Black accused grocery workers of theft

Ontarians have been given a timely reminder why they dislike Conrad Black, after the complex, difficult-to-understand court hearings that found he defrauded investors of non-competition payments and obstruction of justice sent him to jail for six-and-a-half years in the United States and left many heads spinning.

The reminder was in the form of an announcement by the Quebec-based grocery chain Metro Inc. It will rename the remaining Dominion stores and other stores it has bought, including the former A and P and Ultra stores, so all will be known as Metro stores.

The new owner said this will help market the chain better by having a consistent store name and selling the same products throughout all the stores through the same flyers, and provide huge savings.

Marketing experts added the Dominion name had been a “great brand,” but was no longer as relevant.

Dominion Stores, founded in 1919, was commonly considered Ontario’s leading grocery chain before Black bought it. People felt when they shopped there, they might have to pay a bit more, but were getting top quality and service.

Black sold some of its stores, fired many employees and petulantly charged those who protested were stealing millions of dollars worth of its inventory a year anyway, which further hurt the stores’ image and turned off some potential shoppers.

Black had no evidence to support this, and the Liberal labour minister, Bill Wrye, pointed this out and demanded he apologize for besmirching all Dominion workers.

A spokesman for Black eventually and grudgingly conceded that, while some employees abused their positions, the majority carried out their duties honestly and responsibly.

Black had an even nastier encounter with the New Democrat leader, later premier, Bob Rae, after he took money from a pension fund holding it for Dominion’s employees.

Rae called Black “a symbol of bloated capitalism at its worst” and Black, who never was outdone in extravagant language, countered Rae was a coward, liar and “symbol of swinish, socialist demagoguery” and, if Rae wanted to sue him, he would come over and pick up the writ.

Rae won this one, because after a protracted court battle, Black’s company agreed to return $44 million to the pension fund to settle the dispute.

Few have got in bitter confrontations with all three parties in the legislature, but Black even managed to get in a shouting match with the Progressive Conservative government of premier William Davis. Business entrepreneurs usually get along better with the Tories.

Davis’s attorney general, Roy McMurtry, later respected as a non-partisan Ontario chief justice, recommended charges of breaches of securities law be laid against Black after a firm he controlled tried to take over a company in the U.S., but the sometimes independent Ontario Securities Commission refused.

McMurtry continued to maintain there were grounds for prosecution and Black accused him of “scrambling around like an asphyxiated cockroach” trying to find grounds to prosecute him.

Black was never wrong, of course, as he insisted he was not at fault even after the court sent him to prison.

Ontario politicians who had battles with him and the store employees on whom he unleashed his tirades have been restrained in their celebrations of the court’s disposition of him – none has commented in the legislature – but they must be thinking I told you so.

Eric Dowd is a veteran member of the Queen's Park press gallery.