Latest news with #certainty
CTV News
6 days ago
- Business
- CTV News
Ontario finance minister hopes $1B loan program provides ‘certainty' to industries hit by trade war
Ontario finance minister hopes $1B loan program provides 'certainty' to industries hit by trade war Ontario Finance Minister Peter Bethlenfalvy speaks to CP24 about the $1B loan program as a response to U.S. tariffs.
CTV News
12-08-2025
- Business
- CTV News
Federal Liberals looking to provide ‘certainty' to investors in fall budget
MP Ryan Turnbull responds to a question in the House of Commons on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Friday, June 13, 2025. Turnbull said the Liberals are looking to provide 'certainty' to investors in the fall budget. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick OTTAWA — Major institutional investors are asking the federal government to give them a reason to invest more at home in the upcoming fall budget, says the Liberal MPs leading budget consultations across Canada. The federal Liberals are in the midst of consultations on the upcoming 2025 budget. While federal budgets typically are tabled in the spring, this one is set to land during the fall session of Parliament. The budget — which doesn't yet have an exact release date — will be the Liberals' first under Prime Minister Mark Carney and the first tabled by Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, who was appointed to that cabinet position in May. The minister and some Liberal MPs are touring Canada to solicit feedback as part of the federal government's typical pre-budget process. 'From our standpoint, it's our first budget. We want to get the big things right,' said Wayne Long, MP for Saint John—Kennebecasis and secretary of state for the Canada Revenue Agency and financial institutions. The Liberals are hosting roundtables with CEOs from various Canadian industries, heads of chambers of commerce, union leaders and First Nations groups to feed their concerns into the fall budget process. Long has criss-crossed the country since mid-July — part of a plan to visit 45 cities and every province and territory over a two-month span. Long said the fiscal update will be 'defence-centric' and 'housing-centric' — reflecting commitments from the early days of the current government — and will expand on themes laid out in the Building Canada Act passed in June. That legislation, which came with a push for major infrastructure projects, arrived against the backdrop of Canada's trade war with the United States and calls to build up the domestic economy and global trade routes to diminish reliance on the U.S. Long said that in meetings with representatives from Canada's Big Six banks and the Maple Eight large Canadian pension funds, he's heard a desire to invest more at home. He said those large institutional backers want the upcoming budget to help build the long-term confidence they need in order to put their money behind years-long infrastructure projects. 'I almost sense the frustration that they're like, 'Look, we want to invest more in Canadian industry, in nation-building projects and energy projects, but regulatory-wise, it hasn't been effective for us to do so,'' Long said. Putting new rules in place and issuing other signals that show where the federal government wants to focus its efforts could be cost-effective ways to spur investment, Long argued. 'These are tweaks and changes we can make that I think can result in billions of dollars being reinvested back in the country,' he said. Also meeting with industry stakeholders across Canada is Whitby MP Ryan Turnbull, parliamentary secretary to Long and Champagne. He said that in the course of those conversations, he's hearing that stakeholders want to be part of the solution to Canada's trade woes and economic uncertainty. 'We're looking to provide certainty through this budget process,' Turnbull said. He said stakeholders from the energy storage and nuclear industries are looking for Ottawa to commit to expanding investment tax credits for their sectors in the coming years. Such signals from government can convince a business that it's worth investing in themselves, or attempting to lure outside capital, in order to build in Canada, Turnbull said. He said he's also hearing concerns about the state of transportation infrastructure, particularly around Canada's ports. Businesses that want to diversify into global markets need to feel confident that the federal government is going to keep critical infrastructure running at key ports like Vancouver, Turnbull said. 'If (Canada) has bottlenecks and congestion within its transportation system and can't get products to market at the scale and scope that we're going to need to in order to respond to the challenges we face in dealing with the United States, we're going to have to address that port infrastructure,' he said. Carney's mantra throughout the spring election campaign and in the early days of his leadership has been to 'spend less' and 'invest more.' The 'spend less' side of the equation comes from his pledge to balance the operating side of Ottawa's budget in three years. Ministers have been asked to come up with savings of 15 per cent in their day-to-day spending by the end of that period. The Public Service Alliance of Canada has warned of possible job cuts through the spending reductions and has said Ottawa ought to work with unions, not around them, to achieve its savings goals. Turnbull said he's met with public sector unions as part of the consultation and acknowledged that there's 'fear and uncertainty' among bureaucrats. 'And yet I think they also recognize that there are opportunities for improvement and efficiency and to serve the public even better,' he said. 'We don't want to compromise on quality. But I do think it's a very healthy exercise for the federal government to say, where is there duplication? Where is there redundancy? Where can we get better results for Canadians?' While it's Long's first budget at the federal level, he said he does have some experience with budgeting in general. Not in Parliament, mind you — in a Canadian junior hockey league. 'I've never been involved in a budget for a process of this magnitude. But in previous lives, for me, when I was president of the Saint John Sea Dogs, we would go through a budgeting process also,' he said. 'And a lot of the decisions we made in that budget we recognize fully would set the tone for the future. So this is the opportunity we have with this budget.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 12, 2025. Craig Lord, The Canadian Press
Fast Company
08-06-2025
- Health
- Fast Company
5 lessons on finding truth in an uncertain world
Adam Kucharski is a professor of epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and an award-winning science writer. His book, The Rules of Contagion, was a Book of the Year in The Times, Guardian, and Financial Times. A mathematician by training, his work on global outbreaks has included Ebola, Zika, and COVID. He has advised multiple governments and health agencies. His writing has appeared in Wired, Observer, and Financial Times, among other outlets, and he has contributed to several documentaries, including BBC's Horizon. What's the big idea? In all arenas of life, there is an endless hunt to find certainty and establish proof. We don't always have the luxury of 'being sure,' and many situations demand decisions be made even when there is insufficient evidence to choose confidently. Every field—from mathematics and tech to law and medicine—has its own methods for proving truth, and what to do when it is out of reach. Professionally and personally, it is important to understand what constitutes proof and how to proceed when facts falter. Below, Adam shares five key insights from his new book, Proof: The Art and Science of Certainty. Listen to the audio version—read by Adam himself—in the Next Big Idea App. 1. It is dangerous to assume something is self-evident. In the first draft of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, the Founding Fathers wrote that 'we hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable, that all men are created equal.' But shortly before it was finalized, Benjamin Franklin crossed out the words 'sacred and undeniable,' because they implied divine authority. Instead, he replaced them with the famous line, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident.' The term 'self-evident' was borrowed from mathematics—specifically from Greek geometry. The idea was that there could be a universal truth about equality on which a society could be built. This idea of self-evident, universal truths had shaped mathematics for millennia. But the assumption ended up causing a lot of problems, both in politics and mathematics. In the 19th century, mathematicians started to notice that certain theorems that had been declared 'intuitively obvious' didn't hold up when we considered things that were infinitely large or infinitely small. It seemed 'self-evident' didn't always mean well-evidenced. Meanwhile, in the U.S., supporters of slavery were denying what Abraham Lincoln called the national axioms of equality. In the 1850s, Lincoln (himself a keen amateur mathematician) increasingly came to think of equality as a proposition rather than a self-evident truth. It was something that would need to be proven together as a country. Similarly, mathematicians during this period would move away from assumptions that things were obvious and instead work to find sturdier ground. 2. In practice, proof means balancing too much belief and too much skepticism. If we want to get closer to the truth, there are two errors we must avoid: we don't want to believe things that are false, and we don't want to discount things that are true. It's a challenge that comes up throughout life. But where should we set the bar for evidence? If we're overly skeptical and set it too high, we'll ignore valid claims. But if we set the bar too low, we'll end up accepting many things that aren't true. In the 1760s, the English legal scholar William Blackstone argued that we should work particularly hard to avoid wrongful convictions. As he put it: 'It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.' Benjamin Franklin would later be even more cautious. He suggested that 'it is better 100 guilty persons should escape than that one innocent person should suffer.' 'We don't want to believe things that are false, and we don't want to discount things that are true.' But not all societies have agreed with this balance. Some communist regimes in the 20th century declared it better to kill a hundred innocent people than let one truly guilty person walk free. Science and medicine have also developed their own traditions around setting the bar for evidence. Clinical trials are typically designed in a way that penalizes a false positive four times more than a false negative. In other words, we don't want to say a treatment doesn't work when it does, but we really don't want to conclude it works when it doesn't. This ability to converge on a shared reality, even if occasionally flawed, is fundamental for science and medicine. It's also an essential component of democracy and justice. Rather than embracing or shunning everything we see, we must find ways to balance the risk that comes with trusting something to be true. 3. Life is full of 'weak evidence' problems. Science is dedicated to generating results that we can have high confidence in. But often in life, we must make choices without the luxury of extremely strong evidence. We can't, as some early statisticians did, simply remain on the fence if we're not confident either way. Whether we're sitting on a jury or in a boardroom, we face situations where a decision must be made regardless. This is known as the 'weak evidence' problem. For example, it might be very unlikely that a death is just a coincidence. But it also might be very unlikely that a certain person is a murderer. Legal cases are often decided on the basis that weak evidence in favor of the prosecution is more convincing than weak evidence for the defendant. Unfortunately, it can be easy to misinterpret weak evidence. A prominent example is the prosecutor's fallacy. This is a situation where people assume that if it's very unlikely a particular set of events occurred purely by coincidence, that must mean the defendant is very unlikely to be innocent. But to work out the probability of innocence, we can't just focus on the chances of a coincidence. What really matters is whether a guilty explanation is more likely than an innocent one. To navigate law—and life—we must often choose between unlikely explanations, rather than waiting for certainty. 4. Predictions are easier than taking action. If we spot a pattern in data, it can help us make predictions. If ice cream sales increase next month, it's reasonable to predict that heatstroke cases will too. These kinds of patterns can be useful if we want to make predictions, but they're less useful if we want to intervene in some way. The correlation in the data doesn't mean that ice cream causes heatstroke, and crucially, it doesn't tell us how to prevent further illness. 'Often in life, prediction isn't what we really care about.' In science, many problems are framed as prediction tasks because, fundamentally, it's easier than untangling cause and effect. In the field of social psychology, researchers use data to try to predict relationship outcomes. In the world of justice, courts use algorithms to predict whether someone will reoffend. But often in life, prediction isn't what we really care about. Whether we're talking about relationships or crimes, we don't just want to know what is likely to happen—we want to know why it happened and what we can do about it. In short, we need to get at the causes of what we're seeing, rather than settling for predictions. 5. Technology is changing our concept of proof. In 1976, two mathematicians announced the first-ever computer-aided proof. Their discovery meant that, for the first time in history, the mathematical community had to accept a major theorem that they could not verify by hand. However, not everyone initially believed the proof. Maybe the computer had made an error somewhere? Suddenly, mathematicians no longer had total intellectual control; they had to trust a machine. But then something curious happened. While older researchers had been skeptical, younger mathematicians took the opposite view. Why would they trust hundreds of pages of handwritten and hand-checked calculations? Surely a computer would be more accurate, right? Technology is challenging how we view science and proof. In 2024, we saw the AI algorithm AlphaFold make a Nobel Prize-winning discovery in biology. AlphaFold can predict protein structures and their interactions in a way that humans would never have been able to. But these predictions don't necessarily come with traditional biological understanding. Among many scientists, I've noticed a sense of loss when it comes to AI. For people trained in theory and explanation, crunching possibilities with a machine doesn't feel like familiar science. It may even feel like cheating or a placeholder for a better, neater solution that we've yet to find. And yet, there is also an acceptance that this is a valuable new route to knowledge, and the fresh ideas and discoveries it can bring.
Yahoo
07-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
CEOs Crave Clarity on Trump Tariffs, Says KKR's Kravis
CEOs are very concerned about tariffs and they're "right at the top of everyone's agenda," KKR co-founder Henry Kravis said. They're looking for certainty about where tariff policy is going, he said during an interview with Bloomberg's Jason Kelly at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Beverly Hills.
