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AutoCanada to take another look at dividends

GREG KEENAN — AUTO INDUSTRY REPORTER

AutoCanada Inc. (ACQ-T13.270.040.30%) is reassessing its acquisition strategy and dividend policy, after two auto makers that had previously rejected the publicly traded group’s overtures agreed to permit it to buy their dealerships.

The strategy adopted a year ago called for maximizing profits at AutoCanada’s existing Chrysler Canada Inc., Hyundai Auto Canada and other dealerships and paying out a high percentage of those profits in dividends, chief executive officer Pat Priestner told investors on a conference call Wednesday.

That policy was established because several auto makers would not permit AutoCanada to buy their dealerships, which meant the ability to expand beyond existing franchises was limited.

In recent weeks, however, General Motors of Canada Ltd. and Kia Canada Inc. agreed to let the Edmonton-based dealer group purchase, own and operate their dealerships, creating new growth potential and acquisition opportunities, which will require financing.

“We have opened the door to potential growth beyond what we could have reasonably imagined last year,” Mr. Priestner said on a call to discuss the company’s first-quarter financial results.

AutoCanada is taking a 31-per-cent stake in an existing GM dealership near Edmonton and Mr. Priestner will hold 100-per-cent voting control to meet the auto maker’s requirement that the owner and operator of a dealership be a single person.

There is room to acquire more GM stores, he said. AutoCanada will build the Kia store from the ground up.

The board and senior management will examine the dividend and acquisition policies during the current quarter.

“There’s no intention of not having a good dividend,” Mr. Priestner noted.

The company raised its quarterly dividend to 15 cents from 14 cents after reporting strong first-quarter results.

Profit rose to $4.1-million or 20 cents a share from $1.9-million or 10 cents a year earlier. Revenue jumped 18 per cent to $248.4-million from $210.8-million.

Assessing the dividend policy makes sense, said analyst Derek Dley, who follows the company for Canaccord Genuity in Vancouver.

“I think some may have been expecting a larger dividend increase, but I believe the one-penny-a-quarter raise was prudent given the new growth opportunities available to the company following last week’s agreement with GM,” Mr. Dley said.

AutoCanada is Canada’s largest publicly traded dealership group. It owns 24 stores, 10 of which are Chrysler dealerships. About two-thirds of the 24 stores are in Alberta and British Columbia, but Mr. Priestner said last week that he’s interested in expanding to Saskatchewan, where AutoCanada has no stores.

Life on Mayne Island, it's complicated to become simple

By Jack Knox, Times Colonist

People move to Mayne Island for the simple life. It's the kind of leafy Gulf Islands paradise that suit-and-tie office workers dream about as their souls are slowly sucked away in 15 km/h commuter traffic.

But as Tamara Gagne's neighbour likes to say, it's complicated to become simple.

Mayne's stores all shut by 6 p.m., so better not run out of milk. There's no bank to cash a cheque at. No garbage dump, so trash must be hauled off-island.

"You're conscious of what kind of packaging things come in because you don't want to get rid of it," says Gagne, behind the counter at Happy Tides Health Foods.

Living in splendid isolation means doing without certain things. Right now, islanders face doing without a Mountie living in their midst.

The RCMP is looking at rejigging its four-member Outer Gulf Islands detachment. The proposal would see the lone Mounties who live on Mayne and Galiano rehoused on Pender, where the detachment is based. A fifth officer would be added to the unit, which also watches over Saturna and close to 60 smaller islands.

It's largely a safety issue. If there's a call to a potentially violent situation, the RCMP wants two Mounties responding, not one, which means the second officer has to come by boat from another island.

That creates another conundrum, since regulations say there should be two people in a boat. Housing everyone on Pender would solve those problems.

Besides, it's not as though Mayne is a hellzapoppin crime zone. The last time it really made the news was in 2005 when, rather than get off the Tsawwassen ferry at Swartz Bay and board another vessel for home, an islander jumped off the Spirit of British Columbia in Active Pass. Gripping two inflated garbage bags - "Mayne Island luggage," they called them - he swam for shore, hoping to arrive in time for a big baseball game.

Low threat level notwithstanding, residents don't like the idea of their cop moving to Pender. "Having him here is a comfort," says Linda Church. She hears about it as she runs the till at the Miners Bay Trading Post, which is one of those sell-everything stores where the Grey Goose vodka shares a shelf with the Oxo French Dip.

Most concerned are retirees from the city, where police presence is a given. Seniors make up onethird of the 1,100 year-round residents. Only a quarter of the population is under age 45.

It's pretty sleepy in the winter (an Islands Trust survey said just 590 of Mayne's 1,100 houses are occupied full time) but picks up in the summer - though not as much as it used to. Longweekend tourism has dipped.

It's a picture postcard of a place, bookended on one side by the Georgina Point lighthouse looking out over the Strait of Georgia and, on the other, the Japanese Gardens, an echo of the large Japanese-Canadian population uprooted during the Second World War. Galleries and B&Bs are liberally sprinkled among the trees.

On this day, down at the Miners Bay dock, Port Alberni's Ray Schwager is selling shrimp tails and octopus from his freezer boat Spring Bandit. He fishes near Prince Rupert, then works his way south, island to island, emailing customers to let them know when he's coming. It's the sort of scene that makes tourists swoon and buy real estate.

"There's something special about an island," says 20-year resident Church.

But again, choosing to live there means giving up some things that city dwellers take for granted.

There's no public transit (though the island is dotted with "Car Stop" signs where pedestrians can wait for passing motorists to pick them up). Recycling is more than a grudging duty, and water-conservation more than a slogan. "We compost," Church says. "We don't flush every time."

Then there's the ferry schedule. You sense a certain sympathy for the would-be ballplayer who plunged into Active Pass.

At the Miners Bay Trading Post, one guy talked about getting stuck behind a highway crash near Nanaimo after taking a carload of kids skiing on Mount Washington the other day. A pain in the butt if your live in Victoria, but an expensive night in a Sidney hotel if you miss the last sailing to Mayne.

"It totally dictates your life," say Eric Rice, dishing up pastries at the Sunny Mayne Bakery.

Totally worth it, though. Rice, who married a Mayne girl after being raised in Wenatchee, Washington, has found heaven.

"The beach is a walk away. It's safe. You know everybody. I leave my keys in my ignition." Just have to accept that you can't hop in the car and drive away whenever you want.

Dogging Mitt Romney

By GAIL COLLINS -- NY Times

I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, but Mitt Romney once drove to Canada with the family Irish setter on the roof of the car.

Seamus, the dog-on-the-roof, has become a kind of political icon. You cannot go anywhere without running into him. There are Seamus T-shirts and endless Web sites. This week, the story was a New Yorker cover, with Rick Santorum playing the role of the Irish setter.

Neil Swidey, the Boston Globe reporter who first broke the Seamus story in 2007, wrote recently that he had been avoiding a return to the topic for fear that someday the dog would wind up in the lead of his obituary.

Which I can totally understand.

The story took place in 1983, when the Romney family made a 12-hour pilgrimage from Boston to a vacation home in Canada. Romney, his wife, Ann, and their five sons were in the station wagon. Seamus was in a crate, or kennel, on the roof.

At some point — possibly in response to the excitement about being passed by tractor-trailers while floating like a furry maraschino cherry on top of the car, Seamus developed diarrhea. And Romney, who had designated all the acceptable rest stops before beginning the trip, was forced to make an unscheduled trip to a gas station. Where he kept the family in the car while he hosed down the station wagon and the dog, then returned to the highway.

“It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management,” Swidey wrote.

People, does any of this sound appealing? Elect Mitt Romney and he will take the nation on the road to the future. Some of us will be stuck on the roof. The rest of us will be inside singing camp songs and waiting for the day when the master plan lets us stop to visit the bathroom. Plus, anybody who screws up on the way to the future gets the hose.

Anyhow, we are now at a post-Super-Tuesday lull in the campaign, and I am ready to answer Seamus questions.

Haven’t you brought this episode up like about 10 million times already?

I’ve made a kind of game of trying to mention Seamus every time I write about Mitt Romney. This is because the Republican primary campaign has been an extremely long and depressing slog, and we need all the diversion we can get.

It’s as though you’re saying this is the most important fact about a possible future president of the United States.

You could argue that the Seamus story puts Romney in a more human context. This is not just a quarter-billionaire with approximately the same gift for the common touch as Scrooge McDuck. This is a real person. A person who once drove to Canada with the family dog tied to the roof of the car.

In a kennel, right?

“This is a completely airtight kennel, mounted on the top of our car. He climbed up there regularly, enjoyed himself,” Romney told Chris Wallace in a Fox interview that began with Wallace, a dog owner, demanding: “What were you thinking?”

Wait a minute, if the kennel was airtight, how did Seamus breathe?

Excellent question. Also hard to envision the animal continually trying to leap on top of the station wagon in order to enjoy its delights.

So that’s it from Romney?

He did once suggest that the Seamus publicity was a plot by PETA to get even with him for allowing rodeo performances at the Winter Olympics in Utah.

I bet President Obama would never put Bo on top of a car.

Yes, the Obama campaign has been eager to point this out. Although, really, if you’re the president of the United States, you can give the dog his own helicopter if you want to.

I should note that when it comes to presidents and dogs, Romney would have to go a long way to match Lyndon Johnson, who once held up his beagles by the ears for photographers.

Is it even legal to drive around with a dog on top of your car?

Chris Wallace did ask Romney if he knew that he was breaking a Massachusetts law against cruelty to animals. Mitt did his heh-heh-heh thing and pleaded ignorance. The law is actually kind of vague. But I will point out that a member of a group called Dogs Against Romney drove to a protest in Colorado with a model of Seamus on top of his car and was stopped by the police.

I heard a rumor that when the family got to Canada, Seamus ran away.

Seeking sanctuary? Mitt’s sister Jane told Swidey that the dog developed a tendency to wander, and that she took Seamus to her home in California where there was more space. She also gave The Globe an extremely cute picture of Seamus cuddling with some kittens.

Does Romney have a dog now? I’m not sure I want to see Seamus II in the White House.

Romney occasionally says, “We love our pets. Heh. Heh. Heh.” The Romney camp hates talking about Seamus-related issues, but there’s no evidence of an actual family dog at the present. If there is one, I’d hate to think of how it travels when they fly between campaign stops.