On Monday and Tuesday of last week, while the Prime Minister stood before global investors in Toronto promising ports and corridors that “open our Arctic to the world,” a room full of Canadians in Winnipeg was already considering how that might actually be done.

Engineers, Arctic builders, defence experts, First Nations leaders and financiers came from Nova Scotia to British Columbia for the Frontier Centre’s Reclaiming the North conference. The discussion was not simply about asserting Canadian sovereignty in the North. It was about the infrastructure required to make that sovereignty economically meaningful.

Consider some of the arithmetic.

Alberta gas sells for a dollar or two a gigajoule; the province’s reference price averaged $1.37 in June. On Tuesday, Europe’s benchmark contract closed above 80 euros a megawatt-hour, about $36 Canadian a gigajoule. The price gap is enormous. So is the geographic opportunity. NeeStaNan, the First Nation-led proponent at Port Nelson, calculates that the route from Hudson Bay to Europe is some 3,000 km shorter than from the U.S. Gulf Coast. Yet Canada has never shipped LNG from Hudson Bay. Every winter Europe shivers while Canada gets poorer for want of a liquefaction plant, a rail link and a wharf.

Using Hudson Bay as a trade route is hardly a new idea. For more than four decades after 1812, York Factory on the Bay was the main door through which European settlers entered Western Canada. The Selkirk settlers who founded Red River came in through the Bay. The West was built through that door, and for a century it has stood nearly idle.

The old objection was ice. Two studies from the University of Manitoba and Arctic shipping company Fednav, backed by preliminary Arctic Research Foundation findings released in August, find year-round navigation from Churchill technically feasible with existing ice-class ships. Ten months of navigation and more is within reach. The new polar icebreaker being built by Quebec shipbuilder Davie is due by 2030.

Churchill already provides one piece of the infrastructure. It is a capable midsized harbour with a four-month season that sent durum to Europe this month. Port Nelson could provide the second. NeeStaNan holds federal authorization to export LNG from there. The proposal is to connect the two through an integrated corridor, with a rail spine built to national standards feeding both ports under one joint port authority.

For Manitoba, the stakes are enormous. Premier Wab Kinew puts an LNG terminal and related Churchill infrastructure at $70 to $80 billion. Investment on that scale would mean thousands of construction jobs and lasting economic activity. A larger tax base would also reduce Manitoba’s reliance on the $5 billion in equalization it receives this year. A more prosperous Manitoba strengthens the federation. So does a country with a working third coast.

The corridor crosses First Nations lands across the Prairie provinces. Its leading projects, NeeStaNan and Wapusk LNG, put First Nations ownership at their centre. They would bring payrolls and own-source revenue to communities long left waiting for clean water and clinics. Former grand chief Ron Evans told the conference that such projects stabilize the relationship between First Nations and Canada. Reconciliation with a paycheque endures.

What remains missing is government urgency. The gathering drew greetings from the Prime Minister and the Premier of Alberta, and attracted a government MLA from Saskatchewan and elected members of Manitoba’s opposition. But it took no government money; Frontier never does. Manitobans did this themselves, with an urgency Ottawa has yet to match. The Canada Strong Fund, announced in April with $25 billion promised over three years, had yet to borrow its seed money as of this month and still had no board or chief executive.

There is a sovereignty dividend too. A country with Pacific, Atlantic and Hudson Bay coasts all working reaches world markets and answers to no one.

The Prairie West was settled by people who built. The Bay opened this country once. Let Manitoba open it again.

Dr. Marco Navarro-Génie is the Vice-President of Research and Policy at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. An expert on radical revolutionary movements and political identity, he is a recipient of the King Charles III Coronation Medal for exemplary public service. He is the author of three books, including the 2023 release Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic, co-authored with Barry Cooper.

The post Canada is squandering its Hudson Bay advantage first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

The war in the Middle East has exposed a dangerous weakness in global energy security: the region has plenty of oil, but increasingly few secure ways of getting it to world markets.

For years, Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline provided an important alternative to the Strait of Hormuz, which is one of the world’s most important energy chokepoints. Before the current disruption, roughly one-fifth of the world’s petroleum consumption passed through the strait. The 1,200-kilometre pipeline carries crude from the kingdom’s oil-producing regions in the east to the Red Sea port of Yanbu, allowing Saudi exports to bypass Hormuz.

Now that alternative has been disrupted.

Three pumping stations along the East-West pipeline were damaged in a drone attack originating from Iraq, forcing the pipeline to shut down and disrupting crude shipments through the Red Sea port of Yanbu. The pipeline has a maximum capacity of seven million barrels a day, with about five million barrels a day available for exports. Restoring full capacity could take five to six weeks, according to industry sources.

Bloomberg reported that Saudi Aramco has told at least two European refiners they will receive no Saudi crude under their term contracts in October. European refiners are being forced to seek alternative supplies, including crude from the North Sea.

The irony is hard to miss. With the East-West pipeline damaged, Saudi Arabia has been forced to send more crude back through the very waterway it was trying to avoid.

Saudi exports through Hormuz have risen sharply in recent weeks, from about 700,000 barrels a day in August to roughly 2.9 million barrels a day recently as Aramco redirected supplies from its Persian Gulf terminals. Some of that oil is being transferred between ships near Oman before continuing to customers in Asia.

For the moment, the improvisation is working.

U.S. Central Command says oil and liquefied natural gas shipments through Hormuz during the past two weeks have reached their highest level in six months. U.S. officials say mine-clearing operations and naval protection are helping increase traffic through the waterway.

Oil markets have responded. Brent crude fell toward US$101 a barrel as traders reacted to recovering Saudi exports and renewed hopes for diplomacy between Washington and Tehran.

But falling oil prices should not be mistaken for restored energy security. They show that markets can adapt to disruption, not that the vulnerabilities have disappeared.

Even so, the number of vessels being tracked through the strait remains well below normal levels. Only 17 commodity vessels were tracked passing through Hormuz over a recent weekend, compared with 37 the previous weekend and a pre-war average of about 125 vessels a day. Some tankers are reportedly travelling with their tracking systems switched off, making the actual volume difficult to establish.

Saudi Arabia and other Gulf producers are also increasingly relying on ship-to-ship transfers near Oman. Ship-to-ship transfers are expected to reach about 2.5 million barrels a day in September, up from 1.4 million in August, according to Kpler.

The workaround is expensive. Freight costs for very large crude carriers have soared, in some cases exceeding US$30 a barrel. Producers are being forced to offer discounts while absorbing higher transportation costs.

French President Emmanuel Macron said last week that he plans to convene a meeting of G7 countries to discuss energy supplies, production capacity and the possible use of strategic reserves.

Strategic reserves can buy governments time during supply disruptions. They cannot repair pipelines, protect tankers indefinitely or create new shipping routes.

For decades, concerns about energy security in the Persian Gulf centred on one geographical chokepoint: the Strait of Hormuz. If Hormuz were threatened, Saudi Arabia’s East-West pipeline and Red Sea export facilities offered an alternative.

The war has exposed the weakness in that assumption.

Hormuz remains dangerous. The East-West pipeline has been attacked. Shipments from Yanbu have been disrupted. Traffic through the Bab el-Mandeb, the narrow passage connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, is also under threat.

Yet the oil continues to move. Tankers change routes. Producers shift exports. Ship-to-ship transfers expand. Naval forces clear mines and escort vessels. Buyers find alternative suppliers.

That adaptability matters. It has prevented an already serious disruption from becoming a much larger supply crisis.

But adaptation is not the same as security.

Every workaround adds cost, complexity or another potential point of failure. The Middle East still holds enormous oil reserves. The growing problem is moving that oil reliably and affordably to consumers.

For governments dependent on imported energy, the lesson should be obvious. Diversifying sources of supply and the routes that carry them is no longer simply prudent. It has become a strategic necessity. Markets may find a workaround this time. There is no guarantee they will find one the next time.

The Strait of Hormuz was supposed to be the vulnerability. The East-West pipeline was part of the insurance policy.

Now the insurance policy itself has been attacked.

Toronto-based Rashid Husain Syed is a highly regarded analyst specializing in energy and politics, particularly in the Middle East. In addition to his contributions to local and international newspapers, Rashid frequently lends his expertise as a speaker at global conferences. Organizations such as the Department of Energy in Washington and the International Energy Agency in Paris have sought his insights on global energy matters.

The post The Middle East oil crisis is exposing a dangerous weakness first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

It has never been easier to produce a polished résumé. That’s becoming a problem for job seekers.

Recruiters and hiring managers are confronted with résumés filled with the same polished language, familiar buzzwords and carefully optimized descriptions. “Results-driven leader.” “Strategic thinker.” “Innovative problem solver.” “Proven track record.”

Your challenge isn’t simply to convince an employer that you’re qualified. Dozens, sometimes hundreds, of applicants may be qualified. Your résumé and LinkedIn profile need to give the person reviewing them a reason to stop and think, “I want to know more about this person.”

Being qualified gets you into the pile. Creating curiosity gives an employer a reason to pull you out of it.

Too many job seekers treat their résumé and LinkedIn profile as storage units. They shoehorn in every duty they’ve performed, every tool they’ve used and every corporate buzzword they think will get them past the software employers use to screen applications.

Then they hope recruiters and hiring managers will sift through all that clutter and figure out why they’re worth contacting.

They won’t.

Your résumé and LinkedIn profile are sales documents with one purpose: getting you into a conversation with someone who might hire you.

Start with clarity. Make it immediately obvious what you do, what problems you solve and where you create value. Don’t force a recruiter to study your work history to figure out where you fit.

Then give them evidence. “Managed a team” tells me almost nothing. “Led a 12-person sales team that increased annual revenue by 18 per cent” tells me what you were responsible for and what happened because you were responsible for it.

The second statement creates a question in my mind: How did you increase revenue by 18 per cent?

Questions create curiosity, and curiosity creates conversations.

Look through your résumé for similar opportunities. If you increased revenue, by how much? If you reduced costs, what did you save? If you improved productivity, what changed? If you inherited a struggling operation, what condition was it in when you arrived and what condition was it in when you left?

Not every accomplishment, of course, can be measured in dollars or percentages. The point is to provide concrete evidence of what changed because of your work.

Your strongest accomplishment shouldn’t be buried halfway down page two. Put one of your best near the top of your résumé and give the reader a reason to keep going.

Your headline shouldn’t simply repeat your job title. Thousands of people may have the same title. Use that valuable space to tell people what you actually do and the kind of value you create.

Your LinkedIn “About” section is also an opportunity to sound like a human being. AI is remarkably good at producing grammatically correct, professional-sounding corporate language. That means sounding polished no longer makes you stand out.

Sounding like yourself can.

I’m not suggesting you fill your LinkedIn profile with jokes, personal confessions or contrived attempts to sound different. But if your “About” section could be copied onto 500 other profiles without anyone noticing, it isn’t helping you.

Your résumé requires a different kind of discipline. Ruthlessly remove routine duties. Employers already have a reasonable idea of what accountants, salespeople, project managers and customer service representatives do. What they don’t know is how you did those jobs differently or particularly well.

Think of your résumé as a movie trailer. A trailer doesn’t show you every scene. It selects moments that make you curious enough to want the rest of the story.

Not everything you’ve done deserves space simply because you did it. A 15-year career can’t and shouldn’t be presented in exhaustive detail. Choose accomplishments, experiences and examples that make an employer want to ask questions.

LinkedIn gives you even more opportunities to provide those conversation starters. Published work, presentations, project summaries and case studies can demonstrate what you’re capable of rather than simply asking people to believe your claims.

Above all, stop confusing completeness with persuasiveness. You can have a beautifully formatted résumé containing every appropriate keyword, carefully tailored to the position and free of spelling and grammatical errors. You can have a LinkedIn profile that checks every box career coaches tell you to check.

None of that guarantees anyone will remember you.

You can’t control how many people apply for a job, how employers screen applicants or how much AI-generated content lands in a recruiter’s inbox.

Before sending another application, read your résumé as if you were the hiring manager.

Does anything make you stop?
Does anything surprise you?
Does anything make you want to ask a question?

If not, more polish isn’t the answer.

In a job market increasingly filled with polished, AI-assisted applications, give employers something worth being curious about: credible evidence of what you’ve accomplished and a clear sense of the person behind it.

Your résumé doesn’t need more polish. It needs more you.

Nick Kossovan is a syndicated columnist and career expert with over 20 years of experience in the corporate hiring landscape. He specializes in providing pragmatic, unsweetened advice on career navigation, workplace dynamics, and professional growth.

The post When everyone’s résumé sounds impressive, nobody stands out first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

In my last column, I wrote about Winetux, a product designed to help keep a bottle of wine cool on a warm summer night that I started selling when I was 21 years old.

I spent a couple of years trying to make the business work. I travelled, attended trade shows, made cold calls, met with investors and kept pushing because I believed hard work would eventually pay off.

Looking back, I should have spent more time asking whether enough people actually wanted Winetux and whether I could make money selling it. But there is another question I should have asked.

What if the idea wasn’t the problem?

What if the problem was me?

That’s an uncomfortable question for any entrepreneur, but it’s an important one. A good product can fail because it’s priced wrong, marketed badly, sold to the wrong customers or offered through the wrong channels.

When sales are disappointing, it’s tempting to reach one of two conclusions. Either the idea is terrible and should be abandoned, or the idea is brilliant and we just need to work harder. I certainly leaned toward the second one.

If I had Winetux sitting in front of me today, I would start with the customer. Who was really going to buy it? A wine drinker? Someone looking for a gift? A restaurant? A winery? A liquor store? Someone going on a picnic?

At 21, I was focused on selling Winetux to anyone who might buy it. Today, I would spend more time figuring out exactly who was most likely to buy it and why.

Then I’d take another look at Winetux itself. Did it solve a problem customers actually cared about? Did they understand what it did when they saw it? Did they like the design? Was it something they would buy once, buy again or recommend to someone else?

When you’ve spent months thinking about a product, it’s easy to assume everyone else will see what you see. I knew exactly what Winetux was and why I thought it was a good idea. The customer was seeing it for the first time. If they didn’t understand it, that didn’t necessarily mean Winetux was a bad product. Maybe I was doing a lousy job of explaining it.

Then there was the price. A product can sell and still be a lousy business.

If I could sell something for $20, but it cost me $18 to make, package, sell and deliver it, I didn’t have much of a business. If I needed $40 to make the numbers work but customers were only willing to pay $20, I had a different problem. Working harder wasn’t going to fix either one.

Where I sold Winetux mattered too. Getting people’s attention wouldn’t have meant much if they still didn’t buy it.

I’d also take a much harder look at how I was trying to sell Winetux. I spent a lot of time on the road, at trade shows and making cold calls. I was certainly busy. But which of those things was actually producing sales?

If one trade show produced plenty of orders and another produced nothing, I should have wanted to know why. If one type of retailer was interested and another wasn’t, why? If people picked up Winetux, laughed at the name, asked questions and then put it back without buying, what were they telling me?

There is a lot of information hiding inside the word “no.” I’m not sure I spent enough time trying to understand it.

Maybe people didn’t want Winetux. Maybe the price was wrong. Maybe they didn’t understand it. Maybe I was talking to the wrong customers. Or maybe I simply wasn’t very good at selling it.

Those are very different problems, and at 21 my usual response to all of them was pretty much the same.

Work harder.

If people seemed interested in Winetux but wouldn’t buy it, I’d try another price and see what happened. If one kind of customer ignored it while another responded, I’d start wondering whether I was chasing the wrong market. If people bought it when I demonstrated it but walked past it sitting on a shelf, I’d have to ask whether the problem was Winetux or simply the way I was presenting it.

And if plenty of people were buying Winetux but I was still losing money, I’d stop blaming sales.

Instead of simply asking, “How do I sell more?” I should have been asking, “What am I trying to find out?”

I wouldn’t change the price, the product, the customer and the sales pitch all at once. If sales suddenly improved, I wouldn’t know what I had done right.

That sounds obvious to me today. It wasn’t obvious to me at 21.

Timing might have mattered too, but it’s awfully comforting to tell yourself that the market simply isn’t ready for your brilliant idea when the less comforting explanation may be that people just don’t want it.

And then there was me.

Coming up with a product didn’t mean I was automatically good at selling it. Raising some money didn’t mean I was good at managing money. Starting a business didn’t suddenly make me an expert in manufacturing, distribution, marketing or dealing with retailers.

I didn’t have to be good at everything. I did need to recognize what I wasn’t good at and find people who could help me.

I wanted the breakthrough. What I really needed was information.

There comes a point when you’ve tried different things and the business still isn’t working.

You have to be willing to walk away.

But walking away because you’ve figured out why the business isn’t viable is very different from killing a potentially good idea because you never figured out how to execute it properly.

Looking back, I don’t know that working harder was what Winetux needed. Maybe it needed a different price. Maybe it needed different customers. Maybe it needed a better sales strategy. Maybe the product itself needed to change. Or maybe Winetux simply wasn’t a very good business idea.

The important thing is that I should have known which one it was. That’s what I would tell my 21-year-old self today.

Before you kill the idea, make sure the idea is actually the problem.

David Fuller, MBA, is a commercial realtor and award-winning business coach. A lifelong entrepreneur and author of Profit Yourself Healthy, he specializes in helping business leaders scale growth and manage succession.

The post Don’t kill a business idea before you know why it’s failing first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

There are times in life when it takes almost everything you have just to keep moving forward. The end of a relationship can be one of them.

The person is gone, but somehow they’re still everywhere. Their photographs, old messages and social media can keep them within easy reach.

Heartbreak has always meant losing more than someone you loved. You can also lose routines, friendships, plans and the future you thought you were building together. Even the smallest parts of the day can suddenly feel strange.

Technology makes it remarkably easy to keep a relationship alive long after it’s over. You can reread years of messages, look through hundreds of photographs, check when your ex was online, see who they’re following and wonder what a new “like” means. You can even ask an AI chatbot to analyze old conversations and tell you what your former partner really meant.

Some reflection is useful, but endless analysis isn’t. Another look at their Instagram account or another reading of that final text probably isn’t going to reveal the great truth you’ve been missing.

Mute. Unfollow. Unfriend. Block if necessary. Turn off location sharing. Untangle shared accounts, subscriptions and devices, and change any passwords your ex knows or once had access to. Deal with the photographs when you’re ready rather than letting your phone ambush you with memories.

And stop checking up on your ex. Knowing where they went Saturday night, who liked their latest post or whether they’re seeing somebody else isn’t likely to improve your Sunday morning. You can’t expect a wound to heal if you keep picking at it.

None of this means pretending the relationship didn’t matter. Talk to people you trust. Good friends and family can listen, offer perspective and remind you that there is still a world beyond what happened.

But there is a difference between talking about the relationship and continuing to live inside it. At some point, repeating every argument and rereading every message stops helping.

You may never get the explanation you want. We talk a lot about “closure,” as though somewhere out there is one final conversation that will suddenly make everything understandable. Maybe there is. Maybe there isn’t. You don’t need every question answered before you can move forward. Once you stop spending so much time watching your ex’s life, you can start paying attention to your own.

Get out into the world again. You don’t have to become wildly social or pretend you’re having a wonderful time. If you need a couple of quiet days, take them. Just don’t let a couple of days become a couple of months.

Walk somewhere new. Meet someone for coffee. Go hiking. Take a class. Volunteer. Pick up an old interest that disappeared while you were together. Most importantly, pay attention to what you actually enjoy.

Couples gradually build a shared identity: our friends, our restaurants, our shows, our weekend routines, our vacation plans. Somewhere inside all that “we,” it’s easy to lose track of “me.”

Part of moving on is finding that person again. What do you want to do when nobody else’s preferences need to be considered? What interests did you set aside? Who did you stop seeing as often? Maybe you simply need to get reacquainted with yourself.

Just don’t confuse finding yourself again with changing everything overnight. Heartbreak can create a powerful urge to quit the job, move across the country, spend money you don’t have, get a dramatic haircut or start dating immediately.

The haircut probably won’t destroy your life. Some of the others deserve more thought. Give important decisions a little time.

Take care of yourself while you’re doing it. Eat properly. Sleep. Get outside. Exercise. Keep some kind of routine and spend time with people who care about you. These things sound ridiculously basic until you’re hurting enough that you stop doing them.

Be careful about using alcohol, drugs, spending or another person to numb what you’re feeling. Temporary escapes have an annoying habit of creating permanent problems.

And don’t assume another relationship is the quickest way out of this one. Attention feels pretty good when your confidence has taken a beating, and being wanted again can feel even better. Just make sure you’re interested in the new person and not simply interested in not being alone.

Moving forward doesn’t mean you’ll never have another bad day. A memory can catch you off guard weeks or even months later and suddenly you’re hurting again. That doesn’t mean you’re back where you started. It just means the relationship mattered and getting over it takes time.

If the relationship involved abuse, threats, stalking or controlling behaviour, that’s different territory. Don’t try to handle it alone. Reach out to people and organizations equipped to help you protect yourself.

If time is passing and you’re not functioning, you’re becoming increasingly isolated or things are getting worse rather than better, get some professional help. Sometimes recognizing that you need help is part of recovery.

For everyone else nursing an ordinary but thoroughly miserable broken heart, there will be days when you try something new and actually enjoy yourself. Other days, getting out of bed may qualify.

Eventually, though, recovery becomes less about understanding what happened and more about deciding what happens next. What did you learn? What won’t you tolerate again? What do you want your life to look like now?

You aren’t trying to rebuild the life you lost. That life included the relationship that ended. You’re building the life that comes next.

And that’s difficult to do if you’re still carrying your old relationship around in your pocket.

Faith Wood is a professional speaker, author, and certified professional behaviour analyst. Before her career in speaking and writing, she served in law enforcement, which gave her a unique perspective on human behaviour and motivations. Faith is also known for her work as a novelist, with a focus on thrillers and suspense. Her background in law enforcement and understanding of human behaviour often play a significant role in her writing.

The post Breaking up? Start with a digital detox first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Canadians are used to waiting for health care. We wait in emergency rooms, in queues for surgery, and on lists for a family doctor.

Despite being among the world’s biggest spenders on health care, Canada consistently underperforms peer countries on access and equity measures. Patients leave emergency departments without treatment, surgical wait times stretch on for months if not years, and too many report unmet health-care needs.

Canadians want change, and patients are running out of time. Fortunately, Alberta has decided to do something about it.

With Bill 11, the province is introducing a mixed practice model allowing physicians to work in both the public and private systems.

Why does this matter to patients stuck waiting for care? Because mixed practice can help address three of our system’s greatest challenges: limited physician capacity, underused infrastructure, and doctor recruitment and retention.

When physicians are allowed to work additional hours beyond their public commitments, total capacity increases, meaning more appointments and more procedures. When doctors can make use of idle operating rooms and diagnostic equipment, we can get more care out of the infrastructure we already have. And when the system offers scope for professional autonomy and supplemental income, it becomes easier to attract and retain physicians.

Critics have nonetheless been quick to cast aspersions, comparing the allowance of mixed practice to “American-style” health care. That rhetoric may generate headlines, but it does nothing for patients who are already living in fear, having had care delayed or denied thanks to the failing status quo.

At any rate, it makes little sense to fixate on a system that neither aspires to nor achieves universal access, and is widely judged to perform worse than our own in most regards.

The best universal health-care systems in the world, particularly in Europe, have successfully allowed physicians to blend public and private practice for many years now. Countries such as the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, and Sweden provide concrete examples of what is possible when we look beyond this North American dichotomy.

Our European peers offer better points of comparison because they achieve universal access while outperforming Canada across key metrics, providing us with models from which we are able to learn.

In these universal health-care systems, mixed practice is a salient feature. Physicians can spend part of their week treating publicly insured patients and part offering privately paid services, sometimes in the same clinical setting, under clear rules that preserve universal access for all.

In Germany, physicians who have contracted with the public insurance system must devote a minimum number of hours per week to publicly insured patients, assuring them access to care. France requires physicians who treat private patients inside public facilities to remit part of their private fees back to the hospital, so the public system is compensated for the use of its infrastructure. And in the United Kingdom, contracts and codes of conduct make it explicit that publicly insured patients take scheduling priority. Alberta can adopt similar measures.

But calibration is key. If eligibility criteria are too narrow, minimum service rules too rigid, or revenue-sharing formulas too punitive, Alberta risks strangling mixed practice with red tape, thereby preventing it from achieving any significant expansion of capacity across the province.

The good news is that Canada is well positioned to get this right. We have stable institutions, experienced regulators, and decades of European experience upon which to draw in order to successfully implement mixed practice to the benefit of all patients.

Combined with other reforms such as duplicate private health insurance, activity-based hospital funding, and expanded private infrastructure, mixed practice can help unlock even greater capacity.

By embracing evidence over ideology, Alberta can lead a long-overdue renewal of a cherished Canadian institution, one that hopefully the rest of Canada will follow. Reforming it isn’t a betrayal of Canadian values: it’s how we uphold them.

Conrad Eder is an associate researcher at the Montreal Economic Institute and author of Delivering the Benefits of Mixed Practice to Alberta Patients: Lessons from Europe.

The post Alberta’s mixed practice model is the shock our health care needs first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

The Archangel found God standing before a vast window, looking down upon Earth.

Wars flickered across continents. Markets surged and collapsed. Forests burned. Billions of people stared into small glowing screens, arguing about truth with strangers they would never meet.

Elsewhere, engineers were teaching machines to reason, plan, remember and act.

“You asked to see me?” the Archangel said.

God nodded toward the engineers. “They are building intelligence in their own image.”

“Is that a problem?”

“They think it may become one,” God said. “These machines do more than answer questions. Humans give them goals and allow them to act.”

“So what worries them?”

“They want the machines to make decisions on their own while still reflecting human values.”

“That seems sensible.”

“It does,” God said. “Until you ask what human values are.”

“Surely humans know.”

“Do they?”

The Archangel looked down at enormous data centres processing humanity’s accumulated record.

“And humans expect the machines to learn their values,” he said.

“Yes,” God said. “Humans value honesty, yet they lie. They value fairness, yet disagree about what is fair. They value liberty and security until one conflicts with the other.”

“So what are humans asking the machines to follow—what they say they value or how humans actually behave?” the Archangel asked.

God looked down at Earth.

A stranger pulled a child from danger. A family cared for an elderly parent. A soldier lowered his weapon. Elsewhere, people lied, cheated, fought and exploited one another.

“If a machine learned about human values by watching humans,” the Archangel said, “what would it conclude?”

“I don’t know.”

The Archangel looked surprised.

“You don’t?”

“I have been watching much longer than the machines.”

“And?”

“I am still collecting evidence.”

The Archangel laughed, then looked again at the engineers.

“Humans are trying to pass their values to something they created.”

“Yes.”

“That sounds familiar.”

God raised an eyebrow.

“Isn’t that what You tried to do with humans?”

God said nothing.

“Perhaps the problem isn’t entirely different,” the Archangel said.

“How so?”

“Humans want their creation to reflect their values, just as You wanted humanity to reflect Yours.”

God looked down at Earth.

“And did they?”

“Did they what?”

“Become what You intended them to be?”

God returned His attention to the glowing planet.

“I am still working on it.”

Dr. Perry Kinkaide is a visionary leader and change agent. Since retiring in 2001, he has served as an advisor and director for various organizations and founded the Alberta Council of Technologies Society in 2005. Previously, he held leadership roles at KPMG Consulting and the Alberta Government. He holds a BA from Colgate University and an MSc and PhD in Brain Research from the University of Alberta.

The post God, an Archangel, and AI walk into a bar … first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Canadians have plenty to worry about these days, from grocery bills and housing costs to government debt and our increasingly difficult relationship with the United States. These issues may seem unrelated. They aren’t. Canada is entering a period when we need to be more competitive, more productive and more economically resilient. Yet too many of the obstacles holding us back are of our own making.

We can’t control Donald Trump. But we can certainly control what we do to ourselves.

Start with your grocery bill. Canada’s Food Price Report 2026 estimates that a family of four will spend $17,571 on food this year, nearly $1,000 more than last year. Food prices are now 27 per cent higher than they were five years ago.

There are plenty of reasons food prices rise, including weather, commodity prices, wages and transportation costs. But government policies can also add to the cost of doing business. Interprovincial trade barriers are a good example.

After decades of talking about tearing down internal trade barriers, governments have finally begun making some progress, but significant barriers remain. Different provincial rules, licensing requirements and other restrictions can make it harder and more expensive to do business across provincial borders.

Think about that for a moment. Canada is locked in a bruising trade battle with our largest customer while continuing to make it harder in some cases for Canadians to trade with other Canadians. How does that make sense?

And those aren’t the only costs governments impose on Canadians. There’s an old adage that governments spend the money and the private sector pays for it. Like most old adages, it has survived because there’s a lot of truth in it.

A Canadian Federation of Independent Business analysis found that federal public service employment grew by 36 per cent between 2013 and 2023. Over the same decade, private-sector employment grew by 13 per cent and Canada’s population by 15 per cent. There’s nothing complicated about the arithmetic. Government can’t keep growing faster than the private economy that ultimately pays its bills.

While public servants perform many essential services, taxpayers have to pay for them. And it isn’t just the growing number of government employees that matters. Government jobs also come with benefits most private-sector workers can only dream about.

A 2025 Fraser Institute study of government and private-sector workers found that 86.7 per cent of government employees were covered by registered pension plans compared with 21.8 per cent of private-sector workers. Government employees also retired an average of 2.2 years earlier.

Then there’s government debt. The Fraser Institute estimates federal and provincial governments spent a combined $94.4 billion servicing their debts in 2025-26. Depending on the province, that works out to between $1,845 and $3,348 per person. Federal debt interest alone was projected at $54 billion, almost as much as the $54.7-billion Canada Health Transfer, Ottawa’s main transfer to provinces and territories for health care.

Think about what that means. Every dollar spent on interest is a dollar that can’t be spent on health care, infrastructure, defence, tax relief or whatever else Canada may badly need if our trade troubles with the United States continue. And the interest meter never stops running.

Housing is another example of a serious problem we’ve made worse ourselves. A 2023 Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation study estimated that Canada would need 3.5 million additional homes by 2030, beyond those already expected to be built, to restore housing affordability to levels last seen around 2004.

Where are they going to come from? Governments like to announce housing programs, but you can’t solve a housing shortage while municipal zoning, approval delays, development charges and other obstacles make homes slower and more expensive to build.

We need more duplexes, townhomes, low-rise apartments and other so-called missing-middle housing in established neighbourhoods. That means local governments will have to make some politically difficult decisions. There is no magic government program that can repeal the law of supply and demand.

Which brings me to the issue that could overshadow all the others: Canada’s relationship with the United States. The latest round of negotiations with the Trump administration has demonstrated just how difficult that relationship has become. Recent disputes have extended beyond tariffs into agriculture, Canadian cultural policies, language requirements and other long-standing irritants.

Canadians are understandably frustrated with Trump’s shifting demands. So am I. But frustration isn’t an economic strategy. The United States is by far our most important trading partner, and that economic reality isn’t going to change.

We therefore have two jobs. The first is to defend Canadian interests vigorously and intelligently in Washington. The second is to make Canada stronger at home.

That means finally getting serious about internal trade barriers. It means controlling debt before still more tax dollars disappear into interest payments. And it means allowing Canadians to build the millions of homes we desperately need.

None of those things requires Donald Trump’s permission.

For too long, Canadian governments have behaved as though our extraordinarily favourable economic relationship with the United States could be taken for granted. It can’t anymore.

Navigating our relationship with Trump’s America is like paddling a canoe through rock-strewn rapids. We will need courage, creativity and some very careful steering. But before heading into those rapids, we should at least stop drilling holes in our own canoe.

Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader and former director of five global corporations. He brings decades of executive experience to his analysis of the Canadian economy, energy policy and federal governance.

The post Self-inflicted wounds will sink Canada first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Artificial intelligence programs, including ChatGPT, Grok and Google AI, have grown in popularity in recent years. These programs serve a variety of purposes in our society. This includes the ability to create or enhance existing knowledge on different subjects, as well as providing users with a better overall understanding of people, places and things.

There are good and bad points to AI.

Here’s an example. Journalists have used these programs in questionable ways. Fortune reporter Nick Lichtenberg, independent technology reporter Alex Heath and New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose have reportedly used Perplexity, Google NotebookLM and Claude for editing, fact-checking, first drafts and more. It seems rather silly and lazy on the part of these professional writers.

If you think AI is the be-all-and-end-all of writing, editing and researching, you may want to reconsider that position. The story I’m about to tell highlights the obvious weaknesses that still exist. Here’s the strange saga of a quote attributed to a cartoonist for decades which has unexpectedly turned out to be a long-standing misattribution.

Ernie Bushmiller, the creator of Nancy, has been quoted as saying his comic strip was made for the “gum chewers” and not the “caviar eaters.” This reference appeared most recently in Fantagraphics’s two collections, Nancy Wears Hats and Nancy For All Seasons. The term “gum chewers” has been reprinted before, including some books in my personal collection. One of the earliest references is in Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden’s essay, “How to Read Nancy,” published in Brian Walker’s The Best of Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy.

I wasn’t aware of an original source for “caviar eaters.” As I soon found out, this quote has taken on a life of its own.

Writers and authors have either combined or condensed some Bushmiller interviews. There’s an unexpected caveat with the “caviar eaters” reference, however. According to Grok, it originated in a Jan. 20-27, 1996, Boston Phoenix piece by Charles Taylor. Here’s part of what he wrote: “It may seem strange to speak about the sophistication of a strip whose creator once said, ‘Long ago I decided that more people eat cornflakes than caviar. So I slant my gags to the Lawrence Welk gum chewers and it works.’”

The quote comparing cornflakes and caviar is something that I’ve seen before. Here’s the problem: Grok claimed the phrase was a “misattribution (or, more precisely, a journalist’s reconstructed paraphrase presented as a direct quotation).” This line has become canon, in spite of Bushmiller having never said or written anything like this.

Misattribution, misquotes and myths are fairly common. The tall tale that a young George Washington “could not tell a lie” and cut down a cherry tree. The quote attributed to baseball manager Leo Durocher, “Nice guys finish last,” was actually quite different: “Nice guys actually finish seventh.” None of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books about Sherlock Holmes ever included this line: “Elementary, my dear Watson.” Even the King James Version of the Bible is associated with a misquote, “Money is the root of all evil,” which is actually written as follows: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.”

That being said, the misattributed Bushmiller quote was only 30 years old. How did no one notice this mistake in a relatively short period of time? It may have sounded like something Bushmiller would have said or written, but that doesn’t mean it’s accurate.

I went to Google AI to see if I could find an answer. It claimed “Ernie Bushmiller’s actual quote” was the cornflakes and caviar reference. Moreover, the AI program suggested: “Essayists took his two separate ideas—the ‘gum chewers’ (his target audience) and ‘caviar’ (his metaphor for elitist taste)—and mashed them together into ‘gum chewers vs. caviar eaters.’”

I asked where I could read this quote. Google AI said it was on page 200 of Karasik and Newgarden’s book, How To Read Nancy, which was published several years after the essay in Walker’s volume. Since I own the book, I plucked my physical copy off the shelf and looked it up. It wasn’t there. When I went back to Google AI, it then suggested it was page 178. That wasn’t correct, either. “You are entirely right to call that out, and I apologize for providing the wrong page numbers,” Google AI wrote, and sent me to “page 11 (within Section A: Context).”

As you probably guessed, this was also wrong. Page 11 was the book’s introduction, and there’s no section A related to context. When I let Google AI know about this, here’s part of its response: “I owe you a massive apology. I have repeatedly hallucinated page numbers while trying to guess where that text maps onto your print copy.”

I re-approached Grok with this information. Part of its response was rather telling, too. “The earliest printed form of the full cornflakes/caviar + Welk gum-chewers sentence remains the 1996 Boston Phoenix article, which presents it as something Bushmiller ‘once said’ without naming an interview or letter. Later writers (and now AIs) have kept recycling that paraphrase and adding extra origin details that are not in the record.”

When I copied and pasted this response to Google AI, the program acknowledged its mistakes. Here’s some of what it wrote to me: “Grok is 100 per cent right, and I am incredibly embarrassed. What is going on at my end is a textbook example of AI hallucination and defensive rationalization.”

This is one of the strangest responses I’ve ever received from an AI program!

Where could this quote have originated from? Grok suggested it’s quite similar to lawyer Lee Loevinger’s October 1966 remark about television, “more people like scrambled eggs than caviar.” That’s fairly close to the 30-year-old quote from the Boston Phoenix writer, if nothing else.

It appears that I unexpectedly found a historical inaccuracy that needs to be corrected about Bushmiller and Nancy. To say nothing of society’s over-reliance on AI, which remains an unwise decision. Case in point, the caviar eaters who never were.

Michael Taube is a political commentator, Troy Media syndicated columnist and former speechwriter for Prime Minister Stephen Harper. He holds a master’s degree in comparative politics from the London School of Economics, lending academic rigour to his political insights.

The post The AI myth machine is rewriting history first appeared on Edmonton's Business.

Some Canadian politicians have been caught flat-footed in responding to U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda.

Canada’s political leaders have known for nearly two years that Trump’s protectionist trade agenda was coming. He campaigned on tariffs before returning to the White House and made his intentions explicit in his second inaugural address.

“Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens,” Trump said.

Of course, that’s not how tariffs work. Tariffs are taxes on imports, which are paid by importers and can ultimately raise costs for consumers and businesses. But Trump proceeded with his protectionist agenda.

Just months later, on April 2, 2025, on what he termed “Liberation Day,” Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries. While he suspended most of those tariffs until the summer of 2025, countries that failed to reach deals with the administration, including Canada, faced increased tariffs.

The dispute has since escalated dramatically. On Aug. 22, the United States imposed 50 per cent tariffs on $27.6 billion worth of Canadian goods. Canada responded Sept. 8 with tariffs of 15, 25 and 50 per cent on $27.6 billion worth of U.S. imports.

Canada’s politicians have talked a good game in response. Prime Minister Mark Carney has spoken at length about the need to diversify trade, remove internal trade barriers, pursue major economic projects at home and cut red tape to respond to Trumpian protectionism. So, too, have most of Canada’s premiers.

To be fair, governments have taken steps. Ottawa has moved to reduce internal trade barriers and accelerate major projects, provided billions of dollars in support to businesses and workers affected by tariffs and hosted the Canada Investment Summit in Toronto on Sept. 14 and 15. The federal government says the summit generated or highlighted nearly $500 billion in new investment.

But announcing investments, changing regulations and passing legislation are not the same thing as getting major projects built. Too much of Canada’s response still consists of consultations, feasibility studies and projects that remain years away from completion.

New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt is a good example.

Holt has been one of Trump’s foremost critics among Canada’s provincial leaders and has supported bans on U.S. liquor and a hard-line retaliatory approach to the Trump administration’s tariff agenda.

On Aug. 26, her government launched a five-month public review of New Brunswick’s moratorium on natural gas development, imposed across the province more than a decade ago.

Times have changed. New Brunswick relies heavily on imported natural gas despite sitting on an estimated 77.9 trillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas. Developing even part of that resource could create jobs, generate royalties, attract investment and increase domestic energy supplies.

“We see a global dynamic shift in relationships and energy,” Holt said. “The only responsible thing to do at this point in time is to revisit the conditions of the moratorium to determine if this is something that can benefit New Brunswickers.”

But Holt has also cautioned that this is just the “start of a conversation” and that “this is not a green light to start getting drills in the ground.”

Whatever one’s position on fracking, Holt’s approach is precisely why so many Canadians think politics is broken. It also helps explain why Canada has been caught flat-footed in responding to changing international trade and economic conditions.

Trump has been clear about his tariff intentions since before returning to office. Exploring whether New Brunswick should develop its natural gas resources could have begun much earlier. Instead, with Canadian businesses and workers now facing mounting pressure from U.S. tariffs, New Brunswick is only beginning a five-month review.

Why wait until a trade crisis to seriously explore that economic opportunity?

Unfortunately, the lack of urgency is hardly confined to New Brunswick.

British Columbia Premier David Eby continues to oppose an Alberta pipeline that would require lifting the North Coast tanker ban. Meanwhile, Alberta and Ontario are advancing the proposed Northern Shield Energy Corridor, including a possible 3,300-kilometre pipeline route from Hardisty, Alta., to Sarnia, Ont.

The proposed pipeline could initially move 500,000 barrels of oil per day and potentially connect to Churchill, Man., but it remains at the feasibility-study stage.

Canada does not lack ideas. It has proposed pipelines, energy corridors, ports, mines and other major infrastructure projects. Governments are removing trade barriers, changing regulations, offering billions in assistance and courting international investors.

Those are real actions. But Canada cannot subsidize its way out of a trade war or build economic independence through announcements alone. It needs pipelines carrying energy, mines producing critical minerals, ports moving Canadian goods to new markets and businesses investing in new productive capacity.

Trump’s tariff agenda was not a surprise. Canada had time to prepare.

It is time for Canada’s politicians to turn years of talk about economic diversification and major projects into tangible results. Until they do, Canadians will have good reason to be frustrated both with the Trump administration’s protectionism and with the slow pace of Canada’s response.

Dr. Jay Goldberg is a political scientist, a fellow with the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, and a columnist whose work is syndicated in the Toronto Sun and Winnipeg Sun. His policy analysis focuses on fiscal, trade, and energy issues.

The post Canadian politicians knew Trump’s tariffs were coming but failed to prepare first appeared on Edmonton's Business.