Hudson's Bay: good bye and good riddance! The sooner Canada become wholly part of the US, the sooner my great work will be done.
well, what happened to the good mannerd canadians. Jeezus, you vote in a Conservative and next day your gettin annexed. Quick go eat some poutin.
"Quick go eat some poutin". ... did you mean 'putin' ?
btw. poor prime minister harper; no sooner had he been elected prime-minister and he had to check himself into the emergency department at the ottawa general hospital with an asthma attack !
must have been from all the hot air he had to breathe in the house of commons.
he was released soon into the care of the canadian public !
no private physician making a housecall on the prime-minister. we have socialized healthcare even for a conservative prime-minister !
i do wish him speedy recovery !
he's been suffering from asthma since he was a teenager . a/t to morning news 1 in 10 canadian children suffer from asthma - there has been a rather startling increase in this disease since the early 90's .
hbg
did gerry zucker sucker-punch himself ?
some investment analysts think HBC wasn't really such a good buy and that gerry zucker may have taken too much of a gamble in the "no-bidding war" for HBC.
time will tell ! hbg
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By Mathew Ingram - the globe and mail - toronto
Friday, January 27, 2006
So Jerry Zucker, the publicity-shy billionaire from South Carolina, has finally won the takeover "battle" for Hudson's Bay Co., the venerable retailer that is not only one of the oldest companies in the world, but is considerably older than Canada itself.
Why is the word "battle" in quotation marks? Because the takeover contest for HBC wasn't really much of a contest at all, considering the only other bids that surfaced during a period of several months -- one from Onex Corp. and another from a U.S. venture fund called Cerberus Capital -- was actually lower than Mr. Zucker's bid. You know there's something wrong with your auction when the prices start going down instead of up.
So has Mr. Zucker sucker-punched himself with this deal, as my colleague Eric Reguly described it recently? There are those who believe the U.S. entrepreneur didn't have any intention of actually owning or operating Hudson's Bay Co., and that what he really wanted was for someone else to buy him out of his stake in the Canadian retailer. There are also those who believe that Mr. Zucker wants to break the company up and try to "unlock" some of its hidden value by selling HBC's real estate, credit-card unit and other assets.
Many analysts disagree about whether that makes sense or not, however, given the conditional leases and other restrictions that HBC is subject to on many of its most valuable properties. The message from Mr. Zucker's team, meanwhile, is that the billionaire actually wants to operate the company rather than sell it or break it up. According to a spokesman, he wants to "stay the course" by improving the retailer's operations and thereby making it a healthier company.
Obviously, Mr. Zucker didn't become the head of a holding company with more than $3-billion (U.S.) in assets by being a moron. So it's entirely possible that he sees more value in HBC than his new $15.75 (Canadian) takeover offer implies -- and it's theoretically possible that he is right, and that a capable retailer could take HBC over and somehow improve it to the point where it might be worth more. Not that long ago (okay, it was 1997), the stock was trading at close to $40 a share.
The other possibility -- one which many believe is a lot more likely -- is that Mr. Zucker has fallen into the Canadian version of a "value trap," and that HBC will not only fail to recover in the way he intends it to, but in all likelihood will wind up filing for bankruptcy protection, just as its former competitor Eaton's did.
Mathew Ingram is the Globe and Mail's on-line business columnist
hamburger
Une maudite poutine. eh?
we get poutine grappe in New Brunswick. I think it sucks too.
I am amazed that Canadians are always on about HBC being soooo Canadian . . . they were dragged kicking and screaming into the Dominion, and only relented when their charter was revoked.
When Charles Stuart was restored to the throne in 1660 as Charles II, he had a lot of debts to pay. The biggest cash loans to his father before he was executed, and to himself and his brother James had come from Charles Penn, who was dead by then, so Charles gave Pennsylvania to his son William. He caused untold havoc in Virginia by giving half the territory to Lord Fairfax. The Carolinas came from myriad smaller debts he was repaying.
The Company of Gentleman Adventurers Trading into Hudson's Bay was the last big pay-off, in May, 1670. He gave that charter to George Monck--Monck had been a royalist commander who turned his coat in Ireland and joined Cromwell (no one resented that in a military man in those days) and who commanded the last armed force in the British Isle, the Parliamentary Guard at Coldstream, when Oliver Cromwell died, and then his son Richard Cromwell, Tumbledown Dick, fled England, so that Monck eventually decided to restore the monarchy; Prince Rupert of Bohemia--who was not Bohemian, but the son of the former Elector Palatine, who was indirectly responsible for the Thirty Years War (his election as King of Bohemia rather than the mad Hapsburg Archduke of Austria was one of severl causii belli for that war), and who (Prince Rupert himself, not his father) has served as the late King's most trusted officer and commander of his cavalry, as well as his cousin; John Churchill, one day to gain immortal fame as the Duke of Marlborough, twenty years after the death of Charles II, who was nobody in 1670, but whose father Winston Churchill had been a loyal royalist, whose estate was ruined and confiscated as a consequence. Those three men, and a few more than a dozen others were given the most liberal charter in the history of the world, i swear it.
They were empowered to treat with foreign potentates, to levy taxes in their territory (long known as Prince Rupert's Land), to levy war and to treat for peace and tribute, to permit, regulate and/or prohibit settlement in the stated territory--their powers were those of independent sovereigns while yet a private corporate body. They kept settlers out and made themselves (or their heirs) fabolously wealth with no effort. They hired the dirt-poor and hardy Scots of the Islands to work the territory, and competed directly with the French, and when the French were gone, with the English at Montréal and with the Americans. The definition of "Prince Rupert's Land" was so broad and generous that it appeared that Alberta and Saskatchewan could not be created provinces because of the title to that land which the charter, in a rather painfully obvious manner, had given to a private corporate body.
Had Crown and Parliament not abandoned them in 1867, the Hudson's Bay Company may well have proven to be a far more potent and powerful force than the struggling Dominion of Canada. Now, they've somehow become a national institution. Ah, lovely irony . . .
HBC
i'm sure setanta wants to recognize
...LAURA SECORD...as the great canadian heroine of the war of 1812.
perhaps i can persuade setanta to buy some of canada's favourite
...LAURA SECORD CHOCOLATES...
sure to sweeten the life of anyone who's tried them.
(i can't quite understand why anyone would want to name chocalates after laura secord. i guess it's the same as naming chocolates and even sausages after mozart !). hbg
They named sausages after Jimmy Dean, didn't they?
And coffee and dougnuts after Tim Horton....
a/c to canadian press, the canadian army hopes to persuade tim horton's to set up a coffee and donut shop in afghanistan (kabul airport, i believe). the canadian soldiers want their "timmy" !
since the u.s. army has several fast-food outlets in kabul , the canadian army hopes tim horton's will also be willing to set up shop.
negotiations are underway as we speak.
i recall speaking with a canadian army officer recently, who told me that tha canadian army requires tim horton as a morale booster.
tim horton supplied the canadian navy ships operating in the persian gulf region with free coffee during their operations - quite a publicity stunt for tim horton's ! hbg
