There is an undeniably hopeful quality to the holiday season. The imminent New Year provides a fresh start for us individually, and a new quarter for most businesses. It’s an opportunity to restart the clocks and set new goals for the months ahead. We here at The Canadian Business Journal share in this sentiment and are diligently preparing for the entrepreneurs, companies and stories that we will proudly feature in the New Year, and who will lead the 1.7 per cent growth predicted by TD Bank this month at a time when many countries are expecting negative growth.

For a peak into the looking glass, you’ll find HIS’s Chief Economist’s Nariman Behravesh’s Top 10 predictions for the New Year in these pages, addressing global slowed growth.

Laura Stavro-Beauchamp is our guest columnist this month, providing us with a feature story on the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board, relating “that Canadian pension plans are further along the learning curve, treating infrastructure as a separate asset class, hedged in line with inflation affected assets, rather than a subset of real estate investment,” but must recognize changing demographics and backlogs in development.

As always, we have profiled the best of Canadian business in industries such as construction, finance and health care, and are proud to champion those who make Canada the best country in the world to do business.

Anna Guy