Maple Leaf Foods Inc. Chairman Wallace McCain speaks during the annual general meeting of shareholders in Toronto April 29, 2010.Mike Cassese/Reuters
Wallace McCain was a tough, straight-talking son of New Brunswick potato growers, who co-founded a global frozen-food colossus before being exiled in a famously bitter feud with his brother Harrison.
Ousted from McCain Foods Ltd., Mr. McCain rebounded to buy another food giant Maple Leaf Foods Inc. and emerged as a generous philanthropist whose causes ranged from grooming East-Coast entrepreneurs to nurturing ballet dancers in Toronto.
This legendary business lion, who spearheaded the growth of two Canadian corporate icons, died on May 13 at age 81 after a 14-month battle with pancreatic cancer.
"There will never be another like him," says his friend Frank McKenna, deputy chairman of Toronto-Dominion Bank and a former New Brunswick premier. "He had a rare combination of energy, passion, business acumen, generosity and style."
As a younger man, Mr. McCain was a force in building multinational McCain Foods, with his three older brothers, most notably Harrison, with whom he served as co-chief executive officer for decades.
The two became a powerful and inseparable brother act who built a rare Canadian-based consumer-products champion, commanding a third of the world market for French fries. They did it all from tiny Florenceville, N.B, flying in and out on corporate planes that plied the small air strip behind their adjacent homes overlooking the Saint John River valley.
McCain Foods now has diverse interests that span frozen cakes and pizzas, food service and transport trucks, compiling annual sales of $6-billion with 20,000 employees in more than 60 countries.
But these achievements are tragically overshadowed by an angry battle with Harrison over the suitability of Wallace's son Michael to be their leadership successor. In the 1990s, the quarrel exploded into a legal wrangle that polarized the McCain family and forced Wallace from the company - while remaining one-third owner.
Wallace promptly acquired Maple Leaf Foods and settled in Toronto, but the family rift wounded him deeply. "The biggest thing that happened to me in the past 25 years - and in my life - was being unceremoniously dumped from McCain Foods," Mr. McCain once said.
Mr. McCain and his sons Scott and Michael, with funding from Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, took over Maple Leaf, a creaking old meat-packing and packaged-food giant and nursed it back to better health.
But Maple Leaf, under Michael as CEO, has faced its own challenges, including shareholder impatience, economic pressure from a rising dollar, and a near-death experience in 2008, when an outbreak of listeria threatened to sink the company's reputation.
The McCains met the listeria challenge head-on with a policy of frank and open communications, and Michael became a role model for crisis management.
Wallace McCain was born on April 9, 1930, in Florenceville in the upper Saint John valley - the youngest of six children raised by Andrew (A.D.) and Laura McCain in a household where the potato ruled. The McCains were long-time spud producers and A.D. sold seed potatoes internationally, giving his sons an early sense of world horizons.
As a young man, Wallace got drummed out of Acadia University for carousing, then suffered a similar fate at University of New Brunswick, before he finally settled down at his third school, Mount Allison University, from which he graduated with a degree.
He and older brother Harrison went to work for New Brunswick empire builder K.C. Irving, but grew restless as their entrepreneurial ambitions grew. In 1957, with the help of their family, they started up a frozen French fry business, with 30 employees, in their home town.
Their timing was perfect, as they pioneered a huge fast-food category just as the phenomenon of dual-income busy families took hold.
Armed with brash exuberance and a flair for colourful profanity, they invaded country after country, using a formula of inundating the market with Canadian fries, then building processing facilities to draw from local farmers. Britain, France, all of Europe, Australia, the United States and, more recently, China became McCain markets.
The McCains were hard-nosed entrepreneurs, but for Wallace, there was a gentle side too - epitomized by his lifetime love affair with the former Margaret Norrie, a Nova Scotian who like Wallace hailed from a family with Liberal leanings.
They met at Mount Allison, and later married, creating one of the most formidable partnerships in Canadian public life, as Wallace piloted the business side and Margaret McCain put her huge imprint on social activism and philanthropy. The pinnacle of their work together was raising money for a new National Ballet School in Toronto.
Harrison and Wallace spent years in estrangement until, near Harrison's death in 2004, Wallace began to visit his sick brother - a measure of rapprochement that he cherished. He kept a keen interest in the old family business, and has been a confidant to McCain Foods' new non-family executives.
As age took its toll, the old warrior took a reduced role in Maple Leaf, and he supported his sons in the succession. He was fighting cancer over the past year as Maple Leaf's performance came under attack from an activist investor, who, as a cost of its support, secured a board seat. The fact that long-time partner, the Teachers pension fund, sold its Maple Leaf interest has only added pressure on the next generation.
Wallace clearly felt like a caged lion as he spoke, in an interview in mid-2009, about his new, confined role. "It's hard to sit on the sidelines. I said to my wife, 'I think I'll buy another company - a small one,' and she said 'Are you crazy?' But I'm not doing anything here."
Then he joked to the reporter "That's why I'm talking to you too much." But the truth is he was an immensely sociable person who loved to shoot the breeze.
He leaves his wife Margaret, sons Scott and Michael and daughters Eleanor and Martha, as well as nine grandchildren.