Alexandra Posadzki

Two of Canada’s Big Six banks backing away from marijuana industry

Scotiabank and Royal Bank of Canada say they aren’t providing accounts to companies associated with the marijuana industry, leaving some business owners scrambling to find alternate arrangements.

After a decade-long relationship with the Bank of Nova Scotia, Hemp Country owner Nathan MacLellan says he received a letter from the bank late last month stating his account was being cancelled.

The store in Woodstock, Ont., sells marijuana-related items such as pipes and bongs but no actual cannabis, MacLellan says.

“It’s kind of insulting really, especially when legalization is right on the horizon,” he says.

“Nothing in the store that we sell is illegal. Every single variety store sells pipes and bongs nowadays, so why are they singling us out all of a sudden?”

Published by the Canadian Press.

Photo by Darryl Dyck at the Canadian Press.

Watchdog found ‘significant’ deficiencies at nearly 500 real estate firms: data

Canada’s anti-money laundering agency conducted on-site examinations of more than 800 real estate companies over four-and-a-half years and found “significant” or “very significant” deficiencies during 60 per cent of those visits, new data shows.

A document obtained by The Canadian Press through an Access to Information request shows that Fintrac conducted 823 examinations of companies in the real estate sector between 2012 and mid June of this year.

The federal anti-money laundering watchdog found “significant” deficiencies with the anti-money laundering and anti-terrorist financing controls at 468 of those companies, while 28 companies had “very significant” deficiencies.

Meanwhile, 324 companies had only “limited” deficiencies. None of the companies were named in the document.

Published by the Canadian Press.

Photo by Darren Calabrese at The Globe and Mail.

Dozens of real estate firms not compliant with anti-money laundering rules

At least 85 real estate companies have not implemented a plan showing how they are trying to detect money laundering and other suspicious transactions, nearly 15 years after they were required to do so, according to data obtained by The Canadian Press.

The federal anti-money laundering agency received 337 compliance reports from roughly 1,000 companies in the real estate sector it surveyed — including brokers, sales representatives and developers — between Jan. 1, 2013, and Feb. 8, 2016.

The data, which was obtained through an access-to-information request, represents only a small sampling of the real estate industry. There are about 20,000 companies in the real estate sector that are required to report to Fintrac.

An analysis of the data contained in those reports found that roughly a quarter of the 337 respondents admitted they had not yet fully implemented a compliance regime, which has been required by federal anti-money laundering laws since 2001.

Thirty-eight of the companies said they had only partially implemented a compliance regime, while the other 47 said they had not even begun to do so. The names of the companies were not included in the documents.

Published by the Canadian Press.

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick at the Canadian Press.

CMHC gave Maple Bank green light before banking watchdog seized assets

Canada’s national housing agency gave Maple Bank GmbH’s Canadian branch the green light during a financial review, just one month before the federal banking watchdog seized the company’s assets amid a German tax investigation, documents show.

Documents obtained by The Canadian Press through an access-to-information request show that the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation reviewed Maple Bank GmbH’s status as an issuer of mortgage-backed securities and a seller of Canada Mortgage Bonds in January 2016.

At the time, CMHC’s so-called operations support division said it was “comfortable” maintaining Maple Bank’s status, the documents show.

The housing agency was aware of the German bank’s dispute with authorities, which had been ongoing for about four years, according to the documents.

A month after the financial review, Canada’s federal banking regulator announced it was taking temporary control of the Canadian branch’s assets in light of the news that German banking regulator BaFin was shuttering the bank after a tax dispute threatened its financial stability.

Published by the Canadian Press.

Photo by Sean Kilpatrick at The Globe and Mail

GM workers in Oshawa, Ont., brace for 'the fight of our lives' in auto talks

Just over a year ago, Corina and Joe Colacicco — both employees at the General Motors facility in Oshawa, Ont., — sold their house and bought a bigger one to accommodate their growing family.

Today, the couple is contemplating what might happen to them and their four-year-old son if GM decides to close up shop in the southern Ontario city just east of Toronto.

"We've got all our eggs in one basket," says Joe, whose father spent 30 years working for GM before retiring several years ago. "I grew up on a GM paycheque my whole life, like most of my family has, so it's hard to even fathom the thought that they might not be there one day."

Oshawa is a ground zero of sorts for the ongoing contract negotiations, which kicked off last month, between the Detroit Three automakers and its unionized workers.

The plant, whose future is on the line, represents the struggle between the union's desire to keep investment in Canada and efforts by the Detroit Three to move production to jurisdictions such as Mexico and the southern U.S., where labour and power costs are lower.

Published by the Canadian Press.

Photo by Michelle Siu at the Canadian Press.

Despite risks, sedatives called ‘benzos’ widely used

When Shirley was handed a three-month prescription for Ativan, her doctor insisted the popular sedative was just an “innocent little thing” to help her sleep.

But after her doctor yanked her off the drug cold turkey, rather than slowly tapering off the dosage as experts typically recommend, Shirley plunged into a deep withdrawal. Over the next year and a half she was cycled through more than a dozen benzodiazepines and antidepressants, locked up in a psych ward and diagnosed with a slew of mental disorders.

Unable to sleep and gripped by a relentless, gnawing fear, Shirley contemplated the most painless way to end her life.

Published by the Canadian Press.

Photo by Joe O'Connal at the Canadian Press.

Tattoo, piercing technicians often lack hygiene training, Star investigations finds

The following story began as a project for an investigative journalism class at Ryerson University and was later published in the Toronto Star. The final product is the result of a collaborative effort between myself, my classmate Alex Nino Gheciu and Toronto Star reporter/Ryerson instructor Robert Cribb. Here is an excerpt:

Two weeks after Toronto inspectors documented serious “health hazards” at New York New York Accessories & Body Piercing, Carleigh Milton walked in to get her tongue pierced.

She knew nothing of the potentially bacteria-spreading concerns detailed in Toronto Public Health inspection reports — violations including no functioning sink and missing sterilization tests — when she stepped inside the Queen St. W. shop in June 2011.

Like most Torontonians who frequent any of the city’s 3,000 “personal service settings” — from tattoo parlours and body piercing shops to beauty salons — the 21-year-old assumed she was in safe hands.

Not so, she would learn.

A Toronto Star/Ryerson School of Journalism investigation has found that a lack of mandatory training for tattoo and piercing practitioners, along with sometimes lax enforcement against repeat offenders in Toronto, poses serious health risks.

Published by the Toronto Star