The Belinda Stronach Defense
Betraying her party? She was sticking to her principles. The rumoured tryst with Bill Clinton? They’re truly just friends. The fixation on designer clothes? The media are far more obsessed with her wardrobe than she is By Sylvia Fraser
Image credit: Jesse Chehak
I first met 39-year-old belinda stronach last august in Montreal. She was taller and thinner than I expected—five foot nine plus heels—dressed in a shiny beige leather jacket and flared white pants. The heart-shaped face looked different than in photos, with prominent bones dispelling that flat, china-doll mask that has become a media staple. The smile was wide and perfect, the brown eyes large with some dark shadows. She wore little makeup, and her honey blond hair was shoved artlessly behind her ears, as though she were a student on a break from studying—an apt comparison since she was spending the week in French immersion.
Stronach is deft at deflecting personal questions, especially those reflecting her family’s wealth, estimated at $625 million. Though she takes pride in her appearance, she insists, “I don’t regard my clothes nearly as seriously as the people who report on them.” She drives a Ford Escape hybrid, and since she resigned as CEO of the family corporation, Magna International, in January 2004, she no longer has dibs on the company jet. “I made a conscious decision to distance myself from Magna, so everyone would know I’m serious. When I first started campaigning, people kept asking if I ever flew commercial. What a bizarre question! Of course I do.”
Stronach confesses to missing her $9-million paycheque (with bonuses and stock options) but has been donating her $213,000 minister’s pay to provide scholarships for students. She has also been selling off her Magna holdings to avoid conflict-of-interest issues, for an estimated profit of $20 million.
About her family’s fabled 400-year-old Austrian castle: “It’s an old building all right, and I think it burned down once. It’s no baroque palace—there are bigger homes in York Mills!” Dennis Mills, former Liberal MP and now a Magna vice-chair, would later confirm, “One journalist called it a castle and that stuck, but in fact it used to be a monastery.”
Stronach considers her childhood to have been privileged but ordinary. She and her brother, Andrew, two years younger, grew up on a horse farm and attended public schools. What kind of kid was she? “A delightful kid! No—just joking. I was shy.” Is it true that her mother had to bribe her with Barbie dolls to get her to go to school? Stronach’s low-key humour is beginning to show. “Can we define that? It was kindergarten. Not Grade 9! I was terrified, hanging on to my mother. I was just a farm kid.”
When pressed for any piece of hard luck that might have shaped her formative years, Stronach laughs ruefully. “My two turtles died when I was in Austria one summer with my grandparents. I think my father forgot to feed them.”
What wealth buys for Stronach is independence. Though it took grit and gall to cross the Commons, she knew she wouldn’t be job hunting the next day. It also provides challenge. If her immigrant father—the son of an Austrian factory worker—could parlay a Grade 8 education and a tool-and-die apprenticeship into a $23-billion auto parts and racetrack empire, what should she be able to do with all her privilege? Wealth also buys access. When I asked Stronach for a list of people who knew her well, she named two former Ontario premiers and two former Liberal MPs (all of whom had been Magna board members), along with two ex-husbands. Globally, she probably operates at one degree of separation, thanks to her friendship with Bill Clinton. She’s a member of the dean’s council at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Four days before John Kennedy Jr.’s fatal plane crash, he was sitting on Stronach’s patio, urging her to invest in his political magazine, George. In 2002, as CEO of Magna International, she was ranked number two in Fortune magazine’s list of the world’s most powerful businesswomen outside of the U.S. In April 2004, Time magazine named her one of the world’s 100 most influential people. “They knocked me off when I went into politics,” she exclaims.
Wealth is the wind in Stronach’s sails, but it doesn’t steer her boat. Though many Canadians wanted to “unite the right,” she was the one who made the cold call in 2003. “Hello, Stephen. It’s Belinda Stronach. Would you agree to a process allowing negotiations between you and Peter MacKay to begin?”
As she says, “I’m a doer.”
On January 20, 2004, the ottawa press corps converged on the Royal Canadian Legion Hall in Aurora, fuelled more by skepticism than by any sense of gravitas. After helping to graft the rump of the Conservative party, led by MacKay, onto Harper’s Canadian Alliance party, neophyte Stronach was now about to challenge Harper for leadership of this strange beast. Wearing designer clothes and stilettos, embracing her height as easily as her wealth, the pretty heiress teleprompted her way through a speech about sharing “a bigger economic pie.” As reporters looked into the hopeful face, bracketed by perfect blond parentheses, many saw a tall, hothouse poppy in need of trimming: Who does she think she is?
One of Stronach’s friends, journalist Arlene Bynon, was in that audience. “I was half thrilled and half terrified for Belinda,” she says. “I’d always felt there was a sweetness and vulnerability to her that people with money don’t always have. Did she know what she was in for?”
A week later, Entwistle joined Stronach’s campaign (dubbed Blond Ambition by the media) at Mulroney’s urging. “The media interest in her was phenomenal, with autograph hunters chasing after her in airports. She had created this monster, and it was overwhelming.” He himself was cautious. He wanted to check out the bimbo factor. “We spent the next 55 days Velcroed together, and publicly and privately she was always consistent. She wanted to serve her country, to give back some of her privilege. She thinks there’s an unappreciated threat to Canada’s standard of living and that we must mobilize to meet global competition. She would tell reporters this day in and day out, and they would shake their heads and ask, ‘OK, now why are you really running?’” Stronach’s too-good-to-be-true platitudes, delivered with more caution than passion, turned her into a blank screen onto which pundits projected their theories: she was her father’s puppet, assuaging his wounded pride over his earlier defeat as a Liberal MP; she was a dilettante looking for another gold trinket to rattle on her charm bracelet. Belinda Stronach could have any lifestyle she wanted—socialite, fundraiser, international do-gooder. Why would she choose the glare of politics, with its often vicious down-and-dirty?
If Stronach had moments of self-doubt, she kept them well hidden. As Bynon, who sometimes accompanied her, later exclaimed, “Oh my God, watching Belinda debate with the other leadership candidates in Montreal, when she could barely speak French, was like seeing your friend go into the boxing ring with Mike Tyson.” Afterward, Stronach—battered but still standing—said only, “I did my best, and I’m going to do better next time.”
She won 34 per cent of the Tory vote against Harper’s 56 per cent and former Ontario cabinet minister Tony Clement’s nine per cent. She also turned a dull contest into a dramatic one. “Leadership rivalries are some of the bitterest in politics,” says Entwistle. “I think Belinda tried to make a go of it with Harper, but he broke the cardinal rule of Politics 101, which is to keep your rivals inside the tent. She was made patently unwelcome, and as for being a voice for Ontario, she might as well have been standing on Baffin Island.”
The head office of Magna International Inc., built in aurora in 1990, rises like a mountain ridge over 70 acres of lawns manicured to golf-green perfection. The long laneway to the guardhouse is bowling-alley straight. Beyond circular gardens, with hedges scrupulously boxed and trimmed in the style of Versailles, is the imposing main building, of natural stone, thrusting upward in a central peak, with long embracing arms. Its spacious marble lobby contains one anomaly: carved granite tablets like those Moses might have brought down from Mount Sinai. One is the Magna Corporation Constitution, specifying in percentage points how profits are to be shared between investors, management, employees and the community; the other is the Magna Employees’ Charter, listing benefits and urging anyone with complaints to use a hotline.
Through the glass elevator, ascending the inner atrium, you see a sizable man-made lake, distant rolling lawns with block-long horse stables and the Stronach family residences, also of stone. Nothing in this landscape is left to chance or nature. Each perfectly shaped tree, whether willow or blue spruce, occupies its own space, giving the impression that God and Frank Stronach are equal partners here.
Stronach is deft at deflecting personal questions, especially those reflecting her family’s wealth, estimated at $625 million. Though she takes pride in her appearance, she insists, “I don’t regard my clothes nearly as seriously as the people who report on them.” She drives a Ford Escape hybrid, and since she resigned as CEO of the family corporation, Magna International, in January 2004, she no longer has dibs on the company jet. “I made a conscious decision to distance myself from Magna, so everyone would know I’m serious. When I first started campaigning, people kept asking if I ever flew commercial. What a bizarre question! Of course I do.”
Stronach confesses to missing her $9-million paycheque (with bonuses and stock options) but has been donating her $213,000 minister’s pay to provide scholarships for students. She has also been selling off her Magna holdings to avoid conflict-of-interest issues, for an estimated profit of $20 million.
About her family’s fabled 400-year-old Austrian castle: “It’s an old building all right, and I think it burned down once. It’s no baroque palace—there are bigger homes in York Mills!” Dennis Mills, former Liberal MP and now a Magna vice-chair, would later confirm, “One journalist called it a castle and that stuck, but in fact it used to be a monastery.”
Stronach considers her childhood to have been privileged but ordinary. She and her brother, Andrew, two years younger, grew up on a horse farm and attended public schools. What kind of kid was she? “A delightful kid! No—just joking. I was shy.” Is it true that her mother had to bribe her with Barbie dolls to get her to go to school? Stronach’s low-key humour is beginning to show. “Can we define that? It was kindergarten. Not Grade 9! I was terrified, hanging on to my mother. I was just a farm kid.”
When pressed for any piece of hard luck that might have shaped her formative years, Stronach laughs ruefully. “My two turtles died when I was in Austria one summer with my grandparents. I think my father forgot to feed them.”
What wealth buys for Stronach is independence. Though it took grit and gall to cross the Commons, she knew she wouldn’t be job hunting the next day. It also provides challenge. If her immigrant father—the son of an Austrian factory worker—could parlay a Grade 8 education and a tool-and-die apprenticeship into a $23-billion auto parts and racetrack empire, what should she be able to do with all her privilege? Wealth also buys access. When I asked Stronach for a list of people who knew her well, she named two former Ontario premiers and two former Liberal MPs (all of whom had been Magna board members), along with two ex-husbands. Globally, she probably operates at one degree of separation, thanks to her friendship with Bill Clinton. She’s a member of the dean’s council at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Four days before John Kennedy Jr.’s fatal plane crash, he was sitting on Stronach’s patio, urging her to invest in his political magazine, George. In 2002, as CEO of Magna International, she was ranked number two in Fortune magazine’s list of the world’s most powerful businesswomen outside of the U.S. In April 2004, Time magazine named her one of the world’s 100 most influential people. “They knocked me off when I went into politics,” she exclaims.
Wealth is the wind in Stronach’s sails, but it doesn’t steer her boat. Though many Canadians wanted to “unite the right,” she was the one who made the cold call in 2003. “Hello, Stephen. It’s Belinda Stronach. Would you agree to a process allowing negotiations between you and Peter MacKay to begin?”
As she says, “I’m a doer.”
On January 20, 2004, the ottawa press corps converged on the Royal Canadian Legion Hall in Aurora, fuelled more by skepticism than by any sense of gravitas. After helping to graft the rump of the Conservative party, led by MacKay, onto Harper’s Canadian Alliance party, neophyte Stronach was now about to challenge Harper for leadership of this strange beast. Wearing designer clothes and stilettos, embracing her height as easily as her wealth, the pretty heiress teleprompted her way through a speech about sharing “a bigger economic pie.” As reporters looked into the hopeful face, bracketed by perfect blond parentheses, many saw a tall, hothouse poppy in need of trimming: Who does she think she is?
One of Stronach’s friends, journalist Arlene Bynon, was in that audience. “I was half thrilled and half terrified for Belinda,” she says. “I’d always felt there was a sweetness and vulnerability to her that people with money don’t always have. Did she know what she was in for?”
A week later, Entwistle joined Stronach’s campaign (dubbed Blond Ambition by the media) at Mulroney’s urging. “The media interest in her was phenomenal, with autograph hunters chasing after her in airports. She had created this monster, and it was overwhelming.” He himself was cautious. He wanted to check out the bimbo factor. “We spent the next 55 days Velcroed together, and publicly and privately she was always consistent. She wanted to serve her country, to give back some of her privilege. She thinks there’s an unappreciated threat to Canada’s standard of living and that we must mobilize to meet global competition. She would tell reporters this day in and day out, and they would shake their heads and ask, ‘OK, now why are you really running?’” Stronach’s too-good-to-be-true platitudes, delivered with more caution than passion, turned her into a blank screen onto which pundits projected their theories: she was her father’s puppet, assuaging his wounded pride over his earlier defeat as a Liberal MP; she was a dilettante looking for another gold trinket to rattle on her charm bracelet. Belinda Stronach could have any lifestyle she wanted—socialite, fundraiser, international do-gooder. Why would she choose the glare of politics, with its often vicious down-and-dirty?
If Stronach had moments of self-doubt, she kept them well hidden. As Bynon, who sometimes accompanied her, later exclaimed, “Oh my God, watching Belinda debate with the other leadership candidates in Montreal, when she could barely speak French, was like seeing your friend go into the boxing ring with Mike Tyson.” Afterward, Stronach—battered but still standing—said only, “I did my best, and I’m going to do better next time.”
She won 34 per cent of the Tory vote against Harper’s 56 per cent and former Ontario cabinet minister Tony Clement’s nine per cent. She also turned a dull contest into a dramatic one. “Leadership rivalries are some of the bitterest in politics,” says Entwistle. “I think Belinda tried to make a go of it with Harper, but he broke the cardinal rule of Politics 101, which is to keep your rivals inside the tent. She was made patently unwelcome, and as for being a voice for Ontario, she might as well have been standing on Baffin Island.”
The head office of Magna International Inc., built in aurora in 1990, rises like a mountain ridge over 70 acres of lawns manicured to golf-green perfection. The long laneway to the guardhouse is bowling-alley straight. Beyond circular gardens, with hedges scrupulously boxed and trimmed in the style of Versailles, is the imposing main building, of natural stone, thrusting upward in a central peak, with long embracing arms. Its spacious marble lobby contains one anomaly: carved granite tablets like those Moses might have brought down from Mount Sinai. One is the Magna Corporation Constitution, specifying in percentage points how profits are to be shared between investors, management, employees and the community; the other is the Magna Employees’ Charter, listing benefits and urging anyone with complaints to use a hotline.
Through the glass elevator, ascending the inner atrium, you see a sizable man-made lake, distant rolling lawns with block-long horse stables and the Stronach family residences, also of stone. Nothing in this landscape is left to chance or nature. Each perfectly shaped tree, whether willow or blue spruce, occupies its own space, giving the impression that God and Frank Stronach are equal partners here.
Originally published February 2006
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