Podcast

Peter Handley:
27 years in public life, Jack. I knew you had 15 in politics and 12 before that was in hospital board. What turned you towards public service?

Jack Burrows:
I played ball. We used to have a good ball team I think we won the Ontario Championship in 1957. And a lot of the fellas have played on that team are still around, some have moved away. My business then came first. My dad became unable to continue. I took the business over; I think when I was about 29, full time. This was the grocery store. We had our food market; we sold livestock feeds at that time. We are also the distributors for flour in the city of North Bay. We had the distributorship for purity flower, and monarch cake mixes. And we would supply Dominion store in those days when they were still here, A&P, Loblaw’s, all those stores, National Grocers, Gamble Robinson, we were the distributors. We were bringing in straight carloads or truckloads of flour and cake mixes and distributed it to those companies. So that was part of our business. It was beyond the food part of it. So we did all those things. And that kept me pretty busy for a while. But as I got ahead a little bit and got the business rolling, I thought I'd like to be involved in the community as well. And you know you come back to that corny cliché, because you want to put something back into the city. But it's true, you do want to put something back in. So I served on a few small things. And I joined the Rotary Club in 1970, and I was President 1977. But at that time, John, I forgot his last name was the CEO of the Civic Hospital. He was in Rotary. And he said, "Would you consider sitting on the hospital board?" Because he said he wanted some people who had a little bit of a business background. So I thought, sure this may be something I'd really enjoy. So he said, "Fine. Send your name in." And I did and I was accepted. So I began sitting on the hospital board. And that was during the time when we had two runs at a new hospital. And we did have a deal with the provincial government; it was the Conservative Government of the day. And I have a letter from the Minister of Health of the day saying, "Here’s the financial arrangement, we'll do this." As a matter of fact, when the smoke cleared, North Bay had a real good deal. It wasn't going to cost us anything. I think the cost of the hospital in those days was around 56 million. The government was going to fund most of it and any share that the city had, we could take the operating savings. In other words we were taking the two hospitals putting them together as one, and had one operational savings, and we could take that and use that as our capital to pay for our share of the hospital. So, and mind you we hadn't we hadn't identified savings. That was one thing that had to be done. But the formula was there. It had to be savings; the city wouldn't have paid anything. So that was Mr. Grossman. We got the letter from him, and then it wasn't so long after that there was an election called. That government was turned out and the next government put this under review. And so we looked at that for a while we had a new Minister of Health come up and look at it we discussed it and so on. And then we could see that we were getting some slippage. The interest really wasn't there. The government changed again, and it was completely gone. It just fell right off the off the table. So I still have the letter from Mr. Grossman.

Peter Handley:
That must have been a great disappointment.

Jack Burrows:
Oh, it was. Yeah.

Peter Handley:
Were you chairing at that time?

Jack Burrows:
I'm not sure whether or not I was chair at that time or not. But you know, at that time, St. Joseph and the Civic worked very well together. And we had a lot of people, Howie Bondette was on our board, who worked very hard. On the other side, John Hobbs. And the CEO had Tony Vines on our side and sister Margaret Smith on the St. Joe side, really worked well together. And going back over that time, I think North Bay was the only city that I knew of that had a joint board. And they had one, one board that ran two hospitals. That came about through the auspices and good office of Sister Margaret Smith, because if you'll recall, in those days, there was a lot of discussion about the differences in philosophy between St. Joe's and the Civic now. The issue of abortion was very high. And through Sister Margaret Smith, she was the person that suggested that the St. Joe's organization motherhouse, back away from the hospital, turn their hospital over to a lay board. The city would follow suit, and did the same thing, the Civic became under a lay board. And that one lay board ran the two hospitals from that day on. And that was one of the reasons I think we were able to progress. And we also had a joint medical staff, which was good as well, some cities have a medical staff in one hospital and--

Peter Handley:
You were sort of ahead of the time.

Jack Burrows:
We were! Sure we were, and so North Bay really led the way. So those political problems or irritants which might have been were taken away early on, so that when the new hospital began to be discussed, we were able to work as one unit.

Peter Handley:
Politics, though, in 1988

Jack Burrows:
Yes. I've been on the Civic board for that length of time. I was on the W.H.Y/ Y Board for a while during a fundraising exercise that they did. I wasn't doing much after the civic board; friends of mine came and said, "Did you ever think of running for council?" And quite frankly, at that time I hadn't, I'd never even thought about it. But I got thinking about it, and began to watch a bit of council and see, to keep an eye on what was happening. And I thought that might be a very exciting thing to try. I was still in the business, of course and running that. But I had a good staff which meant that I could spend a little time doing things that outside the business. So I got some people together and said, "Well, would you would you give me a hand?" And sure they would. So I think that first campaign, I think I spent 1200 dollars on signs and advertising and so on. And I was elected. And it was quite an amazing thing for me. I couldn't understand how you could just go from nothing to head the polls. And so anyway, that was great. I enjoyed those three years, I was chair of General Government. I was the deputy mayor, and I enjoy it very much. And so friends of mine said, "Well, what you think about running for mayor?" And I said, "No, I don't think so." And I talked to some people in City Hall and some people who've been around for a while. And they said "no, I think you know you really need a couple of terms in Council before you really know. People don't realize it's not just in the building, but it's the relationships you have for other cities, the relationships you have with levels of government, those are all the different things that are part of being a mayor. And their suggestion was that I leave it for another term and maybe look at it after the second term, which I did. And I ran for mayor. And I was very fortunate in getting a lot of people. It was so a-political. It was such a cross section of political people. We had liberals, we had conservatives, and we had NDP, just a little bit of everything. And from the beginning, I didn't want to have a political flavor to my office. I knew that if I came to the office, and we had a liberal in as an MPP and we had of conservative as an MPP. You can't be in one camp or the other because you just shut half the city off. So that's the way it worked out. We had everybody worked on it and did well, and I was elected mayor. Then the second term, of course, I was acclaimed and third term we had Tom Graham and Brian Stevens ran against me and as I was reelected.

Peter Handley:
That's 15 years where you basically top the polls for five elections. Have you ever figured out why Jack Burrows has been so popular with the people of North Bay?

Jack Burrows:
I think, probably, because I lived there all my life. I was born in North Bay; I had a lot of friends. I was involved in a lot of things, sports and other organizations. A little bit through my church, you know, so I think everywhere you go you make connections and friends. And you get a fairly broad constituency. You're not just in one area where you might have friends in one sector of the city, and nothing else anywhere else. So I had a kind of a broad spectrum. And through the business people coming in to store all the time. I saw a lot of people there. And as I said, I've mixed up in sports and I enjoyed going to games. So I think that certainly helped, Peter.

Peter Handley:
What did you expect when you ran in 1988? What did you expect?

Jack Burrows:
You know, one of the funny things about looking back on that time in 1988 Morty Dater was the CEO. Morty has since has gone. Morty and I, I think a few days after I was inaugurated and became the mayor, officially. One of the first things he asked was "Where do you want the budget to be?" He said, "Do you want a zero budget?" He said "do you want to knock the budget down? Do you want to add to the budget? What are your plans?" I said, "Morty. First of all, I have to know what a zero budget means for the city. Does it mean cutting services? Does it mean doing things like that?" He said, "I think the way the finances are in the city right now," and this is back 15 years ago, “we can bring in a zero budget,” he said, and still maintain pretty well what we're doing. And of course, during the campaign that I worked on, I'd said to them, that I'm going to be fiscally responsible. And I want to make sure that the taxpayers don't have an increase in taxes.

Peter Handley:
Was this when you were running for mayor?

Jack Burrows:
This was for the first time, and I was elected Deputy Mayor and Chair General Government. So I was in charge of the budget. And so that was a conversation we had and it was it was so good one because he pointed out things where the city was, what obligations we had, what things that should be done that year, and still thought that with the revenues coming in at that time, we were okay, we could do a zero budget. So let's do the zero budgets. And so I think we were in a zero budget for what, five or six years. In retrospect, looking back, I don't think that was good. And I know the Morty's advice was he thought it was he was giving good advice. And at that time, I think everybody, every community, every city across the country was trying to come in with a flat budget. It was it was the thing that people were wanting. And we felt that we had to do that. A 1%, a 1 and 1/2 % over those years would have been much better, because at the end of that time, that period of time, five or six years, and inflation had gone on. Inflation was higher than it was now. And we found that all the things we were paying for was more expensive. And the things that we had to buy, the things like the wage agreements we had where there are units got away on us, and we had to come in start coming in and very significant increases. But we wouldn’t have had to do that if we had a little increase. So if I had hind vision, you look back at those days and say to yourself maybe a 1% increase would have put 6 or 7,000 dollars into our budget which we would have kept up with. Then you wouldn’t have had that dramatic catch-up that your faced with. But that was it and the Council, of course, I was wasn't the only person, everybody agreed that the zero increase was what we wanted to do and everybody bought in and of course people in town were very pleased with that.

Peter Handley:
When you became mayor, what did you expect to do as mayor?

Jack Burrows:
I think my most important part of being mayor was promoting the city from the standpoint of economic development. I think that the city was going along pretty decently. Stan was my predecessor and Stan had done a good job. I felt that there should be more emphasis put on economic development and I think at that time, we changed the makeup of the economic redevelopment commission. And City Hall was pointing through the striking committee members on the Economic Development Commission trying to find people who would come on who are business oriented, who had interests that could help. We got away from that and formed the Ecomonic Development Commission, and allowed them to go out into the community and find the people they wanted. In other words, if they wanted representation from the mining sector or the forestry sector or whatever, that's what they did. And that formula I think was a pretty good one. They've got a good group of people who are now representing, you know, the whole city. We funded it; It acted as an arms-length. I think we were putting $400 or $500,000 into it as a contribution from the city. But the group themselves ran their own affairs; they had their own staff that answered to them. And I think they did a good job. So they've had some good people, real good people from the community who are really good business people and contributed a lot to that. I think that formula was a good one. I think we've had some successes, because it was after that we were able to develop the call center industry, some of the things through Electronics and Telecommunications that we have today that replaced the loss of the base. If your recall, when we lost those 1200 people out of the base. So I think that that was a good move. But that was my wish that more business would come to the city and more jobs. And from that added revenue and the more people in your city, you could do more things.

Peter Handley:
Was being Mayor what you thought it would be?

Jack Burrows:
It certainly wasn't what I thought-- I didn't have any idea what it would be like being mayor. At the time, when I first was elected mayor, I was still in business. And I thought maybe drop in a few hours a day. And you couldn't do that. Not being the mayor of a city this size, you had to be there. But as more and more people, and more and more business came to town and more activity, I was finding myself more appointments, and I'd have five or six appointments during a day. Plus going out to things in the evening. And the things in the evening were important because sometimes you're invited to things, not big things, not huge gatherings of 200 or 300 people but small things, maybe small organizations, who really appreciate you coming. And we did that, we went to the smaller things when we could. You know you'd get there and you'd say it's great because these people really appreciate you taking time out of your schedule to come in and be part of their evening or, and I think that's part of the job.

Peter Handley:
The Harris government got elected after you'd been Mayor for about a year, which resulted in all sorts of turmoil and downloading and so on so forth. What was your relationship with Mike Harris before he became premier?

Jack Burrows:
I didn't know Mike that well. I knew Mike very, very casually. He ran here for the school board. That was his first entry into politics. He ran for the nomination here and he got it. I recall reading things in the paper and then Mike was going to be into provincial politics. But you know there wasn't much connection at that time, certainly not between the school board and the console. And we really didn't do much together. I guess we knew each other because we were there. But we never had any sort of business relationship or doing things on an ongoing basis.

Peter Handley:
Did the relationship change while he became Premier?

Jack Burrows:
I think once he became the member for Nipissing, of course then we would set up meetings. He would come over to the city hall on special occasions and sometimes we would have an opportunity to sit down and talk about things. During the times that he was in the opposition that was a little more frequent. When he became Premier, his time was pretty well spent in Toronto, and he got home on weekends. But the times were a little less at that time. We could talk to each other on the telephone, but we didn't spend as much.

Peter Handley:
Was it Cordial


Always cordial. Yeah, Mike and I get along fine together. He I think his preoccupation would be in Premier of Ontario took away some of the obviously the concentration, he had on Nipissing. But always wanted to know how things were going and how things were doing in Nipissing.

Peter Handley:
Your first term as Mayor, It was actually in many cases, it was horrendous. You had the downloading; we got a new CIO, basically getting a new system. And then along came the rail land. Why did you want to buy the rail land?

Jack Burrows:
North Bay has always been a kind of a city that's associated with Lake Nipissing. North Bay is on the shores of beautiful Lake Nipissing. We'd go down to the lake and many nights we'd fish out there with kids, we'd go out in the boat and we'd go on the boat, and of course the Chief, and all the things that everything. The draw the anchor of the city was Lake Nipissing. And when the waterfront was done, and Don King was heavily involved in that and a lot of other people and we were able to get the ballast out of the rock out of the hole and build the waterfront and do all the slips and so on. That was just I think the first sign to me that say, “hey, this could be marvelous down here, if this thing was really finished off and moved up into the city.” And of course, every time you look towards the city from the waterfront you see yard engines, and shunting, and making up trains, and a lot of going back and forth. But the thing had changed a lot in the old days when the CPR was a huge employer in the city, right? I think it was something like 12/1500 men come here to the Roundhouse. That was a big thing for North Bay that was our main, you know, economics engine. But that changed when the diesels come through. And of course, all of a sudden North Bay became less important. It wasn't a stop through any more. The diesels went right through from coast to coast. They didn't stop in North Bay, they didn't have the yards here, and they didn't have a lot of the work to do. So the employment dropped, I think down to about 100 and some in the yard. So then you say to yourself, well, is that the type of thing that you should dedicate a yard like that to only that few. And I'm not saying that wasn't a lot of jobs. It was important. But you've got 30 acres of land there supporting 100 jobs. So one day we drove down to the rail lands. We went and we saw these box cars. And what they were doing they were they were filling up boxcars full of wood products, sending them Over the North Bay, putting them in our yard and it's sitting there like an inventory fact for months. So cars would sit there and again, you'd say to yourself, why would you use that precious land those could be sitting out in the siding anywhere? So more and more you're thinking about this thing and how important it was that those lands be changed and taken over by the city and developed. So finally, the day came when I wanted to get really on to this. So I said we're going to go to Calgary and see people in CPR. They had moved from Montreal to Calgary to their head office and office. So we went out to Calgary and they have what they call a bulpitt out there in their office, it's where they sit around, they talk about all these things, and they put us in this bullpit and they had about four or five CPR vice presidents. Some pretty big wheels out there. At that meeting, I didn't really think we were getting anywhere. And these guys said, "Look, this is a working yard. It's an important area too, as we build up our trains here. It's North Bay, and it is one of our important points. Why would be even consider selling this property? We own it, we’re paying for it." Anyway, we at least we broke the ice that day. And then some people come up from Toronto from their real estate office, talked to some of our staff, and the dialogue began talking back and forth. So finally, we got to the point where we thought, well, let's see what they'll do. So we said to them, get out of the rail ends altogether, move completely and run through the city and the CNR track. And then that would free that whole area up for us, we'd be able to do something. So anyway, they didn't say no. But they went away and come back after a while. And somebody said, well, we have the stuff back from CPR and this proposal. Do you want to see I said, “Sure.” They wanted $60 million to move out and run through the CNR line. They said they had to rebuild the trestle on the west end of the city, the old wooden trestle. All that line through the city had to be rebalanced. It was just wouldn't handle the trains and they were afraid of the political fallout with big trains running through the heart of the city again. So there are all sorts of reasons. So we looked at the $60 million price tag for us that was the end of that. We knew that they just didn't want to do it. So we said well, alright, what will you do? So then they come back to us with the new line, which we're looking at today. So that was that was where that came from and how we started looking at that particular piece of land that could be used.