Canwest Global Communications will tell an Ontario court Friday that it will be forced to shut down the National Post, which has lost $62 million in the last four years, if the newspaper isn't shifted into a company that holds its other dailies, The Canadian Press reported. A hearing is scheduled for the matter on Friday afternoon at the Ontario Superior Court, only hours ahead of a deadline the restructuring media giant suggests could determine the fate of its biggest newspaper by circulation.

Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney said Canadians should not underestimate the "historic" restructuring ahead for the economy as it needs to adapt to a reshaped global marketplace in the post-financial crisis era, the Financial Post reported. However, in a TV interview broadcast on Sunday, he said he's confident the country's business community is up to the task, as their balance sheets are in "outstanding shape" and corporate leaders appear to recognize the changes afoot in the global marketplace. Read more.

Jaguar Financial Corp. is opposing a proposed $192-million takeover of base metals company Canadian Royalties Inc. by Jien Canada Mining Ltd., saying it's unfair to debtholders, The Canadian Press reported. Canadian Royalties, a Quebec-based company that's developing the Nunavik nickel project, announced last week it has a friendly deal to be acquired by Jien. Jien is offering 80 cents per share for 102 million common shares of Canadian Royalties and $800 per $1,000 principal amount of debentures issued by the Val-d'Or-headquartered company.

How much debt can an industrialized country carry before the nation’s economy and its currency bow, then break? In Japan, years of stimulus spending on expensive dams and roads have inflated the country’s gross public debt to twice the size of its $5 trillion economy — by far the highest debt-to-G.D.P. ratio in recent memory, The New York Times reported. Just paying the interest on its debt consumed a fifth of Japan’s budget for 2008, compared with debt payments that compose about a tenth of the United States budget.

Canadian provinces, seeking more than C$80 billion ($76 billion) from tobacco companies for treatment of smoking-related illnesses, are attempting to improperly use the bankruptcy process to force Japan Tobacco Inc.’s JTI-MacDonald unit to settle, a company lawyer said. JTI-MacDonald, the maker of Export A cigarettes in Canada, filed for bankruptcy protection in 2004, after a Quebec judge ordered the company to pay C$1.4 billion that the province claims it lost in taxes when tobacco companies exported cigarettes to the U.S.

The CEO of Fraser Papers Inc. says the company's best bet to move forward as a money-making entity is a restructuring that would involve the creation of a separate company to oversee the firm's specialty paper business in Edmundston and in Madawaska, Maine, the New Brunswick Business Journal reported on a Telegraph-Journal story. In an affidavit filed Monday in an Ontario court, Peter Gordon says the company faces many challenges in its quest to emerge from creditor protection.

In the year-long economic slump that is the most severe Canada has experienced since the early 1990s, 357,000 people have lost their jobs – in every sector of the economy, and at every level of the work force, The Globe and Mail reported. But the meltdown has also had a devastating impact on a group that does not show up in the monthly unemployment statistics: the retired. Already hobbled by an aging work force and companies’ gradual move away from guarantees for retired workers, Canada’s pension system has been pushed to the breaking point by the downturn.

Former employees of Nortel Networks Inc. pressed MPs on Thursday to change federal bankruptcy legislation to provide more protection for pensioners and laid-off workers of insolvent companies, the Canwest News Service reported. After filing in January in Canada and the U.S. for court protection from creditors, Nortel said it would not pay severance to some laid-off employees and would trim pension benefits.

It did not appear that a single new deal was signed last week at a two-day investment conference in Haiti, the poorest nation in the hemisphere, The New York Times reported. But the simple fact that hundreds of potential investors showed up to network and discuss possible projects created hope in a country that has been long shunned as too unsafe to visit, never mind invest in. Haiti is used to well-meaning foreigners, most of them relief workers, peacekeepers and missionaries. But this was a new group: profit-minded people assessing Haiti based on its bottom line.

The Foreign Office has forced the Cayman Islands' government to investigate the possibility of introducing direct taxes on businesses and residents based there, The Guardian reported. An independent assessment of diversifying the Caribbean tax haven's revenue base is the main condition stipulated by the Foreign Office for allowing the Caymans to borrow from banks. The Cayman government has also agreed to make significant cuts to its public expenditure programme.