a Global News investigation has found the company, 1PLUS12, is currently facing two lawsuits totaling $6.4 million that allege fraud or misrepresentation and is linked to an alleged $17-million mortgage fraud involving high-end real estate across Toronto.
Canada has achieved zero growth in our innovation outputs despite hundreds of billions of taxpayers' dollars spent on inputs. Compare that with the United States, which relentlessly built 21st-century policy infrastructure and saw its innovation productivity grow at 1 per cent per annum over the past three decades. If Canada performed similarly, our economy would now be generating an extra $100-billion annually.
The dream of creating a standard of transparent, client-focused service in the investment industry died Thursday. Regulators bailed on two reforms
On December 20, 2017, the Supreme Court of Canada released its decision in the Deloitte LLP vs. Livent case. A troubling tone was set. The result was a 4-3 vote on one portion of the case, and 0-7 vote against Livent on another portion. Short of a legislative fix that is years away at best, the only course of action for investors is to understand that annual financial statement audits hold very little value for investors
Canada regulator ignored warnings on risky mortgage investments. Their boss, Executive Director for Licensing and Market Conduct Anatol Monid, decided in May 2015 to do nothing.
Canadians accepted the adoption of IFRS primarily because we were told it would improve financial comparability. Those who believe otherwise should simply read a cross-section of recent audited IFRS financial statements and realize that a major step backwards occurred when IFRS became adopted. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fast-growing marijuana industry.
The Auditor General of Ontario said that nearly $4.5 billion in Ontario Hydro (Hydro One) transmission assets were already beyond their expected service life. The company didn’t even have a good program of trimming trees to reduce power outages.The government has dealt with this problem of the Auditor General by ruling that the auditor can no longer report on Hydro One, despite the large public investment.
Investors are being systematically swindled out of large amounts of retirement savings,” says Al Rosen, a forensic accountant and co-author of Easy Prey Investors, a recently-released book that details shortfalls of Canada’s lax reporting standards. A key challenge, says Rosen, relates to Canada’s use of International Financial Reporting Standards, which “assign excessive power and choice to corporate management, providing them the ability to inflate corporate profits.”
The lax oversight of syndicated mortgages is hurting Ontario investors with little relief in sight Major changes to the Financial Services Commission of Ontario announced nearly two years after critical reports are likely too late for many investors
Lawyers may be the next victims of automation, and the impact on the macroeconomy could be serious. "Everything from contract drafting to legal research appears prone to automation."
Promise of middle class tax relief...Middle-class Canadians are about to find that out with a thump in the coming spring budget when Finance Minister Bill Morneau includes a host of sneaky tax hikes on the middle class, such as making employer-paid health and dental benefits taxable and implementing Trudeau’s carbon tax.
The TPP wasn’t about unleashing the power of the private sector to bring prosperity to millions. It was for geopolitical reasons, “to advance American leadership in Asia.” They serve a foreign policy goal of locking countries into the U.S. sphere of interest. It also would have bound the parties to policies and philosophies anathema to true free-trade regimes.
Canada's lack of cohesive regulation is particularly problematic surrounding the collection of beneficial ownership information on registered companies.The Association of Certified Fraud Examiners' (ACFE) 2016 global fraud study notes the increasing ingenuity of white-collar criminals, and the role of technological advances in this trend. A report issued by the International Monetary Fund expressed concerns about Canada's ability to combat money laundering and financial crimes, noting that Canada is exposed and vulnerable to high risk money laundering threats. In cases successful before the courts, asset recovery is low. Penalties are also low, and are not significant enough to offer a real deterrence to white-collar criminals.
A decision this week by the U.S. Supreme Court should have served as a giant rubber stamp to mark “FAIL” on last December’s UN climate accord. Within days — hours even — China had signalled that if the U.S. was no longer going to impose ruinous emission targets on itself, the People’s Republic was out as well. Many developing nations sent similar signals, but not Canada. Indeed, here, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doubled down with a pledge of $2.65 billion for the UN to dole out to “green” energy or building projects in poorer countries...about three times the amount the Trudeau government has promised for initiatives in Canada to bolster our slumping economy. The Chinese, the Indians, Brazilians, Indonesians and others were never going to cripple their economies to further phoney UN climate goals.
Because assignment sales are rarely listed publicly, they have created a thriving grey market. What’s more, the assignment market appears to reward neither the original seller nor the ultimate buyer, despite pushing prices higher and higher: Middlemen do not pay land transfer taxes on assignment deals because the property is not technically changing hands. This loophole diminishes the effectiveness of the tax as a deterrent to speculation.
"At the heart of the debate about climate change is a simple scientific question: can a doubling of the concentration of a normally harmless, indeed moderately beneficial, gas, from 0.03% of the atmosphere to 0.06% of the atmosphere over the course of a century change the global climate sufficiently to require drastic and painful political action today?
Property that comes with so much debt even the federal government seems scared of it. “A lot of people think ‘I’ve got a $1 million mortgage. I’m the man, give me the best rate.’ In fact, those people are paying even higher rates because their loans have no government backing....they must seek a loan in the subprime market.
A Yorkton, Sask., woman with dementia agreed to give her house to a grandson who promised to pay back-taxes and let her stay as long as she wanted, only to usher her out and install tenants instead, and when an elderly Ontario woman unexpectedly sold the antique truck for a fraction of what it was worth, her daughter’s suspicions were immediately raised. The court ruled that both transactions were invalid and ordered the property returned.
This article, written from an American perspective, discusses the history and nature of money and the money supply
Alberta Court of Appeal erred says Supreme Court of Canada: An Alberta trial judge ruled Heritage Education Funds improperly breached its contract by acting dishonestly. The decision was overturned by an Alberta appeal court, which ruled no specific language in Mr. Bhasin’s contract required Heritage Education to act in good faith.
In a case released Thursday called Bhasin v. Hrynew, the court said Canadian contract law comes with a duty of good faith that requires parties to perform their contractual obligations honestly.
While it’s true that corporate governance has always been a major concern in Canada because of clubby boardroom atmospheres, the problem has been brought into much sharper focus by unfolding events. The result is that board directors are now investors’ last best hope for fair treatment in Canada.
On the hook for court costs, The Consumers' Association of Canada faces ruin.
In Cleveland, the subprime loan crisis has cut a devastating swath, leaving neighbourhoods looted and vacant. But some are asking why complaints about the predatory lending practices that led to the crisis fell on deaf ears until stock markets began losing money, Kristin Goff reports.
Subprime financing. Nuts and Bolts: At the heart of the problem was the idea that you could manage risky mortgages if you pooled the debt with other less risky ones, then sliced and diced them into various investment vehicles, with predictable risk profiles. Instead, it provided channels that helped spread a financial contagion from the United States across the globe. The crisis has caused those in the investment and banking industry to rail against the "lack of transparency". Those who borrowed to buy or refinance their homes complain of fraud, lies and gouging
Something is missing these days from Canadian courtrooms. It's called lawyers. In their place are ordinary people. With civil trials estimated to cost $60,000 to $150,000 and legal aid programs hard-pressed to serve even the poor, judges reckon that anywhere between 40 and 85 per cent of those appearing before them do so without lawyers.
Something is missing these days from Canadian courtrooms. It's called lawyers. In their place are ordinary people. With civil trials estimated to cost $60,000 to $150,000 and legal aid programs hard-pressed to serve even the poor, judges reckon that anywhere between 40 and 85 per cent of those appearing before them do so without lawyers.
Taxpayers are picking up the tab for more than $1.3 million in legal fees to help Jean Chretien and two top aides, Jean Pelletier and Jean Carle, defend their actions in the sponsorship affair, government documents show. Just over $700,000 is earmarked to pay legal counsel for Alfonso Gagliano, the former public works minister., according to the documents obtained under the Access to Information Act.
Canadian society's drift toward a culture of "intense individualism": what may have fallen by the wayside is the consideration of the greater good for society says McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law. The fallout will affect everything from the labour market and productivity, to such seeming intangibles as social cohesion and acceptance of ethnic diversity
When it comes right down to it, a legal battle is war, its weaponry is money and the winner is the side with the most firepower... it's a machine that must win. It becomes not a matter of justice, but a need to win. Those representing it have their reputations and their futures on the line...The protection system our forefathers designed for us, as ours, has been taken over by its insiders, and remade to serve its interests, not ours.. says Dave Brown November 27, 2005
A problem so widespread and so pervasive that it swamps regulators and law enforcement agencies from coast to coast. And it’s going on in some of the most respected financial institutions in the country