David Baines: The Most Hated Man in Business

Richard Littlemore

| July 1, 2005

David Baines is the most hated man by man of Vancouver's business community, and apparently the most feared, too, judging by the answers received when we contacted the investment community looking for a few insights into the ‘troublemaker’.

Rogues, scoundrels, ne’er-do-wells, lend me your ears! I come to bury David Baines, not to praise him... okay, admittedly, it’s premature. Although it stands as a disappointment to many Howe Street regulars, David Baines still walks the earth, using his position as the Vancouver Sun’s most prominent business writer to scourge old enemies and curry new ones. But this retrospective was still intended as a great ceremony – a virtual burial at which antagonists could read belligerent eulogies, piling vilification upon complaint, savaging Baines’s reputation from a safe distance.

Baines himself had lent a hand. First, he dug his own big hole, clawing about Vancouver’s financial district for two decades, flinging great clods of mud at every stock promoter, broker, regulator and, lately, lawyer or accountant who ever had passing involvement in an ‘unsuccessful’ stock play. Baines also agreed to stand still for the anticipatory post mortems, going so far as to provide a list of people he thought most likely to say nasty things behind his back. This, he understood, was to be their moment.

Unfortunately, the celebrants refused to show. Even with their nemesis in easy range, hardly a maligned soul had the courage to fling any dirt back – at least, not if there was any chance that Baines would recognize their fingerprints. The pattern was the same, time and again. I would call, identify myself as a reporter for BCBusiness, say that I was doing a profile on David Baines and ask for comment. Whoever answered the phone – receptionist, assistant or spouse – would utter a low, knowing chuckle and say, “Oh, yes! [insert antagonist here] has a lot to say about David Baines. I’ll tell him you called.”

But if the antagonist answered the call, it was only to stammer, “No, really, I have nothing to offer – not on the record.” Often, there would follow an emotional outburst. Baines, they would say, is a master manipulator of convenient fact, a vengeful slander artist. The most unsavoury of these characters would go on to recite scandalous and unsubstantiated rumours about Baines, most of which have already been debunked in a very colourful court case. But, inevitably, they would end by saying, “If I told you what I really think, it would only fuel his fire,” and, “I really don’t want to get back in his Rolodex.”

David Baines, it seems, finally has Howe Street cowed. Western Canada’s most loathed financial journalist is also its most lauded. In addition to being sued more times than any journalist I’ve ever met (18 suits and counting), David Baines has also won more National Newspaper Awards (three) than any Western Canadian writer since the poetic Bruce Hutchison graced the pages of the Sun. Whenever you bump into Baines at the Webster Awards or the B.C. Newspaper Awards or the Western Magazine Awards, he seems almost embarrassed to be, once again, on the list of nominees.

Like the Sun’s religion and ethics reporter Doug Todd, Baines is likely to explain that a shelf full of trophies helps maintain management’s support. He’s needed it. Although Baines’s critics now seem wary of attention, they have seldom hesitated to besiege Sun management with irate phone calls and angry letters – not to mention writs.

The great promoter Robert Friedland, chair of Ivanhoe Mines, penned one purple outburst in response to a Baines article in Canadian Business magazine that was so quotable, Friedland later repeated it in a letter of complaint to the Sun. “The article,” Friedland said, “was a fever-swamp of false, misleading and unfair headlines and text, which substituted outright errors, innuendo and half-truths for an accurate presentation of the facts.”

No one at the Sun ever thought of putting in a security system until two dozen placard-wielding protesters breached the newsroom in the early 1990s to denounce a Baines exposé on a pyramid scheme. No Vancouver reporter ever took seriously the periodic death threats (“I’ll kill you if you print that”) until the detectives from the Coordinated Law Enforcement Unit rolled up one day to tell Baines that someone was shopping a contract on his life.

Given this history of conflict, it’s no surprise that Baines is also party to the largest libel award in B.C. history. The surprise is that, on this occasion, Baines was the plaintiff. Of the 18 suits filed against him, only three have made it as far as examination-for-discovery – and none has made it to court. The single suit that Baines filed against a detractor yielded a judgment, in Baines’s favour, of $825,000 and an ultimate settlement of $350,000. Half of that went to legal bills but there was enough left over that Baines began, for the first time in his life, to invest in the stock market – mostly blue-chip TSE and NASDAQ stocks in a portfolio that is permanently available for review by Sun management. Baines also donated $60,000 towards a David Baines/Vancouver Sun scholarship in business journalism at UBC, potentially somenting a whole new generation of David Baineses.

Or perhaps not. On this, at least, everyone agrees: Baines is one of a kind. His dad was a banker – ultimately a very successful one. Born in Vancouver, 55 years ago, David enjoyed an itinerant childhood as his father was transferred – usually every two years – from one bank to another, and from one coast to the other. The young Baines may have learned how to stand alone, so stolidly, during formative years that included 12 different schools.

The family’s journey ended in a nice neighbourhood in Toronto, from which Baines departed to study English at Queen’s University in Kingston. On finishing his B.A., he moved to Winnipeg for two years of presumptuous “investigative journalism” at the rambunctious Winnipeg Tribune. Working closely with Gerald Haslam (who was later editor of the Trib and publisher at Pacific Press) Baines says now, “We came up with nothing revelatory.”

In 1974 Baines moved to the Sun, then at the height of its power. “They were the salad days,” Baines recalls. “There were more people than there were things to do.” (This, in clear contrast to the situation today. Thanks to the “synergies” arranged by CanWest Global, 40 per cent of the desks in the Sun’s current newsroom stand empty. You could organize a swordfight at noon and endanger no one.)

Still, Baines was unsatisfied. In 1976 he approached the crusty Jack Brooks, a Fleet Street refugee who was then the Sun’s city editor. Brooks was holding the phone to his ear, apparently taking direction from a chatty reader, and he covered the mouthpiece and said to Baines: “What do you want.” Baines: “I want to talk about my future.”
Brooks, still listening to his caller: “Go ahead.”

At which point Baines quit. He was accepted into two business schools. Queen’s complained about the mediocre math marks on Baines’s GMAT but said the standard of financial journalism in Canada was so appalling, they hoped it might be worth their while to teach a reporter something about business. Baines chose the University of Western Ontario instead and graduated in 1978 with an MBA.

Back at Pacific Press, he was rehired as a financial analyst. The company was in the midst of a huge capital investment in what was then cutting-edge information technology. Baines did a cost-benefit analysis on whether to lease or to buy and was, by his own admission, instrumental in committing PacPress to buying the worst piece of word-processing trash ever foisted upon a Canadian newspaper (a mistake repeated by the Toronto Star the same year).

The next year brought the longest strike in Pacific Press’s history (11 months) – the event ended PacPress’s unchallenged dominance of West Coast news. After crossing the picket line for four or five months, Baines quit once more, signing on as a commercial account manager at his father’s old haunt, the Bank of Montreal.

There followed some wild and useful years. Working at “an obscure branch at Carrall and Hastings,” Baines “spent the first couple of years shoveling money out the door and the last couple trying to collect it.” Interest rates ran to 20 per cent, the Vancouver housing market collapsed and, suddenly, it became critical to study what Baines calls the four C’s of lending: credit, character, capacity and collateral.