Schad Plan Exposed -- bear naked
Outfitter has little to show after year of promises
by Brit Griffin HighGrader Magazine November/December 2000

"This kind of thing changes a person's self-image, when you have your culture and you are proud of it, and then you're told it's a shameful thing, that is the most painful aspect of all of this. Anybody, in the end, can sustain a financial loss, but this goes much deeper."
- Lark Ritchie, hunter/guide, commenting on loss of spring bear hunt.

He was the kind of kid you noticed. With his hair all sticking up, always wearing funny trousers, either with big stripes or way too short, Trevor Kinch was more Carnaby Street than Tommy Hilfiger. He didn't fit in with the usual clean-cut hockey types or the bush boys, and he sure didn't look like a bear hunting guide.
But that's exactly what Trevor was, working summers at his father's hunt camp on the Montreal River near Elk Lake, Ontario. His father Barry and mother Kelsey had been running Mountain Chutes camp for 20 years. A mainstay of the Kinch's income was the spring bear hunt.
That is, until multimillionaire plastics magnate Robert Schad laid down the law with Ontario's Tories and the spring bear hunt was suddenly deep-sixed (see Bear Bait to Birkenstocks HighGrader May 1999). The Kinch family, along with 800 other family-based businesses in Northern Ontario was suddenly facing financial ruin.
Not to worry, proclaimed Robert Schad's supporters. With the bear hunt gone, northern tourist operations would be able to embrace the lucrative new field of eco-tourism. The well-heeled Schad Foundation was going to take the lead in weaning northerners off the hunting/fishing economy. They bankrolled Adventure Travel Ontario (ATO) with the mandate to take bear outfitters and reinvent them as eco-tourism entrepreneurs. Barry Kinch's camp was one of original six chosen for the enviro-makeover.
Brian McAndrew, writing in the Toronto Star, provided readers with the poster boy for the greening of the northern economy - 23-year-old Trevor Kinch: "Kinch has spiky hair dyed the colour of burgundy wine. He wears pink tinted sunglasses and baggy-ass khaki shorts over his lanky frame. He is the new face of northern adventure tourism."
Over a year later, (August 23, 2000) the Globe and Mail was still enthusing about Schad's successful vision. And once again, young Trevor, with his dream of running mountain bikes through the wilderness, was being touted as the northern Pygmalion.
What the Globe article didn't mention was that ATO had come up firing blanks. After over a year of much publicity, and a hefty outlay of cash for consultants, there wasn't much to show for all the hoopla. A promising partnership with a northern tourism group was in tatters and the government had yet to buy into the plan at any level.
After having screened numerous applicants, the Schad Foundation picked the six most promising projects and yet only two seem to have gotten any money.
And as for the new face of northern tourism? Despite being still listed on the ATO home-page at press time, Barry Kinch had long since pulled up stakes, disillusioned if not outright bitter.
Today, he's still trying to hobble together a living out of the fall bear hunt, while his son Trevor has had to pack his bags and head out west.

Taken at His Word
Barry Kinch hunts. He's built strong friendships with the American hunters who come up, year after year, to his camp. It's a business of sorts, but more like a fraternity. In the off-season Barry heads down to the States to meet up with his 'clients' to go off hunting as a team in West Virginia.
He's a bushman, straight up, no veneer. Soft spoken but unflinching in his desire to simply be left alone, Barry Kinch is a man at odds with the times.
Nowhere is this more evident than in his experience with the fall-out after the cancellation of the spring bear hunt.
When Robert Schad announced that his Foundation would assist the financially devastated bear outfitters with eco-tourism opportunities, Kinch took Robert Schad at his word.
"I don't know what happened," says Kinch, looking back, "I've meet alot of people in my day, and I know how it all works, but I put my trust in them. I know of course that you don't get something for nothing, but I really did believe they would help me make a go of it."
The promises were big and from the way the representatives were talking, the sky was the limit. The Kinch family were under the impression that the Schad people had the money and the will to make sure that the project was going to be a guaranteed success.
Schad had thrown an impressive amount of dough into ATO. Based out of a Yorkville office, ATO staged a flashy and cocky public debut. ATO dismissed naysayers, comparing themselves to the Group of Seven: "Many in Northern Ontario claimed that the paintings would never sell. The skeptics were proved wrong."
The press jumped on the ATO bandwagon - a social experiment which would triumph over the negativism of country bumpkins still wedded to the gill and guts economy.
At the helm of ATO were a contrasting duo: David Cotter, a hard-nosed political lobbyist (former aid to John Snobolen) responsible for marketing, and a tourism greenhorn (fresh from graduation) Matthew Binks as Director of Operations.
Cotter's role in ATO remains of source of some complexity. Cotter's involvement began with the management of the campaign to end the spring bear hunt. At the time he was working for World Wildlife Fund (WWF), then moved to ATO as Director of Marketing and then recently to the Schad Foundation.
Back in February of 1999, though, Cotter told HighGrader that he "did whatever the Schad Foundation wants me to do". The impression he left with a number of insiders, regardless of what title he was wearing at the time, was that he was Schad's right-hand man.
Binks and Cotter were backed up by a hefty pool of hired consultants (a maximum of seven). That meant nine well-paid paid staff/consultants to handle the four outfitters that remained as demonstration projects.
With odds like that, how could it go wrong?
Despite the on-going ruckus raised by a few stalwart bear outfitters, everything was looking good. By the fall of 1999, ATO was predicting "rapid future growth". There was even some talk of expanding to 50 outfitters after the first year of demonstration projects if the government was willing to ante up some money

"I remember sitting right here with David Cotter,"says Barry Kinch from the little deck attached to his outfitting camp, "and he'd look around and say, we can put in flower beds there, get some landscaping done, get an interior designer in to re-do your cabins, get kayaks. You wouldn't have believed some of the ideas."
A long list of suggestions followed the site visits from the various consultants. Everything from fluffier towels, bigger coffee mugs and wine tasting seminars were tossed around.
"You have to look at your clientele," explains Cotter from his office at Schad's Bolton-based Husky Injection Molding plant, "He (Barry) wanted to do birding. You're going to be attracting 45 - 55 year old birders and these are the kind of people who drive SUVs and have $500 dollar binoculars. If these people come to your place they are going to want the amenities that they are used to. So you identify those things in your business planning process and you try to implement them." Cotter adds "Personally, for me, I like nice red wine."
Kinch wasn't the only operator trying to figure out how to start attracting a new kind of tourist. Outfitter Vicki Lowe was in the initial shortlist of proposals to the Schad folks.
"They sent up two young guys, they spent a couple of hours walking around. Then they suggested that we stop cutting the grass and grow wildflowers. Well the reason we keep the grass back from the buildings is to fight the bugs and the snakes. I don't think anyone's going to pay $1000 to sit and fight off bugs for a week."
Lowe said her operation depended on hunters, who were willing to put up with the vagaries of vacationing in the northern bush. The hunters came regardless of the weather or the bugs.
On the other hand, she says she's had eco-tourists ask her if she has paved bike trails. Says Lowe, "We don't even have paved roads out here."
The Schad consultants suggested a number of upgrades, right up to installing saunas. But Lowe, like the other outfitters, was struggling financially.
"Just putting in one chemical toilet is about $1200. I don't have that kind of money."
She didn't think much of the Schad consultants and figures the consultants didn't think much of her either. "I think they were just sussing us out, they didn't even leave a business card or anything."

Like Lowe, Kinch was concerned about the cost of the make-over. Successful eco-tourism operations in the north depended on a number of crucial factors -- location, financial resources and the particular personality of owners who could relate to the more upscale clients.
Although Kinch was a passionate birder and naturalist, his camp had the kind of lived in, rough-hewn look you'd expect from a bear camp. The main counter top was crammed with yellowed snapshots of the many bear hunters who had come and gone over the years - picts of kills and hunters dating back 20 years. All this would have to go if Mountain Chutes was serious about impressing a new class of clientele.
For Kinch, however, those photos and memorabillia represented 20 years of his life.
From the get-go Barry was clear with ATO - with his bear business down the tubes, any make-overs were secondary. With recent renovations to a couple of cabins weighing him down, and the repayment of spent bear hunting deposits, he was being squeezed. He needed refinancing.
"At Easter of '99, Don Huff (ATO consultant and campaigner to end spring bear hunt) came out and financing was the main thing I talked about. When Matthew Binks and David Cotter came out in the summer, once again we talked refinancing. We didn't want a whole lot of extras, we were mainly concerned with refinancing and that was the talk, that it could happen through the Schad Foundation. So our whole involvement hinged on this refinancing."
In late October, Kinch wrote to Matthew Binks to remind him that the survival of Mountain Chutes depended on getting some long term financing. "We hope that you can use your influence to speed up the process of finding an institution to back us in our refinancing endeavor".
By then, Kinch was already having concerns about the direction ATO was heading. A glossy brochure that had been produced at use for trade shows claimed Mountain Chutes camp offered biking on the scenic Ishapatina Ridge and Maple Mountain.
"I raised some major comments over that one. I said 'This is bullshit, we're not in a position to offer this stuff.' There were no bike trails, we didn't have any kayaks. But the thing went to print anyway."
Frustrated by lack of progress, and still with no action on possible financing, Kinch mentioned to ATO that he was thinking of expanding his fall bear hunt by two weeks. Even though it wasn't likely that he'd get many hunters, as they tend to book far in advance, any extra income would would help.
"David Cotter told me Mr. Schad wouldn't like that."
When HighGrader asked Cotter about this he refused to discuss particulars. "This is just going to be a 'he said, she said' story. I don't want to get into a negative debate with Barry Kinch. Let's just say we didn't agree on direction."

ATO had come out in a blaze of positive publicity but it was acutely aware that they were still being tagged as meddling southerners. In response, they ditched the Yorkville digs and traded down for an office in Sudbury. ATO was always careful to mention that Binks had origins in the north.
But it was going to take more than an office in Nickel City to garner some legitimacy.
ATO had yet to come up with a win and disgruntled outfitters were still hammering away at the Schad link. Binks even suggested via e-mail that it might be time to "distance ourselves from the Schad name."
As well, the tourism evangelists were having trouble accommodating themselves to the realities of northern-based family-run operations. This was definitely the problem with attempting to create workable business plans acceptable to the Schad Foundation. As one consultant said "David's idea of business and Barry's idea of business couldn't be further apart."
For Kinch his business was a way of life. Money that flowed into the family economy was intricately tied to the bear hunt operation and vice versa. The business plan, however, was aimed at creating a bottom-line driven business.
"I don't think they (ATO) realized that the outfitters were such small family-run operations," says Kinch, "Maybe they didn't realize that most of us doing our own little thing out here in the bush weren't doing it so we could become Robert Schads."
Kinch made a number of attempts to write a coherent business plan that would attract support from ATO. But it was time-consuming. His business was in trouble and ATO's promised support was nowhere to be seen. Then he began to sense that the development of the mountain biking operation was starting to get the cold shoulder from the Schad people and mountain-biking was key to Trevor's future with the family-run camp.
Again it was the pressures of bottom-line marketability. Consultants wanted to tone down the mountain biking (despite all the earlier enthusiasm promoting it), suggesting Trevor maybe rent the bikes and keep working on a business plan to attract financial backing from the banks. But the Kinch's had no extra dough kicking around to even consider taking on more costs themselves.
Then came the phone call with David Cotter.
"He told me there was nothing they (ATO) could do to help me, that I might as well declare bankruptcy. That wasn't exactly the kind of help I wanted. He said I didn't have a viable business. Well excuse me, I've just been in business for 20 years."
But Cotter isn't making any apologies. He says they never got a complete business plan from Barry Kinch. He says it was clear from the contract that they signed with the outfitters that a business plan would be expected. "As you go forward with a business plan, it is not a good business plan if you cannot attract financing from a bank."
If attracting financing from a bank was that simple he wouldn't have needed the Schad Foundation in the first place. And all the suggestions about a camp make-over and expanded packages were well and good, but who was going to pay for them? Certainly not ATO.
As far as HighGrader can discern, in their first year of operations, ATO budgeted some $314,765.70 on it's staff, consultants and their expenses. Only incidental amounts actually went to outfitters. Some money went into marketing but as one industry insider pointed out "It takes three to five years to make this kind of transition. Everybody wants to market these guys but their biggest problem is that they (the outfitters) just don't have the capital to make the transition."
In their second year budget proposal, ATO requested $200,000, of which only $70,000 would actually go for upgrades to the three remaining outfitters. So over the life-time of ATO more than seven times the money went to pay staff as to the actual outfitters that the project was set up to assist.
Matthew Binks admits that maybe things should have been done differently. "It was an expensive way to learn some very important lessons and our operating budget has been reduced because we were not ready for some of the things we tried to do at the front end."

Throughout this period, resentment against the Schad name continued to simmer. On-going pressure from a persistent group of outfitters continued to dog the Schad Foundation and ATO. Schad was still tangled up in the court case brought against him by the Ontario Black Bear Association (OBBA).
Ultimately the courts threw out the case mounted by the OBBA against Schad. He decided to play hard-ball and demanded $15,000 in court costs from the fledgling organization. With many of the outfitters already close to bankruptcy, there was no way the outfitters could make good on the money.
In a move no doubt aimed at putting a happier face of the reversed David and Goliath scenario that was emerging, Schad backed off a bit. He demanded that OBBA ante up 10 grand and fork it over to the Wildlands League. Eventually, Schad backed off altogether.
Last summer, a rumour hit that Schad had enough of the tourism experiment and was pulling out. When asked about ATO's trip to the precipice, David Cotter was not happy. He denied it vigorously.
"That was entirely made up and being as blunt as I can, you got that from someone who was ill-informed, uneducated or stupid. And I'll say it again that is utter nonsense."
But a November e-mail from Matthew Binks to David Cotter, however, had Binks saying "We must be prepared for the prospect of Robert pulling the plug."
Binks claims that his comments didn't "reflect anything about Robert's feelings. At the time we were facing alot of politics around the spring bear hunt, I wouldn't say hostility, but there was a cautionary period when I was travelling across the north and it was if things continue like this I don't know how it can continue."
When HighGrader Magazine called to find out what the big guy was really thinking, Robert Schad refused to emerge from beneath his cone of silence. Our call was returned by David Cotter.

In attempts to bolster its northern image, ATO hooked up with Discovery North Centre for Business (DNCB), a not-for-profit group operating out of Elliot Lake. But it wasn't long before the bloom was off the rose and friction developed between ATO and DNCB over lack of communication and divergent directions. After a brief fling at partnership, DNCB ran a terse statement in several northern newspapers disclaiming any relationship with ATO.
DNCB spokesperson Marie Murphy-Foran was reluctant to discuss details, saying there were still unresolved issues. Rumors suggest besides some serious bad blood there's also a squabble about money.
Matthew Binks says he did not see the turn for the worse with DNCB coming. "They sat down with us and said this is what we need. We said we were prepared to make a long-term commitment. But I guess we've gone our separate ways."
Howard Hennessey, a board member with DNCB, was quoted by writer June Bland of the Kenora Daily News and Miner as saying that ATO "...is very shady in its operations and budgets... you never know where the money is coming from or going to..."
Indeed, ATO seems to have had a knack for making even the simplest questions convoluted. Although listed as a general partnership in their business name registration, Cotter says that ATO was set-up as a not-for-profit. Binks says that ATO never actually registered as a not-for-profit "....because we were simply a demonstration project and ATO as an organization had no need to register. As well, there's significant legal expenses and we didn't want to incur those until it was appropriate."
This would explain why they have had to rely on the World Wildlife Fund to act as their 'fiscal agent'. All invoices for expenses are forwarded to WWF.
And the cloak and dagger stuff continues to plague ATO's image - the use of terms such as the "funnelling of money", or schemes to have the Schad Foundation "run money" through the Ministry of Natural Resources to "facilitate large sum funding" (MNR spokesman Paul Demers said the idea sounded 'unusual' and had no knowledge of it). E-mails from the various parties talk about plans for off loading blame for their failure on the Tories or trying to keep ATO 'virtual' as long as the bad publicity persists.
The language used in ATO correspondence sounds more like the bungling CIA operative types in a Grahame Greene novel, rather than an organization handling tourism development. And like some of Greene's undercover operatives, ATO seemed to have trouble delivering the promised goods.
Matthew Binks is circumspect about the whole thing. "Yeah, a little more clarity up front would have been a great thing, but I couldn't offer it because I didn't have it myself. But I don't want to repeat any of the mistakes we made. That's a hope."
Cotter, on the other hand, offers no regrets.
"There are some outfitters that aren't going to be able to make this transition and I've said that from the day we started this and I still believe it. But if you're going back to whether the bear hunt should have been cancelled, yes, it should have been, this is not an economics decision, this is an ethics decision."
To Barry Kinch the issue of ethics is still very touchy.
Looking back on the last year he wonders if the Schad Foundation was just interested in getting some good PR after strong-arming the bear hunt out of existence.
"From my perspective, after all the press was done, I think they had gotten all they could out of us. After that, they weren't too interested. "
And despite Cotter's doom and gloom predictions about the viability of Barry's operation, Mountain Chutes Camp is still operating. He's doing his own thing, the way he wants, offering hospitality to friends, living with the bush. His way. Though I guess he's missing Trevor.
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