Floyd Kane was frustrated, restless, anxious. On one level, he knew he shouldn’t have to carry the burden of all those angst-anchoring emotions. He should be basking in the glow of everything he’d accomplished and all he was yet to accomplish, thank you very much.

He’d grown up in East Preston, a small, majority-Black community on the fringes of Halifax. His father had been a cement mason, his mother worked in retail. The family—Floyd had three brothers—lived in a four-room house on Frog Lake Road that his father had built with “his two bare hands.”

Despite “growing up poor and without running water [in a house] that might collapse if there was a strong enough wind,” Floyd—by dint of smarts and hard work—had finally carved out a successful niche for himself in a world he’d aspired to be part of since he was a kid.

It was now 2009, and Floyd Kane was not only an entertainment lawyer—put a checkmark beside one of his childhood career ambitions—but also, and more significantly, the vice president of business and creative affairs at DHX Media, a recently formed, publicly-traded Halifax-based entertainment company in the middle of an inexorable merge-and-grow push to become the largest owner of children’s programming in the world.

Ten years before, just two years out of law school, Kane had landed a job as in-house counsel at Salter Street Films, one of Atlantic Canada’s original movie and TV production companies. He’d followed Salter Street’s key players—Michael Donovan and Charles Bishop—as their ventures morphed into the Halifax Film Company and now DHX.

Perhaps that was part of the problem. “I’m probably somebody who stays in a place longer than I should,” Kane allows. “I’d worked with Michael and Charles for a long time. I consider them friends and mentors. But…”

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