What’s the first thing you’ll do in retirement?
I don’t have anything lined up. I’ll take a little bit of time off, but I fully intend to keep working. I’m on the BCE board, I’m the chairman of Aeroplan, and I’ve been doing some private equity things over the years with a group of individuals—small-cap investments. Why did you step down now? I had a five-year understanding with the company that went to August of this year. One of the objectives was to make sure we had internal candidates. The last two CEOs had come from outside the company. So I started a succession process. Last November we appointed Marc Parent as executive vice-president and chief operating officer. I gave him all of the operating segments, while I kept finance and communications. The idea was I would mentor and coach him through this period. You reach a point when they’re ready, when you’ve got to hand it over and get out of the way. Besides, I had accomplished a lot of my objectives—from fixing the balance sheet to diversifying into training and the defence sec
