It’s back. For the sixth straight year Maclean’s asked economists, analysts, investors and financial observers to each select a chart about Canada’s economy they feel will be particularly important to watch in 2020 and in their own words, explain why.
As in past years, certain themes emerge in this year’s chart collection. The stability of Canada’s housing market and the dangerous levels of household debt remain an obvious concern, even if there’s less focus now on rising interest rates. Canada’s weak climate for business investment and the risk from global trade tensions are also top of mind among the experts. So too are environmental and energy issues. You’ll also find charts on how Canadians live, work and shop, how Canada’s waning competitiveness is holding the economy back, and even how a deficit of amorousness could lead to a slowdown down the road.
Late one night in 1954, Anthony Markus hid near Hungary’s border with Austria, waiting for two friends who planned to join him in trying to escape the Communist regime. His friends never showed, so the 18-year-old Markus set out on his own to slip through the Iron Curtain. Crossing minefields and barbed wire fences, he then ran through the night until he found an Austrian vineyard, where the farmer took him in and offered him work.
It’s anything but a straight line from that escape to the small Manitoba community of The Pas, but today Markus and his son Tony operate one of the largest farms in the province’s north. Nestled between rivers in an area known as the Carrot Valley, the family’s Big Lake Angus Farm boasts 14,600 acres of land and 1,000 head of cattle.
And, along with two adjacent farms, it can all be yours—assuming you have access to $53.3 million.
Canada’s king of garbage is, at this moment, standing shin-deep in the stuff. Patrick Dovigi, the CEO of GFL Environmental—the fourth-largest waste management company in North America—clambers over a pile of stained mattresses, crushed plastic bottles and rotting wood at the company’s waste transfer station in northwest Toronto. Dovigi may be doing all this for a photo shoot, but as he hops into the bucket of a front-end loader and gestures with upturned hands for the driver to lift him higher—higher, he signals—it’s clear this is a man very much in his element, foul-smelling as it may be. Never mind that his brown suede shoes seem utterly ruined, that there’s a smear of white sludge across the back of his black sweatshirt, or that in less than half an hour, he’s scheduled to meet with an executive at one of GFL’s largest investors, the $190-billion Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan. “It’s okay,” Dovigi says of the stains. “This is the garbage business.”
It’s unlikely any of his investors would complain about a bit of trash. Outside the world of tech unicorns, few companies in Canada have grown so massive, so fast.
In early 1979, a tiny text ad ran in the back pages of Byte magazine, a journal dedicated to the emerging world of personal computers: “VisiCalc, how did you ever do without it?” If readers were unsure what had apparently been missing from their lives, they soon found out. Forty years ago this October, VisiCalc, the first digital spreadsheet, debuted on the market and immediately became a global phenomenon. Apple co-founder Steve Jobs once hailed it as the “explosion” that moved the computer industry forward, while others have described it as “the original killer app of the information age.” In time, VisiCalc lost the spreadsheet crown to Lotus 1-2-3, which was eventually usurped by today’s king of the spreadsheets: Microsoft Excel. Or, as countless frustrated business users have grumbled over the decades, ExHell.
For Excel’s most hardcore users—the legions of finance, accounting and administrative workers who have been toiling on it for decades—Microsoft’s workhorse spreadsheet software can be a godsend; it’s powerful, versatile and simple to use. Yet with those strengths come many headaches: broken links, input errors and the mayhem of managing conflicting versions of files. They’re frustrating and costly problems that Vena Solutions, one of Canada’s fastest-growing tech companies, has set out to fix. “As a canvas, you can use Excel to model pretty much any kind of data you want to plan, forecast and budget,” says Vena CEO Don Mal. “It just falls down when it’s used in a multi-user corporate environment.”
“I hope they don’t view me as ‘that billionaire from Canada’,” says Canadian billionaire Lino Saputo Jr.
Saputo, CEO of the giant cheese, milk and yogurt company that shares his name, is sitting in the private locker room he installed in the personal hockey arena he built next to the luxury auto club he owns in Montreal. It’s literally and figuratively as far away from the world of Australian dairy farming as you can get. Nevertheless, the “they” he’s referring to are farmers Down Under.
Saputo has been spending a lot of time in Australia lately. Last year, his company acquired the country’s largest dairy processor, a farmer-owned co-op called Murray Goulburn. To seal the deal, Saputo spent weeks criss-crossing thousands of kilometres of arid grasslands, making his pitch to farmers at town hall meetings. In some cases, he even drove directly to farms to sit at their kitchen tables and field questions one-on-one.
Which prompted my first question: What must those farmers think when Quebec’s richest man— his family’s stake in the company is worth $7 billion—shows up on their doorstep?
As food fights go, it’s hard to imagine one healthier than the war underway near the bustling downtown Toronto intersection of King and Yonge. It’s a battle of the salad bowls, and the weapons of choice are kale and quinoa.
With all the salad spots packed into this area there are more leafy greens than a farmer’s field. To the north, a Fast Fresh Foods restaurant attempts to lure customers to one of its eight downtown locations with customizable spinach, quinoa and spring mix salads. To the east, B.Good, a Boston-based chain with five spots in the city, counters with its marinated kale, carrot and brussels sprouts power bowls. A nearby iQ Food Co., one of seven in Toronto, pitches a seasonal rotating salad menu to passersby. And if salad fans needed still more options, there’s a Flock Rotisserie + Greens, a Hopscotch, a Kupfert & Kim, a La Prep and a Salad Days, all vying for their healthy-minded dollars.
And it’s not the only front in the salad skirmish. In cities across Canada, healthful fast-casual chains and mom-and-pop shops are squaring off. In Calgary, restaurants like Dirtbelly, a homegrown chain known for its seasonal mix-and-match salads, and Fork and Salad are facing off against Seed N Salt and larger chains like the Chopped Leaf, which was founded in the Okanagan and has more than 30 locations, mostly in the west but in Ontario as well. Meanwhile, in downtown Vancouver, restaurant-goers on a kale quest have a multitude of options, with names like Chop and Toss, SaladLoop, Green Leaf, GreenDay, Leafy Box and Tractor Foods.
But in this avocado arms race, there’s a Goliath among the Davids. Back in Toronto, within a five-minute walk of King and Yonge, there are eight Freshii restaurants beckoning customers with limited-time kale Caesar salads and wraps. Just beyond those, there’s another ring of Freshii restaurants. And just past them. . .well, you get the picture.
