The Stel Salaried Pensioners Organization wishes to
thank The Hamilton Spectator for permission to post the following article,
published in the March 30, 2006 edition
Hamilton Spectator wires services
(Mar 30, 2006)
Stelco over hump
tomorrow
Two days before Stelco is scheduled to exit its long and
rocky trip through bankruptcy protection, the court-named monitor in the case
issued a report saying it is still on track.
As of yesterday, it appears Stelco's restructuring plan will
be implemented tomorrow at midnight, wrote Alex Morrison of Ernst & Young,
who was appointed by the Ontario Superior Court to watch over the steelmaker's
affairs since the company entered bankruptcy protection two years ago.
Morrison added that his duties will likely continue for
months to come and that a July 17 court hearing has already been scheduled with
respect to certain financial matters.
The report also noted that the Hamilton steelmaker will pay
$32.5 million into its pension deficit for the last six months of this year, in
addition to a lump-sum payment it is making. It will pay $65 million per year
between 2007 and 2010, and $70 million per year between 2011 and 2015.
CGI Group chops 1,000 jobs
MONTREAL Information technology company CGI Group Inc. is
cutting 1,000 jobs, primarily due to lower-than-expected work volumes from
major client BCE Inc., its former controlling shareholder.
The Montreal-based company said 420 of the jobs are in
Toronto, 360 in Montreal and 220 elsewhere, mostly in the rest of Canada. Half
of the jobs will be cut immediately and the rest by the end of the year.
At the same time, CGI announced the company's global
technology strategy will create some 400 new jobs throughout its network of
centres of excellence -- 200 will be in Atlantic Canada with the rest being
located in low-cost India.
CGI's Chief Executive Officer Michael Roach said yesterday
that the company had no choice but to proceed with the layoffs after its
revenues were squeezed by lost business from BCE, Canada's biggest telecom operator
and multi-media company.
"CGI's second-quarter revenue and associated margins
from BCE are now expected to be significantly lower than anticipated on a
sequential basis and decreased at a much faster rate than anticipated,"
explained Roach in a conference call. "This is contrary to historical
trends and required an immediate workforce adjustment."
However, analyst Wojtek Nowak said he wasn't expecting
layoffs but the streamlining wasn't a complete surprise.
IMF should exert more clout
NEW YORK The governor of the Bank of Canada says the
International Monetary Fund should be "revitalized" and given more
authority to work out financial imbalances that threaten the global economy.
A renewed International Monetary Fund "could and should
be the umpire for the world economic order, unafraid to call out countries that
aren't playing by the rules," David Dodge said in a speech yesterday to
the New York Association for Business Economics.
He offered no hints on the Bank of Canada's future interest
rate policy, but said the central bank continues to stand on guard against
inflation.
Statistics Canada reported earlier that average weekly
employment earnings were up 4.8 per cent from a year earlier, the hottest
12-month increase since the survey started in 1991.
"These numbers are notoriously unreliable ... they do
get revised many, many times," Dodge told reporters. "But we really
are watching this issue quite closely."