The Sheila Anne
From the Toronto Sun:
A contract on the life of then finance minister Paul Martin was being shopped around Toronto's underworld in 2003, a former police informant testified yesterday.
Two contracts, worth up to $300,000, were offered, said accused cocaine trafficker Vincent Brown at an abuse of process hearing.
The RCMP took the matter seriously enough to give Brown a polygraph test on May 27, 2003. Nine days later news reports surfaced that Martin's security had been increased.
Why would organized crime figures take out a contract on Paul Martin? They didn't like something in the tax code?
Or was it to pressure him? But then what does Paul Martin, finance minister, have that gangsters want?
Access to a lot of boats. Just over a year after the contract story was known to the Mounties, we have this story:
Police in Nova Scotia have discovered 83 kilograms of cocaine on a ship that is owned by Prime Minister Paul Martin's sons and named after Martin's wife.
Cape Breton police discovered the drugs bolted to the outside of the Sheila Anne -- a registered Canadian Steam Lines vessel -- during a routine ship examination early Wednesday. Martin transferred ownership of the shipping lines to his three sons last year.
That transfer of ownership happened just two months after the RCMP learned of the assassination contract.
That amount of cocaine is for selling. It would be worth upwards to $15 million. The assumption has always been that the drugs were piggy-backing on the ship, utterly unknown to the crew or CSL management.
In a National Post story from July 2, 2004, a spokeswoman for CSL was adamant: "It is the first time that this kind of an incident happened on one of our vessels," she said. "We have absolutely no involvement in this."
First time it was spotted, more like.
It would be interesting to know if CSL ports of call changed at during 2003, or threatened to change, the year when the alleged contract was taken out on Paul Martin's life.
We know that CSL makes regular runs to Venezuala, to a port near the border with Columbia, to pick up South American coal to burn in Canadian power plants:
Almost 80 percent of Nova Scotia’s electricity, and 20 percent New Brunswick’s, is generated at coal-fired power plants. Most of the coal burned by New Brunswick Power and more than a quarter of that burned by Nova Scotia Power is mined at the world’s largest coal mine, located on the Guajira Peninsula in northern Colombia near the Venezuelan border.
Formerly operated as a partnership between Exxon-Mobil and the government of Colombia, the enormous Cerrejón mine was sold in 2002 to a consortium of Australian, British, South African and Swiss corporations. In that same year, the fortunes of the mine’s new owners rose when, responding to pressure from the International Monetary Fund, Colombia slashed the rate of royalties due on the value of exported coal from 15 to 0.4 percent. The Cerrejón mine, which currently measures 35 by five miles, is constantly expanding to satisfy growing international demand for its coal, which is affordable by world standards because of the low wages workers at the Cerrejón and other Colombian mines are paid.
New Brunswick Power and Emera, the parent company of Nova Scotia Power, are among the Cerrejón mine’s biggest customers. Each of these provincial utilities imports about a million tons of Cerrejón coal annually. The coal is shipped to Belledune, New Brunswick, and to Nova Scotia ports in vessels operated by Canada Steamship Lines, the company formerly headed by Canadian prime minister Paul Martin and now managed by his sons.
Was something in the works to change the arrangement? Was a message delivered to Paul Martin? Did Paul Martin cave in to opposition demands to move CSL out of the blind trust, or did he decide that it was too hot a business to be in?
But then to give it to his sons? That's a stretch.
