failure. Not to mention becoming a local political rainmaker as prolific in public as he is adept behind the scenes, as influential and connected as they come in Toronto. And, of course, rich. Very rich. Astonishingly, almost half a century after being elected in 1964 as a councillor from the backwater of North York, through high-profile careers in politics, newspaper publishing, professional baseball, and back to the tumultuous media world, Paul Godfrey remains near the top of his game and at the centre of controversy.
Forty years after the battle of the Spadina Expressway, 30 years after the fight for SkyDome, he still has an eye peeled for the next big thing intended to put Toronto on the map. Nowadays, it’s a casino. The president and CEO of Postmedia Network Inc., in his capacity as chairman of the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corp., was received last week by Premier Kathleen Wynne to explain the fine points of an “iconic” casino he hopes to have built in Toronto.
He’s not a big gambler himself, Godfrey says.
He just likes risk takers and folks with vision — and what the successful ones do to build wealth and build a city.
If the new premier’s instructions to the OLGC to rewrite its casino plan left the odds of success considerably longer, it isn’t like Godfrey hasn’t faced such things before. And, more often than not, his luck has held.
“As long as you’re talking, you can get something done,” he said before the meeting with Wynne.
That’s because, as an acquaintance once noted, his greatest talent is “that of persuasion.” NOW 74, Godfrey keeps slim and fit with a disciplined workout regimen, tweaked here and there, he cheerfully admits, by cosmetic surgery. He’s always had, and seems to have retained, a Duddy Kravitz hustle, a Trump-ian appreciation of the art of the deal, and a Rat Pack sense of confidence and style.
He doesn’t wear his engineer’s iron ring. Rather, he happily shows off the horseshoe ring of diamonds his wife gave him — a bauble so eye-catching he’s forever telling folks it has nothing to do with racetracks or the Indianapolis Colts, but good luck.
In fact, the way Godfrey tells it, his life has been a chain of serendipitous events, various wonderful careers that just sort of happened.
He had to work hard to graduate from the University of Toronto as a chemical engineer in 1962, he says. But as he wrote his last exam, he was pretty sure he didn’t really want to be an engineer.
At 25, he was a single guy, working in sales, living at home. His mother, a political activist in North York, was being encouraged to run in coming municipal elections. There was a meeting in his living room when he came home one night. Bess Godfrey said she didn’t want to run, but she had a son.
“I basically had been offered up,” Godfrey laughs. So he ran for alderman in 1964 and, being lucky and smart, won. He was named to the North York board of control, then, in 1972, made Metro chairman, the most powerful politician in town, the godfather, critics complained, of conservatives, developers and expressways.
“Without development, you don’t have jobs, you don’t have proper housing, you don’t have growth in the city,” he still says. “You need risk takers. Developers were risk takers. . . . I always had a great admiration for people of vision, people who were prepared to take a risk.”
Godfrey’s own vision often tilted toward sports and palaces of play. When Montreal got a Major League Baseball franchise in 1968, he began a crusade to get one for Toronto.
After the Blue Jays arrived in 1977, he fought for construction of a domed stadium, which opened in 1989 as the Sky- Dome. He has long pursued an NFL franchise here.
GODFREY’S BEEN CALLED many things: “a backroom operative” by former prime minister Brian Mulroney; a “chief kingmaker” by socialite Patti Starr; by others a “connector,” a salesman, a closer.
“I learned, mainly from my mother, to get people to do the things you want them to do, you’ve got to treat people as an equal,” he says. “It’s something I feel good about. I feel good about getting people to work together.”
At engineering school, Godfrey learned skills well suited to the careers he would later pursue — especially politics.
He also knew how to count. Former city councillor Tony O’Donohue said in his memoir that — in addition to being as good as his word while Metro chairman — Godfrey “never championed an issue unless he had the votes to win.”
Still, after 11 years in that seat, Godfrey was getting restless, looking for other challenges and a chance to make some money.
“I realized, God, you know, if I’m going to raise a family and do for them what I wanted to do, I had to get out of public life and start earning a living.” ENTER DOUG CREIGHTON, then boss of the Toronto Sun organization, who “out of the blue” made Godfrey an offer he almost, but didn’t refuse.
“I would never have thought of the newspaper business in100 years. I knew two things about the newspaper business. As a politician, I knew how to get my name in the paper. The second thing, on very intelligent days, I knew how to keep it out of the newspaper.”
Creighton told Godfrey he wanted his “people skills.” Still, Godfrey was tough to convince. “Letting go of perceived power was very difficult,” he says. “But it wasn’t real power. It was the perception of power.”
Then his wife, Gina, reminded him what Mother Godfrey always said: “That it was better to leave politics two years too early than two seconds too late.” So leave he did to become publisher of the Toronto Sun.
“It was probably the best move I’ve ever made in my life,” Godfrey says now.
The move ended well for Godfrey, the relationship with Creighton less so, and with the Sun rank-and-file, horribly. In 1992, Creighton was ousted as head of Sun Media, replaced by Godfrey. As Creighton would write in his memoir, the Sun board thought “my departure was the only thing they could do to ensure Paul got the top Sun job.”
In 1996, a group put together by Godfrey bought Ted Rogers’ 63-per-cent stake in Toronto Sun Publishing Corp., shedding staff to do so in what Creighton had always regarded as a big, happy Sun family. A couple of years later, Godfrey et al sold the Sun to Quebecor Inc.
As Rogers recorded, his side got $259 million in cash for the sale. Quebecor paid $983 million. Godfrey’s stock was reportedly worth about $28 million.
“That was quite a two-year return on investment for my friends like Paul Godfrey,” Rogers wrote.
For eight years, until 2008, he was president of the Toronto Blue Jays. “I had to pinch myself to make sure it just wasn’t a dream.”
If he presided over a mediocre product on the field, he helped steer the franchise through financial trouble, improving attendance and securing for owner Ted Rogers the SkyDome — built at a cost to taxpayers of more than $600 million — at a bargain $25 million.
Then, in 2008, it was back to the media biz as boss of the National Post and Postmedia, where Godfrey — like all at his level — now delivers speeches promising efficiencies, cost reductions, building a “smaller, more profitable company,” while relinquishing “the nostalgia” for former business models.
JUST AS HE PROFESSES surprise at being asked to run Postmedia, Godfrey says he was shocked when asked by the Liberal government of Dalton McGuinty in 2009 to take over chairmanship of OLGC. When approached by then-finance minister Dwight Duncan to clean up the messy corporation, “I reminded him that (as a Conservative) I prayed on a different side of the political church from him.”
It didn’t seem to matter. Since he took the job, problems at the OLGC have diminished, the lottery business is being overhauled and casino expansion has emerged.
And if it turns out Godfrey can’t satisfy Wynne, or if “the city decides they’re going to vote against it, we’ll go to Markham or Vaughan or some other municipality in the GTA and we’ll build it. I think it’ll be, unfortunately, Toronto’s loss. The sad part is if one isn’t built in Toronto now, it will probably never be built.”
Over a half-century, Godfrey has enjoyed a longevity of influence that tops any politician of his generation. As Patti Starr wrote in her memoir, he has the ability “to make or break anyone and to orchestrate any and all political scenarios. . . . Recommendations from Paul were worth their weight in gold.”
It says a lot about his staying power, in fact, that one of his keenest contemporary critics, city councillor Adam Vaughan, is the son of one of Godfrey’s first civic opponents, the late alderman and broadcaster Colin Vaughan.
“He’s got a real penchant for big deals,” Vaughan says. “He thinks of himself as a big deal and he likes to strike the big deal. The casino is the SkyDome all over again. It’s going to be all things to all people. It’s jobs, it’s profile, it puts the city on the map. And five years from now, everyone will be saying, ‘OK, how do we sell this thing?’
“Big projects, big ideas like this can sometimes turn into very big white elephants or big problems down the road. He doesn’t hang around long enough to get saddled with the problems.
“Is the Sun better now than it was when he started? Nope. Is the Post better now than when he started? Nope. Did the Blue Jays have their best years under Paul Godfrey? Nope. He shrinks organizations, if anything else.” FOR HIS PART, even before an interview is arranged, Godfrey makes clear he will do no criticizing of those in political office now. His times were different than theirs. Besides, “I live by the theory you play the puck and not the man.”
But he does say he believes Toronto’s most pressing current challenges to be financial (“It’s impossible to live on the real-estate tax alone), transit gridlock and the inability of various levels of government to work together in the best interests of cities.
A Toronto casino, along with the Rogers Centre, would sit as iconic local bookends to Godfrey’s career as city builder, along with a legacy of charitable works. But, even if one does get built here, he’s not done yet.
“I still have one goal to complete. I haven’t given up the hope to be involved with a group to bring an NFL football team to Toronto.
“That’s my last act. In sports.”
“You need risk takers. . . . I always had a great admiration for people of vision, people who were prepared to take a risk.” PAUL GODFREY CEO OF POSTMEDIA NETWORK INC.