How's this for 'tax leakage' by any other name?"...more than $3 billion in 'tax leakage' from this takeover of Fording Coal income trust. That’s even more than the $800 million a year from the LBO of BCE.
Another LBO Of A Canadian Income Trust Due To Harper's Income Trust Tax:
Fording Canadian Coal Trust To Be Bought By Teck Cominco
Brenda Bouw,
THE CANADIAN PRESS
July 29, 2008 (EDIT)VANCOUVER
-Teck Cominco Ltd. pulled the trigger on a deal to buy the assets of Fording Canadian Coal Trust for about US$14 billion. Tuesday's bid is for US$12.4 billion in cash and shares worth about C$1.5 billion. Don Lindsay, president and CEO of Teck Cominco said the structure of the deal is key because of the tax advantages, and the fact the company already owns 20 per cent of Fording. Teck expects to reap more than US$3 billion in tax benefits from the transaction based on established rules covering the acquisition of Canadian resource properties. It will fund the cash portion largely from a US$9.8-billion loan facility it has arranged with a syndicate of banks. The deal follows what Fording described as an extensive review of strategic alternatives, particularly in light of the need to address our income trust structure before 2011.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Flaherty’s actions on behalf of Canada's big lifecos created inexorable tax leakage
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7 comments:
Why doesn't somebody put a tax losses meter on the Honorable Financefool?
Corporations have figured out that the Dept of Finance is open for corporate bangbang, which is exactly what the Teck and Fording deal is. The first bang by Texk is tax sheltering it's taxable income using Canadian resource property write-off. The second bang is that the LBO structure will shelter the taxable income that was been distributed to the income trust investors. There'll be a third bang from the gang: Teck will be taken-over by a foreign company, and the whole shebang will go tax exempt.
Why are the opposition parties so garthawful silent? Why are the Canadian financial press not doing any financial analysis.
God help Canada.
Flaherty the Fool! He has not got a clue about taxes and how they are collected and from whom. He has to call his pal Carney to O.K. any buyout deal. Carney, being in the Goldman Sachs cabal says it is fine providing Goldman Sachs makes money. The idea is to degrade Canada until it is an equivalent of the Phillipines! Nobody will shed any tears when the Globe & Mail; the National Post, etc. close down because few bother to buy or read them. Everything is available on the "net" and more truth is to be found here than in the columnists claptrap! Wonder what work they will do once they lose their jobs....with their background, I would imagine being a garbage collector would suit them admirably.
Just got back---didn`t realize the loss from Fording was that large.
Holy crap , what will Jim do to replace that kind of cash--maybe sell Toronto or even better yet , the whole province of Ontario to Abu Dhabi??
Maybe he will find all of us old fart trust investors a second job to increase his tax take??
Oh , forgot , we don`t have any jobs left here in Ontario.
We know it`s not his fault , but ............
Dr Mike Popovich.
I guess once the CONs have lost sufficient revenue, and burned through the surplus, they'll have the excuse they need to start slashing social programs... like health care, UI, Old Age Security.
It's criminal!
Hmmm...Sound anything like Flaherty's and the Conservative's 18 pages of blacked-out documents?
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Conservatives Attempted To 'Hide' Another Major Climate-Change Report
The Canadian Press
August 1, 2008 4:00PM (EDIT)
OTTAWA — A senior official in Conservative Health Minister Tony Clement's office was forced to concede that the release of a major study on climate change and health could have gone "way differently and way better," as she prefers to describe the apparent concealment.
Rita Smith, Clement's communications director, attempted to brush aside suggestions the Harper government sought to 'hide' the 500-page report.
But the Conservative government's hand was forced when parts of the report were leaked to the media last week.
Clement's office was then forced to email the report, but did so only in pieces, to journalists late Thursday and the health minister later held a brief scrum with reporters at the Conservative caucus retreat in Levis, Que.
Apparently, the Conservative government's plans were quashed when journalists started poking around.
The report, titled "Human Health in a Changing Climate: A Canadian Assessment of Vulnerabilities and Adaptive Capacity," was supposed to be released this spring.
When spring came and went, some of the report's authors worried it would be buried in a quiet corner of Health Canada's website.
A similar fate befell another major climate-change study released earlier this year by Natural Resources Canada.
After years of research, input from more than 140 experts and $50,000 paid to a public-relations firm, Natural Resources only posted the study online after 5 p.m. on a Friday with no flourish.
Pollution Probe's Quentin Chiotti contributed to both the Health Canada and Natural Resources reports. He says the science shows Ottawa needs to do more to help Canadians adapt to climate change.
"If this [Conservative] government doesn't have a clear adaptation strategy and is treating these assessments the way that they are," he said, "what does that say about this government's understanding of adaptation? I don't know."
The Montreal Gazette
PM Harper’s Speech Shows He Is Either Completely Ignorant Or Deeply Arrogant
JOSEE LEGAULT, The Gazette
Published: August 1, 2008
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has been taunting Liberal leader Stéphane Dion with the same dare for almost a year: Either bring down the Conservative minority government or prop it up obediently. His favourite line: “Fish or cut bait.”
He used those very words again on Wednesday night in his speech at the Conservative caucus meeting in St. Agapit, near Quebec City. The prime minister’s list of colloquialisms might be short, but his constant recourse to “fish or cut bait” shows how increasingly frustrated he’s becoming at being unable to provoke an election himself, because of his own decision to go for a fixed-date election in October 2009.
Another line he has been hammering for months is about what he calls the “real nationalists.” In St. Agapit, he repeated his own definition of this strange creature: “Real nationalists can be proud of their region and love Quebec without wanting to break the Canadian federation. Real nationalists don’t want to destroy, they want to build. Real nationalists don’t look to paralyze things, they act.”
As paternalistic as his theory is, interestingly enough, Harper has actually been getting away with it without anyone in Quebec’s political class even offering the slightest reply.
For one thing, his “real nationalists” line flies in the face of Quebec’s political reality and history. If there’s one thing Quebecers know, it is that nationalism here, as elsewhere, has many incarnations. As for its post-Quiet Revolution version, whether it expresses itself in the form of sovereignity, autonomism or renewed federalism, the political affirmation of Quebec’s specificity as a nation comes in a variety of shapes and visions. Each one implies building something different.
To limit this nationalism to Harper’s definition is either proof of the prime minister’s complete ignorance of Quebec’s political history and makeup, or it shows the depth of his arrogance and paternalism.
For someone who has never lived here and who was ‘intellectually’ trained in Alberta, to tell Quebecers what defines a “real nationalist” would be akin to Jacques Parizeau telling Canadians from outside of Quebec what constitutes “a real Canadian nationalist.” I can’t imagine that going down very well.
Of course, Harper also contends that his “open federalism” doctrine is now an intrinsic part of that “real nationalism” in Quebec. But in trying to distinguish himself from Dion’s more centralist vision, Harper says he now wants to spread his open federalism across the country.
When Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon said recently that Ottawa is open to letting provinces strike their own international deals and letting them exercise more autonomy in their economic foreign relations, Ed Stelmach, Alberta’s Tory premier, called this “the most significant policy change in the federal government in at least 25 years.” In yesterday’s Globe and Mail, columnist Lawrence Martin predicted this would “drive Canadian traditionalists bananas.”
But chances are that those new musings coming from the Harper government are like the Parliamentary motion on the Québécois “nation” - just words, or pre-electoral words to be more precise.
As Le Devoir pointed out, although Ottawa never enjoyed it, provinces that wish to do so don’t need its “permission” to extend their own jurisdictions into their respective foreign policies. Quebec certainly has been doing it for decades and it even has a name: the Gérin-Lajoie doctrine, named after one of Jean Lesage’s most prominent ministers.
Quebec has general delegations all over the world. It takes part in Canadian foreign-trade missions, but it also organizes its own. The next one will be in China. In fact, when Cannon said his government would “allow” Quebec to negotiate a work-force mobility deal with France, Premier Jean Charest’s office replied that no such blessing is required. Ottawa hasn’t had a word to say about this, nor was it asked for one, since Charest starting working on the idea.
Maybe the prime minister would be wiser to forget about what constitutes “real” Quebec nationalism. A better idea would be to focus instead on informing himself and his ministers as to how “real” foreign relations work at the provincial level.
The Gazette (Montreal) 2008
Geeze, where have we seen this same sort of story before?
Oh ya, with Harper's and Flaherty's 'tax leakage' claims & calculations.
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Expert Report Questions Tory Greenhouse-Gas Claims & Calculations
The Canadian Press
August 1, 2008 (EDIT)
OTTAWA — The Harper Conservative government is likely overstating how much its climate-change plan will lower greenhouse gases, says a federal advisory panel.
Flaws in government calculations skew projections around the Tories' policies, the National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy says in a report to be released Saturday.
"Problems persist with how individual policy measures are calculated and with their projected emission reductions," the report says.
"Individual policy measures continue to be presented without these sources of overestimation adequately being taken into account."
"We thought it was on the [very] optimistic side in terms of how much reductions would actually happen."
Many experts have criticized Harper's plan as nothing more than 'window-dressing' that will result in little-to-no reductions in greenhouse gases.
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