Your Community. Your Business.
Oh Canada...
where the heck art thou going?
It's Thursday December 31st, 2009. Sylvia and I are in Toronto to spend New Year's Eve. It's a tradition. It's been a day of shopping and around 4 p.m. we wind up in The Bay which is now in the old Simpson's building at Yonge and Queen; a place I haven't been for at least twenty years.
Walking floor by floor through that old building, I had a warm comfortable feeling of being in the cradle of a good old, rock-solid Canadian retailer. This was the Hudson's Bay Company man; the oldest commercial corporation in North America and at one time, the largest private landowner in Canada.
They had a big push going on for the Olympics coming up soon in Vancouver. There was an entire department devoted to 'official' Olympic gear and all the other departments were advertising and promoting the Bay's role as 'official' provider of clothing and anything else they flog to our Olympic athletes (and fans).
I was going to buy an official Canadian Olympic hockey sweater for my grandson... until I saw the price - one hundred and sixty bucks! What floored me was the fact that that this piece of original 'Canadiana' was actually made in China!
The only things I bought off the "Canadian" Olympic rack at The Bay that day were two t-shirts; one had a logo on the front that said, "Believe" the other had some logo on the front that proved that our forefathers in BC used a lot those funny mushrooms that grow out there. These were the only two pieces of the hundreds of pieces of Olympic clothing they had that were actually made in Canada. Heck, I "Believe" that Walmart has more 'made in Canada' stuff than that!
I found it ironic that here, in the cradle of Canadian retail history, as our beloved Canadian Olympic hockey team was preparing to do battle to establish our rightful place at the top of the world of hockey, I learn that they were going to do it wearing maple leafs (leaves?) made in China! Now I can hear you modern 'non-protectionist, free-thinkers' out there trying to tell me, "Wake up! It's a global economy you old fart. Stop resisting it and get with the program."
To which I will reply, politely of course, "Bite me!"
I told this sad (to me anyway) story to my sister, the former Holt Renfrew clothing queen and she said, "Brian. Poor, poor stupid Brian. You really don't get it do you? Step in to the light dear brother. It's a global economy now."
I gave her my stock reply, not quite so politely this time and she rewarded me by not speaking to me for six months. Then she forgave me just in time for me to chip in for her sixtieth birthday present. Who says women aren't crafty?
Anyway, despite the shock of that day, I managed to keep some of my warm feelings toward The Bay since despite having wandered from its true path, it was still the last bastion of Canadiana-type history... or so I thought.
Last weekend, while reading the Saturday Globe and Mail business section, I came across an article about the 'hostile' takeover bid of a great Canadian corporate success story by an Australian company no less! Potash Corporation - which has made Saskatchewan the Saudi Arabia of the Potash world is going to be the primary supplier of fertilizer for the food growers of the world... for the next thousand years! Pretty good deal for Canada eh?
Way back in 2008, I watched Potash's stock price fall from $240 to about $60. This year it's been in the low hundreds with a few occasional dips into the nineties. In June I told myself I'd buy it if it ever went down to ninety again. It did so in late July but I thought I'd wait a day to see if it went down the next day. Instead, it went up. So I thought I'd wait another day to buy it to see if it went back down the next day. It went up again. After a week or so it was back up in the hundred and five dollar area and I just figured it would go back to $90 again during the next recessionary 'dip' the experts (including I think, our esteemed publisher Herr Cooke) are predicting and this time for sure, I'd buy some.
Then this Aussie bloke offers $39 billion for the stock and Potash goes up $30 in one day. My initial reaction was, "Shit!"
Now personally, I'd hate to see another jewel of Canadian business sold to some foreign interests for a fraction of its former value. No matter what the hostile takeover dudes say, they will never convince me that they have the interests of Canada as their number one priority. They know that we've sold our oil, our trees, our steel, our nickel, our retail stores and a whole bunch of other stuff to anyone who had the ability to borrow the money to do it and figured we'd be dumb enough to let them do it. But this is different.
This is the future of Saskatchewan and Canada for the next thousand years and we are actually going to let some Australian company with a horrible track record steal it from us. I say horrible track record because of a letter in the Saturday National Post from a guy in Tucson who points out that the company making the bid has ruined some large companies by doing the same thing they are trying to do now, which is to get in to a business they have never been in before and know nothing about. This deal is just about some fat-cat slimy MBA type guys raising money to, "Do a deal." It's not about potash. Sure they sound like a bunch of real nice fellas but so did a lot of other guys who are now in jail or should be.
Sadly, in that same Globe and Mail issue I found out that we don't even own the Hudson's Bay Company anymore. It's owned by the company that owns Lord and Taylor in the USA!
My problem is that I can't see the 'math' that drives all these deals from a 'good-for-Canada' standpoint. Some people will do well because of it but our grandkids won't look back on us as too smart when they study this in school someday. I think we are selling our future and putting our destiny in the hands of some people we are not going to like once the dust settles down.
One of Canada's former Crown jewels used to be right here in Sarnia. Polymer Corporation was started here in 1942 to produce artificial rubber since the natural rubber was being used by Hitler to make war on us and we needed a lot of rubber to make tanks and airplanes to stop him from doing whatever sick shit he had in mind. Polymer was a huge made-in-Sarnia, Ontario, Canada success.
Later on, the geniuses who run the country (backed by the voters) allowed the company to be sold to Nova who took what they wanted from it and sold the rubber division to a German company named Bayer... you might remember them as the inventors of heroin. The way I saw it, the Germans finally won World War II; instead of beating us on the field of battle, they just bought us. Now there is no more rubber being made in Canada and guess what? The Germans are gone... with a lot of our money and jobs.
Should we just let Potash go Down Under? I don't think so. The Aussies are doing this because they see a way to borrow $39 billion dollars and pay most of it back in two years. If they do that, then we were schmucks for selling a thousand years of future profits so cheaply. If they don't pay the money back, then we will see a first class Canadian corporation in ruins. Either way it's going to mean that the Canadian job market will suffer. How do I know that? I don't know for sure, I'm just going with history on this one.
It's why we don't have any new refineries. We let a foreign company have our oil and build a pipeline to the USA where they will build 'our' refinery if the US recession ever ends despite the fact that we already have a pipeline. Sounds like serious money doesn't it? They can build a pipeline all the way to the Louisiana and still beat our price. In the end, it won't matter. We lost control of the issue because we sold it... for a little more than thirty pieces of silver but we'll all be dead and buried when our grandchildren brand us as the Schmuck Generation.
But Potash is not about oil. It's about food and with the population growth going the way it is, I think that food is going to be a big thing in the future. Selling Potash is like selling Lake Huron to a foreign water company... not a smart thing to do. If we had politicians who were not afraid to stand up for us and really did care about the long term, they would act on this... now. Let us make the rules when it comes to digging up our country. We need to be in control of our destiny!
Where is our country going? It sounds to me like Canada is going to the highest bidder. Now that's just my opinion, but if you think I'm wrong... bite me!
September, 2010
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