New structure’s high grass will be sanctuary for downtown pests

Susan Lazaruk
Province

With the completion next spring of the new convention centre in Vancouver‘s Coal Harbour, there will be a few blocks of new parkland added to the city — but they’re strictly for the birds and the bees.

The expansion project, west of the current convention centre, is being topped off with a 2.4-hectare green — or “living” — roof that covers the flat, sloping segmented roof, and will be the second-largest in North America, next to a Michigan Ford plant covered with grass patches.

About one-third of the roof area was planted in late April with 400,000 seedlings and thousands more seeds, and is sprouting patchy green fuzz like a giant, flat Chia pet.

Two dozen different coastal grasses — such as pearly everlast, nodding onion and field strawberries — native to B.C. were chosen because of their ability to withstand drought and draw birds and insects, said landscape architect Bruce Hemstock.

“They are relatively easy to maintain and they create the habitat for the type of species we want to attract,” he said.

Besides converting carbon dioxide to oxygen, insulating the building to keep heating and cooling costs down and reducing storm-water runoff, the green roof is designed as an ecological reserve.

“We want to promote bees, ants, other insects and birds to bring them back to the downtown,” said Hemstock.

Humans will be allowed to look but not touch.

“You can’t walk on it because then it becomes no more than a park and you lose all that [birds and insects],” he said. “I’ve seen swarms of honeybees up there already.”

The sloping meadows of roof can be seen from adjacent rooftops as well as from inside the centre through specially designed view planes and while walking north on Burrard and Thurlow streets, he said.

And visitors will be able to get up close to the grasses by accessing the 1,500-square-metre roof of an adjoining section of the building to be leased for commercial use.

The remainder of the convention centre’s roof, now covered with 15 centimetres of sand mixed with composted organic matter and lava rock carted up last winter, will be planted next month.

Landscapers left little to Mother Nature, designing the roof to withstand soil erosion from winds or heavy rains.

“Runnels” built diagonally throughout the roof are designed to mimic rivers to slow water runoff.

“We had a really big storm that lasted a week and a half and we had no loss of soil,” said Hemstock.

The choice of plants and lack of natural prey are expected to keep unwelcome species such as rats, Canada geese and seagulls away.

But Hemstock said weeds, which he prefers to call “volunteer species,” will be allowed to float on to the roof as long as they’re not too invasive. Dandelions are fine; knotweed is not.

“It’s self-maintaining and it will grow and change as the plants want to,” said Hemstock.

A 43-kilometre irrigation system, designed to conserve water, is fuelled by so-called black water, the building’s sewage that will be treated on site to a potable state. The auto-sensor is programmed to turn on if the plants wilt and only in the summer months.

No chemical fertilizers will be used and the grasses will be cut every fall and the clippings left for mulch.

If there are leaks in the 30-year membrane, the irrigation system’s auto-sensor will locate them for quick repair, said Hemstock.

© The Vancouver Province 2008

 

Growing demand for nuclear energy prompts investors to look for other producers

Peter Koven
Sun

TORONTO — For Cameco Corp., it was another horrible setback. For the rest of the uranium market, it was a much needed shot in the arm.

Investors pounced on uranium stocks Wednesday after Cameco’s announcement that a shaft at its Cigar Lake project in Saskatchewan had reflooded. It served as a reminder that the world is relying heavily on Cigar Lake, Australia‘s Olympic Dam and very few other projects to meet the demand growth expected over the next decade — and a problem at any one of them could severely tighten the uranium market.

Investors were buying in to any mining company Wednesday that is producing uranium or expected to in the near future. Shares of Denison Mines Corp., Uranium One Inc., and Paladin Energy Ltd. all rose about 15 per cent after being beaten down in the last couple of months.

“I think we’ve benefited because the news of the day is uranium again. It hasn’t been for quite a while, and when people focused on uranium, [they said] ‘Holy cow, look at the value here, ‘” said Peter Farmer, Denison‘s chief executive.

The Cigar Lake debacle began when the deposit first flooded in 2006. Cameco eventually took the blame after an independent report found its “deficient” actions contributed to the accident.

Last month, the company finally began to de-water the mine. Shaft No. 1 was pumped down to 430 metres below the surface without incident until early Tuesday morning, when workers noticed that water was flowing in. They initially tried to pump it out faster. But when the inflow rate got too fast, they let the shaft flood again.

Cameco, the world’s largest uranium producer, is holding a conference call this morning and it could get ugly if investors express their disgust with the latest setback at Cigar Lake.

With estimated production of 8.16 million kg of uranium a year, Cigar Lake is expected to make up about 15 per cent of global supply.

The project is scheduled to return onstream in 2011 at the earliest. But after Wednesday’s announcement, analysts and investors said that even 2012 might be optimistic.

The 2006 Cigar Lake flooding provided a catalyst for the dramatic run-up in spot uranium prices to $138 US a pound. The price corrected all the way back to $57 and now sits at $64.50, according to Ux Consulting.

Experts said the latest incident will not have the same impact on prices. But it demonstrates how small the global uranium market is, and how difficult it is to bring new projects onstream.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Warsteiner’s brewing process removes final 0.5 per cent

Bruce Constantineau
Sun

It looks like beer, smells like beer and even tastes like a very, very light beer.

But there’s not a smidgen of alcohol in it.

De-alcoholized beer has been available in Canada for about 20 years but German brewer Warsteiner says it has introduced the first true zero-alcohol beer to B.C.

Warsteiner Premium Fresh boasts an alcohol content of 0.0 per cent, compared with 0.5 per cent for many low-alcohol beers.

“As far as we know, we’re the only zero-alcohol beer in this market,” Warsteiner Brewery Canadian director Lothar Heinrich said in an interview at the company’s Coquitlam warehouse.

The beverage, introduced in Germany last year, is created from a unique brewing process that increases production costs by about 30 per cent.

Regular fully aged and fully fermented beer is placed under high pressure in a vacuum and heated with low electric heat to a maximum of 30 C to remove alcohol and retain flavour.

The product is only available in government liquor stores and licensed outlets. Heinrich said it’s the only de-alcoholized lager to be listed at B.C. liquor stores.

He said the product is not available in supermarkets now because it’s too costly to buy decent shelf space.

Heinrich feels the demand for the product in Canada is similar to the trend in Germany, where low-alcohol beer accounts for about three per cent of the total market, with annual sales growing by about 10 per cent.

“The trend is shifting and people are looking for it now,” he said.

“Even beer with just 0.5-per-cent alcohol can be dangerous to people who shouldn’t be drinking alcohol. We even see it as being an alternative to soft drinks.”

Heinrich said consumer research in Germany revealed nearly one in two people did not realize “alcohol-free” beer can actually contain up to 0.5-per-cent alcohol by volume.

Warsteiner Brewery, founded in 1753, is the largest privately owned brewery in Germany.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Sun

SHOWING THE WAY

The attraction of downtown residency the subject of the story, The New Republic magazine recently told readers that if they want to know what’s coming down in American cities they might want to visit Vancouver:

” … If you want to see this sort of thing writ large, you can venture just across the Canadian border to Vancouver, a city roughly the size of Washington, D.C.

”What makes it unusual – indeed, at this point unique in all of North America – is that roughly 20 per cent of its residents live within a couple of square miles of each other in the city’s centre.

”Downtown Vancouver is a forest of slender, green, condo skyscrapers, many of them with three-storey townhouses forming a kind of podium at the base.

”Each morning, there are nearly as many people commuting out of the centre to jobs in the suburbs as there are commuting in. Two public elementary schools have opened in downtown Vancouver in the past few years. A large proportion of the city’s 600,000 residents, especially those with money, want to live downtown.

”No American city looks like Vancouver at the moment. But quite a few are moving in this direction. …”

With thanks to Marcella Munro of the Cressey development company for subscribing to all the right magazines.

NEW HOME FOR NEW MOM

Good things come in threes — at least, for Nicole Kidman. The actress has a new baby girl, a starring role in the big-screen version of Broadway’s smash hit Nine, and now a cool new place in Beverly Hills.

Kidman has reportedly already taken occupancy of her house with her spouse, country music star Keith Urban. The 43-year-old house, said to have sold for close to its listing price of about $4.8 million, has five bedrooms and about 4,100 square feet. A grassy play area awaits for when baby Sunday Rose is ready to use it, the Los Angeles Times reports.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

Consumer confidence at lowest level since 2000, report says

David Akin, with file from Derrick Penner
Sun

British Columbia consumers, who have fuelled the province’s robust domestic economy over the past couple of years, are becoming reluctant, which will restrain provincial economic growth, according to the Conference Board of Canada’s latest report.

The conference board, in the latest edition of its semi-annual Provincial Outlook report released Wednesday, forecast that growth in B.C.’s overall economic output is slowing largely because the difficulties that have plagued its export sectors are crimping consumer optimism.

Growth in the output of B.C.’s total economy will have slowed to 2.2 per cent by the end of 2008, according to the conference board forecast, but will recover modestly to 2.9 per cent in 2009.

“The domestic economy [in B.C.] is facing contracting housing starts, softening wholesale and retail trade and a construction industry that has hit the wall,” the report said.

Forestry is forecast to contract by just over 13 per cent this year and manufacturing output will drop by 51/2 per cent, by the conference board’s estimate, with 20,000 jobs lost in the manufacturing sector alone.

“The export sector downturn has already pummelled consumer confidence,” the report said, with consumer confidence at its lowest level since 2000.

“Soaring construction costs, labour shortages in the construction industry, pessimistic consumer confidence and alarming contractions in employment in key provincial industries will plague the domestic housing sector over the medium turn,” it added.

Booming Saskatchewan will lead all provinces in economic growth this year, while Ontario and Quebec will suffer through a difficult year, said board forecasters.

The widening prosperity gap between the West and those in central and eastern Canada presents federal policy-makers with some unique challenges. The West may need policies that slow growth and curb inflation while central Canada has few inflationary worries but needs some economic stimulus to encourage growth.

“It’s very difficult to set a course for the Canadian dollar and interest rates when you have such huge differences,” said Glen Hodgson, a vice-president at the board and an author of the report. “I mean, Alberta‘s arguably had an inflation problem now for three or four years. It’s probably going to be imported now by Saskatchewan and Manitoba where there will be very strong pressure on labour markets.

“Meanwhile Canada would benefit from lower interest rates, but the Bank of Canada can’t cut rates because they’re worried about inflation nationally.”

Hodgson said just as the Bank of Canada struggles with the right balance for its monetary policy, the federal government has some tough choices when it comes to fiscal policy. While Prime Minister Stephen Harper often touts the benefits of his GST cut to keep the economy afloat, Hodgson said a GST cut was probably the last thing a province like Alberta needed because it can fuel inflation.

In the last decade or so, federal bureaucrats in the department of finance and at the Bank of Canada have come to view inflation as the greatest danger to the national economy and have often counselled their political masters to take steps to counter inflation. Sometimes, as was the case with the Conservatives’ GST cut, that advice is ignored.

“You have to think about the regional implications of all your policies, both spending and tax,” said Hodgson. “Alberta probably didn’t need a cut in the GST, for example. But if Ontario avoids recession, it’s in part because of tax cuts, both federally and provincially, that provide a little bit of stimulus.”

In its semi-annual provincial outlook, the conference board says Saskatchewan‘s economy is booming thanks to surging commodity prices, particularly oil and potash, and as a result the economy will grow by 4.2 per cent this year.

In fact, the conference board said workers are now leaving Alberta and heading east to Saskatchewan to make their fortune. The report says that as a result, retailers in Canada‘s flattest province may be in for a particularly good year. “The positive labour outlook, combined with lofty wage gains, is spurring a spending spree. Retail sales are expected to soar by 12.2 per cent in 2008.”

Meanwhile in Ontario, where manufacturers have had particular trouble coping with the one-two punch of a fast-rising Canadian dollar and skyrocketing energy prices, economic growth will be just 0.8 per cent, the conference board said.

Next door in Quebec, it will only be a little bit better this year, where growth of 1.4 per cent is expected.

“Since the middle of 2007, the Quebec economy has been at a near standstill. The weakness in the manufacturing sector has eroded economic gains made in other industries,” the report said.

Only the province of Newfoundland and Labrador will see slower economic growth than Ontario this year. After a stellar year in 2007 with double-digit economic growth, the conference board said the pace in Canada‘s most eastern province is stalled. The board predicts growth of just 0.2 per cent there this year.

Overall, the board believes Canada‘s economy will grow by just 1.7 per cent this year.

The forecasters at the conference board, an independent think-tank, are much more optimistic than the Bank of Canada, which said last month that it believes Canada‘s economy will grow by just one per cent.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

Pop Opera the latest call-up to Donnelly’s Big League roster

Malcolm Parry
Sun

NINE CHEERS: Donnelly Hospitality Management founder-president Jeff Donnelly dreamed of becoming another Charlie Gehringer or Jackie Robinson. A second baseman in the Big Leagues, that is, and a pro athlete like his father, Brian Donnelly, who played defensive back for the 1971-74 B.C. Lions. But a signpost to the Langley-born, Surrey-raised 33-year-old’s real career was clear 20 years ago, long before he played two years of junior-college baseball in Mount Vernon, Wash. (he has dual Canadian-U.S. citizenship), hoping it would net him a scholarship to a major varsity. That’s when he spent after-school hours “picking up condoms and needles and cleaning up puke” from the bar of Vancouver’s then-Mr. Sport hotel, which his dad part-owned.

Until last week, Donnelly held 50- to 60-per-cent interests in five Vancouver nightclubs and four pubs that gross a reported $24 million annually. Then, those interests passed to the newly incorporated Donnelly Investments Ltd. in which Donnelly holds 70 per cent and three silent partners the remainder. Donnelly Hospitality Management Ltd. operates the nine facilities.

Last week, too, Donnelly opened his most glamorous property. That’s the 5,500-square-foot, 230-seat Pop Opera nightclub, located beside the downtown Birks store. He pays “in the mid-30s” per square foot for the premises, which cost a reported $1.8 million to acquire and renovate. Located smack-dab in the central business district, and somewhat remote from other nightspots, Pop Opera had earlier incarnations as the 1996 Hard Rock Cafe, Luce and — reflecting its West Hastings Street address — Dan Blaquiere’s Club 686.

Two other downtown joints should soon join Donnelly’s other club properties — Bar None, the Granville Room, the Modern, Republic — and the Bimini’s Tap House, Calling, Lamplighter and Library Square pubs. One will be a 65-seat lounge, he said. The other, a 375-seat club and attached 350-seat restaurant, should cost close to $5 million and be located in a new building by 2011. He “would love” to operate in the Hotel Georgia when Delta Land Development president Bruce Langereis completes a $300-million redevelopment of that iconic property.

He also wants a “dive bar,” like those once common in U.S. cities, where street-window liquor bottles had tags around their necks reading, say: “Single 55c, Double 80c.” He almost acquired one in Manhattan‘s Chelsea district recently, and regularly takes business partners and senior staff to inspect locales in that city, San Francisco, Las Vegas, Miami, London, Tokyo and — later this year — Berlin.

“I’m in London three or four times a year, and that is the epicentre of nightlife,” said Donnelly, who designs all his own properties. “But we are comparable [in Vancouver], and we do things better than they do in L.A. We’re more professional — our door work, how we pour drinks, how we design our clubs. Our bars are open until 3 a.m. And, in places like Boneta, Chambar, George and the Cascade Room, we have a really cool cocktail culture.”

There’s uncool culture, too. Donnelly learned that when a fatal shooting put the kibosh on Loft Six, a second-floor Gastown club he and Bimini co-owner Steve Jennings opened at a cost of close to $400,000 in 2001. More stringent security was in place by 2003, when he spent a reported $750,000 converting the nearby Cherry Bay into the Modern dance club. Then, in 2007, he leased Gastown’s Lamplighter pub from Dominion Hotel owners Eric Cohen and Tom Gautreau, and spent what may total $1 million renovating the 270-seat premises. Last week, city hall approved his application for a 40-seat patio on the hotel’s Abbott Street side.

Donnelly’s biggest at-bat was the 300-seat, 5,800-square-foot Republic that cost a reported $2.5 million. Running to 3 a.m. seven nights a week, Republic shares the city’s-busiest-club status with Granville Entertainment’s nearby Roxy cabaret, which will mark its 20th anniversary this month. Republic partially fills the role envisaged for Granville Entertainment principal Blaine Culling’s stillborn Pravda, which was to house a pub, club and restaurant in a new, three-floor Granville Street building. Republic’s new-built premises are owned by the area-landlord Bonnis family.

Another Culling property, the old Foghorn’s, turned out to be Donnelly’s springboard to the bigs. He paid $40,000 for it in 2001, renamed it the Granville Room, acquired a now-defunct pub licence and planned a $250,000 renovation (and $350,000 more since). Opposing the plan, his dad called a $117,000 loan he’d made to aid acquisition of neighbourhood-pub-pioneer Peter Uram’s Bimini’s Tap House two years earlier. Donnelly recruited partners Jennings, Steve Ogden and club-scene veteran Murray Kryski, all of whom still invest in his projects. The Granville Room never became a pub, but has minted money ever since. It also put Kryski onside to help him acquire 80 per cent of Bar None for “about a million,” and the remainder six months later.

Donnelly no longer plays second base. But he’s still showing that job’s range, pivoting skill and right-and-left quickness on the business diamond.

SHE SAW LONDON: Self-styled “pantie queen” Kathleen Staples has hung ‘em up. After 14 years, she’s sold her wholesale and retail operations for an undisclosed sum to general manager Lana Diaz, and jokes that she’s “looking for a job as a receptionist or an exceptionalist.”

It’s been quite a ride. In the manner of then-common flower sellers, Staples began by offering late-night restaurant diners not long-stemmed roses but knitted-silk lingerie. Sales of the China-made garments for men and women rocketed when she gave their otherwise-ordinary colours such catchy names as Silver Screen, Fade To Black and Sugar-Frosted Grape.

Carried by The Bay, other retailers, and via her own West Vancouver store and www.staplesonline.com website, Staples sold three million pairs of women’s panties alone. Held as she liked to display them, that number would stretch from here to Winnipeg. Let’s guess Diaz is now targeting St. John’s, N.L.

VAULTS TEMPO: Swiss bankers never blow their own — and especially their clients’ — horns. But the Yamaha Tyros II electronic keyboard appears to be different, especially for Adrian Hartmann, 65, who joined Zurich‘s Foreign Commerce Bank after plans to be a Swissair airline pilot fizzled.

“Music was always my second half,” said Hartmann, who likely upset 1960s bosses by playing his Gibson and Chet Atkins guitar in the country-and-western style. Not that earning $1,000 for a New Year’s Eve gig mightn’t have changed their views.

“Now, music has become my primary half,” said Hartmann — [email protected] — who was transferred to Toronto in 1978, and moved to Vancouver two years later for the chance to begin private asset management. Five years with a Cayman Islands-based money-management firm followed. In 1985, the FCB asked him to open a representative office in Vancouver, and he and wife Hedy have been here ever since.

She’s the dance-and-fitness instructor he met aboard a Lake Zurich cruise vessel in 1965, when he played for her staging of a fashion show.

She’s also the subject of A Woman Like You on Hartmann’s CD, Adrian: How I Sing & Play, Vol. 2. Many of the other 16 titles are Elvis Presley covers. But there’s another original, My Vancouver, Hartmann hopes may be a welcoming anthem for the 2010 Olympics. The song somewhat echoes late B.C. minstrel Evan Kemp’s cowboy-two-step style, albeit without the yodelling you’d think might come naturally to the Swiss.

“I hate yodelling,” Hartmann said, hitting the keys of his $5,400 instrument and breaking into a most unbankerly Don’t Be Cruel.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008

 

Tom and Ray Magliozzi and Doug Berman
Province

Dear Tom and Ray: My wife wants to buy a Honda Fit, but now she is worried about the gas tank. It is located under the front seat rather than under the trunk. Is this dangerous?

RAY: If we tell you it’s dangerous, you’re not going to buy her the car, then take out a large life-insurance policy on her, are you, Prentiss?

TOM: It’s not dangerous, as far as we can tell, Prentiss. We don’t know definitively, because the Fit has only been out for a few years, and it’s possible that a problem could come to light later. But from what we can tell, it’s not an issue.

RAY: Most cars have their gas tank right behind the back seat — conveniently enough, where the mother-in-law usually rides. You’ll notice no one’s ever written to us to complain about that!

TOM: Honda moved the gas tank in the Fit under the driver’s seat to create more room in the back to fold the seats flat. And it IS a very nice, functional design, from the point of view of usable interior space.

RAY: When we looked underneath a Fit, we noticed that the tank doesn’t extend right to the outside edge of the vehicle. It’s at least somewhat protected behind a side structural member.

TOM: Here’s what we do know. When the Fit was crash-tested, it got top ratings for both frontal crashes and driver’s-side impacts. That’s a good sign right there. In addition, if the crash testing agencies (the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety) had seen anything that worried them during a crash test (like, for example, a gas tank that explodes and burns any surviving crash-test dummies beyond all recognition), they would have mentioned it in the optional “safety concerns” section of the results.

There are no such comments about the Fit.

RAY: These days, gas tanks are made of plastic, and they’re pretty hard to puncture. They’re actually very resilient, in our experience.

TOM: If something entered the driver’s side of the car with enough force to wipe out the gas tank, it probably would wipe out the entire front seat, too, if you catch my drift. So either way, your wife won’t have to worry about it.

RAY: I’m sure my brother’s making you feel a lot better, huh, Prentiss?

TOM: Actually, while we can’t say for certain, we have no evidence that suggests it’s a problem. If it gives you any additional confidence, the placement of the gas tank doesn’t stop us from recommending the Fit, which we think is an excellent little car.

Province

TORONTO — Jeff Rubin, chief economist at CIBC World Markets, pushed his bullish oil call one step further yesterday, forecasting in a report that soaring oil prices will drive the annual U.S. inflation rate to six per cent in the next six months.

He said the U.S. Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates 200 basis points by the end of 2009 as a result.

The report says the U.S. economy has not seen an inflation rate this high since 1990 — and that only lasted four months.

“You’ve got to go back to 1982, in the midst of the stagflation that followed the second OPEC oil shock, to see the last time American inflation was clocked at that kind of pace for any sustained period,” Rubin said in the report.

Rubin forecast in April that oil would hit $150 US by 2010 — which looked possible only a few weeks ago when oil crested at $145 US, but less so now with oil at $121 US — and $200 US by 2012 on a wave of emerging market demand and a shrinking supply of politically stable sources.

And he said the last bastion against oil seeping into broader price pressures — wages — is set to fall. High energy prices give American manufacturing workers bargaining power that they have lacked for over a decade, while at the same time encouraging them to ask for larger pay raises to keep pace with the soaring price of gasoline, he argues.

Rubin expects to see a return to cost-of-living allowances (COLA) in North American wage negotiations, particularly in highly organized industries like steel.

“Back in the 1980s, most collective bargaining agreements of the day had cost-of-living allowances built into the wage scale,” Rubin said. “Those COLA clauses largely became self-fulfilling prophesies by ensuring that largely oil-price driven inflation would become self-sustaining through a wage-price spiral.”

To fight off the deepening inflation threat, the U.S. Fed will have to raise rates 200 basis points by the end of 2009, Rubin said. He notes that in 1990 the federal-funds rate — the U.S. central bank’s lever for adjusting overnight loans between commercial banks — was at around 7.5 per cent, a far cry from the current two-per-cent rate.

In contrast to the CIBC World Markets view, many economists believe the current U.S. inflation problem will be fleeting, as the massive housing crunch and economic slowdown suck oxygen from any inflationary embers and stop aggressive wage demands in their tracks.

© The Vancouver Province 2008

 

Anheuser-Busch and Chrysler Building are sold. What’s next?

Jessica Hall
Province

PHILADELPHIA — With a record volume of international takeovers of U.S. companies, it almost appears America itself is up for sale.

The weak dollar and slumping stock prices of U.S. companies has created a window of opportunity for international buyers to snatch up American icons such as beer brewer Anheuser-Busch Cos. Inc. and the landmark Chrysler Building in New York.

“The dollar has depreciated so much that America is on the sale rack,” said Sung Won Sohn, a professor of economics at California State University.

“America has such an appetite for foreign goods — Chinese imports and oil — that U.S. dollars have gone overseas. Now, many Americans aren’t happy that foreign companies are buying pieces of America with the money we gave them in the first place,” Sohn said.

In the second quarter, acquisitions of U.S. companies by international buyers totalled $124.3 billion US, the highest total for any second quarter on record and jumping 23 per cent over the year-earlier quarter, according to research firm Dealogic.

International takeovers represented 22 per cent of all U.S. merger activity in the first half of the year, up from 17 per cent in the first half of 2007, Dealogic is reporting.

InBev NV‘s deal to acquire Anheuser-Busch for $52 billion gave Belgium the distinction of being the most active foreign buyer of U.S. assets in the first half of this year, followed by Spain and Canada, Dealogic said.

The Anheuser-Busch deal ranked as the second-biggest cross-border acquisition of a U.S. company in history, following Vodafone Group Plc’s $60.3 billion acquisition of AirTouch Communications in 1999, according to Thomson Reuters.

Other U.S. assets recently falling into international hands include Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc., which agreed to be acquired by Israel‘s Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., the world’s largest generic-drug company, for $7.46 billion; and eye-care company Alcon Inc. which is being bought by Switzerland‘s Novartis AG for about $27.7 billion.

Earlier this month, Swiss drugmaker Roche AG made a bid to acquire the shares of its U.S. partner Genentech Inc. it does not already own for $43.7 billion. Even the Pennsylvania Turnpike awarded long-term leasing rights to a Spanish-led investor group for $12.8 billion.

Although some investment bankers and analysts pin the spike in cross-border activity to the weak dollar, others contend that strategy and the desire to expand globally were the motivators behind many of these recent corporate deals.

“Strategic buyers don’t wake up in the morning and say: ‘This currency is cheap. I’m going to go do a deal.’ They do a deal because it’s strategic and makes sense,” said Herald Ritch, president and co-chief executive officer of investment bank Sagent Advisers.

“There’s no question that, on the margin, currency levels tend to influence decisions, but strategic deals get done because they fit a company’s strategy,” Ritch said.

European companies have been the most active buyers of U.S. assets, with 314 deals so far this year, compared with 117 deals by Asian acquirers, and 33 by African and Middle Eastern buyers, according to Thomson Reuters.

“Europe and the U.S. dominate deal activity globally, so it makes sense that deals between those areas would predominate,” Ritch said.

Although some investment bankers view the second quarter’s record pace of U.S. takeovers as an anomaly, Sohn said the 13-per-cent depreciation of the dollar against major currencies over the past 18 months should fuel more acquisitions.

“There are trillions of dollars overseas that have to be put to work. This is just the tip of the iceberg,” Sohn said.

© The Vancouver Province 2008

Our top cities friendly places for business

Province

OTTAWA — Canada and its major cities are relatively tax-friendly places for business, according to a global survey by an international accounting firm.

Canada has the third-lowest tax cost for businesses among 10 countries, KPMG said in the firm’s latest guide to international business costs released yesterday.

Among the 35 major cities with populations of more than two million, Vancouver had the fourth-lowest overall tax burden, Montreal sixth and Toronto seventh.

“Vancouver‘s ranking in the top four international cities highlights one of the many benefits of doing business in B.C.,” said Tony Swiderski, head of KPMG’s Vancouver-based international tax practice.

“Recently announced cuts to the provincial corporate-tax rate should further enhance Vancouver‘s appeal.”

The national findings fly in the face of common complaints by business that Canada has an uncompetitive tax system.

Even KPMG, in a report last month, warned that Canada will need to cut taxes even more to lure new foreign investment.

“Canada has done well in reducing its federal corporate-tax rates,” said Greg Wiebe, KPMG’s Canadian managing partner for tax.

“If the provinces follow the federal lead and reduce their rates as well, Canada‘s advantage will be enhanced.”

The report compares total tax costs using a score for location expressed as a percentage of total taxes paid by firms in the U.S.

As such, a lower score is better as it means lower tax costs for businesses.

Vancouver with a score of 75.2, compares favourably with Seattle, its closest U.S. counterpart, which scored at 107.1.

The overall report assesses the general tax competitiveness of 102 cities in 10 countries, focusing on the 35 major centres, comparing their business-tax burdens, including income tax, capital tax, sales tax, property tax, local business taxes and statutory labour costs, such as employment insurance.

Among countries, Mexico and the Netherlands came in first and second, followed in order by Canada, Australia, the U.S., Britain, Japan, Germany, Italy and France. The three most tax friendly cities were located in Puerto Rico and Mexico.

Among other Canadian cities, Chilliwack scored 74 and Edmonton 63.6 and Calgary 69.3.

Separately, a survey of corporate executives ranked Canada as the fifth-best country outside the U.S. for business investment. The survey by Development Counsellors International ranked China first, India, second, Mexico third and the United Kingdom fourth.

© The Vancouver Province 2008