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Play for Toronto FC, A politician apologizes, Bill Gates and Saudi Prince Buy Four Seasons, Voting, Flu Shots

By Ian Bailey-Leung

toronto_fc.jpgYou can play for Toronto FC next year. They are holding open tryouts at the end of December as long as you’re willing to pony up $115. And if you don’t make it, you also get a T-shirt and two free tickets to a game in their first season.
“I’m sorry,” apologized Jim Flaherty with nice, cheap words yesterday. He was apologizing to the Canadians who collectively lost $25 billion when he announced the surprise new income trust tax.
Software billionaire Bill Gates and Saudi Prince al-Waleed bin Talal are going to buy 90% of the Four Seasons hotel chain, which has its headquarters in Toronto. Isadore Sharp still retains 10% ownership and will still manage the company.
Everyone’s thinking about voting today. Americans vote in the mid-term elections. In case there was any doubt, the main issues in voter’s minds going into the booths are “Iraq, Iraq, Iraq.” Meanwhile, in Toronto, voters attended the The Election Party that was held yesterday at Revival on College Street.
Want something to do after you vote this year? Something that will contribute to the common good? Toronto Public Health has announced that flu shots will be available on November 13th.

Comments

  • Karen

    Jim Flaherty is the MP for Whitby-Oshawa.
    Just saying.

  • http://www.benwendt.com Ben Wendt

    $25 billion lost eh? Where was did they lose it?
    That works out to close to $1 billion per person by the way. I for one never had any billion to lose.

  • Ian

    Essentially, it was lost in falling stock prices. No exactly “real” wealth, but it was lost just the same.
    And most of these income funds were owned/controller by old-age pensioners, who were relying on them for steady income in their post-retirement years.

  • http://www.guesswork.ca Patrick M

    Most of the shares were owned by pension and mutual funds, which won’t impact pensions per se, although theoretically it could affect the ability of companies to pay them out (but almost certainly won’t). The principal beneficiaries were the companies that converted to income trusts, who paid less taxes and saw their stock prices, options etc rise accordingly.
    The people who would have primarily suffered had the rush to tax favoured income trusts continued would have been average tax payers, who would have to ante up to cover the corporate taxes that were avoided under the income trust structure.
    This change is a win for the average person.

  • andrew

    From what I understand, the Minister knew this was going to have to happen. I’m sure Finance and Treasury Board staff have been quietly going apeshit regarding Telus and BCE turning into income trusts, and the promise of more to come. Bye-bye nice surpluses. What I don’t get is why Harper would make this kind of promise knowing that Flaherty would only turn around and break it, for surprisingly solid and consistent reasons. Then again, Flaherty is apparently smarter and more honourable than past associations with other PC’s would have me believe, but I digress.
    I have sympathy with folks who lost their pension-supplementary income via the trusts losing value on the stock market, but this is where the salesmen are truly cheats and liars. They had to know that at some point that Finance would put a stop to this hemorrhage of revenue, regardless of whether it was the liberals or the tories. Suddenly getting all excited about it and causing these stocks to lose value [hey, it ain't a stampede of senior citizens desperately undercutting these hard-working corporations, that sound you hear is the collective panic of a class dependent upon electronic transactions of information mugging as wealth] is something they could have avoided with a little foresight and a little less avarice.
    If companies like Telus and BCE were so concerned about the well-being of senior citizens in Canada, then perhaps they wouldn’t have seized the opportunity to develop into income trusts in the first place, depriving the federal coffers and jeopardizing the social safety net that is supposed to look out for ALL Canadian citizens, not just the ones who can afford to invest. My mom, not having a single investment due to poverty, deserves the same kind of health care and long-term care that the billions of tax dollars due to be lost because of income-trust conversion starvation.

  • http://www.newmindspace.com kevin bracken

    > [$25 billion] works out to close to $1 billion per person by the way
    It actually works out to be more like $781.25 per Canadian, (although it does not apply for every Canadian, there are more than 25.)

  • andrew

    according to StatsCan, the figure would be just slightly lower: $774.70 per person. if you use the figures for Canadians 60 and older, then it works out to be $4,238.37 per person. that of course assumes that each one is an investor and equally.

  • http://www.flickr.com/photos/dstopping David Topping

    Kevin, I demand my $6.55.

  • http://cork2toronto.eircom.net Mark Dowling

    I can understand why Toronto FC are concerned with the price of hosting tryouts but MLSE can afford it. This is too much like charging for interviews which is a practice I despise.