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Northern Tigers: Building Ethical Canadian Corporate Champions University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2017-09 Northern Tigers: Building Ethical Canadian Corporate Champions Haskayne, Dick; Grescoe, Paul University of Calgary Press http://hdl.handle.net/1880/52226 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca NORTHERN TIGERS: Building Ethical DICK HASKAYNE WITH PAUL GRESCOE Canadian Corporate Champions With additional contributions from DEBORAH YEDLIN Dick Haskayne with Paul Grescoe With additional contributions from Deborah Yedlin ISBN 978-0-88953-406-3 BUILDING NORTHERN ETHICAL CANADIAN CORPORATE THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. Please support CHAMPIONS TIGERS this open access publication by requesting that your university A Memoir and a Manifesto purchase a print copy of this book, or by purchasing a copy REVISED & UPDATED yourself. Cover Art: The artwork on the cover of this book is not open access and falls under traditional copyright provisions; it cannot be reproduced in any way without written permission of the artists and their agents. The cover can be displayed as a complete cover image for the purposes of publicizing this work, but the artwork cannot be extracted from the context of the cover of this specific work without breaching the artist’s copyright. COPYRIGHT NOTICE: This open-access work is published under a Creative Commons licence. This means that you are free to copy, distribute, display or perform the work as long as you clearly attribute the work to its authors and publisher, that you do not use this work for any commercial gain in any form, and that you in no way alter, transform, or build on the work outside of its use in normal academic scholarship without our express permission. If you want to reuse or distribute the work, you must inform its new audience of the licence terms of this work. For more information, see details of the Creative Commons licence at: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ UNDER THE CREATIVE UNDER THE CREATIVE COMMONS LICENCE YOU COMMONS LICENCE YOU MAY NOT: MAY: • gain financially from the work in any way; • read and store this • sell the work or seek monies in relation to the distribution document free of charge; of the work; • distribute it for personal • use the work in any commercial activity of any kind; use free of charge; • profit a third party indirectly via use or distribution of • print sections of the work the work; for personal use; • distribute in or through a commercial body (with • read or perform parts of the exception of academic usage within educational the work in a context where institutions such as schools and universities); no financial transactions • reproduce, distribute, or store the cover image outside take place. of its function as a cover of this work; • alter or build on the work outside of normal academic scholarship. Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org CHAPTER FOUR TAKING IT ON THE CHIN Home Oil and Hiram Walker Resources AFTER IT HAD BEEN ANNOUNCED that I was leaving Hudson’s Bay for Home Oil, Dave Powell—HBOG’s well-informed explo- ration guy—followed me back to my office to say, “Haskayne, Home is drilling these goddamn wells in Guyana, and the best thing you can do is phone them right now and tell them to stop drilling there.” “I can’t do that, Dave. Christ, I’m not going to be there for a month.” “Well, I’m telling you, Haskayne, you want to get out of Guy- ana as fast as you can because you certainly will never make any money, and not only that, Home is holding the bag there right now.” And that was how I found myself in 1982 on the sultry north- east coast of South America in the office of Forbes Burnham, the hardline socialist prime minister who’d become the autocratic executive president of Guyana. The former British Guiana, which had received its independence two decades earlier, was a bit of an impoverished hellhole and, despite supposedly free elections, no model of democracy. During his twenty-one years in power over what he called a cooperative republic, Burnham had formed al- liances with communist nations and his agents were alleged to have been involved in the deaths of a Jesuit priest-journalist and an opposition leader. The country, as usual, was in a state of politi- cal upheaval. 66 Despite this, Home Oil had a majority interest in oil-drilling operations in Guyana, based on the prospect of a big discovery that never did pan out. Getting our drill rigs there had involved a complex mobilization of resources from all over Home’s world. The company shipped equipment from Edmonton, and our Hous- ton office flew in pipe and cement on big Hercules turboprop transports. Part of the rigs themselves were seconded from Saudi Arabia, and then our logistics people had to figure out how to float them up the Amazon and into the jungle site. The Brazilian gov- ernment charged us about $400,000 in duty alone, just for passing through their country. As time went by, our two partners in the deal—Noreen Energy and Ranger Oil of Calgary—pulled out, so Home had to assume 100 percent of what looked like two ridicu- lously expensive dry holes on the edge of nowhere. “It wasn’t the end of the world,” Ken McNeill used to say, with his wonderfully over-the-top turn of phrase, “but you could cer- tainly see it from there. Some of the administration people Home sent down there were guys they didn’t want around in Calgary. So there they are with an unlimited spending budget down in the poorest country in the world, living like drunken sailors with a big expense account.” Meanwhile, there had been all sorts of false rumours that we’d found a lot of oil, which would bail the nation out of its misery, but had decided not to produce the wells because of low world prices. In 1982, I had to “discount and deny” a Guyanese govern- ment report that said the field 320 kilometres south of the capital, Georgetown, contained two billion barrels. In fact, we found only a touch of light, sweet crude in one of the wells. What Dave Powell had realized early on was that well drilled just across the river in Brazil had hit a salt formation that killed the chance of finding much oil on our side. As he explains it now, “The thing wasn’t explored properly, and even though I personally wouldn’t have gone in there in the first place, if they’d used a rig from Brazil [instead of importing the equipment], they could have drilled those two wells at a fraction of the cost. But the money they were spending then just frightened the hell out of everybody.” 4 | TAKING IT ON THE CHIN 67 And now I was in Burnham’s office in Georgetown to explain why we were cutting our losses. Not surprisingly, the windows had bulletproof glass. The quick-witted president of African de- scent, who led a nation made up of African, Amerindian, East Indian, Chinese, and Portuguese, was a lawyer and a graduate of the University of London. He was using all of his legalistic and political powers of persuasion to convince me to reverse my decision. “Oh, you Canadians are very good people,” he said in his deceptively folksy manner, “I will phone my friend Pierre and get you some assistance.” Pierre Elliott Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister whose government enacted the National Energy Program that kneecapped our Oil Patch. Trudeau had stepped down as PM the year before. “I am not looking for assistance,” I assured Burnham. Our conversation was running into its own dry hole. The only hope Home had of saving the project, I knew, was to attempt a joint venture with the national oil company in neighbouring Brazil. I’d get back to Burnham if we had any success. Home had a large office in Georgetown and a leased Twin Otter aircraft to ferry our people to the rig near the Brazilian border, where we had to build our own airstrip. But I flew there in our little cigar tin of a Lear 35 jet, crossing the vast rainforest— which, from the air, looked like clusters of broccoli—and landing at the big, bustling port of Manaus, the capital of Amazonia State, right on the Amazon River. But the officials of Brazil’s Petrobras oil giant were just not that interested in assuming any of our obli- gations in Guyana. There was no other option but to shut down the whole damn thing. Our unsuccessful South American adven- ture would cost us upwards of $30 million. Being a successful CEO means knowing exactly when to fold as well as when to raise the ante. Here, it wasn’t in the cards to keep playing. About three years later, in June 1985, Forbes Burnham went into hospital in Georgetown for what was supposed to be a rou- tine procedure to treat a throat infection. Only Cuban doctors 68 NORTHERN TIGERS were allowed in the operating room. And there he died on the table—some say murdered, in revenge for the assassination of a Cuba-backed Guyanese political figure that Burnham’s govern- ment had supposedly arranged.
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