This is Patrick’s bio
Five-year Government of Canada bond yields crossed 4.15% this month, and fixed mortgage rates followed. Lenders who were quoting 4.9% in March are now above 5.3%. The reflexive read is that everything just got more expensive. For one group of borrowers, the opposite happened. When you
Five-year fixed mortgage rates have climbed above 5.5% for the first time since early 2024. The driver is straightforward: Government of Canada bond yields surged past 3.8% in recent weeks, and lenders price fixed terms by adding their margin to the cost of those bonds. When yields
A Russian drone crashed into a Romanian apartment building in May 2026. No one died. The debris fell near the kitchen of a residential unit in Constanța, a port city 60 kilometers from the Ukrainian border. Romania is a NATO member. The drone was Russian. And yet the response from
Prince William's announcement that the Duchy of Cornwall will sell roughly 20% of its residential property over the next ten years has been framed as a radical break from tradition. Progressive critics call it overdue. Traditionalists worry it signals the monarchy shedding its land stewardship role. Neither group
Wes Streeting's North Sea Pivot Isn't About Energy — It's About Starmer Wes Streeting just came out for new North Sea oil and gas drilling. He also floated cutting employer National Insurance contributions. Neither proposal aligns with Keir Starmer's current government position. That&
Guyana was already running the table before the missiles started flying. GDP growth in the double digits for three straight years. Production climbing past 600,000 barrels a day from offshore platforms that didn't exist a decade ago. Now, with Iran and Israel trading strikes and crude spiking
Guyana was already selling crude faster than anywhere else on earth. Then Iran started lobbing missiles at Tel Aviv, and suddenly Georgetown's problem changed from "how to manage wealth" to "how to manage wealth arriving six months earlier than projected." The math is straightforward.
Wildfire smoke rolled into Calgary last summer for 11 straight days. The AQI hit 260. Schools closed, hospitals filled, and anyone with a decent air purifier posted about it online. Within two weeks, every unit at Home Depot was gone. Six months later, homes with whole-house HEPA systems started
Scotiabank paid an undisclosed sum to acquire Dallas-based MapleMark Bank and its parent company Maple Financial Holdings in January 2025. The deal was small—MapleMark held roughly $900 million in assets—but it accomplished something several billion dollars' worth of retail branches could not: it gave Scotiabank direct
Scotiabank is paying $315 million for a Dallas commercial lender most people have never heard of. MapleMark Bank had roughly $1.2 billion in assets when the deal was announced—a rounding error for Canada's third-largest bank, which holds $1.4 trillion. The arithmetic doesn't
The International Test Pilot School in London, Ontario, just signed a contract for up to twelve M-346 Master jets from Leonardo S.p.A. The estimated value sits north of US$350 million. That's not a government purchase. ITPS is a private company, and this fleet will
In 2021, Loblaw stopped taking back Loop containers. The company ran the pilot for two years and concluded it "did not achieve scale and economic viability." That was polite corporate for: customers didn't use it enough, and the infrastructure cost more than anyone budgeted. Meanwhile, France