Free Lunch by The Peak

It's no secret that Canada's office market isn't doing so hot. Vacancies are still way above pre-pandemic levels, and some big companies like Shopify are giving up their leases altogether. In the US, where similar dynamics are in play, the value of some commercial buildings have been marked down by as much as 80% in fire sales by panicked landlords.

Should we be worried about our own office real estate market? Brian Rosen, President and CEO of Colliers International's Canadian arm, joins us to explain what's going on in Canada's office real estate market, how landlords and tenants are responding, and what impact it's all likely to have on Canada's economy.

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Few sectors of the economy were as impacted by the pandemic as travel, and few rebounded as quickly when public health restrictions were lifted. Even now, demand for travel is through the roof, and it's driving up prices for everything from hotels to airfare to car rentals.

At the same time, leisure budgets are often the first to be cut as cost-of-living pressures take their toll, and people cut back spending. So is the travel sector on the verge of another reckoning, or will demand hold up even as a recession looms? And how are businesses in the space responding?

Few people have a better view of what's happening in travel than Airbnb Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Nathan Blecharczyk, and he joins us today to share what he's seeing in the sector and break down how travel—and Airbnb—has changed post-pandemic.

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Stop me if you've heard this before: Canada has a productivity problem. You can't open up the business news without reading dire warnings about what's going to happen to the country if we don't improve our productivity. But what is productivity, anyway? What does it mean for an economy to be more or less productive? How does it affect regular people? Should we even care about this metric? And if so, what can we really do to improve it?

William Huggins, a lecturer on corporate finance, economics, and statistics at the DeGroote School of Business, joins us to answer:

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We all know that prices are going up (and have been for some time, now). But how do retailers actually decide when and by how much to raise prices? Is it just a simple matter of charging whatever people will pay? Or is it determined by their own costs? And have businesses been using pandemic-era supply chain problems as an excuse to raise prices now, or have they been forced to do so by factors beyond their control?

On this episode, Marty Weintraub, head of Deloitte's National Retail Consulting practice for Canada, joins us to break down how retailers are setting prices in the inflation era. We cover:

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President Biden's Inflation Reduction Act may be good news for the clean energy sector, but what does it mean for Canada? That's a more complex question. On one hand, some aspects of it are likely to benefit Canadian businesses. But much of the funding included in the legislation is reserved for American producers and could make it difficult for Canada to build its own domestic clean energy sector. If clean energy is going to be a big part of developed economies in the future, that's a problem.

On this episode, Michael Bernstein, the Executive Director of Clean Prosperity, joins us to break down what's in the Inflation Reduction Act, what it means for Canada, and why he thinks Canada needs to develop its own clean industrial strategy that's tailored for our strengths.

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Various levels of government in Canada have allocated many billions (with a b) to projects aimed at building more affordable housing, and yet it doesn't seem like much is actually getting built—certainly not on the scale that we experienced in earlier decades.

Why is that, and what needs to be done to change it? On this episode, we're joined by Jacob Gorenkoff and Marika Albert, two policy experts in the affordable housing space, to explain what's going on.

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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.

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Bank runs have been back in the news of late, but not in Canada. Here, our banking system appears to be doing just fine—as it has through every economic crisis in recent memory. Why is that? Financial historian John Turley-Ewart joins us to tell the story of how Canada's banking system came to be, why it has proven to be less vulnerable to bank runs than the US model, and whether Canadians have anything to worry about as banks in other countries collapse.

What went wrong at Silicon Valley Bank? In the course of a few days, the bank of choice for the US tech sector collapsed, forcing regulators to take unprecedented steps to avoid a broader financial crisis.

On this bonus episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, Murad Hemmadi, a correspondent for The Logic covering business and innovation policy, joins us to unpack how SVB went under so quickly and what the impact of its failure is on the tech sector both in the US and Canada.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine threw the world's energy market into chaos and added a renewed sense of urgency to the search for new sources of power. Many Western governments, including Canada's, are betting big on wind and solar, but there's also growing interest in nuclear power as a reliable and clean alternative. At the same time, many people still have questions about how safe it really is (and whether building new plants is even feasible anymore).

On this episode of Free Lunch by The Peak, Dr. Chris Keefer, a Toronto-based medical doctor and founder of Doctors for Nuclear Energy, joins us to make the case for nuclear energy.

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