RIP global order

Good morning. An Instagram account posing as Canadian Olympian turned-fugitive drug kingpin Ryan Wedding has accrued more than 52,000 followers in the past week. A CBC News investigation determined that the pictures the account posted are AI-generated, and that the account itself has been active since Jan. 2021 under seven different usernames. 

When the CBC DM’d the account asking if they were really Wedding, the user replied “Yes, brother” but didn’t provide any further evidence. Just a hunch, but we don’t think that’s true.

Today’s reading time is 5 minutes.

Markets: Canada’s main stock index and Wall Street indexes were clobbered yesterday as investors retreated amid fears of new Greenland-related U.S. tariffs. Meanwhile, Netflix shares dropped after hours as the streamer posted a quarterly earnings beat that was too narrow for investors’ liking.

We’re guessing it was a pretty awkward afternoon at Davos for the White House delegation. 

What happened: In a speech at the World Economic Forum yesterday, Prime Minister Mark Carney said the rules-based global order is finished, calling out certain governments for using economic coercion to exploit their allies. 

Why it matters: The prime minister’s address, delivered to the applause of the world’s political and business elite, felt like a eulogy for the post-World War Two international order and a warning of more chaotic times to come. Ottawa has started to act accordingly, not just with new trade deals, but with a firmer response to American aggression.

Bottom line: For decades, Canada’s economic prosperity and national security have hinged on our friendship with the U.S. Untangling that web of dependence won’t be easy, but as Carney put it, “if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”—LA

A Canadian company is doing social media work for ICE. Vancouver tech company Hootsuite inked a deal with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement last September, according to documents obtained by the Globe and Mail. It’s unclear exactly what work Hootsuite is doing, but it appears to involve monitoring sentiment on social media. (Globe and Mail)

Transport Canada warns workers of job cuts. The federal agency sent letters to ~1,500 employees warning that their jobs may be affected by a plan to cut some 600 positions. Last week, Statistics Canada sent out similar letters. It’s all part of the plan laid out in last year’s budget to reduce the size of the public service by about 30,000 people over five years. (Globe and Mail)

Air Canada and its flight attendants head to arbitration. The airline and the union representing its flight attendants will meet with an arbitrator to try to hammer out a deal on wages. Workers voted overwhelmingly to reject a new wage proposal last year following a contentious strike. (TravelPulse Canada)

Netflix officially makes its Warner Bros. offer an all-cash deal. Netflix is offering to pay $27.75 a share to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, increasing its previous offer of $23.25 plus stock, as it continues to fend off overtures from Paramount. (CNN)

Lululemon pulls its (unintentionally) transparent clothing line. The retailer paused online sales of its new Get Low line of athletic wear after buyers complained online that the product becomes see-through when bending or squatting. Not a great start to the turnaround effort, Lulu! (Reuters)—QH

Benefits don’t fail because of coverage. They fail because of confusion.

Most benefits plans look fine on paper. In practice, employees are confused and HR becomes the help desk.

Alan is a licensed health insurance company in Canada built to fix that. 

When benefits are clear and easy to navigate, employees use them earlier and HR spends far less time explaining them. 

If you’re a founder or People leader at a growing Canadian company, it’s worth seeing what benefits that actually work look like.

See if Alan is a fit for your company

Shane Hollander and Ilya Rozanov aren’t real-life hockey players, but the protagonists of the hit Canadian gay hockey romance might just be the NHL’s biggest draws. 

Driving the news: A new analysis from ticket resale site SeatGeek suggests the runaway success of Crave’s Heated Rivalry led to a noticeable bump in ticket sales for NHL games. The company compared its sales data across three different weeks during the show’s run. 

Why it matters: The NHL is looking to build off the momentum of seasons of near-record revenue, and, as one league rep put it to the Hollywood Reporter, Heated Rivalry is arguably “the most unique driver for creating new fans” in the league’s history. 

What’s next: NHLers return to the Olympics for the first time since 2014 next month, giving the league another chance to grow its reach. If top talent puts on a show, and more romance fans tune in, the league could bag a bounty when it renews U.S. media rights in 2028.—QH

🤝 Meet Joshua Budman. Originally from Toronto, he made the leap from a promising career in medicine to found and sell Tissue Analytics, a company that used machine learning (today we’d probably call it AI) to do wound imaging with smartphones. Now, he is building another startup in the AI-adjacent space. We chatted with Joshua about the differences in Canadian vs. American business culture, good and bad reasons to do a startup, why he thinks search traffic is going to zero, AGI skepticism, and more.

You left a career path in medicine to pursue entrepreneurship and it worked out well. For others considering taking the leap from a relatively safe career to entrepreneurship, what do you think is a good reason to do so, and what is a bad reason?

Joshua Budman: One good reason: You like to build and want to very clearly see the direct impact of what you build quickly and at scale. This is possible to do at larger companies/in different professions, but my argument is that it’s extremely rare and hard to accomplish if you’re not building your own company.

One bad reason: Money. This is kind of obvious, but the odds of massive success are extremely low. Even if a start-up is very successful, by the time an exit event takes place it typically isn’t even that lucrative for the founders, especially when you consider the time and work it takes to get to an exit.

Your current business is helping companies show up in AI chatbot answers, so kind of like SEO for 2026. How does it differ from old-school SEO?

JB: There is a ton of overlap between pre-LLM SEO and SEO since the introduction of LLMs to search engines. I’ve heard it framed as 80% legacy SEO, and 20% new tactics to get cited by large language models. I think this is a fairly crude but directionally accurate way to frame it. My two cents is that the math has objectively and significantly changed with the introduction of LLMs, so all of the traditional SEO “levers” should be weighted differently. 

No one quite yet knows those new “weights” - they are guessing if they say they do - and those weights will continuously change as the core LLM developers (OpenAI/Perplexity/Google/Anthropic/etc) change their models and deploy new features.

Should businesses be worried about their search traffic drying up?

JB: I think website traffic is going to go to 0, yes, but I don’t think companies should be worried about that. My hypothesis is that the LLMs are going to start to own as much of the web as possible, such that they’ll act as the “front door” to every brand in the near future. We already see this trajectory starting with the LLMs facilitating checkout after a search for DTC products.

This interview has been edited for length. Read the full Q&A on our website.

⚽️ 46%. Share of Canadian youth who play soccer, making it the most popular sport for kids in the country. Hockey, surprisingly, has fallen down the ranking to 8th and is now only played by 22% of Canadian kids. After all of those freezing cold 5 a.m. arena drop-offs, it’s hard to resist a warm, sunny afternoon at the soccer pitch.

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And for our games testers, play today’s bonus mini, and please report any bugs or mishaps.