Venture tycoon Latham BurnsHandout
Latham Cawthra Burns, who died May 12 at 84, led the transformation of his family's small Bay Street investment brokerage into a national leader, now known as BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc., spearheading moves to open an office in London and garner a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
Mr. Burns died surrounded by family after a heart operation at Toronto General Hospital. He had hoped the procedure would give him a new lease on a still-active life after he experienced problems with his heart's valves in recent years. Friends and family say he knew the risks, but wanted to live life to the fullest, or not at all.
With a small group of key partners, Mr. Burns is credited with steering his firm (which began as Burns Bros. and evolved into Burns Fry and later BMO Nesbitt Burns) through a period of change that saw it grow from a regional operation founded by his father and uncle into one of the largest investment dealers in Canada, with an international reach.
"He was one of a core group of three or four which built Burns Fry into a strong national competitor," said Tony Fell, a former chairman of RBC Securities and a friend. "Latham was also a snappy dresser with a great sense of style and humour – always quick with a comment – and he was a bon vivant who loved a good party with lots of Scotch and cigars. He was hard to keep up with."
He was born on June 26, 1930, into one of Toronto's most prominent and wealthy families. Their parties, weddings and social events regularly featured in the society pages of the day's newspapers. His grandfather, Herbert D. Burns, was chairman of the Bank of Nova Scotia, and young Latham Cawthra Burns spent the summers of his youth at his grandparents' vacation home, dubbed the Pansy Patch, in St. Andrews, N.B.
His father, who also went by Latham, co-founded investment dealer firm Burns Bros. with his brother Charles on Toronto's Bay Street in 1932. In 1928, the elder Latham Burns had married Isobel Cawthra, of the prominent Cawthra family, which built a Toronto business empire in the 19th century from what was said to be the city's first general store. Their name remains on a main road in Mississauga.
But the younger Mr. Burns hardly knew his father, who died of pneumonia in April, 1936, at just 30 years old, falling ill en route to Bermuda for a vacation on board the RMS Queen of Bermuda, an opulent luxury liner known at the time as the "millionaires' ship." The funeral for the "prominent stock and bond broker," The Globe reported, was attended by "all classes" including "financiers, industrialists and wage-earners."
Little Latham, not yet six when his father died, was soon sent to board at the Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ont., where he played cricket and was an excellent student.
As a teenager, he lived in New York's storied Carlyle Hotel with his mother, who had remarried in 1940. A chauffeur shuttled him to his classes at the elite Collegiate School, an Ivy League prep school and the oldest school in the United States.
It was during this period, family members say, that he showed an aptitude for business: He got a local florist to hire him to make deliveries, which he did with the help of his chauffeur, and he demanded jobs involving celebrities, thinking they would give him the biggest tips. It was on such a flower delivery that he met Broadway composer Richard Rodgers, of the duo Rodgers and Hammerstein, who invited him in to hear his latest tune.
He graduated from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., in 1952, with an arts degree, and went to work for his Uncle Charlie, whom he adored, at what was then called Burns Bros. and Denton Ltd., after a merger with another firm. In those years, he worked in Hamilton and Ottawa, where he opened new offices for the firm, and in New York, where he learned the bond business.
During this period, he became friends with Peter Munk, who would go on to found Barrick Gold Corp., the world's largest gold producer, which now employs Mr. Burns's son Holton. Mr. Munk remembers Mr. Burns in the years they first met as a dashing figure with an "understated, elegant" sense of humour.
"He was a man around town. He was good-looking, he was rich, he had a good name, he attracted girls. He had everything going for himself," said Mr. Munk, whose family had fled Nazi-occupied Hungary when he was a teenager. "He was it. I was just a hanger-on, a little immigrant boy trying to pick up the leftovers."
He also credited Mr. Burns, born into Toronto's white-Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite of the era, for his openness to a Jewish immigrant, helping Mr. Munk defy the prejudices of the day and gain membership in the exclusive Toronto Club.
In a New York ceremony in 1959, Mr. Burns married Roberta Reed, of a prominent Austin, Texas., family. The reception was held in the Victorian Suite in the Carlyle Hotel. The couple had three children, Reed, Farish and Holton.
By 1960, he was on the board of Burns Bros. and Denton Ltd. In 1966, he became president. The firm would establish a London presence in 1968, at Mr. Burns's urging, and in 1972, in another move driven by Mr. Burns, a merger with Montreal-based J.R. Timmins and Co. gave his firm access to a coveted seat on the New York Stock Exchange.
His first marriage ended in divorce in 1970. In 1971, he married Patricia Annette (Paddy Ann) Higgins, daughter of Paul Higgins Sr., owner of Mother Parkers Tea & Coffee Inc. They met at a horse show, although Mr. Burns, whose family had horses, rarely rode himself. The couple would have two daughters, Ainsley and Cawthra.
In the early 1970s, Mr. Burns would serve as head of what was then his industry's self-governing body, the Investment Dealers Association, speaking out on various issues facing the securities industry.
In a bold move to create Canada's dominant investment dealer, his firm, which had strengths in equities and mergers-and-acquisitions, merged with Fry Mills Spence Ltd., which was strong in the bond markets. The 1976 deal saw Mr. Burns made chairman of the newly merged firm, known as Burns Fry Ltd.
By 1982, Burns Fry was seen as the market leader on Bay Street. But the clock was ticking on Bay Street's independent investment dealers, which largely relied on their partners' own capital, limiting their ultimate size. After the ban on bank ownership was lifted in the late 1980s, Canada's big banks moved quickly to gobble up the Street's investment firms, giving those firms access to much larger bank balance sheets.
In 1994, Mr. Burns and his partners sold their firm to the Bank of Montreal for $403-million in cash and BMO shares. The bank then merged Burns Fry with Nesbitt Thomson, which it had previously acquired, creating what became known as BMO Nesbitt Burns, a powerhouse with 3,700 employees. Mr. Burns stayed on as honorary chairman, maintaining an office at BMO's Bay Street tower until his death.
His Rolodex was legendary. He counted former Eaton's chairman John Craig Eaton and former newspaper tycoon Conrad Black among his friends. In a sitting room in his Forest Hill home, there is a picture of him in a tuxedo sharing a laugh with then-U.S.-president Ronald Reagan, whom he met on a visit to Toronto.
For the past 20 years, Mr. Burns and his horse-loving wife spent winters in Aiken, S.C., riding, playing polo and fox hunting. Just last year, his family said, the still-vibrant Mr. Burns drove his Mercedes down from Toronto by himself. His new passion became his Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. One, named Hennessy after the cognac, he trained in "dog agility," and he rarely left his side.
To indulge his lifelong love of trains, Mr. Burns sometimes insisted friends ride the rails with him all the way to an annual salmon fishing trip in Matapédia, Que., despite the long distance.
Later in life, Mr. Burns also played the role of mentor, taking young entrepreneurs, often friends of his children, under his wing, providing advice and financing. He quietly backed the much-praised restoration of Toronto's Carlu ballroom in 2003. And in 2010, he put up money to stop the shutdown of Aiken's historic Willcox Hotel, which once hosted the likes of Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Bing Crosby.
Former colleagues and friends praised Mr. Burns's quiet but generous approach to charity, noting his commitment to the United Way and his service on the board of St. Michael's Hospital and its foundation board.
"He was one of those people who always had a smile on his face," said Toronto Mayor John Tory, a fellow member of the St. Michael's board, who remembers Mr. Burns's leadership when the hospital faced a financial crunch in the 1980s. "He just made people feel better. That's the way he was."
Mr. Burns leaves his wife, Paddy Ann; five children, Reed Burns, Farish Burns, Holton Burns, Cawthra Burns and Ainsley Burns; and eight grandchildren.
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Jeff Gray