Peter Hugh Pocklington

Peter Hugh Pocklington (born November 18, 1941) is a Canadian entrepreneur and vocal advocate of free-market capitalism. He is also a convicted felon, having pleaded guilty in the state of California to committing perjury during bankruptcy proceedings.

The one-time head of a business empire that spanned auto dealerships, food-processing companies, real estate, a trust companyand professional sports teams, Pocklington is perhaps best known as the owner of the National Hockey League's Edmonton Oilersand as the man who traded the rights to hockey's greatest player, Wayne Gretzky, to the Los Angeles Kings.

Pocklington's life experiences were extensively documented in the 2009 biography, I'd Trade Him Again: On Gretzky, Politics And The Pursuit Of The Perfect Deal, written by Terry McConnell and J'lyn Nye. The book's title was inspired by Pocklington's ongoing conviction the Gretzky trade was the right deal at the right time and had a positive impact on all parties concerned - the Oilers, the Kings, Gretzky and the game itself.

Pocklington was born in Regina, Saskatchewan, to Basil Pocklington, an insurance executive who had immigrated from England as a young man, and his wife, Eileen (Dempsey), and grew up in London, Ontario.

The greatest influence on young Pocklington was the legendary motivational speaker Earl Nightingale and his best-selling recording, The Strangest Secret. "It literally stated, 'You become what you think about,' " Pocklington told his biographers. He says he still has the record today.

One of his earliest business ventures was to find old cars on the farms around his maternal grandparents' home in Carberry, Manitoba, buy them for $25, then ship them toOntario by train, where he sold them for upwards of $500. Because of the West's dry, cold climate, the cars, many of them 25 to 40 years old, were in better shape than comparable vehicles that had been driven on Ontario's salted roads.

By the time Pocklington was 25, he owned his first car dealership, Westown Ford in Tilbury, Ontario. At the time, he was the youngest Ford dealer in Canada. Within a few yea

rs he had sold the Tilbury dealership and bought another in nearby Chatham. By 1971, when Pocklington was only 29, he left Ontario and moved west, where he bought Shirley Ford in Edmonton, Alberta.

Within a few years, Pocklington was running the most successful Ford dealership in Canada. He also had the cash flow to buy Edmonton's fledgling team in the World Hockey Association.

While Pocklington's business empire realized its successes, it suffered its failures, too. Prime interest rates in the early 1980s topped out at 18.5 per cent, a development that sapped the oil boom of its strength, collapsed the real estate market and sank Fidelity Trust in a sea of declining property values.

But perhaps Pocklington's most notorious setback was the result of a six-month strike that crippled Gainers, which at the time was Canada's second largest meat packer. Pocklington used non-union labour, primarily from Quebec, to keep the plant operating despite the picket lines, a decision that earned him the enmity of Canada's labour movement. Eventually, he agreed to settle the strike and rehire the striking workers at the request of the Alberta government. In return, says Pocklington in his biography, the Alberta premier of the day, Don Getty, agreed to give Gainers an interest-free loan for $50 million. Gainers would give the province 10 per cent of its operating profit every year for the next four years, and repay a conventional mortgage after that. Pocklington also insisted the province disband its pork marketing board, which fixed prices on pork at a rate higher than what the meat packers could sell it in the marketplace.

nstead, the government gave Gainers $55 million at 10.5 per cent interest, and didn't get rid of the marketing board. "They said, 'Take it or leave it,' " Pocklington told his biographers. Crippled with a debt-servicing cost it did not anticipate and handicapped by inflated production costs created by the marketing board, Gainers immediately began to drown in a sea of red ink. Loan repayments were missed and within three years, the Alberta government took over Gainers. The province lost $89 million on the venture in the four years it operated Gainers — more than double the rate of loss in Pocklington's last few years at the helm — and eventually sold the company for 1/20th of the price Pocklington paid for it 11 years earlier.

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