The Rogers Family Compact$1:
Who are the Rogers family? How did they get so powerful? Why have they turned against one another? And what does it matter? We've spent a week immersed in Rogers history to bring you this unofficial narrative of Canada's telecom overlords.
Over Troubled Rogers$1:
The author of a key profile of Edward Rogers explains what might really be going on
On May 27, 2008, the employees of Rogers Communications loaded onto buses. Their destination was the Rogers Centre, and the occasion was the 75th birthday of company founder Ted Rogers.
The telecom giant had purchased and renamed the stadium a bit more than three years earlier, and, for a few hours in the middle of a Tuesday, took full advantage of the field’s vast acreage to host a full-on carnival, with stilt-walkers, midway games, a mechanical bull, and 80s Canrock quintet Glass Tiger. (The Globe reported that a more intimate celebration the preceding weekend featured Harry Connick Jr., Paul Anka, and Harry Belafonte.)
The event culminated with 7,000 employees singing “Happy Birthday” to their boss, followed by perhaps the most elaborate fireworks display one could safely have under a 282-foot dome.
It was the kind of birthday bash that could be viewed as obscene, had it not turned out to be Ted Rogers’s last: suffering from congestive heart failure, he passed away that December.
As not just the founder of his company but also its CEO, media speculation around his succession plans stretched back at least to 1990, when the Globe took note of then 22-year-old daughter Lisa joining the board of Rogers’s broadcasting subsidiary.
“None of [my children] will succeed me because of my age — there’ll be someone who’s not a Rogers in between,” he said to the paper. “But after that there will be plenty of opportunity.”
Three decades after those remarks, and 13 years following his death, that opportunity has now devolved into a crisis. Ted’s only son, Edward S. Rogers III, has gone to war with his mother and three sisters. On the surface, the dispute stems from his recent efforts to fire the CEO, Joe Natale, and replace him with the CFO, Tony Staffieri. But the events quickly cascaded to expose larger, longstanding rifts regarding the direction of the company, what it means to own and run a family business, and who gets to follow in the patriarch’s footsteps and how.
CKA Moderator 
CKA Moderator 
