Neoliberalism

Some glass doors with vertical metal handles are obscured by paper on the inside. On either side of the shuttered entrance are grubby off-white tiles, and a metal sign reading "Hudson's Bay Company Incorporated May 1670" and above that, someone has scribbled with marker pen, "Bye colonizers." A planter painted red, yellow, blue and pink is in front of the wall, below the sign.

This conversation was first published by the Halifax Examiner on March 28, 2025.

Private equity firms have been in the news this year.

As I reported here, Canada’s oldest retailer, the iconic Hudson’s Bay Company, has declared bankruptcy and has been liquidating all but six of its 80 stores across the country.

Like so many other retail outlets before it, The Bay succumbed to the private equity buyout-and-bankrupt scourge. The Bay is owned by NRDC, a large U.S. private equity firm owned by real estate mogul Richard Baker, who has “driven a set of coffin nails into The Bay.”

Canada’s new Prime Minister Mark Carney has also been scrutinized for his private equity background. Before becoming leader of the Liberal Party of Canada and then prime minister, Carney spent nearly five years as chair of a private equity firm – Brookfield Assets Management – and there have been criticisms of the way Brookfield operates, and its use of the tax haven of Bermuda for two of its funds.

Many Canadians who are active on the stock market – including Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre – are invested in Brookfield through exchange-traded funds. That’s how pervasive large private equity firms have become.

In a recent report for the Canadian Anti-Monopoly Project (CAMP), author Rachel Wasserman laid out some problems with private equity, or more specifically, with “buyout private equity.” The buyout private equity playbook involves the “leveraged buyout,” when a firm borrows heavily to purchase healthy mature businesses, including consolidating or “rolling up” small independent businesses to take control of an entire sector (such as veterinary services, funeral homes).

The playbook includes saddling the acquired company with the debt used to acquire it, increasing profitability by cutting staff and expenses, stripping it of real estate assets if it has any, and renting premises back to the company. Buyout private equity firms profit massively from short-term serial investments, and then flip them, usually to another private equity firm. In some instances, however, their profiteering drives the company into bankruptcy.

Witness the demise of The Bay.

But it’s not just the owners and employees of the private equity firms who are benefiting from this parasitic playbook. Anyone receiving a pension may well be unwittingly complicit in the private equity business. Canada’s Pension Plan and the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, for example, are two of the biggest investors in private equity in the world, because it is usually very profitable – even if, sadly and ironically, it often harms workers.

After I reported on the immense economic and social damage that buyout private equity causes, I received a lot of feedback from readers who expressed frustration about the problem, and asked what – if anything – could be done to rein in these firms.

I wanted to know the same thing.

So I got in touch with Jon Shell, chair of Social Capital Partners, an independent Canadian organization that sees extreme wealth inequality and concentrated ownership of assets in Canada as “big problems” it wants to help fix.

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This article was first published by the Halifax Examiner.

It’s March 19, 2025, and The Bay in the large mall in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, is busy, busier than it’s been in a long time, according to staff members, because – belatedly, they say – people are showing up to support the department store now that they’ve heard it is in deep trouble and may have to close its stores across Canada.

But inside The Bay store, long-time employees continue to provide their usual impeccable service, despite the possibility that they may soon be out of a job.

They tell reporter Jennifer Henderson that they have no inside information about the fate of The Hudson’s Bay company, and know only what they’ve read in the news. They asked Henderson not to name them for fear of losing their jobs prematurely. All have worked at The Bay for a long time, one of them for 35 years. They have no idea if the Dartmouth store has a chance of staying open, or if they will get any benefits if it doesn’t.

On March 7, 2025, the Hudson’s Bay Company, the iconic Canadian retailer that can trace its roots (albeit shameful colonial ones) back to 1670, filed for creditor protection in the Ontario Supreme Court under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA). It owes creditors nearly $1 billion.

The Bay is facing possible liquidation, depending on the outcome of that creditor protection case, which in turn depends on whether a buyer or interim financing can be found.

So for now, employees just do their work, wait and see.

Only one of the employees Henderson spoke with knows who owns The Bay. She’s worked for the company for more than 15 years, and taken an interest in the corporate history. But that doesn’t mean she knows if or how the ownership is linked to the trouble that has sunk the company.

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November 18, 2019

Morila gold mine in Mali, West Africa, 2002. Photo: Joan Baxter

This book chapter is the result of a visit to the Morila gold mine in Mali nearly 18 years ago, and is excerpted from my 2010 book, “Dust from our eyes – an unblinkered look at Africa,” published by Wolsak & Wynn in Canada and worldwide by Fahamu Books, which was shortlisted for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize in 2009. I decided to republish it here because I regret to say that based on the extensive research I’ve been doing on the gold mining industry in the past few years, it looks as if not much (if anything) has improved since then. I first wrote this story for the BBC, following a visit to the Morila gold mine when it was operated by South Africa’s AngloGold and Randgold. Today, the Morila gold mine is operated by Canada’s Barrick Gold, and is a “joint venture company held by Barrick (40%), AngloGold Ashanti (40%), and the State of Mali (20%).” The economic disparities, and the environmental, social and political havoc that such gold mines cause, are all contributing factors to the horrendous insecurity that now prevails in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger (where Canadian gold mining companies are so prevalent), causing widespread suffering – and death. If I were writing it today, I would probably entitle it, “Gold: all that glitters causes death and devastation.”

All that glitters … is taken away

… the very term investment badly distorts what’s really going on. Plundering, looting and exploiting the non-renewable resources of Africa is a far more accurate description. Gerald Caplan

In my fifth year in Mali, in late 2002, I finally obtained an invitation to accompany the country’s new minister of mines and a team of Malian journalists on a day trip from Mali’s capital Bamako to Morila, the country’s newest big gold mine.

On the short flight to the mine, I found myself seated beside a South African employee of the South African mining giant Randgold, who told me he and his wife had recently applied for Canadian citizenship and that he now lived in Toronto – when he wasn’t in Mali. He said things were deteriorating in South Africa, “if you know what I mean,” and that he and his wife, as white South Africans, felt their futures were in Canada.

He went on to tell me about the wonders I was about to experience at Morila, especially the man-made lake that was filled with water pumped 40 kilometres from a small river, a tributary to the River Niger. And as for the clubhouse, that was something to behold; he was very proud of it because he helped to design it. He called it the “Sahelian Club Med.” There were pleasure craft and a wharf on the man-made lake, he said, and lovely watered gardens, a fine bar and restaurant, with food, wine and other drinks flown in from South Africa. He said he often drove down from Bamako in his Land Cruiser to spend weekends there.

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This article was originally published in the Halifax Examiner on February 21, 2019.

“We care,” says Northern Pulp on the website it has created to spread the word that it “cares about forestry families of Nova Scotia.”

The site is a vehicle for the company’s letter-writing campaign to get people in the forestry sector to contact Premier Stephen McNeil, their MLA, MP, or even Canadian Senators to ask for an extension to the legislated deadline of January 31, 2020 for the closure of Boat Harbour as a stabilizing lagoon for effluent from the Northern Pulp / Paper Excellence mill in Pictou County.

Effluent from the Northern Pulp mill flows out of a pipeline. Photo: Joan Baxter

The form letter on the site requests the extension “to allow Northern Pulp and Paper Excellence the time required to commission and construct a new, environmentally responsible onsite treatment system.” The letter is signed, “A concerned supporter of Nova Scotia’s forest industry.”

This isn’t the first time Northern Pulp has resorted to composing and sending out form letters to try to garner support for itself and its interests, be it to town councils trying to get them to lend their support to a campaign to get the Boat Harbour closure date changed, or to its employees and former employees to get a (my) book signing cancelled in New Glasgow.

The Northern Pulp “cares” website is just part of the company’s intensive PR and lobbying campaign, which also means rallying its supporters in Canada’s largest private sector union, UNIFOR, to get the pro-mill message out in advertisements on the airwaves and social media.

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(This article was first published by the Halifax Examiner on September 14, 2018)

A no-fracking float in a 2011 parade in Tatamagouche, Nova Scotia. From 2011 until 2014, when Premier Stephen McNeil put a moratorium on the practise, Nova Scotians staged frequent demonstrations to call on the government not to allow fracking in the province. Photo: Joan Baxter.

On a late summer evening in September 2018, about 200 people gathered in Pugwash, filling the Northumberland Community Curling Club for a debate framed around the resolution “fracking will be beneficial to Cumberland County” in northern Nova Scotia.

The audience was, not surprisingly, clearly divided between those in favour and those against. For many, including several members of the Nova Scotia Fracking Resource and Action Coalition (NOFRAC), it was like déjà vu, a step back in time to 2011 through 2013, when they took to the streets frequently in their efforts to try to convince the then-NDP government to ban on fracking.

Eventually the NDP government of Darrell Dexter launched an independent review of the socio-economic impacts of the process under the leadership of then Cape Breton University president, David Wheeler.

It’s now four years since the report by a panel led by Wheeler recommended that a great deal more knowledge was needed about the many risks of hydraulic fracturing before the controversial practise be allowed in Nova Scotia. A few weeks later, the government of Stephen McNeil passed a bill to place a legal moratorium on fracking in the province.

But the matter has hardly been laid to rest, and certainly not by die-hard proponents of fracking, who have been popping up all over the province this year.

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People carrying banners and signs as well as Mi'kmaq flag gather with fists raised in front of a mountain.

 This is the last in a series of four articles on the 21st century push for mining and quarrying in Nova Scotia. Earlier versions of these articles appeared in May and June 2018 in the Halifax Examiner and the Cape Breton Spectator. (I am pleased to say that this series of four articles earned a silver Atlantic Journalism Award in Excellence in Digital Journalism: Enterprise/Longform.)

How the mining lobby is working to undermine environmental protection in Nova Scotia

On a cold day in late November 2017 a couple of dozen people gathered near Kellys Mountain in Victoria County, on Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island, for the first in a series of protests over possible mining or quarrying on the mountain.

They were reacting to comments from the executive director of the Mining Association of Nova Scotia (MANS), Sean Kirby, that mineral deposits on Kellys Mountain were “blocked forever” because they were locked underneath the Kluscap Wilderness Area, which had been created in 2015.

According to MANS, Cape Breton’s economy was being “harmed” by protected wilderness areas, losing out on 80 jobs that could be created if a quarry were allowed on Kellys Mountain, where there were 2 billion tonnes of aggregate.[1]

Outraged by Kirby’s suggestions that part of the protected area could be swapped for another piece of land so that Kluscap Mountain could be opened up for quarrying, members of the First Nation organization, Reclaim Turtle Island, organized the demonstration on Highway 105, with support from the Council of Canadians.

The majority of participants were First Nations activists and Warriors, who came from all over the province, including Waycobah, Port Hawkesbury, Sydney, Halifax and Sipekne’katik.[2]

Speaking to CTV during the November 25 protest, Suzanne Patles said that the mountain is sacred to her people, the departure point for Kluscap, and home to the Kluscap Cave where the Mi’kmaq perform ceremonies.

Another protest on December 16 drew about 40 people, who gathered on Seal Island Bridge.

In a telephone interview, Madonna Bernard of Waycobah First Nation, tells me that the police helped control traffic on the bridge while the demonstrators conducted a ceremony for Kluscap Mountain.

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