Jim Balsillie’s bid to buy the Phoenix Coyotes and move them to Hamilton got new life on Thursday (Aug 5). The bankruptcy court judge ruled that Balsillie’s bid would be accepted for the Sept 10 bankruptcy auction.

The NHL board of governors had previously rejected the bid, and had basically said they don’t want Balsillie among their exclusive little club.

This is at least the second interesting twist in the Coyotes affair over the last week. On Monday Coyotes current owner Jerry Moyes released documents showing that the other main bid – the Jerry Reinsdorf bid – included special tax concessions from the city of Glendale, amounting to up to $23 million next year.

Another feature of the Reinsdorf bid had Glendale agreeing to let him move the team without penalty if it continued to lose money for the next five years – either that or pay him $15 million per year for every year of losses.

If this provision makes it to the final Reinsdorf offer it makes it pretty clear that Balsillie’s offer is not the only one that is ultimately going to result in a move. And Balsillie is offering $212 million compared to Reinsdorf’s $148 million.

A report by GO Transit has raised the possibility of GO trains travelling between Waterloo Region and Toronto.

The report proposes that GO establish two stations in Waterloo Region, one in downtown Kitchener and the other at Breslau. No doubt there will be much discussion in the months ahead about the pros and cons of those options.

The new routes will not be cheap – at least to get up and running. GO Transit puts the initial start up cost to have the service running by 2011 at a minimum of $153 million. To turn it into a permanent service would cost about $549 million, according to the Go Transit report.

The report suggests that GO trains would initially carry between 2,300 and 5,000 passengers a day. It predicts that the number would rise to about 9,000 a day by 2031. Considering the growth potential of Waterloo Region this seems like a reasonable target.

Some things about this proposal seem obvious. First, the traffic on the 401 is increasing – especially the truck traffic – so anything that will take commuters off the 401 is worth considering. Second the potential for rail transport in SW Ontario is not being properly exploited. What we really need is a serious proposal for getting trucks off the highway and onto tracks.

The University of Waterloo is getting set to unveil a new marketing logo and it has student groups in an uproar. Steve Sauve, a student at the U of W is using his Facebook group to rally students and alumni against the new design.

According to Sauve, those who are against the new design “do not believe it represents UW’s prestige and degree of professionalism properly.”

Waterloo has a service-oriented economy with flourishing insurance and high-tech sectors as well as two major universities. The city’s largest employers are Sun Life Financial/Clarica, the University of Waterloo, Manulife Financial, Research In Motion, and Wilfrid Laurier University.

The city is part of Canada’s Technology Triangle (CTT), a joint economic development initiative of Waterloo, Kitchener, Cambridge and the Region of Waterloo that markets the region internationally. Despite its name, CTT does not focus exclusively on promoting technology industries, but on all aspects of economic development.

Waterloo has a strong technology sector with hundreds of high-tech firms. The dominant technology company in the city is Research In Motion, makers of the BlackBerry, which has its headquarters in the city and owns several office buildings near the University of Waterloo’s main campus.

Notable Waterloo-based high-tech companies include:

• Dalsa
• Descartes Systems Group
• Maplesoft
• MKS Inc.
• Open Text Corporation
• Research In Motion (RIM)
• Sandvine

Many other high-tech companies, with headquarters elsewhere, take advantage of the concentration of high-tech employees in the Waterloo area, and have research and development centres there. Sybase, Google, Oracle, Adobe, McAfee, NCR Corporation and Agfa are among the large, international technology companies with development offices in Waterloo.

Before it became known for technology, Waterloo was often called “the Hartford of Canada” because of the many insurance companies based in the area. Manulife, Sun Life Financial and Economical Insurance have a significant presence in the city.

Breweries and distilleries had been a significant industry in the Waterloo area until 1993 when a Labatt-owned brewery was shut down. Now the only major brewery is the Brick Brewing Company. Waterloo was the original home of distiller Seagram (also home town of many descendants of J.P. Seagram), which closed its Waterloo plant in 1992. Of the remaining Seagram buildings, one became home of the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), while others were converted into condominiums.

Source – Wikipedia.org

Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Nov 13, 2008 – Finance Minister Jim Flaherty boosted Ottawa’s efforts to ease the credit crunch yesterday in a series of measures aimed at enticing Canadian banks to loosen their purse strings and extend more lending to businesses and consumers.

Ottawa will triple the amount of insured mortgages it will be able to buy from banks and make it cheaper for banks to use government insurance that guarantees borrowing, Flaherty announced from his office in Toronto.

Economists praised the measures, which they said will reduce the pressure on banks and help consumers gain better access to credit. The moves are expected to give banks access to a large pool of cash, or liquidity, which will help insulate them from the crisis that has hit global money markets.

Mortgages in Canada, and in the Waterloo Region in particular, have not been as adversely affected by the current world-wide credit crunch as in most other parts of the world. This move by the federal government should give home buyers across Canada even more confidence in the real estate market.