HAMILTON – Cable industry veteran Owen Boris died Saturday night at his home in Hamilton after suffering a heart attack. He was 79.
Boris founded Hamilton’s Mountain Cablevision in 1959 and remained principal owner of the successful cableco for half a century before selling the business to Shaw Communications in July 2009. At that time, Boris told Cartt.ca that he felt that the time was right to retire and to “pass this great history on to someone with more financial muscle.”
Fellow industry veteran JR Shaw described Boris as “truly one of a kind”.
“There’s no one else in the industry quite like him,” the Shaw Communications founder and executive chair told Cartt.ca in an interview. “He spoke his mind and it didn’t matter if it was somebody in the industry, the Commission, or the government, he told it like he believed in it. He had no hesitation, he was straight forward, he was always honest and forthright. He was a person that we’re really going to miss.”
Prior to launching his cable company, Boris (pictured, below right), an engineer by trade, was a member of the team that helped to create the famous, and infamous, Avro Arrow jet. When that project was scrapped by the Diefenbaker government months after its test flight, Boris turned his focus to his fledgling TV repair business, and banked on the notion that his neighbours may be interested in receiving more television channels from nearby Buffalo and Toronto than the current over-the-air technology could provide. Along with some help from his wife Marta, Boris built a TV tower in his Hamilton Mountain backyard and began digging trenches through their neighbours’ yards to run cable lines to their homes.
And there was no looking back, according to those who knew him best.
“Owen was a strong willed person, and if you were working around him you had two choices – either get out of his way because he was going somewhere and you’d better not impede his mission, or join him,” said Pat Kiely, who was hired by Boris in 1999 as Mountain Cable’s director of business operations and who now works for Shaw in Winnipeg. “And if you joined him, you were going for a hell of a ride. He had a vision about the way things should be, and he didn’t wait around for people to get 100% onside, he just kind of pushed the issue until it got resolved to his satisfaction, and I think that’s what a pioneer needs to do in an industry, and what was required of him – and it was a characteristic that stayed with him for 50 years in this business.”
Mountain Cablevision eventually grew into one of the country’s most successful independent cable companies, due in large part to Boris’ technical wizardry and tolerance for risk.
“Boris had a real love of technology,” Rogers Communications vice chairman Phil Lind told Cartt.ca. “When you consider what he did with his small base, it was quite amazing. He was not very far behind, almost alongside actually, the big companies when it came to new technological advancements for the system. And that’s neat because the bigger companies always had lots more resources, but Owen was always right there with the best of them in terms of ‘here’s what the cable systems can do, and here’s what we’re going to do’.
“The other guys would wait awhile and see whether it would or not it would work and how it would work before they would put it in to their systems, but not Owen. He was right there with the best,” Lind added.
Boris’ son Les, who, along with his sister Jackie, also worked at Mountain Cable, described his father’s work ethic as “passionate about providing a good technical service and a good customer service.”
“He loved serving the public – he liked his customers and the people who worked for him,” the younger Boris told Cartt.ca. “When we sold the cable company to Shaw, we were the most successful cable TV company in North America as far as being a competitive telephone provider to the telephone companies. Within four or five years, we had almost three quarters of our customers taking our phone service and I think that was one of the accomplishments that he was very proud of.”
Added Capital Networks’ Bil Trainor, a supplier with a long relationship with Owen and Mountain Cable: “(Owen) always got the engineering part right and coupled it with unmatched customer service, that resulted in achieving and maintaining some of North America’s highest penetration rates for cable, telephone and Internet.”
“Let me tell you this about his cable system that we bought,” continued JR Shaw. “It was one of the most advanced and up-to-date cable systems that we’ve ever bought. It was there, ready to go, and whether it was Internet, telephone, or two-way, he was on the leading edge both when he sold and all the way along.”
But it was loyalty, whether to customers, employees, or fellow cable operators that appears to have set Boris apart.
“In addition to being a tremendous contributor to the success of the cable industry, he was somebody who was a proud family man and loyal to his employees,” Shaw Communications president Peter Bissonnette told Cartt.ca. “He was proud to be able to treat his employees generously when the company was sold, and he conducted that transaction with their best interests in mind.”
Canadian Cable Systems Alliance president and CEO Alyson Townsend also highlighted Boris’ passion and devotion to the Canadian cable industry, his family and his employees.
“He was an entrepreneur for sure, and fiercely loyal to those he was friends with whether it was personal friends or business friends,” she said. “The CCSA was lucky that we were the recipient of that fierce loyalty. When he backed you, he never looked back.”
Townsend recalled Boris inviting all CCSA member companies considering launching home telephone service to visit him at Mountain to tour the facility and benefit from both his experience and mistakes. “He was a great teacher, and a number of members took him up on it,” she continued. “Owen always believed in the little guy, and that the little guy could co-operate with another little guy to build something unique.”
As a founding member of the CCSA, Boris was honoured with a lifetime achievement award by the organization at its annual general meeting in 2009.
Cartt.ca editor and publisher Greg O’Brien remembers Boris as a candid source, and described the Canadian cable industry as “poorer without his voice – even if that voice was a little ornery sometimes.”
“Owen was the ultimate straight-shooter so as a reporter, he was gold because you always knew where he stood,” O’Brien said. “He was not afraid to speak his mind and despite Mountain Cable’s relative size, Owen was often able to set the tone for the cable industry, especially during the height of the battle against black market satellite, for example.”
In addition to building Mountain, Boris also brought a modern cable TV system to Port-au-Prince Haiti in the early 1980s, plus built and operated cable systems near Fort Lauderdale, Florida and in Atlanta. But it was philanthropic ventures that became his focus in the last few years, according to his son Les.
“He wanted to give back to the community that made the business and family successful”, Les Boris continued. “He just gave $3 million to the Toronto Western and General Hospital Foundation to set up a chair that is going to lead their new initiatives in stem cell eye research, he’s been working with the St. Joseph Hospital Foundation to make a substantial donation to their new alcohol research centre in Hamilton, and with McMaster University Hospital on some of their stem cell research initiatives. The family knows what his wishes are there, and we’ll be carrying on and making that come to fruition.”
Pre-deceased by his youngest son Peter, Boris is survived by his wife of 52 years, Marta, his children Les and Jackie, and six grandchildren.
A celebration of Owen’s life will take place on Thursday, May 5 at the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum in Hamilton from 4 – 7 p.m. and Les predicts that the upbeat occasion will be “one hell of a good bash.” Donations in memory of Boris can be made to the St. Joseph Hospital Foundation or the Heart and Stroke Foundation.
