Canada's "shock doctrine" in Honduras

On June 28th, 200 soldiers of the Honduran military kidnapped the president, Manuel “Mel” Zelaya, and flew him to Costa Rica. His attempted return 4 days ago was unsuccessful.
The coup d'eat was roundly condemned by the UN, the EU, the Organization of American States, and rather more tepidly by the USA; the EU pulled its diplomats; the World Bank suspended aid; and all called for the return and reinstatement of Zelaya.

Amidst this near-universal condemnation, on Saturday Canada's Minister for the Americas, Peter Kent, recommended that ousted President Manuel Zelaya delay his planned return to the country, saying the "time is not right". When 2 of 100,000 Zelaya supporters waiting for his plane to land at the airport were shot by the military, Kent went on national tv to blame Zelaya for their deaths.

What is he on about?
Corporate interests and the fear of united social reform in Latin America.
After a devastating hurricane destroyed most of Honduras' crops and infrastructure in 1998, Canada offered millions in aid in return for opening up the country to Canadian mining interests.
Canada and the US also took advantage of this disaster/opportunity, as they did in Colombia, to rewrite Honduras mining laws, granting Canadian corporations tax breaks and land rights to mineral extraction over the rights of local communities. Canada is now the second largest "foreign investor" in the country.

Ashley Holly at The Tyee : Shame on Canada :

"Currently, Canadian companies own 33 per cent of mineral investments in Latin America, accumulating to the ownership of over 100 properties. Export Development Canada contributes 50 per cent of Canadian Pension Plan money to mining companies, which offered upwards of $50 billion in 2003. Goldcorp alone has received nearly one billion dollars from CPP subsidies.

Although EDC is responsible for regulating Canadian industry abroad, it has been accused of failing to apply regulatory standards to 24 of 26 mining projects that it has funded.

In February 2003, nearly five hundred gallons of cyanide spilled into the Rio Lara, killing 18,000 fish. The mine in San Andres uses more water in one hour than an average Honduran family uses in one year. In that same year, mining companies earned $44.4 million, while the average income per capita in Honduras in 2004 was just $1,126USD."

Zelaya has been moving steadily left ever since his election : doubling minimum wage from $132 per month to $290 ; proposing nationalization of energy production and reforms to make government more transparent and accessible; joining Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Nicaragua and Venezuela in the left-leaning ALBA, formed to counter imperialism in the region; and - oh yeah - banning new mining concessions.

Canada's training of Honduran military personnel through its Military Training Assistance Programme is really paying off for Canadian mining corporations here. According to the MTAP Directorate, officials from DFAIT, DND, and CIDA combine to "promote Canadian foreign and defence policy interests," using "the mechanism of military training assistance to develop and enhance bilateral and defence relationships with countries of strategic interest to Canada."

As this Guatemalan newspaper asks : Will President Colom of Guatemala, Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua, or President Funes in El Salvador be next?

Zelaya discusses the coup with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now today.
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Only $24 billion, you say...

Two weeks ago The Star published this rogue's gallery of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the extravagant bonuses they received despite having lost $24 billion in taxpayers' money.

Yesterday in the HoC : NDP Wayne Marston :

"...according to economist Toby Sanger, in the last 10 years, the CPP fund would have made $13 billion more than it did if it had been invested in government bonds, rather than in a diversified portfolio of equities, real estate and bonds.

In the fiscal year 2009, the losses in the fund wiped out four years of contributions..."

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Four years of contributions...

Naturally the CPPIB defence team immediately rushed to its defence :

Ted Menzies, Con : "We do not want political interference in the remuneration of this board. They have done a very good job... We are absolutely on the right track"

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Dean Del Mastro, Con : "The NDP has a history of advocating explicitly for political interference in the CPPIB. That is inappropriate.

I actually believe that the CPP Investment Board is very well managed"

Steve : "I actually noticed, by the way, that the board, in fact, did drop a total compensation for its executives by 31 per cent last year."

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Canada Pension Plan corporate welfare

The Star : "Four top executives of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board pocketed nearly $7 million in bonuses this year despite losing $24 billion of taxpayers' money in bad investments, according to the board's annual report released yesterday. Their investments lost 18.6% of their value. "

Plus as NUPGE reports, "they are due another $7 million in long-term awards that will be paid out over the next three fiscal years."

This is on top of their salaries, of which Dennison's is almost $½-million a year, compared to Stephen Harper at $315,400 a year and the average CPP retirement benefit for Canadians at around $6000.

CPP Investment Board chair Robert Astley explains that the size of these bonuses ... wait for it ... "enables us to compete for talent within the private sector world of capital markets."

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Hard to believe, isn't it?

I mean, as Canadians we have millions of our hard-earned dollars invested for us by CPP in war profiteers like Halliburton, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and Lockheed Martin, not to mention Monsanto, Walmart and the US tobacco industry, and yet somehow the CPP comes up short.

You would think the war on terra would pay better, and not just to CPP CEOs.

Say, whatever happened to those Principles for Responsible Investing CPP proudly signed onto with the United Nations Environment Programme Financial Initiative (UNEPFI)? Are cluster bombs and land mines mentioned on there somewhere?

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Saturday Update from Progressive Economics : The tortoise and the Hare

"Before the CPP Investment Board was created, Canada Pension Plan savings were invested entirely in government bonds. Canadians were told that we could make higher returns on these savings if they were invested in the stock market and in private investments instead.

Out of interest, I calculated what these returns would have been if the initial investment had been left in government bonds and if these funds and all the further net transfers to the CPPIB had been reinvested in long-term government of Canada bonds at their yield for each year since 1999.

These calculations show that leaving these investments in long-term bonds would have earned about $36.5 billion over the past decade: $13 billion more (and 50% higher) than the CPP Investment Board earned."

We'd have been better off both ethically and financially if public pensions had continued to be invested in public debt.

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"Lethal, survivable, supportable, affordable"

That's what it says on the Joint Strike Fighter logo which I'd normally post up here but for this advisory on the JSF website : "Note, individuals utilizing the JSF logo for purposes other than that which is determined to be in the best of interests of the program may be prosecuted."***

Via Paul Graham, who isn't happy about it :
"The big news in the Peg this afternoon is the federal government’s $43.4 million loan to Bristol Aerospace of Winnipeg, part of a $120 million upgrade that will allow Bristol to help develop the F-35 Lightning II fighter jet. According to the Winnipeg Free Press, this investment could yield $3 billion in revenue over the next 25-30 years."

Bloomberg : "The U.S. and eight countries are collaborating on the development of the aircraft in the largest international weapons program ever."

The largest evah! Vroom, vroom!

Dept of National Defence in 2006 : "The Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program is a United States-led multinational effort to build an affordable, multi-role next generation, stealth fighter aircraft.... There are defined needs for more than 3000 aircraft over the course of the program with an estimated value of over US$276 billion. An additional 3000 aircraft could be sold to other allied buyers."

"In 2001, the U.S. Department of Defense selected Lockheed Martin as the Prime Contractor for the JSF Program. Pratt and Whitney US and General Electric have been selected to design and develop engines for the JSF.
Canada's $US160 million contribution to JSF includes funding from both the Department of National Defence and Technology Partnerships Canada (TPC). TPC promotes the participation of Canadian firms, especially small and medium-sized enterprises.
As a result of Canada’s participation in the JSF program, 54 Canadian companies, universities and research institutions have won 154 contracts to date valued at approximately CDN$157 million."

So what is Canada's current rank in the echelons of world arms dealing? Still sixth, are we? Or has this latest investment rocketed us into the Top 5?

And are our pension plan contributions still being invested in these arms dealers? Yup, there they are at the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board website, who report a good return last quarter.

War is a racket.

***JSF do however permit the logo to be used as a nice screensaver, if you're interested.

Canadian Fire Sale

600 Canadian companies gone to foreign ownership since the start of 2006

Did you notice last week that Don Drummond of TD Bank and Jack Mintz formerly of CD Howe both used the following exact same phrase within days of each other, on CBC TV's News Hour and CBC Radio News respectively, to allay concerns about the fire sale of Canadian companies to foreign ownership?

"The real story of the past 10 years is that Canada is hollowing out business in other countries."

I thought it an odd coincidence at the time - ok, what now? - but today David Olive at The Star refutes the factual basis behind their claim :

"The Statscan figures cited by Drummond are out of date, stopping at 2005, just as the manic buying of Canadian assets in 2006-07 was getting underway. The number of takeovers back and forth is a red herring. What matters is their total value. And in 2005-06, the world bought $66 billion more of us than we bought of the world."

I have argued in more detail previously that Canada has both the means and money to protect Canadian companies from foreign takeover.
The means : Investment Canada's mandate requires that sales to foreign owners be "of net benefit to Canada".
The money : Canada Pension Fund has $1.3 trillion of our money, our money, that it is currently pumping into crap like this, instead of investing it in Canada's future, our future.

OK, so what are we missing? The political will apparently.

Harper made a few peeps this year about not selling Canadian companies to any of the countries on the US shit list. Has he invoked the Investment Canada mandate towards achieving even that meager goal? No, he has not.

By the time you have even the CCCE free marketeers expressing alarm, and Canadian boards of directors weeping at takeovers they are powerless to prevent, and Preston How-soon-can-we-join-the-US? Manning saying things like :

"If you don't want bin Laden fiddling with Quebec hydro lines or Beijing controlling the oilpatch, there should be national-security provisions in the approval process to protect our values and objectives",

In other words, by the time you have free marketeers begging for government intervention in the form of regulation of the marketplace....

well then, Steve, it's probably time to let go of the disastrous free marketeer ideology of your youth and do some of that Standing Up For Canada.

Now, can someone please explain to me the significance of that Drummond and Mintz dual messaging?

Only in Canada, you say?

The signs in Beirut and Tyre all say "Made In USA" but where are the signs saying "Made in Canada"?

From The Coalition To Oppose Arms Trade :
"Few Canadians realize that their country is one of the world's leading producers and exporters of advanced, war technology.
[M]any of Israel's most-deadly, US-made weapons systems--now being used in air strikes against Lebanon--would not be able to function without hundreds of crucial, high-tech, electronic components supplied by Canadian war industries, and subsidized unwittingly by Canadian taxpayers."

C.O.A.T. provides a list of "Made in Canada" parts for US attack helicopters and fighter bombers here.

And "subsidized by Canadian taxpayers?"
Scroll down the same page to see this list of Canada Pension Plan investments in companies in the arms business, dated March 2006.



As I already blogged back here, on April 27, 2006, the CPP Investment Board signed a global set of "Principles for Responsible Investing" published by the UN Environment Programme Financial Initiative (UNEPFI).

You can contact the CPP Investment Board here and tell them what you think about their policy of investing our pension money in warmongers.
Go on, take you two minutes.
Let them know "Made in Canada" is supposed to be something we're proud of.

Pictures from a great photo essay at CathiefromCanada.

Pensions and landmines

When I'm old, my cats and I do not want to be living on catfood purchased with landmines.

More than half of the $90 billion in assets controlled by the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board is invested in over 1800 companies, including such arms dealers as Halliburton (in whom we invested $8 million), Raytheon ($4 million), Northrop Grumman ($5.4 million) and General Electric ($323 million).

I was prepared to overlook the $8 million to Monsanto, the $19.5 million to WalMart and the more than $90 million the CPP Investment Board has invested on our behalf in the tobacco industry, but I really do have to draw the line at the $5.5 million we are giving Lockheed Martin to make more landmines and cluster bombs.

Lockheed Martin - counting some people, blowing other people up.

On April 27, 2006, the CPP Investment Board announced that it had signed a global set of Principles for Responsible Investing published by the United Nations Environment Programme Financial Initiative (UNEPFI).
You can contact CPPIB here and ask them how this will affect their policy of investing in warmongers.

Slowgirl provides a link to the Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade, or COAT, where you can follow the money from the CCPIB to the arms dealers and back to the politicians, and sign the petition.

And if you're wondering how your Canada Pension Plan shares are doing in Exxon or McDonald's or Nike or Dow Chem, the CCPIB site provides this handy list from March 2005.

The futures are so bright, we gotta wear shades.