Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Yup, time for another election folks, whoopee!! Who will come out on top? I don’t care, whoever it is, get the heck out of my bedroom and my wallet (to paraphrase Pierre Elliot Trudeau). 

Stephen Harper dropped by the Governor Generals place at 9:00 AM on a Sunday (wonder if she was dressed by then) and the government was dissolved. All this and the poor woman couldn’t go to the Paralympics Games opening ceremonies.

My wife and I will be playing the fun game: “How many political party signs can we get on our front lawn”, you should try as well, if someone sends me a picture of their lawn with GENUINE political signs on their front lawn, I will post them (I promise).

The questions I will be asking anybody who shows up on my doorstep from any party:

1. What is your party’s status on income sharing between spouses who are  younger than 55 years old and don’t have pension income?
2. How will your party help students attempting to not carry a crushing debt load when they graduate from University?
3. Will your party bring in stronger controls of Pay Day Loan companies?
4. If I vote for your party, will you help me find a job in the government? Really, come on, give an unemployed guy a break!
5. What is your party’s stance on the Federal Government standardizing their databases so that Canadians are not “tracked” in more than 10 different Federal government databases?

Any other questions folks might want to ask, add them in, I’ll post the best of on Friday.

Google Turns 10!

Yup 10 years ago on Sunday Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and now it is worth over $150 Billion dollars. How? They went where the money is, advertising, and they also innovated when others were attempting to only survive, way to go guys, now can you please increase my Adsense payments?

Another company that might have been good to buy, even after the RIDICULOUS IPO price (who knew?).

Yes, the sounds of Gilles Vigneault ring in my ears, as my Quebecois brethren go the polls in one of the hardest to call elections in years. What effects will this have on Canada’s economy? Really can’t tell, but instability internally to any nation causes interesting ripples in the economy. Sometimes it is opportunity, like how Rene Levesque was voted Man of the Year, by the Toronto board of Trade one year, sometimes it is other things. We shall see, but as with any Quebecois politics, it is going to be hard to explain!

According to Stats Canada, Canadians are less lazy these days, but still not as productive as our American friends. What is more interesting is that our productivity has dropped since 2000, but the number of hours we Canadians work has gone up, way up! So we are working harder, but not smarter? Why aren’t we as good as our U.S. cousins? That’s rhetorical, I think this is a numbers game, and it reflects data, but means little about the “working hearts” of Canadians, I think we are a hard working group of folk (but we might value our free time a little less now, which is troubling). Remember work Smarter, not Harder!