Cassis, a new Canadian fashion retailer, has its sights set on boomer women aged 45 to 60, a lucrative market they feel has gone underserved, reported the Hamilton Spectator Oct. 5. It’s the seventh of 10 Cassis stores slated to open in Quebec and Ontario in 2006 as Reitmans, the retailer’s Canadian parent company, makes a play for the “lady boomer”. The trick will be attracting a generation with an attitude unlike any other, said Alan Middleton, a marketing professor at York’s Schulich School of Business. “In their head, the boomers think like they’re under 30, even if they’re over 30 from the neck down,” Middleton said. “They know they won’t be able to wear what they did in their 20s but they don’t want to spoken to like they’re old. So you have to strike the right balance.”
At York, colonel pitches the long view of the Afghan mission
Almost since he returned from Afghanistan at summer’s end, Colonel Mike Capstick has been on the road, wrote The Globe and Mail’s Christie Blatchford in an Oct. 5 column. The former commander of the first Canadian Strategic Advisory Team in Kabul – the second iteration of 15 men and women there to lend their strategic-planning skills to the fledging Afghan government in place now – has been crisscrossing the nation, talking about Canada’s mission in that exhausted country. Normally blunt, the 54-year-old colonel is about to become, as he told a small group of graduate students at York University, Citizen Capstick, and that has served only to make him even more frank. His bottom-line message is this: Canadians viewing Afghanistan though the lens of our combat operations there should understand that it’s akin to looking at the country through a straw.
Boomers enter retirement risk zone
While we in the press write about the “boomer effect” of a generation approaching retirement, the financial services industry sees a huge moneymaking bonanza, wrote the National Post’s Jonathan Chevreau in his Oct. 5 personal finance column about new retirement income products. This shift from wealth accumulation to providing an income stream is provoking healthy competition from the three big players in this space: mutual funds, banks and insurance. The advance guard of the boomer generation is turning 60 this year. That puts them in what Moshe Milevsky, a finance professor at York’s Schulich School of Business, calls the “retirement risk zone”. A total of 408,000 Canadians now occupy this “fragile period in the financial lifecycle”. They are 10 years or less from the mandatory deadline to convert RRSPs into income streams (typically via registered retirement income funds or annuities).
War pilot attended Osgoode
Spitfire pilot David Goldberg was a modest man. Personal courage, heroism and leadership were simply doing one’s duty, just what he was sure every other fellow would do, began an obituary in the Hamilton Spectator and printed in the Toronto Star Oct. 5. Goldberg, 89, died in Hamilton Sept. 17. With war’s end, he attended Osgoode Hall Law School and returned to Hamilton. After a 50-year career in corporate and commercial law, he retired from Ross & McBride in 1999.
On air
- Chris Robinson, finance professor in Atkinson’s School of Administration Studies at York, was interviewed about proposed federal legislation to deregulate the payday loan industry, on CBC Newsworld and CBC Radio regional programs in St. John, Thunder Bay, Fredericton, Victoria and Vancouver Oct. 4. Robinson opposes Ottawa’s plans to shift responsibility to the provinces with little restriction on fees.