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Neil Young is forever Canadian
Every time Neil Young plays Winnipeg — he’s playing there tonight — it’s a big deal. While the legendary artist was born in Toronto and lived in Omemee, Ont., as kid, it was in the Peg where he spent his teenage years.
The city’s residents loves to claim Young as their own, and you can’t blame them — he played Winnipeg’s clubs, started his first band The Squires here, was friends...
Investing: Prescription for profit
On March 22, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a landmark bill that gives roughly 32 million uninsured Americans health-care coverage for the first time. It was a historic moment for our southern neighbours, but here in Canada keen investors were watching something other than the explosion of punditry on CNN — they were watching stock prices in the volatile American health-care sector....
Emerging economies: Border crossing
It was just over a year ago that the stock market’s recovery officially began. Between March 9 and May 7, 2009, the S&P/TSX composite index jumped more than 2,800 points, and investors were thrilled that the dark days of the recession were over. Since then, however, the picture hasn’t been as rosy. In the following 11 months, the markets have climbed only 1,800 points, leaving anxious...
Business plan: Another piece of the pie
Any good entrepreneur knows that when an idea strikes, you write it down wherever you are — even if it’s a smoky bar. When Nick Quain’s big idea hit 10 years ago, he was in the midst of a heated discussion with a technology-minded friend (who would soon become his business partner). With a beer in one hand and a napkin near the other, the Web media exec began jotting down his thoughts...
Income trusts: Trust temptation
Leslie Lundquist will never forget where she was the day Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced the federal government would tax income trusts. It was a Halloween afternoon in 2006, and the fund manager at Calgary’s Bissett Investment Management was sitting in a colleague’s office, having a casual, late-day chat. “Then my phone started ringing off the hook,” she says. When she heard the...
Get a 50% return, guaranteed
Imagine if your financial adviser came to you with a secure (and legal) way to get a guaranteed 50% return on your money. You’d likely say ‘yes’ pretty quickly. Well, no need to imagine any longer, because that’s exactly what you can get if you’re lucky enough to have a share ownership plan at work.
Brock McEwen, a director at Great West Life, says that with his company’s plan, for...
Tags: investing
Why the banks want to be your Facebook friend
Ever wonder who’s checking your Facebook profile? Sure, there are probably the old standbys, like your high-school crush and your nosy co-worker, but you should be aware that there might be someone else checking you out: your banker. Financial institutions of all stripes have been scouring social-networking sites since the days when MySpace was all the rage; now they troll Facebook, Twitter...
Travel: St. John’s, Nfld
Compared to most of Canada’s major cities, St. John’s, Nfld., is tiny. And yet when the Juno Awards comes to town on April 15 to 18, visitors will be taken by the outsized personality of the place — not to mention the spectacular views of the Atlantic. Metric, Michael Bublé and tween hero Justin Bieber are set to perform at the event. But for pure entertainment, it’s hard to compete with...
Bryan Borzykowski is a Toronto-based web and print writer, editor and blogger working mainly for business and entertainment publications. He regularly contributes to Canadian Business magazine, writes Metro Canada's weekly Audio Files music column and shares personal finance tips on Rogers TV's Daytime Toronto. He's also written for Maclean's, MoneySense, PROFIT, Chatelaine, Hello Canada, MSN Tech, Yahoo Finance and the National Post. He was recently nominated for five National Magazine Awards, winning one in an online category.
