Businessman and billionaire Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter.
Tag: business
Canada to Lead Trade Missions for Women, LGBTQI, Indigenous Businesses
The Canadian government is going to help businesses owned by women, Indigenous peoples, and LGBTQI people (LGBTQI means lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning and intersex people).
The government will create “trade missions” to support their businesses.
A trade mission is when one country — in this case Canada — travels to another country in order to talk about increasing the amount of business between the two countries.
Typically, business owners and government officials go to another country, and meet with business owners and government officials there. They discuss ways the countries can work together.
Canada’s Economists Need To Improve Their Writing Skills: Report
It’s important to be able to write clearly. Some of Canada’s economists are finding out just how important.
An “internal report card” gave mediocre grades to economists at the Bank of Canada on their writing skills.
The Bank of Canada is Canada’s central, or main, bank. “Economists” at the Bank of Canada are in charge of making sure Canada’s economy is healthy.
Every once in awhile, organizations like the Bank of Canada take a look at how well they’re doing.
Just like school report cards, they grade themselves in many different areas so they can see where they need to improve.
Students Win Prize For Making ‘Power Flour’ from Insects
A team of business students from McGill University in Montreal have won $1-million for developing a nutritious, low-cost food made from insects.
Their new “power flour” will help feed poor people around the world.
Every year, the Hult Prize Foundation holds a contest for college and university students. They challenge the students to find ways to help solve social or environmental problems by developing new products or new businesses.
The prize was awarded on September 23 in New York City by former U.S. president Bill Clinton. Clinton chose the theme of world hunger for this year’s contest.
Ahmad Ashkar, the founder of the Hult Prize, said almost a billion people go hungry every day.
The winning team, which calls itself Aspire Food Group, developed a plan for adding dried and ground-up insects to flour to make it more nutritious.
Volunteering In Canada Worth More Than $50-Billion
In Canada, more than 13.3 million people volunteer. That means that on their own time, and without being paid, they work on a project to help others in some way.
This week (April 21 to 27) is National Volunteer Week in Canada, according to an organization called Volunteer Canada.
In a recent report, two economists* have put a dollar figure on all of that volunteering.
Volunteering creates $50-billion in economic value every year for Canadians, Craig Alexander and Sonya Gulati, economists with the TD Bank, say in a report.
They call volunteering “the life-blood that keeps (many organizations) running.”
Cirque Du Soleil Lays Off 400 Employees
Some of Cirque du Soleil’s performers will soon have their feet on the ground.
That’s because the fantastical circus company is laying off 400 employees.
Cirque employs about 5,000 people around the world, doing more than 100 types of jobs including performing.
Most of the lay-offs will be at the organization’s Montreal headquarters, according to an article in the Globe and Mail.
Cirque du Soleil is a famous Canadian performing troupe. According to Wikipedia, they describe themselves as “a dramatic mix of circus arts and street entertainment.”
They were founded by two former street performers, Guy Laliberte and Gilles Ste-Croix, about 30 years ago.
Gap Between Rich-Poor Growing: OECD
Canada’s rich people are getting richer and the country’s poor people are getting poorer.
That’s because the gap — or distance — between the amount of money the richest and poorest people earn at their jobs is widening.
The richest Canadians earn 10 times more than the poorest.
That means if the average rich person earns about $100,000 a year, the poorest earns only about $10,000 for a whole year.
A new report by an international organization called the OECD* said the same thing has been happening in many countries including the United States.
It has been happening since the 1990s, before the new millennium.
Canada Trading More With India, China
Canada has always done a lot of trading with the United States, the biggest buyer of the products and natural resources it sells.
But now companies in Canada are finding other countries to trade with, like India and China.
A new report written by experts at one of Canada’s biggest banks says that by the end of this decade — the year 2020 — Canada will only trade about 60 per cent of its goods with its neighbouring country, the United States. That’s down from 75 per cent right now.
Canada Post, Air Canada On Strike
Two major strikes are affecting services in Canadian cities including Toronto and Montreal.
A “strike” happens when workers, who are banded together in a “union,” decide to stop working until they get something they think is fair, such as raises, health coverage or money for their retirement.
A strike puts pressure on a company to talk to the union and possibly give the workers what they want.
Usually there is a “compromise,” in other words, the workers and the company get some things they want but perhaps not everything.
The company and the union try to find a solution that pleases both sides.
