CTV National News: High cost of beef putting a damper to BBQ season
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Many cuts of beef have seen a price increase of more than 30 per cent across Canada. Kathy Le explains what is driving up the price.
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CTV News
37 minutes ago
- CTV News
Torontonians spend more on housing than nearly every city worldwide, study claims. Here's what experts say needs to change
A new global index suggests Toronto is among the world's worst cities when it comes to housing affordability — as experts blame decades of policy missteps, development delays, and overwhelming population demand for the problem. The 2025 Global Cities Index from Oxford Economics finds that as a result of Toronto's expensive real estate market, residents 'spend more of their income on housing than residents of nearly every other city in the world.' While the federal government recently promised to eliminate the GST on first-time home purchases under $1 million, critics argue that restrictive housing policies, costly development charges and sluggish approvals have created a market that's out of reach for most buyers. The average price of a home in the Toronto area did decline four per cent year-over-year in May but still stood at more than $1.1 million, according to the latest data from the Toronto Region Real Estate Board. 'Over the past 20 years Toronto's population has grown by 35 per cent but affordable housing hasn't kept up. The result? Life is getting too expensive for families,' Mayor Olivia Chow said during a press conference on Friday. 'Young people are giving up on the dream of home ownership.' The City of Toronto has a program where it will defer development fees for some projects so long as at least 20 per cent of its units are affordable. However, demand for the program has far exceeded the city's ability to fund it and as a result Chow says that there are projects totalling 300,000 new units from about 70 different developers that are 'shovel ready' and just 'sitting there in the pipeline' waiting for funding from other levels of government. In Toronto alone, development fees can add more than $100,000 to the cost of a new home and in some areas in the GTA development fees can easily double that, says Frank Clayton, Senior Research Fellow at Toronto Metropolitan University. Prime Minister Mark Carney has previously promised to help municipalities reduce those fees by 50 per cent through additional payments that could be distributed by the provinces though he has not provided a timeline for those investments. 'If a municipality takes $200,000 up front, developers got to increase their prices such that $200,000 is reflected ultimately in the price of the house,' Clayton said. 'Builders won't build, unless they can cover their costs.' Toronto housing A real estate sign is displayed on the front lawn of a house in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, on Thursday, May 11, 2017. Clayton identifies three key culprits behind Toronto's crisis: high fees, restrictive planning rules, and relentless demand — the latter driven in part by immigration. Last year alone, nearly 300,000 newcomers arrived in the region, fuelling further housing pressure. 'You need sites. You need sites that are zoned, and you need sites that are serviced,' Clayton said. 'The planning system is very unresponsive to changes in demand.' 'We have to act now' New home sales in the GTA hit a seventh consecutive month of record all-time lows in April, owing in part to a significant reduction in housing starts. Dave Wilkes, president and CEO of the Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD), says time is running out to fix the system. 'We are seeing real market consequences. 80,000 people leave the GTA,' Wilkes said. 'The longer we wait, the longer that it's going to take to balance supply and demand.' Wilkes is calling for urgent action on housing taxes — especially the harmonized sales tax (HST) formula, which hasn't been revised since 1991. 'Making that change on HST today is the most immediate thing we could do,' Wilkes said. 'It would bring costs down by a dramatic 13 per cent for the first million dollars of a purchase.' He also warned that the federal government's plan to remove GST only for homes under $1 million misses the mark in high-cost cities like Toronto, where the average sale price sits well above that. 'Under a million is just not a product type that is available in the GTA,' he emphasized. Row of houses in Toronto Children ride bikes by a row of houses in Toronto on Tuesday July 12, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Cole Burston What is the market is lacking? Jason Mercer, Chief Information Officer for the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, says affordability has technically improved — but warns that too little new construction could reverse that trend. 'Two years ago, a lot of households simply wouldn't have qualified,' Mercer said. 'Today, I would argue that a lot of those households could qualify, because prices have edged lower and interest rates have come down.' Still, Mercer says demand will eventually rebound, and if the city can't match it with supply, prices will climb again. 'We haven't done a good job keeping up with housing supply to meet that population growth,' he said. 'From a public policy perspective, we want to look at ways that we see sort of a sustained pipeline of new housing coming online.' A turning point with urgency Clayton says the roots of the crisis stretch back to the early-2000s when Ontario shifted its land-use focus towards environmental protection, including the establishment of the Greenbelt. He argues the policy limited where housing could be built, and gave too much power to growth management plans that discouraged the types of homes most people want — townhouses and detached units. 'We have to have a competitive supply of land,' Clayton said. 'Because if there's competition, then prices don't go up very much.' Despite efforts from all levels of government to address the issue — including a recent Ontario bill aimed at speeding up construction — most experts agree that housing affordability won't be meaningfully restored unless there's a broad and urgent shift in policy, from zoning and fees to taxes and timelines. 'The time for discussion has concluded. We really need the time for action,' Wilkes said.
Globe and Mail
an hour ago
- Globe and Mail
Nvidia Stock: Forget AI Data Centers, Is This Market Nvidia's Next Big Growth Driver?
It's clear that Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA) has been the biggest winner of the artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure boom. Its graphics processing units (GPUs) have become the go-to chips for running AI workloads in data centers, thanks to their parallel processing capabilities. Parallel processing allows chips to perform many calculations all at once, which is essential for both training large language models (LLMs) and running AI inference. Just as important is Nvidia's CUDA software platform, which makes it easy for developers to build and optimize AI models on its hardware. The combination of best-in-class GPU performance along with a sticky software platform has helped cement the company's lead in the data center space. Where to invest $1,000 right now? Our analyst team just revealed what they believe are the 10 best stocks to buy right now. Continue » At the same time, this has been an explosive market. Over the past two years, its data center revenue has gone from $4.3 billion in the fiscal first quarter of 2024 (ended April 30, 2023) to $39.1 billion in fiscal Q1 of 2026 (ended April 27, 2025). That's a nearly 10 times increase in just two years. Nvidia sees data center capital expenditures (capex) rising to more than $1 trillion by 2028. Not all that spending will go toward GPUs, but with its more than 80% market share in the GPU space, Nvidia is well positioned to capture a sizable chunk of that overall data center spending growth. However, that is not the only potential huge market that Nvidia is eyeing. Nvidia's next big opportunity While AI data center spending is Nvidia's largest market by far, it's certainly not the only end market it participates in. The GPU was originally created to speed up graphics rendering in video games. The company later created CUDA as a way to expand beyond this market, giving developers an easy way to program its GPUs for other tasks. However, the market for GPUs outside of video games was slow to develop. Around the same time CUDA was introduced, Advanced Micro Devices bought rival GPU maker ATI Technologies. With integration a top priority and not a lot of early traction outside of video games for GPUs, AMD was in no rush to create a competing software platform. Despite the slow uptake, Nvidia smartly began pushing CUDA for use in universities and research labs, which helped make it the default software program that developers were taught to program GPUs. Today, that is why Nvidia's GPUs have a dominant place in the data center. At this same time, though, Nvidia was also edging into another market: automobiles. In fact, Audi was one of its first big customers outside of the video game space. The German luxury carmaker began using Nvidia's GPUs in its infotainment and navigation systems, and Nvidia later built a full automotive platform called DRIVE, which is a family of hardware and software tools developers need for advanced driver-assistance and autonomous vehicle development. While long promised, autonomous driving is finally here. Alphabet's Waymo, for example, is now providing more than 250,000 paid robotaxi rides per week in the U.S. It's currently only in a few cities, but it's expanding rapidly. According to reports, Waymo uses Nvidia's GPUs in its vehicles. Waymo is not Nvidia's only automobile customer -- far from it. Mercedes, Volvo, and Hyundai all use Nvidia's DRIVE platform and GPUs to power self-driving technologies, while Toyota announced it would use Nvidia's platform and chips for advanced driver assistance features in its next-generation vehicles. Meanwhile, General Motors and Hyundai will use Nvidia technologies to improve their manufacturing with "smart factory" initiatives. Last quarter, Nvidia saw its automobile revenue surge 72% to $567 million. However, more growth is in store, with the company forecasting its auto revenue to rise to approximately $5 billion this fiscal year. The growth will come as new vehicles using its technology begin to hit the roads. Mercedes' new CLA sedan is the latest vehicle with its technology. It's easy to dismiss a segment that was only a fraction of its data center revenue last quarter, but with the data center, Nvidia showed how quickly end markets can ramp up. The autonomous driving market is still in its infancy, so the opportunity is just massive. With Waymo having just around 1,500 robotaxis now, it's easy to see that this could scale to 100x or more vehicles when it reaches scale. Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has predicted that every car on the road will eventually be robotic. With more than 1 billion cars on the road, that's a huge opportunity. At its investor day in 2022, Nvidia estimated the auto market could be a $300 billion opportunity. With Nvidia's stock trading at a forward price-to-earnings ratio (P/E) of 33 times this year's analyst estimates and a 0.7 price/earnings-to-growth (PEG ) ratio, with numbers below 1 considered undervalued, the stock is currently not pricing in any potential upside from its next big potential market opportunity. Should you invest $1,000 in Nvidia right now? Before you buy stock in Nvidia, consider this: The Motley Fool Stock Advisor analyst team just identified what they believe are the 10 best stocks for investors to buy now… and Nvidia wasn't one of them. The 10 stocks that made the cut could produce monster returns in the coming years. Consider when Netflix made this list on December 17, 2004... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $669,517!* Or when Nvidia made this list on April 15, 2005... if you invested $1,000 at the time of our recommendation, you'd have $868,615!* Now, it's worth noting Stock Advisor 's total average return is792% — a market-crushing outperformance compared to171%for the S&P 500. Don't miss out on the latest top 10 list, available when you join Stock Advisor. See the 10 stocks » *Stock Advisor returns as of June 2, 2025
Toronto Star
2 hours ago
- Toronto Star
Nova Scotia's ambitious ‘Wind West' offshore energy plan wins support with conditions
HALIFAX - Two leading environmental groups are giving a thumbs up to Nova Scotia's ambitious plan to dramatically expand its fledgling offshore wind energy industry. But both groups were quick to add caveats. On Monday, Premier Tim Houston said the province's plan to license enough offshore wind farms to produce five megawatts of electricity would be increased eightfold to 40 megawatts, well beyond the 2.4 megawatts Nova Scotia needs. He called on Ottawa to help cover the costs of his new Wind West project, saying the excess electricity could be used to supply 27 per cent of Canada's total demand. 'Nova Scotia is on the edge of a clean energy breakthrough,' the Progressive Conservative premier said in an online video, adding the province is poised to become an 'energy superpower.' ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW Gretchen Fitzgerald, executive director of Sierra Club Canada, said the premier's bold plan, which includes building transmission lines across the country, represents an exciting opportunity for the province. 'It could be a game-changer for the region and for Canada,' she said in an interview from Ottawa. 'But it needs to be done correctly and with consultations.' Fitzgerald said the Nova Scotia and Canadian governments must focus on securing long-term benefits from the nascent offshore wind industry because they did a poor job on that front when dealing with the offshore oil and gas sector. 'We have to make sure that we are not selling out what is a massive resource for less benefit than communities should have,' Fitzgerald said, adding that Nova Scotia continues to suffer from a high rate of energy poverty. In May of this year, utility affordability expert Roger Colton produced a report showing that 43 per cent of Nova Scotians were struggling to pay their energy bills — the highest proportion in Canada. While Fitzgerald applauded Houston's clean energy plan, she criticized what she described as the premier's populist penchant for taking decisive action before consulting with experts and the public. 'Moving from a couple hundred turbines to thousands in the next decade needs to be done in a staged way so we learn how to do this right,' she said, adding Houston appears to have adopted a ''move-fast-and-break-things mentality.' ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW '(That) can lead to unacceptable harm to sensitive ocean life,' she said. 'From a community benefits and acceptance point of view, breaking trust can be the biggest barrier to getting to good climate solutions.' In October 2023, the Public Policy Forum released a study saying Sable Island Bank, an ocean area about 180 kilometres south of Nova Scotia, is among the world's best locations for wind energy generation. 'It and several other similarly endowed areas off the coast of Atlantic Canada hold the potential to place the region among the leading global hubs of offshore wind-powered energy development,' says the report from the independent non-profit think tank. It goes on to say that as the world shifts from a dependence on fossil fuels to forms of energy that do not emit climate-changing greenhouse gases, Atlantic Canada is facing 'a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity ... to recover an economic vitality comparable to the Age of Sail — fittingly built again on the power of wind at sea.' The report says the installation of 15 gigawatts of offshore wind generation would create about 30,000 direct jobs annually. Despite the hype, the industry must also earn acceptance from Nova Scotia's fishing industry, which in 2023 contributed $2.5 billion to the province's economy and employed 19,000 people. ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW In Halifax, a spokesman for the Ecology Action Centre called on the provincial government to build public trust, especially with coastal communities. 'There really needs to be a priority on stakeholder engagement for all ocean users,' said senior energy co-ordinator Thomas Arnason McNeil. 'We're going to need to prioritize ecological safeguards and preserve the existing livelihoods that we have. That includes the fishing industry. That's half the economy in Nova Scotia.' Still, he said the province's big push for clean energy is on the right track, especially when it comes to building out its electricity grid to better connect with the rest of the country. If done right, the payoff would be enormous, Arnason McNeil said. 'We're talking serious job creation here and a lot of revenue potentially,' he said. 'The bottom line is that you have to do this right. (But) the prize at the end of the road is monumental in terms of the benefits.' A call for bids to build enough offshore turbines to generate five gigawatts of electricity is expected as early as this year. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 8, 2025.
