76% of people who own small-to-medium-sized businesses are planning to retire within the next decade. What happens when they call it quits? Who will take over those businesses, if anyone? What will happen to the people they employ? These are all pressing questions, but the vast majority of small business owners in Canada do not have a succession plan. On this episode, Cordell Jacks, CEO and General Partner of The Regenerative Capital Group, joins us to explain... The scale of the wave of retirem...
Oct 03, 2023•42 min•Ep. 42
If you want to make yourself mad about the state of transportation in Canada, all you have to do is go to Europe. Anyone who’s made the trip can tell you that in almost every European country, it’s faster, more convenient, and more comfortable to take public transportation than it is here. And the same is true now in many parts of Asia—places that not long ago were much poorer than Canada, with much less well-developed infrastructure. So why is public transportation in Canada so far behind these...
Sep 26, 2023•50 min•Ep. 41
Canada’s job market is confusing right now. On one hand, unemployment is still near record lows, last month’s job numbers from StatsCan exceeded expectations, and wages are finally starting to increase faster than inflation. But... Our population is growing so quickly that we actually added more people in July than the 40,000 jobs that were created, job vacancies are drying up, and compared to the US, our wage growth hasn’t been great at all. Brendon Bernard is the Senior Economist at Indeed.com...
Sep 19, 2023•57 min•Ep. 40
If you look at a chart of global nuclear energy output over time, what you see is hockey-stick growth from the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s—and then nothing. After growing from zero to around 2600 THw, we just stopped building more of it. But that’s starting to change. Around the world, new nuclear projects are starting up, and plants scheduled for shutdown are being refurbished to last for decades to come. And one of the places at the forefront of this nuclear renaissance is Ontario. Ontario...
Sep 12, 2023•38 min•Ep. 39
This episode originally aired on April 4, 2023. In the past six months, publicly-available artificial intelligence models have advanced from an interesting toy to, with the launch of ChatGPT-4, something altogether different. The new version of OpenAI's language model can write reasonably good code, pass standardized tests like the LSAT with flying colours, and understand subtle jokes—things that machines have never done. As its capabilities have advanced, a growing number of people have express...
Sep 05, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Season 1Ep. 38
The Online News Act, or Bill C-18, has already radically changed how Canadians get their news. First and foremost, we can no longer get it on Facebook or Instagram. Google may be the next to go, depending on what the final regulations look like. But Canada isn't the first country to attempt to bring in regulations like C-18. Several European countries have tried to force Big Tech to pay publishers, too, and in some cases have been subject to news blocks that are still in effect. Ricard Gil is an...
Aug 29, 2023•53 min•Ep. 37
A recession is coming. A soft landing is around the corner. Inflation is here to stay. Inflation is transitory. Rates are going to stay elevated indefinitely. Central banks are going to cut rates soon. These are all messages that investors have heard at some point over the past two years or so, as every new bit of economic data seems to bring new forecasts about where the economy is heading. In such a confusing environment filled with mixed signals, how can the average person hope to manage thei...
Aug 22, 2023•37 min•Ep. 36
The economy has been through a pretty turbulent period over the past few years, and one of the sectors that’s experienced that the most has to be the restaurant industry. Pretty much all the big macro trends we’ve lived through show up here. Whether it’s the supply shocks of COVID, the inflation of the past 18 months, or disruptions in the labour market, restaurants have experienced all of these things in a really dramatic way. And through it all, they’ve had to go on opening their doors and ser...
Aug 15, 2023•40 min•Ep. 35
This episode originally aired on January 24, 2023. Anyone who has dealt with Canada's healthcare system knows that it's under incredible strain. Part of that is because of the pandemic and the backlogs that piled up over the past three years. But many of the factors that led to the crisis we're now facing have been building up for much longer than that. Dr. Saad Ahmed, a family physician based out of Vancouver and lecturer at the University of Toronto's Department of Family & Community Medic...
Aug 08, 2023•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 34
The wildfires Canada has experienced this year have been the worst on record, and it's not even close. Most of us have been impacted in one way or another. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes, and—tragically—a number of people have lost their lives. In this episode on Canada's wildfires, we are joined by Derek Nighbor, President of the Forest Products Association of Canada, to look at their impact on the forestry industry, how businesses in the sector are respond...
Aug 01, 2023•53 min•Ep. 33
A lot has happened since 2018, but if you think back to that time, you might remember that Canada’s cannabis industry was booming. There were multiple Canadian cannabis businesses that were valued at multiple billions of dollars. People were getting rich trading weed stocks and starting weed companies. And this wasn’t just money moving around, like with meme stocks during the pandemic. The largest companies, like Canopy, Aurora, and Aphria, were spending money to build massive facilities across ...
Jul 25, 2023•47 min•Ep. 32
Last week the Bank of Canada hiked its policy interest rate to 5%, a 22-year high and a 10x jump from where they sat just over one year ago. By now, everyone is familiar with the Bank's rationale for aggressively raising rates: It has a mandate to ensure price stability and bring inflation down to a target of 2%. But how are higher rates actually pushing inflation down? When prices are driven up by supply shocks in Eastern Europe or labour strikes at ports, how much control over inflation does C...
Jul 18, 2023•53 min•Ep. 31
Fun fact: Canada used to be something of a semiconductor manufacturing power. Ottawa was a centre of innovation in the space, with local telecom companies like Nortel Networks at one point employing nearly 100,000 people around the world. Things have changed since then, of course. Nortel and Ottawa's other telecom giants are gone (or shadows of their former selves), either bought out or put under by foreign competition. And Canada is no longer a big semiconductor player. Meanwhile, the importanc...
Jul 11, 2023•46 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Canada's population is growing quickly. Really quickly. Last month, we surpassed the 40 million mark, and we're growing faster than any other G7 country. Between 2016 and 2021, Canada has grown twice as quickly as the US. And the reason for that growth is simple: Immigration. Of the growth we saw in 2022, immigration accounted for around 95% of it. And this is by design. By 2025, the federal government wants to add 500,000 new permanent residents to Canada every year. So how our immigration syst...
Jul 04, 2023•42 min•Ep. 29
As the COVID-19 pandemic spread around the world, the importance of the biotech sector suddenly became very clear to everyone. Things we have taken for granted for our entire lives—ready access to vaccines and medicine—became a scarce commodity, and the supply chains to deliver them became a top priority. But the biotech sector is far larger than just vaccines (or even pharmaceuticals). Biotech companies in Canada are working on products for customers in agriculture, manufacturing, and more. On ...
Jun 27, 2023•53 min•Season 1Ep. 29
By many measures, men aren't doing so well right now. Suicides and deaths of despair among men are rising. 15% of men report having no close friends. In a recent survey, 65% reported agreeing with the statement, "no one really knows me well." Men have fallen behind women when it comes to educational attainment, and most young men report feeling no sense of purpose. So, what's going on here? Matt Jeneroux thinks we have, among other things, a communication problem, and he joins us on this episode...
Jun 20, 2023•36 min•Ep. 28
Toronto is one of the epicentres of Canada's housing crisis. And while you may not care about the city's housing regulations (unless you live there), they are impacting you. Buyers priced out of the city end up scooping up homes elsewhere, driving up prices in other parts of the country. For a long time, Toronto hasn't done much to increase its own supply of homes. But that just changed: The city passed a new law making it possible to build multiplexes—up to 4 units in a single building—across t...
Jun 13, 2023•40 min•Ep. 27
Our hosts are off this week, so we're bringing you one of our favourite episodes (just our third-ever) from back in January. Enjoy! Canada's housing market has become our national obsession, and with good reason. Years of skyrocketing prices are now meeting surging mortgage rates, and the result is some of the least affordable housing in the world. What's driving that affordability crisis, and what comes next? On this episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, we speak with Mike Moffatt, a Senior Direct...
Jun 06, 2023•52 min•Ep. 27
Basic income has been pitched as the solution to so many of our problems. Eliminating poverty, sparking entrepreneurship, empowering people to pursue their passions—all of these would be, its boosters claim, outcomes of a basic income. But not everyone is so optimistic about the idea. Lindsay Tedds is an associate professor at University of Calgary’s Department of Economics, and co-authored the book Basic Income and a Just Society: Policy Choices for Canada’s Social Safety Net. On this episode, ...
May 30, 2023•51 min•Ep. 26
Every aspect of our economy—every transaction, every contract— is ultimately shaped by our laws, which are enforced by the police. But how policing actually works is, for many of us, a black box. Who makes decisions about what the police should do? How much do we spend on the policing we get? Is our policing system working, and for who? How could it work better? On this episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, Kent Roach, University of Toronto law professor and author of the 2022 Donner Book Prize-nom...
May 23, 2023•51 min•Ep. 25
It's no secret that Canada's office market isn't doing so hot. Vacancies are still way above pre-pandemic levels, and some big companies like Shopify are giving up their leases altogether. In the US, where similar dynamics are in play, the value of some commercial buildings have been marked down by as much as 80% in fire sales by panicked landlords. Should we be worried about our own office real estate market? Brian Rosen, President and CEO of Colliers International's Canadian arm, joins us to e...
May 16, 2023•51 min•Ep. 24
Few sectors of the economy were as impacted by the pandemic as travel, and few rebounded as quickly when public health restrictions were lifted. Even now, demand for travel is through the roof, and it's driving up prices for everything from hotels to airfare to car rentals. At the same time, leisure budgets are often the first to be cut as cost-of-living pressures take their toll, and people cut back spending. So is the travel sector on the verge of another reckoning, or will demand hold up even...
May 09, 2023•44 min•Ep. 23
Stop me if you've heard this before: Canada has a productivity problem. You can't open up the business news without reading dire warnings about what's going to happen to the country if we don't improve our productivity. But what is productivity, anyway? What does it mean for an economy to be more or less productive? How does it affect regular people? Should we even care about this metric? And if so, what can we really do to improve it? William Huggins, a lecturer on corporate finance, economics,...
May 02, 2023•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 22
We all know that prices are going up (and have been for some time, now). But how do retailers actually decide when and by how much to raise prices? Is it just a simple matter of charging whatever people will pay? Or is it determined by their own costs? And have businesses been using pandemic-era supply chain problems as an excuse to raise prices now, or have they been forced to do so by factors beyond their control? On this episode, Marty Weintraub, head of Deloitte's National Retail Consulting ...
Apr 25, 2023•54 min•Ep. 21
President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act may be good news for the clean energy sector, but what does it mean for Canada? That's a more complex question. On one hand, some aspects of it are likely to benefit Canadian businesses. But much of the funding included in the legislation is reserved for American producers and could make it difficult for Canada to build its own domestic clean energy sector. If clean energy is going to be a big part of developed economies in the future, that's a problem. ...
Apr 18, 2023•51 min•Ep. 20
Various levels of government in Canada have allocated many billions (with a b) to projects aimed at building more affordable housing, and yet it doesn't seem like much is actually getting built—certainly not on the scale that we experienced in earlier decades. Why is that, and what needs to be done to change it? On this episode, we're joined by Jacob Gorenkoff and Marika Albert, two policy experts in the affordable housing space, to explain what's going on. ----- Links: More episodes of Free Lun...
Apr 11, 2023•55 min•Ep. 19
In the past six months, publicly-available artificial intelligence models have advanced from an interesting toy to, with the launch of ChatGPT-4, something altogether different. The new version of OpenAI's language model can write reasonably good code, pass standardized tests like the LSAT with flying colours, and understand subtle jokes—things that machines have never done. As its capabilities have advanced, a growing number of people have expressed concern that AI could pose a threat to people...
Apr 04, 2023•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 18
Bank runs have been back in the news of late, but not in Canada. Here, our banking system appears to be doing just fine—as it has through every economic crisis in recent memory. Why is that? Financial historian John Turley-Ewart joins us to tell the story of how Canada's banking system came to be, why it has proven to be less vulnerable to bank runs than the US model, and whether Canadians have anything to worry about as banks in other countries collapse.
Mar 28, 2023•52 min•Ep. 17
What went wrong at Silicon Valley Bank? In the course of a few days, the bank of choice for the US tech sector collapsed, forcing regulators to take unprecedented steps to avoid a broader financial crisis. On this bonus episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, Murad Hemmadi, a correspondent for The Logic covering business and innovation policy, joins us to unpack how SVB went under so quickly and what the impact of its failure is on the tech sector both in the US and Canada.
Mar 23, 2023•51 min•Ep. 16
Russia's invasion of Ukraine threw the world's energy market into chaos and added a renewed sense of urgency to the search for new sources of power. Many Western governments, including Canada's, are betting big on wind and solar, but there's also growing interest in nuclear power as a reliable and clean alternative. At the same time, many people still have questions about how safe it really is (and whether building new plants is even feasible anymore). On this episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, ...
Mar 21, 2023•1 hr 11 min•Ep. 15
