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Inside the Toronto mansion of Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz, venue of glittering parties featuring Canada's cultural and political elite, the library is one of the most popular rooms. In among the shelves of literature, art books and countless tomes by Winston Churchill and about John F.

It has been a long time since a Canadian government tried to force the auto industry to improve fuel efficiency. The energy crisis scares of the 1970s were still fresh memories when Pierre Trudeau's Liberals passed the Motor Vehicle Fuel Consumption Standards Act in 1982.

If it's true that you've got to be smart to be lucky, then Jean Monty is one heck of a smart businessman. A year ago, the chief executive officer of BCE Inc. flirted with the idea of swapping the conglomerate's 39-per-cent stake in Nortel Networks Corp.

When it comes to taking care of personal finances, Bohdan Dolban, 32, and his wife, Mary, 35, are about as good as it gets. His job as a sales representative for a Toronto packaging company and hers as a systems analyst give them a family income of about $85,000, and every cent is put to good use.

In Ireland, where the price of a pint is often a measure of prosperity, there is no greater gauge of the prevailing public mood than O'Donnell's pub.

Over the past year, Jean Monty has been buying up properties and piling them on top of one another much like a winner at a blackjack table stacks his chips in multicoloured towers. In February, the chairman and chief executive of BCE Inc. dished out $6.8 billion for control of Teleglobe Inc.

Call it convergence. Bill Gates, in Toronto last fall for the first time in a couple of years, runs into Ted Rogers in the middle of the lobby of the Royal York Hotel. Rogers, who would love to collaborate with Gates's gigantic Microsoft Corp.

Watch what I do, not what I say. That, in effect, is how BCE Inc. chief executive Jean Monty explained the latest and boldest step in his campaign to reinvent the Montreal-based telecommunications giant as the dominant provider of Canadian content on the Internet.

John Jacobsen has been through a lot of boom and bust cycles over the past 30 years, but he's never seen anything quite like this. As vice-president in charge of operations for Calgary contractor Precision Drilling Corp.

By any standard it was a meaty budget. On taxes, Finance Minister Paul Martin's first fiscal plan for the new century laid the table for five years of gradual cuts to corporate and personal rates.

No one expected Napoleon to retreat from the steppes of Russia, or Conrad Black to dispossess himself of the newspapers he has spent most of a lifetime acquiring.

The plot is like something out of a Mordecai Richler novel. Sharp-eyed, compulsive-smoking Jewish guy from, of all places, small-town Manitoba goes nose to nose with equally sharp-eyed, private-school-educated WASP from Toronto for the big enchilada.

It was a feat of magic befitting Harry Potter. In early July, Allan MacDougall, the head of Vancouver's Raincoast Books, was in the same jam as most Canadian publishers. Collectively, they were owed tens of millions of dollars in back payments by gigantic bookstore chain Chapters Inc.