Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Hello and welcome. I'm here to provide acknowledgement of country. For those who don't know me, I'm kj Karen Jackson, director of Moon Balletic. My genealogy tracks back to Moira Lakes in Barma Forest and Mount Hope in Pyramid Hill. Giving me my connections to Yorta, Yorta, and Barra language groups. There's a couple of things I'd like you to take away from my acknowledgement. The first is to remember the hidden history of Aboriginal people since invasion, our loss of language removal from country, and our new extinction from massacres and pandemics. The second is our strong and inherent connection to community and country. These connections have given us the resilience and courage to rebuild our languages, gain access to country, regenerate our cultural practices in acknowledging the traditional owners of the country on which you are now on. I'd like to sincerely thank them for their generosity and kindness in welcoming people onto their lands. Lands never seeded and lands that run deep into their being and spirit. I wish to pay my deep respect to the ancestors, elders, communities, and families of the rung wri on whose land I stand and who create connection and share knowledge with all of us. Thank you,
Speaker 2 00:01:19 Colleagues. It's wonderful to be with you and welcome to the People of VU podcast. And first, thank you again to KJ for providing her acknowledgement of country at the beginning of every episode. It's so important to hear, to listen, and to endorse, and I too acknowledge and pay my deep respects to the ancestors, elders, and families of the traditional owners on all of our campuses here, Melbourne, in Sydney, and in Brisbane. And of course extend that to wherever you may be listening. Today's guest is a very special one, John McCall, McBain. Now John's impact spans many things, education, business, philanthropy, global climate action. And he's also the founder and chair of the McCall McBain Foundation, president of PO Promoter Capital. And I have to say it, a fellow Canadian, you'll hear this in two seconds. And over the past two decades, his foundation has committed over half a billion dollars to scholarships, education, health, and environmental initiatives all over the world. John, it is a special moment to have you with us. Welcome today.
Speaker 3 00:02:20 Thank you, Adam. Happy to be here.
Speaker 2 00:02:22 It's so great,
Speaker 3 00:02:22 Especially the fellow Canadian. Oh, look,
Speaker 2 00:02:24 It doesn't happen every day and I doesn't.
Speaker 3 00:02:25 It doesn't. It's a good thing. It's a
Speaker 2 00:02:26 Super, it's super excellent thing. So there's three words that strike me when I look at your cv, uplift, generosity, transformation. And what I'd love to know is, you know, where did those impetuses come from? It sounds like they might've started quite young in your life. Where, what do you reckon when, when were you into the idea of helping others for the first time? Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:02:48 It's a good question. I'm, I'm from Niagara Falls Canada, and my father was a small town lawyer in Niagara Falls, but I noticed when his spare time, he did community service. He didn't have, you know, big donations to make, but he was president of the, of the local YMCA, he was at the Children's Aid Society. So I sort of saw that as a model. And so when we were very successful in our business and, and sold the business, had some money, we decided to give the majority of our wealth away. And also, I'm not, I don't believe in a dynastic family. In other words, a family that goes on for 10 generations, like some of the royalty. And lately we can see the royalty hasn't been doing that well. Yes. So, so I think that it's, you know, we want our children to be independent.
Speaker 3 00:03:26 Yeah. And so helping them be independent is really our goal as, as a parent. And the other part of our goal is to our community. And so that's where we think that the need of a community and the need now is, is, is quite high. And we felt that we looked at many things. We felt that scholarships is our primary thing. We're members of the Giving Pledge and we're sort of the leaders in scholarship for the Giving Pledge and helping others develop good scholarships. So we've learned a lot about scholarships. We're doing scholarships at vu. Yep. Several of 'em we've done and want to continue more with your university. And we just call it all over the world. And I think that's the way we're giving back scholarships. Help me as well when I started out.
Speaker 2 00:04:00 So let me just imagine Niagara Falls, and it's one of the few cities with the same name in North America, which is in both US side of the border and the Canadian, the
Speaker 3 00:04:07 Tourist side, Canada, the chemical town as the United States. Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 2 00:04:09 That's correct. But there is both, right? There's those who don't know. That's correct. And it's at one stage in my youth, I think I was eight, I went to the so-called peace bridge. Right. And I was able to stand with a line. It was painted on the, the border was, and you could have your foot in both countries. That's right. I don't think that's gonna happen today, John. No, no. What
Speaker 3 00:04:27 Do you think? I don't think a lot of kids are putting their foot in the United States these days. No. For certain
Speaker 2 00:04:30 Reasons. Even one foot.
Speaker 3 00:04:31 Even one foot. Exactly.
Speaker 2 00:04:32 You know, you could just imagine. Yeah. And I was saying earlier that last night, the bit bit of climate change information that the falls almost froze. Yeah. Again, you know, really strong deep winter,
Speaker 3 00:04:43 Probably twice in my lifetime it's frozen like that. And it's, it's really a sight to see. It's
Speaker 2 00:04:46 Something special. The American falls
Speaker 3 00:04:47 Freezes the Canadian Horseshoe Falls. Doesn't freeze, shall we? But we state the falls is the, does freeze
Speaker 2 00:04:52 Canadian's more freeform, shall we say? Yes, exactly. A bit more free form. Little more fluid. A bit more fluid. Yeah, that's right. Exactly. So, and sincere, sincerely though, it's a a bridge. We used to cross a lot. I went to Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. We were down in the US almost every weekend competing in track and field or cross country and so on. Did you travel a lot to the US as a kid, if you were living there
Speaker 3 00:05:10 As a kid? We traveled some to the us Not a lot, but we traveled some, we had a, went skiing south of Buffalo in Ellicottville in Holiday Valley. Oh
Speaker 2 00:05:18 Yes, yes. It's amazing. 'cause it's really border town. Right. It's a real border town. Right, exactly. That kind of thing. And people forget sometimes they get lost and end up in the us. Exactly. You know, which is pretty hard to come back, you know, from that if you don't have the right visa. So sincerely though, was it a good place? Did you go to school there?
Speaker 3 00:05:34 Yes, I did. I went to school at public high school, government high school in Niagara Falls and all my trading there. And, and 19, we did grade 13 at the time. You probably did grade 13 as well. Well, I did. I did. And, and then I went on to McGill University in Montreal. So I left Niagara Falls at that time. But I still go back to my hometown. We actually, my wife and I, she's from Southwestern Ontario. We started a hometown scholarship for our hometown. And so we're, we're going back, we choose students to go to university for our hometowns. And that's been a big part of our scholarships.
Speaker 2 00:06:02 What a great thing. So tell me about Marcy. Did you meet her, you know, at that time when you were young? Or did, was it later?
Speaker 3 00:06:07 No, we, we met, no, we met later. I met her actually in Vancouver at a beginning of a bike race at six in the morning by chance. So, seriously.
Speaker 2 00:06:12 Yes. So, well, I'm glad you got there early. Exactly.
Speaker 3 00:06:15 I'm too. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:06:15 So, you
Speaker 3 00:06:16 Know, anyway, but we, we work together in our philanthropy and you know, we do three areas mainly Adam. Yeah. We do, first of all, scholarships. Yeah. We're, that's our main, main thing. We think it transforms things. Unlike Cecil Rhodes who gave his money and his will, we decided to give our money. We're still alive. So as today, Adam had us meet some of the students and our scholarships here, which is great. And that's a nice thing to some give back on that. Secondly, we do work on climate change and we think it's a major issue though today it's very difficult as you can imagine. Yeah. And thirdly, we do a little work on health issues, some youth mental health work as well. Yeah.
Speaker 2 00:06:49 And I thought I might pick that one up because I know that youth mental health, and it's linked to many things, of course, environment, you know, a addiction, even screen addiction. There's all sorts of reasons. We actually have a very interesting organization called Lifeline, which is one of the largest charities to do with mental health, youth mental health as well. And it's based on, the Western headquarters is based on one of our campuses and the CEO's a graduate. Oh, wow. So we get to see the students come through, they actually volunteer and they help the community. 50% of the clients are community, 50% university. So is there, do you think more that universities could be doing in the mental health space?
Speaker 3 00:07:28 I think it's necessary. I think that it starts even before university. Yeah. I think one of the reasons for mental health issues at university is people are changing their community. They're going away from home. They're entering a new system. I think the block program at VU actually is a good thing and makes transition to university a lot easier. A lot easier to manage for students. But sometimes if you're coming from rural area, for example, you're not come to the big city and, and there's so many temptations opportunities. Yeah. And, and no guidance of how we should start. So we, we've involved in several scholarship programs to help students in their final two years of high school transition towards university. There's a famous American scholarship called the Posse Scholarship, which brings together students in grade 11 and 12 as a group. And then that same group then goes to the same universities. They keep their friendship group.
Speaker 2 00:08:08 What a wonderful
Speaker 3 00:08:09 Thing. So that was a really good idea, I thought. And, and, and so we're involved with several programs trying to help students in that transition. Obviously mental health is both how do you transition, but also the problems that can come thereafter. I think social media, I think is a big issue here. Yeah. Especially men and video games. Mm. Lack of communication. COVID didn't help in that area. And we saw a real spike in youth mental health issues after COVID, during COVID.
Speaker 2 00:08:33 We certainly during did and still are in fact still.
Speaker 3 00:08:35 Yes. The,
Speaker 2 00:08:36 The, the after effects are still,
Speaker 3 00:08:37 The after effects are. And we, we ignore the after effects when you think of it, you know, somebody said, you know, we had all these programs for the GIS after they came back from the war, yet I think two or three times the amount of people in the United States died of COVID. Yeah. Then in the war. And there was no GI program for them. Interesting.
Speaker 2 00:08:50 There is no GI program. And you know, there's a lot of things which are other effects, you know, circulatory and others that can affect people's, you know, mobility and things. The long term, you know, COVID effects too. So you're absolutely right. And one of the things that's fascinating during that era, we tracked mental health incidents of our 45,000 students approximately. It went down with the block model didn't go up, went down because we had a, a whole program called the Elevenses at first, which was about, you know, doing exercise at home, diet at home, you know, getting people involved, not just the study. And then we have another program called Thrive John, which is interesting. It was founded by our own staff and students. And it's how do you involve people in any number of a hundred, 200, 300 different really good mental health preserving activities. Oh, good. We've now got 11,000 students and 3000 staff involved in it. That's, it's the biggest in the world. That's great. So I just got an a silver award in, in London last couple of months ago. So the study's crucial, but the whole person, which is what I love about what you do, the scholarships are for the whole person. Right. And we,
Speaker 3 00:09:50 You, we, we want don't want just to give money to students. That's very important, obviously. So they can go to school, but also we want them to succeed. So a lot of programming around it. In the Koban schools, at McGill, for example, we have programming every two weeks we have each student is appointed a mentor Yeah. From the community. So if you were a lawyer, you'd have a, you know, appeal court judge, potentially be your mentor. They have a, a faculty member who's assigned to them and they have a coach, a paid coach, actually. So, so we're trying to provide that with social capital a bit. What we talked about before, trying to get social capital. So kids from anywhere. And our job is as, as philanthropists for scholarships, is we want to, you know, there's talent everywhere, but our job is to bring opportunity to talent, which means not only selecting from talent opportunity, but also going out and find that talent.
Speaker 2 00:10:33 I think the talent hunt talent Exactly. Is really important. You
Speaker 3 00:10:35 Know, it's, the hunting is important. Selecting
Speaker 2 00:10:37 Right. What you've gotta know where, and ask a word of mouth of course is important. But even just the confidence for people to apply. Exactly. You know, often
Speaker 3 00:10:44 Helping them to apply too. Some people, you know, people from certain university, they got all this help from the university to apply and of course their applications look great, but you know, other kids that didn't, we wanna try to have, you know, have the university get involved even, you know, university, all university involved to help their students do good applic
Speaker 2 00:10:58 Applications. I think we're talking about such an important topic. You may not know this, but there's a group also in the west of Melbourne where most of our campuses are, which is called Western Chances, which is all about scholarships. Two from school to beyond. Oh, great. And it is based on one of our campuses. Oh wow. That's great. So it's literally headquartered there. That's good. So we're sort of saying, you know, that generosity of which you're speaking has to start early and often be repeated. And then people, as you say, it give back repeatedly, you know, and we just saw that with the students with whom we spoke. It was great. So coming back to you though, you attended university, you were lucky enough to go to McGill University and McMaster. Tell me what were the differences between those two?
Speaker 3 00:11:36 So I went, I went to McGill. My wife actually went to McMaster. Yeah. And you know, I think they're both a great, you know, like in Australia I think should be very proud in Australia and New Zealand and Canada. We have a good public education system and for at least domestic students, you know, the price is still reasonable. Yeah. And I think that, so I I, that was a good education for me. I got into leadership roles. I was actually President McGill Student Society at the end. I was fortunate to win a scholarship, Rhode scholarship to go to Oxford. Yeah. Which I found was really an interesting country. I'm not necessarily, I'm more a business practical person than the English. So there was a bit of a conflict there. But yeah. But I did enjoy my time there and learned a lot, learned how to think.
Speaker 3 00:12:13 And then I went to Harvard Business School more as a almost a trade school, try to learn the business craft. I was, my actual story was when I was 17, my dream, I had a dream as every head when I was 17, my dream was that I'm gonna be a swimming instructor Oh. For the city of Niagara Falls. And I'm going to do that and that will pay my way through university. So when I turned 17 on February 13th, that year in March, I took the swimming course in April. I got the job for the, for the, for the city of Niagara Falls. And everything was great. And then I won the, I think it was a Spanish contest or the form for young Canadians to go to week in Ottawa. Yeah. So I called up the woman that was running the program and I said, look, I gonna miss the first week. But you know, there 12 of the kids didn't get a job. So one of them will take the job for the first week and I'll do the other seven weeks. And they said, no, John, you're fired. You're fired.
Speaker 2 00:13:00 Before you even
Speaker 3 00:13:00 Started, before I even started my first job, which my dream job, I was fired from before I even started. So, so what I actually did was I, this is where my entrepreneurial spirit came. I said, well, yeah, and I really wanted to study, I really wanted study to teach students and that was what I had my only thing I could do. So I went around to people's pools and I started getting people to let, lend me their pools. And they were at work. And I got a insurance policies. If everything happened, it was my fault. And, and there's paid. And so I went around in the end, after two, three years, I had 20 pools and six instructors and Yeah. Had a little business and made three times as much I would've made. Oh, oh, that's great. That's working. Got clever. Yeah. So my first job was my city of Niagara Falls, who we very generously fired me. It was like, it's probably a good thing, you know, it's probably a good thing,
Speaker 2 00:13:39 But two shows Lucky that you were exactly
Speaker 3 00:13:41 Lucky I was fired. Yeah. And
Speaker 2 00:13:42 They say here that you got sacked at the right moment.
Speaker 3 00:13:43 At the right moment, you know, which is a, so, you know, as your earlier thing about, you know, resilience, and I think that's an important part. One of the characteristics we look at helping students with is this resilience aspect because Yeah. You know, it's, it's easy to, if you only have successes, it's easy. But if you have a, you know, if you have a bad time, sometimes if you had 20 before, you know how to deal with them. And so one of our big sayings that we have sayings that we say, one of the big sayings is, you know, you never know when you had a good day. Yeah. So, you know, you looked at that day, the, the worst day of my life, I was fired by the city. I fall. It was actually a very good day. Yes. Because I was able to realize I could do it on my own.
Speaker 3 00:14:15 And that sort of inspired me. And that's probably one of the, I did that all through high school and able to pay, sorry, all through university, I was able to pay for the university, but it allowed me also to know that I'm entrepreneurial. And, and that led me my chance to, you know, decide to go to Harvard bi school and get into business. So I knew, you know, I mentor a lot of students and they're, you know, uncertain where they want to go. And I understand that. But then they asked me, well, John did, you know? And I said, actually I did. You did. I did know because they, because I had that terrible thing, which was a good thing being fired by the city of United Falls.
Speaker 2 00:14:41 But you also had the attitude, which I think is great. And it's linking to sport attitude and uplift. You know, it's, yes. Sport plays a, there's a through line of sport throughout a lot of your career. Career and I mean, many sports, wrestling, skiing, you know, you name it, running, you know, do you have a favorite?
Speaker 3 00:14:57 Well, I love skiing. Yeah. I must say I love skiing. Yeah. That's your number one. I, I'd say in number one, skiing, I love wrestling. And the problem is, I, I, I wrestled when I was 17 and I, I lost all Ontario and the guy actually I lost to actually won the gold medal at the Commonwealth Games. Yeah. So I, for 50 years I didn't wrestle. Oh. And six months ago I got back into wrestling. How did you suddenly with a chein French Olympic team guy who was a coach. And during my eighth lesson or something, I did a move on him and I hurt my shoulder. So I've got this rotator cuff operation I had a few months ago, but three weeks ago he, I saw him and he came over to the house and he was talking to my wife and I, and he said, you know, I don't know, he told you, John, the whole story, what happened that day? And I said, yeah, I hurt my shoulder. He said, no, no, when you threw me, you broke my ankle. What? So I broke the ankle, this Olympic guy. So I was, oh gee. So it made a much better story than falling in the bath when you heard tour. Oh. So, so I like wrestling as well, but I think I'm gonna have to cut that back. So no, I, I still play ice hockey. I'm a commercial pilot and fly. I have a float plane. So I'm involved in lots of sports, you know, and swimming,
Speaker 2 00:15:59 The ultimate Canadian thing of course is the planes that land on lakes. Yes. Not everyone here has seen this. Right. You know, like on a freshwater, like, you know, in the kind of like, and
Speaker 3 00:16:06 A little bake a protected bay and salt water as well. Yeah. No, I'm, I've got a turbo Kodiak and I fly it in the summers and it's, it's actually amphibious. So we can put the wheels down and land on the land. Oh. But also put the wheels down. So I think, I think keeping involved in different things is important. You know, we had a business trader classified media from 1987, 2006. And you know, you said to yourself, we thought it was time to sell. And of course we, it was a good choice and allowed us to do our philanthropy. But it also allowed me to say, you know, I'm not just identify with your, your role. You want to be identify with many things and life will change. And you wanna be able to, you know, enjoy new things. So I think that, you know, keeping up the sports and some of the activities have been very important for me. Well,
Speaker 2 00:16:44 We're pr we're pretty passionate here. 'cause sports science is the number one discipline of this place.
Speaker 3 00:16:48 Yes. And senior sports,
Speaker 2 00:16:49 Sports science rank in the world. Now it's gone up, you know, V is great and, and it's very interesting. 'cause of women in sport is the leading research area here. You know, safety, coaching, high performance tech. And we're finding that whole half of the world is really requiring a lot more attention. And, you know, debates are going on at the Australian Open now about should women be playing five sets in the finals of Grand Slams people here in into that sort of whole, you know, very interesting. Very. But it's great that you've been leading all the way through that. And tell me, the thing I was gonna ask, when you started the foundation, whose idea was that?
Speaker 3 00:17:23 So I guess it was, you know, my wife and I talked about it and, you know, we realized that, you know, we were very well with the business. We didn't need all the money ourselves. So we thought, you know, what can we do to help our community? And as you know, going back to my earlier comment about my father, he, you know, wasn't able to give money away, but he was able to give his time. So we decided that we'd be able to, to do this. And then we, we did search a little while. Our first thing, what actually happened, Adam, was we, you know, I said, okay, we're gonna create a foundation and we're gonna try to solve the biggest problem in the world. And we looked around and we thought the biggest problem in the world was Liberia, maternal health. Right. So maternal health in, in Liberia, everybody's looking at children.
Speaker 3 00:17:58 So we looked at that and what we learned in our foundation was that there are big issues and then there's, but the real form is what, what is the, a problem times the chance? Success times how much it cost per success. Yep. And that changed us. So we had, you know, it was very difficult environment working in Liberia. We tried to do our best, we pivoted more towards scholarship. We see it was something we could, we know we were making an impact. We, you know, got a lot of expertise in it from our backgrounds, but also really studied it. And we felt that that was a better thing. So we've changed our model saying, no, we don't, you know, there may be people who are better than us to work on a problem, but we wanna make sure the result is the best. Yeah. And so by taking the problem, whether it's extremely large or the third largest, and having a higher chance of success and having to cost per success.
Speaker 3 00:18:40 So that's what we do now. And so we found that our, our best things we can do are our scholarship because it's something we know about. So we can have a higher chance of success. Yeah. It's, it is an issue. It's bringing people, you know, teaching people how to fish, not, you know, giving the fish. So that's, that's been a successful thing. We've, you know, I was at a event once and this student came up to me and said, you know, hi John. I said, what are you doing here? And he said, well, I'm one of your scholars. I said, well, that's nice. Yeah. He was our Dalhousie law scholarship named after my father. And I said, why are you here? He said, well, I'm the lawyer. And I said, what do you mean the lawyer? So there was an honorary doctorate given to Sidney Blake stock, who was a indigenous professor at McGill. Yeah. Because of her work on getting in equal funding for indigenous people in Canada. Yeah. And her lawyer was our
Speaker 2 00:19:22 Scholar. Oh, look at and just look where it goes.
Speaker 3 00:19:25 Yeah. So you can see you're, you know, you're making a bit of a difference there. It's good to
Speaker 2 00:19:28 See it's so, it's beginning, but you don't know where it's gonna end, but you know that you're igniting. Right. That's what I think is really exciting. Right. Exactly.
Speaker 3 00:19:35 And we're giving them social capital too. 'cause you know, people so dependent, you know, although we have a public education system in Canada, as they do in Australia, there's still social capital. And so we want to try to bring the social capital that we've developed through our networks, et cetera, to those students. And, and so we get these students. So we're, we're training them as well. You know, not only leadership skills, but also life skills and Oh, you know, if you wanna do that, lemme talk to somebody to help them. And the mentorship program is really good too.
Speaker 2 00:20:00 I think it's great. And just think, we're sitting here because we're the beneficiaries of philanthropy ourselves.
Speaker 3 00:20:05 Both of us are, I'm of us are a scholarship student.
Speaker 2 00:20:07 Both of both of us are scholarship students. And you can always tell 'cause people are full of gratitude for that chance. It was life altering, life changing, life defining, I think, for both of us. So imagine if you can echo that for thousands. Have you tracked how many students you've now given scholarships?
Speaker 3 00:20:22 You've given a lot of
Speaker 2 00:20:22 Scholarships. Do you know what the total is?
Speaker 3 00:20:23 It's probably tens of thousands.
Speaker 2 00:20:25 Tens of thousands. But look and more to come, John, this is only part one, part two, we're gonna talk some more on the 8th of October this year we're hoping you're gonna come to our hundred
Speaker 3 00:20:35 Hundred 10th anniversary. That's
Speaker 2 00:20:36 Correct. Anniversary. And we'll talk more about those tens of thousands of impacting people. But today, I just wanna say you fitting us in now at a very short notice for just a less than a day in Melbourne.
Speaker 3 00:20:46 It just goes to the generosity. No, we wouldn't Miss Vu. It's been a, a long term partner of our foundation. We're very happy to work with them and to work with, with yourself and your team. Thank you. It's wonderful. Thanks again. Thank you. Thank you. That's great.
