COMMENTARY: The enduring legacy of maverick media baron Jim Shaw

By Peter Menzies

A hard-nosed businessman, he made a brilliant cable territory swap, competed ferociously with Telus and pulled Global television from the Canwest infernoFEW OCCASIONS BETTER illustrated the cultural divide between the world of the western bottom-up entrepreneur and that of Ottawa’s top-down public service bureaucracy than when Jim Shaw and Konrad von Finckenstein crossed swords in a hearing room.There, front and centre of the raised platform bearing commissioners, would be the multilingual von Finckenstein, a six-foot-something-awesome lawyer who was chief legal adviser on the original North American Free Trade negotiations, served as head of the Competition Bureau, became a Federal Court...