Small Terasen Investors Saw The Danger
Posted on Monday, October 31 at 11:02 by BC Mary
In spite of the many shareholders who were against the sale and the sound arguments presented by them, the votes came in overwhelmingly to sell Terasen. And why did this happen? It appears that there are some shareholders and institutional investors who hold large blocks of shares and since each share gets one vote those who held these large blocks of shares were able to bring about this result.
You see, the smaller investors saw the dangers of selling our utility to a foreign company, but the larger holders just wanted a quick, clean profit.
I thought the loss of our gas utility would be front page news in the British Columbian dailies, but when I opened the Times Colonist this morning, I found the article tucked away on an inside page in the Business Section. And how misleading it was.
The Times Colonist wrote, "Shareholders of Terasen Inc. On Tuesday overwhelmingly approved the company's $6.9 billion takeover by U.S. pipeline giant Kinder Morgan. More than 95 percent of them voted for the deal..." That is totally untrue and misleading. It was not 95% of shareholders that voted for the deal, it was a few shareholders who held 95% of the shares who voted for this deal.
I would like the Times Colonist to do another article on this and to give the facts. Also, I would like them to write about some the arguments put forth by the majority of the shareholders who were against this deal.
Regards,
Trudy Aldridge
[Address witheld]
Victoria, BC
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Terasen New One.
Say it fast people...thats how it's going to feel after they send you the new gas bills.
Damn bastards. Running a company to make a profit! And succeeding, too.
No wonder you're upset.
No one falls for their trolls anymore.
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"If you must kill a man, it costs you nothing to be polite about it." Winston Churchill
governments are collecting these huge windfalls as well.
Bev in B.C.
The largest bulk of share holders in Terasen are individuals. They hold 50% of all shares. The next largest share holder is Transmountain which is part of Terasen with 8%. Then it is the CPP investment board with 7.3%.
The personhood of corporations has been declared by some obscure US court over a hundred years ago, with Canada jumping on the bandwagon to please our "best friends and biggest trading partners", but where and what court has ever decided that the artificial entities of corporate shares are also individual persons with the same voting rights as humans ? I've never heard of any such decision, so I wonder where it comes from ?
So now we have stocks in one company, worth .23 cents each, having the same personhood, with the same rights, as the stocks of another, selling at $69. of $156. Makes sense ?
Of course, we live in a "competitive market economy", which means an economy based on the bidding rights of a few overruling the human rights of millions, so, how far down the line, when seats in Parliaments and the right to govern will be auctioned off to the highest bidders?
After all, we already have such a system with candidates with the largest campaign funds usually getting the seats, so it would be the logical step to ensure that the "right people", in other words, the biggest thieves should also have the right to govern, according to the prevailing economic theories. The Fraser Institute has been advocating and lobbying for many years for the sale of all Crown lands, lakes and rivers, as "environmental protection measures", so I'm wondering, when they will start pushing openly for the sale of governments on the open markets ?
Just imagine the world of good when we could see American and Chinese investors, with their "national status" guaranteed by free trade agreements, trying to outbid each other for the governments of BC and Alberta to secure the natural gas an oil rights. After all, isn't this what the "competitive market economy" theory is about ?
Ed Deak, Big Lake, BC.