Inside the St. Laurent Shopping Centre, sales in almost every store ranged from 40 to 70 per cent off on Cyber Monday. Shoppers got a head start on their Christmas shopping, getting the most bang for their buck, including Mark Nui. "When I do see something that's a percentage off, like 50 to 70, yes, I will take a peek and see if there's something that my family would need," Nui said. It's been a record weekend for retailers across the world with Ottawa's Shopify reportedly setting a new sales record on Black Friday. Global sales reaching $5 billion USD, and Cyber Monday is expected to reach over $13 billion . However, according to the Retail Council of Canada, shoppers are being more cautious with their spending, as retailers have experienced a decline in sales throughout the year. "Usually, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the busiest retail days. They still are. But it's been a sluggish year for retail," said Matt Poirier, Vice President of Federal Government Relations with the Retail Council of Canada. "Generally, because of inflation and other factors. That puts a lot of pressure on people's pocketbooks." With the lingering effects of inflation and the ongoing Canada Post strike, Poirier says it's a difficult to retailers during the holiday season. "Retailers have been trying really hard all year to entice people into store with big discounts. It's certainly a trend that we've been seeing, but the fact of inflation is that stuff costs more now," Poirier said. "People go in and expect to be paying more, but it's not just because they want to buy more, it's because they know that stuff costs more." He adds most Canadians say they're waiting for Dec. 14 to do their holiday shopping, when the National GST break is set to kick in. "You'll certainly save then, but you might end up saving more buying right now," Poirier said. "It's really important for Canadians to know that not to hold off on their spending because they might be forgoing some really good deals at this point too." Even with inflation being where it is for Canadians, Poirier says the spending will continue up until Christmas. "Most people, even though they know it's going to cost them more than maybe in previous years, are still doing it, because that's the tradition, to give gifts and what not on Christmas," Poirier said. "Certainly, we're welcoming of the tax holiday because Canadians do need a break and it's coming at a very important time for us in retail. Even though we get a lot of sales and foot traffic in the lead up to the holidays, right after, in early January, in early February is the worst time for retail," Poirier added. Cyber week deals are expected to stay in effect throughout the next couple of days. Shopping Trends The Shopping Trends team is independent of the journalists at CTV News. 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That works out to more than 1.6 per day. Stay ConnectedComfortDelGro sets commission from cabbies at 70c per ride for 3 monthsPeter B. Teeley, who made a lasting entry in the political lexicon during the 1980 presidential primary when, as press secretary to George H.W. Bush, he came up with the term “voodoo economics” to knock the supply-side agenda of Bush’s then-rival Ronald Reagan, died Nov. 29 at a hospital in Washington. He was 84. He had tracheal cancer, said his wife, Victoria Casey. Teeley previously survived colon cancer and two bouts of throat cancer. PETER TEELEY Teeley, an old hand in Republican politics, was born in a shipbuilding town on the northwestern coast of England that endured heavy bombardment during World War II. He celebrated his seventh birthday at sea en route to the United States. He became an American citizen and, ultimately, a trusted aide to a long line of local, state and national political leaders. The most important of them was Bush, whom Teeley served as press secretary during Bush’s unsuccessful campaign for the White House in 1980, his winning bid in 1988 and his time as vice president in between. Teeley had his first taste of presidential politics working for Gerald Ford’s failed 1976 campaign. The campaign was managed by James A. Baker III, who helped bring Teeley into the Bush orbit four years later. Bush’s inner circle used the term “B.B.I.” — “Bush Before Iowa” — to refer to the team of staffers who were with the candidate before he pulled off a surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses over Reagan, the former California governor. Reagan went on to win the 1980 Republican nomination and then the presidency with Bush as his running mate. Mr. Teeley was “a charter member of B.B.I.,” historian Jon Meacham, the author of the Bush biography “Destiny and Power,” said in an interview. He was “an important part of a core group of people around George Bush in a campaign that made, in many ways, the Bush presidency possible, even though it was eight years later.” According to Meacham’s book, Mr. Teeley supplied Bush with the term “voodoo economics,” a catchphrase intended to deride Reagan’s plan to invigorate the economy through tax cuts. Mr. Teeley said he had read an editorial dismissing President Jimmy Carter’s economic policies as having been concocted by economic “witch doctors.” Inspired to lob a similar attack at Reagan, he reflected on what witch doctors do. “And then it hit me,” Meacham quoted him as saying. “They do ‘voodoo,’ and I put it in Bush’s speech.” The phrase, which never faded from politics, came to haunt Bush when Reagan selected him as his running mate and Democrats turned the phrase against the Republican ticket. “He used to complain that [it] was the only memorable thing I ever wrote and it got him into trouble,” Mr. Teeley jokingly told a reporter years later. From 1981 to 1985, during Bush’s first term as vice president, Mr. Teeley served as his press secretary. He left the job to open a public relations firm, Teeley & Associates, but returned to work for Bush during the 1988 campaign that propelled him to the presidency. In May of that year, with Bush slipping in the polls against Democrat Michael Dukakis, Mr. Teeley resigned as chief spokesman amid internal disagreement over campaign strategy. Mr. Teeley argued for a more aggressive approach, which Bush wished to defer until later in the campaign. “He wasn’t just a ‘yes’ person,” said David Clanton, a longtime friend of Mr. Teeley’s who worked with him when they were young staffers in the office of Sen. Robert P. Griffin (R-Michigan). “He would speak candidly to whoever he was talking with.” Mr. Teeley remained on Bush’s 1988 campaign staff. As president, Bush named him U.S. representative to UNICEF and then ambassador to Canada. His tenure in Ottawa, where he arrived in mid-1992, was cut short when Bush lost his reelection bid to Democrat Bill Clinton that November. Mr. Teeley later worked as vice president for government and public relations at the biotechnology company Amgen. Peter Barry Teeley was born on Jan. 12, 1940, in Barrow-in-Furness, England, a town subjected to what was known as the “Barrow Blitz” by the German Luftwaffe during World War II. After the war, he and his parents joined a paternal aunt in Detroit. Mr. Teeley spent the rest of his upbringing in Michigan, delivering newspapers to help his parents make ends meet. His father worked on an assembly line, according to Mr. Teeley’s wife, and his mother managed their apartment building in exchange for free rent. Mr. Teeley studied English and journalism at Wayne State University in Detroit, where he graduated in 1965. He took jobs in public relations and advertising before venturing into politics. The first elected officials he worked for included Detroit Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, a Democrat, and Michigan Gov. George W. Romney, a Republican. Mr. Teeley came to Washington as an aide to Griffin and later worked for Sen. Jacob K. Javits (R-New York) before joining the Ford campaign. Mr. Teeley’s marriages to Eileen Stempien, Sandra Evans and Valerie Hodgson ended in divorce. Besides Casey, his wife of 23 years, survivors include two daughters from his first marriage, Susan Risi and Laura Stanley; two daughters from his third marriage, Adrienne Teeley and Randall Teeley; a daughter from his fourth marriage, Rosa Casey-Teeley; and two granddaughters. With co-author Philip Bashe, Mr. Teeley wrote the book “The Complete Cancer Survival Guide” (2000). Bush provided a foreword. Mr. Teeley was found to have colon cancer — his first cancer diagnosis — in 1991 and became gravely ill during treatment. Bush, then serving as president, sent one of his physicians to oversee Mr. Teeley’s care and personally called the intensive care unit to check on his friend. In the aftermath of his illness, Mr. Teeley drew on his experience at UNICEF to found the Children’s Charities Foundation. Since its establishment in 1994, the group has distributed $10.5 million across the Washington area and has provided more than 50,000 new winter coats to needy children, according to the organization. One of its signature fundraising events was the BB&T Classic college basketball tournament. “One thing I learned when I got ill,” Mr. Teeley told Washingtonian magazine in 1995, “is your spirit and your health are better when you’re working on worthwhile things for the future.”
Atelier Announces Brokered and Non-Brokered Private Placement and Intended Public Listing on CSE
'Under significant pressure': regional Victorian hospitals still strugglingNoneNone
New digital platform aims to combat systemic discrimination in PeelThough just 17, Donald Trump’s granddaughter appears to relish her role as an aspiring, up-and-coming MAGA influencer , as she shares slickly produced videos on social media about the fun she has hanging out with her beloved, president-elect “grandpa.” But there’s only so much that Kai Trump can do to soften the image of a man who has been compared by critics to history’s most dangerous fascists and who regularly hurls insults and makes profane remarks. His opponent in the election, Kamala Harris, received some 74 million votes to his 76 million. With her latest video published Tuesday, the teen golf prodigy also showed “grandpa” looking a bit out of his element while a guest at Elon Musk’s SpaceX launch last week. In one particularly “cringe-worthy” moment of Kai Trump’s behind-the-scenes video, Trump is seen sending Musk into “an awkward spiral” after he asks him whether a rocket booster can be reused — after it has crashed into Gulf of Mexico in a fireball, the Daily Beast reported . Last week, Trump joined Musk, his top campaign donor and his purported new expert adviser in government efficiency, to watch the latest test flight of his Starship rocket system, the Daily Beast reported. For the occasion, Trump was joined by Kai Trump and her good friend, as well as Kai Trump’s father, Donald Trump Jr., and Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Musk, who also is a NASA contractor, planned to show Trump a repeat of the “incredible maneuver” that one of his Starship rocket ships executed in October, the Daily Beast said. That’s when giant mechanical arms, sticking out of the launch tower, successfully “caught” the rocket’s “Super Heavy” booster, after it performed the precise moves needed to return to the launch site, SpaceNews.com reported. For the Nov. 19 Starship launch, the rocket successfully lifted off from the SpaceX Starbase test site in Boca Chica, Texas, at 5 p.m., SpaceNews.com reported. Its booster separated from the vehicle’s upper stage about two minutes and 45 seconds after liftoff. The booster started to return to the launch site but, a little more than a minute later, controllers announced “booster offshore divert,” meaning that the booster would not return to the launch pad but instead crash into the Gulf of Mexico. Making the boosters reusable has been a key part of SpaceX’s efforts to cut the cost of each $100 million Starship flight in half, the Daily Beast reported. Kai Trump’s video, which she also shares as a YouTube vlog, caught the moments when Musk told Trump, “We had some concerns about the tower so it was commanded to land out at sea.” In the video, which shows Kai Trump standing nearby, Trump appeared to be uncharacteristically quiet and perhaps a bit awe-struck, as he clearly missed the meaning of what the billionaire was saying. That’s because Trump responded by muttering, “amazing.” The former reality TV star then asked Musk, “Can they use that again? Can they get it from the sea?” Musk appeared to do a double take and to even give the president elect some “side-eye,” the Daily Beast said. Musk awkwardly responded: “Uhh, it’s going to be. ... it‘s ... it’s probably gonna blow up. That’s my guess.” Cruz, standing next to Trump, jumped in to help cover up for Trump’s question by getting Musk to explain that he already has “better” versions of the booster in production, with one ready to use. “Well, there you go,” Cruz said. Trump actually said little else that day, according to Kai Trump’s video and to other news reports. A report in The Telegraph affirmed the view that Trump’s outing with Musk to the SpaceX rocket launch was “awkward” for both men, even as they’ve spent the weeks since the election practically “joined at the hip” at Mar-a-Lago. Trump indeed looked like a “fish out of water” and appeared to be intimidated by Musk during the Starship test flight, according to Darren Stanton, a former police officer and body language expert. Trump showed none of his “alpha male persona” and “power gestures” during the event, Stanton told The Telegraph. “Trump was very uneasy... usually he comes over as this alpha male, the most empowered, most powerful person in the room. I think he’s quite intimidated by Musk,” Stanton said. “He was out of his depth – his hands were just by his side like a mannequin.” It’s hard to believe that Kai Trump intended for her “grandpa” to be seen looking “out of his depth.” As Daily Beast entertainment writer Eboni Boykin-Patterson said in another report , Kai Trump, whose mother is Vanessa Trump, has taken on a role in Trumpworld once filled by her aunt, Ivanka Trump. Since Kai Trump spoke at the Republican National Convention — to “show the side of my grandpa that people don’t often see” — she has become the photogenic young female relative who tries to “sanitize” Trump’s image, Boykin-Patterson also said. Earlier in her video, Kai Trump poked gentle fun at her grandfather — while also giving her some 2.6 million followers some of the “aspirational” content that social media users look for, Boykin-Patterson wrote. As the teenager giddily showed off the luxurious accommodations on Trump’s private jet, she and her friend also spent a few moments recording a TikTok clip , in which they mimicked her grandfather’s golf swing and his meme’d campaign dance moves, set to the Village People’s “YMCA.” The Daily Beast said the result of Kai Trump’s posts is “a simpler, smiley perspective” on Trump, whom she describes as a ” hard worker” for “all Americans.” With her followers, the teenager also shares slideshows of her 78-year-old grandfather, sporting big smiles. “And if that’s all you see of this agreeable, doting grandfather, you’d think he’d never tried to overturn an election,” Boykin-Patterson wrote. ©2024 MediaNews Group, Inc. Visit at mercurynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Sirikanya Tansakul, deputy leader of the People's Party (PP), criticised the government on social media for failing to clarify its position regarding reports of a proposed value-added tax ( VAT ) hike. On Saturday she was responding to Suksit Srijomkwan, the prime minister's deputy secretary-general for political affairs, who defended Prime Minister Paetongtarn Shinawatra amid growing speculation about the VAT increase. Mr Suksit claimed the prime minister was working to dispel misunderstandings about the issue and accused Ms Sirikanya, whose party advocates for a welfare state, of obstructing tax reform. Ms Sirikanya countered in a post on X, saying she had appeared in multiple forums over the past week to discuss the VAT issue. Despite this, she was accused of hindering reforms. She acknowledged that VAT, a significant source of government revenue set at 7% since 1999 despite a legal ceiling of 10%, might require an increase. However, she argued any hike should be gradual, capped below 15%, and accompanied by measures to mitigate economic impacts. Prime Minister Paetongtarn, she said, failed to adequately address the issue when questioned by the media on Thursday. Instead, the prime minister posted on X the following day, asserting there were no plans to raise VAT to 15%. Earlier, Finance Minister Pichai Chunhavajira faced backlash after proposing at a forum to increase VAT to 15% while simultaneously reducing corporate and personal income taxes to enhance state revenues, improve competitiveness, and reduce economic disparities. Ms Paetongtarn later dismissed the proposal, saying no such VAT adjustment was under consideration. Ms Sirikanya criticised the government's poor communication, warning that it undermines efforts to reform the tax structure. Separately, Charnnarong Buristrakul, chairman of the Khon Kaen Chamber of Commerce, said the government might consider raising VAT to address urgent issues such as flood rehabilitation. However, he cautioned that any increase should be limited to 10% due to the economy's vulnerability. Sirikanya Tansakul
