What do you think?
Rate this book
Northern Tigers : Building Ethical Canadian Corporate Champions (Canadian Hardcover) by Richard Haskayne
- GenresBusiness
320 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
1 person is currently reading
14 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 10, 2026
I enjoyed this book a lot more then I would of thought. A must read for anyone in the O&G industry as it provides a good history of Canadian oil companies through mergers and acquisitions.
“Canada’s energy sector is responsible for about 20 percent of the county’s gross domestic product, 660,000 jobs across the country, with the industry paying an average $15 billion per year through taxes and royalties to local, provincial, and federal government between 2013 and 2016.”
“The $81 billion invested by the energy sector is 2014 fell to $31 billion in 2016, accompanied by a drop in business confidence across the country.”
“The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) has an ever more impressive pedigree, being older by two
centuries than Canada itself. Founded as the Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay in 1670, it once owned a third of what would become the Dominion of Canada. It is still the oldest such enterprise in the English-speaking world.”
“Perhaps, I thought, it should have stayed in the petroleum game where I once worked for a company partly owned by HBC: the late, laminated Hudson’s Bay Oil and Gas. HBOG, as people in the Oil Patch called it, survived for fifty0five years before it was swallowed by a more aggressive and much-overvalued competitor, Dome Petroleum.”
“I had at HBOG the best leaders are those who try to blend personal humility with professional will and who are ambitious for the company rather than simply for themselves.”
“Then in October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) declared an embargo on oil shipments to nations that had supported Israel in its recent conflict with Egypt.”
HBOG was a team operation with little politicking, he remembers: There was a community feeling, and we were very proud of our assets and what we’d accomplished.”
“In 1976, when HBOG celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, we settled onto our own forty-two-story tower on Seventh Avenue. The company was the largest non-integrated oil company in Canada (meaning we had no marketing, transportation, or refining operations) and the ninth-largest oil company in sales, with net earnings of $78.7 million.”
“The black Dome Tower, rising beside the HBOG building in downtown Calgary, was a testament to the two men who had created Canada’s highest-profile energy company. With assets of $6.5 billion in western Canada, the Arctic Islands, and the Beaufort Sea – sixty million acres in the Beaufort Sea – it was exploring on land holdings surpassed in size only by HBOG’s.”
“Fortunately, on their own hook, our directors had long since decided to protect the top seven management people as well as the company itself. They’d worried that, given all the machinations of a possible Done deal, all of us high-profile guys would bail out of HBOG early. Their solution was to create one of the first Canadian golden parachutes – those contracts given to senior executives in the even they lose their jobs when their company faces a hostile takeover. Generally, the contracts offer sizable severance pay, stock options, and a bonus.”
“PanCanadian Petroleum born of an amalgamation between Canadian Pacific Oil and Gas and Central Del-Rio Oils, which had its roots in a wildcat operation just after Leduc came in.”
“Harley Hotchkiss, something of a legend in town. Harley – a farm boy from southwestern Ontario with an honours degree in geology from Michigan State University (where he played college hockey) – worked in Calgary for CIBC in the first petroleum department of any Canadian bank and that’s where I got to know him. Harley later worked with the Seaman brothers, Doc and BJ, before launching his own company, Sabre Petroleum Ltd., and selling it for $24 million in 1976. But most Calgarians knew him as one of the founding partners, with the Seaman’s and three others, in the NHL’s Calgary Flames.”
“It isn’t so much that dying is tragic, for death comes to us all, but dying without meaning.”
“Richard Kinder left Enron in 1996 after he didn’t get the top job, bought the company’s liquids pipeline, and co-founded Kinder Morgan Inc., which became an $11.3 billion success.”
“TransAlta’s roots go back to 1911 and Calgary Power, Alberta’s first large-scale electric energy company, which harnessed hydro power generated on the Bow River. Its base was in Montreal, and its founding president was the Canadian business tycoon Max Aitken. In 1947, the year of the Leduc gusher, Calgary Power finally relocated its head office to the city it was named after. By then, it was supplying 99 percent of the province’s power and soon turned to thermal generating plants fueled by coal and natural gas.”
“The simple lesson: Unless you occupy a very special niche in your industry, you’d better grow big enough to be predator-proof.”
“In 2005, EnCana Corp, surpassed the Royal Bank as the leading company of the benchmark Canadian stock exchange. Not long after, its president and chief executive officer, Gwyn Morgan, was named Canadian Outstanding CEO of the Year.”
“North America’s largest independent gas producer was born only three years earlier in a brilliant cloak-and-dagger merger of PanCanadian Energy and the Alberta Energy Company (AEC).”
“The opportune time came in February 2001, when CP announced its intention to spin off its five remaining pieces: PanCanadian, Fording, CP Ships, and Fairmont Hotels & Resorts (which had seventy-seven deluxe properties in North America, Mexico, Bermuda, and Barbados).”
“How about EnCana, he asked one evening, as in Energy Canada – with the Final A representing Alberta.”
“On a snowing Sunday morning three days later, with the blessing of both boards and with big Canadian flags flanking them, the principles announced the birth of EnCana Corporation. Overnight, it became the world’s leading independent oil and gas company in terms of its estimated reserves, production, and enterprise value – what the market believed its ongoing operations were worth – of more than $27 billion.”
“An independent evaluator has to determine there’s at least a 90 percent probability that reserves will be recovered to declare them proved.”
“Ontario’s Security Commission defined such trust as: An income trust is an entity that holds an underlying asset or group of assets. Most of the income these assets generate is distributed to unitholders. In contrast, publicly listed companies usually retain and re-invest their earnings to their shareholders as dividends. An income trust structure is formed when, instead of offering its securities directly to the public, an operating entity creates a trust. The trust offers units to the public and uses the proceeds to purchase the common shares and high-yield debt of the operating entity. The combination of the trust’s equity and debt holdings allows the income to flow through to unitholders essentially tax-free.. The trust structure avoids the double taxation that comes from combining corporate income tax with shareholders dividend tax. In other words, the corporate entity in the trust doesn’t pay taxes on its income – the investors do. As a result, the value of the company’s shares is inflated, and it is therefor much less attractive as a takeover target.”
“What few people know about Ron Mathison is that he was a key silent partner in one of the most extraordinary success stories on the Oil Patch: Canadian Natural Resources, our second largest gas producer. Ron was among a small group of investors who in 1988, saw the possibilities in a bankrupt oil and mining company, operating one in Alberta with nine employees and a measly market capitalization of about $1 million. Among Canadian Natural’s major financiers were Murry Edwards, a Regina Chartered accountant’s son and commerce grad who wound up doing deals at Peter’s & Co.”
“Hank Swartout founded Precision in 1951 and turned it into our biggest contract driller and oil-fields services provider, earning $424 million in profits during 2004. But a year later, he decided to convert it into an income trust that would trade at a higher-value multiple than a conventional company. Precision has substantial holdings in the U.S. And now they would be a big drag on the proposed financial vehicle because, under domestic regulations, the income they produced couldn’t easily be absorbed into a tax-free trust.”
“Letting my capitalistic tendencies kick in once more, I must argue that most things run far more efficiently under free enterprise. Two of our biggest transpiration companies, which went private, make my case. CN, as a government-backed railroad, was poorly run and bleeding cash, and today, it’s an aggressive competitor throughout the continent, with a share price that jumped by 1,000 percent in the past decade. Air Canada, for most of its history, was a ward of the government that Ottawa had to keep bailing out, and now it seems on its way to becoming one of the most successful airlines in the world, co-existing more peaceably with the upstart WestJet.”
“If we pay higher taxes here than our competitors in Houston, then they are going to have equity advantage. They are going to be more highly valued, he points out.”
“The best definition of the word CULTURE that I have heard is that it is how people behave when nobody is watching.”
“For example, the issue of staggered boards, in which a portion of the directors have different lengths of terms. Sometimes these are referred to as classified boards, in which directors serve
various terms according to their classification.”
“All of the waste that is ever been generated at Bruce – ever – is floating in a swimming pool that is not as big as an Olympic pool. Hal says, It is submerged under the water, and I have stood right beside that water on-site at Bruce. It is not harmful to anyone. The water absorbs all the radiation that this weak fuel puts out, and you could take all of that spent fuel, drill one deep hole into the Ontario Canadian Shield, and put it all down there. Hal has some surprising allies in making his case for nuclear power.”
“In September 2016, Potash agreed to a friendly deal with Calgary-based Agrium, a fertilizer producer with retail operations. The deal, which created a new company, to be called Nutrien, with an enterprise value of $36 billion, means that merged company will operate in 20 countries around the world, with 20,000 employees, generating $20 billion in revenues. It also makes it the third largest publicly traded agriculture company in the world.”
“Suncor acquired Canadian Oil Sands for $6.9 billion in January 2016, a company whose primary asset was a 37 percent interest in the Syncrude mining project. Acquiring Canadian Oil Sands boosted Suncor’s ownership of that asset from 12 percent to 49 percent. The price paid, said Williams, was between 20 and 25 percent of the original cost of building the operation. From there, four months later, the company moved to buy Murphy Oil’s five percent interest in Syncrude from $932 million, giving Suncor an ownership stake of 53.74 percent in the Syncrude operations capable of producing 350,000 bbls/d.”
“When oil prices collapsed in 2014, the comment being made in Calgary was that bottom of the downturn would be signaled when Murray Edwards and Canadian Natural Resources began buying assets. That happened in March 2017, when Canadian Natural Resources announced it was acquiring for $12.74 billion that oil sands assets of Royal Dutch Shell, which was still in the process of selling assets to pay for its hefty acquisition of BG Group in early 2016 for $49 billion. As part of that deal, Royal Dutch committed to selling $30 billion in assets between 2016-2018 – and the oil sands piece was clearly part of that plan, not to mention another step towards Shell’s goal of becoming a natural gas company.”
“For CNQ the deal meant it was buying assets at a 40 percent discount from what it would cost to build a new mining operation. But it had been modestly bulking up prior to the Shell acquisition. In February 2014, just before oil prices started their downward slide, the company paid $3.2 billion from Devon Energy’s assets, including the oil sands reserves and production, as the Oklahoma-based company moved to downscale its exposer to Canada.”
“Statoil sold to Athabasca Oil Sands, Shell, as previously mentioned to CNQ, and ConocoPhillips sold its joint venture interest in Foster Creek and Christina Lake to its 50 percent partner, Cenovus, in March 2017. Eighty percent of oil sands production is now controlled by companies headquartered in Canada.”
“The Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance came together in 2012, with 13 oil sands companies signing a charter and committing to working together to decrease the impact of oil sands development, including water use and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. COSIA has been held up as a model of collaboration by other industry groups and governments around the world and has been seen more than $1 billion in technologies amongst the members since inception.”
“Canada’s energy sector is responsible for about 20 percent of the county’s gross domestic product, 660,000 jobs across the country, with the industry paying an average $15 billion per year through taxes and royalties to local, provincial, and federal government between 2013 and 2016.”
“The $81 billion invested by the energy sector is 2014 fell to $31 billion in 2016, accompanied by a drop in business confidence across the country.”
“The Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) has an ever more impressive pedigree, being older by two
centuries than Canada itself. Founded as the Company of Adventurers of England trading into Hudson Bay in 1670, it once owned a third of what would become the Dominion of Canada. It is still the oldest such enterprise in the English-speaking world.”
“Perhaps, I thought, it should have stayed in the petroleum game where I once worked for a company partly owned by HBC: the late, laminated Hudson’s Bay Oil and Gas. HBOG, as people in the Oil Patch called it, survived for fifty0five years before it was swallowed by a more aggressive and much-overvalued competitor, Dome Petroleum.”
“I had at HBOG the best leaders are those who try to blend personal humility with professional will and who are ambitious for the company rather than simply for themselves.”
“Then in October 1973, the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) declared an embargo on oil shipments to nations that had supported Israel in its recent conflict with Egypt.”
HBOG was a team operation with little politicking, he remembers: There was a community feeling, and we were very proud of our assets and what we’d accomplished.”
“In 1976, when HBOG celebrated its fiftieth anniversary, we settled onto our own forty-two-story tower on Seventh Avenue. The company was the largest non-integrated oil company in Canada (meaning we had no marketing, transportation, or refining operations) and the ninth-largest oil company in sales, with net earnings of $78.7 million.”
“The black Dome Tower, rising beside the HBOG building in downtown Calgary, was a testament to the two men who had created Canada’s highest-profile energy company. With assets of $6.5 billion in western Canada, the Arctic Islands, and the Beaufort Sea – sixty million acres in the Beaufort Sea – it was exploring on land holdings surpassed in size only by HBOG’s.”
“Fortunately, on their own hook, our directors had long since decided to protect the top seven management people as well as the company itself. They’d worried that, given all the machinations of a possible Done deal, all of us high-profile guys would bail out of HBOG early. Their solution was to create one of the first Canadian golden parachutes – those contracts given to senior executives in the even they lose their jobs when their company faces a hostile takeover. Generally, the contracts offer sizable severance pay, stock options, and a bonus.”
“PanCanadian Petroleum born of an amalgamation between Canadian Pacific Oil and Gas and Central Del-Rio Oils, which had its roots in a wildcat operation just after Leduc came in.”
“Harley Hotchkiss, something of a legend in town. Harley – a farm boy from southwestern Ontario with an honours degree in geology from Michigan State University (where he played college hockey) – worked in Calgary for CIBC in the first petroleum department of any Canadian bank and that’s where I got to know him. Harley later worked with the Seaman brothers, Doc and BJ, before launching his own company, Sabre Petroleum Ltd., and selling it for $24 million in 1976. But most Calgarians knew him as one of the founding partners, with the Seaman’s and three others, in the NHL’s Calgary Flames.”
“It isn’t so much that dying is tragic, for death comes to us all, but dying without meaning.”
“Richard Kinder left Enron in 1996 after he didn’t get the top job, bought the company’s liquids pipeline, and co-founded Kinder Morgan Inc., which became an $11.3 billion success.”
“TransAlta’s roots go back to 1911 and Calgary Power, Alberta’s first large-scale electric energy company, which harnessed hydro power generated on the Bow River. Its base was in Montreal, and its founding president was the Canadian business tycoon Max Aitken. In 1947, the year of the Leduc gusher, Calgary Power finally relocated its head office to the city it was named after. By then, it was supplying 99 percent of the province’s power and soon turned to thermal generating plants fueled by coal and natural gas.”
“The simple lesson: Unless you occupy a very special niche in your industry, you’d better grow big enough to be predator-proof.”
“In 2005, EnCana Corp, surpassed the Royal Bank as the leading company of the benchmark Canadian stock exchange. Not long after, its president and chief executive officer, Gwyn Morgan, was named Canadian Outstanding CEO of the Year.”
“North America’s largest independent gas producer was born only three years earlier in a brilliant cloak-and-dagger merger of PanCanadian Energy and the Alberta Energy Company (AEC).”
“The opportune time came in February 2001, when CP announced its intention to spin off its five remaining pieces: PanCanadian, Fording, CP Ships, and Fairmont Hotels & Resorts (which had seventy-seven deluxe properties in North America, Mexico, Bermuda, and Barbados).”
“How about EnCana, he asked one evening, as in Energy Canada – with the Final A representing Alberta.”
“On a snowing Sunday morning three days later, with the blessing of both boards and with big Canadian flags flanking them, the principles announced the birth of EnCana Corporation. Overnight, it became the world’s leading independent oil and gas company in terms of its estimated reserves, production, and enterprise value – what the market believed its ongoing operations were worth – of more than $27 billion.”
“An independent evaluator has to determine there’s at least a 90 percent probability that reserves will be recovered to declare them proved.”
“Ontario’s Security Commission defined such trust as: An income trust is an entity that holds an underlying asset or group of assets. Most of the income these assets generate is distributed to unitholders. In contrast, publicly listed companies usually retain and re-invest their earnings to their shareholders as dividends. An income trust structure is formed when, instead of offering its securities directly to the public, an operating entity creates a trust. The trust offers units to the public and uses the proceeds to purchase the common shares and high-yield debt of the operating entity. The combination of the trust’s equity and debt holdings allows the income to flow through to unitholders essentially tax-free.. The trust structure avoids the double taxation that comes from combining corporate income tax with shareholders dividend tax. In other words, the corporate entity in the trust doesn’t pay taxes on its income – the investors do. As a result, the value of the company’s shares is inflated, and it is therefor much less attractive as a takeover target.”
“What few people know about Ron Mathison is that he was a key silent partner in one of the most extraordinary success stories on the Oil Patch: Canadian Natural Resources, our second largest gas producer. Ron was among a small group of investors who in 1988, saw the possibilities in a bankrupt oil and mining company, operating one in Alberta with nine employees and a measly market capitalization of about $1 million. Among Canadian Natural’s major financiers were Murry Edwards, a Regina Chartered accountant’s son and commerce grad who wound up doing deals at Peter’s & Co.”
“Hank Swartout founded Precision in 1951 and turned it into our biggest contract driller and oil-fields services provider, earning $424 million in profits during 2004. But a year later, he decided to convert it into an income trust that would trade at a higher-value multiple than a conventional company. Precision has substantial holdings in the U.S. And now they would be a big drag on the proposed financial vehicle because, under domestic regulations, the income they produced couldn’t easily be absorbed into a tax-free trust.”
“Letting my capitalistic tendencies kick in once more, I must argue that most things run far more efficiently under free enterprise. Two of our biggest transpiration companies, which went private, make my case. CN, as a government-backed railroad, was poorly run and bleeding cash, and today, it’s an aggressive competitor throughout the continent, with a share price that jumped by 1,000 percent in the past decade. Air Canada, for most of its history, was a ward of the government that Ottawa had to keep bailing out, and now it seems on its way to becoming one of the most successful airlines in the world, co-existing more peaceably with the upstart WestJet.”
“If we pay higher taxes here than our competitors in Houston, then they are going to have equity advantage. They are going to be more highly valued, he points out.”
“The best definition of the word CULTURE that I have heard is that it is how people behave when nobody is watching.”
“For example, the issue of staggered boards, in which a portion of the directors have different lengths of terms. Sometimes these are referred to as classified boards, in which directors serve
various terms according to their classification.”
“All of the waste that is ever been generated at Bruce – ever – is floating in a swimming pool that is not as big as an Olympic pool. Hal says, It is submerged under the water, and I have stood right beside that water on-site at Bruce. It is not harmful to anyone. The water absorbs all the radiation that this weak fuel puts out, and you could take all of that spent fuel, drill one deep hole into the Ontario Canadian Shield, and put it all down there. Hal has some surprising allies in making his case for nuclear power.”
“In September 2016, Potash agreed to a friendly deal with Calgary-based Agrium, a fertilizer producer with retail operations. The deal, which created a new company, to be called Nutrien, with an enterprise value of $36 billion, means that merged company will operate in 20 countries around the world, with 20,000 employees, generating $20 billion in revenues. It also makes it the third largest publicly traded agriculture company in the world.”
“Suncor acquired Canadian Oil Sands for $6.9 billion in January 2016, a company whose primary asset was a 37 percent interest in the Syncrude mining project. Acquiring Canadian Oil Sands boosted Suncor’s ownership of that asset from 12 percent to 49 percent. The price paid, said Williams, was between 20 and 25 percent of the original cost of building the operation. From there, four months later, the company moved to buy Murphy Oil’s five percent interest in Syncrude from $932 million, giving Suncor an ownership stake of 53.74 percent in the Syncrude operations capable of producing 350,000 bbls/d.”
“When oil prices collapsed in 2014, the comment being made in Calgary was that bottom of the downturn would be signaled when Murray Edwards and Canadian Natural Resources began buying assets. That happened in March 2017, when Canadian Natural Resources announced it was acquiring for $12.74 billion that oil sands assets of Royal Dutch Shell, which was still in the process of selling assets to pay for its hefty acquisition of BG Group in early 2016 for $49 billion. As part of that deal, Royal Dutch committed to selling $30 billion in assets between 2016-2018 – and the oil sands piece was clearly part of that plan, not to mention another step towards Shell’s goal of becoming a natural gas company.”
“For CNQ the deal meant it was buying assets at a 40 percent discount from what it would cost to build a new mining operation. But it had been modestly bulking up prior to the Shell acquisition. In February 2014, just before oil prices started their downward slide, the company paid $3.2 billion from Devon Energy’s assets, including the oil sands reserves and production, as the Oklahoma-based company moved to downscale its exposer to Canada.”
“Statoil sold to Athabasca Oil Sands, Shell, as previously mentioned to CNQ, and ConocoPhillips sold its joint venture interest in Foster Creek and Christina Lake to its 50 percent partner, Cenovus, in March 2017. Eighty percent of oil sands production is now controlled by companies headquartered in Canada.”
“The Canadian Oil Sands Innovation Alliance came together in 2012, with 13 oil sands companies signing a charter and committing to working together to decrease the impact of oil sands development, including water use and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. COSIA has been held up as a model of collaboration by other industry groups and governments around the world and has been seen more than $1 billion in technologies amongst the members since inception.”
January 9, 2023
A lot of intricate details on the boards that Dick Haskayne (whom the business school at the university of Calgary is named after). One thing that resounded was the ethnic homogeneity in the Calgary board rooms over the years - hopefully this changes in future generations to include more diversity.
March 27, 2009
I grew up in the oil fields of Alberta, so reading Richard Haskayne's book was a peak into the board rooms of what was going on while I was growing up.
I was disappointed that there was not more insight into the issue of building an ethical firm, it was more of an historical perspective.
I was disappointed that there was not more insight into the issue of building an ethical firm, it was more of an historical perspective.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews