Op-Eds
Toronto’s government and business have to work together to make reopening work - Toronto Star Op-Ed
Toronto is a creative, resilient city. The underlying strength of our economy, built on world-leading talent and diverse, innovative local businesses, will enable us to rebound from the COVID-19 pandemic. That is the good news.
Tackling the uneven impact of the current crisis — disastrous for some sectors but profitable for others, devastating for many people but enriching for others — will take hard work and tough choices. As members of the city’s Economic and Culture Recovery Advisory Group, we are committed to building an inclusive economic recovery that not only gets the economy and our cultural realm back on track, but also remedies the structural inequities that create barriers to prosperity for many of our racialized and…
Canada’s buoyant housing market, with lots of new construction, booming renovations, and a torrid pace of transactions, has been a good news story in a year that had too few. But as underlined in a recent FP article called “The housing boom that never ends,” the news on housing has been a little too good.
Meanwhile, other business investment – in non-residential structures, machinery and equipment, and intellectual property – has languished. We ended 2020 in a troubling place: recent GDP numbers from Statistics Canada showed that private residential investment almost equaled all other types of private investment in the fourth quarter. In other words, almost half of all private non-consumption spending was on housing.…
As we emerge from the COVID crisis, attention is shifting to the economic recovery. How quickly can Canada’s economy grow, replace lost jobs, raise incomes, and support government programs and suddenly higher public debt?
A critical growth driver is business investment. Capital spending on buildings, engineering infrastructure, machinery and equipment, and intellectual property creates demand as it occurs. Even more important, once complete, the buildings, infrastructure, machinery, R&D and software equip workers with the tools they need to produce, compete and earn higher wages.
Unhappily, GDP numbers released Tuesday by Statistics Canada reinforce a bleak message from recent C.D. Howe Institute research. We now have…
Quand le vent souffle fort, même les dindes peuvent voler. Pour un temps. À preuve les titres boursiers gonflés à l’hélium par l’action coordonnée de petits investisseurs.
L’appréciation aussi artificielle que spectaculaire d’une poignée d’actions soulève des questions importantes sur les causes profondes et sur les conséquences de ce phénomène, encore trop récent pour être pleinement compris.
Résumons d’abord les faits essentiels, sans entrer dans les détails de la plomberie financière.
Aux États-Unis, des milliers d’investisseurs novices, surtout de jeunes hommes, se sont coordonnés dans un forum du réseau social Reddit pour acheter une douzaine d’entreprises mal aimées, notamment GameStop, AMC et BlackBerry,…
ll est grand temps que nos entreprises accélèrent leur numérisation. Celles qui ne mordront pas la carotte des appuis offerts par les gouvernements et les institutions financières goûteront au bâton des concurrents qui redoublent d’ardeur.
La COVID-19 agit en accélérateur de changement, que l’on pense seulement au télétravail et aux achats en ligne qui ont grimpé en flèche. Or, ce ne sont que deux manifestations parmi plusieurs de la numérisation de l’économie, un concept large qui englobe aussi la bande passante à haut débit qui livre les séries de Netflix ou l’accès internet aux services bancaires, par fibre optique ou par les ondes de nos téléphones.
Dans les entreprises innovatrices, l’information numérisée lubrifie…
