THE first gold coins minted in Canada barely saw the light of day before they were withdrawn from circulation in 1914, in order to boost the government’s gold holdings at the start of the first world war. The coins sat in official vaults for almost a century before they were rediscovered in 2012, declared a “national treasure” and promptly put up for sale.
The government is being rather coy about how much it raised from the sale, which ended on December 31st. If it received the asking price for the 30,000 coins sold (another 215,000 are to be melted into gold bars) the take was about C$30m ($28m). Not a huge haul, but every penny counts to the Conservative government, which is bent on eliminating the federal budget deficit (C$18.9bn in fiscal year 2012-13) before Canadians next go to the polls in 2015.
The finance minister, Jim Flaherty, swears the disposal of government assets, which began in earnest as the budget deficit headed toward a record C$55.6bn in 2009-10, does not amount to a fire sale. And he has held back on some major items, such as the government’s remaining stake in General Motors, saying he wants to wait until the time is right.
Even so, the impression prevails that anything not securely nailed down is being assessed for how much it could contribute to the bottom line. Official diplomatic residences in Lisbon, London, Dublin and Boston have been sold and those in Paris, Brussels and Rome are on the block, as are a host of buildings in the United States. Critics complain that getting rid of quarters such as the Villa Grandi, a 13,000-square-foot residence with sprawling gardens in Rome, makes it harder for Canadian diplomats to give a favourable impression of their country. “You’re not going to be able to serve Canada if you serve ginger ale and Ritz crackers from a basement apartment,” was one acerbic comment.
That complaint resonates less domestically than the charge that asset sales have been bad value for Canadian taxpayers. The government rejected the advice of its officials to postpone the sale of its Dublin ambassadorial residence in 2008, for example, realising much less money than initially hoped for. The sale of the gold coins also suffered from poor timing. Although gold was selling for about $1,660 an ounce when the coin sale opened in January 2013, the price had fallen to just over $1,200 by the time the last coin was sold 12 months later.
Other disposals have hit trouble of a different kind. Plans to sell 22 paintings by famed Canadian artists owned by the Department of Foreign Affairs were cancelled in 2012 after a public outcry. Among the paintings earmarked for disposal were two large and colourful panels by the late Quebec painter Alfred Pellan, that were prominently displayed in the lobby of the department until the controversial decision by the current foreign minister to replace them with a portrait of the Queen.
But the most inept of these disposals dates back to 2009, and the sale of what the government regarded as surplus silver and china from Rideau Hall, the residence of the governor general (the Queen’s representative in Canada). It turned out that two sterling-silver flower baskets sold for C$532 were on loan from Buckingham Palace. A red-faced government was forced to buy them back, at a price that shows what a seller with a real sense of market conditions can achieve: C$50,000.
