By Yves Engler
On Sunday, April 26th military forces trained by the Canadian Special Operational Regiment subdued a hijacker who took command of a Halifax-based CanJet plane at an airport partly run by Vancouver Airport Services. While Canadian companies and institutions played a major role in these events this drama did not take place in Canada. It happened in Montego Bay.
Canada has long been influential in Jamaica and across the English-speaking Caribbean. Some prominent Canadians once wanted to add Britain’s Caribbean colonies to Canada’s expanding territory. In the late 1870s the Canada First Movement sought “a closer political connection” with the British West Indies. By the early 1900s official Canadian policy supported annexing the British Empire’s Caribbean possessions (the various islands as well as British Honduras [Belize] and Guyana).
The West Indies Union movement reached its apex in the early 1900s, but the idea continued to find support after World War One. At the end of the conflict the other British Dominions (South Africa, Australia and New Zealand) that fought alongside London were compensated with German properties. With no German colonies nearby Ottawa asked the Imperial War Cabinet if it could take possession of the British West Indies as compensation for Canada’s defence of the Empire. London balked
Ottawa’s push to wrest control of the British Caribbean was spurred by insurance and banking companies, which entered the region when the Halifax Banking Company signed an agreement in 1837 with the Colonial Bank, a London headquartered operation that had a preeminent place in the British Caribbean. Prior to opening a branch in Montr, in 1882, the Merchants Bank of Halifax (later the Royal Bank) established itself in Bermuda. Most of the other major Canadian banks quickly followed suit. According to The Economist, by April 2008 Canadian banks controlled “the English-speaking Caribbean’s three largest banks, with $42 billion in assets, four times those commanded by its forty-odd remaining locally owned banks.”
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