Category: Business

Frank Stronach still chasing his dreams amid legal feud with daughter Belinda

“An old man walks into the dining room of the private golf club northeast of Toronto with apparent purpose. He is two minutes late for an appointment and carrying a black briefcase in his right hand, which he plunks onto a chair, and then fishes through its contents to produce a spiral-bound book with colour-coded page dividers. He starts flipping pages, and stops when he finds what he is looking for. ‘I don’t know how much you know about me,” he said. “But this is my resumé. It’s two pages long. I thought it might be helpful for you to read.'”

Joe O’Connor – Financial Post – May 2019

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Bad Jobs: Why We Stayed

“They tasked me with designing and developing a website, marketing plans and brochures, and dealing with customers, as well as purchase orders, packaging goods and arranging shipments. Most days, I had a lot of independence; I hired printing companies, and sourced out costs, and travel to the U.S. Work made me feel important and valuable. As someone who had grown up working in various not-for-profit organizations, this type of fast-paced capitalist driven enterprise was exhilarating.”

Leonarda Carranza, Tamara Jong – Carte Blanche – January 2019

The Business of Bedtime

“Somewhere, right now, there is a baby who should be sleeping. Instead, she is screaming in a crib, wailing in a stroller, or sitting up, eyes wide open, in a car being driven endlessly in circles. But there is one baby who isn’t. Jack is four and a half months old, and he just passed out in his mother’s arms. She is sitting on a grey felt rocking chair, and on a nearby table, a down-tempo, slightly spacey version of Brahms’s ‘Lullaby’ is playing from a Bluetooth-connected gizmo, a cylindrical speaker and night light, all of which she is controlling with her iPhone.”

David Sax – The Walrus – January 2019

Animal House

“It had become trendy for tech companies to hire media refugees like me to serve as ‘brand storytellers’ instead of spending millions on conventional advertising. Vision Critical had invented a position for me on the marketing team—senior director, content. I knew next to nothing about promoting software to market researchers, yet I would be overseeing an in-house propaganda machine of writers, videographers, graphic designers and social media managers. My salary would be double that of the average magazine editor. I signed the contract.”

Mark Pupo – Toronto Life – December 2018

Money for a post-work world

“Yet here we are, still toiling away with unemployment rates at multi-decade lows. Instead of eradicating work, technology has done what it will surely always continue to do: create more jobs than it destroys. What matters far more in Forget’s view is the quality of those new jobs. And it is the rise of precarious labour, reflected in the side-hustle economy, piecemeal freelance gigs, and endless contract positions, which basic income is perfectly suited to address, by providing a measure of insurance against job insecurity.”

Jason Kirby – Literary Review of Canada – November 2018

The Minister of Everything

“On Nov. 5, 2015, the morning after he was sworn in, Navdeep Bains approached a podium in the halls of Parliament Hill. It took him exactly 23 seconds—barely enough time to recite his unwieldy new title, Minister of Innovation, Science and Economic Development—to announce the return of the mandatory long-form census, which the Conservatives had scrapped in 2010. He lifted a copy of the document and struck a grade-schooler’s show-and-tell pose, flashing a grin for the scrum of photographers surrounding him. The smile wasn’t all show. Bains, a 41-year-old FCPA and four-term Liberal MP, is a self-professed ‘numbers guy.’ And nothing gets a numbers guy going like a census.”

Luc Rinaldi – Pivot Magazine – November 2018

 

Checking in with the oil crowd

David Gray-Donald – Briarpatch – August 2018