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Canada's share of merchandise exports going to the United States fell from 75.9% in 2024 to 71.7% last year, and Statistics Canada clocked July at 66.3%, the lowest reading since 1997 outside the pandemic. That is a remarkable shift in the customer mix, and it has not yet moved a single rail line. The Wall Street Journal reported today that Mark Carney is exploring whether Canada could hold some form of associate membership with the European Union. The status does not exist y

Chinese refiners have a supply problem this week. A pipeline from Alberta is already part of the answer. Reuters reports that Chinese independent refiners have bought more than 20 million barrels from Canada, West Africa and South America as supplies from Iran and Russia become harder to secure. Canadian heavy crude moving through Trans Mountain is part of that buying wave. Most of the case for diversifying Canada’s oil exports is about us: what happens if our largest custome

103 Search and Rescue Unit, Canadian Forces Base Gander I turned on the news that morning mostly for white noise. Minutes later, I watched Flight 175 hit the South Tower. It was a beautiful early morning in Vancouver, the sky only just beginning to brighten, and I was getting ready to head to the office. It took me a minute to realize something was terribly wrong, and even as I watched it happen, I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. There are moments when the world cha

GE Aerospace has agreed to pay $11.75 billion for Consolidated Precision Products, a castings company most people outside aerospace have never heard of, and one GE has been buying from for more than 15 years. CPP makes highly engineered castings that go into jet engines, and castings have become a persistent constraint on engine output. GE says it wants more capacity, but it also wants design and manufacturing closer together so it can apply its own operating system to the pl

Matti Blume, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons In January, Trump threatened a 50% tariff on Canadian-built aircraft and said he would decertify Bombardier’s Global Express jets. This week it became: if you want the U.S. market, build here. Same company and same president, seven months apart, but a very different problem. A tariff changes the economics of selling into a market. A localization requirement changes the operating

We put a team of young developers in charge of code that was older than most of them. Seven applications, thirty years of patches, billions of dollars in operating revenue running through them, and a service provider that was winding down whether we were ready or not. We had bought the legacy software from them, and responsibility for keeping it running was moving to us. Naturally, we asked for the documentation. We got a user manual from 1996. Most of the original developers

Four of us heard the same wrong word on a Gino Vannelli record last weekend. And I was the reason. I was golfing with some friends at a beautiful course in Kananaskis Country. Dave was kind enough to drive, which meant I got to look around instead of paying attention to the road. At one point, I noticed several dark bovines standing by the side of the road, out of the sun. And for reasons that made perfect sense in my head, I immediately belted out: "Black cows look better in

An oilfield-services company just agreed to spend US$3.4 billion on heat exchangers, and very little of it has to do with oil. SLB is buying Kelvion, a German thermal-management firm, and taking on roughly another US$700 million of debt. Kelvion's biggest and fastest-growing market is data centres. SLB expects the two companies' data-centre businesses to generate more than US$2 billion in pro forma revenue this year. Read that as a pivot into AI and you miss what actually hap

Canada’s ambassador to Washington recently stated that no future trade deal will succeed unless it preserves a viable Canadian auto assembly and parts industry. This statement raises an important business question: The Cost of Maintaining Capabilities What does it cost to maintain a capability, and what is the cost of rebuilding it after letting it go? These two figures are rarely the same. On a spreadsheet, a capability can appear to underperform quietly. A plant may seem in

Meta's code changes were up 220% year over year. Changes that actually reached users were up 36%. Reuters published the investigation yesterday, and those two numbers are what I'd put in front of anyone about to restructure a team around AI. Meta reportedly ran Project OT, an AI-native restructuring exercise that envisioned smaller teams working with autonomous agents. Internal scenarios explored cuts of up to 60% in some teams, and the planned second wave was later cancelled

An automaker closes an assembly plant and four thousand people lose their jobs. The site sits behind a fence while governments work out what to do with an industrial complex built for somebody else's production system. Then another manufacturer shows up. That is Camaçari, in Bahia, where Ford stopped production in 2021. BYD bought the former Ford property from the state for roughly US$55 million, committed R$5.5 billion to the complex, and started building cars there in 2025.

For a Canadian company, that is not just over two weeks of waiting. It is just over two weeks to find out which business cases quietly assumed U.S. inputs would keep costing what they cost yesterday. Ottawa says the tariffs will be concentrated in steel, dairy, appliances, agricultural equipment, pulp and paper, and electronics. Somewhere in a lot of Canadian companies, one of those is sitting inside an approved business case, and the number behind it was written before Frida

Project management remains a critical skill for mid-market organizations aiming to deliver complex projects successfully. Over the years, many experts have shared their knowledge through books that distill best practices, methodologies, and leadership strategies. I have reviewed several top project management books to extract key insights that can help organizations establish robust project management offices and empower project professionals. Key Lessons from Top Project Man