Surfing: Riding the Great Lakes

Storm conditions on the Great Lakes make them ideal for surfing, even in below zero temperatures. Toronto resident Antonio Lennert, founder and CEO of Surf the Greats, learned to surf on the ocean but discovered he could ride the waves in Lake Ontario. That led him to fostering a local surfing community, holding training sessions, and opening a store to cater to the specific needs of lake surfing. He talks to Jeyan Jeganathan about the joys and risks of surfing on a lake rather than an ocean.

Why Kawhi Leonard Should Stay in Canada

Well, Kawhi Leonard, you’ve really done it now.

You’ve gone ahead and won the Toronto Raptors their first NBA championship.

You were so, so great, the Finals MVP. You’re the quiet stranger who changed basketball in Canada. Now you’re about to be a free agent, with the chance to leave and chart your own course.

We’re going to respectfully ask you to stay. It’s your call, of course, but it’s the correct call. Please, Kawhi.

Run it back with Canada. Don’t abandon the happy dinosaurs, still floating after knocking off the Golden State Warriors Thursday night.

If you were hoping to slip out the back door without anyone noticing, that’s not possible now. The Raptors traded for you last summer, after things got ugly in San Antonio, and you didn’t get a say in that deal. The presumption was you would endure a season up in the frozen north, then wind your way to where you really wanted to go—perhaps a warm destination in Southern California, where you are from.

But you know the correct destination, Kawhi. You’re already there.

This is a perfect marriage, between a low-key superstar and a franchise and city that understands him. The Raptors didn’t just embrace you. They became you. The whole outfit is modest, mellow, hard-working, all business. The Raptors may not have been a popular preseason pick to win this title, but they believed.

.. We love that you’re chill. That you don’t say much. This is a hyper-verbal society. We’ve all got too much to say, to the point all the words and syllables grind into a dull, meaningless noise. That’s not your deal. When you speak, it means something. It matters. You’re old-school that way.

But it isn’t just your silent mien. Your whole style is understated. Your game is electric, but you’ve never been about the sizzle. You’re sponsored by New Balance, for crying out loud. The Yeezys of dentists. It’s perfect.

You’re a national treasure now in Canada. That kind of statement probably makes you uncomfortable. You’re the most important Raptor in franchise history, after one season. Teams throw up statues for lesser accomplishments.

You don’t owe Toronto anything. We should be clear about that. They know what they traded for, the terms, and the possibility you could leave. You’ve earned the right. It’s an important milestone in a player’s career, and all of us would want to take a look around.

So look around! There are openings throughout the league. There’s long been speculation that you’d wind up with the Los Angeles Clippers, who are on the way up, but are also, you know, the Los Angeles Clippers. Of course, there’s also space across the hall with LeBron James’s Lakers, but you don’t want any part of that. They’re like the Bizarro Raptors; everything about the Lakers is backward.

You could try Brooklyn. It’s nice in Brooklyn. There’s a lot of yoga.

Of course, you could be a Knick. But, and we’ve said this before, friends don’t let friends become Knicks. Besides, the Knicks now have the opportunity to give a max contract to an aging player with a ruptured Achilles tendon, and that is probably too enticing a possibility for them to turn down.

You already know the correct move, Kawhi. Yes, you are under no obligation. Toronto will probably retire your number, even if you leave. Yes, there are tax issues with playing across the border, but we’re going to give you the number for the Journal’s tax genius, Richard Rubin, who might have some ideas. I don’t know if Richard knows Canadian tax laws, but he probably knows someone who does.

The future is where you are, Kawhi. How many athletes get to make an indelible bond like the one you’ve made in Toronto? You’re as big as Tim Horton. Drake calls you.

You’ve written the fairy tale, Kawhi. Now write the sequel. Up north.

Canadian Tech Sector Thrives, but Struggles to Keep Its Talent

Government seek to attract investment from big foreign players while stopping the brain drain

Mr. Trudeau has lamented a “brain drain” of Canada’s best tech minds, saying at a recent Google event in Toronto, “Quite frankly, we’re tired of Google poaching our best graduates from the University of Waterloo and sucking them down to California.”

.. Trudeau wrote to Mr. Bezos, asking him to consider Canada because of its inclusiveness, single-payer health-care system, and an immigration system designed to attract high-skilled talent.

.. Canada is widely considered to be at the nucleus of some world-leading research in areas such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.

.. Seminal work published by University of Toronto’s Geoffrey Hinton, University of Montreal’s Yoshua Bengio and others has spawned advancements in voice recognition and automated driving. Mr. Hinton published breakthrough research on “deep learning” in 2007 and 2012 that ushered in a new wave of AI and the potential it could have for smartphones, self-driving cars and other devices.

.. Canada’s AI talent pool is also the third biggest in the world behind the U.S. and the U.K., with about 1,100 researchers in the country

.. An Amazon move to Toronto might also end up being a “Trojan horse” that would draw Canadian workers to the company’s Seattle base rather than improve Canada’s economy

.. “The best and brightest Canadian engineers or marketers that operate under Amazon Canada will see their career path head down to Seattle, not in Canada,”

.. He says companies like Facebook have different needs than startups, noting that staff at Facebook’s AI lab in Montreal are focused on more advanced research.

.. Cole Clifford, a 23-year-old machine-learning engineer at Toronto-based startup DeepLearni.ng , said he received about 50 recruiter emails in his LinkedIn account last month, most of them from Silicon Valley firms

.. the Canadian government spent C$125 million last March to set up new AI “superclusters” in Toronto

.. The goal is to keep researchers in Canada and create 1,000 AI graduates in the next five years

.. “We aren’t realizing that the intellectual property developed by these individuals and all of those economic benefits are rarely in Canada and not taxed in Canada,” Mr. Ruffalo said. “That’s the problem.”

.. One potential avenue for keeping foreign companies in check is for Canada to withhold R&D tax incentives

.. Another option is to create a government-backed sovereign patent fund, similar to what South Korea, Japan and France have launched in recent years, which would protect smaller startups from patent claims by foreign companies