Frank Stronach

Intrusive government regulators must back off

April 11, 2023

Former U.S. president Ronald Reagan used to say that the scariest words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” Audiences loved that line because it really hit home. However well-intentioned our government officials are, they usually end up making everything a little more difficult, a little more costly and a little more complicated. About 10 minutes up the road from my office is a new eight-storey, 422,000-square-foot facility built by the local regional municipality. The new administrative office, which cost more than $200 million to build, will oversee a variety of public services and house 1,500 government employees. What worries me most is what many of these civil servants will be doing day

Schools have role to play in helping children grow strong and healthy

July 25, 2023

Most parents would surely agree that our nation’s number 1 priority should be the health of our children. But if the old saying that “you are what you eat” is true, then our kids are in a lot of trouble. Many children are eating unhealthy, non-organic foods at home, at school and at fast food restaurants. It’s one of the main reasons why we’ve seen an alarming rise in illnesses such as obesity and Type 2 diabetes in Canadian children. These illnesses drastically reduce the quality of life for a growing number of children and hinder their ability to learn. They also cost our health-care system millions of dollars each year. The universal hope and prayer of Canadian parents is

Save the family farm

February 14, 2023

When you think about King Charles III, the last thing you probably think about is family farming. But Canada’s new monarch made an impassioned plea over a year ago for small family farmers in the United Kingdom and around the world to come together in a co-operative movement to better ensure their survival. A strong advocate of organic farming, Charles has also created what he calls a “Terra Carta,” a charter that lays out a roadmap for producing environmentally sustainable, healthy food, while ensuring the survival of small family farms. But in the U.K., as in Canada, many small family farms are barely scraping by, and those who grew up on such farms are increasingly fleeing the fields and barns

Government bureaucracy is the cholesterol clogging up the economy

July 11, 2023

Back in the early 1980s, when commercial computers first came onto the market, they were sold with a big promise: they could do the work of an entire floor of employees in a typical office building and could dramatically decrease the amount of paperwork and paper filing for businesses and organizations. But it never happened. If anything, the piles of paperwork, government forms and compliance reports that needed to be filled out increased enormously — and with it, so too did the size of our bureaucracy. As a result, today you see hundreds and hundreds more office buildings staffed with more people who devote a large chunk of each workday to regulation compliance requests. The facts bear this out: government

Give young Canadians – and Canada – a break. Teach them trades

August 1, 2023

When most Canadians think of quality products made with a high level of technical skill and engineering, they usually think of Europe. And for good reason: European countries such as Switzerland, Germany, France, Sweden and Italy are all exporters of world-class products. These products include BMW and Siemens from Germany, Ferrari and Ducati from Italy, Cartier and Michelin from France, Kuehne + Nagel and Schindler from Switzerland, and Electrolux and Husqvarna from Sweden. These brands — as well as other quality products from Europe — are synonymous around the world with state-of-the-art engineering, technical precision and know-how, and reliability. It’s why the European Union has one of the strongest and most productive economies in the world and why European living

Big business does best when workers get their share

October 10, 2023

I’ve been arguing in this column for a while now that large Canadian companies should have to share their annual profits with employees — and that it should be a cornerstone component of a new national economic charter of rights. Some businesspeople have said to me the last thing they want is the government telling them that they have to give up some of the company’s hard-earned profits. I can understand why they feel that way. When I was the CEO of Magna International, we introduced a profit sharing program with my managers, employees and investors that gave each stakeholder group a pre-determined percentage of our annual profits. After introducing the program, profits skyrocketed. My only regrets are that I