76% of people who own small-to-medium-sized businesses are planning to retire within the next decade. What happens when they call it quits? Who will take over those businesses, if anyone? What will happen to the people they employ? These are all pressing questions, but the vast majority of small business owners in Canada do not have a succession plan. On this episode, Cordell Jacks, CEO and General Partner of The Regenerative Capital Group, joins us to explain... The scale of the wave of retirements coming in Canadian small businesses. The risks to the economy if we don't plan for the succession wave. Why entrepreneurs who buy businesses succeed more often than those who start from scratch. The interesting way his investment fund is incorporating social and community impact into their business model. ----- More episodes of Free Lunch by The Peak: https://readthepeak.com/shows/free-lunch Follow Taylor on Twitter: @taylorscollon Follow Sarah on Twitter: @sarahbartnicka Subscribe to The Peak's daily business newsletter: https://readthepeak.com/b/the-peak/subscribe

If you want to make yourself mad about the state of transportation in Canada, all you have to do is go to Europe. Anyone who’s made the trip can tell you that in almost every European country, it’s faster, more convenient, and more comfortable to take public transportation than it is here. And the same is true now in many parts of Asia—places that not long ago were much poorer than Canada, with much less well-developed infrastructure. So why is public transportation in Canada so far behind these other parts of the world?Why does it seem to take forever to get anything built here (and cost way more)?And what would we need to do differently to fix it?To answer these questions, we’re joined by Reece Martin, who is a public transport expert, consultant, and creator of the wonderful and fascinating YouTube channel RMTransit, which has 250,000 subscribers and hundreds of videos all about different transportation systems around the world. ----- More episodes of Free Lunch by The Peak: https://readthepeak.com/shows/free-lunch Follow Taylor on Twitter: @taylorscollon Follow Sarah on Twitter: @sarahbartnicka Subscribe to The Peak's daily business newsletter: https://readthepeak.com/b/the-peak/subscribe

Senior Economist Brendon Bernard discusses Canada's job market, highlighting low unemployment rates, wage increases, and population growth challenges. The podcast delves into the complexities of tracking job market data, real wages, labor productivity, Alberta's economic struggles, and the future of the energy sector.

If you look at a chart of global nuclear energy output over time, what you see is hockey-stick growth from the mid-1960s through the mid-1990s—and then nothing.After growing from zero to around 2600 THw, we just stopped building more of it. But that’s starting to change. Around the world, new nuclear projects are starting up, and plants scheduled for shutdown are being refurbished to last for decades to come. And one of the places at the forefront of this nuclear renaissance is Ontario. Ontario already produces an outsized share of the world’s nuclear energy—around 3.7% of the global total, ahead of Germany and the UK. And in the last couple of years, it announced plans to increase that dramatically, with new reactors and refurbishments at its plants in Bruce Country, Darlington, and Pickering. We recently had the chance to tour the Pickering facility and see firsthand the work that’s going on there. Afterward, we sat down with Riley Found, a Senior Manager for New Nuclear Growth at Ontario Power Generation, to talk about what's driving the renaissance in Ontario's nuclear sector and what's changed since the last time we built nuclear in the 1980s.----- More episodes of Free Lunch by The Peak: https://readthepeak.com/shows/free-lunch Follow Taylor on Twitter: @taylorscollon Follow Sarah on Twitter: @sarahbartnicka Subscribe to The Peak's daily business newsletter: https://readthepeak.com/b/the-peak/subscribe

This episode originally aired on April 4, 2023.In the past six months, publicly-available artificial intelligence models have advanced from an interesting toy to, with the launch of ChatGPT-4, something altogether different. The new version of OpenAI's language model can write reasonably good code, pass standardized tests like the LSAT with flying colours, and understand subtle jokes—things that machines have never done.As its capabilities have advanced, a growing number of people have expressed concern that AI could pose a threat to people—not just by wiping out jobs or being used to spread disinformation, but by acquiring goals of their own, and pursuing them at our expense.Our guest today, AI safety researcher Jérémie Harris, has advised top security officials in the US and Canada on these risks, and he joins us today to explain why he is concerned about where artificial intelligence is heading, and what it means for us.-----Links: Get Jeremie's new book, Quantum Physics Made Me Do It Follow Jeremie on Twitter More episodes of Free Lunch by The Peak: https://readthepeak.com/shows/free-lunch Follow Taylor on Twitter: @taylorscollon Follow Sarah on Twitter: @sarahbartnicka Subscribe to The Peak's daily business newsletter: https://readthepeak.com/b/the-peak/subscribe

The Online News Act, or Bill C-18, has already radically changed how Canadians get their news. First and foremost, we can no longer get it on Facebook or Instagram. Google may be the next to go, depending on what the final regulations look like. But Canada isn't the first country to attempt to bring in regulations like C-18. Several European countries have tried to force Big Tech to pay publishers, too, and in some cases have been subject to news blocks that are still in effect. Ricard Gil is an Associate Professor and Distinguished Faculty Fellow of Business Economics Smith School of Business of Queen’s University, and has studied the impact of these regulations on the media industry in European countries. He joins us to explain what happened in Europe and how Big Tech's response has impacted the sector there. -----Links: More episodes of Free Lunch by The Peak: https://readthepeak.com/shows/free-lunch Follow Taylor on Twitter: @taylorscollon Follow Sarah on Twitter: @sarahbartnicka Subscribe to The Peak's daily business newsletter: https://readthepeak.com/b/the-peak/subscribe

A recession is coming. A soft landing is around the corner. Inflation is here to stay. Inflation is transitory. Rates are going to stay elevated indefinitely. Central banks are going to cut rates soon. These are all messages that investors have heard at some point over the past two years or so, as every new bit of economic data seems to bring new forecasts about where the economy is heading. In such a confusing environment filled with mixed signals, how can the average person hope to manage their money effectively? On this episode, Andrei Bruno, Director, Exchange Traded Funds for Fidelity Canada, joins us to bring some clarity to this muddled picture and share his view on how to make smart investment decisions when the future is so unclear. -----Links: More episodes of Free Lunch by The Peak: https://readthepeak.com/shows/free-lunch Follow Taylor on Twitter: @taylorscollon Follow Sarah on Twitter: @sarahbartnicka Subscribe to The Peak's daily business newsletter: https://readthepeak.com/b/the-peak/subscribe

The economy has been through a pretty turbulent period over the past few years, and one of the sectors that’s experienced that the most has to be the restaurant industry. Pretty much all the big macro trends we’ve lived through show up here. Whether it’s the supply shocks of COVID, the inflation of the past 18 months, or disruptions in the labour market, restaurants have experienced all of these things in a really dramatic way. And through it all, they’ve had to go on opening their doors and serving customers every night if they wanted to stay in business. Today we talk to someone who has lived and worked through this firsthand to find out what it’s been like to be in the trenches running a restaurant during all of this, and what that can teach us about what’s going on in the economy more broadly.Our guest Yannick Bigourdan is the owner and operator of some of the best restaurants in Toronto, including The Carbon Bar and Lucie, and was also behind two local institutions, Nota Bene and Splendido.-----Links: More episodes of Free Lunch by The Peak: https://readthepeak.com/shows/free-lunch Follow Taylor on Twitter: @taylorscollon Follow Sarah on Twitter: @sarahbartnicka Subscribe to The Peak's daily business newsletter: https://readthepeak.com/b/the-peak/subscribe

This episode originally aired on January 24, 2023. Anyone who has dealt with Canada's healthcare system knows that it's under incredible strain. Part of that is because of the pandemic and the backlogs that piled up over the past three years. But many of the factors that led to the crisis we're now facing have been building up for much longer than that.Dr. Saad Ahmed, a family physician based out of Vancouver and lecturer at the University of Toronto's Department of Family & Community Medicine, joins us to break down how exactly our healthcare system works and explain the root causes of its biggest problems.-----Links: More episodes of Free Lunch by The Peak: https://readthepeak.com/shows/free-lunch Follow Taylor on Twitter: @taylorscollon Follow Sarah on Twitter: @sarahbartnicka Subscribe to The Peak's daily business newsletter: https://readthepeak.com/b/the-peak/subscribe

The wildfires Canada has experienced this year have been the worst on record, and it's not even close. Most of us have been impacted in one way or another. Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated from their homes, and—tragically—a number of people have lost their lives.In this episode on Canada's wildfires, we are joined by Derek Nighbor, President of the Forest Products Association of Canada, to look at their impact on the forestry industry, how businesses in the sector are responding, whether we're facing another supply shock that will drive up prices in the lumber market, and what role the industry can play in mitigating the harm of wildfires in the future.We also talk about why this year's fires are so much worse than past seasons, and what other countries have done to reduce the risk of forest fires that Canada could look to for lessons.-----Links: More episodes of Free Lunch by The Peak: https://readthepeak.com/shows/free-lunch Follow Taylor on Twitter: @taylorscollon Follow Sarah on Twitter: @sarahbartnicka Subscribe to The Peak's daily business newsletter: https://readthepeak.com/b/the-peak/subscribe