This Friday, May 4, 2012, Conrad Moffat Black, Lord Black of Crossharbour, is being released from the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex.

Coleman, Florida, is in the middle of the state. It’s south of Wildwood and east of Lake Panassoffkee. In other words, in the middle of nowhere.

When he’s released, Black will head for Toronto. Immigration Canada has determined that the likelihood of him reoffending is low, he is not violent and his family is here. So, like thousands of other ex-cons that meet these criteria, he has been given a “Temporary Resident Visa.”  Seems reasonable, NDP opposition leader Mulcair’s posturing and bluster notwithstanding.

Though born in Canada and having lived most of his life here, he infamously gave up his citizenship in 2001, in order to accept a British peerage. It should be noted that he did not give it up without a fight. The well-established animus between Liberal Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and Conservative Mr. Black culminated in an Ontario Court of Appeal decision (Conrad Black v. Jean Chrétien et al, docket # C33887) that found in favour of Mr. Chrétien.

In fact, Black had intended to become a dual Canadian and British citizen at the time and Chrétien could have elected to stay out of the issue altogether. Nevertheless, the Canadian Prime Minister, no fan of Black and his National Post, reached deep into the musty vault and came up with the Nickle Resolution of 1919, a non-binding request to King George not to give British honours to residents of Canada. For the record, Black was then a resident of the UK.

In any case, Black’s renunciation of his Canadian citizenship to facilitate membership in the planet’s pre-eminent old-boys club, the British House of Lords, generated much resentment here at home. As such, there was no sympathy when, a few years later, his legal trouble began. With his release from incarceration imminent, the vitriol directed at Black and the prospect of his return is palpable.

The rebranding of Conrad Black began with the release last year of his jailhouse opus, A Matter of Principle, all 709 pages of it. To be fair, the last 41 of them are appendices. (!)

It’s an extraordinary book. Black’s “Reflections on the American Justice System,” the tome’s postlude, is alone worth the price of admission. To whit:

“The American criminal justice system is based on the plea bargain, which is hideously abused, and it could not possibly be otherwise. Prosecutors single someone out and threaten all sorts of acquaintances or colleagues of the target with prosecution if they do not ‘cooperate,’ which in practice means producing inculpatory evidence against the target, with negligible concern for its veracity, and an immunity against prosecution for suborned or extorted perjury.” Whew!

Black makes a compelling case for prosecution run amok as central to his own legal travails. He convincingly paints himself as an innocent man wronged, stoic, head held high throughout 42 months of incarceration. Indeed, all but two of his eight convictions were overturned on appeal. Black, whatever his flaws, is made of strong stuff.

It must be said, his book is a gymkhana of vocabulary excess. His command of the lexicon is beyond formidable, and he’s quite prepared to go out of his way to let us know this. Nevertheless, hubris and bombast are no reason to keep Mr. Black out of the country. Furthermore, I submit it’s a more interesting place with him in it.

If A Matter of Principle was phase one, phase two will be personal appearances on carefully chosen venues to tell his story. Check John Tory’s radio program on CFRB and, of course, The National Post.

As for phase three, a unanimous judgment by the Supreme Court of Canada on April 18th allows Black to bring a libel lawsuit against other former Hollinger International directors in Ontario, even though the alleged offence occurred in the US. Is Black’s nemesis, Richard Breeden, looking over his shoulder yet?

This is the rebranding of Conrad Black. It’ll be a great show.

Aside from painful hours on the Don Valley Parkway, commuting from Don Mills to Bay Street, there’s very little driving I wouldn’t prefer to do myself.

I’m barely tolerant of automatic transmissions and now cars are parallel parking themselves. Ford in particular is pushing this technology down market, making it optional on its humble Focus.

I’m no technological Luddite, quite the opposite. I love my GPS, for example, though with all that guidance and just doing what I’m told, I rarely remember the route taken. Regardless, I prefer a degree of active participation and engagement with my driving.

With limited parking space available, especially in our big cities, being able to get your car into a tight spot is an important skill. Now you just press a button, sit back and let the car do the work.

Evidently parallel parking is a challenge for some drivers, perhaps many. Still, not being able to control a vehicle with sufficient skill to back it into a parking spot end-to-end between two cars causes me some consternation. What does this say about the driver’s ability to control the vehicle in heavy traffic or bad weather? I’m out there with them, in a car or on a motorcycle, and I would prefer to share the road with technically competent drivers.

The same technology – laser range finders, radar, microprocessors and servo-motors – that will parallel park your Focus, can be enhanced with more complex technology and collision avoidance algorithms that will ultimately do all your driving. Might be the logical next step for the parallel parking-challenged.

Don’t assume this is the stuff of 1950s Popular Science  and flying cars. Compare this video from 2007 of an autonomous VW Passat undergoing trials at Stanford with this video of a newer Passat driving itself around in German traffic, in 2010. The progress is staggering. We’re still a ways from Will Smith’s self-piloting Audi from the 2004 film version of Isaac Asimov’s I Robot – what horrible thing to do to a series of great books – but it’s later than you think.

On the other hand, for someone who simply cannot drive, a car with a mind of its own will be a godsend. A vision-impaired person, for example, would be the perfect customer. In fact, the folks behind Google’s self-driving Prius thought so, too.

In any event, marketers are already having a field day telling you what you no longer have to do for yourself behind the wheel. What a downer.

PGePROPEL is small enough that all of us worked directly with Deanna at one time or another, on one project or another.

Last summer, before she took a leave of absence, I wrote copy for several of her projects. Never mind the corporate constructs that are titles and hierarchies, it was clear from the get-go that she was the boss, a taskmaster. That was as it should be.

The clients for whom she managed projects appreciated her diligence and attention to detail as much as we did. There were several in attendance at her service yesterday.

The Deanna we knew and worked with marched to her own drummer. In fact, he was probably a tabla player she knew from some unpronounceable province in a country half-way around the world. She often regaled us with stories and achingly beautiful photographs of her adventures, most recently to eastern India, to the Himalayas.

The Deanna we knew was quirky. She was opinionated. The Deanna we knew was tough and sometimes a pain in the butt, always for the right reasons. She was funny and charming and she was fearless.

She lived and passed away on her own terms.

Her friend and colleague, Lorraine Fung, called her a force of nature. Indeed she was.

We miss her. We’re better for having known her and worked with her.

After making much of its Passat ad for last year’s gridiron extravaganza (Darth Volkswagen – August 2011), my expectations were high. In a noteworthy use of online media, the spot was teased on YouTube. Entitled The Bark Side, the teaser features dogs barking out the Star Wars march. Cute, though somewhat aimless and annoying; as a teaser it gets a passing grade. It’s YouTube, after all – a pet performance paradise.

Then there was the actual Super Bowl spot, interestingly also previewed on YouTube a few days ahead of game day.

A dog (in a fat suit) is inspired by VW’s redesigned Beetle to get in shape and then race it down the road. Love the dog; love the much improved Beetle – so far, so good. Then there’s an inexplicable transition wherein we realize the dog-and-Beetle saga is a commercial playing on a screen in the famous Cantina bar on Tatooine. Pint-size Darth Vader shows up in what looks like a desperate effort to tie this spot to last year’s.

The two parts of this thing are stapled together without a scintilla of relationship. It’s, well, a dog’s breakfast.

But as a commercial (within a commercial within the commercial that is the Super Bowl), does it work? Part one does: The viewer can’t help but smile and that positive emotion is, ultimately, associated with a new Volkswagen product – so, mission accomplished. Part two, however, is a head-scratcher.

It’s as if no new ideas for using the Stars Wars milieu were worthy of a production budget; they’d already shot some stuff and thought they’d just tack it onto the end of a completely different idea.

Or, the production budget was in fact the issue…

Here are the links:

TORONTO, ON (February 1, 2012) ̶ Marketing agency PGePROPEL has launched a unique online marketing tool specifically for financial institutions.

Initially optimized to help financial institutions communicate with high-value clients, the marketing system facilitates customized email campaigns from client advisors. It creates several types of campaigns including e-newsletters, webinars and in-person events and includes comprehensive reporting via an online dashboard.

The application guides the client representative through a best-practices workflow, thereby ensuring adherence to company business processes and legal requirements. It also facilitates performance reporting for senior management.

“We have two installations in service today with a major Canadian bank, one in English and one in Spanish for their South and Central American operations,” said PGePROPEL president, Andrew Gage. “A French language version is also available.”

Permission-based email marketing has become an integral part of client communications for virtually all major corporations, including generally conservative financial institutions.

PGePROPEL is a boutique agency specializing in innovative marketing solutions. Their offices are in Markham, ON.

For more information contact: Brad Taylor 905.940.0200 ext 136