Waste of time

Good morning. The small Quebec town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil just became the first place in Canada to recognize trees as living beings with their own rights. It’s a major milestone for our leafy friends, but we suspect they may not be out of the woods just yet.

Today’s reading time is 5½ minutes.

Earnings to watch: Alimentation Couche-Tard will report its earnings after the bell today, while the embattled Corus Entertainment will release its results Friday morning. Micron Technology, one of the best-performing tech stocks this year, will report its earnings on Wednesday.

TD now stands for Time Detective, apparently. 

Driving the news: In a bid to boost productivity, TD Bank will start tracking some of its employees’ work with a software tool that monitors how much time they spend in meetings, browsing the internet, and using internal applications. According to Reuters, the lender will initially roll out the tool, called WorkiQ, in its financial crimes and risk management team. 

Why it matters: From major banks to fast food chains, worker surveillance has become increasingly common. With some companies employing tech to monitor every minute of the workday, employees are under pressure to justify each click, brief pause, and interaction in their day.

Bottom line: We’re certainly a long way from the days of the no-questions-asked three-martini lunch. Roughly a third of Canadians who work remotely have reported some level of workplace surveillance, whether it's keystroke monitoring, location tracking, or screen grabs. Some workers say they’ve been asked to explain even brief 10-minute absences from their computers.—LA

Canadians may be warming up to EVs. As gas prices surged amid the war in Iran, Canadians bought 60,678 electric vehicles in the first four months of the year, a nearly 21% jump from the same period last year. Experts say that higher gas prices and renewed federal EV incentives have sparked more interest in the EV market. One poll found that the number of Canadians who are likely to buy an EV has jumped 28% from a year ago. (CBC News)

Canada sent a record delegation to Japan for a trade mission. Nearly 300 Canadian business execs and government officials are in Tokyo this week to drum up business with their Japanese counterparts, the largest trade mission Canada has ever launched in the Indo-Pacific region. Japan is already Ottawa’s fifth-largest trading partner and the third largest foreign investor in Canada. (CTV News)

Iran is pausing nuclear talks with the U.S. after Trump threatened to renew strikes. Less than a week after the two countries agreed to a ceasefire deal, negotiations on a lasting peace appear to be on shaky ground. Iran’s delegation reportedly left talks in Switzerland after Trump publicly threatened new military strikes over the country’s support for Hezbollah. (Reuters)

What else is on our radar: 

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⚽️ Canada wraps Group Stage in the World Cup. Canada is almost certain to advance out of the Group Stage of the tournament this week for the first time in history. It has a good shot of winning the group outright, something it can achieve with a win or tie against Switzerland on Wednesday. In that scenario, Canada would face a third-place team out of Groups E, F, G, I, or J on July 2nd in Vancouver —  right now, The Athletic projects the most likely opponent to be Egypt, Algeria, or Austria. Should Canada lose to Switzerland and finish second in the group, they’ll likely face South Korea on Sunday in Los Angeles.

📊 New inflation data. The Consumer Price Index for May comes out this morning and is expected to show headline inflation ticked up in the month, mostly because of higher energy prices. While there’s not much the Bank of Canada can do about what drove that spike (the Iran war), there were a number of factors pre-dating the closure of the Strait of Hormuz that were contributing to broader price hikes, including the AI buildout, tariffs, and rising inflation in the U.S. 

🇬🇧 Starmer expected to resign as British prime minister. Keir Starmer will reportedly announce plans today to step down as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister of the U.K. today, ahead of a cabinet meeting tomorrow at which he was likely to face a revolt. Starmer’s departure has been triggered by the victory of rival Andy Burnham in a by-election last week, and Burnham is now the frontrunner to replace Starmer atop the party and step into the country’s top job. Whoever succeeds Starmer will be the country’s seventh prime minister in the last 10 years.

Turns out that asking ChatGPT to do everything for you may not be so great for your brain. (I know, we’re shocked too.)

What happened: There is mounting evidence that when people regularly use AI to perform tasks, their skills in those areas degrade. 

Why it matters: With their tendency to hallucinate, AI tools still require supervision by skilled humans to be used reliably for anything important. If people lose those skills because they’re leaning too much on AI as a crutch, they’re more likely to be led astray by false or misleading AI-generated outputs.

Yes, but: Other technologies have also degraded human skills without much harm done (how many of us have more than one or two phone numbers memorized, or can navigate without GPS as easily as we could have 20 years ago?).

Our take: Offloading something mundane like memorizing phone numbers is one thing. But AI promises us a general-purpose intelligence that can (in theory) handle many foundational cognitive tasks for us, from writing to planning to analysis — thinking, in other words. Turning all of that over to a machine is fundamentally different, and more dangerous, than relying on a calculator or GPS system.—TS

💰 US$1.9 million. Polymarket bets that were seemingly made by influencers in viral videos online, wagers that a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed were entirely fake. The analysis found that 70% of videos posted by creators, who were paid by Polymarket, depicted “winnings” that were not real. One such creator claimed to have made ~$410,000 worth of bets in his videos — none of those wagers were ever placed.

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It’s a perfect morning to take on today’s mini-crossword, the daily sudoku, Codebreaker, and Who’s Who.