The Senate is Canada's dirty little secret. The institution is an anachronism imposed by Britain and perpetuated ever since without justification.

The Senate should be abolished, but remains the DNA of Ottawa which is why, despite the current and previous scandals, absolutely nothing changes and no one is held accountable....

On May 14, British Columbians face Hobson's choice in their provincial election: Liberal leader Christy Clark is in trouble in her own riding and the NDP guy is wobbly in polls and should be.

But voters must hold their noses and re-elect the Liberals (who are actually Conservatives) because it's...

In 2009, Eleanor Squillari called me after reading my article "Madoff: More money laundering than Ponzi." She had been Bernie Madoff's secretary for years and wanted me to participate in a documentary about her ordeal and that of others in the fallout from Madoff's $62.5 billion fraud.

She was, like...

In the good "old" days of quality financial journalism, stories had to cite named sources and accurately unearth facts. Even then, those that would effect stock prices would be meticulously edited and "lawyered" before publication.
Some tried to get around these rules but it was impossible to plant a...

Bombings, poisonings and stock drops dominated headlines this week, but two other significant events occurred. The first was the funeral of the great Margaret Thatcher, the first female in history elected to lead a major nation. And the second event was the rejection by the German Parliament of gender quotas...

By 1554, The Netherlands had become the world's first "modern economy" and a leader in technology, trade and banking. That year, some Dutch entrepreneurs imported tulip seeds from Turkey. The hardy, beautiful flower became popular and by 1637 horticultural innovators produced a rare strain that fetched ten times the annual...

My first job in Canada was to create one or two corporations every day for the country's richest individual and industrialist, E. P. Taylor. This was because my boss, Taylor's tax lawyer, divided Taylor's huge income into thousands of new corporations to pay a tiny small business income tax.

Taylor,...

The biggest heist in history was when newspapers and magazines allowed Google to "crawl" their content to readers, to pay nothing and to sell ads around their stories.

Google became, in other words, the ubiquitous newspaper right under the noses of proprietors who should have charged.

But they didn't because...

The old adage is that when you owe the bank a million dollars and cannot pay, you're in trouble. But if you owe the bank a billion dollars and cannot pay, the bank is.

Cyprus is the guy who owes a million and cannot pay, unlike Greece or Italy who...

Immediately after Pope Francis became the leader of the world's 1.2-billion Catholics this week, he prayed for guidance.

And it's little wonder. He is the newly elected CEO of the Vatican, a sovereign state, and faces the same crisis as does Washington or Brussels. His bureaucracy is beset by a...

Any economy, culture or enterprise that denies females equal education and opportunities taps only half of its collective IQ. This is a truism, but is ignored by too many regimes, religions and organizations of all kinds.

The economic importance of gender meritocracy was explained to me 20 years ago in...

Albertans are unique because they don't occupy a parallel universe, living on other peoples' money. They live in the real world and the province's current fiscal deficit has sparked intelligent conversation.

The Alberta Advantage is its adherence to discipline and is why it has the lowest taxes in the country....

Politicians in the developed world are preoccupied with dividing up a diminishing pie, not a growing one.

Even in debt-free Alberta, an oil bubble is causing budgetary handwringing in government as deficits loom. This means spending cuts, or revenue hikes, or a bit of both or even, goodness forbid, racking...

Canada's oil sands are besieged with two myths: That a "clean" coal technology exists and that the oil sands imperil the planet as the world's dirtiest fuel.

Both statements are bunk and yet they inform an environmental movement that swarms the White House and Congress to fight the Keystone XL...

In the corporate world, sleepy or dysfunctional boards of directors of public companies often and suddenly find their corporations taken over or besieged by a hedge fund or aggressive change-agent.

In the media world, sleepy or dysfunctional content providers often suddenly find their audiences disappear, thus driving them out of...

One of the challenges in life is to know the difference between a cyclical slump and a transformation that will permanently change a business, industry, economy, lifestyle, living standard, a family's prospects or the future of a nation-state.

Harvard Professor Clay Christensen explained the difference in the business world, with...

President Vladimir Putin's gift of citizenship and 13 per cent tax rates to French actor Gerard Depardieu highlighted the next phase of globalization: The nation-state as a brand.

Here more than ever at the World Economic Forum, nation-states have become all about gaining a bigger market share of the...

The World Economic Forum in Davos opens next week and will host a stellar gathering of people who go to Switzerland annually to be depressed, and inspired, by high-octane panels and experts in everything.

The theme is "Resilient Dynamism," something that business and government leaders certainly need as the global...

I've always enjoyed Gérard Depardieu as an actor, but his most recent role, as an international tax dodger, is pure Academy Award quality.

For those unaware of his theatrics, Depardieu left France last month in a huff over its proposed 75% income taxes on rich people. This is ironic: His...

I occupy the unenviable position of being both a Canadian and an American citizen which means that I must file and pay taxes to each country.

The Americans, and now the Australians, are the only nations that tax people on the basis of citizenship irrespective of residency. So whatever taxes...