BCE boosts dividend despite earnings dip + MORE Feb 8th

Quentin Servais-Laval, Operations Manager for Instacart Canada, shops to fulfill an Instacart order at Loblaws to demonstrate how the app works. (Photograph by Della Rollins)
Dorothy Kwan goes to the grocery store about 14 times a week, if you don’t count the trips she makes to buy food for her own family. On weekdays, the 43-year-old single mother drives her 2012 Mazda5 back and forth from a Toronto-area Loblaws to random people’s houses because someone needs to stock up on pop and ice cream, or maybe a family wants a roasted chicken for dinner. She is buying for folks who can’t or simply don’t want to shop for themselves, and therefore summon someone like Kwan, a shopper with the app Instacart, to pick it up and deliver it—ideally within an hour or two.
For Kwan, it’s another source of income in the gig economy, supplementing what she earns from Uber driving and delivering lunches through UberEats. But to the customers she’s buying groceries for, Instacart offers the chance to avoid the hassles of the store—the lugging of heavy items like water bottles, the waiting at the cashier, the loading and unloading of the car—all through a couple of clicks in an app…

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An awkward question for employers: Does your company pay men more than women? You may want to say “no,” but statistics suggest the answer is probably “yes.” And with the Canadian government rolling out “equal pay for equal work” legislation in April, the time for blind eyes and dragging your feet is done. But besides writing a pile of ladies-only bonus cheques, how can employers actually close the gap and work towards sustainable change? Here are nine ways to start.
Dare to crunch your numbers
Understand that it’s very possible to have a wage gap problem and not even know it. “I’m sure many employers will say, ‘Oh no, there’s no issue here’,” says Jason Beeho, Toronto employment lawyer. But the truth is you don’t know until you’ve really looked. “It takes a big picture analysis to identify these disparities, and employers need to start by taking stock and structure of their overall organization,” he says. Smart bosses will identify problems before someone makes a public claim of discrimination…

BCE Inc. reported Thursday that its fourth-quarter profit fell compared with a year ago as a number of expense items increased but the Montreal-based company says its dividend to common shareholders will be going up.

Warning comes hours before Trudeau set to unveil changes to regulatory regime for resource projects