The yin and yang of yoga pants
Vancouver-based yogawear maker Lululemon has shut down its two trial stores for men, one in New York and one in Toronto, Bloomberg reports. Customers respond to Lululemon better as a “dual gender brand,” spokesperson Erin Hankinson said. “We continually test and learn at Lululemon ― which is what we did with the men’s stores.” Lululemon is not the only retailer testing out gender-specific locations, with mixed results. Nordstrom opened a men’s store in New York last year, while Saks Fifth Avenue shut down a “test concept” women’s store earlier this year.
Scheer’s climate plan looks a lot like industry’s wish list
Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer’s climate plan, unveiled on Wednesday, barely deserves to be called a plan, say numerous climate groups, with one such group noting the proposal looks very similar to a plan released earlier this month by the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, an industry energy lobby group. “This is not a plan to cut climate pollution,” Climate Action Network executive director Cat Abreu said, as quoted at Vice. “This is a plan to somehow save the world by increasing Canada’s emissions.” Abreu criticized Scheer’s proposal to give financial incentives to oil and gas companies to innovate green technologies. “If all that money goes right back into company coffers, then there’s no incentive for them to be seeking out emissions reductions opportunities, which is the whole point of carbon pricing,” she said.
Watch: Grim outlook for Canada in latest climate report. Story continues below.
Toronto tech wages soar (thanks, Trump)
Donald Trump’s disdain for immigration ― legal or otherwise ― has proven a boon to Canada’s high tech sector, with numerous companies setting up shop north of the border to take advantage of the country’s more liberal admission policies for foreign tech workers. The result? Toronto led the world (including Silicon Valley) in tech job creation in 2017, according to research from commercial realtor CBRE. Now, new research from job search marketplace Hired finds Toronto tied with Boston for the fastest-growing tech salaries among North America’s tech hubs, and Paris and London, in 2017. Toronto was the only Canadian city included in the survey, but it did indicate tech salaries in the Six jumped nine per cent that year, to an average of C$100,000. But that’s still well below salaries seen in U.S. tech markets. Tech workers have generally been paid more in the U.S. than elsewhere.
Now hiring: A travelling ‘hair care expert’ for Canada’s Armed Forces
In one of the more unusual jobs to come up this summer hiring season, the Canadian Armed Forces are advertising for a “deployment support barber/stylist” to travel with the soldiers to Kuwait and Latvia over a six-month period. The barber-stylist “trims and styles hair according to customers’ preference or according to particular style. She/he shaves and trims beards and moustaches on request,” the job description states. It comes with an annual salary range of $47,780 to $52,970, plus a hardship allowance, a risk allowance and a foreign service premium. Narcity notes that the Canadian Forces hires for all sorts of support jobs, including fitness coordinators, travel assistants and retail workers.
Mexico ratifies North American trade deal, but that’s the easy part
Mexico has become the first North American country to ratify the USMCA (or CUSMA, as Canadian officials seem to call it), the replacement to the NAFTA trade deal. The country’s Senate voted 114-4 to approve the deal on Wednesday, the Wall Street Journal reports. Ratification in Canada seems a given, but the hard part will be to get the deal through a Democratic-controlled Congress, which is loathe to hand President Donald Trump any political victories. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hasn’t scheduled a ratification vote yet, the Washington Post notes. She and other Democrats have voiced concerns that the new deal lacks enforcement mechanisms for its labour and environmental rules.