Toothaches

Good morning. Put off by the price of school photos, some parents are opting for a DIY approach: snap a pic of your kid on your phone and use AI to make it look like a school photo.

We’re all for saving money, but it does occur to us that you probably don’t need to send photos of your kids to giant AI companies to be reimagined by software — just taking a nice photo is always an option!

Today’s reading time is 6 minutes.

Markets: The S&P 500 closed at an all-time high, fueled by a run-up in tech stocks and companies exposed to the AI infrastructure buildout and a dip in bond yields and oil prices.

Like the first sip of coffee after brushing your teeth, Ottawa’s dental plan has left a sour taste in some Canadians' mouths.

Driving the news: A new report from the Canadian Dental Association (CDA) found that despite millions of Canadians enrolling in the national dental plan, many are struggling to afford their oral care or get claims approved.  

Why it matters: The dental plan was championed by Ottawa as “free dental care” and, in terms of cost, is one of the largest social programs in Canadian history. While more people now have access to dental care, the design of the program still means that many are left with a hefty bill that they assumed the government was picking up. 

Our take: The “free dental care” plan seems like more of a messaging mistake than a failed policy. Despite the entire cost often not being covered, the share of Canadians without dental care coverage has dropped from 35% to 25%.—LA

Ottawa gave Stelco’s owners an ultimatum. In a letter to Stelco’s president, Federal Industry Minister Mélanie Joly demanded its U.S.-based owner, Cleveland-Cliffs, detail a plan to maintain jobs at the Hamilton steel plant within five days or face legal action. Cleveland-Cliffs agreed to keep jobs at the plant when it acquired Stelco in 2024, but announced last week it would idle production and lay off as many as 500 workers. (CBC News) 

Paramount closes its US$111 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery. The merger brings networks HBO, CBS, CNN and MTV, the Harry Potter, Batman and Star Trek franchises as well as both of the namesake Warner and Paramount studios under one umbrella. But the new company, called Skydance, faces serious challenges. Among them: heavy debt, an ambitious commitment to distribute 30 films a year, and competition from Netflix and YouTube. (Reuters)

Canada is getting a new utility giant. Halifax-based Emera Inc. will acquire Calgary's Canadian Utilities Ltd. and its parent company, ATCO Ltd., in an all-stock deal valued at $14.3 billion. The combined company would have an enterprise value of ~$72 billion, and serve approximately six million customers. The merger comes as electricity demand has surged: Prime Minister Mark Carney announced plans in May to double Canada's electricity generation by 2050. (Bloomberg News)

📡 What else is on our radar:

🤝 Meet Marie Thiffault. She’s the founder and CEO of Sunii Energy, a two-year-old Canadian caffeine gum startup that’s already landed in 1,500 Circle K stores. We sat down with Marie to talk all things caffeine, and how she managed to turn her dad’s decades-old invention into a new business. 

How does Sunii gum differ from an energy drink or a cup of coffee?

The first one would be pricing. Drinks can get really expensive nowadays. To give you an idea, a 5-hour Energy shot is $5.89 on average, and a pack of gum is $5.99. So it's cost-efficient. There are also no liquids, so no need to go to the bathroom and you don't feel bloated. Coffee will also give you the jitters, and that's a big reaction from digesting the product. When you chew the gum, it's absorbed through your buccal glands, so not only are you bypassing your digestive system, it goes straight in, which makes it work fast. You'll feel it in five to 10 minutes. And there's no sugar, so you don't get the huge spike some energy drinks give you.

I know that your dad developed the earliest version of this product. How did you decide to pick it up and turn it into a gum business?

That's how it started, exactly. My dad worked on this project years ago, and it was a complete failure. It was buccal absorption within the gum  — think of something you want to feel really fast, like a painkiller. You don't want to wait 30 minutes for a pill to kick in, so you develop a technology to do that, and we had it in gum as a concept. That R&D was millions of dollars, and it takes forever. So he threw it in the trash, retired, and now spends his time in Whistler living his best life. I took the idea, tweaked it for the consumer, and made an energy gum out of it, with my own vision for it.

Is part of the idea behind the gum that you get more of a kick with less caffeine? 

Yeah, one piece of gum has 15 milligrams of caffeine. I take two at a time for the right kick, but I also don't drink coffee. I'm the ideal person for this product. The thing with coffee and energy drinks: think of how you drink them. You sip, and it gradually goes into your system, and at one point you're sort of at a little plateau. With 15 milligrams, it's less, but it's right there, right now, a precise dosage, and you know exactly how much you're getting. So a lot of people need less caffeine to feel the same benefit as drinking a whole cup.

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

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has turned around an 18-slide PowerPoint deck last minute on a Friday afternoon, but most workers who use AI say it’s helping them get stuff done faster.

What happened: A Gallup survey of employees in the U.S. found that 63% of those who had used AI in their job said it allowed them to finish tasks faster, and 56% agreed that it helped them find more creative solutions.

Yes, but: Just because a task is done doesn’t mean it’s done well. Workers were evenly split on whether AI helped them produce higher-quality work, and other research has found that 40% of employees have had the misfortune of dealing with “workslop” — AI-generated work products that may look good at first blush, but actually lack substance and rigour. 

Why it matters: The findings are a sign that the AI rollout is still in its early innings, and its impact on work is still uncertain. What that eventual impact will be, and whether it will justify the vast sums being poured into the technology — more than $1 trillion this year alone, by some estimates — is the question looming over the entire economy right now.—TS

As AI chips away at what used to make platforms defensible, most are turning to built-in payment processing - often priced well above market - to juice revenue.

Helcim is countering with a free browser extension that gives merchants a way out - letting them keep the software they already use while escaping the inflated rates built into it. Learn about it here.

👷 580,000. New workers that will be needed to build everything in Canada’s Major Projects pipeline, according to a new report by BDC. This is significantly higher than the growth forecast for Canada’s workforce, raising the prospect of shortages, particularly in the skilled trades.

Your games await! Here are today’s mini-crossword, the daily sudoku, Codebreaker, and Who’s Who.