Under the influence

Good morning. The owners of Myspace revealed in a new documentary that they are looking to relaunch the platform in some capacity. The granddaddy of social media sites has cycled through several owners over the years, all of which have tried to figure out what the hell to do with it. In its current form, it appears to be a link repository for music mag Spin.

It’s no secret elder millennials are suckers for nostalgia, but we struggle to envision a future where Myspace is anything but another zombie brand lifelessly shuffling around for eternity.

Today’s reading time is 6 minutes.

Markets: Canada’s main stock index hit a new record high yesterday, lifted by a tech surge that also benefited top Wall Street indexes. Meanwhile, SpaceX posted its first earnings report, causing shares to drop in after-hours trading (though they remained above where they opened the day).

Ottawa’s new foreign influence registry has already managed an impressive feat — getting criticized for being both overreaching and ineffective.

Driving the news: Canada’s first foreign influence registry went live yesterday. Anybody working on behalf of a foreign government or agency trying to influence Canadian politics must now register with a newly established foreign influence office within 60 days or face up to $1 million in fines.  

Zoom in: The scope of who must register is broad — so broad that there's still uncertainty over who actually has to sign up. Everyone from accountants to journalists to sovereign wealth fund employees could fall under the auspices of the act.

Yes, but: At the same time, other critics have lambasted the new measures as toothless — indeed, the new office doesn’t have any special powers to prevent foreign interference — and have argued that the fact it took so long to set up is reflective of its low priority status. 

Why it matters: Striking the right balance between ‘too invasive’ and ‘too soft’ is admittedly tricky for this initiative, but for so many facets to remain unclear after two years of development points to a persistent issue of the feds rolling out half-baked ideas.—QH

Moderna to start human trials of new Ebola vaccine. The pharma giant got approval to test its vaccine for the Bundibugyo strain of Ebola, a variant with no known vaccine that has been spreading rapidly across the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The trials will take place at three sites in Canada, with tests to see if it triggers immune responses in recipients. (Reuters) 

Canada-U.S. trade talks continue. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc flew into D.C. yesterday to meet with various U.S. senators and industry leaders ahead of the August 19 deadline for new 50% tariffs. Meanwhile, 25 U.S. states sued the Trump administration over its other batch of new tariffs enacted under the guise of anti-forced labour measures. (CBC News)

Wildfires continue to burn through B.C. A massive blaze near the town of Vernon has destroyed some 230 homes and forced roughly 8,000 people to evacuate, as of writing — another 7,300 residents have been warned to be ready to leave at a moment's notice. In total, there are 120 active wildfires across the province, six of them deemed “major.” (CBC News)

📡 What else is on our radar:

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🤝 Meet Florence Tresarrieu. She’s the CEO of Corby, the Canadian spirit and wine maker behind brands like Absolut, Cottage Springs, and Jameson. We sat down with her to talk about alcohol trends, the truth about Gen Z's drinking habits, and why everyone is suddenly obsessed with St-Germain Spritzes. 

How much truth is there to the narrative that young people don’t drink as much? 

You hear that people don't socialize anymore or that they don't go out, and some of that is true, to be honest. I don't think they socialize in the same way. There’s more emphasis on experiences like travelling and festivals. Everybody's saying Gen Z doesn't drink as much, or don’t drink at all, but they do. They just don't drink in exactly the same way that past generations have. The format is different. They don't drink as frequently. It's more of an evolution in the way people drink.

Corby just came out with a Tabasco Absolut vodka. What's the process of coming up with a flavour like that? 

Innovation is super key in the industry, and very key for us. I guess the genesis is that we realized through consumer research that people were actually craving more spicy food and cocktails. We see it, for instance, in Canada as well, with the Caesar, which is quite unique. 

It's not a given that it will always work, but mixing Tabasco and Absolut in a bottle is going to be something nice if you do it right. It always starts from consumer science. Social media is amazing — the number of times you go into a bar, people have a drink or something to eat, the first thing they do is take a picture and post it on Instagram or TikTok. So you can gather that information and the trends emerge. 

Why is everyone obsessed with spritzes? Does it have anything to do with new drinking habits? 

I think it's always been a big trend in Europe: the aperitif. We say in our industry that the days are longer and the nights are shorter. People are not going out as late as in the past, so you don't have as many clubs as in the past. They will go to happy hour, then they'll have dinner, and then at night the bar will put the music up a little bit, and people will start dancing, but it’s much earlier than my generation. So you need to be able to capture the opportunity when people are drinking, and the aperitif is feeding into that. 

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

Canada has quietly resigned its role as the world’s peacekeeping nation.

Driving the news: Canada’s Department of National Defence is slashing its troop contribution to United Nations peacekeeping missions, withdrawing all of its peacekeepers from UN missions in Congo, South Sudan, Cyprus, and Kosovo by the middle of next year. 

Catch-up: Canada is widely credited with inventing modern peacekeeping. Lester Pearson won the Nobel Prize for engineering a UN effort to defuse the 1956 Suez Crisis, one of the first times that Canada’s foreign policy approach split meaningfully from the U.S. and U.K. After that mission, peacekeeping became core to Canada's international identity.

Why it matters: With NATO putting a greater emphasis on defence spending, Ottawa’s peacekeeping efforts have taken a back seat. Canada spent a record high ~$63 billion on defence in the last fiscal year, up from just ~$20 billion a decade ago. 

Zoom out: Canada’s certainly not alone in this respect. After Donald Trump took office (the first time) and pushed for a reduction in peacekeeping troops, the UN cut the number of peacekeepers it deployed by almost half of what it was in 2016.—LA

🎶 300 million. Premium subscribers Spotify has after adding seven million last quarter, per its latest earnings report. The audio streamer also announced a string of new AI tools to make custom playlists and let users make remixes of songs. However, investors weren’t too thrilled about how much that AI initiative was going to cost.

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