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Major BC Liberal Donor Named in Panama Papers
Major BC Liberal Donor Named in Panama Papers
Haywood Securities listed as a shareholder in firms registered in British Virgin Islands.
Finance Minister Michael de Jong said he had ‘no knowledge’ of a BC Liberal donor being named in the Panama Papers. Photo: BC Gov’t Flickr.
Haywood Securities Inc., a Vancouver company that has giventhe BC Liberals $332,000 since 2005, is described in the database as a shareholder in companies registered in the British Virgin Islands, a researcher with the Dogwood Initiative environmental group in B.C. discovered.
According to the database, Haywood held shares in Kola Gold Ltd., a company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands in 2014. The investment firm held the shares both directly and in trust for a holding company.
The database also lists Haywood as holding shares in African Aura Resources Ltd., a mining company incorporated in the British Virgin Islands, in trust for 22 investors. And it held shares in trust for an investor in Gem Diamond Mining Company of Africa, which is also registered in the British Virgin Islands.
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the database on May 9. On its website, the ICIJ describes the Panama Papers as a “giant leak of more than 11.5 million financial and legal records exposes a system that enables crime, corruption and wrongdoing, hidden by secretive offshore companies.”
A disclaimer in the ICIJ website stresses that there are legitimate uses for offshore companies and trusts, and the organization does not intend to imply anyone appearing in the database has broken any laws or otherwise acted improperly.
Finance minister won’t ‘speculate’
The Tyee’s call to Haywood was put through to company president Rob Blanchard’s office. An assistant to Blanchard took the message, but the call was not returned by publication time.
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Canada’s new deficit plan is trouble
Canada’s new deficit plan is trouble
Yesterday Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau announced the projected deficit for 2016-17 is now $18.4 billion. This amount does not include $10.5 billion in new spending promised by the Liberals during the election campaign. When the budget is delivered in one month’s time it is foreseeable the total deficit could be in excess of $30 billion. During question period Prime Minister Trudeau defended the proposed financial course of action as something the Canadians want and voted for, while the Leader of the Opposition, Rona Ambrose, alleged that increased federal spending will amount to waste. (Ms. Ambrose is likely well aware of the wastefulness of government programs after having served for three years as Minister of Public Works and Government Services. In that role and other portfolios she has held she is not innocent herself of producing and perpetuating waste.)
In their book Free to Choose, Milton and Rose Friedman exposed, among other things, the fallacy of the welfare state and the disappointing nature of all government programs. This is an unavoidable consequence of the spender spending someone else’s money on yet someone else. It is like paying for someone else’s lunch out of an expense account. The spender has little incentive either to economize or to try to get his guest the lunch that he will value most highly. Moreover, as Hayek (1945) explained in the “Use of Knowledge in Society”, spenders do not have and cannot obtain the information necessary to spend money on other peoples’ money on yet other people as effectively as when you spend your own money on yourself. This is the crux of why government spending is so wasteful. Legislators vote to spend someone else’s money. Bureaucrats who administer the spending programs do the spending someone else’s money on yet someone else.
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Trust Trudeau? I’ll Wait and See
Trust Trudeau? I’ll Wait and See
Canada’s young prince promises ‘real change.’ I can’t help but be wary.
Like many Canadians, I want to trust the Liberals, but I don’t enjoy having to trust them. Photo by Mario Jean.
How are we feeling about the new Canadian Camelot? Justin Trudeau is young, movie star handsome, and projects the confident hope of his famous pedigree. All of North America seems swept up in the romance of his remarkable moment, and of course there are obvious reasons to celebrate.
Like 70 per cent of the voting public, I am savouring the end of the Stephen Harper era as one might relish being released from a Turkish prison. His insidious regime edged us toward a mean and narrow vision of Canada that was becoming almost unrecognizable.
While the Tory defeat was decisive by pundit standards, many of us hoped for more of a Mulroneyesque wipeout worthy of Harper’s jagged hubris. Alas, the Conservatives were only wounded and may re-emerge under new leadership as a political force more familiar and somewhat less toxic to our country.
Trudeau and his team no doubt ran a masterful campaign, but I fear the victorious Liberals might take the wrong lessons from Monday night. Like all political partisans, Liberal supporters are apt to confound what is good for their party with what is best for our nation.
Trudeau and his team no doubt ran a masterful campaign, but I fear the victorious Liberals might take the wrong lessons from Monday night. Like all political partisans, Liberal supporters are apt to confound what is good for their party with what is best for our nation.
Will they embrace meaningful changes to our antiquated voting system now that they have again hit the electoral jackpot? The Liberal party has enjoyed fully 16 “majority” governments since Confederation, while only three represented an actual majority of votes.
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PM-Elect Of ‘US Ally’ Canada Wastes No Time: Tells Obama Will Withdraw Fighter Jets From Syria, Iraq
PM-Elect Of ‘US Ally’ Canada Wastes No Time: Tells Obama Will Withdraw Fighter Jets From Syria, Iraq
With the ink still damp on voter slips, newly crowned elected Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wasted no time in fulfilling the first of his liberal “hope” and “change” promises. As AFP reports, hours after defeating Stephen Harper, Trudeau has told US President Obama that he will withdraw Canadian fighter jets from Syria and Iraq, though giving no timeline. So far, the US response is a mutedly diplomatic but tinged with guilt, “We have stood shoulder to shoulder with Canadian armed forces… in Iraq and Afghanistan,” from the US State Department.
“About an hour ago I spoke with President Obama,” Trudeau told a press conference.While Canada remains “a strong member of the coalition against ISIL,” Trudeau said he made clear to the US leader “the commitments I have made around ending the combat mission.”
Canada last year deployed CF-18 fighter jets to the region until March 2016, as well as about 70 special forces troops to train Kurds in northern Iraq.
During the campaign, Trudeau pledged to bring home the fighter jets and end its combat mission. But he vowed to keep military trainers in place.
His new Liberal government will be “moving forward with our campaign commitments in a responsible fashion,” Trudeau said.
“We want to ensure that the transition is done in an orderly fashion.”
Earlier on Tuesday, as Sputnink News reports, the US State Department addressed questions as to whether or not it was concerned that Canada’s new government may not support US foreign policy regarding IS presence in Afghanistan.
“These are all decisions the Canadian people have to make and Canadian legislators have to make… and their Prime Minister [has to make],” department spokesperson John Kirby told reporters.“We have stood shoulder to shoulder with Canadian armed forces…in Iraq and Afghanistan,”he added.
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While this move seems like a hope-y and change-y step forward, the lack of timeline leaves plenty of room for the neocons to knock on Trudea’s door and shower gifts on an economy floundering on the verge of “Emerging Market” status (as HSBC analysts warned).
A New Era For Canadian Oil And Gas, For Better Or Worse
A New Era For Canadian Oil And Gas, For Better Or Worse
Canadian voters kicked out the conservative government in the October 19 election, a party that had been in power for a decade. Polls had predicted a slight lead for the Liberal Party, but in a surprise result, the Liberals actually won a majority of seats in parliament and will form a majority government. Most analysts had expected the Liberal Party would have had to form a coalition government, but many voters appeared to strategically vote for the frontrunner in order to ensure a loss for the conservatives. The new government of Prime Minister-designate Justin Trudeau will almost certainly be much less friendly to the oil and gas industry in Canada, though to what extent remains uncertain. Trudeau opposes Enbridge’s (NYSE: ENB) Northern Gateway Pipeline, but also backs TransCanada’s (NYSE: TRP) Keystone XL Pipeline – the latter of which could be blocked by the U.S. government. More will be known in the coming weeks. However, one clear promise from Trudeau was his plan to engage in deficit spending to goose the economy through higher investments in infrastructure.
The U.S. Department of Interior cancelled two lease sales for the Arctic, effectively ruling out new drilling for several years. The agency said that there was almost no interest from potential buyers for acreage in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, so it decided to scrap the lease sales. The move follows the decision from Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE: RDS.A) to abandon Arctic drilling, and without any other companies positioned to move forward, offshore drilling in the U.S. Arctic may not happen for years. In addition to cancelling the lease sales, the Obama administration also denied a request from Statoil (NYSE: STO) and Shell to allow an extension of their leases. They are set to expire in 2017 (Beaufort Sea) and 2020 (Chukchi Sea).
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Meet Canada’s Latest Liberal Man-Boy
Meet Canada’s Latest Liberal Man-Boy
The most infamous, of course, was Jean Chretien’s, which he held high and waved at every opportunity in the 1993 election. Co-authored by Paul Martin, it promised the world as we would like it: strong communities, enhanced Medicare, equality, increased funding for education, an end to child poverty. You could almost hear the violins playing. But what turned out to be the most remarkable thing about the book of promises was the record number that were ultimately broken: all of them.
The only time you can trust the federal Liberal Party is when they don’t have a majority — and even with a minority government they have to dragged kicking and screaming to do anything that does not please Bay Street. This fact needs to be repeated over and over again in the next few months leading up to the election as political amnesia is a dangerous condition to take with you into the voting booth.
It’s been 10 years since we had a Liberal government and even longer since we had a majority Liberal regime. A trip down memory lane might serve as a curative.
The effect of amnesia as it relates to the Chretien regime (actually the Martin regime) leaves most Canadians recalling Martin as the deficit dragon-slayer, saving us from our profligate, self-indulgent, entitlement culture and getting us back on the road to solvency. A few will actually recall that Martin chopped 40 per cent off the federal contribution to social programs — but even that memory is diluted by another one: the legendary “debt wall” built exclusively of hyperbole and hysteria over the three years preceding the 1993 election.
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Sorry Liberals, ‘Oversight’ Won’t Fix Menace of a Terror Bill
Sorry Liberals, ‘Oversight’ Won’t Fix Menace of a Terror Bill
Party’s position on C-51 is downright surreal, and solution to fix it equally flawed.
The House of Commons sent Bill C-51, the Anti-terrorism Act, to the Senate on Wednesday, where it is expected to quickly pass and become law. One-hundred-and-eighty-three Conservatives and Liberals voted in favour, while 96 NDP, Greens and BQ members opposed.
Lurching to its inevitable outcome, the debate over C-51 began to resemble a bad play in which the actors find themselves trapped, fated to continually repeat the same lines. Conservative speakers were like the Walking Dead: insensible but still menacing. NDP and Green contributions were earnest but increasingly bewildered: did Conservative talking points on the bill ever intersect with reality?
The worst piece of demagoguery actually came not from the robotic ranks of the Harperites, but from Liberal Joyce Murray, who asked an NDP MP “whether he would want it on his conscience should there be an attack that leads to deaths of Canadians because of the loopholes that the bill is attempting to fix?”
The Liberal position on C-51 is downright surreal. Liberals voted for a bill they argue is so flawed that it will be necessary to elect a Liberal government to rectify its problems. Like John Kerry on Iraq, they were for it before they were against it, but in their case they were already against it when they were for it, and vice versa. No wonder Pat Martin of the NDP referred to the Liberals twisting themselves into pretzels.
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