Yearly Archive: 2016

Here are my top ten predictions for 2017. The TSE will end the year up 7 percent. The Raptors will make the playoffs but not win the NBA title. The Jays will have a so-so year, win 78 games, but not make the playoffs. WTI crude oil price will rise to US$75 per barrel. Donald Trump will be a better president than many fear. Vladimir Putin will expand his influence and Russia’s territory. The C$ will sink to US68 cents. Kevin O’Leary will be chosen leader of the Conservative Party. Europe will continue to unravel. We will survive. Somehow.

Every night on the television news we see horrific footage of young people overdosing in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. They are being attended to in alleyways by firefighters, paramedics and volunteers. They are addicts, hooked on heroin, often laced with fentanyl, which is fatal spelled a new way. In the first ten months of this year, more than 600 people have died of illicit drug overdose in British Columbia. Vancouver has long been home to the highest drug use in Canada. There are supervised injection sites, detox and treatment centres, even a mobile medical unit, all of them stretched so thin by the problem that...

The knock on my front door was so light I hardly heard it. But hear it I did. It was 8 p.m., and I don’t usually answer the door after dark, but I did. A young woman was standing there, reasonably well dressed, with a tentative smile. She was wearing a Santa hat. “Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way,” she sang, then stopped and said, “I’m out carolling because I’m a single mom trying to collect money for toys for my children at Christmas. Anything I get I’ll give 20 percent to the Salvation Army.” From nowhere came...

Everywhere you turn these days, along with signs of Christmas, you see Shen Yun. If you don’t know the name, you will realize who they are when I tell you that it’s a Chinese dance company. They are inescapable: posters, car cards, broadcast ads, mailed brochures and people on street corners handing out pamphlets. The money behind the show must be amazing. Shen Yun seems to come through southern Ontario more than once a year. They have thirteen performances scheduled between now and early March in Toronto, Kitchener, Hamilton and Mississauga. They are not from China. In fact, the group (there must be several on...

Word-of-mouth and published reviews are good ways to find out about new books of interest. Word-of-mouth is probably the best because you can judge the passion and the source then decide if you’ll buy based on what you’ve heard. Increasingly, published book reviews are untrustworthy. Not because some editor chooses the wrong titles, but because reviewers don’t take the assignment seriously. Here’s an example from last Saturday’s Globe and Mail. Zadie Smith’s new novel, Swing Time, was clearly the pick of the week. It takes up a full page with a photo of the author and a four-column review. But the first quarter of...

Mystical Landscapes, a special exhibit currently at the Art Gallery of Ontario, opens with a trumpet fanfare. Three paintings by Paul Gauguin, all circa 1890 before he fled for the debauchery of the South Pacific, are displayed like a medieval tryptic. Gauguin painted them to be hung together but this is the first time the artist’s wish has been achieved. They include Jacob Wrestling with the Angel, The Yellow Christ and Christ in the Garden of Olives, usually hanging in Edinburgh, Buffalo and West Palm Beach respectively. The rest of the exhibit of 90 paintings and 20 drawings is equally compelling and includes two...

I don’t like Donald Trump any more than anyone else, but I think we should all follow Barack Obama’s lead and give the president-elect some time and space. Forget about the early White House appointments and what they might signal. And don’t fret about the bond market losing $1 trillion in a matter of a few days. The traders are just sending Trump a signal not to count on spending whatever he wants on infrastructure. An inflationary economy is a bad idea. Nor should we worry overly about rowdy demonstrations and police with assault rifles at the ready. This is nothing compared to 1968...

Ontario Minister of Transportation Steven Del Duca wrote me a letter recently to say that I’d been chosen at random for a traffic survey. I was delighted to participate. After the weather, traffic is the number one topic of conversation in Toronto. The survey was straightforward. They designated a specific day and asked where I went and how I traveled. In my case, it was simple: a three-point trip by subway downtown to the Toronto-Dominion Centre, on to Yonge and St. Clair, and then home. Hard to imagine what they learned from that. In fact it’s hard to imagine what they’ve...

Previously, I chided Stephen Poloz for having exporters too much on his mind as governor of the Bank of Canada. It would seem that he’s driven down the C$ to help exporters yet export sales have not risen to any great extent. In fact, the number of manufacturing firms is dropping all the time. Over the last ten years Canada has lost more than 10,000 manufacturers. Even at a modest 10 employees per plant that’s 100,000 jobs no longer tied to exports. Moreover, most Canadians don’t work in export businesses. About 80 percent of all Canadian jobs are in service roles such as...

David Rosenberg, chief economist with Gluskin Sheff + Associates, parsed the recent pontifications of Bank of Canada Governor Stephen Poloz and noticed repeated use of the word “exports.” Three times in two sentences, in fact. And how Poloz seemed to want an even lower Canadian dollar when measured against the U.S. dollar. So much so that Poloz said the central bank considered lowering interest rates last week but kept them flat. Such an admission by a central banker is very unusual. Rarely do they say what they might have done. Maybe Poloz counted on such talk driving down the C$ even further. If...

Just when you thought Toronto couldn’t look any more foolish, what with a baseball fan throwing a beer can at an outfielder, someone goes to court to stop Cleveland from being called the Indians. Douglas Cardinal, a renowned architect and indigenous Canadian, argued he would be affronted to see the Indians play last night at Rogers Centre. Then Cardinal went to China where he probably couldn’t or didn’t watch the game anyway. I’d like first to declare my bona fides when it comes to such matters. I’ve helped raise money for the Native Canadian Centre so I think I can say, without...

When I heard that Bob Dylan had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, I felt like a member of the crowd at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when the folksinger first went electric: I booed. Dylan might have been a wonderful musician in the 1960s, with or without electrical amplification, but hardly worth a Nobel Prize for Literature. How does “The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind/ the answer is blowin’ in the wind” compare with the works of previous winners such as John Steinbeck, Alice Munro or Boris Pasternak. Was the Nobel Committee in some sort of time warp...

Clover Leaf Seafoods has a new website where you can look up information on the tuna in the can you bought. Go to cloverleaf.ca/trace-my-catch. Once on the site you enter the numbers and letters on the can. My can contains albacore tuna. No surprise there. Next, there’s a map showing that the tuna was caught in the South Pacific, east of the Solomon Islands, using longline fishing gear with baited hooks. That’s good, no net scraping the ocean floor. The vessel was the Sui Yuan Yu 30 from China and my tuna was caught sometime between August 9 and September 3, 2015. A year ago....

Along with a lot of other Canadians, I was saddened to hear that BlackBerry will no longer make smartphones. To be sure, the company has been irrelevant for some time. In February 2012, I was in Arizona, thumbing away on my BlackBerry when someone said to me, “You must be the last man in America with a BlackBerry.” Only two years before, when my book on BlackBerry came out, Research In Motion was flying high with 50 percent of the U.S. smartphone market. I remained loyal, and bought the Q10 in 2014, but most didn’t. Market share is now barely measurable. I...

I confess to being a little late learning about this bit of news but a National NewsMedia Press Council was established last year. Its two main purposes appear to be: respond to complaints and promote ethics in the media. Some good people are involved including John Fraser, former editor of Saturday Night; Joanne De Laurentiis, former CEO of the Investment Funds Institute of Canada; and Ken Whyte, my boss at National Post, now at Rogers. This national group replaces four press councils and represents most English-language media. This being Canada, Alberta and Québec are not aboard; they continue to have their own...