Terry Fox - Canada's Hero

D could not resist taking off  running on this endless beach on the coast of California during a trip we took to cheer our hockey team, the Vancouver Canucks.

A blog about all things Canadian would never be complete without talking about Terry Fox.  My husband loves to run so I learned very early on who Terry was.  He is considered one of the greatest Canadians of all times.  

I am very proud to tell you that Terry was a Kinesiology student at my very own school, Simon Fraser University in BC.    He belonged to the school's basketball team.  Terry was diagnosed in 1977 of bone cancer and he lost his right leg to it.  His leg was amputated about six inches above his knee.  He had seen the suffering of other cancer patients, specially of children, and he decided he had to do something to raise awareness and money.  What he came up with was running across Canada.  He called this mega marathon The Marathon of Hope.  

He started running on April 12, 1980 at one of the most Western part of the country in St. John's, Newfoundland.  He ran an average of 26 miles a day, which is the length of a full marathon, every day  nonstop with just one leg!  That is some serious determination.  People congregated in the streets to see him run by their towns and cities and cheer him up.  When he was forced  because of cancer to stop his race in Thunder Bay, Ontario about 4 months and two weeks afterwards he had run  5,373 km.  

He lost the battle to cancer in 1981 but his legacy lives on.  The Terry Fox Foundation has raised over $550 million for cancer research to the date.  D has this dream of running across Canada too.  I think many Canadians do because what Terry Fox started is very fresh in the memories of them all.  There is a Terry Fox run in SFU every September, I would love to participate in the 2012 one.

 

Canada - A Business Startup Heaven?

A local bike rental business near Stanley Park in Vancouver

I walk pass the Small Business BC office on my way to work every morning and my feet itch to go inside and check it out.  But of course I always have just enough time to make it on time so I kept telling myself that I'll do it tomorrow.  I have found out online though that they have seminars that go for  as little as $25 and a pretty nice range of affordable services for entrepreneurs.

I read a very interested article on the Financial Post that says that Canada has been ranked as the best place out of the G20 countries to start a business.  Here, it only takes 5 days to start a business as opposed to 22 days to start one in a G20.  Some of the reasons for this is that Canada has a very strong banking sector, good coaching and education programs available, and that start up costs are not as high as in some other countries.  In a study for the Youth Business Foundation from the firm Ernst and Young Canada got 93 points and the United States, its closest competitor, got 75 points .  So this gives you a good idea of how favorable the business climate is here.  Canadian entrepreneurs can count on the education system to provide them with a large pool of qualified employees, more opportunities for collaboration and less regulatory burdens than in other highly develop economy.

Being an entrepreneur is, of course, not all that easy.  One tip that might help your business success is that Canadians spend more time than anybody else in the world online (see article here).  This explains why it is so easy to get in touch with my husband and family here just by using facebook. I can send them a message and get an almost instant reply like with text message.  So maybe blogging or getting your business its very own profile page can help you reach out to your customers not only more effectively but also cheaply.  So what do you think, would you like to start a business in Canada?

A short video with advice  to help your business keep up with trends