Tausi Insider

Some Canadian employers say they plan to hold onto their workers even if the economy slips into a recession rather than risk not be able to rehire later, which should put a lid on job losses and soften the economic blow of the slump. Canada’s jobless rate dropped to a record low of 4.9% over the summer and has since edged up to 5.2%. In October, the economy added a net 108,300 jobs, and wages growth climbed to 5.5%, even as the economy began to stall. The challenge of hiring over the last few months is giving employers pause. “I don’t anticipate layoffs at all,” said Mark Seymour, CEO of trucking service Kriska Transportation Group in Prescott, Ontario. Up until a few months ago, Kriska’s 1,200 employees were too few to keep up with demand, Seymour said. Now trucking activity, a leading indicator, has fallen off about 5% from earlier this year, Seymour told Reuters. Seymour said his company hauls for one major car manufacturer who is expecting to be able to boost production again soo...

More retirement-age Canadians are still paying off a mortgage, and financial advisers say rising interest rates will make it even more challenging for Canadians to pay off their home before they retire. The number of people older than 65 with an outstanding mortgage in their residence increased from 1.2 million to 1.5 million between 2016 and 2021 according to Statistics Canada, although the agency noted they don’t measure whether others residing in the home are contributing to mortgage payments. However, the number of seniors living alone with a mortgage also grew, from roughly 181,000 to 220,000 in the same time frame. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. data also showed an increase in the share of people aged 65 and older with a mortgage. People in that age group accounted for 10 per cent of mortgages in 2017, and 13 per cent of mortgages in 2022. The age group also accounts for 9 per cent of the country’s outstanding mortgage balance, compared with 7 per cent in 2017. Furthermore, ...

FYI 12-21-97 (1).jpg robmag-bestmanaged-fyidoctors-1128 Handout FYidoctors Handout When it comes to running a company, rapid growth is, of course, generally considered to be a good thing. But when growth far surpasses expectations, maintaining company culture is challenging for even the most seasoned leaders. “In the past two years alone, growth has been more than triple what we budgeted for,” says Dr. Alan Ulsifer, founder and CEO of FYidoctors, a network of eye care and medical aesthetics clinics. The company, born in 2005 when a group of Albertan optometrists decided to merge their practices, has grown steadily via the acquisition of independent clinics. Last week, it merged with its biggest competitor, FunctionLab, to form the largest network of medical aesthetics clinics in the country. “We’re excited about all this growth, but onboarding so many new people can be stressful. Our biggest challenge has been making sure companies that join us have a good experience,” says U...

Sustainable investing has taken its knocks, but that isn’t because the climate crisis has become any less acute. Instead, rising interest rates and a flight to safer short-term opportunities are doing much of the damage, says a top institutional investor. Investments in green technology and sustainable funds took off early in the pandemic as society focused its attentions on environmental vulnerabilities such as climate change. Years of low and stable interest rates helped fuel the boom, said Martin Grosskopf, portfolio manager and director of sustainable investing for AGF Management Ltd. As inflation fears have grown and rates have climbed to two-decade highs, investments in cleantech companies that may not generate cash flow until well into the future have given way to demand for more immediate payouts, Mr. Grosskopf said in an interview. “I would say the most problematic aspect of the last 18 months has simply been interest-rate volatility,” he said. One saving grace for the secto...

Flight status boards at Harry Reid International Airport, in Las Vegas, on Jan. 11. John Locher/The Associated Press U.S. air travel returned mostly to normal Thursday, a day after a computer system that sends safety information to pilots broke down and grounded traffic from coast to coast. By midafternoon on the East Coast, about 150 flights had been cancelled and more than 3,700 delayed – much lower figures than on Wednesday, when more than 1,300 flights were scrubbed and 11,000 delayed. Attention turned to the federal agency where the technology failure apparently started hours before it inconvenienced more than 1 million travellers. The Federal Aviation Administration said a damaged database file appeared to have caused the outage in the safety-alert system. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised a thorough examination to avoid another major failure. “Our immediate focus is technical – understanding exactly how this happened, why the redundancies and the backups that we...