There are ghosts on the old trading floor of the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX), an entity up for sale that hasn’t had any true homeland since 1983.
Gone are the woolly days of brokers in Brooks Brothers jackets yelling, “Buy!” or “Hold!” and all the other big business extremities that made Gordon Gekko decree: “Greed is good.”
Today, there is no stadium to house Toronto’s “Wall Street,” and yet to stroll down Bay Street is to see a corporate heartbeat that’s still very much alive. The Toronto Stock Exchange may be eaten up by London, and, as of print time, that deal seemed to hang very much in the balance, but a jaunt through the recently redesigned Canoe restaurant during the lunch hour is to see the wheels of commerce still rolling along.
“Business here has always been fast and furious. The only time there was a lull was during the G20,” says John Horne, Canoe’s chef de cuisine, a 32-year-old from Midland, who says he enjoys looking out from his open kitchen at the Maple Leafs’ Brian Burke spinning deals.
These days, with the Leafs on the market just like the Toronto Stock Exchange, you wonder if places like Canoe, Far Niente or Bymark down the street are still doing numbers like they were in the days before the dollar hit par.
“The market is nothing more than a reflection of human behaviour,” says David Ekmekjian, a portfolio manager for BMO Nesbitt Burns, who has spent the past 54 years working on Bay Street. Ekmekjian is tall, pink and graceful and relates the classic immigrant story of arriving in Canada with nothing but the clothes on his back and $20. And he is a familiar lunchtime face at Canoe.
He finds value in seeing and being seen at the city’s downtown restaurants, places where it pays to eat very quietly and eavesdrop on your neighbouring diners for investment advice.
“Some people may consider a place like this snobbish,” says Ekmekjian, who wears a pocket square and a skinny grey suit that must have been cut by an Italian. “I don’t think it’s snobbish. Ninety per cent of the people in here work in finance, like attracts like, but remember, there was nothing to Bay Street when I started. I’m proud of the solid foundation we’ve made here.”
The groundwork that people such as Ekmekjian have created is easy to appreciate with a lychee martini and a lobster club on Canoe’s 54th floor location.
I’m sitting back in a seat by the window and breathing in a culture that’s a universe away from where I live. Horne brings me out a plate of short ribs and a glass of wine, and everything’s so exquisite — the atmosphere, the waiter’s polish, the high shine of the forks and knives and the taste of the food — that I wish I’d paid attention in school. Sometimes it seems hard to imagine that there are people who actually live this way.
Overlooking the halls of finance, drinking red wine, you have to feel at least a little good that Toronto hasn’t really produced a Bernie Madoff or Earl Jones, the Montreal swindler who made off with his family’s money.
As the sun sets on the CN Tower and Ekmekjian finishes his biscotti, I’m building up a head of steam to check out the exchange, or what it was, but I want to soak up a little more of the lifestyle that fuels Bay Street before checking out the deserted past. I still have some cleaning up to do.
“The rich are going to continue to always be rich. You can’t say Frank Stronach is going to be affected by a $40 haircut,” says Rick Ricci, owner of Truefitt & Hill, the barbershop equivalent of Dubai. Ricci, who owns two gourmet men’s salons along Bay Street and is currently in negotiations for a third, says he’s gotten wealthy catering to the whims of the titans of industry.
“None of the banks would finance me, so in 1999, I got an angel, and now my guys shave the bankers who once turned me down,” says Ricci, who keeps his shop immaculate and his barbers decked out in slicked-back hair and bow ties.
At Truefitt & Hill, where there’s no clocks on the wall and Frank Sinatra plays softly, I lean back into a barber’s chair while one of Ricci’s guys takes a straight razor to my peach fuzz. I love to hear the babble of the masters of the universe at ease.
“Marriage is like a tornado,” says someone I can’t see. “In the beginning, there’s a whole lot of sucking and blowing. And then, poof! your house is gone.”
I ask my barber if he hears a lot of good stock tips. “You hear things and see things, but you never say a word,” he says. “That’s the Sicilian way.” I introduce him to the Jewish way. “You see a little, hear something, get something to eat, and then blab about everything to everyone.” We exchange knowing glances and then he massages my head.
Now, properly fed and shaven, it’s time for me to check out the dinosaurs.
A long time ago, the TSX packed up its tickertape and moved into cyberspace. I walk into the Design Exchange, which was the first outside entity to take over the Toronto Stock Exchange in 1987.
The room still has its original light fixtures and murals, and as I walk inside the empty cathedral, I can almost feel how the opulent dressing is beside the point.
But even if the TSX goes to London, there’ll never be a closing time for Bay Street. The ghosts have a hold on the city that’s too strong.
Ben Kaplan is a features writer for the National Post
