TORONTO -- Joseph J. Barnicke has kept his share of secrets in the nearly 50 years he has helped orchestrate commercial real estate deals across Canada.
When a company wanted to pick up stakes and move to new quarters, sometimes across the country, the firm's president would often first pick up the phone and talk to Mr. Barnicke, swearing him to secrecy to work out the plan long before employees and shareholders found out.
Or, when the old Eatons department store chain wanted to expand to what was then a novel retail centre - a mall - it was Mr. Barnicke who cut through the red tape by quietly meeting with the political boss of the day.
"In these deals, we don't take credit," Mr. Barnicke says. "Our clients get all the credit and we work on the periphery as facilitators. There's lots and lots of confidentiality."
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Now that he's sold his company to British interests, there's no secret about what Mr. Barnicke wants to do - at 84, he would like to maintain a role with the company he founded in 1959 and built into a recognized powerhouse in commercial real estate, with 25 offices across Canada and 400 employees, including 175 at the Toronto head office.
"Consolidation is the word because clients are looking for international service suppliers and service around the globe," Mr. Barnicke says of his decision to sell J.J. Barnicke Ltd. to DTZ Holdings PLC for $26.6-million. He will stay on as chairman for a few months to assist in the transition. It means he will continue his routine of arriving at his downtown Toronto office at 7:30 a.m. and hang around until 7 p.m.
Mr. Barnicke has his roots in Cudworth, Sask., near Prince Albert, but his parents, strapped by the Depression and a severe drought, moved when he was six months old to Oakville, Ont., where he received his education.
His life has been full of excitement since his days as a daring pilot instructor for the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War. One day, he decided to take a plane for a spin - under a bridge in Calgary.
"You're not supposed to do what I did that day," Mr. Barnicke recalls sheepishly in an interview at his office. "I knew how to fly. When you teach students, you fly so low that you're cutting the grass. My bosses wanted to discipline me but they didn't win. I went to a discipline meeting and I had 175 instructors on the base as witnesses. They stood up for me."
When the war ended, he took advantage of a University of Toronto program that permitted servicemen to use military credits toward a degree. In 10 months, he completed a commerce and finance course and began working for Carling O'Keefe Breweries. He rose to the post of national sales manager at a time when O'Keefe held more than 30 per cent of the beer market in the country. (It was taken over by Molson in 1989.)
After 10 years with O'Keefe, Mr. Barnicke plunged into real estate, eventually establishing his own company. "I wanted a new challenge. I was in my 30s and my peers were in their 50s and they didn't like a young man offering them my views," he recalls.
Within a few years, he played a key role in the development of Toronto's Yorkdale Shopping Centre, which was believed to be the first mall of its magnitude in Canada when it was completed in February, 1964.
The Eaton family wanted to expand into the mall, which at the time was in a rural area north of Toronto. While the zoning was in place, it needed an access road to be viable.
So, Mr. Barnicke was enlisted to help, and met with Bill Allen, chairman of the Metro Toronto council of the day. Over cigars and martinis at his special booth at the old Winston's lounge on Adelaide Street, Mr. Barnicke went one-on-one with Mr. Allen and on a napkin forged a deal for a road that eventually became the Allen Expressway.
"We were just in the background in those negotiations," he says. "The road was built. Like water, a road finds its way out. In those days, you could do a deal one-on-one, whereas, today, clients are becoming committee-oriented."
His numerous dealings with the Eatons continued through the years. Mr. Barnicke paved the way for the Sherway Gardens shopping mall in west-end Toronto as well as the Rideau Centre in downtown Ottawa - both of which were anchored by an Eatons department store.
The Rideau Centre was a project that Mr. Barnicke says took seven years to complete and it was special to him because he was also a partner, purchasing some of the land involved. At his office, he proudly shows a photograph of some of the celebrities attending its opening, including then prime minister Pierre Trudeau and Mr. Barnicke's friend, Bill Davis, the Ontario premier at the time.
But Mr. Barnicke didn't limit himself to retail projects. He also helped companies quietly acquire land in order to transfer their headquarters to new cities. Notable among these was Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd.'s move to Calgary from Montreal, Imperial Oil Ltd. to Calgary from Toronto and large chunks of Royal Bank of Canada's backroom operations from Toronto to Mississauga.
It's been a lucrative living for Mr. Barnicke that has allowed him to engage in philanthropy and dabble in real estate at a personal level. He owns a swank ski lodge at Craigleith in Collingwood, Ont., and a multimillion-dollar family cottage compound on Lake Rosseau in the Muskokas where he parks his rare, mahogany boats and entertains political friends and clients.
Mr. Barnicke is the last independent real estate icon in Canada of note to give in to a big corporation and he's somewhat proud of this longevity. But modesty is his motto when he's asked about his kingpin independence and selling out.
"Pride and vanity have no place in my life," he says. "You can't go against the tide in the big ocean. You have to be realistic. It's the way the business operates. It's about consolidation."
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