Business
My European Favourites – Day Trip From Amsterdam
The Netherlands is a great place to visit either as a main destination or as a stopover for a couple of days. I have always enjoyed flying KLM and use them often for our many groups travelling throughout Europe. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is an east hub to fly into from North America, and I like the airport layout over other big and busy European airports.
Amsterdam itself has many interesting places to visit and explore. The city is full of history, great architecture, canals, bridges, museums, great shopping, cyclists, interesting cafes, the Anne Frank House, the Heineken Brewery, and yes, the notorious red light district. Not many people venture outside the city during a stopover, but one of our favourite day trips is from Amsterdam. We always try to do it on a Wednesday, so we catch the Edam cheese market show.
De Huisman Windmill exterior and interior grinding spices. Clog machine at work and the final products.
Zaanse Schans
Our twenty minute early morning trip to Zaandam starts after a good breakfast at our centrally located hotel in Amsterdam. On the way, you can enjoy the beautiful Dutch countryside including dikes and plots of land reclaimed from the water, called polders. Starting in the late 16th century, the Zaandam and the Zaan river area were important wood milling regions during the “Dutch Golden Age” with thousands of saw windmills. In the 19th century, the area became a leader of the “Industrial Age” in the Netherlands.
Starting in 1961, the Zaanse Schans was turned into an open air museum with windmills and buildings from the 18th and 19th centuries. Various wooden houses, barns, shops, warehouses and windmills were transported here starting in 1961. The buildings along with traditional farmsteads, paths, ditches and fields depict how village life was like during that prosperous time.
When we arrive at the Zaanse Schans parking lot, you will undoubtably smell chocolate from the nearby cacao processing factories. Entrance to the Zaansee Schans is free, but some of the workshops and windmills located throughout the grounds are museums and require an entrance fee. You can purchase a ticket to have access to all the museums.
One of the first buildings you will see on arrival is the Kooijman Souvenirs & Clogs Wooden Shoe Workshop. Here you can see a wooden clog machine demonstration. Afterwards, wander throughout the site checking out the bakery, fisherman’s house, weavers house, clock house, merchant house, cheese house, pewter house, pancake house and see how vats and barrels are made at the cooperage. With a little breeze, you can see the sails of the windmills slowly turning while the inner workings churn away. The windmills saw wood or mill oil, flower, spices or pigments to dye cloth. Some windmills allow visitors to climb up to the deck via narrow stairs for a nice view of the river and the area.
The Zaans Museum, located by the parking area, opened in 1998, and contains clothing and artifacts from the area. At its Verkade Experience you can see original chocolate and biscuit factory machines from the early 20th century at work. The museum also has a café and shop.
Traditional houses that are now workshops and museums. Like the Catharina Hoeve Cheese House.
Edam
Another short 20 minute drive, and we reach Edam, which is famous for its cheese market that started in1520. Edam cheese is round with a flattened top and bottom and is coated with a red paraffin wax which allowed it to age well and not spoil on long voyages. Its unique taste plus the lack of spoilage made it extremely attractive for exporting throughout the world. The market was closed in 1922 when cheese began to be made in factories rather than by local farms.
At the original market, farmers would bring their cheese using horse drawn cart or by boat. Once they arrived, the cheese carriers, who wore different colored hats depending on which cheese guild they belonged to, would load the product onto wooden barrows. Once the barrow was loaded, the carriers placed carry straps over their shoulders and walked the precious cargo to the cheese tasters. The tasters would drill a core sample from the cheese and based on the exterior wax, smell, taste and other factors began to bargain the price with the seller using a series of shouts and hand claps. When the price was settled the cheese was taken to the weighing house to determine the final amount to be paid.
Every Wednesday in the summer from 10:30 to 12:30, the town re-enacts the hustle, and bustle of the market at the Jan van Nieuwenhuizen Square. The colorful market includes many family members, including children, wearing traditional costumes, dresses and clogs plus kiosks selling cheese. Throughout the performance, horse carts and boats arrive, cheese carriers scurry at a comical pace and bargain shouts and hand slaps can be heard. So visitors understand everything that is happening, there is a person on a microphone explaining the entire process. It’s quite interesting and fun to witness.
The Edam cheese market square, unloading the boats, cheese carriers and girls in traditional costumes.
Smoked Eels
Next, we will travel from Edam to the seaside fishing village of Volendam to visit a local smokehouse that was founded in 1856. Smoked eels at one time were an important staple food in the Netherlands but recently a drop in the eel population and the resulting price increase has made it a delicacy. Today, the 5th and 6th generations of the Smits’ family keep their family’s secret fish smoking process and traditions alive. The smoked eel is their specialty and during the eel fishing season the entire family is involved in the cutting, gouging, skinning, digging and filleting of the eels. The Paviljoen Smit-Bokkum offers private tours of the smokehouse to introduce people to the traditional eel fishing, processing and smoking activities. In addition to eel, they smoke salmon, dorado and sea bass using pine wood. The eel is delicious and at their restaurant you can try various local dishes. The location also has a shop and a small Palingsound (eel sound) Museum dedicated to Volendam’s unique and famous pop music.
The Paviljoen Smit-Bokkum, our guide with smoked eels, smoked fish and a fish display in Volendam.
Volendam
Volendam, once a simple catholic fishing village, is now Holland’s best-known seaside town and is visited by millions annually. The Volendam Catholic fishermen had their own typical costumes and dialect. The town’s boardwalk, once home to fishermen’s wooden shacks, is now adorned with colorful wooden houses, tourist shops, cafes and restaurants. As you walk through the town and its shops, you will see locals wearing the traditional clothing. If you explore the village’s narrow lanes in the old neighborhoods, you can still see some of the old fishermens’ houses.
There used to be hundreds of vessels at one time when Volendam’s fishing fleet had access to the North Sea, but after closing its access, the harbour contains only a few fishing vessels doing fresh water fishing on Markermeer lake. Nowadays, leisure boats and the ferries that go to the nearby island of Marken occupy the majority of the harbour space.
Some restaurants offer tasty local seafood dishes and cool drinks on patios overlooking the harbour. For a quick lunch, food stands and take away restaurants sell kibbeling (battered and fried fish nuggets), herring, shrimp and of course smoked eel.
A visit to the Volendams Museum provides an interesting look into the town’s history, costumes, traditions and art. If you have time, you may consider taking the Volendam Marken Express boat to Marken.
Volendam’s boardwalk with shops and restaurants. The harbour area with leisure and ferry boats.
Cheese Farm
On the way back to Amsterdam, and a short distance from Volendam, we will stop at the Henri Willig Jacob’s Hoeve cheese farm. The staff wear traditional clothing, and they give a short introduction and demonstration of the cheese making process. The number of cow goat and sheep cheese varieties is quite overwhelming but very interesting to sample. Some flavours you might encounter include truffle, cumin, pesto, red chili pepper, coconut, pepper, rosemary and garlic. They are all for sale in various sizes along with other Dutch souvenirs and foods. You can also see the cows in their new stable especially designed for the organic farm’s herd of Jerseys.
Henri Willig Jacob’s Hoeve entrance, the cheese making demonstration and the many cheeses for sale.
It is only twenty minutes back to Amsterdam and as you enjoy the countryside you can decide on what great restaurant you will go to tonight. I think an authentic Indonesian “rijsttafel” or rice table would be a great way to end the day. The rice table was brought back to the Netherlands from the Dutch East Indies where it was created by the Dutch as a festive way to showcase their colony’s diverse and multi-ethnic Indonesian cuisine. The rice is accompanied by a multitude of small meat, vegetarian and condiment dishes that may include spring rolls, satay meat skewers, curries, fish, boiled eggs, spicy sauces, peanut sauces, vegetables, and fried bananas. It is great for sampling different tastes and for sharing. You can find Indonesian fast food and restaurants throughout Amsterdam, but a place like Tujuh Maret or Ron Gastrobar Indonesia offering a rice table is definitely something you should experience.
Explore Europe With Us
Azorcan Global Sport, School and Sightseeing Tours have taken thousands to Europe on their custom group tours since 1994. Visit azorcan.net to see all our custom tour possibilities for your group of 26 or more. Individuals can join our “open” signature sport, sightseeing and sport fan tours including our popular Canada hockey fan tours to the World Juniors. At azorcan.net/media you can read our newsletters and listen to our podcasts.
Images compliments of Paul Almeida and Azorcan Tours. This article was original published in March 2021.
It finally happened. Canada received a federal budget earlier this month, after more than a year without one. It’s far from a budget that’s great. It’s far from what many expected and distant from what the country needs. But it still passed.
With the budget vote drama now behind us, there may be space for some general observations beyond the details of the concerning deficits and debt. What kind of budget did Canada get?
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For a government that built its political identity on social-program expansion and moralized spending, Budget 2025 arrives wearing borrowed clothing. It speaks in the language of productivity, infrastructure, and capital formation, the diction of grown-up economics, yet keeps the full spending reflex of the Trudeau era. The result feels like a cabinet trying to change its fiscal costume without changing the character inside it. Time will tell, to be fair, but it feels like more rhetoric, and we have seen this same rhetoric before lead to nothing. So, I remain skeptical of what they say and how they say it.
The government insists it has found a new path, one where public investment leads private growth. That sounds bold. However, it is more a rebranding than a reform. It is a shift in vocabulary, not in discipline.
A comparison with past eras makes this clear.
Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin did not flirt with restraint; they executed it. Their budgets were cut deeply, restored credibility, and revived Canada’s fiscal health when it was most needed. The Chrétien years were unsentimental. Political capital was spent so financial capital could return. Ottawa shrank so the country could grow. Budget 2025 tries to invoke their spirit but not their actions. Nothing in this plan resembles the structural surgery of the mid 1990s.
Stephen Harper, by contrast, treated balanced budgets as policy and principle. Even during the global financial crisis, his government used stimulus as a bridge, not a way of life. It cut taxes widely and consistently, limited public service growth, and placed the long-term burden on restraint rather than rhetoric. Budget 2025 nods toward Harper’s focus on productivity and capital assets, yet it rejects the tax relief and spending controls that made his budgets coherent.
Then there is Justin Trudeau, the high tide of redistribution, vacuous identity politics, and deficit-as-virtue posturing. Ottawa expanded into an ideological planner for everything, including housing, climate, childcare, inclusion portfolios, and every new identity category. Much of that ideological scaffolding consisted of mere words, weakening the principle of equality under the law and encouraging the government to referee culture rather than administer policy.
Budget 2025 is the first hint of retreat from that style. The identity program fireworks are dimmer, though they have not disappeared. The social policy boosterism is quieter. Perhaps fiscal gravity has begun to whisper in the prime minister’s ear.
However, one cannot confuse tone for transformation.
Spending is still vast. Deficits grew. The new fiscal anchor, balancing only the operating budget, is weaker than the one it replaced. The budget relies on the hopeful assumption that Ottawa’s capital spending will attract private investment on a scale that economists politely describe as ambitious.
The housing file illustrates the contradiction. The budget announces new funding for the construction of purpose-built rentals and a larger federal role in modular and subsidized housing builds. These are presented as productivity measures, yet they continue the Trudeau-era instinct to centralize housing policy rather than fix the levers that matter. Permitting delays, zoning rigidity, municipal approvals, and labour shortages continue to slow actual construction. Ottawa spends, but the foundations still cure at the same pace.
Defence spending tells the same story. Budget 2025 offers incremental funding and some procurement gestures, but it avoids the core problem: Canada’s procurement system is broken. Delays stretch across decades. Projects become obsolete before contracts are signed. The system cannot buy a ship, an aircraft, or an armoured vehicle without cost overruns and missed timelines. Spending more through this machinery will waste time and money. It adds motion, not capability.
Most importantly, the structural problems remain untouched: no regulatory reform for major projects, no tax competitiveness agenda, no strategy for shrinking a federal bureaucracy that has grown faster than the economy it governs. Ottawa presides over a low-productivity country but insists that a new accounting framework will solve what decades of overregulation and policy clutter have created. More bluster.
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From an Alberta vantage, the pivot is welcome but inadequate. The economy that pays for Confederation, energy, mining, agriculture, and transportation receives more rhetorical respect in Budget 2025, yet the same regulatory thicket that blocks pipelines and mines remains intact. The government praises capital formation but still undermines the key sectors that generate it.
Budget 2025 tries to walk like Chrétien and talk like Harper while spending like Trudeau. That is not a transformation; it is a costume change. The country needed a budget that prioritized growth rooted in tangible assets and real productivity. What it got instead is a rhetorical turn without the courage to cut, streamline, or reform.
Canada does not require a new budgeting vocabulary. It requires a government willing to govern in the best interest of the country.
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Business
Climate Climbdown: Sacrificing the Canadian Economy for Net-Zero Goals Others Are Abandoning
By Gwyn Morgan
Canada has spent the past decade pursuing climate policies that promised environmental transformation but delivered economic decline. Ottawa’s fixation on net-zero targets – first under Justin Trudeau and now under Prime Minister Mark Carney – has meant staggering public expenditures, resource project cancellations and rising energy costs, all while failing to
reduce the country’s dependence on fossil fuels. Now, as key international actors reassess the net-zero doctrine, Canada stands increasingly alone in imposing heavy burdens for negligible gains.
The Trudeau government launched its agenda in 2015 by signing the Paris Climate Agreement aimed at limiting the forecast increase in global average temperature to 1.5°C by the end of the century. It followed the next year with the Pan-Canadian Framework on Clean Growth and Climate Change that imposed more than 50 measures on the economy, key among them a
carbon “pricing” regime – Liberal-speak for taxes on every Canadian citizen and industry. Then came the 2030 Emissions Reduction Plan, committing Canada to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 40 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, and to achieve net-zero by 2050. And then the “On-Farm Climate Action Fund,” the “Green and Inclusive Community Buildings Program” and the “Green Municipal Fund.”
It’s a staggering list of nation-impoverishing subsidies, taxes and restrictions, made worse by regulatory measures that hammered the energy industry. The Trudeau government cancelled the fully-permitted Northern Gateway pipeline, killing more than $1 billion in private investment and stranding hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of crude oil in the ground. The
Energy East project collapsed after Ottawa declined to challenge Quebec’s political obstruction, cutting off a route that could have supplied Atlantic refineries and European markets. Natural gas developers fared no better: 11 of 12 proposed liquefied natural gas export terminals were abandoned amid federal regulatory delays and policy uncertainty. Only a single LNG project in Kitimat, B.C., survived.
None of this has had the desired effect. Between Trudeau’s election in 2015 and 2023, fossil fuels’ share of Canada’s energy supply actually increased from 75 to 77 percent. As for saving the world, or even making some contribution towards doing so, Canada contributes just 1.5 percent of global GHG emissions. If our emissions went to zero tomorrow, the emissions
growth from China and India would make that up in just a few weeks.
And this green fixation has been massively expensive. Two newly released studies by the Fraser Institute found that Ottawa and the four biggest provinces have either spent or foregone a mind-numbing $158 billion to create just 68,000 “clean” jobs – an eye-watering cost of over $2.3 million per job “created”. At that, the green economy’s share of GDP crept up only 0.3
percentage points.
The rest of the world is waking up to this folly. A decade after the Paris Agreement, over 81 percent of the world’s energy still comes from fossil fuels. Environmental statistician and author Bjorn Lomborg points out that achieving global net-zero by 2050 would require removing the equivalent of the combined emissions of China and the United States in each of the next five
years. “This puts us in the realm of science fiction,” he wrote recently.
In July, the U.S. Department of Energy released a major assessment assembled by a team of highly credible climate scientists which asserted that “CO 2 -induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed,” and that aggressive mitigation policies might be “more detrimental than beneficial.” The report found no evidence of rising frequency or severity of hurricanes, floods, droughts or tornadoes in U.S. historical data, while noting that U.S. emissions reductions would have “undetectably small impacts” on global temperatures in any case.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright welcomed the findings, noting that improving living standards depends on reliable, affordable energy. The same day, the Environmental Protection Agency proposed rescinding the 2009 “endangerment finding” that had designated CO₂ and other GHGs as “pollutants.” It had led to sweeping restrictions on oil and gas development and fuelled policies that the current administration estimates cost the U.S. economy at least US$1 trillion in lost growth.
Even long-time climate alarmists are backtracking. Ted Nordhaus, a prominent American critic, recently acknowledged that the dire global warming scenarios used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rely on implausible combinations of rapid population growth, strong economic expansion and stagnant technology. Economic growth typically reduces population increases and accelerates technological improvement, he pointed out, meaning emissions trends will likely be lower than predicted. Even Bill Gates has tempered his outlook, writing that climate change will not be “cataclysmic,” and that although it will hurt the poor, “it will not be the only or even the biggest threat to their lives and welfare.” Poverty and disease pose far greater threats and resources, he wrote, should be focused where they can do the most good now.
Yet Ottawa remains unmoved. Prime Minister Carney’s latest budget raises industrial carbon taxes to as much as $170 per tonne by 2030, increasing the competitive disadvantage of Canadian industries in a time of weak productivity and declining investment. These taxes will not measurably alter global emissions, but they will deepen Canada’s economic malaise and
push production – and emissions – toward jurisdictions with more lax standards. As others retreat from net-zero delusions, Canada moves further offside global energy policy trends – extending our country’s sad decline.
The original, full-length version of this article was recently published in C2C Journal.
Gwyn Morgan is a retired business leader who has been a director of five global corporations.
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