Free Lunch by The Peak

As Ontario's Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade, Vic Fedeli has been front and centre for some of the largest investments in the province's history happening in clean tech. He joins us today to talk about how he thinks about industrial policy, what it takes to attract businesses to the province, and why he thinks the big bets the province has taken on EVs and batteries will pay off.

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Crypto has been through a challenging period, with the sharp decline of prices in DeFI and NFT markets, the collapse of FTX, and Binance's CEO facing criminal charges. But with Bitcoin on a sustained rise, there are signs that the crypto winter may be ending. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong joins us to talk about what's next for the industry and his long-term vision for crypto.

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Jeremie Harris, co-founder of AI safety research company Gladstone AI, joins us to explain the fallout from the OpenAI board shakeup, what it means for the AI space, and the implications for work on AI safety.

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In a lot of ways, the economy we have is created by our laws. That may seem obvious, but it’s easy to forget that when you’re just going about your business, all those little daily transactions happen with a larger framework. Things like how much the stuff you buy costs and what people get paid are, to a great extent, determined by the laws we make rather than just “economic laws.”

One of the most important pillars of that institutional framework our economy functions in is competition law, and to really understand Canada’s competition laws and how they work, on this episodewe’re joined by Professor Jennifer Quaid.

Professor Quaid is an Associate Professor and Vice-Dean of Research in the Civil Law Section at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, and she’s worked on some of the most important competition cases in Canada. 

Today’s show is a true deep dive, and quite long, so we’ve turned it into two parts. In the first part last week, we looked at the details of what competition law is for, and how it’s meant to work in Canada. In this episode, part 2, we look at how that law was applied in the case of the Rogers-Shaw deal, and some of the changes to competition law the federal government is exploring now. 

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In a lot of ways, the economy we have is created by our laws. That may seem obvious, but it’s easy to forget that when you’re just going about your business, all those little daily transactions happen with a larger framework. Things like how much the stuff you buy costs and what people get paid are, to a great extent, determined by the laws we make rather than just “economic laws.”

One of the most important pillars of that institutional framework our economy functions in is competition law, and to really understand Canada’s competition laws and how they work, on this episodewe’re joined by Professor Jennifer Quaid.

Professor Quaid is an Associate Professor and Vice-Dean of Research in the Civil Law Section at the University of Ottawa’s Faculty of Law, and she’s worked on some of the most important competition cases in Canada. 

Today’s show is a true deep dive, and quite long, so we’ve turned it into two parts. In this first part, we get into the details of what competition law is for, and how it’s meant to work in Canada. Next episode, in part 2, we’ll look at how that law was applied in the case of the Rogers-Shaw deal, and some of the changes to competition law the federal government is exploring now. 

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Two things are true: Electric vehicles have never been better, and the vast majority of people in Canada (and the US) still aren't buying them.

So what's going on? Has the EV transition hit a roadblock or are these natural growing pains that will get worked out in time? And how are the automakers factoring all this into their plans for the future?

Brian Kingston, President and CEO of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers' Association, joins us on this episode to explain what's going on inside the automaking sector and where the Big Three automakers see challenges and opportunities when it comes to EVs.

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This episode originally aired in July 2023.

Canada's population is growing quickly. Really quickly. Last month, we surpassed the 40 million mark, and we're growing faster than any other G7 country. Between 2016 and 2021, Canada has grown twice as quickly as the US.

And the reason for that growth is simple: Immigration.

Of the growth we saw in 2022, immigration accounted for around 95% of it. And this is by design. By 2025, the federal government wants to add 500,000 new permanent residents to Canada every year.

So how our immigration system works matters quite a bit. 

But a growing number of economists and experts are warning that it might not be working so well anymore. One of those people is Mikal Skuterud, a professor in the economics department at the University of Waterloo and the Director of the Canadian Labour Economics Forum. 

Mikal has argued that the economic case for immigration policy has begun to break down as Canada has tried to scale up the number of people coming here. On this episode, he joins us to explain exactly how our immigration system works and why, in his view, it has started to fail. 

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The cost-of-living pressure created by high inflation and rising interest rates hurt consumers, of course. But it's also creating headaches for many retailers.

In this episode, Marty Weintraub, leader of Deloitte's National Retail Consulting practice in Canada, joins us to explain the many ways that the cost-of-living squeeze Canadians are feeling is also impacting the retail sector, from a sharp uptick in shoplifting to a squeeze on mid-tier stores.

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Many of us have a vague sense of what industrial policy means, and we might even have an opinion about the specific forms it can take. But that fuzziness around even the definition of industrial policy has made studying it — and learning what makes industrial policy succeed and fail — difficult.

Dr. Réka Juhász is trying to change that. Through her innovative academic work (and that of her collaborators at The Industrial Policy Group), she is advancing our understanding of how governments are using industrial policy, and what specific policies they are adopting.

On this episode, Réka walks us through how she took a new approach to researching this topic, what actually constitutes industrial policy, and why she believes more governments have turned to these policies in recent years.

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A lot of the big trends in the economy right now are converging in the auto sector, and the negotiations over new contracts for autoworkers at the Big Three carmakers: Ford, GM, and Stellantis. 

You’ve got the conflict between workers and employers over wages, and some evidence that workers may have more leverage than they’ve had in a long time. You’ve got the clean energy transition, with the rise of EVs and what that means for the industry and people who work in it. And you’ve got the push to manufacture more things onshore again, and preserve an industry that’s been an engine for middle-class jobs for decades.

On today’s show Jim Stanford joins us to explain how all these issues are playing a role in the negotiations between Unifor and UAW and the Big Three, and what autoworkers want to see in their new contracts. Jim is an economist and Director of the Centre for Future Work, and spent 20 years as Economist and Director of Policy for the union formerly known as the Canadian Auto Workers (and now known as Unifor). 

Note: This episode was recorded prior to the Unifor strike at the GM facilities in Ontario.

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