Hot water

Earnings to watch: Canada’s big six banks are set to release their Q1 earnings this week, starting with Scotiabank on Tuesday. BMO and National Bank follow on Wednesday, with CIBC, TD Bank, and RBC wrapping things up on Thursday.

The maker of ChatGPT is in hot water for not sounding the alarm on the suspected Tumbler Ridge shooter. 

Driving the news: After its automated systems flagged violent conversations between ChatGPT and the alleged Tumbler Ridge, B.C., shooter, OpenAI decided not to alert Canadian law enforcement about the potential threat, despite multiple concerned employees urging senior leadership to do so as far back as June.  

Why it matters: The onus has long been on tech giants like Meta and Google to report nefarious online activity to law enforcement. Now, with ~250 million people interacting with ChatGPT every day, OpenAI is finding itself in a similar position.

Zoom out: There are at least two ongoing lawsuits in the U.S. alleging that OpenAI failed to alert authorities about users who discussed acts of violence and self-harm with ChatGPT, and later acted on it. 

Bottom line: Tech firms generally don’t contact law enforcement proactively with information on users, even if there is suspicious activity. Examples like this might make that seem like a bad policy, but the privacy implications of changing those rules could also be a slippery slope.—LA

Canada lost the gold medal game in heartbreaking fashion. As if the Blue Jays losing in Game Seven of the World Series wasn’t enough torture for Canadian sports fans, the Olympic men’s hockey team came up just short of gold yesterday, losing 2-1 in overtime to the Americans. If that sounds eerily familiar, don’t worry, you’re not crazy. On Thursday, the Canadian women’s team also lost the gold medal game 2-1 in overtime to… the Americans. Prepare for some long faces at the office today. (CBC News)

Trump raised his new global tariff to 15%. A day after announcing a new 10% tariff on every U.S. trading partner, the president said, on second thought, the levy will be upped to 15%. After the Supreme Court struck down most of his global tariffs, Trump is now leaning on the 1974 Trade Act, which allows the president to impose certain tariffs for 150 days without approval from Congress (which he’s unlikely to get). (Bloomberg News)

Mexico’s military killed an infamous cartel leader. Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Oseguera, the leader of one of Mexico’s most powerful cartels, was killed in a military operation yesterday that escalated into a deadly shootout. A former police officer, Oseguera led the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and was one of the world’s most wanted drug traffickers. (CNN)

📡 What else is on our radar: 

💬 Trump’s State of the Union speech. Donald Trump will deliver his State of the Union address tomorrow and is likely to spend a good chunk of it talking trade after last week’s Supreme Court decision that struck down the bulk of his tariff policy. A company called Statt used AI to generate a predicted transcript of Trump’s remarks, which comes in at around 5,000 words and focuses on the economy, trade, health care, and the border — which you probably could have guessed even without AI.

💼 New Canadian growth numbers. Forecasters expect the final GDP numbers for December (and a preliminary look at January) to show the Canadian economy softening. If that turns out to be the case, some of it will be blamed on trade uncertainty, but some of it is also attributable to the impact of temporary disruptions, like labour strikes. 

💵 Alberta announces its provincial budget. Premier Danielle Smith will table her government’s budget on Thursday, setting the stage for what is shaping up to be a high-stakes year for the province. Smith’s budget will likely make few new spending commitments and could see deficits increase, as low oil prices have eaten into the province’s revenue.

The sci-fi dream of drawing all our electricity from powerful batteries is getting closer to becoming a reality.

What happened: The all-in cost of electricity from a battery project fell to a record-low $78 per megawatt-hour (MWh) in 2025, down 27% from the previous year and roughly half of what it was in 2020, according to a new BloombergNEF report. That cost is expected to fall by another 25% by 2035.

Why it matters: If batteries get cheap enough, powering a bigger share of the electrical grid with solar and wind will become a more realistic possibility. Even when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn't shine, batteries could supply the grid with their stored energy.

Yes, but: Today’s batteries typically store enough power to last, at most, around four hours, but the grid needs power around the clock. It’s common to go longer than that without much wind, and as anyone who has lived through a Canadian winter knows, we frequently experience multi-day stretches of grey, sunless weather.

What’s next: Cheaper batteries will make supplying more of our energy needs with renewables possible, but until we see technological leaps to produce better batteries as well, some level of gas or nuclear power is still a must.—TS

🛒 $10,000. Fine that Canada’s food regulator gave Loblaw for advertising imported food as “Products of Canada” at a Toronto Superstore location. An investigation last year into so-called ‘maple washing’ found that grocers violated the country-of-origin labelling rules in nearly a third of all complaints.

Today’s tantalizing trio of puzzles: The mini-crossword, daily sudoku, and Codebreaker.