Bruce Linton, co-founder and CEO, Canopy Growth Corp.

Linton’s challenge this year is to prove Canopy Growth Corp., a stock-market speculators’ darling, isn’t a flash in the pan, though it has already achieved the status of the world’s biggest publicly traded cannabis firm.

Skeptics point to Canopy’s chronic losses, a total of $20.4 million in red ink over the past three money-losing years. And Canopy, a mere three-year-old firm whose stock has gained 515 per cent in value since its IPO just last year, does bear the hallmarks of irrational investor exuberance.

Then again, Canopy’s revenues have increased almost 17-fold in three years, to $39.9 million in fiscal 2017.

Linton’s acquisition-driven growth strategy helps account for what Canopy bulls would argue are front-end losses to achieve future market dominance.

Linton is a veteran of high-tech firms and of export markets; he helped tech firm CrossKeys System Corp. crack the China market.

The vertically integrated, geographically diversified Canopy grows and distributes medicinal and recreational pot on four continents.

Goals for 2018 are to drive down costs, expand Canopy’s customer base of about 40,000 users, and strengthen consumer recognition of its many brands, notably Tweed and Bedrocan.

That challenge became a lot more feasible with the October announcement that U.S. distilling giant Constellation Brands Inc. will be the first Fortune 500 company to invest in a marijuana venture, spending $245 million (Cdn.) in 2018 to eventually acquire as much as 20 per cent of Canopy.

For the venerable Constellation, owner of popular brands Corona, Modelo and Svedka vodka, Canopy is partly a hedge against a flattening beer market.

Canopy also seeks in 2018 to develop alcohol-like beverages that contain THC rather than alcohol, a line of products Linton hopes to have on the market by 2019.

“Maybe they’ll make you a little bit euphoric or contemplative, maybe they’ll make you a little bit hungry,” Linton says.

Chrystia Freeland, Canadian foreign affairs minister

A journalist and historian in an earlier life, Freeland, 49, sees the difficult negotiations over a renewed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as part of a wider disintegration of the global institutions that have delivered more than 70 years of unprecedented peace and prosperity in the world.

Freeland’s immediate goal is to preserve and even enhance the benefits the 23-year-old NAFTA has brought its three partner countries, much as Freeland played a pivotal role in negotiating the extraordinary Canada-E.U. Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA).

In the NAFTA debacle, Canada has discovered it has far more U.S. friends than it realized. Freeland’s objections to Trump administration demands for auto-export levies, scrapping the treaty’s dispute-resolution mechanism, “Buy American” procurement rules, and a proposed sunset clause that would see NAFTA renegotiated all over again in five years’ time are shared with, among other powerful U.S. forces, the more than 300 state and local U.S. chambers of commerce that have fired a letter to the White House in support of the existing NAFTA.

But Freeland this year will be looking beyond NAFTA to a new world order not so heavily reliant on the post-Second World War institutions of the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and other stabilizing forces.

They have been undermined by a resurgence in anti-immigrant nationalism, dynamic economic change, and a breakdown in global trade – factors eerily similar to the conditions that led to World War I.

Appearances to the contrary, Freeland is not the “NAFTA minister.” Compelled by Brexit, refugee crises, North Korean belligerence and other troubling realities, Freeland instead will have as her top goal in 2018 helping rebuild global trust in a current period she describes as “probably the most uncertain moment in international relations since the end of the Second World War.”

Tarana Burke, founder of the #MeToo movement

As revelations of improper sexual conduct by men, prominent and otherwise, accumulated in 2017, a question arose among some about distinctions between harassment and rape on the spectrum of aberrant behaviour.

But not for Burke, 44, the U.S. social activist who launched the Me Too campaign a decade ago: “If your ‘me too’ [incident] was about sexual harassment versus sexual assault but it’s traumatizing to you, then it’s important for you to be heard. Trauma is trauma.”

Burke had wondered if this “viral moment,” as she modestly describes 2017’s colossal outpouring of revelations, would be widely embraced.

It has been, of course: Within 24 hours of U.S. actor Alyssa Milano’s first use of MeToo as a hashtag in exposing the alleged misconduct of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, more than half a million #MeToo tweets were sent.

That shouldn’t have been the surprise it was.

Four years ago, a United Nations report found that 99.3 per cent of women it interviewed had experienced sexual harassment.

By October there were local-language hashtags worldwide, even in semi-closed societies like Iran, Egypt and Afghanistan. The global hashtags include the Spanish-speaking world’s #YoTambién, Israel’s #UsToo and France’s #BalanceTonPorc (#DenounceYourPig).

Burke does make a distinction, though, between the revelations and what we do about them.

“Sexual violence knows no race or colour or gender or class,” she told the Boston Globe in October. “But the response to sexual violence does.”

Self-destructive men have seen the irrevocable ruination of their careers and reputations in 2017.

It’s Burke’s cause in 2018 and beyond to see an end to the behaviours causing trauma, by curing men of the unconscious bias by which so many men fail to understand that even groping is a violation that can traumatize a victim for a lifetime, because it implants a lasting fear that it will happen again.

Theresa May, Prime Minister of Britain

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Donald Tusk, president of the European Union (EU) council, is blunt about the urgency in negotiating Britain’s divorce from the EU “We have only 10 months” to hammer out a deal agreeable to both parties,” he says. “This will be a furious race against time.”

Actually, that ominous deadline comes much sooner for May, 61, leader of the only G-7 country whose economic prospects are completely up in the air.

At this moment, about 10 per cent of U.K. companies have started preparing for the prospect of failed talks, by which Britain quits the EU – world’s biggest economy – stripped of access to the EU’s vast Common Market. If no deal for continued Common Market access for Britain isn’t reached by March that number is expected to leap to 60 per cent.

Which means May has just three months to strike a deal with the tough-minded EU divorce negotiators, or the bulk of British business will hit the “go” button on transferring employees and assets from Britain to EU countries in order to retain the vital benefits of remaining within the 27-member EU.

Canadian and other financial institutions in London have already begun to defect, with EU member Ireland among the biggest winners of British defectors. March marks the point at which U.K. business decisions about uprooting or scaling back its U.K. operations are of the “no turning back” kind.

May’s chances of achieving a deal are slim. She heads a shaky coalition government. Her cabinet is openly divided on what Britain should offer to get a deal. And some 40 of May’s Tory backbenchers have signed a statement of no confidence in their leader.

That disarray has emboldened staunchly pro-EU leaders Emmanuel Macron of France and German Chancellor Angela Merkel to insist on a separation injurious to Britain, as a cautionary tale for any other E.U members with breakaway thoughts.

Mohammed Bin Salman, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia

For generations, the West has dealt with a House of Saud whose control of the world’s biggest oil-reserves was dispersed among scores of Saudi sheiks.

That ended abruptly in 2017, when Bin Salman, 32, heir apparent to his father, the Saudi king, sacked and arrested hundreds of clerics and state officials and 11 princes within the House of Saud itself, replacing them with hand-picked favourites.

A West unaccustomed to dealing with a Saudi autocracy doesn’t know what to expect.

The year ahead will signal if Bin Salman means to continue neglecting his Kingdom in extending Saudi Arabia’s external influence.

At home, poverty rates run high, but Bin Salman’s bid for global influence has seen him invest $45 billion (U.S.) in a Pacific Rim fund run by Japanese software tycoon Masayoshi Son. The crown prince has pumped another $20 billion (U.S.) into a U.S. private equity fund.

That’s money that could be spent upgrading Saudi’s own deficient social infrastructure, the decay of which might someday threaten Bin Salman’s grip on power.

Bin Salman so far has been a destabilizing force in a sensitive region.

It was Bin Salman, as his father’s defence minister, who launched a feckless war in Yemen that has achieved nothing for the Kingdom and unleashed a lengthy slaughter in that country.

Bahrain has long been treated as a Saudi vassal state; and in 2017 Bin Salman reduced Lebanon to Saudi vassalage, as well. Bin Salman long ago committed his Kingdom to a vain military role in the Syrian civil war.

Bin Salman appears intent on remaking the Middle East, mostly in order to isolate arch-enemy Iran. While Saudi Arabia has been on the losing end of its military adventures, Bin Salman remains determined to assert his Kingdom as a military force to be reckoned with in a geopolitical game unprecedented in the Kingdom’s modern history.

Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies

This is Musk’s make-or-break year to prove he can mass-produce Tesla’s technologically advanced electric vehicles (EVs).

Observers will count Musk’s audacious bid to have the world using EVs and colonizing Mars with his spaceships by 2022 as a success – or at least a decent shot at one – if Tesla can turn out its mass-market Model 3 sedans at the rate of 5,000 vehicles per month by Musk’s self-imposed deadline of this spring.

Ultimately, Tesla’s goal is to ramp up production of the Model 3, priced at about $45,000 (Cdn.), to more than 100,000 sedans per year. That’s a production rate whose volume of units and speed of getting to that volume is without precedent in more than a century of auto history.

If Tesla can endure what Musk, 46, has described as “production hell” at Tesla’s Fremont, Calif. factory in hitting Musk’s deadlines, he will remain a hero to techies everywhere. But if Tesla’s bet-the-company project is mired in delays and product glitches, it won’t be Tesla alone that suffers.

The audacity of Tesla in forcing the world’s automakers to get with the EV program has cast a halo over Musk’s many and varied other seemingly fantastic pursuits. They include commercial rockets supplying the International Space Station; a Musk firm that designs, builds and installs solar panels atop residential and commercial buildings; and emerging “hyperloop” technology for transporting commuters among cities in something akin to pneumatic tubes.

The shine will come off those ancillary activities if the “Everyman Tesla vehicle” fails to appear in sufficient number, or to please the thousands of motorists whose advance down-payments on the vehicle have financed a Tesla Inc. that has never turned a profit.

It must be said, though, that each of Tesla’s previous models has been delayed, and yet most have delivered – in performance, comfort and design – even beyond high expectations.

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