Andrew Seale

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...

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...

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...

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...

In fall 2023, Jaclyn T. and her husband awoke to flashlights shining through their apartment windows. No strangers to the sounds of the city’s nightlife, they assumed it was someone who’d been drinking. “My husband slides the window open and yells dude, it’s 3:00 am, what do you want?” explains Jaclyn. “The guy yells back: it’s the Toronto police, we’re looking for J...

In September 2023, Compagnie Maritime Nantaise’s MN Pelican cargo vessel left the harbour of Bilbao, Spain, bound for Poole, United Kingdom for with a peculiar attachment onboard: a 100-square-metre inflatable wing sail.
The MN Pelican – a roll-on/roll-off cargo vessel – was running sea trials on the WISAMO (a portmanteau of wing, sail and mobility) wind propulsion system, an innovative design engineered by Michelin Group and geared toward maritime transport decarbonization.
“As the world con...

Surging popularity in superyachts is driving Canadian designers and shipbuilders to push the limits of innovation and craftsmanship, redefining the opulence of life at sea in the process.
According to VesselsValue, a provider of vessel valuation and market perspective for the maritime industry, 887 superyachts – pleasure vessels larger than 24 metres (78 feet) – were sold in 2021, more than double the 429 sold in 2019.
“When I began, there were about 25 boats over a hundred feet under constru...

Lilith Wang was in the early stages of launching Fund the North, a venture capital syndicate fund for investors to pool their resources, when she met Ben Su, a founder, angel investor and lawyer in 2022. They instantly bonded over a shared vision to streamline the fundraising process for Canadian startups.
Wang, whose background is in venture capita...

As a fourth-generation fisher in Yarmouth, N.S., Marc d’Entremont saw the sun setting on traditional trawling, a style of fishing his family had built their livelihood on.
The centuries-old fishing process where vessels drag large, cone-shaped nets held open by a pair of one-tonne steel doors (which often make contact with the sea floor) was becoming costly amid reduced fishing grounds, restrictive quotas, rising environmental scrutiny and soaring fuel prices.
“We needed to change to meet the...

hen Will Ross and William Steenbergen started their company in early 2020, they quickly discovered just how much they’d have to rely on remote workers.
The pair incorporated their company, Federato – a California insurance technology startup based on their graduate research at Stanford University – just three days after the university closed for the pandemic.
It ...

Talent shortages are causing more Canadian businesses to look at newcomers as a badly needed source of labour – but some say the strategy may replicate past problems with funneling high-skilled migrants into lower-skilled jobs if key changes aren’t made.
“Right now, about half of newcomers to Canada are economic migrants,” says Pedro Barata, executive director of Future Skills Centre, a skills innovation and policy think tank launched by Blueprint, Toronto Metropolitan University and The Conf...

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When Stephanie Tschirhart moved her in-home beauty salon to a brick-and-mortar location in Kincardine, Ont., she used the opportunity to rebrand from Butterfly Kisses to Kwe Beauty to better express her indigeneity.
Although it’s not a one-to-one translation, “kwe” represents the idea of a woman in Ojibway, says Ms. Tschirhart, who built the business alongside her...

Longevity has always been interwoven with Michelin’s legacy.
Today, the 135-year-old company is one of the largest and most well-known tire manufacturers in the world. They’ve designed tires for cars and bicycles, motorcycles and aircraft, heavy equipment, and space shuttles. They’ve even created tires for use on the moon.
But it’s taken a lot of trial and error to get there.
Michelin’s tires are a complex mix of 200 ingredients and go through rigorous testing – over one billion kilometres wo...

Canadians are struggling to talk about end-of-life planning, despite recognizing the importance of estate planning. But failing to have a strategy in place and properly documented could leave individuals’ finances in disarray, putting the onus on the courts to make sense of their legacy after their death.
The National Institute on Ageing (NIA), in collaboration with RBC Royal Trust, produced a report that examined Canadians’ views on estate planning. The report, based on the results from a 20...