The Bruce Scribes

The joke is as old as it is bad, but it’s also apt.

Set-up: How do you know you’re an entrepreneur?

Punchline: When the Government of Canada won’t let you claim EI.

Certainly, 25 years ago, on a late August morning dripping with hope and heat, I wasn’t thinking about this when I toddled out of Toronto in a U-Haul with sticks of furniture, my nose pointing due East towards a land of old dreams and, if I was fortunate, new chances.

To be clear, I was born in Hog Town, but I was raised in Halifax. And I had always claimed a form of dual citizenship with all the conflicting emotions that this implied: Ontario arrogance; Maritime pride (misplaced perhaps?); bluster and bravado; and just an insouciance of Nova Scotian humour and generosity.

Frankly, I suspect that this had been the cause of my restlessness since arriving in Toronto for a “good job” some five years earlier. What I know is that, in 1989, my bones ached to move down the road again, much to the consternation of my small, close circle of friends.

“You must be mad,” one exclaimed at hearing the news of my pending departure. “Why would you want to throw your career in the toilet to go hibernate in some East Coast outport?”

Others evinced similar displays of shock and dismay. After all, they insisted, the Maritimes was over, a victim of its dependence on federal transfer payments, a have-not region that absolutely will not pull itself up by the bootstraps and do what better regions do: Quit complaining and get to work.

They had a point. At 28, I was far too young to take such a risk (My God, my eldest son-in-law is now five years older than I was then!) But I didn’t have a choice. I had a notion, and that was to be my own boss.

Nowadays, my wife likes to observe slyly that I am utterly unemployable. Of course, she is correct.

Whatever devotion to a bi-weekly pay-pouch I once had – whatever willingness I had to blindly adhere to the prescriptions of a buffoonish boss (apart from me goodself, naturally) – was gone. And the bug that bit me those many years ago keeps biting, though the world threatens to tumble into economic disarray all over again.

Happily, I’m not alone on this, the last day of small business month in Canada.

The box scores on entrepreneurship have been in for some time.

According to Industry Canada, 98 per cent of businesses in this country employ fewer than 100 people. Between 2002 and 2008, roughly 100,000 small businesses emerged (and this doesn’t include the plentitude of “Mom and Pop” operations of the self-employed kind).

In 2011, small enterprises gainfully employed about five million individuals – roughly 48 per cent of the national labour force – and accounted for more than 30 per cent of Canada’s gross domestic product. In fact, between 2001 and 2010, little companies were responsible for creating a disproportionate number of jobs in the economy, given their commercial might: just over 43 per cent of the total.

As for people like me and my wife, the perpetually self-employed, we are the canaries in the national coal mine. The cohort to which we belong account for 15 per cent of all workers; we are far more vulnerable to the ups and downs in the economy than just about everybody else; and, of course, we don’t get EI (though we pay into it) when our adventures in entrepreneurship inevitable fade and die away.

But, again, that’s okay with me. Of all the bromides about enterprise to which I actually subscribe is the late, American management guru Peter Drucker’s: “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

I’m also fond of Mark Twain’s: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So, throw off the bowlines. Sail away from from the dafe harbour. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. . .Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great.”

And the joke will always be on them.

Over the past 40 years of a reasonably successful span in the world of work, I’ve held hundreds of jobs; but only six of them have been salaried or, perhaps more accurately, indentured. Throughout, I demanded my freedom.

The first found me as a “copy-boy” for The Canadian Press, working the weekend graveyard shift amid hard-smoking deskers who knew more about the affairs of mid-1970s porn stars than they did about their own jobs, let alone the terror of the 15-year-old boy they sent to the local pool hall for 2 am supplies of instant coffee.

The second saw me as a Pepsi-sponsored “junior sports reporter” for a Dartmouth AM radio station, where the best salary among on-air talent was $14,000 a year, and the best digs anyone there could afford was a bachelor-basement apartment, replete with hot plate, on the Halifax side of the harbour.

The third elevated me to “box-boy” for a major women’s apparel retailer at the Halifax Shopping Centre, where for $3.55 an hour I unpacked garments, organized hangers, swept floors, vacuumed carpets, and otherwise ducked the grandmotherly purpose of the elderly ladies who peddled the merchandise I placed in their parchment-white hands to pinch my cheeks whenever they were on break.

The fourth brought me to Toronto, where I laboured (mostly happily) to become the best “trencher” (i.e., novice reporter) the Globe and Mail had ever seen. As it happened, that didn’t.

Still, I managed to keep the job, despite the fact that I knew virtually nothing about the businesses and politicians I was assigned to cover. As my boss said at the time: “Bruce, justice demands that all of us have our buckets of shit to carry every once in a while. Just make sure you’re not one of mine.”

My fifth is hardly worth mentioning, if a nest of vipers is hardly worth remembering.

My sixth was for this newspaper as a writer and editor (for about ten minutes) in the first decade of the current century. Unlike my earlier experiences in the salary mills of this industry, it was an almost uniformly enjoyable experience. Lots of license. Plenty of authority. A multitude of talented writers from which to draw. And a not-bad salary to boot.

So why, after three months, was I itching to get out from under that efficacious boulder?

The only answer I’ve been able to credit with any degree of verisimilitude is that I had been ruined by the 90 per cent of my working life spent in various degrees of productive entrepreneurship.

To be clear, this has not meant that I have invented anything, or improved a manufacturing process in any way, or even inspired another to follow in my footsteps. It has just meant that, on balance, I have been happier working for myself than anyone else.

Why this is, is anyone in my own family’s guess. Some there say I am an unreconstructed narcissist. Some believe that I am a lazy ox, unwilling to hold down a “real job” and pull the plough till death do us part. Others simply don’t care. Oddly enough, neither do I.

The essence of entrepreneurship is freedom. Freedom to succeed. Freedom to fail. Freedom to begin again, over and over, just as you did when you were ten years old, and the world was a boat you floated in an icy May bay on the south shore of Nova Scotia, as you looked for a good wind to take you to the far shore – somewhere you had seen, coveted and had never visited, until, of course, you did.

Make no mistake, the darkness is coming. The good jobs have all gone. The salaried positions are winnowing. We, in this place, in this fine and decent plain on the planet, must rebuild the entrepreneurial culture that made this country possible.

We are the true heroes of our futures in this roundly, friendly, lovely, exquisitely elegant community that is New Brunswick.

Let us all be entrepreneurs. Let us all scratch that itch to be free.