As legions of cockroaches defiantly scurried out of boxes stored in the kitchen of his new apartment, Michael Twohey began to think he’d made a big mistake leaving Canada for a posting in China, began a Globe & Mail story Nov. 12 on working abroad. “I had never seen bugs that large. I spent the whole night killing cockroaches,” recalls Twohey, who is now manager for professional programs for York University’s English Language Institute. A few sleepless nights later, he thought he had the roach problem under control, when the invasion of the monster rats began. At that point, he was ready to drop out of what would eventually be a two-year assignment teaching English and grab the first available transportation out of Chongqing, a sprawling city on the upper end of China’s Yangtze River. “I had to ask the basic question: ‘Why am I here?’ The first couple of days you find yourself excited by everything. Then the realization hits you in the face. You’re not here on a holiday; you’re here to work. That’s always unsettling.”
Business values have changed post-Enron
David Shugarman, the director of York University’s Centre for Practical Ethics, agrees that in the post-Enron world, business values have changed, wrote office advice columnist Susan Pinker in The Globe & Mail Nov. 12. There’s an expectation that people will be guided by a sense of corporate responsibility. “It eventually comes back to haunt the person who said nothing,” he said in an interview. “If he walks away from it and believes there’s been a wrong, he’s removed himself from being complicit, but is allowing the wrongs to continue. What’s to prevent this from going on? Other people are going to be defrauded.”
Speaking of WestJet and Air Canada
WestJet Airlines Ltd. has announced its foreign ownership climb is quickly approaching the government’s ceiling of 25 per cent on foreign control, reported Canadian Press Nov. 12. The announcement is a “shot across the bow” at the federal government’s “outdated and arbitrary” ownership rules, said Fred Lazar, airlines expert and economics professor at York’s Schulich School of Business. “They’ve already made it quite obvious they want the limits raised – and they’re right,” Lazar said. “The world is moving to the 49 per cent level and at some point down the road [the limit] will probably disappear altogether.”
Lazar also told CP in a story Nov. 11 that Air Canada could be in good position to take advantage of growing Asian markets when it emerges from bankruptcy protection with Hong Kong businessman Victor Li as its controlling shareholder. Even though Air Canada will continue to sport its maple leaf livery, Asians will know who it belongs to and will pick it over competitors from the United States and elsewhere, he said.
Quality matters most on corporate boards
The Globe & Mail cited a study by Richard Leblanc, a policy professor at York University’s Schulich School of Business, in a story Nov. 12 about the wave of companies jumping on the bandwagon to adopt new corporate governance practices. Leblanc spent five years attending corporate board meetings to assess the quality of board interaction. His study, published earlier this year, concluded that structural factors such as independence are less important than the quality of board operations, said the Globe.
On air
- Julie Anne Boudreau, a political science professor with York’s Faculty of Arts, and a York student who commutes by bus, were interviewed as part of a report on how a new Liberal provincial government and new Toronto city council may get along better than the old regimes, especially when it comes to public transit and a subway to the University, on CBC TV’s “Canada Now” in Toronto Nov. 11.