Yearly Archive: 2025

Abandon hope, all ye who enter here. If you don’t like bad news or pessimistic forecasting, read no further. I have nothing positive to say about the near-term future of the Canadian economy. Despite the homespun efforts of Canadians to buy Canadian products in grocery stores, I see only troubling signs for our economy that will almost certainly lead to a recession later this year. We may already be in one. Why do you think Ontario Premier Doug Ford called an election way before he needed to? Because he can collar another mandate before the economy tanks and he would...

I’ve been a fan of Elon Musk ever since I first read about him a few years ago in a book by Walter Isaacson. The author did his usual thorough job when he writes about a business leader like he did with Steve Jobs. I was amazed by Musk’s entrepreneurial brilliance in areas never tackled by others, at least not all at once. Just to remind, he invented and built the Tesla and soon was selling a million cars a year. He also launched SpaceX and sent dozens of rockets into space. There was even one occasion where a select...

Ontario Premier Doug Ford this week called an election for February 27 because he says he needs a mandate. I won’t say that statement is a lie. Instead, I will call it a terminological inexactitude, a phrase first used by Winston Churchill in a Commons speech in 1906. No, I won’t call it a lie despite the fact that Ford’s Progressive Conservative Party already has a mandate: 79 seats in a 124-seat Legislature. And his current mandate runs to March 2026. Why now? Could the timing of this election possibly have anything to do with the fact that I, along...

“April is the cruellest month.” So begins T.S. Eliot’s famous poem, “The Wasteland.” He goes on to say, “Winter kept us warm, covering/Earth in forgetful snow, feeding/A little life with dried tubers.” In 2025, winter is doing everything except keep us warm with temperatures hovering well below zero. Eons ago, when I was a lad, my father always corralled me to help if he were doing something around the house. Jobs in which I assisted included removing and hanging wallpaper, prepping walls and painting, replacing electric outlets, taking out the ashes from the coal-fired furnace, and once, making and pouring...

The race is on to replace Justin Trudeau as Prime Minister and leader of the Liberal Party. Who, even a few months ago, would have foreseen such a turn of events? But here we are, so let’s review what happened and then handicap the potential candidates. For the longest time, the uprising within the Liberal caucus seemed stuck at about twenty malcontents. Then, suddenly, a majority of the Liberal MPs from Atlantic Canada, followed by a similar number in each of Quebec and Ontario announced themselves unhappy with Trudeau. How the mighty had fallen. Even while Trudeau was jetting around...