If you are a Canadian who does not want to hand over your money to be wasted by your government on things like bank bailouts, explore Offshore World

Here's an article about Offshore Tax Havens and Canada...

Offshore tax havens and the financial institutions based in them are an important part of the transparency problems at the heart of the present economic meltdown. Unfortunately, while their role has received considerable attention in the United States and Europe, they have largely been overlooked in Canada. Unless these problems are addressed, regulatory initiatives will have little effect in achieving a more transparent and accountable international economy.

More than half of all global trade is conducted through tax havens, and half the global monetary stock is estimated to pass through them at some point.

Offshore tax havens are the centerpieces of a shadowy economic system that has developed since the 1970s. Today there are more than seventy tax havens, many but not all based in small states such as the Cayman Islands, Bahamas, Bermuda, Panama , Liechtenstein, the Channel Islands and Singapore. Offshore tax havens are secrecy jurisdictions that exist expressly to enable their clients to escape the scrutiny of regulators and tax authorities in their own countries. The service providers based in these jurisdictions are insurance companies, legal and financial firms, and the subsidiaries of mainstream banks headquartered in Geneva, London, New York and Toronto.

Tax havens are an entrenched part of the international economy. At least half of all international bank lending and approximately one-third of foreign direct investments are routed via secrecy jurisdictions. More than half of all global trade is conducted through tax havens, and half the global monetary stock is estimated to pass through them at some point. The value of offshore hedge funds is currently about US$1.17 trillion. Wealthy individuals hold an estimated US$11.5 trillion in offshore accounts.

Banks and multinationals companies routinely establish offshore affiliates to obscure their business and financial practices. Frequently these offshore affiliates, or international business corporations, are dummy companies that conduct no business in the offshore jurisdiction and whose presence is little more than a postal address and a bank account. Tax havens host more than two million international business corporations. One modest building in the Cayman Islands is home to more that 12,000 of these entities. A January report from US Government Accountability Office revealed that eighty-three of the one hundred largest publicly-traded companies in the US — including big banks receiving bail-out money — have scores of subsidiaries in offshore tax havens.

Offshore dummy companies offer a number of advantages. They can be used for profit laundering, assigning profits and losses on paper so that taxes can be minimized. They are also used to conceal liabilities. Before being exposed as a fraud, Enron had established a network of 3,500 dummy companies, 600 of which were registered in the Cayman Islands. When the British government nationalized the failing Northern Rock bank in 2007, officials were stunned to discover that £50 billion of mortgages had been shifted to an offshore account disguised as a foundation benefiting Down' s syndrome children.

Tax havens facilitate billions in lost tax revenues. US Senators Dorgan and Levin have been investigating offshore tax abuses and assess the cost to the US treasury at $100 billion annually. In the United Kingdom, a parliamentary public accounts committee estimates tax losses are at least £8.5 billion annually, although others estimate the loss as much higher.

Tax havens are also conduits for illicit capital flight from developing countries. A December 2008 report from the Washington-based Centre for Financial Integrity calculated that developing countries lose $858 billion to $1.06 trillion in illicit capital outflows every year, ten times greater than all development assistance to the developing world. The largest part of this capital flight is tax evasion by multinational companies.

In 2002, Canada's Auditor General warned that corporate " tax arrangements with foreign affiliates have eroded Canadian tax revenues of hundreds of millions of dollars over the past ten years." A study released in June 2008 by the University of Quebec at Montreal concluded that the five major Canadian banks avoided $16 billion in federal and provincial taxes through offshore affiliates between 1991 and 2003.

In a 2002 study, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives found that four out of five corporations with revenues of more than $250 million paid less than $25,000 in income tax in the period 1995 to 1998. Meanwhile, the Fraser Institute reported last December that the Canadian government shelled out $182 billion in corporate subsidies between 1994 and 2006.

A 2004 Library of Parliament report noted that Canadian corporate investments in Barbados, Bermuda and the Cayman Islands increased dramatically during the 1990s. Between 1990 and 2003, Canadian investments in Barbados increased from $1.5 billion to $24.7 billion, exceeding the GDP of Barbados by a factor of six. The report concluded that at least some of these investments could only be explained as tax avoidance measures.

Why does all of this matter in the context of the current crisis?

It matters because taxpayers are assuming enormous obligations in the form of public debt to bailout many of the financial institutions and corporations that have behaved irresponsibly and arguably illegally.

It matters because massive bailouts limit the capacity of governments to support people most vulnerable to economic recession, such as pensioners and the unemployed.

It matters because financial institutions and corporate elites have been permitted to evade their obligations to the societies that nurtured them, while accumulating fabulous wealth at the expense of the many.

All of this matters because currently there are only superficial proposals for changing the practices that helped create this economic disaster in the first place. Unless unregulated and unaccountable secrecy regimes are dismantled, all of this will happen again.

Peter Gillespie works with Inter Pares, the Ottawa-based international social justice organization.

By Peter Gillespie of StraightGoods.ca