Mike Harcourt
By Pat Johnson
Mike Harcourt claims he never really had anything to retire from.
“I didn’t have a career,” he says. “I just had happenstance.”
He was a young lawyer when residents of Chinatown engaged him to fight a planned freeway that would have obliterated their neighbourhood. That got him mad at city hall and he ran for council.
“To my surprise, and my new wife’s horror, I won,” he says. The mayor’s office followed, then a seat in the legislature, then the leadership of the BC NDP, the premiership and then, after 1996, two decades and counting of something that doesn’t look anything like retirement.
At age 74, he’s chair of True Leaf Medicine, which is aiming to become one of the country’s licensed producers of medical marijuana. He is also involved in other startups, including one that is coming to market with a device that identifies how much cancer is in a cell.
“I’ve been involved in about 12 startup companies in the last decade with the usual crash-and-burn rate,” Harcourt says. “But I’ve got three or four that I think are going to do pretty well.”
When he quit politics he didn’t sit at home and wonder what to do next.
Then-prime minister Jean Chretien offered him a Senate seat. “I said, Jean, I’m a triple-A guy – abolish, abolish, abolish – so it would be a little hypocritical of me to take a seat in the Senate.”
When the president of University of British Columbia invited him to work on sustainability issues, Harcourt bit. He spent a few years there, as well as serving on the National Round Table for the Environment and the Economy, the BC Treaty Commission, and the boards of the Vancouver Airport Authority, the Vancouver Port Authority and other boards and commissions.
Harcourt currently chairs the Age-Well Network, which exists to improve the quality of life for aging. He also chairs QUEST – Quality Urban Energy Systems of Tomorrow – which brings businesses, governments, utilities and others together to make Canada a world leader in smart energy.
He’s worked with the Nisga’a Commercial Group of Companies and the Musqueam Capital Corp., both of which advance financial independence for their respective First Nations.
In his spare time, Harcourt does a lot of volunteering, particularly around homelessness and First Nations issues.
Harcourt estimates he works about 35 to 40 hours a week, compared with the 80 to 90 when he was mayor and premier. And while he says he sees no point in giving it up, a rough 2016 did slow him down somewhat. He had open-heart surgery, to repair a ballooning aorta, followed by lower-back surgery to address a cracking disc.
At his wife’s urging, he does plan to reduce his schedule a bit.
“That’s where I’m trying to get to, but retiring totally I just don’t see happening,” he says. “Why? There are too many interesting issues and projects to deal with.”
Joe Segal
By Glen Korstrom
Joe Segal is 91 years old and he still puts in more than 40 hours a week at Kingswood Capital Corp., which is the real estate and investment company that he founded in 1979.
He has never considered retiring. In fact, he says that the concept does not make sense for him.
“You’re speaking with an individual who has never had a job in his life,” Segal says while sitting in a comfortable chair behind a large desk in his office above Pacific Centre in downtown Vancouver.
“I’ve been independent all of my life. I was in the army overseas in World War II. I took orders because when you’re in the army you take orders or you wind up peeling potatoes. I vowed I would never have a job when I got out of the army. I would be independent. That’s what I’ve done.”
Business has been his passion since he returned from military duty in Europe and launched an army surplus store in 1946. He had little money to buy products to resell and excess military supplies were cheap.
He later founded and realized sufficient success at Fields to afford to buy the struggling Zellers chain in 1976. He doubled sales within three years and flipped the company in a sale to Hudson’s Bay Co. in 1979.
Since then he has been dabbling in myriad investments – from real estate to baby cribs to space imagery.
His current role at Kingswood is what he calls being a “bird dog.” Segal is the one who finds potential investments and analyzes pitches that people send him.
Every night he takes a pile of papers home to his west- side home and sorts through them. He also reads seven newspapers a day.
For health reasons, he often spends an hour in his home pool in the morning doing resistance exercises.
Segal could reduce his workload but he thrives on activity.
Seven years ago he had a stroke and was left incapacitated.
“I couldn’t talk and I couldn’t walk,” Segal says. “It was frustrating, absolutely frustrating to have this feeling of uselessness with no productivity. It’s better to be dead than alive if you can’t contribute.”
His work ethic does not mean that he for`goes vacations. Segal and wife Rosalie have gone on cruises and on trips to the sunshine, but he is a reluctant tourist.
“I don’t vacation unless I want to go somewhere,” he says. “I don’t plan vacations. If I decide that I want to go somewhere, I go. But I like it at home.”
Spending time at work means that he gets to see a lot of sons Lorne and Gary. Lorne heads the company’s real estate division while Gary runs some subsidiary companies. But the work is also personally rewarding, he says.
“What else am I supposed to do? Wither and die because I’m 91? My life is exciting. Every day is a different day. Every day I see something new. I don’t mean material things, just life. You’re either part of life or you’re retired. You’re either in or you’re out. If you’re retired, you’re out.”
Constance Isherwood
By Amy Smart
While many people in their 90s have been retired for at least a couple of decades, Constance Isherwood sticks to her routine: arriving at the office every afternoon to see an average of 20 clients per week.
At 96, Isherwood is the oldest practising lawyer in British Columbia. She’s grown accustomed to the common question: aren’t you interested in retiring?
“I get this question frequently from clients and also from friends and neighbours. There’s always that curiosity,” she says. “The more I think about it, the more I think it’s rather a good idea. I must do it one of these times. Maybe next year.”
The petite woman, warm and composed, speaks from behind her desk in the 1887 heritage house on Victoria’s Fort Street, where she works in general civil law.
Isherwood, called to the bar 65 years ago, didn’t have a passion for law when she started – she played piano and drums, and would have liked to have been in an orchestra. But she worked for a lawyer who encouraged her to enrol at the University of British Columbia’s law school.
She did, and launched what would be a series of trailblazing landmarks for B.C. women in the legal profession. When she entered law school in 1948, Isherwood was one of only eight women in a class of 208. By the time Isherwood graduated at the top of the class in 1951, she had become the first woman to win the Law Society of British Columbia’s gold medal.
Last October, she became the first woman to win the law society’s highest honour for lifetime achievement.
Isherwood, née Holmes, says she has never felt excluded or had to work harder to prove herself. In school, men copied her homework and gave her the nickname “Sherlock Holmes” for her meticulous research. “There was just a feeling of camaraderie,” she recalls.
After graduating, she was welcomed back to Victoria with a job by her mentor, Ernest Tait, and formed Tait & Holmes. In 1963, she opened Holmes & Isherwood with her husband, Foster Isherwood.
“The reason that I am still working is that I like the work and I also like the interaction with people; it’s almost the social aspect of it. It’s the work with clients and different people that you enjoy,” she says.
Isherwood believes work is also part of what has kept her healthy.
“I think for people who like to work and keep working, as long as they are happy with it and able to do it, it’s a benefit, both to them and to the people they help.”
Jim Byrnes
By Baila Lazarus
If there’s a character on the horizon that Jim Byrnes has yet to play, it should be the Energizer rabbit. At 68, the singer-songwriter, film/television/stage actor, radio host, narrator and voiceover artist does not seem to slow down for a second.
At the time of writing, Byrnes had just come back from an extensive tour across the Northwest Territories and northern B.C. (he rattles off 13 cities he visited as though they were stores in a mall where he had just finished his Christmas shopping); he was just finishing up his run as Scrooge in Bah! Humbug! – the Downtown Eastside’s modern-day version of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol; he was prepping for a tour of Vancouver Island with his band the following week; and he was still organizing his Roundhouse Radio show that runs Saturday evenings.
The man has had four days off since September.
Known for starring in TV roles in Wiseguy and Highlander, Byrnes still picks up the odd acting role, does voice work for commercials and narrates TV programs for the Knowledge Network, but what takes up most of his time is music, and it’s clear that music is what feeds his soul and keeps his energy going.
He still plays over 100 dates a year in North America and Europe.
“When on stage, I’m home. That’s me,” says the multiple Juno Award winner. “The energy and love from the audience nourishes and keeps me moving.”
In fact, the only thing that seems to slow the musician down is the travelling.
“I’ve gotten to a point where I really hate going to the airport because of my disability,” he says, referencing a 1972 accident in which he lost both his legs.
Surprisingly, despite the enormous success he’s had over the years, he still considers his career as “feast or famine.” There are times when his band’s gigs conflict with a movie role, and he has to pass on one or the other, including one recently where he was to play opposite Anthony Hopkins, but had to give it up because of a conflict with his band’s dates.
Aside from the music and acting, Byrnes enjoys family time travelling with his wife – last year they visited Amsterdam and Paris. Among the things still to do on his list he includes a new album he’ll be recording in March and a memoir to write “some day.”
And as far as retiring?
“You know, every year I have a meeting with my bank adviser to talk about finances and for the last three or four years he’s asked me when I’m going to retire. I guess when I fall over on stage and can’t get up.”•
