You don’t have to live in a grand colonial American home to enjoy the look of that historic period. If a little painting is on for you this spring or summer, and if you are a bit of a history buff as well, it might interest you to know that Benjamin Moore has just introduced a new line of 144 colours called the Williamsburg Collection. The paint company says that the colours in the new palette are based on those that were used in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  A release announcing the new line of house paint colours says that the “amazing, accurate” colours are as stylish today as they were 250 years ago. To create the historically accurate colours, Benjamin Moore worked with researchers at the famous historical site, Colonial Williamsburg. Historians and conservators looked at documents from the period, paint samples, wallpaper and architectural fragments to find ... Read More »

The main industry group representing appliance manufacturers in the US and Canada, together with a pair of advocacy groups for sustainability, has announced the first sustainability standard for clothes washing machines. The new standard from the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM), CSA Group, and UL (Underwriters Laboratories), is intended to help consumers, retailers, and manufacturers, identify “environmentally preferable” washing machines. AHAM 7003-2013/CSA SPE-7003-13/UL 7003, Sustainability Standard for Household Clothes Washers, identifies the environmental impacts of clothes washers in six key areas: materials, manufacturing and operations, energy and water consumption during use, end-of-life, consumables, and innovation. AHAM says that the standard will serve as an “objective and practical measurement tool” for manufacturers to evaluate the environmental sustainability of home appliances. The release of this and other sustainability standards is in response to growing consumer demand for products with better environmental performance, according to a spokesperson for CSA Group. The standard ... Read More »

There’s one thing to do this Victoria Day weekend that we can guarantee you haven’t done before in Toronto—not a fireworks display, though there are several of those, not a parade or a reenactment of some important historical event. This is truly unique for this city. Tomorrow, May 18, is the official opening of the giant panda exhibit at the Toronto Zoo. The big friendly bears made a splash in the media a couple of months ago when they arrived on a FedEx plane from China, greeted by none other than the prime minister and China’s ambassador to Canada. It was all very friendly, even heart-warming, seeing the roly-poly pandas, named Er Shun and Da Mao, through the bars of their cages. What we didn’t know then was that the two visitors, a male and a female, had not even met each other yet when they arrived from China. They ... Read More »

We might like to think that the stereotype of the self-satisfied senior male executive, surrounded by other senior male executives, all of whom think that their maledom is a pre-ordained reality in the world of business, is a thing of the past. The Conference Board of Canada finds the opposite to be true. It says that attitudes about the role of women in senior management are “polarized” along gender lines. Those who are least concerned about increasing the numbers of women at the top are men at the top. The issue is more complex than a matter of self-serving upper-management male attitudes, however. The Conference Board report finds that an opportunities gap between men and women emerges early in their respective careers, at the first level of management. Women, the report says, are less likely to feel that they can obtain management responsibilities, and this creates an “experience gap” that ... Read More »