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2. Seventeen years on the job: Why aren’t you a Canadian citizen yet?

JA: I guess I’m an honorary one, at this stage of the game. Literally, my backyard in Lewiston, N.Y., is the Niagara River. I live a few hundred yards from Queenston, Ont. Every morning I can hear the dogs barking across the river. In the summertime, people are out in their backyard, and I can wave to them, and they can wave to me. I wake up every morning and I look at Canada.

3. How did your parents, Irish immigrants, land in Brooklyn instead of, say, Toronto?

JA: I had a lot of relatives in New York who were nice enough to give my dad and my mom an opportunity to come to the United States because they were poor and they had nothing. They were farmers. My dad and mom didn’t know each other in Ireland, they actually met at a dance in The Bronx. They were married in The Bronx, and then we grew up in Brooklyn. I’ve been back to Ireland a number of times, and compared to how they grew up there — and you can talk to Irish immigrants in Canada, Irish immigrants in the United States — this is the land of opportunity, North America. My brother Bill is a hospital (chief financial officer), my brother Jim is an aeronautical engineer, my brother Brendan owns a few of his own companies. And literally, my parents just got off the boat a generation ago.

4. Your father died of a heart attack when you were seven years old: How did Mary Armstrong raise four boys by herself in the big city?

JA: She’s my hero. In our world, we’re around famous people all the time, and people ask, ‘Who do you idolize? Who do you look up to?’ And I always say the same thing: ‘There’s only one, and that’s my mother.’ I wouldn’t be here, I wouldn’t have everything I have in my life without all the sacrifices she made for me and my brothers. We grew up in a small apartment building in Brooklyn. I slept in the same bed as my brother Brendan. We didn’t have a whole lot. I was seven when he died, and my oldest brother, Bill, was 14. And growing up in the inner city, with crime, drugs, a lot of bad influences that can take you the wrong way. She insisted — demanded — and more importantly, showed us the right path in how she lived her life … She’ll be 88 in February. She’s great. And I talk to her every single day. I call her every day, and I always finish the conversation with the same three magic words: ‘I love you.’