Business
My European Favourites: Český Krumlov
Český Krumlov is the most picturesque medieval town in the Czech Republic, and one of the best small town destinations in Central Europe. Český Krumlov is located in the South Bohemia Region of the Czech Republic about a two hour drive directly south from Prague and only thirty minutes from the nearby city of Ceske Budejovice. It is only about thirty kilometers from the Austrian border, and Linz is only an hour away. It is a natural stop from Prague to Salzburg, and we frequently stay in Ceske Budejovice, where many of our hockey groups play games or train at former NHL and Czech hockey star, Jaroslav Pouzar’s arena.
Český Krumlov’s old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is nestled in between a meandering river and is surrounded by lush green hills and a towering castle above. With narrow cobblestone streets and a mixture of baroque and renaissance architecture, this could be the backdrop to any fairytale.
After we enter the town, we will park our bus across the street from a little park, called the Deer Garden, that is dwarfed by the back side of the Český Krumlov Castle. To get up to the castle, there is a path at an incline just on the right of the park or there are stairs up to the castle located at the back right of the park.
Once you reach the top, on the right you will find the eleven hectare castle garden. The garden includes a cascade fountain, an outdoor amphitheatre with a revolving auditorium, the Bellaria summer palace and the castle’s winter riding hall, which is now used to host special events.
If we go left instead of going into the park, a few steps away is a small gated entrance to a terrace that you should not miss. The terrace offers a spectacular panorama of the river, the town below, the castle on the left and the surrounding area. Your camera will be busy here and, at times, you will have numerous people jockeying for position to get that perfect shot. Please note that the terrace is not always open in the evening.
Cesky Krumlov Castle from the photo terrace and from the Lavka pod Zamkem wooden bridge.
Český Krumlov Castle
The Český Krumlov Castle dates back to 1240 when it was built by the Witigonen (Vitkovci) dynasty. In 1302, the Rosenberg dynasty became owners of the castle, and you will see their family’s five petalled rose logo at various locations throughout the city. In 1622, the castle was transferred to the Austrian Eggenberg family who expanded the castle, including adding the unique baroque theatre that bears their name. Today, the local brewery in Český Krumlov is named after the Eggenbergs. The Schwarzenberg family took over the castle from 1719 until 1947 when it was transferred to the Czechoslovak state. The castle complex, with five courtyards, is listed as a Czech National Monument and is listed on the UNESCO World Heritage List.
What would an old castle be without a good ghost story? In medieval times, the appearance of a White Lady during the day or night was an omen that someone in the family would soon die. At the Český Krumlov Castle, legend has it that the castle is haunted by their own White Lady, Perchta of Rosenberg. Her husband treated her poorly and on his death bed he asked her for forgiveness. She refused and her husband cursed her. Since her death, her ghost has haunted her former husband’s estates including the castle.
Cloak bridge, entrance into the 4th courtyard and frescoes on the courtyard walls.
When we leave the photo terrace, we cross the fifth castle courtyard surrounded by the baroque castle theatre and the renaissance house to the white and grey Cloak Bridge. The bridge, which offers more great views of the old town and river, has three stories above the arched walkway that connect the castle to the theatre.
Entering the area called the Upper Castle, we pass through two small courtyards, named the fourth and third castle courtyards. The courtyards’ facades were painted in the 16th and 17th centuries. The frescoes painted on flat walls use the “trompe–l’oeil” technique to create the optical illusion that the walls are three-dimensional brick with intricate stone decorations and inlayed statues. The “Upper Castle’s” renaissance interiors are palatial with an important collection of paintings, tapestries and furniture. The castle’s underground foundations, called the Wenceslas Cellars, are a labyrinth of pillars and arches. Exiting the third courtyard, we go down a steep and windy passage way, which may have been used for vehicles.
A sundial, the second courtyard fountain and tower. The first courtyard and the red gate.
Arriving at the second castle courtyard, we find the Burgrave’s house from 1578. The Burgrave, or “Count”, was the governor of the town, with judicial and military powers bestowed on him by the Holy Roman Emperor. From 1742-1948, the lower floor of the Burgrave’s house was used to house the Schwarzenberg grenadier guard.
The courtyard has a stone fountain from 1641 in the middle and the colorful castle tower in the corner. The tower and the adjoining “Hradek” building are the two oldest parts of the castle. If you climb the tower, you will get amazing views of the castle and the town.
The castle Bear Moat with bears enjoying bread, vegetables, apples and watermelon snacks.
To access the first courtyard, we cross a small bridge that has a Bear Moat below. There have been bears in the moat since 1707, and most times we can see them walking around or eating their vegetables and fruit. Unfortunately, we don’t always see them as they like the area under the bridge. This is the largest courtyard and was used as an agricultural area and animal enclosure. We leave the castle through the Red Gate and continue until we reach the Latrán street where we turn right. A few meters away on your left is the entrance to the Monastery.
Monastery of the Minorites
After the castle, the monastery is the second largest historic complex in Český Krumlov. The medieval monastery was founded for the brothers and sisters of the order of St. Francis of Assisi in 1350. St. Francis gave the name “Friar Minor” or “Minorites” to the Franciscans. The order of St. Clare, “Poor Claires” or the “Clarissas,” is the name of the female branch of the Franciscans. The monastery church located in the center of the complex separates the convents of the Minorites (here from 1357-1950) and Clarissas (here from 1361-1782).
The Latrán street, a Trdelník vendor and the crucifix on Lazebnicky bridge.
Latrán Street and Lazebnicky Most
The renaissance area just outside the castle and across the river from the old town center was once the home of castle servants. Today the cobble stone Latrán Street’s colorful houses are full of shops, cafes, restaurants and artist galleries. Just off the Latrán, you will find artist workshops featuring paintings, iron works, statues and furniture. Some of these artist workshops are decorated with interesting murals.
Undoubtably, you will be hit by the sweet aroma of the chimney cake or Trdelník. The Trdelník is a rolled dough which is wrapped around a thick spit, baked over hot coals and topped with sugar, walnuts and sometimes cinnamon. You can find variations of this treat throughout the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary.
Connecting the Latrán street to the old town is the wooden Lazebnicky bridge with a large crucifix in the middle. Form the bridge, you have a magnificent view of the castle above, the Vltava river meandering its way around the town, and the riverfront houses and restaurant patios of the old town.
The Český Krumlov old town square with the Marian Plague column and city hall.
Historic Old Town
Once you cross the bridge, if you go forward on the Radniční street for about a hundred meters you will arrive at the Town Square. Instead, we will turn right and take the curved Dlouhá Street with interesting cafes, restaurants and hotels. At the end of the Dlouhá street, we arrive at the Široká street. Turning right we will come to the old mill where we can see the waterwheel still turning and we get another great view of the castle. We continue in the other direction leisurely making our way down the wide and vibrant Široká street until we reach a junction where three streets meet. This is a very picturesque little square with colorful buildings decorated with frescoes.
Only a few meters away from this junction, we find ourselves in the Český Krumlov town square or Náměstí Svornosti. The square has served not only as a market in medieval times, but also as a place of execution. The large white building with renaissance arcades is the 16th century Český Krumlov Town Hall. The four coats-of-arms painted on the façade of the building are those of the Eggenbergs, the Schwarzenbergs, the town and of the Czech state of Bohemia. Like many towns in the Czech Republic, the square has a Marian Plague Column with a fountain at the center. The plague columns give thanks to the Virgin Mary for the end of the plague that killed many throughout Europe in the 17th century. The beautiful buildings adorned with stucco decorations and frescoes around the square once belonged to the town’s upper class and have been restored to their original splendor.
The St. Vitus church from the river, the old town’s Široká street and the three street junction.
Church of St. Vitus
From the town square you will see the 19th century spire and tall roof of the Roman Catholic church of St. Vitus. A short climb up Horní Ulice street you will reach the church entrance. The gothic church has a white interior with an impressive vaulted ceiling supported by stone columns. The tall but clear gothic windows allow light to flood the nave and they push your eyes upwards to the magnificent ceiling. Dating back to the 13th century when the site became a place of worship, the church has undergone a few additions and changes over the years. The church is the burial place of notable Bohemian families including generations of the aforementioned Rosenbergs and Schwartzenbergs.
Not far from the church is a little garden called the Seminární Zahrada, or the Seminary Garden. The garden is part of the Regional Museum, which used to be a seminary for the Jesuits. Like the terrace by the castle, this garden is one of the best spots in town to get that spectacular panoramic photo. The castle and tower are prominent in the background, seemingly rising above a sea of the red tiled roofs below.
Panoramic view from the Seminary Garden and buskers on the Latrán Street.
Rafting on the Vltava
As you leave the old town back to the parking area, you will cross the Lavka pod Zamkem wooden bridge which leads to the Deer Garden. The bridge offers a few more photo opportunities of the river, the castle and the Cloak Bridge. One of the most interesting things to see from the bridge is the wier on the Vltava River that has a spot on the right for rafters to slide down from the higher water level to the lower level. Rafting is very popular, and in summer months you will see raft after raft leisurely floating down the river. The Malecek Rafting company offers canoe and raft rentals with trips of various durations from a thirty-minute trip in the city center all the way to half-day and full-day trips further down the river. They also offer a fifty-minute historical cruise on a twelve-person wooden raft. In the middle ages and beyond raftsmen used the Vltava to transport goods and raw materials like wood and salt. Today, people can enjoy this experience in amazing surroundings.
Rafters and canoers going down the Vltava Rivers’ weir and leisurely past the castle.
Český Krumlov has many small museums worth visiting. My favourite is the Museum of Commerce (Muzeum Obchodu) located in the old town just as you cross the Lazebnicky bridge. The museum has recreated shop interiors, shop machinery and advertising from the early 1900s. Individual packaging of products, like we are used to today, was non-existent. They have a great display of metal dispensary containers where customers would get their coffee beans, sugar, flour or other goods. They also have old style metallic advertising signs for sale. Across from that museum, there is an antique shop with very unique items and next door is the Fairytale House & Puppet Museum.
Other museums you may want to visit in Český Krumlov include the Museum Fotoatelier Seidel, the Egon Schiele Art Centrum, the Moldavite Museum (Muzeum Vltavinu), the Regional Museum and the Torture Museum. There are many other little museums around town worth visiting. Nearby, hikers enjoy climbing the 1,084 meter high Mount Klet’ and guided tours of the Graphite Mine.
Český Krumlov is the second most popular tourist destination in the Czech Republic. I have been to this medieval town numerous times with my tour groups and I am always excited to include it in my itineraries.
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Images compliments of Paul Almeida and Azorcan Tours.
(This article was originally published on April 11, 2021).
Click below to read Paul’s sobering story about Canada’s role in WWI.
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
New script, same budget playbook. Nothing in the Carney budget breaks from the Trudeau years
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s first budget talks reform but delivers the same failed spending habits that defined the Trudeau years.
While speaking in the language of productivity, infrastructure and capital formation, the diction of grown-up economics, it still follows the same spending path that has driven federal budgets for years. The message sounds new, but the behaviour is unchanged.
Time will tell, to be fair, but it feels like more rhetoric, and we have seen this rhetoric lead to nothing before.
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. The government’s assumptions demand trust, not proof, and the budget offers little of the latter.
Former prime ministers Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin did not flirt with restraint; they executed it. Their budget cuts were deep, restored credibility, and revived Canada’s fiscal health when it was most needed. Ottawa shrank so the country could grow. Budget 2025 tries to invoke their spirit but not their actions. The contrast shows how far this budget falls short of real reform.
Former prime minister 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. Carney’s budget 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.
The federal government’s latest budget 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 still rises at a pace the government cannot justify. Deficits have grown. The new fiscal anchor, which measures only day-to-day spending and omits capital projects and interest costs, allows Ottawa to present a balanced budget while still adding to the deficit. The budget relies on the hopeful assumption that Ottawa’s capital spending will attract private investment on a scale economists politely describe as ambitious.
The housing file illustrates the contradiction. New funding for the construction of purpose-built rentals and a larger federal role in modular and subsidized housing builds announced in the budget is presented as a productivity measure, yet continues 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. These barriers fall under provincial and municipal control, meaning federal spending cannot accelerate construction unless those governments change their rules. The example shows how federal spending avoids the real obstacles to growth.
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. The money flows, but the forces do not get the equipment they need.
Most importantly, the structural problems remain untouched: no regulatory reform for major projects, no tax-competitiveness agenda and 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. The budget avoids the hard decisions that make countries more productive.
From an Alberta vantage, the pivot is welcome but inadequate. The economy that pays for Confederation receives more rhetorical respect, 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 country’s best interests.
Marco Navarro-Genie is vice-president of research at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy and co-author with Barry Cooper of Canada’s COVID: The Story of a Pandemic Moral Panic (2023).
Business
COP30 finally admits what resource workers already knew: prosperity and lower emissions must go hand in hand
From Resource Works
By Jim Rushton
What a difference a few weeks make
Finally, the Conference of the Parties to the UN climate convention (COP30) adopted a pragmatic tone that will appeal to the working class. Too bad it took thirty meetings. Pragmatism produces results, not missed targets.
We should not have been surprised. Influential figures like Bill Gates and Canadian-Venezuelan analyst Quico Toro, who have long argued that efforts to reduce CO₂ should focus more on technology and prosperity, and less on energy consumption and declining growth, have gained ground.
In the World Energy Outlook 2025, prepared by the International Energy Agency for COP30, you can see that many of the views held by the people above had already gone mainstream before the conference started.
The World Energy Outlook 2025 lays out three scenarios: Current Policies (CPS), Stated Policies (STEPS), and Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE). In WEO 2025, all three scenarios reflect longer timelines for the decline of fossil fuels than in earlier editions, and the NZE pathway explicitly states that major technological breakthroughs will be required.
Unfortunately, many potential technologies are adamantly opposed by the loudest groups within the Climate Change Movement because they are not perfect. Even some continue to oppose nuclear power, one of the few proven sources of large-scale, zero-carbon, firm electricity.
Another noteworthy standout in WEO 2025 was the strong recognition that energy security, costs, and supply chains are now the primary considerations in determining each country’s energy mix.
What all this means is we are breaking away from emotionally charged, fear-based policies and rhetoric and moving toward a practical “let’s do things better” approach.
For 30 years, the radical leadership of the environmental movement has focused on what we should stop doing and on sacrificing prosperity. Essentially, what has been going on is an attack on working people in the industrialized and developing world.
Today, workers in the developed world are so anxious that many are losing faith in democratic institutions. Meanwhile, people in the emerging and developing world see light at the end of the tunnel and are determined to industrialize.
Clearly, it is time to merge the fight to lower CO₂ emissions with prosperity. “Let’s do things better” captures the history of human progress and resonates with working people today.
What does it take for longer, healthier, safer, and more sustainable lives? It takes the pragmatism of workers. They spend their lives striving to improve workplace safety, to develop tools that enable them to perform tasks more effectively with less physical effort, to earn higher pay, to produce more food with less land, and to preserve their opportunity to continue working.
Resource workers have felt under attack and are humiliated when celebrities fly in on a helicopter to denigrate their work and make references to the virtues of small-plot gardening, or politicians who tell them to go back to school for “jobs of the future”, only to find themselves in low-paying service jobs.
As the COP30 discussion indicates, we have reached a turning point. It is time to focus on doing what needs to be done, but doing it better. It is time to stop banning activities entirely as though circumstances and technology never change. Demanding perfection hides what is possible, slows progress and, in some cases, stops it altogether.
Bill Gates’ memo to COP30 points to the turn in the road:
“We should measure success by our impact on human welfare more than our impact on the global temperature, and our success relies on putting energy, health, and agriculture at the centre of our strategies.”
Gates also makes a point that will resonate with working people: “Using more energy is a good thing because it is closely correlated with economic growth.” Ironically, a statement made by a billionaire resonates with working people more than does the message of many climate activists.
The work at the Port of Prince Rupert comes to mind, given its growing role in supplying cleaner cooking and heating fuels, when we are reminded that 2 billion people worldwide cook and/or heat their homes with highly polluting open fires (wood, charcoal, dung, agricultural waste).
Persuasion published Quico Toro’s essay on November 13, 2025, which speaks another truth.
“COP imagines these emissions as something a country’s government can set, like the dial on a thermostat. But emissions are more like GDP: the outcome of a complex process that politicians would like to be able to control, but do not actually control.”
I am feeling more secure about the future here in Canada and BC, as governments, First Nations and the public are leaning into climate and economic pragmatism.
There will be hard discussions and uncomfortable trade-offs. Past decisions need to be re-examined in good faith. Do they meet today’s demands? Are we doing what needs to be done better? Is it the right move for today’s youth and future generations? Will we bring back the hope and opportunity of a growing middle class?
Nobody, not the Liberal government, the BC NDP government, First Nations, none of us would have predicted the world we are facing today, where our economy and sovereignty are challenged.
Today, oil, natural gas, and critical minerals, not one or two but all three, are the financial backstop Canada needs, as we rebuild the economy and secure our sovereignty.
Look West: Jobs and Prosperity for Stronger BC and Canada is as much of an admission that we are falling behind as it is a call to action. Success will take billions of dollars, the exact amount unknown.
But what we do know is that oil, gas, and critical minerals generate the most public revenue, the highest incomes, and are our most significant exports. They are Canada’s bank and comparative advantage. They will provide the cash flow needed to get it done.
Not maximizing oil production and exports is fighting with both hands tied behind our back. We all know it; now we need to focus on doing it better because circumstances have changed dramatically.
Jim Rushton is a 46-year veteran of BC’s resource and transportation sectors, with experience in union representation, economic development, and terminal management.
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