How much do Canadians love Florida?

By Amanda Shendruk - Friday, April 12, 2013 at 9:44 AM - 0 Comments

A BMO report released this week reminds us just how much we all love Florida. It notes that more than 500,000 Canadians own property in the state (Canadians are the largest foreign buyers of Florida real estate), that Canada is Florida’s No. 1 source of foreign tourists, and that perhaps Canadian snowbirds played a significant role in pulling the recession-hit state from its post-2008 slump.

The cost of loving

By Amanda Shendruk - Thursday, February 21, 2013 at 5:52 PM - 0 Comments

It has been a week since St. Valentine’s Day and the romantic hangover is gone. But are you still hurting? No, I’m not talking about heartache. I’m referring to the weighty pain that accompanies a lighter wallet. Love is expensive: It’s just a North American fact. But one Canadian website—RateSupermarket.ca, a site that provides market comparisons on personal finance—thinks it has finally put a price on that expense. And that cost is $43,842.08.

The website has determined the average cost of “love”: One year of dating, one year of engagement, and a wedding. And it will cost you a pretty penny (or at least a nice nickel, now that the penny has perished).

Check out the basic breakdown below and let us know in the comments: Is love too expensive? (For an extremely detailed outline of dating and wedding costs in Canada, check out Rate Supermarket’s site.)

Infographic: Where are all the jobs?

By Amanda Shendruk - Thursday, January 31, 2013 at 11:20 AM - 0 Comments

Much has been written about the plight of the recent university graduate. She is over-educated, underemployed, and staring down an uncertain job market; the promise of a stable position was the last generation’s reality, not hers.

A newly-released report from the American non-profit Center for College Affordability and Productivity suggests almost half of all graduates work in jobs for which they are overqualified.

In Canada, the situation doesn’t seem quite as dire, but during the last year for which there are numbers, 2006, about one in four university-educated workers was in a position that didn’t require a degree. As Chris Sorensen and Charlie Gillis pointed out in “The New Underclass”, this proportion is believed to be even higher now.

But there must be jobs somewhere, right? In 2011, The Canadian Occupational Projection System (administered by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada) developed a detailed, 10-year labour market projections report that focuses on the estimated trends in labour supply and demand between 2011 and 2020.

Broken into occupational groups, the report determines which jobs are projected to have an excess of positions and which will have an excess of workers. The chart below details 20 of the occupations expected to see the greatest worker shortages between now and 2020. Note: They are not the positions where there are the most jobs, but the areas in which the chances of getting a job (due to the number of job openings exceeding the number of job seekers) are greater. Interestingly, only three require university-level education.

While the projections provide hope for some, they also reveal occupations for which the number of job seekers far outweigh the number of positions. To those seeking employment in the following fields (just to name a few): consider becoming a tailor.

• Management in communication.
• Managers in art, culture, recreation and sport.
• Physical science professionals.
• Athletes, coaches, etc.
• Machine operators and related works in pulp and paper production, wood processing, and workers in fabric, fur and leather.
• Machining, metalworking, woodworking and related machine operators.

Explore HRSDC’s list yourself.

NHL Interactive: Putting a value on hockey loyalty

By Nick Taylor-Vaisey - Wednesday, January 23, 2013 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Hover your cursor over each circle to read more about the giveaways:

In the days after the NHL lockout ended, teams rushed to offer special deals to fans to make amends. If the euphoria on display last week was any indication, much has been forgiven. But if teams truly want to satisfy fans after the protracted dispute, opening night giveaways won’t go far enough, says a sports marketer and former hockey executive. Cary Kaplan, the president of Cosmos Sports and a former executive with the Hamilton Bulldogs hockey team, says the flurry of discounts were an important gesture, but won’t provide the “sustained change” fans deserve after so many months of being deprived of the game.

Players should be front and centre in that effort, says Kaplan. They should call season-ticket holders to thank them for their loyalty, or do more for fans on game days. “Why doesn’t every player sign autographs after every game? Why isn’t that mandatory?” he asks. “Kids don’t want free popcorn. They want to meet Phil Kessel. That’s the power these players and leagues and teams have.”

Still, Kaplan admits the discounts didn’t hurt. Of the teams that reportedly offered freebies, Maclean’s looked at how much they were potentially willing to put on the line for their first home game, relative to their team salaries (see graphic, below). For instance, if every Carolina Hurricanes fan took advantage of the savings offered on opening night— half off tickets and merchandise, cheap food and drink—the team would have given up an estimated $2 million in revenue. That amounts to about three times what it paid its players for the night’s work. Five of the 10 most generous teams were in Canadian cities, while Winnipeg and Toronto were further down the list.

On the eve of the NHL’s shortened season, one in four Canadian hockey fans told a Harris-Decima poll they’d watch the pros less this year. It will take more than cheap hot dogs to win them all back.

Now that every team’s hosted a home game, we thought we’d take a look at how all the discounts paid off, assuming they played a role in filling seats in NHL cities. The first graph below looks at how full arenas were on each team’s opening night. The second graph looks at how opening night attendance compared to each team’s average attendance during the 2011-12 season.

Infographic: How Canadian university students are paying their bills

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 22, 2013 at 3:00 PM - 0 Comments

The typical Canadian university student spends four years blowing borrowed money on clothes, music and liquor, right? That may be the stereotype, but it’s not the reality. The Canadian University Survey Consortium’s 2012 study of more than 15,000 graduating students shows that six in 10 are working, the vast majority pay off their credit card bills each month and only one-third have more than $20,000 in debt. Here’s an infographic that shows how students are paying their bills, via Maclean’s On Campus:

Jessie Willms

Pharaoh's good-eating guide

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, May 29, 2011 at 12:43 PM - 9 Comments

Someday, the USDA Food Pyramid will be a core case study in disaster for design students. The New York Times reports that the administration is reversing the incomprehensible 2005 decision to divide the famous pyramid into coloured wedges instead of labelled ascending slices. This was an idea which, and stop me if this seems obvious, contradicted the whole pretext for a pyramid-shaped infographic. You depict something as a pyramid when you want to imply a quantitatively large and fundamental base—in the ideal diet, whole grains and vegetables—and a smaller, less important top, which in the original plan for the pyramid was basically occupied by meat and eggs. The Meat ’n’ Eggs Lobby (i.e., the agriculture industry that the USDA exists to serve) didn’t like the hierarchical implications, and so the pyramid became, in the words of a nutritionist quoted by the Times, a diagram “which basically conveys no useful information”.

I’m eager to see the new circular “plate” that will replace the pyramid this week. The government doesn’t want to call it a “pie chart”, although homemade pies in round tins seem pretty low on the list of public-health threats in the year 2011. The archetypal chubby kid in old black-and-white comedies who made a habit of stealing pies off window sills was at least playing outside and getting a fair amount of fruit; he’d be considered a paragon of health now.