Tausi Insider

Finance Minister Paul Martin and Secretary of State for Financial Institutions Jim Peterson, right, in Ottawa on June 25, 1999. FRED CHARTRAND/CP Keldon Bester is a co-founder of the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project and a fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation. Where is Paul Martin when you need him? In the late nineties, Canada’s banks had decided competition wasn’t for them. RBC and BMO announced their nuptials in January, 1998, and CIBC and TD followed suit in April of that year. Though the scale of RBC’s proposed purchase of HSBC is nowhere near that of the proposed consolidation in the nineties, regulators should learn from then-minister of finance Paul Martin and take a firm stance against Canada’s largest bank absorbing a competitor. The brazenness of the bank’s consolidation plans 20 years ago cannot be overstated. Canada would have gone from five major banks to two megabanks and a ticking clock on the future acquisition of their remaining competitors. B...

The logo of the World Economic Forum in the Alpine resort of Davos, Switzerland, on May 25, 2022. ARND WIEGMANN/Reuters Don Tapscott is an author, executive chair of the Blockchain Research Institute , adjunct professor at INSEAD and a member of the Order of Canada. He formerly led the Global Solution Networks research initiative exploring new methods of global co-operation, problem solving and governance. For years, critics have viewed the annual Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum as a cabal of the rich and powerful, conspiring to bend the world to corporate interests. Today, the political right leads the criticism, spinning up conspiracy theories on how the global elites seek to run the world. Plots range from forced vaccinations and mandatory ID cards, to radical limits on property rights and wealth ownership, to chips implanted in people’s brains. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has aligned himself with the some of these theorists – saying he opposes the WEF’s “socia...