Economy | torontolife.com

The comprehensive index of every blog post, magazine story and restaurant review that appears on Torontolife.com

All stories relating to economy

Undercover Boss Canada, episode 1: hanging with gorillas (and worse, employees) at the Toronto Zoo

The economy is mired in a meltdown! The world is ending! Bosses must take extreme action! The fear-mongering opening segment of W Network’s Undercover Boss Canada certainly isn’t subtle, but it almost makes the show’s absurd premise—CEOs saving their companies by disguising themselves as everyday working schleps and manning the front line for a week—seem both logical and necessary (we said almost, okay?).

In the inaugural episode, the first bigwig to try his hand at hard labour is John Tracogna, CEO of the Toronto Zoo, who announces his plans to a boardroom of lesser execs in a meeting that has clearly been staged for the cameras (everyone nods enthusiastically and one guy actually says, in wooden tones, “I think it’s a great idea”). Transformed into a beatnik-biker hybrid, Tracogna scoops a lot of poop, buddies up with a gorilla and quickly reveals that he’s never cleaned a toilet before. He also does some superficial bonding with a few employees, whom he showers with gifts, Oprah-style, after he reveals himself as the big boss-man. See whether Tracogna was an Everyday Hero or an Everyday Zero (and whether we’d hire him) after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

To Market, To Market

February 2, 2012 | 12:45 pm

Comments

BMO says the housing market is in a balloon, not a bubble (apparently, there’s an important difference)

With confusion already rife about whether or not Canada’s housing market is in a bubble, Bank of Montreal economists have further muddied the debate with a competing (and equally vague) comparison. In a special report, they suggest the housing market is actually more like a balloon, explaining that “while bubbles always burst, a balloon often deflates slowly in the absence of a ‘pin’ ” (we gather a “pin” would be an event like a spike in interest rates, a severe recession or stalled foreign investment). Switching gears, they add that even Toronto’s hot condo market will likely “cool” rather than “correct.” As far as we can tell, that’s good news. Though we think the banking folks could probably stand to drop the metaphors. They’re confusing us. Read the entire story [Globe and Mail] »

The Informer

From the Print Edition

December 20, 2011 | 10:55 am

10 Comments

Editor’s Letter (January 2012): how immigration and repatriation are making Toronto a more interesting city

Cities are often affected by political events outside their borders. In the mid-20th century, North American cities profited enormously from the arrival of well-educated immigrants fleeing the Nazis. The brilliant philosopher Hannah Arendt famously landed in Manhattan after escaping France in 1941. The pioneering modernist architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe moved to Chicago in 1937 after the Nazis deemed his work not German enough. Later, in 1956, when Soviet troops occupied Hungary, Canada admitted close to 40,000 Hungarian refugees, nearly doubling the Hungarian-Canadian population. Many intellectuals, writers and artists settled in Toronto, and the city’s café culture was born.

A decade or so later, Canada absorbed a tidal wave of draft dodgers—tens of thousands of young Americans, many of them well-educated, who came here to avoid fighting in Vietnam. For Toronto, it was a windfall. Dodgers proved to have a profound impact on the social makeup of the city, assuming leadership roles in our universities and cultural institutions as well as the corporate world. Andy Barrie, the former host of Metro Morning on CBC, exemplified the phenomenon: for 15 years on the show, he was a fierce Toronto patriot, more enthusiastic about his adopted city than many of us who were born here.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

To Market, To Market

December 9, 2011 | 2:05 pm

4 Comments

Bubble trouble: the Toronto condo boom may (or may not) soon go bust

Is the Toronto condo market in a bubble? Who knows! Yesterday, the Bank of Canada warned that the condo boom is about to get seriously less boomy (apparently, “the supply of completed but unoccupied condominiums is elevated, which suggests a heightened risk of a correction in this market”). Sure, that may sound gloomy, but some indicators of the market’s health aren’t even tracked. For instance, although rumour has it that foreign investors are buying all the condos they can, according to the Globe and Mail, Canada doesn’t track foreign investment in its real estate market. Meanwhile, National Bank analyst Stefane Marion believes a recession is the real threat to the housing market, and Urbanation predicts 2011 will actually be a record year for Toronto condo sales. If you’re not sure what to think, don’t worry: we’re pretty sure nobody really knows (not even The Economist). Read the entire story [Globe and Mail] »

(Images: Toronto skyline, Seekdes (Mike in TO); bubble, Rhett Maxwell)

The Informer

From the Print Edition

November 30, 2011 | 9:05 am

10 Comments

Reason to Love Toronto: four new five-star hotels are about to make staycations super-luxe

By Philip Preville | Photography by Hudson Hayden

Reason to Love Toronto

Toronto is a great place to visit. Just ask the people who live nearby. Residents of Halton Region, a mere 30-minute drive down the QEW, made 153,000 overnight visits to the city in 2009, more than came from British Columbia, California, Texas or Illinois. The same goes for many of Toronto’s other bedroom communities: they could drive home after the show, but they prefer to stay the night. Tourism here is a giant house party, and our accommodations are getting a major upgrade with four new five-star hotels. Last February came the Ritz-Carlton on Wellington Street. January will mark the opening of the Trump Tower, a flamboyant structure at Bay and Adelaide whose 275-metre, 90-ton spire took 12 hours to lift into place (arguably Toronto’s greatest feat of high-rise engineering since the CN Tower). Asian Pacific–style opulence arrives next summer with the 65-storey Shangri-La on University Avenue. And our own luxury export to the world, Izzy Sharp’s Four Seasons, will finally get a hometown building worthy of its brand in summer 2012: two slender glass towers at Bay and Yorkville. The Manhattanization of our hotel industry is the result of an economy that continues to dodge the disasters befalling others. Together, the new hotels will provide 989 super-luxe rooms that are sure to be a hit with tourists. They may even resurrect Toronto in the eyes of Americans, whose impressions of us and willingness to visit are still tainted by the SARS crisis. But above all, they’ll make it more fun to splurge on ourselves.

The Informer

Opine for Business

November 17, 2011 | 3:05 pm

Comments

City councillors want the Toronto Raptors to play basketball again—for the sake of the economy

Josh Colle and Michael Thompson are concerned about the NBA lockout and its potential impact on the city’s economy. Sure, it’s easy to forget, but the Toronto Raptors actually rake in a lot of money. The Globe and Mail reports that the Raps “are one of 10 NBA teams that average more than $1 million a game in gate receipts,” and that the Air Canada Centre adds roughly $2.4 billion annually to Toronto’s economy. But we have to wonder—like some of the commenters on the Globe story—how significant that impact really is. Sports teams don’t actually create new capital, so the money that isn’t being spent on the Raptors is likely being redistributed elsewhere in the local economy. Of course, from a sports perspective, it’s no secret that teams often struggle to rebuild their fan bases after a cancelled season. Just ask the poor Montreal Expos. Read the entire story [Globe and Mail] »

The Hype

From the Print Edition

October 18, 2011 | 1:45 pm

3 Comments

The Argument: David Hockney’s iPad paintings show that a cool device can’t rescue bad art

By Paddy Johnson | Illustration by Lisel Ashlock

David Hockney’s Fresh Flowers

David Hockney’s Fresh Flowers exhibition has been touring Europe in advance of its only Canadian stop, at the ROM’s Institute for Contemporary Culture, and garnering a lot of hype along the lines of “74-year-old visionary explores cool new medium!” The show consists of hundreds of flower-themed still lifes done exclusively on iPads and iPhones. (Hockney added his own spin, saying that working with the Apple devices allows him to paint without the “mess”—which sounds as though he’s promoting a cleaning product.)

This could be seen as familiar territory for the British pop art pioneer. In the ’80s, his use of office-quality photocopies, fax machines and Polaroids put him at the forefront of art about the tension between original works and reproductions. The kind of heavy collage pieces he created by manipulating original work is now a regular sight in modern art galleries. (Today, the subject of reproduction couldn’t be more relevant to the copy-and-paste practices of young artists, though Hockney’s influence is cited far less often than you’d expect.)

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

Opine for Business

October 18, 2011 | 11:35 am

1 Comment

Paul Krugman squares off against Lawrence Summers on the economy at the next instalment of the Munk Debates

While the Occupy protestors entrenched in St. James Park are proof enough that times are bad, four high-profile economists are set to debate whether we’re clawing our way out of the recession or if we are, indeed, truly sunk. “Be it resolved, North America faces a Japan-style era of high unemployment and slow growth” is the topic of November’s Munk Debates, in which New York Times columnist Paul Krugman and Gluskin Sheff’s David Rosenberg argue for and former Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers and Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer argue against. These titans have more Wall Street cred than Scrooge McDuck, so the discussion should be one to watch—and maybe by the end we’ll know whether we’re in brioche or gruel for the next decade. Read more at the Munk Debates website »

The Informer

Tech Wars

October 12, 2011 | 5:55 pm

Comments

Research in Motion grinds to a halt as Blackberry blackout goes global

Millions of people are feeling CrackBerry withdrawal symptoms as a blackout inhibiting all email, texting and browsing enters its third day. While the problem had originally been restricted to Europe, Asia and Africa (if three continents can count as “restricted”), Canadian users found themselves disconnected this morning as the outage crossed over to the Americas. RIM blames the catastrophe on a “core switch failure” at its head office in Waterloo that has caused a massive backlog of data—unlike most phone companies, RIM handles all email and message traffic internally. Hurt most are RIM’s favourite users: business people, who rely on steady and secure service. (Although if BlackBerrys are really as popular among execs as is often claimed, we’re surprised the global economy didn’t shut down within the hour). And while there’s no good time for a widespread service failure, hitting on iPhone 4S launch week seems like a cruel joke. We wanted to check on how the beleaguered company is coping, but strangely RIM did not respond to our BBM messages for comment. Read the entire story [The Globe and Mail] »

The Informer

Election Whoas

October 7, 2011 | 3:00 pm

1 Comment

The blame game: Tim Hudak’s provincial election loss is the result of a bad campaign bus, among other things

(Image: Ontario Chamber of Commerce)

Our friends at Torontoist may have coined the best term for post–provincial election analysis: a post-boretem. By all accounts, this election wasn’t terribly exciting stuff. (Voter turnout is sufficient proof of that.) But there are a few other reasons things turned out the way they did last night—reasons Tim Hudak couldn’t make gains in Toronto, or Dalton McGuinty managed to stay in office despite his opponents having ample ammunition to turn the tide against him. With that in mind, we look at five theories offered up today by the Toronto press corps on what transpired last night—from the Rob Ford factor to broken-down campaign buses—after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

From the Print Edition

October 3, 2011 | 10:25 am

7 Comments

Tim Hudak spent his life climbing the Tory ladder and now he has a shot at taking over Queen’s Park—but can he convince voters he’s more than just Mike Harris lite?

By Trevor Cole | Photography by Brian Finke

Tim Hudak

Tim Hudak is riding in the back of an RV, a big, bouncy RV wrapped in an enormous picture of his smiling face, and he’s coming to see you. He’s really happy. So happy that he’s tweeting about it on his BlackBerry. “Outstanding,” he types, and, “On my way…” Now he’s peering out the front window, over the driver’s shoulder, toward one of the event venues where he’s going to meet you. “Shit, has this thing started?” He doesn’t want to be late. He wants to look you in the eyes and tell you what he thinks, and he wants to listen to you, too. The whole big meet-and-greet ball of wax: he loves it. This is who he is. “It gets in your blood, right?” he asks. Although that’s not actually a question. Putting “right?” at the end of certain things he says is just Tim Hudak’s way. “You are who you are, right?” he says. “I’m Tim Hudak.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

In Transit

September 28, 2011 | 4:40 pm

1 Comment

City council considers toll roads (very, very briefly)

Two city councillors have an idea to increase city revenues and—oh, wait, forget it. Councillors Josh Matlow and Doug Holyday both made calls for the city to consider adding tolls to Toronto roads. The Toronto Sun reports that Matlow said his idea could be an answer to the mayor’s repeated call for someone—anyone—to propose something other than service cuts as a way to balance the city’s books. But Rob Ford said that tolls hurt the economy and cause congestion (surprise, surprise). Both motions were defeated. Read the entire story [Toronto Sun] »

The Informer

Election Whoas

September 28, 2011 | 12:15 pm

1 Comment

Reaction Roundup: sailing metaphors, locker room talk and ignoring Toronto. The skinny on what happened at last night’s provincial election debate

Given the amount of chatter generated by Dalton McGuinty’s erratic hand gestures last night, it would seem that the provincial election leader’s debate was the uninspiring affair that most suggested it would be. Aside from a few exciting moments and a couple of strange ones (like Andrea Horwath’s locker room anecdote), the debate was predictable enough to get any viewer properly buzzed—and we don’t mean on the political intrigue. Of course, even if uneventful, the debate could still play an important role in the final stretch of the campaign. With that in mind, we give you our summation of the ink that’s been spilled on the subject, after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

From the Print Edition

September 14, 2011 | 11:15 am

39 Comments

Exodus to the burbs: why diehard downtowners are giving up on the city

The reasons to abandon the overcrowded, overpriced, not-so-livable city are beginning to outnumber the reasons to stay. More and more of us are tempted by the 905 and beyond. Screw Jane Jacobs. We’re outta here
By Philip Preville | Photography by Stephanie Noritz

The New Suburbanites

Brian Porter and Carrie Low thought they’d hatched the perfect plan to avoid the eight-lane gridlock they faced every week on their drive to the family cottage in the Kawarthas. Porter, a soft-spoken 41-year-old Toronto firefighter, would arrange his work schedule to be home on Friday. He’d pack the car at noon and pick up his daughters, Lily and Amelia, from daycare shortly after lunch. Then, rather than head from their home in the Beach to pick up Low downtown, he’d drive to a strategic pit stop in Oshawa. Low, a slim 41-year-old redhead, works as a lawyer with RBC in the financial district, her days and nights packed, respectively, with meetings and paperwork. Her role in the escape plan was to get off work early and catch the GO train to Oshawa Station. Often, she’d end up working a pressure-packed day until 5 p.m. anyway, leaving Porter and the girls waiting at the station for hours. In the end they never gained that much time—it could still be a challenge to get to the cottage before nightfall. But at least they’d avoided the worst hours on the DVP and the 401.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Informer

From the Print Edition

September 2, 2011 | 10:55 am

3 Comments

Why Dalton McGuinty isn’t worried about a record provincial debt, an exodus of trusted MPs and the Tim Hudak surge

By Kelly Pullen | Photography by Daniel Ehrenworth

Dalton McGuinty Six months ago, Ontarians had barely heard of Tim Hudak. Now he’s roaring toward victory. How do you plan to overcome his lead in the polls?
If we were to knock on a hundred doors and ask people what their top concern is, they’re not going to say the polls. They’re interested in good schools, great health care and the economy. Those have been our priorities for eight years, and we’re going to keep strengthening them.

Some would say that your legacy will be defined more by the eHealth scandal and the G20 policing fiasco.
I expect people will take the really good things and the less-than-stellar things into account, as they should.

Voters have swung to the right federally and municipally. Do you think that trend is feeding Hudak’s momentum?
The political firmament has been reorganized in some ways. But I can only be who I am, and our government can only do what it does, and that’s to continue to be informed by the values of Ontarians. You know, my dad was the MPP for Ottawa South before me. He was shovelling snow off the back deck and had a heart attack and died at age 63. When he was alive I said, “I’m never going into politics—who needs this?” But it has been incredibly rewarding to shape the future.

Read the rest of this entry »

All stories relating to economy

Contests

Links and Offers

Most shared stories today

The latest from across the St. Joseph Media network