You are here: Home // All publications
Income trusts: Trust temptation
Leslie Lundquist will never forget where she was the day Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced the federal government would tax income trusts. It was a Halloween afternoon in 2006, and the fund manager at Calgary’s Bissett Investment Management was sitting in a colleague’s office, having a casual, late-day chat. “Then my phone started ringing off the hook,” she says. When she heard the...
Get a 50% return, guaranteed
Imagine if your financial adviser came to you with a secure (and legal) way to get a guaranteed 50% return on your money. You’d likely say ‘yes’ pretty quickly. Well, no need to imagine any longer, because that’s exactly what you can get if you’re lucky enough to have a share ownership plan at work.
Brock McEwen, a director at Great West Life, says that with his company’s plan, for...
Tags: investing
Why the banks want to be your Facebook friend
Ever wonder who’s checking your Facebook profile? Sure, there are probably the old standbys, like your high-school crush and your nosy co-worker, but you should be aware that there might be someone else checking you out: your banker. Financial institutions of all stripes have been scouring social-networking sites since the days when MySpace was all the rage; now they troll Facebook, Twitter...
Travel: St. John’s, Nfld
Compared to most of Canada’s major cities, St. John’s, Nfld., is tiny. And yet when the Juno Awards comes to town on April 15 to 18, visitors will be taken by the outsized personality of the place — not to mention the spectacular views of the Atlantic. Metric, Michael Bublé and tween hero Justin Bieber are set to perform at the event. But for pure entertainment, it’s hard to compete with...
Travel: Austin, Texas
From March 12 to 21, a huge crowd of bands, film nuts, movie execs and music lovers will converge in Austin, Texas, for the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) film and music festival. The event, now in its 27th year, is one of the city’s largest — more than 170,000 people pile into the growing desert locale to make deals, listen to copious amounts of music and explore this always-active college...
How to choose a social network
(View seven social networks to avoid slideshow on MSN.ca)
Choosing a social network to join is a lot like figuring where you want to go to university. Are your friends going? Do you want to go alone and meet new people? Will you get something out of it in the end? It’s a decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly — social networking is not only time consuming, it tells people a lot...
Tags: social networking, tech
Weighing the cost of pennies and nickels
Inflation has hit the humblest of financial instruments. In the American government’s recent budget, the Obama administration revealed that pennies cost 1.8¢ to make, while nickels run 9¢ per coin. The U.S. treasury has spent $100 million more in some years than the currency is actually worth.
The rising costs of zinc and copper are to blame, so fashioning the coins out of a cheaper material...
Last chance for Death Row Records
It won’t come as a surprise for you to know that I’ve never been to a Death Row Records party, but I can imagine what it would have been like. The venerable rap label, started by endlessly incarcerated Suge Knight and hip-hop legend Dr. Dre, played a major role, if not the biggest part, in gangsta rap’s popularity. It’s no secret that guns, drugs and dubious characters played a big role...
Bryan Borzykowski is a Toronto-based writer and editor working mainly for business and entertainment publications. He regularly contributes to Canadian Business magazine, Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, PROFIT, MoneySense and the Advisor Group. Bryan's the editor of Review magazine and is a senior editor with Connected for Business magazine. He's also a contributing writer with Hello! Canada and was once a weekly music columnist for Metro News. He's been nominated for several National Magazine Awards and recently co-authored