Cover: Jacqui Oakley

As the world’s second-most populous continent and blessed with abundant mineral riches, Africa holds great promise and economic opportunity. But those opportunities must also be mentioned and measured along with Africa’s many challenges: its division into 50 often fractious nations, frequent wars and civil strife, a stubborn history of corruption and inefficiency, and the deepest poverty anywhere on the planet. It’s fair to say Africa is the toughest place in the world to do business.

Illustration: Dushan Milic

Over the years, Canada has earned its reputation as a destination for international arbitration. Canada was the first country to adopt and implement the United Nations’ UNCITRAL Model Law implementation statutes 25 years ago as well as the first to sign on to the New York Convention, an international treaty covering foreign arbitration awards. The country has also prospered as a place to carry out commercial arbitration due to its proximity to the United States, its bilingual and multicultural status, reputation for fairness and neutrality, common and civil law systems, and a court system supportive of arbitration.

Illustration: Steve Munday

The growth in international trade has made the world smaller, more interconnected, and more complex. It has taken longer, and has received less public attention, but that same dynamic is also occurring when it comes to cross-border government procurement.

For more than half a century, international arbitration has proven increasingly popular as a way to settle disputes between parties headquartered in different countries. The reasons for the attractiveness are many, but chief among them is the reluctance of parties to have a dispute heard in a foreign court. Other perceived benefits include the promise of confidentiality, a more enforceable decision at the end of the day, a faster, cheaper process — at least in theory — and the ability to lay out the ground rules for dispute resolution ahead of time.

Offshore financial centres, or offshore tax havens as they are more commonly referred to, have been the subject of heightened international scrutiny and pressure in recent years from governments in the developed world.

The photovoltaic array on the rooftop of Air Miles operator LoyaltyOne Inc.'s headquarters in Mississauga, Ont., is capable of producing 165 kilowatts of green electricity each hour.

The 800-panel solar photovoltaic array adorning the rooftop of the Mississauga, Ont. headquarters of LoyaltyOne Inc. produces enough electricity an hour to power 16 homes. This gives the corporate offices of the Air Miles operator the largest solar photovoltaic array in Canada, capable of producing 165 kilowatts every hour.

 

The millions of ’tweens packing their local theatre to watch the second instalment of the Twilight series may not realize, or even care, that the Forks, Wash., school where Edward Cullen and Jacob Black vie for Bella Swan’s affection is actually Vancouver’s David Thompson Secondary School.

 

The springtime remodelling of General Motors of Canada Ltd. was remarkable for a number of reasons. The most obvious was its sheer scale. As the largest manufacturer and seller of vehicles in the country, it arguably posed the biggest corporate restructuring challenge in the country’s history.

Philip Slayton, in his article entitled “Moral Neutrality is No Longer Enough” (Canadian Lawyer, February 2009), argues that the given the ethical problems of the 21st century, the practice of moral “neutrality” in the legal profession is no longer sustainable and must be left behind.