Ryan Stuart

At the height of the worldwide shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) last year, outdoor gear specialist Mustang Survival realized it could help. Mustang makes the majority of its flotation devices and waterproof clothing overseas. But the Burnaby-based company manufactures its...

The Deer Horn mining project was unusual from the start. When an area in the Coast Mountains south of Smithers first intrigued him back in 2010, Tony Fogarassy didn’t send in a field geologist on a clandestine rock-bashing mission. The...

When Sarah Wilson was a kid in Rivers Inlet, the only thing her mom could grow was moss. Mountains and ocean squeeze the remote Central Coast community, where rain falls by the foot, the sun rarely appears, the soil is...

The sales numbers told Roger Keery that things were turning around at Skeena Sawmills. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the Terrace mill had sold out its lumber production two months in advance. Its new $20-million wood pellet plant was exceeding expectations. And its wood chips were in demand to make medical...

Boring, sweaty, repetitive, thankless work—that’s dishwashing in a bakery. Turnover tends to be high. But not at Gabi & Jules Handmade Pies and Baked Goodness in Port Moody. “One of our dishwashers shows up an hour and a half early, every day,” says owner Lisa Beecroft. Beecroft’s daughter is on the...

The rise of freelancing and contract labour changes not only how we work but how we find work, notes Ron McGowan. “We’re a society that knows how to apply for a job,” says the Vancouver-based employment expert and author. “The...

What if Elon Musk, Uber and Boeing are wrong? All three predict that the future of commuting revolves around a personal vehicle: Musk dreams of underground tubes bypassing gridlock, autonomous cars are Uber’s focus, and Boeing sees air taxis flying over street traffic. “Those ideas assume we just want more of...

To explain the future of recruiting and retaining talent, Sandra Miles uses her own hiring woes as an example. A few years ago, she was looking for a new staff member at Vancouver-based employment agency Miles HR, where she is...

Neo-Luddites, look out. “We think every industry is a tech industry,” says Tomica Divic, VP operations at Innovate BC, a provincial government agency that helps industries and firms adopt new technology and funds accelerator programs to kick-start innovation. Divic sees...

”At one point, freelance and contract workers were a small corner of the labour market,” says Andrew Cash, co-founder of the Urban Worker Project. “It was easy for policy-makers, media and the labour movement to ignore the group as an outlier. That’s no longer possible.” In 2017, more than 15 percent...

LlamaZoo’s newest product sees the forest for the trees and the trees for the forest. The visualization tool uses terabytes of data about a planned logging site from satellite and aerial imagery, geographic information and infrared surveys to create a 1:1 digital replica of the area—down to the placement and height...

Axine Water Technologies Inc.’s first client doesn’t want anyone to know its dirty secret. Vancouver-based Axine won’t give many details about the company, except that the water used at its electronics plant in San Jose, California, is so contaminated with solvents...