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Rowland Kelly’s experience dealing with financial turmoil over four decades has helped him influence the growth of Canada’s credit-union system

Retail transition

We heard it again at last week’s Business in Vancouver editorial board meeting: “Companies get a great out-of-town candidate in their sights,” said one of the participants, “then that person clicks through to the real estate listings and calls back to turn down the job. They can’t afford to move here.”

Steve Jobs is gone, in what seemed mere weeks after leaving the top job at Apple, the company he co-founded. The bitter irony that millions would learn of his death via a device he invented was not lost on us. Over the course of his tenure, Jobs led Apple on a wild ride and changed our world irrevocably. He was arguably one of the best marketers out there.

In the fall of 2001, I was in the Victoria office of then-B.C. Attorney General Geoff Plant to discuss why the B.C. Liberal government had flipped positions on the Nisga’a treaty.

Can you feel the energy in the room? No?

Canadian families looking for flexibility in tax and estate planning often set up trusts, but they can also benefit small-businesses owners.

Increasingly, the red-hot smartphone market seems focused on the competition between Apple – with speculation of an iPhone 5 launch this fall – and Google’s Android – with new contenders arriving more or less monthly from Samsung, HTC, Motorola and others.

It’s been a habit of mine to do a financial checkup in the first few weeks of fall. I think of it as a sort of a “getting back to business” review of the portfolio and other financial issues after a summer of fun and sun. Maybe it’s a throwback to my school days, which was more years ago than I care to admit!

Laneway housing seems too good to be true. It’s a form of detached housing that can be built almost anywhere in Vancouver for as little as $140,000 (ready to move in, everything included) – half the price of an equivalent condo. For that you can get a 400-square-foot living space with a parking spot and a shared yard. Larger – up to 1,000 square feet – units are more popular, costing as much as $330,000.