Michael Sabia's idea of the end of an era! LOL

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Obviously this grossly biased reporting on income trusts last Friday by Havard Gould of the CBC is not going unnoticed within the Department of Finance, as I see that Finance was visiting the CAITI blog after Googling the words “Havard Gould income trusts”. ( see attached)

Do it yourself and you will see what that Google search brings up. Apart from several links to the CAITI blog you will find a link to a CBC article of October 11, 2006 in which Michael Sabia made this comment upon announcing the conversion of BCE to an income trust:

"There's no doubt the winding down of BCE certainly does mark the end of an era in Canadian business," BCE chief executive Michael Sabia said during an analyst conference call.

Not only does this serve to belie the fact that Michael Sabia had NO INTENTION of converting to an income trust, but the comment is completely farcical, as the “era” that Sabia is referring to is the litany of failed investments that BCE made over the years. NONE of which were successful and were simply an exercise of destroying BILLIONS upon BILLIONS of shareholder wealth. From Montreal Trust, to Daon Developments, to TransCanada Pipelines to selling Yellow Pages at 50 cents on the dollar to fund the buyback of 20% of Bell Canada at more than they sold it for two years previously to losing some $9 billion in less than 18 months from BCE’s purchase of Teleglobe, EVEYTHING that BCE has done by way of acquistions and corporate reorganizations has been an exercise of turning gold into tin.

So if that’s the “era” that Michael Sabia was lamenting was coming to an end, which it was, when BCE was being asked by its long suffering and totally abused shareholders to convert to an income trust and deliver these profits to shareholders rather than nuking them, in order to maximize shareholder value (and tax revenue to the government) then all Canadians should have been rejoicing. The one problem however being that BCE had NO SUCH INTENTIONS of converting to the greater shareholder discipline of an income trusts and used its control over its media group BCEGlobeMedia to spin a completely false argument of tax leakage to completely dupe the entire country along with a bunch of gross uninformed and financially illiterate people in Ottawa (the 308 Members of Parliament) and the press (CBC, etc) into thinking the sky was falling, in order that Michael Sabia and his fellow bandits at the CCCE could continue on with their abusive corporate practices and destroy the vastly better form of investment (from all possible vantage points) called income trusts.

That said, I wonder why the Department of Finance was Googling Havard Gould of the CBC? Good question. All I know is that a reporter’s worst nightmare is when he or she becomes the story.