Venture
When Venture first launched in 1985, one stated goal was to be a TV version of the Wall Street Journal's front page: lively, lucid and wide-ranging. It's about business, but it's not just for businessmen and businesswomen. Venture covered all the aspects of the economy in Canada and beyond: prices, profits, personnel, innovation and ideas as they affect any business. From farms to fishing boats, boardrooms to barbershops, Venture was about the business of making a living. CBC cancelled Venture in 2007, after an amazing 22 seasons on the air. Twenty-three years after Venture's debut, the CBC Digital Archives focuses on the show's first season, under host Patrick Watson.
37 television clips
Everyone's got a theory
Broadcast Date: April 6, 1997
It seems everyone's got a theory about Bre-X. To find out what people are thinking in the weeks following the initial Bre-X crash, CBC's Venture hit the streets of Toronto. "I think there's gold," declares one believer. "I believe in Bre-X," says another. Others, however, are more skeptical, announcing that the whole thing is probably a big scam. And a number of those asked think the Bre-X saga would make a great Tom Clancy-style movie.People also seem to delight in speculating on what happened to de Guzman, the geologist who died after a fall from a helicopter. "I don't think he committed suicide," says one woman, while another interviewee considers the possibility that he was pushed out.
And one smug passerby poses the rhetorical question, "Wasn't it Mark Twain who said 'Gold mines are holes in the ground with liars on top'?"
Everyone's got a theory
• Until the Strathcona Report (released in early May) provided proof that fraud had occurred, there were many Canadians who still had faith in Bre-X. A Maclean's magazine article from late April, for instance, stated: "On CBC Radio's Cross-Country Checkup last week, caller after caller lavished praise on Bre-X founder and CEO David Walsh, the formerly bankrupt stock promoter who built the company into what was, for a time, a $6-billion enterprise."• Some investors kept their stock and some even continued to buy stock in Bre-X in late April, believing so strongly that there was actually gold and that the stock would rise again.
• The quotation "A gold mine is a hole in the ground with a liar on top" — which was often quoted during the Bre-X fiasco — is generally attributed to Mark Twain. But according to many Twain scholars, there's no actual record of the well-known American writer saying this.
• To feed the public's desire to learn more about Bre-X, there was a flurry of books released on the topic in 1997 and 1998. These included:
• Bre-X: The Inside Story by Diane Francis
• Fever: The Dark Mystery of the Bre-X Gold Rush by Jennifer Wells
• Fool's Gold: The Making of a Global Market Fraud by Brian Hutchinson
• The Bre-X Fraud by Andrew Willis and Douglas Goold
• Some entrepreneurs tried to use the Bre-X fiasco to make some money on novelty gifts. A couple of entrepreneurs in Calgary put together a gag gift called Bre-X-It, a kit to help people tamper with their own gold samples. And some Toronto entrepreneurs were selling T-shirts on the Internet, featuring slogans like "I Survived Bre-X" and cartoon pictures of de Guzman falling out of the helicopter.
• The idea that Bre-X should be made into a movie was brought up frequently, and a number of deals for film rights were made, including one by Toronto-based Alliance Atlantis Communications. By 2004, however, no feature film has been made yet.
Everyone's got a theory
Medium: Television
Program: Venture
Broadcast Date: April 6, 1997
Host: Robert Scully
Producer: Brenda Hanna
Duration: 3:31
Last updated:
Feb. 20, 2004
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Venture
Everyone's got a theory.
The CBC Digital Archives Website.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Last updated: Feb. 20, 2004.
[Page consulted on Feb. 13, 2012.]