Journalism

FT: Justin Trudeau grapples with Quebec’s religious wear law

| October 11, 2019
Quebec Bill 21
Photo by Adrien Olichon on Unsplash

On Amrit Kaur’s graduation day in June, “Bill 21” — a law that bans some civil servants in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols — came into force in Quebec, Canada’s French-speaking province.

Refusing to remove the turban she wears on a daily basis, the Sikh education graduate became instantly unemployable as a teacher in her home province. She has since moved 4,500km west to anglophone Surrey, British Columbia.

“If federal politicians really don’t want to see a Canada that’s racist, then do something about Bill 21,” said Ms Kaur, who also works with the World Sikh Organisation of Canada.

Ms Kaur’s reaction underlines how fraught an issue the bill, passed by the right-leaning Quebec government of Premier François Legault, has become in Canada’s fiercely contested federal election campaign.

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FT: Justin Trudeau tries to save campaign after racism scandal

| September 19, 2019

Following the release of a video showing a third instance of Justin Trudeau dressed up in blackface, Canada’s prime minister apologised for how his “racist” behaviour had “hurt people who shouldn’t have to face intolerance and discrimination because of their identity.”

The question is how much damage the blackface scandal has done to his Liberal Party’s bid for reelection on October 21, and whether Mr Trudeau’s carefully-crafted brand of progressivism on the world stage has been forever tarnished.

 

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Trudeau’s grand promises go missing in Canada election

| September 16, 2019

The day after Canada’s federal election campaign officially got under way, the party leaders faced off for their first televised debate, with one conspicuous exception — prime minister Justin Trudeau was a no-show.

While the leaders of three national parties sparred over topics such as the economy, indigenous issues and the environment, a podium put out for Mr Trudeau stood empty. Prior to the debate, Green party leader Elizabeth May pretended to shake hands with an invisible Mr Trudeau.

“I think we can all agree that Justin Trudeau is afraid of his record and that’s why he’s not here tonight,” said Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, who is trailing Mr Trudeau narrowly in the polls.

Mr Trudeau’s decision to stay away from Thursday night’s debate was widely seen as reflective of a government struggling to reconcile the grand promises he made in 2015 about change and transparency in government with the reality of the past four years.

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Election 2019 primer: Jobs, the economy and the deficit

| September 12, 2019

If it was only about hard economic numbers, Justin Trudeau’s Liberals might not have all that much to worry about in their bid for another four years in office. The most recent economic releases from Statistics Canada on jobs and GDP growth both delivered pleasant surprises to the upside, for which Team Trudeau wasted no time in taking credit. And with Canadians once again telling pollsters that the economy is at the top of their list of priorities, the Liberal’s message—that their strategy of deficit-driven intervention in the economy is working—might carry the day for them.

The problem for Trudeau is that a lot of Canadians don’t feel the economy has gotten better, or at least not for them.

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Trash talking: How Patrick Dovigi built Green For Life into a waste empire

| August 30, 2019

BY JASON KIRBY

Canada’s king of garbage is, at this moment, standing shin-deep in the stuff. Patrick Dovigi, the CEO of GFL Environmental—the fourth-largest waste management company in North America—clambers over a pile of stained mattresses, crushed plastic bottles and rotting wood at the company’s waste transfer station in northwest Toronto. Dovigi may be doing all this for a photo shoot, but as he hops into the bucket of a front-end loader and gestures with upturned hands for the driver to lift him higher—higher, he signals—it’s clear this is a man very much in his element, foul-smelling as it may be. Never mind that his brown suede shoes seem utterly ruined, that there’s a smear of white sludge across the back of his black sweatshirt, or that in less than half an hour, he’s scheduled to meet with an executive at one of GFL’s largest investors, the $190-billion Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. “It’s okay,” Dovigi says of the stains. “This is the garbage business.”

It’s unlikely any of his investors would complain about a bit of trash. Outside the world of tech unicorns, few companies in Canada have grown so massive, so fast.

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Can this company make Excel less excruciating?

| August 15, 2019

In early 1979, a tiny text ad ran in the back pages of Byte magazine, a journal dedicated to the emerging world of personal computers: “VisiCalc, how did you ever do without it?” If readers were unsure what had apparently been missing from their lives, they soon found out. Forty years ago this October, VisiCalc, the first digital spreadsheet, debuted on the market and immediately became a global phenomenon. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once hailed it as the “explosion” that moved the computer industry forward, while others have described it as “the original killer app of the information age.” In time, VisiCalc lost the spreadsheet crown to Lotus 1-2-3, which was eventually usurped by today’s king of the spreadsheets: Microsoft Excel. Or, as countless frustrated business users have grumbled over the decades, ExHell.

For Excel’s most hardcore users—the legions of finance, accounting and administrative workers who have been toiling on it for decades—Microsoft’s workhorse spreadsheet software can be a godsend; it’s powerful, versatile and simple to use. Yet with those strengths come many headaches: broken links, input errors and the mayhem of managing conflicting versions of files. They’re frustrating and costly problems that Vena Solutions, one of Canada’s fastest-growing tech companies, has set out to fix. “As a canvas, you can use Excel to model pretty much any kind of data you want to plan, forecast and budget,” says Vena CEO Don Mal. “It just falls down when it’s used in a multi-user corporate environment.”

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Canada’s meat farmers skewered in Huawei dispute

| July 14, 2019
Photo by Laura Anderson on Unsplash

Watching world events unfold from his pig farm in southwestern Ontario this past spring, Craig

Hulshof expected a strong summer for Canadian pork producers.

The Trump administration’s tariff fight with China had made it more costly for American producers to serve the booming Asian market. Meanwhile, the spread of African swine fever in China, the world’s biggest consumer of pork, forced the culling of millions of pigs, creating an opportunity for Canadian pork to fill the void.

Instead, pork and beef producers here now find themselves shut out of China altogether, the latest victims of worsening diplomatic relations between the two countries after Canada arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in December.

“We expected that when barbecue season started up that’s when we’d make our money,” Mr Hulshof said. “China has put a fork in it.”

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Best online brokers package for MoneySense

| June 20, 2019
Photo by M. B. M. on Unsplash

Canadians have never had more options when it comes to managing their investments, from full-service brokerages and financial advisors, with their often hefty fees, to an emerging crop of robo-advisors offering hands-off, low-cost portfolios. However, many investors want the best of both worlds—low fees and access to a full range of investments—and they prefer to take personal control of where their money goes. For these investors, online brokers remain the best choice. But, among the dozen or so firms serving Canadians, which is the best online broker in Canada for your investing style and needs?

For the seventh year in a row MoneySense has teamed up with Glenn LaCoste, the founder of Surviscor, a firm that analyzes banking and brokerages across North America, to bring you the most definitive ranking of the Best Online Brokers in Canada for 2019.

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GFL lines up investment banks for IPO, seeks to raise up to $1.98-billion

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Photo by Sikander

Waste management company GFL Environmental Inc. is seeking to raise up to $1.98-billion (US$1.5-billion) in an initial public offering this fall, according to a person close to the transaction, one year after it brought in new private-equity backers.

The Toronto company, whose lime green garbage and recycling trucks have become fixtures in cities across Canada and the United States, plans to dual-list its shares on the Toronto Stock Exchange and in the U.S., although it has not selected an American exchange yet. GFL has hired a syndicate of investment banks to advise on the offering, with Royal Bank of Canada and Bank of Montreal doing the Canadian side of the deal and J.P. Morgan Chase and Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. handling the U.S.

 

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Dirty money: it’s a Canadian thing

| June 12, 2019

On paper, Peter Zhang and his wife, Judy Wang, were models for the type of newcomers Canada wanted to attract with its immigrant investor program. Before it was scrapped in 2014, the program’s aim was simple: lure the world’s wealthy to Canada’s shores with the promise of a passport. In return they would bring their business savvy, invest in the economy and create jobs.

Zhang and Wang were undeniably rich. They arrived from China at the end of 2010 with at least $6 million, settling in the suburbs north of Toronto. But almost immediately after, a twisting tale was set in motion that would eventually see Wang accuse a realtor, a lawyer and others of fraud and negligence, and prompt an Ontario judge to raise questions about both the source of Zhang and Wang’s wealth and a string of real estate and mortgage transactions tied to the case.

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