High Wire Act: Ted Rogers and the Empire That Debt Built.

James D. Cameron is an associate professor of history at St. Francis
Xavier University in Nova Scotia.

Ted Rogers, Canada’s late billionaire “telecom titan,” died in 2008, leaving behind a business empire called Rogers Communications Inc. with $14 billion in assets and 22,500 employees. The life of this hard-driving, relentless Canadian entrepreneur is recreated by the business journalist Caroline Van Hasselt, who aimed to create a fair and accurate portrayal of Rogers’s business conquests. Although it is unauthorized, Rogers himself generously cooperated. Additionally, Van Hasselt draws on nearly 200 interviews as well as articles and reports. The biography is composed of a prologue, 23 chapters, and an epilogue, which is followed by an interview with Rogers, a bibliography, and an index.

Van Hasselt appropriately organizes her material into four successive “acts”: “Radio,” “Cable,” “Wireless,” and “Riverboat Gambler.” Each tracks Rogers’s contributions to powerful waves in communications technology. The story begins with Rogers’s father and his pioneering work in radio. He died when Rogers was only five and his business legacy was lost to the family. Rogers’s mother instilled into her son a drive “to rebuild what had been lost”; as a young man, educated at Upper Canada College and the University of Toronto, he had a vision of a great family enterprise.

Van Hasselt’s Rogers, the founder of Canada’s biggest cable and wireless company, emerges as irrepressible, mercurial, controlling, centralizing, tough, and savvy. A recurring theme (see her title) was his astonishing risk tolerance. She observes, “No other business leader north of the 49th parallel has rolled the dice as often and won.” Rogers was also highly competitive and laboured to outsmart Bell Canada. His keys to business success were relentlessness, endurance, intelligence, highly competent lieutenants, and luck. Overall, Rogers emerges as a complex man who was domineering, demanding, and impatient, yet often humble, charming, and caring.

Van Hasselt’s biography makes an important contribution to Canada’s business history. She used a solid range of oral sources, effectively contextualized Rogers’s life, and traced key developments in our communications history. She presents a close-up, balanced, and fascinating inside story of a dynamic Canadian business leader. On the down side, more disciplined selection of material that was directly relevant would have resulted in a shorter and less intimidating biography. As well, thematic subtitles would have helped to organize chapter content. Overall, Van Hasselt has convincingly demonstrated that Rogers “has been a pervasive force in Canada for almost 50 years.”