August Survey of Manufacturing
Good news for Canadian manufacturers – according to StatsCan, manufacturing sales in August rose 1.4% to $47.6 billion. This is the highest level that manufacturing sales have been at since October 2008. A breakdown of some of the provinces is as follows: Manitoba fell 2.4% Newfoundland and Labrador rose 53.6% to $397 million Nova Scotia […]
Open Source and Innovation
What exactly is “Open Source”? The open source production model is a model where the source materials for the end products are available to the public. In the case of software, where this term is mostly heard, it means that the source code of the software is available for others to view – this has […]
The CRA’s SR&ED Service Standards
The CRA released their average processing times for claims during the months of April 2011 through September 2011. Overall, it’s looking a lot better than it was previously – the total average numbers have all fallen since we last spoke about this at the beginning of this year. Average Processing Time April 2011-September 2011 Type […]
What’s your biggest office pet peeve?
A survey done by LinkedIn and released today took a look at what people’s greatest pet peeves in the office are. Turns out the top five are: people not taking ownership of their actions constant complainers dirty common areas start meetings late or going long people who don’t respond to emails Read the press release […]
In the News This Week…
In this article by Michael Scissons, we read about Why Canada is a hotbed of tech activity, including five factors that are unique to Canada in contributing to the innovative tech activity that is happening here. We have all heard the news about Steve Jobs stepping down from Apple – I feel like this is […]
British Columbia Reverts Back to PST/GST
After a vote on August 5th, the voters of British Columbia have decided to revert back to the PST/GST system from the combined HST system they were using. Reverting back to the separate PST/GST systems will take approximately 18 months to put into place, but those in British Columbia can look forward to paying 7% […]
The UBB Hearing
This week and next week, the CRTC has been having a hearing about the proposed User Based Billing (UBB) that some of the large telecom companies would like to instate. While this hasn’t been getting nearly enough exposure on traditional media to suit my tastes, I have been following it closely online. As an overview, […]
Fact or Fiction: We don’t work in a lab so don’t qualify for SR&ED!
The Scientific Research and Experimental Development program was developed to help any companies in Canada that do any kind of research and development. While this does include work that is done in a science lab, it can also include many other areas of work. This program helps reward companies who are developing new products, improving […]
State of Canada’s science, technology and innovation system
Today, the Science, Technology and Innovation Council (STIC) released a major report that looked at Canada’s state of innovation as compared to the global economy. This is the second public report the council has released; it looks at how Canada’s performance has changed since 2008, allows readers to understand how innovation happens in Canada, and […]
On Monday, StatsCan posted a new study: The year in review in manufacturing. According to this study, manufacturing sales increased 8.9% from 2009, to a total of $529.8 billion. While this is the largest single annual increase since 2000, it is still below the sales figures from 2008. Nineteen industries (95.4% of total manufacturing) saw […]