Category: Hicks on Biz columns from The Edmonton Sun
Hicks on Biz columns from The Edmonton Sun
There was once a decrepit old house in the heart of the Highlands.
It had been a pleasant, older family home among many such homes in one of Edmonton’s heart ‘n’ soul, tree-lined, spacious, back-alley neighbourhoods.
The house needed upgrades. But it was bought by an absentee landlord, rented to riff-raff and turned into a drug den. In a few short years, the house had devolved into a neighbourhood blight.
So here’s what the neighbours did.
They bought the property, pooled their skills, hired where they had to, gutted and then renovated the 100-year-old house. They gave their teenagers summer jobs to do all the physical labour … plus the kids learned about buildings.
The house is now in its final stages of re-construction, the exterior design intact.
Once sold, it should make a small profit for the participating neighbours.
A small profit cash-wise, but consider the societal value:
Neighbourhood decay was stopped in its tracks, protecting current hom ...
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Rumour has it, reputable rumours, that the Prentice financial team will soon emerge from its extended huddle to announce a three-pronged attack on the 2015/16 budget shortfall.
To counter an expected loss of $7.5 billion in provincial energy royalties, $2.5 billion will come from spending cuts, $2.5 billion from new revenues (i.e. new taxes/health care premiums) and $2.5 billion taken on in new debt.
The premier will order an average across-the-board 5% cut to every departmental budget from 2014/15, except for Health. As Health will stay static, bigger cuts will happen in every other department.
New revenues could include the re-introduction of medical premiums (raising $1 billion), higher personal and corporate provincial income tax (an extra $1.25 billion) plus a hike in cigarette, booze, fuel and other nickel-and-dime taxes ($250 million).
Or, and who would have thought it even before Christmas, a 2% provincial sales tax (raising $2 billion) plus other tax hikes ($500 million).
Borrowing: Pr ...
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It’s a hoary old cliché, but so true.
In journalism, there’s no such thing as objectivity.
Bias hangs out on every corner.
It’s so darned obvious in the mountains of verbiage expended on .02% of Canada’s boreal forest surrounding Fort McMurray, the oilsands.
Note the bias: I throw in the fact the oilsands take up less than one-fifth of one percent of the boreal forest. The underlying message: The oilsands are NOT destroying Canada’s wilderness.
That one little fact, slipped in, pretty well tells you where this commentator is coming from.
The reality is this city, hence yours and my livelihoods, is highly dependent on oilsands generated wealth. So I support oilsands development – as long as the environmental rules are followed, and the rules get tougher to the point of miniscule or zero tolerance when technology permits.
Most commentators will not admit to a bias. But it’s so easy to tell.
Those adamantly opposed to oilsands development call the oilsands the “tar sands.”
Gee, what was your first clue?
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Something’s happened out there in the past year.
Sustainability, environmental awareness, saving the planet has truly arrived.
The scoffers are getting older and retiring. The doubters are coming around – maybe not on global warming, but certainly on recycling, waste reduction and conservation in general. For Gen Y, green is a given.
“Social licence” is now one powerful business tool. Without societal acceptance, mega-construction projects cannot move ahead.
We have in our midst a young social entrepreneur who is either a world-class visionary using business to create a sustainable planet or he’s one amazing promoter. Or maybe he’s a little of both.
Joey Hundert, 33, is founder and CEO of both Sustainival, a travelling midway with all its rides running on diesel fuel made from used cooking oils and Sustainitech, a company working in partnership with the Wood Buffalo regional municipality to grow food and farmed fish in self-contained, insulated shipping containers using processes known as aquaponics and aeroponics.
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Had successive Albertal governments stuck to their guns and kept growing the Alberta Heritage Fund from energy royalties rather than simply spending the cash, the Heritage Fund today would be worth north of $100 billion, easily able to contribute a steady - say $10 billion a year – stream of revenue into general government revenues while continuing to grow. Instead, it's stuck at $17 billion.
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So, quite suddenly, Alberta’s (lower-end) job market has been thrown into turmoil by the federal government’s toughening up of its Temporary Foreign Workers Program.
It’s been long known that the program has/had serious flaws: An unscrupulous hotelier, for instance, bringing in a foreign worker in a waiter category, then transferring him/her to housekeeping at (lower) waiter wages.
Even in worker-short Alberta, the Alberta Federation of Labour says companies are hiring foreign workers (at lower wages) when Albertans are available.
Still, it was surprising how the feds, despite glaring labour shortages in Western Canada, were so abrupt in changing the current system. Major, major abuse of the Temporary Foreign Workers’ program must have been happening for Employment Minister Jason Kenney to move so quickly.
How Alberta brings its jobs-to-workers ratio back into balance is beyond the scope of this column.
Obviously the politicians have to do something. The country will suf ...
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Entrepreneurs and senior business managers, this column is for you.
It’s not about money per se, it’s about who is buying your goods/services, what they are buying, and how they are thinking.
Last week, business consulting company Deloitte Canada brought its director of research Duncan Stewart to town to deliver his annual Deloitte’s TMT (Technology, Media and Telecommunications) predictions for 2014.
On the same day, Ipsos market research/polling company CEO Darrell Bricker delivered the keynote address at the Alberta’s Industrial Heartland annual Stakeholder Update. Bricker’s talk was about the “new” Canada, which, ironically, had the undivided attention of the “old” Canada (regional municipal politicans, 90% white, over 55 and male) in his audience.
There’s a thread here, an obvious one, a cliché fast moving to reality.
If your organization doesn’t adapt to the “new” Canada, it will die.
The new Canada&rs ...
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It is the vastness of the contrast, between income, living standards, attitudes and quality of life.
I have just spent five weeks in Asia – three in the Philippines, one in Thailand, one in Cambodia.
By Southeast Asia standards, Canadians are rich beyond imagination. “I wish I’d been born into royalty,” my oldest daughter sighed during the trip. Looking out the van window at yet another slum, I replied “You were.”
According to the World Bank in 2012, Canada’s per capita income (gross domestic product divided by the population) was $52,219.
Thailand has come a long ways, now in the mid-ranks of the world with a per capita income of $5,480.
The Philippines is far behind, in the bottom third. The average per capita income is $2,587. Its greatest export and income earner are Filipinos living and working abroad – 12% of its people.
Cambodia is the poorest sister of Southeast Asia, at $946 annually per capita. Despite the horror of its history and th ...
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Ontario is reeling.
The “Ontario Green Energy Program,” introduced four years ago by then-Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty’s Liberal government, has proved to be an utter disaster.
A public inquiry has brought to light the sheer size of this white elephant.
The consequence of going all-out green will cost the average Ontario family an extra $636 a year by 2018 , a 42% jump in electricity bills over the next five years.
Independent analysts are pegging the additional costs at $16 billion today, $23 billion by 2016. This in a province that is already $273 billion in debt!
“Trying to save the future has created an economic disaster in the here and now, for our children and our grandchildren,” summed up one commentator.
Ontario industry is paying more for power than almost any other jurisdiction in North America. Any wonder manufacturing and food processing companies are leaving Ontario? Any wonder it’s so tough to find a job in Ontario?
I don’t preten ...
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It's the opening of an annual request, to give some poor, tough, confused teenager a gift for Christmas.
The Edmonton Sun’s Adopt-A-Teen program celebrates our community’s loving ability to give 8,000 teens living in poverty a small Christmas gift.
And it’s a time to appreciate the vows of near-poverty those working in the charitable sector have taken, and the unavoidable paradoxes any charity director must deal with.
The business of charity: Those working in charitable organizations do us a huge favour.
If it wasn’t for the charitable sector, government would be forced to care for so many more Albertans not so good at caring for themselves.
Were it not for charities, government would groan under the financial demand of three, not two ministries – not only Health and Education, but Human Services as well.
Executive in the charity sector make half to two-thirds of their earning power elsewhere.
Click here to donate.
Any new charity executive director rapidl ...
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