Oh great, you might be able to buy HBC shares again!...

Canada's oldest company, and one of the oldest corporations in the world, the Hudson's Bay Company, was sold to an American wheeler-dealer in 2006.

That sharpie flipped it to a hedge fund a couple of years later.

The hedge fund sold off the Zellers store leases to Target a couple of years later, recouping their investment in its entirety.

What they've got left will be their gravy.

And now they want to float an IPO for the remaining entrails.

The main value point in what's left of HBC is the Bay chain of stores. Looks to me like the hedgies are trying to get out before Nordstrom comes into Canada and cuts their grass.

Avoid this IPO like it's the plague.

Remember when the Eaton chain came back from the dead?

A lot of sentimental Canadians went for that. How could they go wrong? Hell, I remember buying a nice suit at Eaton's. They even had real tailors in the stores to do the custom fitting.

The Eaton clan profited handsomely from that resurrection, and within a year the brand was dead.

Leaving the Eaton clan mourning at their various estates north of Toronto, counting the money from that final share flotation.

This HBC IPO is deja vu all over again.

Short this puppy before it climbs out of the crib.

The Canadian way; busywork for bureaucrats

There's one thing that Canadians do really well. In fact, we're pretty much world leaders.

We study stuff.

Feasibility studies. Environmental reviews. Impact assessments. Canadians have more words for "studying stuff" than Eskimos have words for snow.

Since at least the 1970's various government ministries have studied the possibilities of widening Highway 7  between Guelph and Kitchener. Engineers have graduated, spent their working lives studying the road widening possibilities of this ten mile stretch of two-lane black top, and retired. In fact, there are engineering consultants studying the project today who can proudly state that their grand-daddy studied that highway.

Soon there'll be guys who can proudly state that they're the forth generation of their family studying the possibility of widening that road.

There will have been ten times more spent on fifty years of studies than it would have cost to hire a paving crew and add two lanes around the time they first started the studies.

There's a guy at U of T doing his Ph.D studying the studies.

When the bad news about the F-35 hit the fan this week, Canada immediately took very Canadian measures to correct the problem. They assembled a team of bureaucrats to study what went wrong. In Canada there's no problem that another level of bureaucracy can't fix, but of course they have to study it first.

Bloomberg reported yesterday that the Canadian government will review the sale of store leases from the American owners of Zellers to the American Target chain on the grounds that ownership of department store leases might impact Canada's cultural heritage or national identity.

That's right! One American corporation selling shopping plaza leases to another American corporation is a threat to Canada's national identity?

That's something we have to study. I'm pretty sure that a year from now, when at least a dozen six-figure policy analysts have had a go at it and numerous reports have been written, the conclusion will be that the transfer of leaseholds between American companies operating in Canada will have no significant impact on our cultural heritage or national identity.

But you can't be too sure.