Canadian banks use of tax havens keeps growing

Tony Sanger, The Progressive Economics Forum:

A growing share of Canada’s investment overseas is being channeled by Canadian banks into tax havens.

The latest Statistics Canada figures  show 24% of Canadian direct investment overseas in 2011 went to the top twelve tax havens, up from 10% in 1987.   In fact, tax havens of the Barbados, Cayman Islands, Ireland, Luxembourg and Bermuda were five of the top eight national destinations of total Canadian investment abroad, with the US, UK and Australia the only countries not considered tax havens in this group.

To put this in perspective, over $390 billion of Canadian “investment” has flowed into Barbados in the past decade, with precious little coming back.  That’s $1.4 million for every resident of that island, but you can be sure that very little of this actually flows to the people there.   Over $175 billion of Canadian investment has gone to the Cayman Islands in the past decade, equal to $3.2 million for each of the island’s residents.

These totals would be even higher if they included figures for other tax havens such as Monaco, Liechtenstein and many others where the figures either aren’t available or weren’t made available for confidentiality reasons.  They also don’t include money going to tax havens associated with the UK and the US, such as Channel Islands, or through banks in those countries.

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