Canada Now Requires Companies to Disclose Who Benefits

Following similar legislation in other countries Canada has finally introduced a beneficial ownership requirement on Canadian companies. Federally registered companies will have to disclose who owns them, which means it’ll be harder to commit tax fraud. Plus, by having companies reveal who benefits from their existence it will be easier for authorities to track criminal behaviour and efforts around snow washing.

In 2017, an investigation by the Toronto Star and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, based on ICIJ’s Panama Papers dataset, revealed how Canada had emerged as a popular tax haven, touted by corporate service providers as a “reputable” destination to hide wealth.

Transparency advocates welcomed the landmark reforms, which passed into law on Nov. 2 under an amendment to the Canada Business Corporations Act, following a years-long push for a legislative means to tackle money laundering and tax evasion.

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Use This App to Avoid Shady Companies

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Too many companies say they care about an important issue, sponsor events, and then turn around and fund organizations (or politicians) that actively fight the important issue. This behaviour by corporations is unethical and wrong. One person got so sick of companies claiming to be in favour of issues only to fund campaigns opposing it that he built an app to out the corporations. The Bobbele app allows you to scan a barcode and see what corporations fund behind the scenes, plus any controversies the companies are embroiled in.

A good example is Google since they gave up on doing no evil their controversy list is rather long.

From the creator of the app:

I use the wikipedia dumps that are provided monthly and go through all articles to filter out company and product related ones and all the relevant sections which might be controversial. I do a lot of post processing then to link all the companies based on the parent and owner information so luckily no manual labour and its easy to keep up to date!

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G7 Nations Agree on Minimum Corporate Tax

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Corporations love keeping their shareholders money instead of contributing to society, and it’s the role of governments to ensure that corporations do their part. Usually this comes in the form of taxation. Multinational corporations create multiple subsidiaries to obfuscate and obstruct the ability of governments to collect tax, it’s the corporate equivalent of dining and dashing.

A recent G7 meeting revealed that the largest economies in the world are going to enact a global minimum taxation rate for corporations. Having an agreed-upon minimum will remove the incentive to corporations to create subsidiaries to avoid taxation, while increasing the wealth of nations.

The rules on making multinationals pay taxes where they operate – known as “pillar one” of the agreement – would apply to global companies with at least a 10% profit margin. 

Twenty percent of any profit above that would be reallocated and taxed in the countries where they operate, according to the G7 communiqué. 

In the case of the UK, for example, more tax revenue would be raised from large multinationals and would help pay for public services.

The second “pillar” of the agreement commits states to a global minimum corporate tax rate of 15% to avoid countries undercutting each other.

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Canada to Monitor Behaviour of Corporations Aboard

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Canada announced yesterday that, like other nations, the country will be monitoring how Canadian corporations behave beyond its borders. Over the years there have been too many accounts of corporations based in Canada getting into conflicts and abusing communities of people internationally. Obviously this sort of behaviour is bad for people and tarnishes any positive thoughts people have about Canada. It’s up to the new role of the ombudsperson to check to see that Canadian corporations don’t break any human rights or the like outside the nation’s borders.

The role of the Canadian ombudsperson for responsible enterprise will be to work towards resolving conflicts between local communities and Canadian companies operating abroad.

The position will focus on several sectors including mining, oil and gas and the garment sector.

It will also have the power to independently investigate and make recommendations in cases involving human rights complaints.

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Cadbury Goes Fair Trade

If you’ll excuse for a moment while I pander to corporate interests, I think it’s worth noting that Cadbury’s Dairy Milk chocolate bar will now be made from certified fair trade cocoa. This is great to hear, because this is a huge product from a huge company, and it’s another big step towards a world in which consumers have no excuse not to know about fair trade.

Cadbury and the Fairtrade Foundation today announced plans to achieve Fairtrade certification for Cadbury Dairy Milk, the nation’s top selling chocolate bar, by end of Summer 2009. This groundbreaking move will result in the tripling of sales of cocoa under Fairtrade terms for cocoa farmers in Ghana, both increasing Fairtrade cocoa sales for existing certified farming groups, as well as opening up new opportunities for thousands more farmers to benefit from the Fairtrade system.

The press release doesn’t indicate which countries the change will take effect in, but the UK and Canada are definitely included.

Read the press release on the Fairtrade Foundation website.

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