There are a few baseline industries that are so critical to the overall infrastructure of a nation that any change in those industries can have profound effects on the overall economy. Home building is a well known example. Another is transportation and shipping. Even minor changes in either of these industries can cause unanticipated ripples to roll over other areas of productivity. Over the coming ten years, the Canadian logistics and shipping industries will change very quickly. These changes will, in turn, have remarkable implications on the greater Canadian economy. What will emerge will be a far more efficient, safe, and cost effective transportation industry but one that produces substantially fewer employment opportunities. This week’s public introduction of Elon Musk’s long distance electric transport truck, one that comes with a driverless option, alters a number of equations the Canadian economy is built upon. Minutes after Musk introduced the trucks, the […]

How secure is your business? What about the data you collect for business use, how secure is it? In the expanding digital age, the two questions are virtually one and the same. Most businesses are primarily made of data. Frighteningly, more than half of the 650 registered businesses surveyed by the Canadian Securities Administrators reported some sort of cyber-security incident in 2016. As an organization, the Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) has good reason to be concerned about the state of cyber-security in Canada. The CSA is made up of regulators from the 10 provincial and 3 territorial securities commissions. Their goal is to improve, coordinate, and harmonize regulation of Canadian capital markets, administration of which is functionally left to each province or territory. It’s a safe extrapolation the CSA is considering mandating federal regulations around cyber-security for businesses across Canada. The most frequent attack reported was phishing. 43% of respondents […]

Lost amidst the mayhem of last week’s news cycles was a small story that had far larger implications than the amount of attention it received. Google and Apple signed a historic deal that pushes Google results sets onto even more devices than ever before. Google search results will replace search results generated by Bing on versions of the personal assistant Siri found on Apple’s iPhones powered by iOS. Though financial figures behind the agreement were not revealed, a previous agreement between the two companies to provide Google search results on other iOS devices is thought to be worth billions per year. Two important signals stem from this agreement. The first is the rise of the digital personal assistant (PDA). The second is the unmistakable importance of mobile search for both Google and Apple. It is honestly hard to determine which is the more important of the two. Digital personal assistants […]

I’m an armchair economist. I have little formal training in economics beyond the generalist survey courses most university students select before deciding what they want to major in when they grow up. Nevertheless, I find the machinations of any given economy fascinating. As a spectator sport, economics has the fine detail of baseball mixed with the speed and brutality of hockey, the long-game passion of European football and the regimentation of American football. Armchair economics is reality based fandom. For entrepreneurs, armchair economics is both a form of fantasy sport and an important part of business planning. All entrepreneurs dream about the future. Developing an understanding of how the world works is an essential part of foreseeing the future and the ability to foresee the future is one of those things that separates an entrepreneur from everybody else. It would be no good to develop a business making green widgets […]