Maclean’s is the largest circulation weekly news magazine in Canada, reporting on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, and current events.
On immigrant dreams, the importance of failure and why the future belongs to Canada
Peter Munk, the founder and chair of Barrick Gold, the world’s biggest gold miner, found a land of opportunity when he arrived in Canada as a teenager after he fled Nazi-occupied Hungary. But the 83-year-old businessman is convinced the country’s brightest days may still lie ahead. As the appetite for raw materials skyrockets in China, India and other developing countries, he argues that Canada has a rare, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to establish itself as the world’s next big financial sector, rivalling the dominance of London and New York.
Q: Let’s talk first about your earliest impressions of Canada as an immigrant boy.
A: That day I arrived, it was a miserable, rainy day in early March ’48. It was like, terra incognita, like going to Mars. I know it sounds moronic.
Q: No. It doesn’t.
A: I arrived in Toronto, and I tried to talk to my Uncle Nick in Hungarian, I tried to talk to him in German. The last time I saw him was in 1938 when Grandfather sent him to Canada as a General Motors agent. He was my father’s young brother. When I arrived, Uncle Nick was a part-owner of the Ajax manufactory. He said, “We don’t speak here Hungarian. This is Canada, we speak English.” I took it in school and I never practised except for the five days in England when Dad shoved me on that boat in Liverpool.
Q: Was the idea that you’d come and do a year of high school and then go to university?
A: It was Grade 13, and number one, I never in my life could conceive, never heard, never read, about mixed-sex schools. In Hungary and Switzerland there were girls’ school, and if a guy went near a girls’ school he was in danger to be dismissed, okay?