Author and economist Robert MacIntosh seen at his home in downtown Toronto, on Jan. 10, 2007.Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail
Robert MacIntosh was an outgoing intellectual in the conventional world of Canadian banking. Mr. MacIntosh, who died in Toronto on Oct. 6 at the age of 97, was president of the Canadian Bankers Association and for many years one of the three top people at the Bank of Nova Scotia, where he was an executive vice-president. In an era when many leading bankers started their careers at small branches and worked their way up the chain of command, Mr. MacIntosh studied at McGill University, the London School of Economics and Cambridge University, and had a doctorate in economics.
“Bob was one of the first university graduates – if not the first – to be hired by the Bank of Nova Scotia,” said Robert Brooks, who was vice-chairman of the bank. “As an intellectual, Bob was the odd man out in the group running the bank.”
One of his key jobs there was knowing where interest rates were going, and he headed its investment department. For many years he was the Bank of Nova Scotia’s one-man economics department.
Robert Mallory MacIntosh was born on Jan. 8, 1923, in Stanstead, Que., on the border with Vermont. His father, Gordon, was from the family that owned the local granite quarry ,which, among other things, supplied material for gravestones across Canada. His mother, Bernice (née Mallory), was a graduate of Mount Allison University, and when her children were older, she taught at Stanstead College, a private boarding school. Robert was a day student there.
“Robert traced his academic success to one teacher at the school, Earl Ameron. He said he had a major influence on his life,” his wife, Lynn MacIntosh, said.
After Stanstead, Mr. MacIntosh went to McGill University. During the war there was a call for people to help with the harvest on the Prairie provinces and Mr. MacIntosh went there, planning to write a few articles for the McGill Daily. The work was so exhausting that he only wrote one. He volunteered for the Canadian Army and served overseas at the end of the war. He stayed in Europe and enrolled at the London School of Economics, where one of his classmates was Simon Reisman. Mr. Reisman would later work as deputy minister of the Department of Finance in Ottawa, where Mr. MacIntosh worked with him on revisions to the Bank Act.
When Mr. MacIntosh returned to Canada, he taught economics at Bishop’s University in Lennoxville, Que., before joining the Bank of Nova Scotia as its economist in 1953.
One of his responsibilities was to advocate for the bank’s interests when there was a revision of the Bank Act. Those revisions always involved significant changes, things such as allowing banks into the consumer lending business, effectively putting usurious finance companies out of business, and allowing the big banks to buy brokerage houses.
“He was an enormously enthusiastic banker. He thought that the Canadian banking system was so well designed. Part of it was there was a mandatory revision every 10 years, which meant the regulations kept up to date,” Mrs. MacIntosh said.
Mr. MacIntosh spent 50 hours testifying before parliamentary committees prior to the 1980 revision to the Bank Act. “My job is to improve [the big banks'] credibility,” he told the writer Roderick McQueen.
Mr. MacIntosh was modern in a couple of ways. He embraced technology early and oversaw the bank’s systems division, meaning its computers. He also saw early the advantage of hiring women at senior levels rather than exclusively as tellers and secretaries.
“I remember Bob saying at a meeting in the early 1970s, ‘Why would we cut ourselves off from 50 per cent of the world’s population?’ ” Mr. Brooks said. “He went out over a number of years and hired a large number of well-qualified senior women.”
One of them was Helen Sinclair, a young economist.
“For a bunch of us women, he was the guy who gave us our opportunities, at a time when more women were coming into the work force,” said Ms. Sinclair, who joined the bank in 1975. “I could name you a dozen women whose careers he championed, including my own. In the bank he broke down the barriers between the old school and the new world.”
Ms. Sinclair’s first job was government relations.
“The first thing he assigned me to was to follow the Royal Commission on Corporate Concentration,” Ms. Sinclair said. “They had moved from sort of a hate-on for the large media conglomerates to a hate-on for the banks. So I spent every hour of my working day following the latter.”
Mr. MacIntosh left the Bank of Nova Scotia in 1980 and became president of the Canadian Bankers Association, a job he kept until 1989, when Ms. Sinclair replaced him.
“He was first actual president of the CBA,” Ms. Sinclair said. “It was a great match. He understood the economics of banking though he was a non-banker banker. I don’t think he ever made a loan in his life. He was interested in public policy.”
At the Bankers Association he helped pave the way for changes in payment systems, which led to things such as Interac payments and allowing non-banks into an area that was exclusively ruled by the big banks.
Mr. MacIntosh was fully retired for 30 years, though he wasn’t idle. He read a lot, played tennis until he was 90 years old and collected antiquarian books, with a particular interest on books about Toronto and Muskoka, where he had an island on Lake Muskoka. He left that collection to the Bracebridge library and some 300 books on Toronto to Ryerson University.
He wrote several books on banking and history. In 2007, he wrote Earliest Toronto, which Globe and Mail reviewer Michael Posner described as “irreverent.” Mr. MacIntosh said Toronto was a French settlement from 1676 and that history was rewritten by John Graves Simcoe, the first lieutenant-governor of Upper Canada. “It annoyed me that there was this perception of Simcoe as a hero. He was a pompous ass,” Mr. MacIntosh told the reviewer. He said Simcoe went about replacing all the French and Indigenous place names, brushing aside 178 years of French habitation.
Mr. MacIntosh was interested in the wider world and he travelled extensively with his wife. “We loved to travel, to Europe and Africa,” Mrs. MacIntosh said. “We loved going to the Black Sea. We went there at the right time, you can’t go to Crimea any more.”
He was also a lively dinner companion. “Very few could hold court at the dinner table like Robert. He really could tell a story,” said Mike Boehm, who was related by marriage.
Mr. MacIntosh leaves his wife, Lynn; their children, John and Justine; his children from his first marriage, Valerie and Jeffrey; and 11 grandchildren.