Ted Rogers

Duncan McDowall is a professor of history at Carleton University, and
the author of Quick to the Frontier: Canada’s Royal Bank.

In 1900, the word “communications” meant little more than
telegraphs, telephones, and newspapers. We were still a localized
society. Nearly a century later, Canada is a “wired” society, linked
nationally and globally by a cobweb of electronic communications,
ranging from the Internet to cable television. One of the most
industrious spiders weaving this web has been Canadian Ted Rogers, a
Toronto lawyer who had the foresight in the mid-1960s to realize that
Canadians wanted clear television signals, and lots of them, pumped
directly into their living rooms. From cable TV, Rogers has become, as
Bruce McDougall puts it, “the Honest Ed of information” not just in
Canada, but also south of the border. Rogers delivers cable to 2.6
million subscribers. A firm believer in complementary diversification,
Rogers commands an empire that has spread into multimedia production in
television, radio, and hard print—notably The Toronto Sun and The
Financial Post—as well as long-distance telephone and wireless
services such as cellular phoning. Rogers is always front-page news in
the “Report on Business.” His debt-heavy acquisitions and bold
assaults on much larger players in his industry are breathtakingly
un-Canadian. Thirteen thousand people work for his $1.2-billion empire.

For all its pervasiveness, the electronic revolution is poorly
understood by most Canadians. Despite the fact that virtually every
citizen pays a monthly bill for access to some section of the
communications superhighway, the technology, entrepreneurship, and
competition behind these myriad services escape them. Business
journalist Bruce McDougall has opted to take a biographical approach,
casting an “irreverent eye upon the life of one of Canada’s most
fast-moving entrepreneurs.” Alas, he does so in a curious and at times
annoying fashion. He first inverts the usual structure of a biography.
We learn of Rogers’s beginnings only in the last chapter. The first
chapter, “The Present,” portrays Rogers as we know him now, but it
is only in the last chapter, “The Man,” that we learn about the
formative forces in his life—the premature death of his inventor
father at age 38, his legal studies, his lifestyle, etc. In between,
McDougall layers his analysis of the Rogers empire in chapters that
neatly divide his activities into the technologies behind them, the
competition confronting them, the regulation directing them, the
alliances abetting his ambitions and the financiers supporting his
acquisitions. This approach is sensible to a degree, but for a biography
it tends to compartmentalize and dehydrate the subject’s life.

Like a persistent fuzzy television signal, the most annoying aspect of
this biography is the sophomoric journalistic style of the author. There
is a relentless resort to flippancy, exaggerated comparison, and
childish wisecracks throughout the book. This laugh-a-minute style of
writing might have been fine in high school, but it pales in the
biography of a national figure. No wonder Rogers seems to have refused
McDougall’s requests for an interview.