Comments

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  Michael Ras said:

  Boyd - this editorial by Terrence Corcoran appears in today's Financial Post. Corcoran's never been a fan of CSR and offers up an interesting example of a cultural sponsorship by TD-Canada Trust that demonstrates how some CSR initiatives are bound to fail. Would love to read your opinions of this article and of how CSR can be used effectively to drive a lobbying campaign.
  
  
  
  No Happy End for bank merger agenda
  National Post
  Thursday, October 13, 2005
  Page: FP23
  Section: Financial Post: Comment
  Byline: Terence Corcoran
  Column: Terence Corcoran
  Source: Financial Post
  
  Canada's big banks, masters of political grovelling and socially responsible appeals for public sympathy as great corporate citizens, can once again write their efforts off as total failures. Speaking in New York last week, Prime Minister Paul Martin declared bank mergers to be a dead issue. Also dead is any possibility of change in foreign ownership rules or in the government's position on cross-pillar mergers between banks and insurance companies.
  
  The prime minister's declarations on bank policy came during a question and answer session following his comments before the Economics Club of New York. There was no room for ambiguity (see text below). Bank reform is dead. After hiring crews of Liberal lobbyists, running massive charitable-giving operations and spending millions on image-burnishing cultural ventures, the banking industry has collected another fat return on investment: zero.
  
  There should be no surprise here. The industry's failure to win hearts and minds on bank reform is an expected result of botched public policy. Canada's banks believe their future rests in denying their existence as profit-maximizing institutions in a competitive world. We need to merge so we can cut costs and make more money. It's our right as bankers and as representatives of shareholders. But we cannot and will not say as much.
  
  No bank publicly trumpets these important and, one must assume, overriding corporate objectives. Instead, they hire lobbyists to weasel around Ottawa. They fill their public relations efforts with feel-good blather, campaigns for cancer cures and cultural programs that say: We're not banks, we're not in this for profit. We're in this for the good of society and to keep artists painting and actors performing.
  
  How any of these activities help banks promote their agenda is a mystery. All too often, moreover, these activities directly subvert the banks as banks. Take, for example, recent theatre offerings at The Shaw Festival in Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont. One of the plays is Happy End, a Kurt Weill-Bertold Brecht musical. It is, in summary, a Marxist/Communist romp around the political morality of robbing banks -- sponsored by TD Canada Trust. "Robbing a bank is no crime compared to owning one," quips one of the characters. That line gets big laughs from the audience.
  
  The play ends with a call to arms based on the old Communist doctrine that a little bit of violence to bring about social justice is a good thing, especially if the violence is aimed at J.P. Morgan and the banking industry. "Blasting open a safe is nothing -- we've got to blast open the big gang that keeps the safe locked. So slip on your brass knuckles and learn where to hit." As the play ends, we hear "Bring on the tanks and the cannon," because we're heading up to Ed Clark's office to smooth out the inequities in our social system.
  
  So, every few days all summer a few hundred people leave a theatre in Southern Ontario humming along with a different kind of bank reform agenda. How many of these people go home thinking, well, gee, that reminds me, wouldn't it be a good idea if Canada's banks were allowed to compete in a more open and less regulated market, perhaps merge or join forces with insurance companies to improve service and profits?
  
  More likely they go home thinking like Paul Martin. "I'm not sure," he said in New York, "that public policy would benefit from, in fact, a merger between an insurance company and a large bank in Canada at the present time." He said he won't let banks merge until he's sure there would not be a reduction in competition. As for allowing greater foreign ownership of the banks, he said he "could not see a change" in the current 20% limit.
  
  The reason for maintaining these restrictions on banking and insurance is to protect the public, the poor masses who might otherwise slip into soup-kitchen lines and revolutionary mode if the current banking laws and regulations were suddenly dismantled. Formal Marxism may be dead, but its general themes still waft through our culture, from politics to the theatre, often sponsored by the banks. Indeed, there's a certain Brechtian quality to Mr. Martin's anti-bank comments. A little bit of regulatory violence to keep the banks from doing what the banks would do in an open market is a good thing, he is saying, if it means protecting Canadians from the capitalist monsters of Bay Street.
  
  And that's where the banks today find themselves -- back where they started a decade ago, when Mr. Martin, then Minister of Finance, killed two bank mergers in a theatrical gesture than earned him great political applause. If political support for bank reform is ever to materialize in Canada, it's hard to imagine where it will come from. If the banks won't openly sell their policy objectives, who will? It certainly won't come from Ottawa, or the arts community or any of the other circles of ideological influence where the banks spend millions currying favour.
  
  
  Idnumber: 200510130050
  Edition: National
  Story Type: Business; Editorial; Column
  Length: 830 words
  Keywords: GOVERNMENT POLICY; BANKS; ACQUISITIONS & MERGERS; LOBBYING; POLITICS; CANADA
  
  
  
  October 13, 2005 14:56
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  Boyd Neil said:

  Thanks Mike . . . I have often felt that Terence Corcoran could easily be the host of show called 'Faulty Logic' or maybe "The Regressive" co-hosted with Conrad Black. Maybe the issue isn't the efficacy of bank responsibility programs, but their unwillingness to make a strong enough case publicly for the benefits to the public of mergers. Or, maybe in fact they really believe as Corcoran does that " We need to merge so we can cut costs and make more money. It's our right as bankers and as representatives of shareholders." Now there is a strong public position! As to the efficacy of responsibility programs, who's to say that the banks would not be subject to even more regulatory scrutiny if they weren't in the communities supporting productions of Brecht's plays. And what's Corcoran doing at the Shaw Festival anyway . . . Culture is for liberals and soft-hearted social democrats isn't it?
  October 13, 2005 19:13
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  Xanax said:

  Hi, all!a plant or an animal, has a nature), and so is thatby which they are produced--the so-called 'formal' nature, which isspecifically the same (though this is in another individual); forman begets man.
  May 15, 2006 19:16
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  xanax said:

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  May 19, 2006 17:18
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  xanax said:

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  May 19, 2006 17:18
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  xanax said:

  Nice site. But they differ inasmuch asthe acting causes, i.e.
  May 19, 2006 17:18
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  xanax said:

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  May 19, 2006 17:19
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  xanax said:

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  May 19, 2006 17:19
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  xanax said:

  Nice design. If, then, luck or spontaneity is a cause ofthe material universe, reason and nature are causes before it.
  May 19, 2006 17:19
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  xanax said:

  Hi, all!Of things that arequanta incidentally, some are so called in the sense in which it wassaid that the musical and the white were quanta, viz.
  May 19, 2006 17:20
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  xanax said:

  Good site.  The difference between becoming in the full sense and becomingin a qualified sense has been stated in our physical works.
  May 19, 2006 17:20
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  xanax said:

  Hi, all!The reason is that this, most of all the senses, makes us knowand brings to light many differences between things.
  May 21, 2006 04:47
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  xanax said:

  Nice design. And experience seems pretty muchlike science and art, but really science and art come to men throughexperience; for 'experience made art', as Polus says, 'butinexperience luck.' Now art arises when from many notions gained byexperience one universal judgement about a class of objects isproduced.
  May 21, 2006 04:47
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  xanax said:

  Hi, all!And a man who is puzzledand wonders thinks himself ignorant (whence even the lover of mythis in a sense a lover of Wisdom, for the myth is composed of wonders);therefore since they philosophized order to escape from ignorance,evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for anyutilitarian end.
  May 21, 2006 04:47
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  June 3, 2006 13:04
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  July 18, 2006 18:57
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  October 3, 2006 01:44
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  October 14, 2006 15:52
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  order soma said:

  Hello! Nice design. And experience seems pretty muchlike science and art, but really science and art come to men throughexperience; for 'experience made art', as Polus says, 'butinexperience luck.' Now art arises when from many notions gained byexperience one universal judgement about a class of objects isproduced.
  October 14, 2006 15:52

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