Viola and the TSE Bears

(SASKATCHEWAN) - Circa 50 years ago, when stock fraud was in its infancy, there dwelt in Toronto a comely mining promoteress named Viola MacMillan who, with her compliant husband in tow, promoted a stretch of moose pasture that bore the fanciful name of Windfall Oils and Mines, hard by Ontario's celebrated mining district.

Viola's medium was the vaunted Toronto Stock Exchange, then famed as Canada's speculative mart, dedicated to great expectations and a dearth of reality, and the focus of every hustler, dynamiter and shoeless innocent in northern North America.

Viola MacMillan was destined to be the instrument of the change that was to follow. Viola, that is, with the help of that ancient Canadian institution, The Royal Commission.

For an extended period, Viola had successfully enticed the bored brokers of Bay Street (alliteration purely accidental) to run up the stock of Windfall, of which she and her husband, naturally, were the owners of a hat full. This unChristian endeavor succeeded in arousing Windfall from its well-deserved slumber in the pennies' neighborhood, soaring (as the financial press johnnies are wont to describe recognized winners), upward to the dizzy altitude of $5.65 per share.

Windfall's peak performance coincided with the approach of a pivotal weekend when, it was announced far and wide, Windfall's crew would be pulling a lengthy core sample, the composition of which would render every supplicant on Bay Street as rich as Croesus.

Came the weekend, the core was indeed pulled, but it was carefully sequestered in the trunk of Viola's car awaiting the new week, when it would be assayed and the results made known to everyone holding their collective breath on the street of dreams.

The sequence that followed is important to any undergraduate student majoring in high finance, with a minor in criminal justice. (1) On Friday, Viola and her husband unloaded the aforementioned hat full of Windfall stock on the eager buyers on the TSE, nailing it at its historic high. (2) On Monday, the assayers evaluated Windfall's core sample and revealed a colorful cross section of the Canadian Shield, but nothing else. (Clever readers will by now have detected the origin of this newsletter's title, hence the star of the initial show. Translation: The Canadian Shield is the term used to describe Canada's Laurentian backbone, much older than both the Rockies and the Appalachians, and also the escutcheon, the very coat-of-arms and codpiece of our “fair domain.”)

Windfall stock on the belated announcement, went to zero while Viola and her husband went to Palm Springs.

What happened next might stir the heart of any Canadian since Louis Riel, or William Lyon McKenzie (hold the "King.").

(1) Someone in the House of Commons awoke long enough to suggest to the Minister of Finance that a Royal Commission was indicated, that fine old pseudo-British tradition designed to sweep pesky problems under the thick carpeting of the House, to lull the populace and influence the next election. The purpose of this investigative measure, it was announced, was to inquire into the circumstances surrounding the high-Beta trading in Windfall's shares, and to determine just what constituted the bottom line.

In fact, any messenger boy on Bay Street could have supplied the information that in the matter of Windfall Oil and Mines, there was no bottom line.

(2) The Ontario Securities Commission, at long last given the excuse it had waited for, transmogrified the Toronto Stock Exchange, anointing it with the status of Canada's senior investment -grade stock market, thereby determining that in Montreal, the MSE would implode into its traditional role (since Wolfe clobbered Montcalm) as always the bridesmaid, never the bride).

In the process, the OSC also banned and expelled a legion of scam artists who had long since answered the call of avarice from as far distant as Dallas, Spokane and Frisco.

These stock players, (to all appearances like the cast of "Guys and Dolls," complete with black shirts and yellow ties) resembled the former hookers and jazz musicians who were exiled by the Navy Department in 1917 from New Orleans' Storyville. With heavy hearts, they turned westward where the land was bright, and created what was to become the worldwide mecca of stock fraud known as the Vancouver Stock Exchange.

The findings of the Royal Commission were stored in some vault in Ottawa, never to be read again except by a few economics professors, anxious to hone their stock trading skills.

Viola MacMillan will (or should) be celebrated as one of the great promoters, such as Joe Hirschorn and Murray Pezim, in the annals of Canada's resource sector, who advanced that great industry by example - and default. There is some consolation in the fact that her surname is immortalized at least by half within the name and style of that famous forestry company in B.C., also dedicated to agile maneuvers in the purloining of Indian land, sustained, aided and abetted by the United Church of Canada's outreach.

The Royal Commission carries on today, ever ready to answer the call of justice, whenever that elusive grail is threatened, whenever men of good will may attempt to screw each other over. Not to mention women of good will who have ever since striven to emulate their patron saint and role model, Viola MacMillan.

Next week: Another essay on another exciting Canadian investigative body – The Truth and Reconciliation Commission - starring Stephen Harper, Mr. Justice Murray Sinclair and such academic heavyweights as Professor John Milloy, sometimes performing, like the immortal Jackie Gleason, (as in the hustler's game of 9-ball) under the name and style of Trent University Fats.