Vancouver company finds world’s second-largest diamond
Vancouver-based gem miner Lucara Diamond Corp. (TSX:LUC) has unearthed the largest diamond to be discovered in more than a century.
Found at the company’s operation in Botswana, the 1,111-carat stone is nearly the size of a baseball and rated as a Type IIa gem, meaning it has virtually no impurities.
The only diamond bigger than it is the 3,106-carat Cullinan diamond uncovered in South Africa in 1905 and presented as a gift to Queen Victoria.
Lucara CEO William Lamb said he isn’t going to try to estimate the diamond’s worth but instead will let the market determine its value.
“We don’t believe we’re going to actually sell this in the normal process. This will be sold as a single stone,” he said.
The day after Lucara announced the discovery, workers at the same mine in Botswana discovered both an 813-carat diamond and 374-carat diamond.
Foreign ownership study is about money, not race, planner says
Urban planner Andy Yan’s study on foreign homeownership in Vancouver is generating controversy after he analyzed non-Anglicized Chinese names on land titles throughout the city’s tony Dunbar neighbourhood.
Yan, who works at Bing Thom Architects and teaches at the University of British Columbia, found 66% of the buyers of the 172 homes analyzed had names indicating they were recent arrivals from mainland China.
Some said the study provided proof foreign money is driving home prices up in the region, while critics accuse the study of racist undertones.
“This isn’t a story of China; it’s a story of money,” Yan told Business in Vancouver. “It’s this weird sense that money is no longer connected to what you do and where you live; it’s just this constant flow.”
Trudeau appoints three B.C. MPs to cabinet
Newly appointed Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has named his cabinet, selecting three MPs from B.C. to serve as ministers.
Vancouver-Granville MP Jody Wilson-Raybould has been chosen to lead the Ministry of Justice.
Harjit Sajjan, MP for Vancouver-South, has been named defence minister and Delta MP Carla Qualtrough became minister of sport and persons with disabilities.
The selections have been praised by local politicians such as Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson and B.C. Premier Christy Clark.
“On priority issues like affordable housing, transit and climate change, Vancouver will have a strong voice in Ottawa at the cabinet table,” Robertson said in a press release.
Clark said she is pleased the province is well represented in Ottawa and she looks forward to the new ministers advocating for LNG and softwood lumber.
Awarding of $1.5 billion Site C contract gets mixed reactions
The province and BC Hydro have awarded a consortium that includes a Fort St. John company with a $1.5 billion contract to work on the Site C dam.
Northeastern B.C. politicians and chambers of commerce are meeting the decision with excitement but reaction elsewhere has been more mixed.
“Skilled and experienced B.C. dam builders will be sitting idle while BC Hydro builds Site C with less experienced workers, many from outside B.C. and, we expect, many from offshore,” said BC Building Trades executive director Tom Sigurdson.
“This is not acceptable to our 39,000 members, and we wonder if it is acceptable to Premier Clark and Ministers Bennett and Bond.”
The project will employ 1,500 workers, while 600 workers are expected to be on the job by May.
Mark Anthony Group sells Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Palm Bay to Labatt for US$350 million
Vancouver’s Mark Anthony Group has sold the rights to its ready-to-drink (RTD) brands in Canada to Labatt for US$350 million. Those brands include Mike’s Hard Lemonade, Palm Bay, Okanagan Premium Cider and Stanley Park beers.
The company said the deal would allow it to focus on its wine and spirits business.
“Many people don’t realize that Mike’s, which has become an American beverage icon, was created here in Vancouver,” Mark Anthony Group founder and CEO Anthony von Mandl said in a speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade last year.
The Mark Anthony Group will retain ownership of its RTD products in the U.S., where sales of its products are five times larger than at home.
The deal is expected to close in early 2016.
Full details of Trans-Pacific Partnership released
The full text of the 12-member Trans-Pacific Partnership has been made public.
Business groups and the former Conservative government had been staunch supporters of the massive trade agreement between a dozen Pacific Rim countries, saying it would give Canadian companies more access to markets like Japan and Vietnam.
But the deal, which is the result of many years of negotiations, also means ceding part of Canada’s domestic market for dairy to foreign producers. The government has promised $4.3 billion in compensation payments to dairy producers as well as $1 billion to mitigate potential job losses in Canada’s automaking sector as import tariffs are reduced.
Critics have also warned that under the agreement Canadians could face fines or lawsuits from other countries for violating copyright laws.
