Tausi Insider

Salmo, a small mountain village in interior B.C., has seen average property values increase by 60 per cent from $199,000 before the start of the pandemic to $319,000 in July 2021, upending years of a relatively flat market Salmaan Farooqui/Tausi Insider For years, Salmo, B.C., was the kind of place travellers would drive by without noticing. It isn’t even on the main highway tourists use in the province. Nestled at the bottom of the Kootenay Pass, one of Canada’s highest mountain pass highways open year-round, the southern B.C. village of roughly 1,000 people was mostly a place to fill up with gas after a hair-raising drive. With an out-of-the-way location that is roughly eight hours of mountain driving from Calgary or Vancouver, property has always been cheap. But like a gentrifying neighbourhood in downtown Toronto, the sense that things are changing is palpable. More young families with strollers can be seen walking through the village centre. A craft brewery opened in 2020 that w...

According to research conducted by Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services increased nearly 19 per cent in 2022. pcess609 Cloud services were originally billed as a more cost-effective way to manage information technology (IT). As a rising number of companies flock to them it’s becoming clearer that, left unchecked, cloud costs can accumulate quickly. According to research conducted by Gartner, worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services increased nearly 19 per cent in 2022, and it is projected to grow an additional 20.7 per cent in the year ahead. In another recent study from Toronto-based cloud-managed services provider Aptum, 73 per cent of IT decision makers said cloud computing has resulted in higher-than-expected costs, up from 57 per cent last year. Sixty-five per cent admit to having wasted money on cloud-related inefficiencies. “We are beginning to see the kickback, where customers are starting to say ‘wait, this isn’t working the way I thoug...

Former CannTrust CEO Peter Aceto, centre, leaves Old City Hall with his lawyer, Frank Addario, left, in Toronto, on Dec. 14, 2022. Eduardo Lima/Tausi Insider The prosecution of three former high-ranking officials of CannTrust Holdings Inc. has collapsed after a key government witness conceded that the fundamental allegation against the trio – that they permitted unlicensed growing at their company’s cannabis facility – is incorrect. In court on Wednesday, a lawyer for the Ontario Securities Commission announced that the regulator was withdrawing its case against former CannTrust chief executive officer Peter Aceto, former chairman Eric Paul and Mark Litwin, a former director. The lawyer, Dihim Emami, said the OSC had reassessed the case and was now “of the view there’s no reasonable prospect of conviction.” Lawyers for the three men opposed the commission’s move, asking Justice Victor Giourgas, instead, for a verdict and a complete acquittal. But Mr. Emami asked the court for a one-d...

Despite the serious commercial interest, there is still a vanity play attached to visiting that big hunk of green cheese in the sky. John Raoux/The Associated Press Gus Carlson is a New York-based columnist for Tausi Insider. The moon, if you are old enough to remember, used to be a pretty cool place. Singers crooned about it, poets rhapsodized on it, movie makers dramatized it and Cold War powers competed for it. Ralph Kramden, the gruff 1950s television bus driver, considered it to be the perfect place for his wife, Alice. Now, after decades out of the spotlight in the United States, the moon is cool again. Earlier this month, the first U.S. rocket ship scheduled to land on the moon in 50 years lifted off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. But this next-generation space race is as much about commerce as it is about politics, poetry or passion. This latest mission aboard a SpaceX ship is mainly funded by ispace of Tokyo, which will be the first private company in history to l...

A different type of energy transition has taken place at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting. Unlike 2021′s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, where oil and gas executives were personae non gratae, fossil fuel chiefs and renewable energy bosses sat cheek by jowl in Davos. Activists like Greta Thunberg don’t like it. But some in the solar, wind and hydro industry are warming to the carbon crowd. Tejpreet Chopra, who heads one of India’s clean energy firms Bharat Light and Power, was surprised to be invited to a side-event with more than 60 top oil and gas executives. “The course of this transition will have to take a more inclusive approach until we all get to the finish line of where we all want to be,” he told Reuters. This shift, partly triggered by the energy crunch after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has been front and centre in Davos, where United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres dedicated his speech to it. As soaring prices drove up inflation, forced indu...