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A state-owned Russian venture capital fund is poised to pump millions of dollars into Canada's fledgling nanotechnology industry.

Senior officials from the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies — which calls itself RUSNANO — were in Windsor, Toronto, and Ottawa last week meeting with scientists and entrepreneurs, as well as provincial and federal officials, as part of their global search for promising nanotechnology companies that need some seed money.

“What we saw we liked,” said Alexander Losyukov, RUSNANO's deputy director general for international co-operation, in an interview in Ottawa. “Scientists are getting engaged.”

Losyukov and other senior fund officials have also travelled to Germany, Israel, Finland, the U.S. and elsewhere as they look for startups in which to invest. With $5 billion U.S. to work with, RUSNANO is one of the largest technology capital funds on the planet.

Losyukov said it has identified more than 100 Canadian firms involved in commercial development of nanotechnology.

Later this spring, fund officials in Moscow will decide which firms or startups it wants to back. The fund's minimum investment in any of these firms will be $10 million U.S. [Red the rest of the story]

It's been 92 years since Canadian troops knocked the Germans off of France's Vimy Ridge, at a terrible cost in blood, limbs, and lives to both sides. I disagree with those in the PMO who say it was a “decisive battle” that help define the course of the First World War. But I, and many historians agree with the PMO's statement (not online yet) that, for a young Canada, the battle, which began on Easter Sunday 1917, was a monumental coming-of-age moment: The first time all four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together as a single unit — and won a major objective.

One of the best and most emotionally enriching assignments I've ever had in 25 years in this biz was covering the 90th annniversary of this battle. At a ceremony attended by tens of thousands in France, Prime Minister Harper was joined by Queen Elizabeth II, who spoke French on French soil in tribute to Canada, and French Prime Minister Dominique deVillepin, who spoke English (!) on French soil tribute to Canada.

The ceremony was special but so, for me, was Easter Sunday morning. Journalists had been taken up to the Ridge before dawn. There, with only a handful of people around, we watched a magnificent sunrise and reflected on the awful battle and tremendous sacrifices that had happened on that cold, snowy, muddy, deadly morning 90 years ago. Then later, we attended a church service at nearby St.-Martin-de-Vimy and, finally, a celebration of Canada's troops in the town of Arras. Here's a couple of photos I took from that day and more can be found here.

The only good news in Statistics Canada's monthly jobs report was that it was not as grim as some had expected. Still — it was as grim as most expected. More than 61,000 Canadians lost their jobs in March, the fifth month in a row, and our unemployment rate is now 8 per cent.

Dawn Desjardins, the assistant chief economist at the Royal Bank looked at the numbers and says:

The unemployment rate has risen at a staggering pace from a generational low of 5.8% at the beginning of 2008 to 6.6% at the end of the year and 8% at the end of the first quarter of 2009. This pace of increase clearly outflanked the rise in the unemployment rate during the economic slowdown earlier this decade (it increased to 8% from 6.7%) but is less than the 4.8 to 5.8 percentage point increase recorded in the early 1980s and 1990s recessions. That being said, we expect the unemployment rate to continue to move higher in the months ahead given the weak state of the economy and persistent uncertainty in financial markets.

However, with the considerable monetary policy and fiscal stimulus hitting up in Canada, we believe conditions are in place for the economy to start to recover mid-year especially if the nascent signs of stability in the US economic and financial markets build momentum. All eyes are on the Bank's statement on April 21 which will deliver the framework for quantitative and credit easing and we look for policymakers to reiterate their commitment to keeping interest rates low until the economy is growing sufficiently strong to close the output gap and limit downside risks to the inflation outlook.

Here's CIBC World Markets Avery Shenfeld:

We’ve reached much higher jobless rates in past recessions, but the pace of employment losses, with a further 61,000 in March extending a more than 2% drop since October, is consistent with a severe recession.

The Department of National Defence, of course, is not in the real estate business. Still, its latest transaction is a little unfortunate.

In 2002 — just at the end of decades of neglect by Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments — DND decided it could live without 373 hectares of land at CFB Shearwater in Nova Scotia. So it sold the chunk of land for $1.5 million to the Canada Lands Company, the federal Crown corporation which “optimizes the financial and community value of strategic Government of Canada properties.” Well, CLC optimized all right.

Turns out that, now that Liberal and Conservative governments are giving DND some cash again, the air force has decided it needs that 373 hectares back again.

And so today it announced that it had bought that land back from CLC. Total purchase price: $7.9 million.

The good news is that both DND and the CLC have the same shareholder: The Canadian taxpayer.

It's heartening to hear that the Conference Board of Canada forecasts economic growth this year for Quebec City, Ottawa, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, and Regina. That's the good news. The bad news is that of the 13 metropolitan areas the Conference Board surveys, more than half — eight — will shrink and canada's biggest metropolitan area — Ontario's Golden Horseshoe incorporating Toronto and Hamilton — is going to trail all metropolitan areas when it comes to economic growth.

Here's the Conference Board's predictions for economic growth for 2009 (in percentage terms compared to 2008)

1. Saskatoon: +1.7%
2. Regina: +1.6%
3. Winnipeg: +1.1%
4. Quebec City: +0.6%
5. Ottawa: +0.2% (Weakest since 1996)
6. Halifax: 0.0
7. Calgary: -0.1% (First decline in 20 years)
8. Edmonton: -0.2%
9. Victoria: -0.3%
10. Montreal: -0.5% (Worst since 1991)
11. Vancouver: -0.9%
12. Toronto: -1.6%
13. Hamilton: -1.9%

We all know we're about to sink in the red but, at the end of January at least, the federal government was still $500 million to the good.

The latest numbers from the federal Department of Finance show that, with just two months remaining in the government's fiscal year (it ends on March 31), Ottawa had a budget surplus of $0.5 billion, compared to a budget surplus of $9.6 billion for the first 10 months of fiscal 2008. Revenues were off by $3.3 billion of 1.7 per cent while program expenses were way up by $7.5 billion or 4.7 per cent. Public debt charges are down, though, by $1.7 billion on a year-over-year basis.

January itself was alright as well with a narrow surplus for the month of $37 million, compared to a year ago when the January surplus was $1.2 billion.

Canadian Manufacters & Exporters, a lobby group which represents some 5,000 or so manufacturing companies in Canada, is doing periodic surveys of its membership. The last few have been pretty bleak. But its latest business conditions survey seems to indicate a bit of an uptick. From the release:

It's not a signal the recession is over yet, but more Canadian manufacturers and exporters are optimistic about business conditions over the next three months than they have been since the beginning of 2009, according to the Canadian Manufacturers & Exporters' March Business Conditions Survey.[PDF]

“It's a glimmer of hope in an otherwise bleak outlook,” said CME President, Jayson Myers in response to the survey results. “I believe the real economic impacts are still to be felt, but it is encouraging news that the economic decline appears to be slowing.”

This month, 717 companies participated in the survey conducted during the first two weeks of March. Exactly 49 per cent of firms expect orders to decrease between March and June, down seven percentage points from February's figure of 56 per cent. And there's some good news for job seekers — 13 per cent of companies expect to increase employment over the next three months, up from 11 per cent in February. The number of firms who are planning lay-offs also shrunk over the past month, decreasing from 45 to 42 per cent.

Myers' says that the number one issue for manufacturers continues to be access to credit.

Consumer bankruptcies in Canada spiked sharply in January, the beginning of what credit experts warn could be a wave of bankruptcies this year that are the inevitable result of rapidly rising unemployment.

“We're not even close to the filings we saw in 2004,” said Bruce Alger, president of Alger & Associates, a bankruptcy trustee with several offices in Alberta. “We've got a ways to go yet.”

More than 10,700 people in Canada declared themselves insolvent in January, an increase of 23.1% from the same month in 2008.

For the 12-month period ending on Jan. 31, 2009, 117,704 consumers had declared themselves insolvent, a 16% year-over-year jump. [Read the rest of the story]

National Bank Financial Group is out with its monthly “House Price Index” . The national number is always less important — prices down year/year 2.35 % and month-to-month for February down 1.55% — as the numbers for your neighbourhood.:

Of the six constituent city indices, three were down from a year earlier: Calgary (−8.2%), Vancouver (−4.2%) and Toronto (−2.4%). Two others were still up from a year earlier but by much less than last month: Ottawa (2.1%) and Halifax (1.2%). The sixth city, Montreal, also showed deceleration but maintained a respectable 12-month increase of 4.1%.

In another indication of the recent downtrend, each of the six city indices was down from its all-time high of last year (or 2007 for Calgary). However, they have not been moving in lockstep. The Calgary index was down from the month before in 14 of the last 17 months, with seven straight declines from last July through January. January was also a seventh consecutive month of decline for Vancouver. For Toronto it was the fifth, for Ottawa the third and for Halifax the second (the fourth in five months). Montreal’s index peaked in September, fell for three months in a row, then edged up 0.1% in January.