Business

OAKVILLE, Ont. — Ottawa could have prevented the loss of hundreds of jobs at an Ontario locomotive plant if it had acted to modernize Canada’s “outdated” foreign investment laws, Premier Dalton McGuinty said Monday.

MONTREAL — Research In Motion may not have many suitors at home or abroad especially with Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comments that he would like to see the BlackBerry maker remain a Canadian company, analysts said Monday.
The prime minister recently told Reuters news agency that he wants to see the “company succeed and continue to grow as a Canadian company.”

NEW YORK — Forget the battle between the Giants and the Pats. The real Super Bowl showdown is between advertisers.

OTTAWA—Research prepared for the federal government shows the old-age benefits cited by Stephen Harper as perhaps unsustainable are a key factor keeping seniors out of poverty.
The technical, 80-page paper shows that without Old Age Security or the Guaranteed Income Supplement, more than a third of women and more than a quarter of men in their 60s would fall below the poverty line.

NEW YORK — Facebook made a much-anticipated status update Wednesday: The Internet social network is going public eight years after its computer-hacking CEO Mark Zuckerberg started the service at Harvard University.
That means anyone with the right amount of cash will be able to own part of a Silicon Valley icon that quickly transformed from dorm-room startup to cultural touchstone.

LOS ANGELES — The California owner of a Honda hybrid car won her unusual small-claims court lawsuit against the automaker over the vehicle’s failure to deliver its stated fuel economy.
Los Angeles Superior Court Commissioner Douglas Carnahan awarded Heather Peters $9,867 on Wednesday, saying Honda did mislead her about the expected mileage.

OTTAWA—To hear the prime minister and his cabinet talk, Canada’s public pension system is unsustainable and needs major repair—likely in the form of a higher eligibility age for Old Age Security payments.
But number-crunching and projections by many economists, and by the federal government’s chief actuary, suggest the sustainability problem is not severe.

OTTAWA—The Canadian economic recovery is showing signs of stalling, with real gross domestic product surprisingly falling back by 0.1 percent in November after no gain the previous month, according to a report from Statistics Canada.
The unexpected contraction after a flat October sets up the fourth quarter of 2011 to come in below the Bank of Canada’s two percent expectation.

MONTREAL — Target is looking for independent pharmacists to own and operate franchises within its Canadian stores, which open next year in dozens of former Zellers locations as the U.S. discount retailer expands outside its home market.

OTTAWA — The international oversight body for the world’s financial markets has again concluded that Canada needs a national securities regulator.
The Financial Stability Board, headquartered in Switzerland and now headed by Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney, commends Canadian authorities for making improvements in the last five years.