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Good morning. Canadian chipmaker (potato chip, that is) Covered Bridge is in a legal battle against 17 New Brunswick residents who claim that its chip factory has made their lives hell.
The processing plant opened last year near the town of Woodstock after Covered Bridge’s previous plant burned down. The litigants claim it has caused numerous disruptions due to noise, lights, and — most of all — smell. One person called the factory’s odour “sickening.”
If we were the company, we’d try to buy them off by offering a free lifetime supply of chips. The promise of never having to worry about movie night snacks again might sway them, though these folks have probably been turned off by their recent olfactory experiences.
Today’s reading time is 5½ minutes.
MARKETS
| ▼ | TSX |
34,412.05 |
-0.70% |
|
| ▲ | S&P 500 |
7,520.36 |
+0.02% |
|
| ▲ | DOW JONES |
50,644.28 |
+0.36% |
|
| ▲ | NASDAQ |
26,674.73 |
+0.07% |
|
| ▼ | GOLD |
4,486.3 |
-1.07% |
|
| ▼ | OIL |
89.44 |
-4.74% |
|
| ▼ | CAD/USD |
0.72 |
-0.21% |
|
| ▼ | BTC/USD |
75,107.07 |
-1.17% |
Markets: BMO, Scotiabank, and National Bank all topped analyst estimates in their quarterly earnings reports yesterday. However, it wasn’t enough to lift Canada’s main stock index — in fact, shares in National Bank fell 4% — which continued to slide amid Middle East tensions.
TRANSPORT
WestJet lobbied Ottawa to undo passenger rights rules
Source: Justin Hu / Unsplash.
In news that should surprise absolutely nobody, a major Canadian airline is not a fan of regulations that force them to compensate passengers for flight delays.
Driving the news: According to documents obtained by the Toronto Star, WestJet has been lobbying the federal government to remove the Air Passenger Protection Regulations (APPR), arguing that the system stifles competition in the sector and adds to airlines’ already high operating costs.
The APPR were introduced in 2019 to make it easier for Canadian travellers to get compensated for flight delays and cancellations.
Catch-up: Airlines aren’t happy about the added cost of APPR, and they could soon be paying more. Amendments proposed in December 2024, which still have yet to be rolled out, would automatically place responsibility for a flight disruption of more than three hours on the airline.
Right now, airlines only have to provide refunds, hotel rooms, and meal vouchers if a flight disruption is caused by something under their control (like understaffing), which is often difficult for passengers to prove.
Why it matters: The passenger protections are great for travellers in theory, but whether they have benefited fliers in practice is a matter of debate. More than 95,000 unresolved complaints (which now take three years on average to resolve) are still in the backlog, and airlines say added costs just get passed on to passengers.
Canada’s transport regulator estimated that airlines are paying an additional $27.50 per passenger to apply the current passenger protections.
Our take: Air Canada and WestJet both ranked in the bottom three of North American airlines for on-time performance in 2025. Even if some of the costs of the APPR are passed onto passengers, the relative success of similar regulations in Europe shows that passenger rights rules can work when implemented correctly. —LA
BIG PICTURE
Source: Unsplash
Lululemon strikes a deal with founder Chip Wilson to end his activist battle. The Canadian athleisure brand has agreed to appoint two of Wilson’s handpicked board nominees. In return, Wilson will end his longstanding (and very public) feud with the company he started in 1998. Lulu’s stock is down over 37% this year, fashion trends are shifting away from its core products, and upstarts like Vuori and Alo Yoga (not to mention cheap private-label dupes) are poaching its customers. (Bloomberg News)
Ottawa is making a pair of defence deals with European allies. Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that the feds have entered negotiations to buy a fleet of Sweden’s Saab surveillance planes, which are built in collaboration with Bombardier in Montreal. Ottawa also inked a deal to buy Polish drones and deepen defence ties with the country. The deals mark a deliberate departure from Canada’s longstanding reliance on U.S. defence contractors. (CBC News)
Meta is rolling out premium versions of its platforms. The new paid subscriptions for Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp offer bonus features like extra post insights, profile customization, and other perks. These “Plus” tiers, which are priced between US$2.99 and $3.99, will give Meta a new revenue stream outside of its ad business to offset its enormous AI costs. The company still doesn’t offer an ad-free subscription outside of the EU and U.K. (TechCrunch)
📡 What else is on our radar:
Samsung workers in the company’s electronics division have signed an AI profit-sharing agreement that will see employees net average bonuses of US$400,000.
The U.S. carried out more strikes against Iran.
Ottawa will release its official AI strategy next week.
Several big tech companies are backing a new initiative to develop environmentally friendly technologies to power data centres.
Gucci will become the title sponsor of the Alpine Formula One team next year.
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IN THE LAB
Science is one step closer to resurrecting the dodo
Source: Colossal Biosciences.
Colossal Biosciences has made the age-old paradox, “What came first, the chicken or the egg?” obsolete. The biotech startup claims it hatched 26 chickens using a silicone-based membrane system that mimics an egg. The design succeeded where previous artificial eggs failed by allowing gas exchange in the embryo while keeping moisture in and contaminants out.
Why it matters: You may remember Colossal as the company that claimed to "de-extinct" the ancient dire wolf last year by rewriting grey wolf genes and transferring them into embryos. It’s now trying to bring back extinct bird species, including the dodo. It’s doing so in the name of restoring the Earth’s dwindling biodiversity — a mission many scientists doubt.
TECH
Spotify joins the clipping economy
Source: Spotify.
The media landscape is rapidly changing, one 30-second video at a time.
What happened: Spotify is rolling out a new feature for free and Premium users where you can clip segments of podcasts within the app and share them with others. The tool looks pretty straightforward: just select the area of interest and press a new scissors icon.
Why it’s happening: The feature certainly seems like a response to the rise of the “clipping economy” — a phrase that has taken off this year to describe the vast network of people who make short-form clips of long-form content, either for promo or monetization purposes.
Unsanctioned “clippers” make money by generating views on platforms like YouTube and TikTok, posting affiliate links on their clips, or working for “clipping agencies.”
Clippers can also be commissioned to make clips either by marketing agencies or directly by creators, many of whom have in-house clippers ready to pump them out.
Why it matters: Clips were once meant to tease or preview longer content. Online media has now reached the point where podcasts and streams are primarily a means to generate clips, which rack up far more views, impressions, and attention than their full-length sources.
Clips are also eating into traditional advertising streams. For example, the campaign for L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt has spent nothing on TV airtime but cut a US$30,025 cheque to a clipping agency.
Zoom out: Clips are now building burgeoning media empires. Case in point: OpenAI recently bought business-tech news show TBPN for a rumoured price tag of ~US$200 million. While the average episode only gets around 7,000 viewers, the average clip racks up 257,000 views, according to research by Prof G Markets — that’s a 37-fold increase.—QH
ONE BIG NUMBER
🦖 US$30 million. Estimated sale price of a real Tyrannosaurus rex named Gus, which is being auctioned off by Sotheby’s. Gus could be something of a bargain (relatively speaking): Another T. rex skeleton was sold by the auction house for a record $44.6 million in 2024.
PEAK PICKS
Summer's incoming. Before the cottage, the road trips, and the general chaos — your will takes 20 minutes. Start yours at Willful.*
Read: The art of being fashionably unreachable.
How Canadian chefs are cooking with cabbage this summer.
Inside the lucrative lifestyle of a jet-setting travel nurse (Wall Street Journal, paywalled).
Why this no-frills internet browser is blowing up.
Watch: How director Wes Anderson uses miniatures in his films.
NASA unveiled an ambitious timeline to get a human habitat on the moon.
*This is sponsored content.
Take a crack at the puzzle gauntlet! We’ve got today’s mini-crossword, the daily sudoku, Codebreaker, and Who’s Who.
