The Trade Brief: Commitments pending - Business Council of Canada

Replacing the roughly 360 jobs to be lost at RBW when the Owen Sound plant closes in January won’t happen overnight. But people in business development and labour market analysis say there are reasons for hope. TC Transcontinental told its printing plant workers Wednesday at a meeting that the plant will close at the end of January. The local work will be shared among five other Transcontinental plants. Equipment will be moved out and the industrial site will be sold.

China was once the top holder of U. S. Treasuries but has been shedding its massive stockpile for years, fueling fears of de-dollarization, but official data may not fully capture Beijing’s actual portfolio. The decline began in earnest around 2021, but as recently as April 2022, China still held $1 trillion in Treasury securities. U. S. data on Friday show that’s been whittled down to just $591 billion as of August, the lowest in 18 years and down from $700 billion a year earlier.

If you’ve ever pulled a fistful of leaves out of a pool pump basket, you already understand the only thing that went wrong at Africa’s only nuclear plant in August. Stuff gets sucked toward the pump, stuff piles up on the screen, the flow drops, and eventually the pump quits. Now swap the pool for the South Atlantic, swap the leaves for a mass of dead sardines, and swap your pump for one that’s keeping a 930-megawatt reactor cool. That’s pretty much what happened at Koeberg, which sits on the coast about 17 miles north of Cape Town. On Friday, August 21, Eskom, the state utility that runs the place, cut Unit 1 back to 50 percent. A cooling pump had shut itself off because the seawater intake was packed with what Eskom called “marine material,” which turned out to be fish. Lots of fish.

A company selling analog farming tools is fuelling the rural right-to-repair movement Reprinted with permission from Be Giant, a non-profit, non-partisan media outlet reporting on the people, places, ideas and breakthroughs shaping Canada's future. Sign up for their weekly newsletter.