Tausi Insider

A security personnel stands guard next to a COP27 sign during the closing plenary at the climate summit, in Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Nov. 20. MOHAMED ABD EL GHANY/Reuters The first United Nations climate conference I covered was the 2009 COP15 dud in Copenhagen. Since then, I have worked the conference mob scenes in Paris, Madrid and, earlier this month, Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. They were duds, too, in the sense that none ended with formal agreements to reduce fossil-fuel use – the only metric that matters as average global temperatures rise to dangerous levels. The annual COPs have turned into chaotic, bloated carnivals where, in their final desperate hours (most of them go into overtime) the distraught host-country presidency produces a face-saving agreement that allows it to declare a victory of some sort – or at least deflect some of the criticism that the outcome was a total failure. Even a breakthrough that barely fits the definition is billed as a win, sinc...

Last April, when the Trudeau government tabled a budget amid some of the most difficult economic questions in decades, it said it was going to seek help finding answers. In the budget, the government announced it would establish a permanent Council of Economic Advisors. This body of top economic experts would be there to provide sage counsel on how to shape policy to best navigate the current murky waters, and chart a course for future prosperity. It promised details about the council’s composition “in the coming months.” But nearly eight months later, the promised council isn’t helping find those answers. The government hasn’t even found its council yet. The Liberals have been all but silent about the plan since trumpeting it in the spring budget. There was no mention of it at all in the government’s fall economic statement this month. “Work is still very much ongoing,” Finance Department spokesperson Jessica Eritou assured me through an e-mail on Friday. But from the perspective of...

Fred Lum/the Globe and Mail If houses are investments, then they’re subject to the harsh math of investing losses. However much an asset falls in price, it has to rise by a larger percentage just to get back to the starting point. The national average resale home price peaked at $816,720 in February and has since fallen a bit more than 21 per cent to $644,463 in October. To get back to the peak, we need the average price to rise by almost 27 per cent. Figure on it taking between four and five years to do that, if prices bounce back enough to revive the toxic idea that houses are investments. Treating houses as investments means the death of affordability. The longer prices decline or flatline, the more opportunity there will be for home ownership to remain a viable middle-class goal. Still, the investment mentality is a big reason why our housing market overheated. Attention must be paid. What houses have going for them as investments is a decades-long history of price appreciation t...

European Union governments tentatively agreed on Thursday on a $60 a barrel price cap on Russian seaborne oil - an idea of the Group of Seven (G7) nations - with an adjustment mechanism to keep the cap at 5% below the market price, according to diplomats and a document seen by Reuters. The agreement still needs to be approved by all EU governments in a written procedure by Friday. Poland, which had pushed for the cap to be as low as possible, had as of Thursday evening not confirmed if it would support the deal, an EU diplomat said. EU countries have wrangled for days over the details of the price cap, which aims to slash Russia’s income from selling oil. The initial G7 proposal last week was for a price cap of $65-$70 per barrel with no adjustment mechanism. Since Russian Urals crude already traded lower, Poland, Lithuania and Estonia rejected that level as not achieving the main objective of reducing Moscow’s ability to finance its war in Ukraine. “The price cap is set at $60 with...

Steve Pomerleau, Taylor Gorick, Teri Gorick and Catie Hildenbrand stand outside of Project Hope, the community food pantry Taylor and her husband Steve started. Handout The organizers: Taylor Gorick and Steve Pomerleau The pitch: Launching Project Hope The reason: To provide food to those in need A couple of years ago, Taylor Gorick and her husband, Steve Pomerleau, were trying to think of a way to help people in their community when they came up with the idea of donating food packages to homeless people in Windsor, Ont. With the help of family and friends, they delivered 100 boxes. “It felt really good, but also something didn’t seem right,” Ms. Gorick recalled from the family’s home in Harrow, which is about 40 minutes south of Windsor. “It kind of felt like we were just giving them a Band-Aid solution.” She’d seen community pantries where someone sets up a fridge on a sidewalk and people donate what they can or take what they need. She liked the idea and turned it into Project ...