YEAR IN REVIEW
Atlantic Canada’s biggest business news of 2019
From boardrooms to courtrooms, catch up on Atlantic Canada’s biggest business news of 2019
It’s been a momentous year for business news in Atlantic Canada, from boardrooms to courtrooms and pulp mills to fishing wharves. These are the top business headlines of 2019 that continue to be read, shared and talked about. Some of these high-profile stories filled the business pages for weeks. Others promise to continue dominating the news in 2020.
QUADRIGACX
The downfall of Canada’s largest cryptocurrency exchange was sudden and dramatic.
QuadrigaCX founder and CEO Gerald Cotten died last December while travelling in India.
Upon his death, it was revealed that the Fall River, N.S., man had sole access to so-called “cold wallets” — encrypted offline platforms used for storing digital cash.
Without the passwords to recover the cryptocurrency, more than 100,000 customers of the online exchange lost an estimated $250 million.
The complex case dominated business news as the company sought legal protection from its creditors, and later entered bankruptcy, through Nova Scotia Supreme Court.
Lawyers for clients who lost millions through Quadriga asked the RCMP earlier this month to exhume the remains of the firm’s founder to confirm they are indeed those of Cotten.
The story promises to continue unfolding in 2020.
NORTHERN PULP
The mill opened in 1967 in Abercrombie Point, N.S. It was hailed as an economic boon for Nova Scotia, creating jobs in
Pictou County and supporting the province’s forestry industry.
But the pulp mill — Scott Paper then, Northern Pulp now — also brought pollution.
Toxic effluent was piped into Boat Harbour, a bay off the Northumberland Strait alongside a Mi’kmaq community. Foul-smelling sulphur odours — once shrugged off as “the smell of money” — filled the air year after year.
As awareness grew about the air and water pollution, the public began to demand higher emissions standards and cleaner water.
Amid increasing concern with the mill, the Nova Scotia government passed the Boat Harbour Act in 2015, banning the use of the once pristine tidal estuary for the mill’s waste after Jan. 31, 2020.
Northern Pulp proposed to build a new treatment plant that would treat the waste, then pipe it into the Northumberland Strait.
But the province’s environment minister recently said the mill’s report on the proposed system lacked enough sciencebased information, and ordered an environmental assessment report.
Three days later, Premier Stephen McNeil said he wouldn’t extend the deadline to close Boat Harbour. The decision will continue to make headlines in 2020, as hundreds of mill workers are expected to be laid off as the mill shutters.
MASS SALMON DIE-OFF
They died in early September. But it would be weeks before the death toll was known: An estimated 2.6 million salmon died in pens on Newfoundland’s south shore.
It was the biggest die-off of farmed fish in Atlantic Canada’s history. Northern Harvest Sea Farms blamed the deaths on unusually warm waters, saying the salmon clustered at the bottom of pens in search of cooler water. They suffocated from a lack of oxygen.
In all, about 5,000 tonnes of salmon – half of Northern Harvest’s fish stock – perished.
The situation dealt a serious blow to the aquaculture industry, which many say has breathed new life into struggling coastal communities.
It also reignited debate over salmon farming’s potential impact on the environment and traditional fishing grounds, including the use of antibiotic and pesticides, and concerns with farmed salmon escaping cages and breeding with wild salmon.
The Newfoundland and Labrador government responded with the release of new aquaculture policies and procedures, while other Atlantic provinces said they were monitoring the situation.
The mass die-off will likely plague the aquaculture industry in Atlantic Canada for years to come.
CRANE COLLAPSE
Powerful storm Dorian walloped Atlantic Canada in September, plummeting hundreds of thousands into darkness, uprooting trees and knocking down a tall construction crane in downtown Halifax.
The crane became a symbol of the post-tropical storm and the strength of mother nature.
Hurricane-force winds crumpled the towering crane nearly in half, leaving it dangling over the concrete frame of a building under development.
The crane became an infamous — albeit fleeting — attraction for locals and tourists. Storm-watchers flocked to the downtown area to see the wreckage firsthand — despite authorities pleading with residents to steer clear of the area.
It forced the evacuation of homes and businesses in the vicinity for several weeks, prompting a proposed class action lawsuit to recoup losses incurred by businesses and residential tenants displaced by the fallen crane.
TRADE WITH CHINA
As tensions between China and the U.S. deepened this year, Atlantic Canada quietly stepped up trade with the Asian country.
Nova Scotia led the charge, with the province’s exports to China on track to hit $1 billion this year. Seafood alone accounted for about two-thirds of trade.
LONDON - Helicopter cash, climate crises, smart cities and the space economy -- investors have all those possibilities ahead as they enter the third decade of the 21st century.
They go into the new decade with a spring in their step, after watching world stocks add over $25 trillion in value in the past 10 years and a bond rally put $13 trillion worth of bond yields below zero.
They also saw internetbased firms transform the way humans work, shop and relax. Now investors are positioning for the tech revolution’s next 10 years.
Could we see a repeat of the roaring twenties, as the 1920s were known -- years of prosperity, technological innovation and such social developments as women winning the right to vote?
Possibly. But there’s unease, along with all the euphoria. The current economic cycle is already the longest in U.S. history and a recession looks inevitable in the new decade -which also will mark 100 years since the Wall Street crash of 1929.
And solutions may need to be unconventional, even more so than the extraordinary policies of negative interest rates and bond-buying that eased the post-2008 global funk.
With those policies maxed out, “in the 2020s it seems inevitable that a world of helicopter money awaits,” Deutsche Bank predicts.
That would entail central banks or governments providing citizens with large amounts of money, as though it was being dropped from helicopters, a strategy rejected even by the unorthodox policymakers of the 2010s.
Another radical option under discussion is modern monetary theory, when governments create and spend as much money as needed, so long as inflation stays low.
“Central banks have effectively invited governments to experiment with more unconventional policies,” Deutsche said. However, those policies may pile up even more global debt, already at record highs. So what will markets do? A decade of rock-bottom interest rates didn’t revive growth and inflation in developed nations, but they certainly inflated markets, as prices for bonds, equities and real estate show.
The inequality they spawned have also triggered a widespread backlash against globalization. The result is a de-globalizing world, or as Morgan Stanley puts it, “slowbalisation”.
The bank expects tech investments to outperform, in particular smaller internet firms in China, as protectionism hurts larger rivals.
But it predicts less exciting returns -- “a lower and flatter frontier compared to prior decades, and especially compared to the ten years postGFC (global financial crisis).”
GLOBAL WARMING, PEOPLE AGEING
As market returns cool, the planet will continue to heat up. Carbon emissions, temperatures, sea levels and thus climate-induced poverty and immigration are expected to rise.
That should increasingly lead asset managers to seek alternatives to pollutants, especially coal, use of which must cease in OECD nations by 2030 for the Paris Agreement to be met.
BofA expects clean energy and electric-vehicle companies to emerge as winners, estimating the clean energy market to be already worth $300 billion.
Ageing populations are another challenge, making demographics a key investment criterion. Deutsche Bank names Ireland, Rwanda, Ghana, Botswana and Laos as among the 22 nations in line for a “demographic dividend”, benefiting from growing working-age populations.
It also backed sectors like e-commerce as Generation Z, those who will be in their mid 20s to early 30s by 2030, exercise growing spending power.
But in some countries, affluent older spenders will still carry clout. By 2030, over 80s will represent 5.4% of the U.S. population, up from 3.7% in 2015, driving demand for retirement homes, healthcare and long-life innovations.
“Immortality may prove the most interesting secular theme in the 2020s,” BofA predicts.