‘No one available to work’: How labour woes are crimping our economy’s prospects
I hope no one thinks Canada’s only economic problems are NAFTA and pipelines. If those two issues magically disappeared, we’d be obsessing over a different crisis: an embarrassing inability to take maximum advantage of an impressive run of global economic growth.
Our notoriously weak commitment to productivity and innovation has caught up with us. The latest evidence comes in a new report from Business Development Canada (BDC), which finds that about 40 per cent of the country’s smaller companies are struggling to find workers.
NATIONAL POST
Google wants to change the way we interact with URLs
Google’s done a lot with Chrome — and by extension, our relationship with the internet — in its relatively short life. Autofill, ad management, web encryption… These are all things that were at one time pretty ground-breaking, but which we now simply take for granted. Now, following the browser’s 10th birthday and coinciding with its major redesign, Google has announced it’s thinking about Chrome’s Next Big Thing: killing the URL.
ENGADGET
Think it’s hard to build big projects in Canada now? Wait till you see the Liberals’ new bill
CALGARY — A fight over the federal government’s bill to overhaul the National Energy Board has been playing out away from the public eye but is expected to take centre stage in the Senate in September.
Behind the scenes, lower levels of government, companies and think tanks have been suggesting changes to Bill C-69 — which would turn the NEB into the Canadian Energy Regulator and establish an Impact Assessment Agency for new resource projects with a new scope and timelines.
At a recent meeting of energy ministers in Iqaluit, Saskatchewan’s Bronwyn Eyre said she and her counterparts in Alberta and Ontario raised concerns with the bill, which she called “an existential threat to our competitiveness.”
FINANCIAL POST
Making Change Is Not a Matter of Willpower
We like to think that making change is a question of mind over matter, that we — and the people with whom we work — are masters of our actions. We decide to make a change, we commit to it, and we follow through.
On an organizational level, the standard leadership approach to creating change is to whip up enthusiasm for a new process or initiative by explaining why the change is so important, promote the change throughout the company with posters and slogans and social media, and, once everyone is singing from the same song sheet, wait for the change to fall into place.
STRATEGY + BUSINESS
