Extra credit

Good morning. The BIA for downtown Ottawa’s Centretown neighbourhood has a lot of explaining to do after putting up a series of accidentally lewd French-language posters.

The posters advertised a new improvement program and were meant to read "placettes publiques,” French for public spaces. Instead, they bore the words “placettes pubiques,” which is French for… well, we think you can guess. They have since been taken down.

Also, a quick programming note: we are off tomorrow for Canada Day. We’ll be back in your inboxes on Thursday. Please have fun and celebrate responsibly!

Today’s reading time is 5 minutes.

Markets: Canada’s main stock index fell yesterday on lower gold prices, but it easily remains on track to close Q2 in the black and record its eighth-straight quarter of gains — that's the longest such stretch since 1996.

The viability of carbon capture is up in the air (literally and figuratively), but one Canadian company looks promising. 

Driving the news: Montreal-based Deep Sky became the first North American company, and just the second company overall, to provide carbon removal credits via direct air capture (DAC). It stored 14 tonnes of carbon underground and gave credits to RBC and Microsoft.

Catch-up: Most carbon capture and storage tech pulls CO2 directly from emitting sources and must be stationed near them, but DAC is able to suck it right out of the air from anywhere. This makes it extremely promising, though it remains largely unproven at scale.

Why it matters: These first credits are a promising proof point that DAC isn’t just a pipe dream, and this news couldn’t come at a better time for Deep Sky. Carbon removal credits are a hot commodity as big companies look to offset AI-related greenhouse gas emissions. 

Zoom out: More broadly, we need carbon capture to work at scale to offset the worst effects of global warming, with one report finding that capacity must dramatically increase. So far, the tech has left a lot to be desired. As of last July, operating commercial projects captured 64 million tonnes of carbon per year, a meagre ~0.1% of all global emissions.—QH

Ottawa is relaunching its environmental retrofitting program for homes. Energy Minister Tim Hodgson announced that the feds will spend $300 million, in addition to provincial funds, to retrofit the homes of low- and median-income households in B.C., Nova Scotia, Quebec, and PEI. The program will install heat pumps, improve insulation, and make other upgrades Ottawa says will lower energy bills and emissions. The feds launched a similar $2.6 billion program in 2021 but axed it two years ago after it ran out of money. (CBC News)

Comcast is spinning out NBC and Sky. In a major restructuring, the company is separating its media and entertainment arms, NBCUniversal and Sky, from its more profitable telecom business. NBCUniversal — which includes the Peacock streaming platform, Universal theme parks, DreamWorks, and the NBC TV network — will be combined with the European media arm, Sky, to form a new publicly traded company. (Reuters)

Tidal is cutting off all payments for AI-generated audio. The streaming platform rolled out a new AI policy yesterday that includes labelling all AI-generated music, removing any AI songs that attempt to mimic an existing artist, and cutting off all monetization to AI-generated “artists.” Apple Music and Spotify have both implemented labelling systems for AI music, but have stopped short of demonetizing it entirely. (TechCrunch) 

📡 What else is on our radar: 

What they’re saying: “It’s a place that you can come in and you can finally post about your cat again, and not have someone land on your post and tell you just how disgusting you are or start an argument for no reason,” Ben Waldman told the Globe and Mail. He’s talking about Gander, a Canadian-centric social media platform he co-founded, which opens to the public on Canada Day. It currently has more than 18,000 users and has raised $2 million. 

Why it matters: Gander is trying to address two issues plaguing Canadian social media users: data sovereignty concerns and trolls. It promises to solve the former by running on Canada-located servers and the latter with moderation rules aligned with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Does the market exist for such a platform? Personally, we’re doubtful, but we wish them the best.

To borrow the famous Jerry Maguire quote, investors are asking Big Tech to “show me the money.”

Driving the news: Since peaking in mid-May, the Magnificent Seven stocks — Apple, Amazon, Nvidia, Meta, Tesla, Alphabet, and Microsoft — are down more than 13%, while the S&P 500 is down only about 2% over the same period. Every Mag 7 stock is now down double digits from its 52-week high. 

Catch-up: The Magnificent Seven have been the engine of the stock market's bull run over the last few years. The stocks collectively climbed nearly 76% in 2023 (Nvidia alone surged 239%), while the S&P 500 returned just over 24% for the year.

Why it matters: After years of investors pouring money into these companies based on AI optimism (or perhaps AI FOMO), there’s growing pressure to prove that the hundreds of billions of dollars in capital expenditure on AI infrastructure will actually translate into profit. 

Our take: With OpenAI and Anthropic set to hit public markets over the next year, the amount of capital parked in tech stocks (regardless of their profitability) is likely going up, not down.—LA

Skip the escape room. Bay Street Kicks Kids Cancer is a corporate soccer tournament that puts 100% of proceeds toward Camp Quality Canada — an organization that gives children living with cancer access to free summer camps and year-round family programs.

Head to www.campquality.org/baystreetkicks to register a team, sign on as a sponsor, or do both.

🥬 1,700. Kilograms of food that the city of Kingston, Ontario, has donated to a local food bank since October through an initiative that redirects parking ticket fines to address food insecurity. The city is expanding the program for another five years and will direct $80,000 annually to a vertical farm that grows produce year-round.

^{*This is sponsored content.}

Don’t wait until game night. Play today’s mini-crossword, the daily sudoku, Codebreaker, and Who’s Who now!