Tausi Insider

Romaine lettuce in Simi Valley, Calif., in 2018. Wholesale produce distributors say demand is exceeding supply of iceberg and romaine lettuce. Mark J. Terrill/The Associated Press The cost of lettuce is spiking amid a shortage that’s leading some restaurants to temporarily stop offering leafy greens on their menus. Wholesale produce distributors say demand is exceeding supply of iceberg and romaine lettuce, and pricing pressures are expected to continue throughout the month. Restaurants Canada COO Kelly Higginson said a major lettuce-growing area in California was hit by some kind of virus, after a year that’s already been rife with difficulties thanks to heat and drought. “That particular area has had crops decimated. So there’s a massive shortage,” said Higginson. From fast-food joints to fine dining establishments, “everybody’s just pulling lettuce off the menu,” she said. That’s because not only is lettuce in short supply, but the available product has in some cases quadrupled in...

Michel Leblanc, head of the Montreal Chamber of Commerce, in downtown Montreal on Nov. 17. Christinne Muschi/Tausi Insider For the past two years, Michel Leblanc was the guy in the tie trying to save downtown Montreal from pandemic-induced ruin – a fate the city centre avoided. Now comes the hard part: reviving its office culture. Mr. Leblanc is president and CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of Metropolitan Montreal, a business group with outsized influence and a rich history of accomplishments. In its early days, merchant members organized the dredging of the St. Lawrence River so Montreal’s port could accommodate bigger ships. Later on, they pitched the creation of what is now the internationally renowned business school, École des Hautes Études Commerciales. So when the Quebec government opened its purse strings in March, 2021, to try to stimulate an economic recovery in Montreal’s financial centre after successive COVID-19 waves and work-from-home mandates, the Chamber of Commerce ...

A looming recession might provide a big push in the adoption of AI as weak economic conditions always provide the impetus for using machines to cut costs and raise productivity. Martin Meissner/The Associated Press As we prepare to kick off 2023, we are doing so knowing that the global economy is faltering while organizations are still being squeezed by high costs. On top of that, even a recession might not make much difference to the tight labour market they face. With technologies improving by leaps and bounds and companies looking for ways to improve the bottom line, the timing is just right for a huge uptick in AI use in a way that could transform the economy and labour market. When it comes to embracing AI, Canada is near the forefront. According to the 2021 Global Vibrancy Ranking on artificial intelligence from Stanford University, the country is in fifth place, behind the United States, China, India and the United Kingdom. The index is calculated using a number of metrics, i...

Jane Glassco walks on the pier on part of the 300 acres of her woodland and farmland that she donated to preserve the Ontario Greenbelt, near Schomberg, on May 23, 2007. J.P. MOCZULSKI/Tausi Insider Ontario’s Greenbelt, a swath of land that encircles the Greater Toronto Area, is an aggregation of farmland, river valleys and other natural features. Established in 2005, it was to remain protected forever for the benefit of future generations, permanently off-limits to urbanization. Forever turned out to be less than 20 years. Seeking to solve what has been widely described as a housing crisis, the government of Premier Doug Ford this month removed 19 plots of land from the Greenbelt, on which it hopes at least 50,000 new homes will be constructed. The government suggested that many of these 7,400 acres never deserved protection in the first place. Environment Minister David Piccini told reporters at a briefing that some of the Greenbelt’s boundaries “were based more on political scienc...

Pam Farrell started Grow Community Food Literacy Centre, a charity that provides nutritional food to low-income families and information on food literacy. CARLOS MARQUEZ/Handout The organizer: Pam Farrell The pitch: Founding Grow The reason: To help address food literacy. Pam Farrell was in the midst of a postgraduate degree in education a couple of years ago when she began exploring the concept of food literacy. “It kind of intrigued me,” Ms. Farrell, 45, recalled from Calgary. “Because I’ve heard of it before, but I never really knew what it meant.” She started researching ways to improve the understanding of how sociocultural factors affect and influence food literacy. And soon her topic became much more than an academic pursuit. In 2019, Ms. Farrell launched Grow Community Food Literacy Centre in her hometown of Niagara Falls, Ont., where she has been an elementary-school teacher. “I witnessed some of the inequities in the food system,” she said. “What students brought to school ...

Canada’s urban areas experienced their strongest population growth in at least two decades, rebounding from a weak expansion during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the year ending July 1, 2022, the country’s census metropolitan areas (CMAs) grew 2.1 per cent or by 574,000 people, according to Statistics Canada estimates published on Wednesday. That was the strongest pace of growth in figures that go back to the early 2000s. It was a comeback of sorts for urban regions, which had grown just 0.5 per cent the previous year, lagging the increase in rural areas. The pandemic and accompanying border restrictions led to a dramatic decline in immigration, while others decamped to smaller communities. Immigration to Canada hits record high in 2022 But the demise of the city, as some commentators had predicted, does not bear out in Wednesday’s report. As COVID-19 restrictions have eased, immigration has surged to record levels, helping to drive most of the population growth in ...

German army battle tank Leopard 2 returns after a NATO exercise in Lithuania on May 17, 2017. INTS KALNINS/Reuters Prime Minister Justin Trudeau isn’t ruling out sending Canada’s German-made battle tanks to Ukraine, saying Ottawa would consider such a request from Kyiv. Speaking to reporters in Saskatoon on Monday, Mr. Trudeau was asked if he would donate Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine in the event Germany dropped its objections to the re-export of military weapons it manufactured. Germany has resisted such a move so far, saying Western tanks should only be supplied to Ukraine if there is agreement among Kyiv’s main allies, particularly the United States. “Right from the start we’ve made it clear we’re here to support Ukraine against the illegal and brutal invasion by Russia,” Mr. Trudeau said. “We’ve sent a huge slew of different types of weapons, including an air-defence system. We will look at all the requests from Ukraine but we’re not there yet for the Leopard 2 tanks,” he said. ...

Eileen Dooley is a talent and leadership development specialist and a leadership coach based in Calgary Early in my career I worked at a national office, which also had employees in four regions, each representing an area of the country: Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario and Western Canada. To say that nobody understood each other would be an understatement. Conversations with the group, especially on national projects and activities went something like this: National office: Here is what we need the regions to roll out … Them (in no particular order): 1. You don’t understand us. 2. We are big and have lots of resources so we will do what we want. 3. No. This is not going to work here (angry tone). 4. We have so few resources, so we will take whatever you give us. It was predictable, and not all that progressive. More time was spent listening to criticism of content and process, as well as defending decisions, than being productive and co-operative. The national office wanted things to look ...