Another year, another budget — and for many Ontarians, another round of numbers-induced bewilderment. But fear not: we’ve got you covered. With the province’s finance minister set to present the 2017-18 edition at Queen’s Park this Thursday, here’s a quick primer on how the budget actually works.

Economies in the Great Lakes region grew faster than the Canadian economy last year, pulled along by Ontario, Quebec, and Indiana, according to a report released Tuesday morning by BMO Capital Markets at a conference in Detroit.

This year, Ontario is expected to lead the country with GDP growth of 2.6 per cent, “topping the national average on a sustained basis for the first time in more than a decade,” the report says. Auto production, a weak Canadian dollar, housing in the GTA, and low oil prices are all contributing to strong growth in the province.

“While some headwinds have kept the pace of growth in check south of the border,” the report notes, “most signs point to a stronger expansion in 2017.” The two Canadian provinces and eight U.S. states that surround the Great Lakes had an estimated combined GDP of $6 trillion (all figures U.S.) in 2016, up from $5.8 trillion the year before. If the region were a country, it’d boast the third largest economy in the world, after the U.S. and China.

Donald Trump fired a shot at Canada’s dairy sector this week, in a speech to factory workers in Wisconsin. The President told his audience Canada had been “very unfair” to U.S. dairy farmers.

There to sign his “Buy American, Hire American” executive order, Trump also took the opportunity to talk about renegotiating NAFTA and protecting American farmers.

“We're also going to stand up for our dairy farmers in Wisconsin,” he said. “It's another typical one-sided deal against the United States. And it's not going to be happening for long.”

In 2014, a 19-year-old Congolese exchange student named Levy Thamba Pongi ate one-sixth of a pot cookie — the amount recommended by Colorado public health — while visiting Denver with friends. After 30 minutes the THC hadn’t kicked in, so he ate the rest of the cookie. Then he jumped off a fourth-story balcony and died.

Pot was legal in Colorado by then. The state has since changed its labelling and packaging laws so that each edible dose of the drug is individually wrapped. “Colorado failed to completely anticipate how much attention edibles would attract and how difficult it would be to regulate them,” the Colorado Health Institute reported in 2015.

Pongi’s death and the legislative aftermath should serve as a lesson for Canada, where marijuana is set to be legalized on July 1, 2018, with legislation to that effect coming next week.

Whether it’s because we can’t get time off work or we’re stuck at home with young kids, many of us are missing doctors’ appointments: a recent Ipsos poll found that 68 per cent of Canadians have missed at least one due to long wait times or a lack of after-hours availability. A new Uber-like service, recently launched in Ontario, is looking to change that with virtual care.

But like Uber, it’s controversial: Maple, the new 24/7 virtual walk-in clinic, has to work around existing health-care legislation, because the services it offers are not covered by provincial insurance. And, like Uber, it’s disrupting a traditional service model through technology. “We are not a health-care provider," says Maple’s chief executive, Brett Belchetz. “We’re a technology platform.”

Beer brewers have some early mornings, but not usually this early. It's about 2 a.m. one day in November at Indie Ale House, in Toronto’s Junction district, and as you approach the brewing kettles it gets more and more humid. Water drips from the ceiling in the brewing room.

A new shift of brewers comes in at 6 a.m. to relieve the overnight crew. One pours himself a beer from one of Indie’s taps when he arrives. Indie’s head brewer is sleeping on the floor, on an air mattress he'd brought in for the occasion. By the time he wakes up, around 9 a.m., the air is thick and smells of sourdough bread. The beer is almost ready to go.

The brewers are pulling this all-nighter for a very special reason: to make a “wildly fermented,” Belgian lambic-style beer. Soon they'll start transferring the beer into kegs and loading it onto a truck, at which point they'll drive the beer out to a winery in Prince Edward County and unload it into "coolships" — large, open vessels — to let it cool outside overnight. (The brewers will spend their night in tents nearby.) In this way, the brewers say, the beer can collect the wild yeasts in the air.