Mega deduction

Good morning. Two former TikTok executives have rolled out a new app that uses AI to teach users how to pose for photos. You simply take a selfie or photo of yourself, and the app will generate four poses to try and mimic. Co-founder Melody Chu said that the idea came about because her husband was hopelessly unable to take a good photo of her.

It may sound silly to you, but remember: this could be a game changer for the millions of people who suffer from “what do I do with my hands” syndrome.  

Today's reading time is 6 minutes.

Markets: Stocks had another difficult day as oil prices ticked up and yield on U.S. 10-year Treasuries rose to a fresh multi-year high.

Time will tell whether the Investment Summit that wrapped yesterday yields the bountiful harvest of fresh capital the federal government is hoping for, but at least one announcement did turn heads: an aggressive new tax deduction for companies.

What happened: The federal government’s new “Productivity Mega Deduction” builds on the government’s “Productivity Super Deduction” (not a joke) announced in its 2025 budget, dramatically expanding the number of businesses that are eligible to claim it. 

Why it matters: The change will immediately improve the economics of many of the major projects the federal government hopes to see get underway soon, including pipelines, mines, data centres, and transportation infrastructure.

Zoom out: Like any major tax deduction, the change comes with a price tag — around $36 billion over five years — and will make Canada’s marginal effective tax rate on business investment the lowest in the G7, and less than half what it is in the U.S. That will mean less revenue for public spending, a loss that Ottawa hopes will be more than offset by the new investment it attracts.

Ottawa is opening up Canada’s four largest airports to investors. Prime Minister Mark Carney (who has had a busy couple of days) announced that Toronto Pearson International Airport, Vancouver International Airport, Trudeau International Airport in Montreal, and Calgary International Airport would all be opened up for private investment. Canada’s pension funds, which already invest in airports in other countries,  have been petitioning Ottawa to do so for years. Carney says the feds will maintain ownership of the airports’ underlying land and assets. (CBC News)

Nvidia and Salesforce roll out their own reasoning model for businesses. The new AI model, called Koa, has been built on Nvidia’s open-weight Nemotron model and has been trained to specifically tackle business tasks like sales, marketing, and customer support. Koa uses fewer tokens than frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic consume, positioning it as a more tailored, affordable option for businesses. 

OpenAI sees Canada as a data centre destination. A top OpenAI exec told Bloomberg that the company is taking a close look at the Canadian market for its data centre plans, saying that “Mark Carney has articulated one of the clearer plans for AI adoption of a western government.” The company said that Canada’s surplus of energy and land makes it a promising fit for its data centre partnerships. (Bloomberg News)

📡 What else is on our radar: 

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🤝 Meet Chris Myden. If that name sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve been subscribed to his flight-discount tracker, YYZ Deals, for longer than you can remember. Myden started the site 16 years ago to alert Canadian travelers of incredible flight deals. It’s still going strong, and Myden runs similar pages for deals in many other Canadian cities. We spoke to him about how he monetizes his work, flight pricing trends, and whether ultra-low fares are a thing of the past.

How did you get started with YYZ Deals? 

It did start out as just a hobby. Back in those primitive times, it was really difficult to answer questions like, “What is currently the cheapest flight to Europe?” You literally had to make hundreds or thousands of individual searches to answer questions like this.

I was really interested in building things that helped me acquire and analyze airfare data, purely out of curiosity. While doing so, every now and then I would run across an unusually cheap airfare that I found to be really exciting. Very early on, I found a $100 roundtrip fare to a small island in Spain, Menorca, that about 12 friends also managed to get in on. From that point, I knew I was hooked and I decided to start a blog. Sometime around year two or three it had grown large enough to become my full-time job. 

What’s your process for combing the internet for these deals? Has AI entered the picture for you?

Back when I first started I had to get creative about acquiring the data I was looking for, from, say, an online travel agency like Expedia or a meta-search site like Skyscanner.  

But then these same websites noticed I was sending them traffic from the deals I found and they would contact me to say, "You know, we can just give you access via our API or backend."  So then I started building more sophisticated scripts to process larger volumes of airfare data and help me analyze it. It used to take me a few weeks or a month to code something preliminary to work with an API and massage the data from it that I was looking for. Now, with AI, that process can take an afternoon or a few days.  

This is now your full-time job. How are you making money?

My websites have always had the typical banner ads. And if a deal is available through a meta-search site (like Skyscanner or Kayak) it's possible to earn affiliate commissions by sending traffic to them.  

Over the years, I've often had people ask about turning it into a subscription service. I've been pretty fortunate to have a large enough audience that I don't feel the pressure to go down that road. I feel like if I did, there would be unnecessary pressure to provide deals that I don't feel excited about. You'll notice that sometimes you don't hear from me for a while. There can be stretches without anything interesting, and I would rather not intrude on your inbox with any mediocre deals. 

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

Long blamed for gutting the world’s rental housing market, Airbnb is looking to polish up that reputation.

Driving the news: Airbnb is launching a $250 million fund to back affordable housing projects that need a little extra cash to get over the finish line, per the Wall Street Journal. The program will kick off in U.S. cities, but the company says it could soon expand to other countries. 

Catch-up: Cities around the world, including Toronto, Vancouver, and Montreal, have tightened regulations on short-term rentals (STRs) in recent years to discourage landlords from taking long-term rental units off the market. 

Why it matters: Rightly or wrongly, Airbnb and other short-term rental companies have been blamed for high rents and housing shortages in major cities around the world. This program, while not exactly an admission of guilt, is being pitched by the company as a way to address that problem. 

Zoom out: Cities like Vancouver, which has a documented hotel shortage, have to walk a fine line between tackling housing affordability and making sure tourists actually have somewhere to stay when they’re in town.—LA

Sixty-one percent of Canadians say online advertising annoys them, highlighting a growing challenge for marketers competing for attention. At the same time, Vistar Media's latest Canadian consumer research found that 50% of Canadians trust out-of-home advertising, and 39% have taken action after seeing an out-of-home ad. Vistar Media's new Canadian consumer research breaks down why context matters as much as creative — and how programmatic DOOH puts your brand in the right place at the right moment.

View the report.

💳 51%. Share of Canadian parents who say they have provided financial assistance to an adult child in the past 12 months, according to a new survey by RBC. 19% of parents of adult children aged 35-40 say their kids are still not financially independent.

And now it’s time for a break with today’s mini-crossword, sudoku, Codebreaker, and Who’s Who.