I have never embraced the idea that one should not say anything if you have nothing nice to say. This is the ethic of the charlatan and the git. This is not to say that one should not use good manners as problems are honestly surveyed. Yet one has to admire the particular gusto with which this Toronto Star writer takes on the tale of the ending of corporate thingie BCE announced yesterday:

...The die may have been cast in the gradual decline of a great company on April 28, 1983, when Ma Bell was reinvented as BCE by then-Bell CEO Albert Jean de Grandpré. Bored by the regulated phone business, the trained lawyer and erstwhile classmate of Pierre Trudeau at Montreal's Jean de Brebeuf College refocused one of North America's most consistently well-run phone utilities away from its core business. His almost comically maladroit diversification campaign took Bell into natural gas pipelines, a trust company, women's magazine publishing, banknote and other commercial printing, office towers and shopping centres in Canada and the United States and far-flung cable operations in the United States and Britain.

De Grandpré's successors were left with the unenviable task of unloading that grab-bag of troubled assets at an enormous loss. But Jean Monty, CEO in the 1990s, was the equal to de Grandpré as an ambitious and ill-starred empire builder, snapping up fibre-optic giant Teleglobe Inc., CTV Inc. and The Globe and Mail, and leaving it to Sabia to endure huge writeoffs on Teleglobe, Bell Canada International Inc. and other chronic red-ink generators.

Feckless diversification takes its toll in two ways...