Sometimes I absolutely startle myself and dumbfound myself with what I do," Martha Billes told a reporter recently. She was talking about her corporate position at Canadian Tire, the store Canadians love and she owns, but unfortunately she made the remarks just before a sex-and-vengeance lawsuit by a former lover finally came to trial in Calgary.
Observers are startled and dumbfounded too. It's not just a question of the evidence being revealed at the trial -- Ms. Billes is being portrayed as a home-wrecker who deliberately destroyed her lover's business after he left her; she responds that she was merely making logical financial decisions -- it's that in Canada, combining sex and business isn't, well, sensible.
Canadian Tire is lug wrenches, hockey helmets, belt sanders and money with the ur-Scotsman Sandy McTire on its face. Its success goes contrary to modern retail thinking, a store where you can never find what you want but you keep wandering the aisles because you know it's there somewhere. It's not Gucci nor Versace nor Bloomingdale's nor even Corel, where sex is a running narrative. It's "Tire," as the Billes family always called it at home.
Martha Billes's dad was one of its founders. Kept on the sidelines because she was born a girl, Ms. Billes fought her brothers for a decade before they called for a truce and gave each sibling right of first refusal on shares. She bought them out in 1997 and now controls 61 per cent of Canadian Tire Corp. Ltd. stock, that is worth about $105-million.
So Ms. Billes, 58, is someone who gets what she wants. "She will fight for what she thinks is right," says journalist Ian Brown, who observed her closely for his 1989 book Freewheeling: The Feuds, Broods and Outrageous Fortunes of the Billes Family and Canada's Favourite Company. "She is very tough, exceedingly rational and she has very good judgment in lawyers."
Which is ironic. Paul McAteer, now 51, was a lawyer. He had been married for 20 years to Pamela Mason, with whom he had three children. He was looking for investors for his Calgary development company, Devoncroft Developments Ltd., approaching, among others, businessman Earl Joudrie, who declined because he was in the middle of divorcing his wife. (Later, that same wife would shoot Joudrie six times. He lived.)
Mr. McAteer was introduced to Ms. Billes in 1990. She eventually invested $750,000 in Devoncroft, which owned a building in Red Deer, Alta., and a golf course and subdivision in La Salle, Man. This gave her half the company, with Mr. McAteer having 10 per cent and the rest being held by his wife in trust for the children.
They began an affair, and behaved as bizarrely and heartlessly as teenagers. Mr. McAteer's wife, Pamela Mason, had no notion of what was going on until he told her over coffee one morning, six days after their 20th wedding anniversary and nine months after he met Ms. Billes.
"I was surprised," Ms. Mason told the court with remarkable understatement.
Gallingly, Mr. McAteer then asked her to go see Ms. Billes and comfort her. "Paul told me she was distraught and very upset, that she was concerned about what I might do." So she did and the two women wept together, each for entirely different reasons.
Three days later, Ms. Billes came over to Mr. McAteer's house where he proposed and she accepted. "I heard her say: 'I accept your proposal,' " Ms. Mason told the court. The lovers bought an expensive house and moved in together -- Mr. McAteer even signed a prenuptial agreement -- but the relationship soured after a year had passed, and he left her. By this time, Ms. Billes had control of Devoncroft by means of further loans. When she called them in, the company sank.
Essentially, Mr. McAteer and Ms. Mason (now divorced) are saying that Ms. Billes deliberately pushed the company over the edge and gathered up what was left, solely to wreak vengeance on the man who dumped her. They're each seeking $10-million in general damages from Ms. Billes and another $1-million each for punitive damages.
Ms. Billes denies the allegations and is countersuing for $5.1-million. The McAteer lawsuit, filed in 1993, has taken seven years to come to this sorry point. Mr. McAteer told reporters outside of court this month that Ms. Billes's lawyers told him it would never happen. "Well, here we are. I'm a very tenacious man."
Mr. McAteer appears to have been as thoughtless in his dealings with Ms. Billes as he was with the mother of his children. In 1992, Ms. Billes wrote to him that combining an affair with business was "indeed a terrible mistake for me. You say that you are now emotionally free to spend time with someone. That is great for you. Congratulations. My situation is different. I am still hurting badly. Enough said."
It isn't Alanis Morissette's You Oughta Know, but those clipped sentences still resonate for anyone who has ever been discarded.
No matter which way the court decides, no one except Pamela Mason (who is defending the interests of her children) comes out looking particularly saintly. But it matters more for Ms. Billes, who has a very public family name to uphold. Ms. Billes, twice-married, has bent a few rules in her lifetime, but society can be particularly cruel to an older woman who has financial clout, and dares to have sex too.
What kind of person is she? Pamela Mason, who has re-established her life happily and successfully in Ottawa, says simply, "I don't know her. She's quite a private person." She advises reading that day's Calgary Herald, which reports that Ms. Billes is kind to cats and dogs.
Ian Brown says Ms. Billes is an unpretentious woman. At least in the early days of her fight for Canadian Tire, she was shy, and surprised when people were interested in her.
"She is not a snob. She thinks of herself as a pickup [truck]kind of girl. She has no airs and doesn't want to be part of Toronto society." This is a family trait. He remembers when the family wanted to donate money to the University of Toronto for a business school. U of T wanted the "Billes School of Business" but the family, hating publicity, wanted the "Canadian Tire School of Business," so U of T said no.
Ms. Billes attended U of T herself, getting an honours degree in science. She worked for Lever Brothers and then the Ontario Research Foundation, testing margarine colour and oil content, taught public school in east-end Toronto and had a son, who now works for Canadian Tire. For all the fights with her brothers and how much that upset her dad, she is intensely family-oriented, turning up at an interview with the Calgary Sun wearing a Canadian Tire brooch made from her mother's jewellery, and an enormous diamond ring her father gave to her mother.
She is an unlikely femme fatale. She looks like a practical sort of person, though she dresses like a 1980s rich woman, turning up in court with gold chains on her purse, gold-rimmed and gold-armed sunglasses, gold earrings, gold necklace, the works. She is indeed an animal lover, owning five Lakeland terriers. And, as the Herald also reported, she has installed her own tiles and done her own wiring and plumbing. Plus, after court, she went straight to a local Canadian Tire store where she gave a donation through its charitable foundation to a Calgary shelter for battered women.
Her women friends speak of her with great warmth, one of them telling business columnist Don Braid that when her cat died, "Martha drove me to just about every pet store in Calgary, looking for another little kitten, just to make me feel better. That's who Martha Billes is. That's the warm, caring person I know."
No one can tell whether Ms. Billes will prevail in her lawsuit, but if her track record is any guide, she will pursue it to the utmost, with appeal after appeal if need be. That's the way Ms. Billes got the family firm -- by using a good business mind and by wearing down the opposition. The courts may see a lot more of her yet.