Today, I'd like to point out the relative attractiveness of Canadian banks over U.S. banks, which is a report from BMO Nesbitt (a major Canadian bank and financial services organization).

I support all the timely assessments of this BMO report (dated July 7). Download Report on Cdn Banks

Speaking of timeliness, everything is relative. Last night's Junkanoo Festival in Nassau started with music entertainment from every "known" Bahamian act, plus some not so well known.

"Who Let The Dogs Out" was a big deal of course because of the Baha Men, but now to be fair to the women, new choruses were added, as in "Who Let The Jerks Out".

This was by far the biggest crowd I have ever seen in Bahamas. There were as many multiple tens of thousands of people, including ages from a couple weeks old to the quite elderly at 5am (when I left) as there were at my 11pm arrival.

Singing, dancing, eating and drinking is a passion of many cultures of the world, but here they manage to do it better (as in "Better in The Bahamas"). This is basically Mardi Gras combined with Independence Day flag waving, so you can imagine the intensity.

Still, I have to admit, timeliness is not part of the culture. The 3am Junkanoo parade was delayed to 4am, then 5am. Then I saw hundreds of straggler band members nowhere near the starting point at Rawson Square, so I decided to head off to bed.

At 10am breakfast, Rev. Joel Harvey, the New York ordained minister who I had ventured over to the fairgrounds with, but who quit at about 1:30am, said that there had been the sounds of a parade go by the hotel at about 8am or 9am, after a thunderstorm had rolled through.

At 5am, I kinda got the picture that if not 3, 4 or 5, maybe it wouldn't be 6 either, so I went to bed. But I'll bet that when that parade finally got started, there were still 30,000 proud Bahamians chanting and dancing in the streets. These people know how to party!

National independence btw means sovereignty. Thirty-three years ago today, The Bahamas attained independence from the UK. Did you know that countries like Bermuda, Cayman Islands and Turks and Caicos are not independent? In fact those countries have decided, for one reason or another, to remain U.K. dependencies.

Another point I'd like to make is that Bahamas is not a tax haven. Yes, foreign individuals or corporations can in most cases (U.S. is different) enjoy zero tax, but that is because there is no income tax act here. The local people and corporations also pay no income tax.

So rather than call this country a tax haven, please understand that the government has a different fiscal system. That's all.

Obviously the government here has to pay the costs of providing national defence, police, education, hospitals, roads, social services and so forth. But the money is raised in a different way than income tax.

There is a set of heavy charges for customs duties on most items that are imported, and trust me, most things (like consumables and building materials) are imported. There are also monies raised by govt in the form of a transit tax on maybe 7 million annual tourists passing through airports and seaports, and stamp tax on purchase and sale of real property (land and buildings), and business permits and ex-pat residency and work permits.

My work permit for instance will cost me $10,000 per year.

So, at the end of the day, Bahamas may have zero income tax, estate tax and other taxes that the high-tax jurisdictions have, but the government operates a fiscally prudent regime, and does so with a local dollar that is interchangeable with the USD.

I like the system here. No income tax means no loopholes, no lobbyists and the rest of it.