Dimitry Anastakis

Glimpsed from a distance, Toronto’s skyline provides a useful visual tableau, the background canvas for a telling portrait of a founder, his family, his firm, and their profound influence upon Canada’s technological and business landscape. Inevitably, a viewer’s gaze will be drawn toward the Rogers Centre, the iconic baseball stadium that sticks out as the most prominent physical acquisition and visible manifestation of the sprawling and ubiquitous telecom empire that Ted Rogers built over five decades as one of Canada’s most dynamic entrepreneurs and business…

The North American auto industry of today is a jarring amalgam of contradictions. Cars and their makers are dismissed as anachronistic, smokestack relics of a blue-collar carbon age, yet they simultaneously represent a futuristic, AI-powered, green transportation ­utopia that humanity has pinned its very survival on. This disconnect reveals itself most forcefully in the current state of General…

We are at a fascinating and fearful juncture. The Second Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth century remains a global force of social and political change, one that profoundly impacts the economic lives of billions of people. Henry Ford’s legacy persists, despite the onset and geographic unevenness of deindustrialization, especially here in North America. Meanwhile, the post-1970s Third Industrial Revolution of…

There was a time not so long ago when being a Canadian victim of U.S. domination was all the rage. In the glorious 1960s and the not-so–glorious early ’70s, Canada was young, hip and irreverent; Canadian nationalism was at its height; and American imperialism was at yet another post-war peak (nadir?). In these heady days, a generation of Canadians was taught that Canada was a colony…

Why does Canada stink so much at innovation? Outside of a few noteworthy exceptions, Canadians seem to lack the killer instinct to play in the big leagues, especially when it comes to technological innovation. As the adage goes, because of our lack of innovation and our dependence on resource exploitation, Canada is the world’s most advanced underdeveloped…

Let us, for a moment, pity poor Ontario. The litany of affronts, indignities and embarrassments over the last two decades is long and inglorious: free trade agreements foisted upon it, careening business cycles and a roller-coaster dollar, wrenching and radical changes in government, ever-increasing taxes and an end to cheap power, never-ending sporting failure and Olympic disappointment…