Tomorrow is Good Friday, and like much of the business world, we’re closing shop for a long weekend. Here at CBJ Central HQ in Toronto, the weather should co-operate insofar as having a kickin’ weekend goes. Let’s hope the same is true for your neck of the woods! So long everybody, and see you Monday!

A recent mess around a special ballot at the University of Guelph, which involved a Conservative staffer who, according to reports, made a move to grab a ballot box with or without actually touching the box, has raised a lot of attention. Unfortunately, too much of the attention is being shone upon the situation for the wrong reasons. It’s clearly tempting to single out the Tory staffer in question as anything from overzealous to crazy, and to paint this as antidemocratic policy straight from...

Apparently Green Party Leader Elizabeth May is willing to sue for her right to interrupt Stephen Harper. A colleague of mine here at the CBJ.ca compound pointed out to me that a Google search of the fields “Elizabeth May” and “shrill” will yield 6,350 results. I’m not a big fan of such Google search statistics – you can find just about any combination of anything on Google – but this is a bit different, as a bulk of the results are along the lines of “How shrill was Elizabeth...

Imagine you’re a 25-year-old voter. (If you’re 25, this should be easy for you.) Canada going to the polls in May, which is now a certainty, might seem a little dull. A 25-year-old voter will have only been of voting age seven years and by May will have gone to the polls four times. Canada would usually only see two elections in that sort of time frame. This voter has seen minority governments elected three times, and will likely see a fourth this year. The voter might even be unaware...

That gasoline prices have been high lately in Canada is no mystery – any trip to a gas station will confirm that. The cause of high gas prices itself is no mystery either, as the market is worried about the state of oil producers in North Africa and the Middle East, best exemplified at the moment by Libya. The development today that might raise some eyebrows was Statistics Canada’s latest daily release, which announced the Consumer Price Index rose by 2.2 per cent in the 12 months to February....

There’s nothing like a little hockey controversy to get every windbag in Canada fuming (this corner being no exception). Of course, the smallest hockey transgression becomes colossal if it happens in Montreal. And so it’s little surprise that Boston Bruins defenceman Zdeno Chara’s hit on Montreal Canadiens greenhorn Max Pacioretty has become the gift to the media that keeps on giving, the dead-in-the-ground story that just won’t die even days later, like some Charlie Sheen-esque...

It’s a bit of a cliche that we in Canada and the rest of the First World have won the world’s biggest lottery, that we live in countries where even the relatively poor are very wealthy by global standards, and have enough to eat every day, and have good health care. We are safe and provided for in a world where everyone isn’t. The growing crisis over the steadily climbing price of food makes it clear just how big the gap between the haves and have-nots is in this world. Yesterday,...

A study that shows a significant minority of Canadians show up to work late every week serves as a good talking point on the pros and cons of a lax workplace. Showing up to an office where a laissez-faire atmosphere is the norm makes things a lot less stressful day to day, and everyone would appreciate some leniency in showing up 10 or 15 minutes late in the morning. It can encourage staying late, and focusing on whether the work is done or not, rather than the arbitrary time spent within a building’s...

For many of us, Monday is a holiday. And how sweet it is to already be preparing for the first long weekend of the year. It does bring up two questions: why doesn’t the whole country get Family Day off, and why don’t we in Canada have a long weekend in June? Five provinces get the third Monday of February off, which is good but not good enough. Since Ontario came on board a few years ago, it is more likely the laggards will see the need to take the day off, especially since it’s...

The self-destruction of a rock ‘n’ roll star always makes for a good story, doesn’t it? In an industry that has seen its fair share of flameouts, the meteoric rise and fall of the Guitar Hero video game series may go down as the starkest example. Rising from the 2005 original game’s humble PlayStation 2 release to the mainstream adoption of the series and genre rival Rock Band a couple years later, Guitar Hero almost singlehandedly turned the niche music game genre into a...