How to spend it

Good morning. After 20 NBA seasons, Kyle Lowry signed a ceremonial one-day contract in order to retire as a Toronto Raptor. The Greatest Raptor of All Time spent nine seasons in Toronto, making six All-Star appearances and helping lead the team to an NBA title in 2019. 

The scrappy future Hall of Famer wasn’t just the Raptors’ leader for nearly a decade; he felt like the human embodiment of the franchise’s underdog ethos — an undersized point guard who bounced around the league before finding a home and blossoming into an elite player. 

We could wax poetic about Kyle for hours, but instead we’ll just link to this highlight package.

Today’s reading time is 6 minutes.

Markets: Canada’s main stock index rose yesterday as higher oil prices offset the drag of lower gold prices. Meanwhile, U.S. tech stocks sank amid another semiconductor sell-off.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has spent the last year globe-trotting and selling investors on Canada. Now, he’s having a hard time finding places to put their money to use.  

Driving the news: Ottawa’s new Major Projects Office (MPO) has been unable to deploy any of the $70 billion that the United Arab Emirates committed to invest in Canada back in November, according to a Financial Times report. The delay is reportedly due to a lack of shovel-ready infrastructure projects.  

Why it matters: After a decade that saw the largest exodus of foreign capital in Canadian history, the Carney government has made attracting foreign investment a pillar of its economic plan. That push has been largely successful, but it appears that the wheels of bureaucracy are still spinning too slowly to actually deploy that capital on major projects. 

What’s next: Carney is hosting a summit in Toronto this fall for 100 of the world’s biggest investors, with a goal of attracting $1 trillion in capital to Canada. The pressure will be on the feds over the next few months to prove they can put the money they're asking for to work.—LA

B.C. will sue OpenAI over Tumbler Ridge shooting. B.C. Attorney General Niki Sharma said the province has hired lawyers in California and B.C. as it prepares to sue OpenAI for failing to alert authorities about the account activity of the Tumbler Ridge shooter before the deadly attack. The AI giant is already being sued by several of the victims’ families. (CTV News)

Infamous Indian gang leader charged in Nijjar killing. The U.S. Justice Department indicted 37 suspects for offences tied to Indian organized crime, including the 2023 murder of Sikh activist and Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar in B.C. One of the suspects is imprisoned gang leader Lawrence Bishnoi, who was charged with ordering the hit. The RCMP previously accused Indian government officials of having ties to Bishnoi’s gang. (The Canadian Press)

NATO is putting in an order for made-in-Canada jets. The military alliance confirmed that it is starting talks with Sweden’s Saab to buy up to 10 GlobalEye early warning surveillance aircraft. Though the surveillance tech is Swedish, the base of the jet is actually made by Canada’s own Bombardier — it’s the 6500 executive jet, produced in Toronto, to be exact. (CBC News)

📡 What else is on our radar:

🤝 Meet Drummond Munro. He’s the co-founder and co-CEO of Fairgrounds, a reimagined take on the antiquated racquet club with pickleball, padel, and soon enough, tennis. We sat down with Drummond to talk about the racquet sports boom, how vacant Sears box stores helped get Fairgrounds off the ground, and why the pickleball court can be a great place to find a date. 

What was the inspiration for starting Fairgrounds?

I grew up playing racquet sports. I played on Team Canada for badminton, I played competitive squash. My brother's actually a squash pro in New York. I was privileged enough to grow up around one of these private clubs, and it really was this true community hub, but it was inaccessible. It always felt like I was walking on eggshells — not wearing the appropriate attire, everyone turning their nose up if your shirt wasn’t tucked in, or you weren’t wearing white clothing. It didn't make sense to me that no one had come with the times and said, “this stuff's ridiculous — we don't need dress codes anymore, let's rethink this whole experience.”

Do you think padel has the legs to have a pickleball-style boom, or was there something unique about pickleball?

I think it's the latter — there's something unique about pickleball's physical accessibility. Padel can get there, I just don't think it'll happen with the same explosive growth trajectory. I think how padel has entered North America — positioning itself as a luxury sport — is going to stymie its growth. If you go to Mexico, Spain, or Argentina, courts are on every corner and you're paying two or three euros to play. It's not a luxury sport there. If you go play at one of the clubs in New York City, you're paying close to US$300 for 90 minutes. 

Padel is still pretty isolated to a community that already plays racquet sports, or upper-class circles with access to private courts. There are more padel courts in Muskoka per capita than anywhere else in Canada. 

You guys ran some speed dating pickleball events. Has it worked well? 

They’ve been great. There's a cultural shift — no one wants to be on dating apps anymore. People are spending so much time on their phones, and things like Barry's Bootcamp have become ‘the new bar.’ Pickleball is community-centric, so we've tried to rethink what programming could look like. Our competitors aren't doing partnerships with Tinder or running date nights, so we thought it was a great way to create a new social programming element. We're going to be relaunching them — they were a huge hit. I want to keep doing fun things like that.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Read the full Q&A here.

An unexpected side effect of the rise of GLP-1s? More spicy options in the snack food aisle.

Driving the news: Nestlé is now taking into account how GLP-1 weight-loss drugs affect taste buds when coming up with new flavour combos, the Wall Street Journal reports. This could mean reformulations that include more spices or pepper to entice Ozempified tongues.

Zoom out: Researchers have found GLP-1 drugs can alter users’ tastes, heightening, dampening, or otherwise twisting flavour perception. A study from last year found that all five basic taste qualities — sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami — were depressed by GLP-1s. 

Why it matters: Some 3 million Canadians currently take GLP-1 drugs, which will almost certainly rise as they become more accessible. This means continuing changes to packaged food staples — from ingredients to portion size to taste — potentially affecting all shoppers.

Yes, but: Some of these product changes coincide with consumer demands. GLP-1 users need to prioritize protein and fibre to prevent side effects like muscle loss and indigestion — these just so happen to be perhaps the two trendiest words in grocery aisles today.—QH

As AI adoption grows, so does the demand for infrastructure to support it. Telehouse Canada recently completed a major upgrade to support the next generation of AI deployments, introducing first-of-its-kind direct liquid cooling within an urban interconnection data centre in Canada. The technology helps organizations scale AI initiatives while supporting the performance and reliability needed for long-term growth.

Explore the infrastructure powering Canada’s next wave of AI growth.

✍️ ~30%. Share of employers that say they’ve increased their use of non-compete clauses over the past five years, per an OECD survey of 15 developed nations. The report argues the trend has hampered productivity, finding that a 10 percentage-point increase in the number of non-compete clauses in a given industry can lead to a 1.9% decline in productivity. 

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