Tell the truth and tell it first, Atlantic Business Magazine awards gala told

It was a bit of a coup for Atlantic Business Magazine to land Michael McCain, the president of Maple Leaf Foods, as its keynote speaker for its annual Top 50 CEO awards gala in Halifax last week. McCain is a hometown Atlantic boy, who grew up in Florenceville, New Brunswick.

McCain made the most of his opportunity to share with his fellow CEOs what he learned from last summer's listeria outbreak and the deaths that accompanied it.

"And what a speech it was," said columnist Alec Bruce, writing in the Moncton Times Transcript.

Nothing Maple Leaf Foods does now, he said, will ever erase what happened. Food safety, he said, lies at the core of the company's philosophy. All it can do in the future, he said, is ensure that nothing like this ever happens again and hope that consumers begin to trust the quality of its branded products as they have for decades.

Still, here was an enormously valuable lesson for any CEO in the room dealing with a crisis of confidence in his or her own wares: Tell the truth and tell it first.