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Thales opens expanded facility in Montreal By Mary Kirby Thales has unveiled an expanded facility in Montreal to meet the continuing growth of its aerospace capabilities. The manufacturer’s new larger location will house around 145 employees, including after-sales support and a maintenance team, as well as test bench facilities. Today’s inauguration coincides with the 10-year anniversary of Thales’ aerospace activities in Canada. Francois Quentin, Thales senior VP in charge of aerospace activities, says: “Thales has a long and prestigious history as a key partner to Canada’s aerospace and defence establishments. Its roots go back to the early 1980’s, when Thales first established a domestic presence in Canada. “Thales’ Canadian aerospace activities play a key role as the central hub for the regional and business aircraft market and represent a worldwide centre of excellence for flight control systems.” From Montreal, Thales provides avionics systems for regional and business aircraft with customers ranging from Bombardier, Embraer, Sukhoi, Gulfstream and Dassault Falcon. It is currently equipping Air Canada’s entire fleet with its in-flight entertainment systems. Source: Air Transport Intelligence news http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2008/02/11/221483/thales-opens-expanded-facility-in-montreal.html

(Courtesy of The Globe and Mail)

TD and Royal downgraded to sell Posted: January 16, 2009, 8:47 AM by Jonathan Ratner Both Royal Bank and Toronto-Dominion Bank were downgraded to a “sell” at Dundee Securities on expectations for weaker credit quality, bringing them in line with the firm’s bearish view on the sector as a whole and its recommendations for all of the Big 5 banks. Despite significant deterioration in its U.S. loan portfolio’s credit quality, Royal’s earnings have held up reasonably well on the back of its domestic retail banking programs, analyst John Aiken told clients. However, since Canada is unlikely to escape the “economic carnage” occurring in the U.S., he said it is only a matter of time before domestic credit quality begins to weaken materially, as credit card exposures have already started to show. “Consequently, although Royal will likely fair relatively well and should retain a premium to the group, absolute risk still exists,” Mr. Aiken said, cutting his price target on the stock from $38 per share to $35. It closed at $34.04 on Thursday. His forecast for TD moves from $51 to $44 as a result of expectations for a challenged outlook in the coming quarters as a result of additional deterioration in credit quality. It ended the day at $44.05. While Mr. Aiken said TD’s operations remain strong and its long-term prospects are solid based on its U.S. growth platform, he thinks 2009 will be the second straight year of declining earnings. “TD will not be immune and we believe that there is a risk that current expectations for credit losses have a significantly greater chance of being too low rather than too conservative,” the analyst said. Mr. Aiken did upgrade Laurentian Bank from a “sell” to “neutral,” but lowered his price target from $36 to $33. The stock closed at $31.41 on Thursday. “We believe that Laurentian’s valuation is much more reasonable at these levels,” he said, adding that while the bank does not have any direct exposure to the U.S., it will still feel pain on the domestic front. In general, Mr. Aiken feels the impact of underlying economic weakness and credit woes in the U.S., which has produced an earnings drag, increased write-downs and higher loan loss provisions, has also filtered into the Canadian market and will likely linger into the first half of 2009. “Consequently, we believe that headwinds to the banks’ earnings and concerns of capital adequacy will remain in the forefront as the banks begin the journey into 2009, and with it, the remaining perils from the past year, plus those yet unknown,” he said. As a result, the analyst said now is not the time to change his cautionary stance on the sector. Instead, he said it is time to remain “selective and mindful.” Mr. Aiken suggested that strong domestic operations should bode well for the retail market leaders TD, Royal and to a lesser extent CIBC. He also expects higher provisioning will come from the U.S. exposures of TD, Royal and Bank of Montreal, as well as the ripple effects to Bank of Nova Scotia’s Latin America assets. “Overall, valuation outlook will be largely predicated on the depth and breadth of the U.S. economic slowdown,” the analyst said. “Further credit deterioration will result in higher provisions, while added margin compressions will also depress earnings, offering little justification for any meaningful near term increase in valuations.”

Has Canada slipped into recession without anyone noticing? July 16, 2008 - 6:35 pm By: Julian Beltrame, THE CANADIAN PRESS OTTAWA - Canada is within a hair's breadth of slipping into a technical recession, economists said Wednesday, a day after the outlook for the North American economy soured sharply. But they add that it won't seem like recessions of the past. In fact, says University of Toronto economist Peter Dungan, Canadians may already have lived through a technical recession - two quarters in a row of a shrinking economy - and not noticed. "Our forecast is there's a recession now," Dungan said. "There may be a slight revision to the first quarter, but the second (which ended June 30) is almost certainly negative. "This is nothing like the recessions we had in the early '90s and early '80s, however, when we had serious recessions and serious unemployment," he added. The early '80s recession came after two major oil price shocks in the 1970s that battered the North American economy and led to a restructuring of heavy industry, especially steel and autos, with the loss of millions of jobs. The early 1990s recession produced widespread bankruptcies in real estate and retail before growth resumed a few years earlier. Speaking in Calgary, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty expressed confidence that the economy would stay on the positive side of the ledger and insisted Ottawa won't fall into a deficit as a result of the slowdown. "We are on track in terms of our budget in Canada, that we will continue to run a surplus," he said, adding that the country's "strong fundamentals" and status as an emerging energy superpower will keep it in better shape than the United States, although not immune to a global economic slowdown. "Canada is not an island," Flaherty said earlier in a speech to a Calgary Chamber of Commerce luncheon. Following a first quarter contraction that saw gross domestic product fall 0.3 per cent and continuing signs of stress, economists and policy makers have been routinely revising their growth projections for the year, all trending downward. In the last week, Canadians have been hit by a series of bad news announcements. Employment fell in June for the first time this year and full-time employment tumbled for the second straight month. Average home sale prices edged down during the month, the first year-over year price decline in nearly a decade. And General Motors Corp. (NYSE:GM) announced plans to lay off 20 per cent of its white collar staff in North America, a further cut of thousands of jobs. Meanwhile, the Bank of Canada warned of rising inflation Tuesday while lowering its 2008 growth forecast from 1.4 per cent in April to one per cent. On Wednesday, the Conference Board of Canada downgraded its projection from 2.2 per cent this spring to 1.7 per cent. For both, it was the second downward revision so far this year. Both are overly optimistic, says David Wolf, chief economist with Merrill Lynch Canada, who says gross domestic product increase will likely come in at a tepid 0.5 per cent this year, a statistical blip from recessionary times. "Absolutely, by the informal definition of recession we could be in recession," agrees Global Insight economist Dale Orr, noting that nobody will know for sure until late in August, when Statistics Canada releases the second quarter growth tally. But Orr also points out that the Canadian economy still has some legs, particularly in the resource and oil and sector, consumer spending, and employment and housing that while slowing, are coming off record-setting years. Even manufacturing showed signs of life in May. Statistics Canada reported Wednesday that manufacturing sales rose 2.7 per cent from April, the fourth increase in five months. The details behind the aggregate number were weaker as sales remain below last year's levels and most of the gain was due to higher prices, not increased production. The strongest pillar remains high-priced commodities, particularly Alberta oil, which is bringing tremendous wealth into the country and helping grease the general economy through corporate profits, job creation, and higher government revenues that get passed along in lower taxes and higher spending. "Perhaps the volume of what we produce is going down, but the wealth effect (from commodity exports) is very much there," said Pedro Antunes of the Conference Board. "We often think that's beneficial for some regions and sectors, but there have been redistributive effects. The federal government has collected dividends that's been fanned out to all Canadians in the form of tax cuts, and the effect on stock prices, wages, employment have been distributed all over the country." That has kept nominal gross domestic product growth - which measures the actual worth of what Canadians produce - above four per cent, as opposed to the flat performance in real growth, which measures the amount produced. "The hurt in Canada is narrowly focused in the trade sector," Orr says. "If you are in Windsor, Ont., where unemployment is near 10 per cent and the value of your home is falling, or in the auto sector, or if you are in a forestry one-industry town in northern Ontario or Quebec or B.C., then you are really hurting." But for most Canadians the slump has yet to register and likely won't if forecasts of a second-half improvement prove accurate. And for those who live off the resource sector, this is boom times, says Orr. Dungan says another difference between today and recessions of the previous two decades is that inflation, while rising, remains relatively tame, and governments now have the wherewithal to stimulate the economy or at least not inflict further harm. "The Bank of Canada is trying to keep inflation from rising, not reduce it, and generally speaking prevention is not as costly and not as unpleasant as cure," he explained. "And our government balances are basically OK. It's not like 1991 when we had huge deficits and therefore you couldn't do anything, if anything you were trying to raise taxes to make those better, which only makes the downturn worse."