#Potash: Sing When You're Winning

For Reguly and some others:

If Potash goes, every company – even Canadian champions – is fair game

"Opposition stems largely from the fear that if Potash Corp. goes, every Canadian company – even those who have styled themselves Canadian champions – is fair game. “There’s a huge risk. If this goes through, I can’t see how we would keep an Encana or a CNRL in Canadian hands,” said Leonard Waverman, dean of the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. “I think it’s going to kill Alberta.”"

The above quote, now deleted, was the conclusion of the Globe's original story Hometown opposition to Potash takeover puts Harper in bind - still available at time of writing at CTV. The Globe's final version, heavily edited, is now titled Western opposition to Potash sale complicates PM’s decision, and ends differently, with a more ambivalent quote from Gibbons. Since that's the version that will appear in Wednesday's paper, I've decided to quote the original article in full, below, for anyone who likes to play "spot the differences" and for posterity's sake. Enjoy:

Hometown opposition to Potash takeover puts Harper in bind
- Steven Chase, Shawn McCarthy, Brenda Bouw & Nathan VanderKlippe

Weighty political opposition to the Potash Corp. takeover from Stephen Harper's hometown of Calgary is complicating the task of reviewing BHP Billiton's bid, Conservative insiders say.

As one senior Tory tells The Globe, this Alberta-based backlash to the BHP deal has ended up broadening the political calculations for Ottawa beyond Saskatchewan.

Richard Haskayne, a veteran of Canadian boardrooms who's helmed several of this country's biggest companies, is one Calgary businessman who's been pressing Tory MPs and cabinet ministers to reject the takeover.

“My neighbour, two doors down, is Jim Prentice and he knows where I stand,” said Mr. Haskayne, after whom the University of Calgary's business school is named.

The Harper government has set itself a deadline of November 3 to rule on the acquisition. It must decide whether the deal is what foreign-takeover legislation calls a “net benefit” to Canada.

Mr. Haskayne says a green light for the Anglo-Australian BHP to take over Potash would be wrenching for Canada, where three provincial governments have already joined Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall in opposing the deal.

“It's going to be as divisive as the NEP,” Mr. Haskayne said, referring to the interventionist 1980 National Energy Program that infuriated Albertans.

Over his career, the Calgarian has served as president of Hudson's Bay Oil and Gas, CEO of Interhome Energy, chairman of TransAlta Corp, chairman of MacMillan Bloedel and chairman of NOVA Corp. when it merged witih TransCanada PipeLines.

He's been campaigning against a foreign acquisition of Potash because it controls such a key portion of a strategic resource. The former Saskatchewan Crown corporation has title to about 25 per cent of the world supply of potash, a vital ingredient in fertilizer.

Mr. Haskayne said he cannot see any “net benefit” to Canada to letting BHP buy Potash. “And I've been on 20 public company boards and chairman of half a dozen.”

The Calgary businessman said a foreign takeover of Potash would encourage outsiders to train their sites on the oil sands next. “If this aproved, and they let it go ahead, the next one is liable to be Cenovus or Canadian Oil Sands.”

Mr. Haskayne noted that he was chairman of forestry giant MacMillan Bloedel, a British Columbia corporate star, when it was bought out by U.S.-based Weyerhaeuser in 1999. But he said the circumstances were different.

“The company had financial problems. We tried to find a Canadian solution to it.” Mr. Haskayne added that the firm was able to show significant net benefits to Canada by a Weyehaeuser takeover including “better silviculture, better safety and better markets.”

He said he's of the opinion that Calgary's business community has turned against the deal in the last few days.

Exceptions, Mr. Haskayne noted, are economists such as Jack Mintz, the chair of the University of Calgary's School of Policy Studies. But he argues that business-school support for a takeover is a matter of “ideolology versus practical business stuff.”

Mr. Haskayne said foreign companies know they are welcome to make direct investments in Canadian resources. “If they want to come here and bring their technology and their money, we welcome that.”

But he is more concerned about takeovers of vital publicly-traded companies such as Potash. “We have a right to invest in them,” he said. “I have 20,000 shares of Potash. I am not going to tender them no matter what.”

Mr. Wall also lashed out at the Investment Canada review process on Tuesday, in particular information outlined in stories Tuesday in The Globe and Mail and National Post, which he called a betrayal of the process. Saskatchewan is calling for the Industry Minister to investigate the leaks.

“Money is being made and lost based on those remarks,” Mr. Wall told reporters in Regina. “Most importantly, it indicates that the government is prepared to go against the expressed wishes of the province of Saskatchewan.”

He said the government was “castigated at the official level by federal officials saying the confidentiality here must be strictly adhered to,” and now appears it was leaked by insiders.

Mr. Wall added: “This is a Saskatchewan takeover, let’s make no mistake. It affects our resources, and our industry, it affects jobs in this province and revenue to the government and it affects the strategic position of Saskatchewan and Canada in the world. And that’s why we made the recommendation of no. If they go with anything else but no, we don’t believe it’s representing the interests of the province very well on the part of the federal government.”

Opposition to a Potash deal goes beyond the Prairie populism of Mr. Wall and the Alberta oil patch, where some executive worry about the loss of Canadian head offices in key sectors.

Former Liberal industry minister John Manley, who now heads the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, said there is disagreement on the issue among his members, with some believing Ottawa should not approve the deal. Mr. Manley said the decision should be based on the national interest – and not the interest of one province or premier – and judged strictly according to the net benefit test of the Investment Canada Act.

The Harper government has sent signals to Chinese and other state-owned enterprises that they are welcome to invest in developing oil and gas properties, but that Ottawa would be more reluctant to approve the takeover of an operating company that's producing petroleum.

Calgary is also home to Agrium, a fertilizer giant which is one of the three members of the potash marketing cartel Canpotex.

An Agrium spokesman said the company has not been involved “in any way, shape or form” in the proposed BHP bid for Potash Corp., and that it’s not part of any Calgary business community support of Saskatchewan’s position.

He said the company’s only involvement on the issue came in its support for Canpotex, “an excellent marketing agency” for its potash production in Saskatchewan. Agrium has provided background to government agencies, including the government Saskatchewan, who have asked for information on the potash industry over the past couple of months.

Alberta’s conservative impulses have brought substantial support for the Potash deal. “people in the energy industry are very allergic to government interference in their business,” said David MacLean, vice-president of the Edmonton-based Alberta Enterprise Group.

But there is growing unease among some of the top leaders in the province’s powerful oil patch, many of whom have direct access to Mr. Prentice and Mr. Harper.

“There are certainly several senior executives in town that are against the deal,” said one oil patch source. “If they approve Potash, then I think every single large cap CEO in this town recalibrates who could or could not take them over.”

Opposition stems largely from the fear that if Potash Corp. goes, every Canadian company – even those who have styled themselves Canadian champions – is fair game.

“There’s a huge risk. If this goes through, I can’t see how we would keep an Encana or a CNRL in Canadian hands,” said Leonard Waverman, dean of the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. “I think it’s going to kill Alberta.”

30-10-95 PPS. "Referendum fraud one of greatest scandals in our political history"

On m'a fait savoir que j'ai fourni un lien défunt quand j'ai cité l'article de Webster dans mon billet 30 octobre 1995 et suites : je me souviens. J'ai corrigé cette situation, et pour rendre autant justice à Webster que j'en ai rendue à son collègue Macpherson, je cite l'article au complet, çi-bas :
Referendum fraud one of greatest scandals in our political history
 
BY THE GAZETTE (MONTREAL)JUNE 1, 2008 
 
Those "spoiled" referendum ballots from 1995, off for burning or shredding or kitty litter or whatever, represent a huge failure of Quebec society. What we have here is inaction in one of the great political scandals in Canadian history - arguably, the greatest of them all. If it had succeeded, its consequences would have far outranked the Pacific scandal or Beauharnois, Munsinger or sponsorship.

To recapitulate, many thousands of perfectly valid No votes in the sovereignty referendum were thrown out by Parti Québécois poll officials. More such votes were accepted only because observers on the scene raised a stink. Nobody knows how many No votes across the province were, or almost were, illegally invalidated - but their total could have been decisive in what everyone knew would be a skin-of-the-teeth poll.

Simply put, this was fraud that could have cost us our country.

Now, you might think this would qualify as a Big Deal. You might think it merited serious investigation, followed by ruthless prosecution, followed smartly by a few large cheeses being strung up by their thumbs, preferably in public and in prime time. The message might have gotten through that Quebecers will not accept this sort of criminality.

Yet none of the institutions we depend on for truth and justice seem to give a damn. All have given it the big yawn. Banana republics are, by comparison, models of diligence and integrity.

When the affair hit the light soon after the referendum, thanks to sleuthing by The Gazette's William Marsden, Quebec's election commissar could hardly bring himself to take notice. His successors, true to form, have laboured on the file only to dispose of it. The police and crown took a couple of low-level schmucks to court, said tsk-tsk when the case collapsed and dropped all charges against 29 others.

Our learned judges, meanwhile, have mostly contented themselves with gratuitous advice to stop wasting their precious time. And our political parties, those tireless defenders of the public weal? None of them has given a peep about this ingenious, outrageous scheme to thwart the will of the people and deliver us to political chaos and financial disaster.

During the referendum campaign Daniel Johnson, leader of the No forces, made the very sensible observation that you don't break up a country on a recount. Ah, but could one have saved the country on a recount once the separatist "victory" had been trumpeted across the seas and things begun to unravel?

Could we have got the Patriotes back in the tube? These are big hairy questions we almost had to answer, thanks to this brazen attempt to rig the vote.

So where did it come from? Are we seriously to believe that a few PQ bottom feeders thought up this ingenious plot to declare No ballots "spoiled"? Tell me another. We'll never know, though, once the ballots have been destroyed physically and expunged from the collective memory.

Let's dream for a moment. What might Quebecers have learned if a judge had handled this case with the ferocity of "Maximum John" Sirica, the jurist who broke open the Watergate scandal in Washington? What if we'd had the equivalent of Senator Sam Ervin and his committee calling out the John Deans and other slimy Nixon operatives to testify live on national television?

How high up did all this go? What did (insert famous name) know and when did he know it? How widespread was the planning for this criminal caper? How flagrant were the "spoiled ballot" calls (pretty damned flagrant, according to those who have seen examples)? Should we insist on United Nations observers if we ever have to go through this again?

A disagreeable element in the affair has been the performance of the province's francophone media. Usually, they do a commendable job of political coverage - always excluding the hotline ranters and the tabloids that cynically punched up the "reasonable-accommodation" crisis. Usually, one applauds. But it's hard to be enthusiastic about coverage of this sorry affair.

Almost throughout the piece, our colleagues have exhibited deep incuriosity. Their liveliest contributions have been to berate The Gazette for not letting this one go; for breaking the story in the first place, then not having the decency to let it die a quiet death.

Get over it, almost everyone keeps telling The Gazette, as the ballots edge their way toward the memory hole. Keeping the story going without them - without the physical proof - will not be easy. Loud will be the sighs of relief in certain quarters when the ballots meet the shredder.

Meantime, I'll be filing all this in a folder whose title sums up a memorable mess: VOTE THEFT. Just an incredible story, and one that has not done us proud.

Norman Webster is a former editor of The Gazette.