Andrew Seale

B onhomme Carnaval is a long way from home. A statue resembling the Carnaval de Québec’s iconic red-toqued snowman grins from the corner of a courtyard at Richard’s Motel in Hollywood, Florida. It’s early November, balmy and quiet aside from Michael Jackson’s “Smooth Criminal” playing over the speakers scattered around. Air conditioners click on and off as I scan the nearby buildings—the clay-tiled two storey behind Bonhomme, the shingled bungalow to my left—trying to decide where Richard’s M...

Advancements in quantum computing promise to solve problems too complex for today’s systems. The technology also threatens the underlying architecture for sharing and protecting online data.

In the remote northeastern B.C. community of West Moberly First Nations, blackouts are common and hydro bills are higher than average, says Chief Roland Willson. The energy challenges are compounded by a lack of natural-gas access for the village of 350 people – 80 of whom live on reserve.
“We run primarily off wood and electric heat for heating,” he says. “We had families that couldn’t make their mortgage or rent payments because the hydro bills were so high.”
Against the backdrop of sky-hig...

The Moon is not a good place for terrestrial tires. Its surface is tough and consistently bombarded with a cocktail of solar and galactic radiation. Temperatures easily fluctuate from boiling highs to extreme lows.
It’s the most inhospitable environment humans have ever visited, let alone driven a vehicle. And yet, when we return over the next decade, we will invariably need a way to get around t...

Tracey Pritchard, who co-owns the Flour Mill – a destination food shop in St. Marys, Ont. – didn’t realize the history of the 160-year-old limestone building she bought in 2021 until her first walk-through.
When Pritchard noticed the remnants of an old flour mill, it felt like kismet. “There was something magical about that – especially since I was baking, and we knew we’d open a food business,” says Pritchard.

Climate change and extreme weather are pushing cities to prioritize climate resilience and reconsider the way buildings and other infrastructure are designed. Canada experienced its most destructive wildfire season in recorded history in 2023, and more than 250,000 Canadians experienced disruptive fires and flooding.
Policymakers, architects and the construction industry are looking to adaptation as a way to manage the near-term effects of climate change.
“Every year we’re seeing larger clima...

In the late 1990s, Ingersoll Paper Box (IPB) – a fourth-generation paper-packaging producer – got a call from one of its biggest customers, saying it would no longer need IPB’s services. For 50 years, IPB, based in Ingersoll, Ont., had supplied packaging to automotive-filter company Fram, which had been acquired by multinational conglomerate Honeywell and was moving its operations.
The decision was devastating for IPB. The automotive industry accounted for about 75 per cent of its business at...

In digital artist Alexander McLeod’s Pink Hills (2019), a tree stump perches improbably at the peak of an equally improbable mountain in a soft pink landscape populated with hot pink evergreens.
The stray stump is awkward and weird and McLeod loves it.
“You feel almost empathetic to space in that way because you’re like, I’m that little tree stump on this beautiful vantage… it just feels so human,” says McLeod. B...

Canada’s aging transmission-line infrastructure will need an overhaul to meet the country’s targets of net-zero emissions by 2050.
Provincial utility providers have ramped up transmission-line projects to support increasing electricity demands and transition to renewable energy over the past couple of years, says Ali Hooshyar, Canada Research Chair in electric power systems and an associate professor of energy systems at the University of Toronto.
BC Hydro, for example, announced plans to inv...

Naim Ali knew differing generational viewpoints on diversification could create tension when he joined SM2 Capital Partners, a private, Calgary-based family-owned holding company that oversees his family’s wealth.

Data breaches are endemic, with about one in six Canadian businesses affected by cybersecurity incidents in 2023, according to Statistics Canada. Experts say companies continue to grapple with defence protocols and postbreach responses, despite the proliferation.

Over the past century, Sprague Foods – a fifth-generation, family-run cannery and soup manufacturer in Belleville, Ont. – has experienced nearly every growing pain common to a family business.
But amid the collapse of the canning industry and a series of unplanned successions, the business has thrived as a cornerstone of Canada’s canned food sector.
“You know in a movie where somebody’s running and the ground is falling, but they just keep running?” says Keenan Sprague, account manager at Spr...

Over the past 40 years, Zavitz Insurance and Wealth has entertained a steady deluge of acquisition offers, but the response from the family-run insurance business, based in London, Ont., was the same every time.
“We looked at them, but we always said no,” says Terry Zavitz, who started the business in 1983.

Brent Downey’s zero-waste vertical-farming startup Urban Stalk has attracted a broad base of support.
His Brant County-based business is tackling food insecurity and greenhouse gases (GHGs). Its self-contained pod system creates an optimized growing environment for more than 50 vegetables, increasing their nutritional values and reducing the cost and carbon footprint of each yield.
“It’s a fully symbiotic, circular system,” Mr. Downey says. The pods, easy to install in unused spaces such as b...

As climate change disrupts farming and threatens food security, Canadian agriculture-technology (agri-tech) companies are finding innovative ways to help with adaptation.
According to Statistics Canada, 8.7 million Canadians – almost one in four (22.7 per cent) – live in food-insecure households. Climate change is expected to exacerbate that problem, affecting growing seasons and production patterns in some regions, and damaging crops through extreme heat, flooding and prolonged drought.
Some...