by Elaine Dewar
See: Ontario Superior Court of Justice Commercial List, the Honourable Justice Ground, Tuesday 30th of April, 2002. In the matter of a Plan of Compromise or Arrangement of General Publishing Co. Limited, General Distribution Services Limited, Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, the Boston Mills Press Ltd. And House of Anansi Press Limited.
See: Statement of Affairs General Distribution Services, August 19, 2002.
See: bershirehathaway.com/news/feb2701.html.
See: “Government Approves Chapters-Indigo Merger” by Leah Eichler, Publishers Weekly, June 18, 2001.
Interview with Robert Biehler, Deloitte, August, 2016.
Ibid, Biehler interview.
See: In the matter of an application under the Companies’ Creditors Ontario Superior Court of Justice Commercial List, Initial Order of Justice Ground, April 30, 2002. Also: Ibid, Biehler.
The company is called General Kinetics, of Brampton.
See: video of Launch of Griffin Poetry Prize, online, where his bio is outlined and he also speaks.
Interview with Marthe Sharpe, August 30, 2016.
See: Unanimous Shareholder Agreement, Section 2.8.
See: Non-Consolidated Financial Statements of McClelland & Stewart Ltd., Year ended December 31, 2005. Draft #7, April 4, 2006.
See: McClelland & Stewart Ltd. Non-consolidated statement of Operations and Deficit, year ended December 31, 2002.
Ibid, MacSkimming, p. 388.
See: “Simon & Schuster buying Canadian Company” from New York Times as reproduced by Bloomberg News, November 20, 2002.
See: “Get Your Facts Straight Paul,” by John Honderich, Toronto Star, January 27, 2016.
See: “As long as it continues to live, Postmedia is a blight to readers,” by David Olive, Toronto Star, Business, January 30, 2016.
Ibid, John Honderich.
See: “Above the Fold” by Margo Goodhand, The Walrus, February 4, 2016.
Ibid, Honderich; Ibid, Olive.
See: “Paul Godfrey wants more foreign ownership,” Michael Lewis, Toronto Star, January 30, 2016.
Ibid, Honderich.
See: Torstar Information Form, 2015, p. 26.
See: Torstar Information Circular, 2015, p. 1.
See: “Torstar slashes dividend for the second time this year,” by Sean Craig, Financial Post, July 27, 2016. See also: “Guelph Mercury newspaper to close amid financial pressures,” by Tim Shufelt and Christin Dobby, Globe and Mail, January 25, 2016.
See: John Honderich bio, Ryerson School of Journalism at www.Rsj.journalism.ryerson.ca/team/john-honderich.
See: “Honderich quitting Toronto Star,” by Katherine Harding, Globe and Mail, January 26, 2004.
See: Torstar annual report for 2009.
See: “The Lunch: Penguin Random House CEO Brad Martin loves a good read,” Mark Medley, Globe and Mail, June 5, 2015.
See: “North Star,” by Guy Lawson. New York Times Magazine, December 13, 2015.
Some are successful enough to become foreign takeover targets. In June, 2010, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage heard testimony on the proposed takeover of film and television production and distribution company, Lions Gate, by the corporate raider Carl Icahn. Lions Gate was founded in BC, was listed on the Vancouver Stock Exchange, produced movies and series television in Canada worth about $800 million a year, owned a Canadian distributor called Maple, but was managed from Hollywood by Americans and only 4% owned by Canadians. Apparently, Lions Gate maintained its Canadian status because two thirds of its directors were Canadian. The then assistant Deputy Minister of Canadian Heritage, Jean-Pierre Blais, would not answer questions from Committee members on whether or not Lions Gate got tax credits for its investments in “Canadian” productions. But he did make it clear that the Investment Canada Act had been no real impediment to foreign purchases of cultural businesses. He and his deputy, Missy Marston-Shmelzer, testified that Canadian Heritage gets about 12 applications for such transactions every year, and since 1999 only three had been denied. When asked what constitutes a Canadian company, while acknowledging that in general the Act defines it as Canadians owning 50% plus one of a company’s shares, Blais also made it clear that the Act concerns itself as well with definitions of de facto control which complicate matters. He said, “I think we would run out of time if I were to answer that, since there are only a few minutes left.” Blais also said there is no explicit written policy that can be applied to foreign takeovers of Canadian newspapers—there are only implicit rules under the Income Tax Act. See: testimony of Jean-Pierre Blais, Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, June 1, 2010.
See: “Last Words,” by Steven Price, Literary Review of Canada, September 2016. See also: “Celebrated editor Ellen Seligman dies” by Mark Medley, Globe and Mail, March 25, 2016.
See: Joseph Seligman, Wikipedia.
Ibid, Mark Medley, March 25, 2016.
See: “Light in the wilderness,” by Robert Potts, theguardian.com, April 26, 2003.
See: “Corporation Control: An Evolving Concept” by Jack Bernstein, Canadian Tax Foundation, 1995 at wwwctf.ca/ctfweb/Documents/PDF/1995, and Income Tax Folio, S1-F5-C1 “Related Persons and Dealing at Arm’s Length, referring to Section 251 and 252 of the Income Tax Act, last modified 24 November, 2015.
See: announcement email of Tracy Turriff of Penguin Random House of July 18, 2016.
See: Globe and Mail hires Jared Bland as books editor, by Sue Carter, Quill & Quire, February 12, 2013.
See: undertakings 3 and 7 in Schedule A to Share Purchase Agreement between U of T and Random House dated December 30, 2011. Term of five years is in the preamble.
See: “Jared Bland named M&S publisher,” by Conan Tobias, Quill & Quire July 18, 2016.
September 15, 2016, see CTV News, Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun, etc.
The book is called Changer les règles du Jeu and can be found on Amazon.ca.
See: “Liberal Budget Follows Through on Promise to Restore CBC Funding,” by Stephanie Levitz, Canadian Press, March 22, 2016.
See: Canadian Heritage website with listing of Minister’s expert advisory group. Three more names added on October 7, 2016.
See: Canadian independent music industry magazine Cima, report on cultural industries published at cimamusic.ca/9288.2.
“Personal Information19(1) Subject to subsection (2), the head of a government institution shall refuse to disclose any record requested under this Act that contains personal information as defined in section 3 of the Privacy Act.
Advice, etc.
21(1) The head of a government institution may refuse to disclose any record requested under this Act that contains
(nq) advice or recommendations developed by or for a government institution or a minister of the Crown,
(nr)an account of consultations or deliberations in which directors, officers or employees of a government institution, a minister of the Crown or the staff of a minister participate,
(ns)positions or plans developed for the purpose of negotiations carried on or to be carried on by or on behalf of the Government of Canada and considerations relating thereto, or
(nt)plans relating to the management of personnel or the administration of a government institution that have not yet been put into operation, if the record came into existence less than twenty years prior to the request.”
So I went to section 3 of the Privacy Act at laws-lois.Justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/p-21/page-1.html.
Section 3 is the definitions section of the Act that sets out what personal information under the Act is, and whether and in what circumstances it may be handed over to the public. Nothing in section 3 other than perhaps subsection c, applies to what I asked for, which was: the names of persons invited by the government to attend a public event, and the names of persons who actually attended along with their positions in
particular cultural industries. Their phone numbers or addresses could be withheld under subsection c which demands the government protect the privacy of any “identifying number, symbol or other particulars assigned to the individual.” But I ask you: does this include names, titles and Twitter handles of persons invited to Twitter at a live-streamed event? I don’t think so.
Besides, section 8(1) says personal information under the control of that institution “shall not be disclosed by the institution except in accordance with this section…” (what follows are exemptions to the shall not which transform shall not into may)
“(m) for any purpose where in the opinion of the head of the institution
(i ) the public interest in disclosure clearly outweighs any invasion of privacy that could result from the disclosure, or
(ii) Disclosure could clearly benefit the individual to whom it relates.”
In other words, in the event that the information is already public (live-streamed on Facebook) the head of the institution was fully entitled to give the same information to a journalist.
See: MLB-Slaw. Selected Case Summaries: Information Commissioner (Can) v. Canada (Minister of National Defence…) 2011 SCC 25.
See: “Together we will rise from this darkness,” by Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press as published in Toronto Star, February 3, 2017, p. A3.
I can’t tell you what Michael Wernick, (a graduate of the U of T, I must point out), was thinking when he reviewed the gift/sale for approval by the Minister because he would not respond to requests for an interview. I made them through the Privy Council Office. I insisted that he must be given a chance to respond, but his media officials insisted no such interview would be granted. When I asked if anyone had put this request in front of Mr. Wernick personally, I was assured that all appropriate steps had been taken. Whatever that means.
Testimony of Jean-Pierre Blais, Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage, June 1, 2010.
Those figures are Statistics Canada’s. Canadian Heritage puts forward different numbers. In it’s Cultural Industries November 2015 document, available on its website, it says that in 2014–2015 the Book Fund “supported 6,349 new Canadian authored titles by 247 Canadian-owned publishers” and that Fund recipients produced 7554 ebooks, an 85% increase over a five year period.
Please go to: http://www.ppforum.ca/publications/shattered-mirror-news-democracy-and-trust-digital-age.
See: “Keeping Up with the Times,” by Gabriel Snyder; “Robots Wrote this Story,” by Joe Keohane, “Fake News Factory to the World,” by Samanth Subramanian, Wired, March, 2017.
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Bibliography
Books
Bianco, Anthony. The Reichmanns: Family, Faith, Fortune and the Empire of Olympia and York. Toronto: Random House of Canada, 1997.
Cameron, Stevie. On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years. Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 1994.
Cameron, Stevie and Harvey Cashore. The Last Amigo: Karlheinz Schreiber and the Anatomy of a Scandal. Toronto: Macfarlane Walter & Ross, 2001.
Clarkson, Stephen and Christina McCall. Trudeau and Our Times: Volume 1 The Magnificent Obsession. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Inc. 1990.
Dewar, Elaine. Cloak of Green. Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, Publishers, 1995.
Ibbitson, John. Stephen Harper. Toronto and New York: Signal/ McClelland & Stewart, Penguin Random House, 2015.
MacSkimming, Roy. The Perilous Trade: Book Publishing in Canada 1946–2006. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Ltd., 2007.
McDonald, Marci. Yankee Doodle Dandy: Brian Mulroney and the American Agenda. Toronto: Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, 1995.
Newman, Peter C. The Canadian Establishment: Volume Two. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1981.
Newman, Peter C. The Establishment Man: A Portrait of Power. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited, 1982.
Newman, Peter C. Titans: How the New Canadian Establishment Seized Power. Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Ltd., 1999.
Ross, Alexander. The Traders: Inside Canada’s Stock Markets. Don Mills: Collins Publishers, 1984.
Sarlos, Andrew. Fireworks: The Investment of a Lifetime. Toronto: Key Porter Books Limited, 1993.
Smith, Cameron. Unfinished Journey: The Lewis Family. Toronto: Summerhill Press Ltd., 1989.
Articles, Papers, BlogPosts
Campbell, Neil, Jun Chao Meng and Francois Tougas, “Monopsony Power and the Relevance of the Sell-Side Market,” Canadian Competition Law Review, Vol. 26, No.2, 2013.
Campbell, Neil, Jun Chao Meng, James Musgrove, and Francois Tougas, “Group Buying—A Canadian Case Study,” The Antitrust Source, at www.antitrustsource.com, December, 2013.
Clifford, John F. and Sorcha O’Carroll, “Monopsony and Predatory Buying: The Canadian Landscape Is Wide Open.” Paper presented at Competition Law Section of Canadian Bar Association Annual Conference, October 11–12, 2007, Gatineau, Quebec.
Nevlin, Shawn, Michael Kilby, Jon W. Leopold and Michel Gelinas, Stikeman Elliott LLP, “Canada: Foreign Investment in the Canadian Book Industry,” last updated October 6, 2014.
Theriault, Chelsea, “First, Do No Harm; Five Years of Book-Industry Data Sharing With Booknet Canada Sales data.” Project submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Publishing in the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, Simon Fraser University, Fall 2010.
Court Orders, Regulatory Decisions,
Statements of Affairs, Registrations
Order of the Ontario Securities Commission: “In the matter of the Securities Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. S.5, as amended and in the matter of Chapters Inc. and Trilogy Retail Enterprises L.P.” January 11, 2001.
Ruling of the Ontario Securities Commission: “In the matter of the Securities Act R.S.O. 1990. Chapter 466 and In the matter of Canwest Capital Corporation and in the matter of Onex Capital Corporation and Oncap Holding Corporation, (sections 73 and 99), March, 1986.
Ontario Superior Court of Justice Commercial List In the matter of an application under the Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act, R.S.C. 1985, c. C-43 And in the matter of a plan of compromise or Arrangement of General Publishing Co. Limited, General Distribution Services Limited, Stoddart Publishing Co. Limited, The Boston Mills Press Ltd., and House of Anansi Press Limited, The Honourable Mr. Justice Ground, Tuesday, April 30, 2002.
Statement of Affairs (Sec. 158) In the Matter of the Bankruptcy of General Distribution Services Limited, August 19, 2002.
Statement of Affairs (Sec. 158) In the Matter of the Bankruptcy of General Publishing Co. Limited, August 20, 2002.
Province of Ontario Financing Change Statement/2005/09/27 regarding McClelland & Stewart Ltd., filed by McMillan Binch Mendelsohn LLP with the Personal Property Security Registration Database under File Number FN # 619229727, expired on 2012/09/27.
Government Documents and Papers
Investing in the Future of Canadian Books: Revie
w of the Revised Foreign Investment Policy in Book Publishing and Distribution, Discussion Paper, Department of Canadian Heritage, July, 2010.
Canadian Culture in a Global World: New Strategies for Culture and Trade, The Cultural Industries Sectoral Advisory Group on International Trade, February, 1999.
Book Publishing Industry Profile, Ontario Media Development Corporation, www.omdc.on.ca
Reports
Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage. “The Challenge of Change: A Consideration of the Canadian Book Industry,” Clifford Lincoln, M.P. Chair, June, 2000.
Bennett Family Foundation. Annual reports for 2008–2013, Canada Revenue Agency, Charities Branch, CD-ROM.
Department of Canadian Heritage: Overview November 2015; Administration of the Investment Canada Act November 2015; Cultural Industries November 2015; Cultural Affairs Sector November 2015; An Introduction to grants and contributions at Canadian Heritage, November 2015.
Evidence
Standing Committee on Access to Information,
Privacy and Ethics:
Testimony of Nigel Wright, Tuesday, November 2, 2010.
Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage
Testimony on book publishing:
Tuesday, December 7, 1999.
Thursday, February 24, 2000.