I guess most venture capital investors didn’t get the memo about how Canadians were supposed to invest in themselves now that economic relations with the US are strained.
Investors poured $2.9 billion into 254 Canadian VC deals in the first six months of 2025, marking a 26 per cent decline in dollars invested and a 22 per cent fall in deal count compared to the same period last year, the report released on Wednesday said. It was the lowest first-half total since 2020.
"What the “Elbows Up” crowd miscalculated was the ease with which American importers of Canadian products can switch and pivot. Most have far more options than our own importers do — and many operate far more leanly. Challenges will intensify, whether Canadian products are… https://t.co/59jHfgHn6M
— The Food Professor (@FoodProfessor) August 10, 2025
Calgary Herald- Cove Beach in Chestermere Lake closed to swimming due to elevated levels of fecal bacteria
Alberta Health Services is advising the public not to swim or wade at the Cove Beach area in Chestermere due to elevated levels of fecal bacteria in the water, which emerged in recent testing results.
AHS said at current levels, gastrointestinal illness may result from ingestion of the water at Cove Beach, at the northern tip of the lake. There is also the possibility of skin, ear and eye infections with water contact.
And the return of our old friend, “unexpectedly”.
The Canadian economy lost the most jobs since January 2022, and excluding the pandemic, it’s the largest drop in seven years.
Employment fell by 40,800 positions in July, driven by decreases in full-time work, while the jobless rate held firm at 6.9%, Statistics Canada data showed Friday. The number of job losses surpassed even the most pessimistic projection in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
The monthly decline was concentrated among youth ages 15 to 24, who are usually among the first to experience a labor-market downturn. Their unemployment rate reached 14.6%, the highest since September 2010 outside of the pandemic. The employment rate for youth fell to the lowest since November 1998, excluding the years impacted by Covid-19.
The Canadian labor market failed to sustain its strong momentum from June, when it surprisingly added the most jobs in six months. The Bank of Canada held its policy interest rate at 2.75% for a third straight meeting last week, but said the labor market remains soft, with the unemployment rate rising from 6.6% at the beginning of the year.
Are the boom years in the housing market finally petering out? We’ll soon know for sure. One thing is for certain: the marginal home buyer is stepping away from the market in bigger and bigger numbers.
The Calgary Real Estate Board says home sales in the city declined 11.6 per cent in July compared with last year as inventory grew to levels not seen since before the pandemic.
There were 3,911 new listings on the market last month, up 8.6 per cent from a year earlier, as the city’s inventory reached 6,917 homes for sale — a 66.1 per cent surge.
Sun- Staggering 1,100 men in Ontario inquired about sex with kids in police sting
…the operation was an elaborate sting that at one point was swamped with more than 100 calls a day from Johns in the GTA seeking to feed their most demented desires.
Those charged included a teacher, students, business owners, construction workers, entrepreneurs, and retirees. One of those arrested had two outstanding warrants for his arrest in Guelph for breaching his release order.
The water carriers for the Trump Whisperer are out in full force today, blissfully unaware how stupid it looks to portray a stunning defeat as a victory. It’s notable that no one wants to mention the elephant in the room: the undue influence of the Canadian dairy lobby which is a major reason why these talks went nowhere.
Payne thinks Canada has leverage — aluminum, critical minerals, electricity, oil and potash — and should be using them to retaliate. She said she has repeated that message to Canada’s ambassador to the U.S. and the prime minister’s office.
“It’s important right now that we draw a line in the sand and understand that Canada has a lot of strength and a lot of leverage, and we’re going to have to use some of it.”
If Canadians were going to “stick it to Trump” by offsetting a decline in travel to the US with an equivalent boost in domestic travel, apparently Air Canada didn’t get that memo. Canadian exceptionalism, it seems, is characterized by a mass of financially exhausted marginal consumers.
Shares of Air Canada (AC.TO) fell over 10 per cent on Tuesday, after the airline’s quarterly earnings missed expectations.
The airline continues to see lower demand for trips to the U.S., with revenue dropping 11 per cent on eight per cent less capacity, says president and CEO Michael Rousseau.
Thus far, the election of the man many said was just the ticket to stand up to Trump has garnered results that are a bit less than stellar.
The talks, said one Canadian government source, who spoke on condition of anonymity, “have been volatile.”
“By the end of May, before we even hit the 50 per cent tariffs, we saw a 30 per cent decline in production across the country,” said Catherine Cobden, president and CEO of the Canadian Steel Producers Association (CSPA). She doesn’t have the June numbers yet, but she expects it be “much worse.”
In an economy overloaded with exponentially growing debt, vendors actually have very little pricing power. If they try to raise prices the marginal consumer will just say no. What they can do, however, is lower their asking price, and that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s either that or fold the tent.
IKEA announced on Tuesday it’s cutting its restaurant prices in half for adults and children eat free from Monday to Friday.
National Post- Canadian talent (and money) is fleeing to the U.S.
In fields ranging from engineering to law, the average Canadian professional can not only make more money in the United States, but face dramatically lower housing prices and cost of living expenses. The disparity has long been most obvious in the tech sector. In some years, the University of Waterloo’s software engineering department has immediately lost up to 85 per cent of its graduates to jobs in the United States.
If you imagine an event will happen, is that a guarantee that it will? That certainly seems to encapsulate Doug Ford’s view of our current trade negotiations with the US.
I’ll take “bloviating sanctimonious blowhard” for $100, Alex….
“We have to negotiate through strength,” Ford responds, “and we really have to flex our muscles and make sure President Trump hears us.”
“(Americans) are going to feel the pressure,” Ford says. “They’re going to feel the pressure when Americans start losing their jobs because we’re going to start on-shoring everything, and once that happens, I told Lutnick, it’s hard to turn that tap off.”
The mechanism of Net Present Value can be a real bear sometimes. Particularly when interest rates fall for over forty years, housing costs soar and your wages don’t keep up.
In 1985, for example, the median home price was about $81,000, but rose by 406 percent to about $426,000 in 2023. Obviously, any taxes, insurance, and down payments that are proportional to the home price were far lower in 1985 than they are now. Moreover, as home prices quintupled from 1985 to 2023, median household income only increased by 241 percent, rising from about $23,000 in 1985 to $84,000 in 2023.
If Pulte really wanted to see homes become more affordable, he would push for less monetary inflation and for lower federal deficits. He would push for the Fed to reduce its balance sheet of mortgage backed securities.
Elbows up? Oh, wait…scratch that….
Four of the five highest unemployment rates in the country are in this region, with Windsor leading the way at 11.2 per cent.
The auto city is followed by Peterborough at 10 per cent, Oshawa at 9.3 and Toronto at 8.7. Canadian manufacturing has shed nearly 45,000 jobs since January — the largest employment decline of any sector — and these regions make up almost a quarter of that workforce, said Battaglia.
I’m sure the new PM will be able to fix all these problems, right? Perhaps a few more taxpayer bailouts with cute titles like the Ontario Together Trade Fund will do the trick.
The Canadian Federation of Independent Business released a report Wednesday based on a survey of 187 small-to-medium-sized businesses in the automotive sector, from parts suppliers to repair shops, and found that tariffs are already having an impact.
Their revenue has declined by 13 per cent, on average, and half of them reported that they have paused or cancelled investments due to uncertainty caused by the Canada-U.S. trade war, which could lead to billions in lost revenue or missed investments, the report said.
In a sweeping operation that has shaken India’s medical education sector, the country’s premier investigation agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), has unearthed what is believed to be one of the largest medical education corruption cases in the country’s history.
The scheme allegedly involved what the agency called “egregious” acts, including bribery, criminal conspiracy, and forgery, as well as collusion.[…]
The scope of the alleged scam spans multiple states, suggesting a coordinated effort that has ramifications for over 40 institutions nationwide and undermines the integrity of medical education across India, experts said.
The NMC is a regulatory authority in India responsible for overseeing medical education, professionals, institutions, and research. It recognises medical qualifications, accredits medical colleges, registers medical practitioners, and monitors medical practices while assessing the medical infrastructure across the country.[…]
Nidhi said: “The entire scam has exposed the failure of private medical education in India. Approvals are now being auctioned like vegetables in a market. This touches everything – ethics, education, healthcare, and social work – and has completely shaken public trust.”
He added: “If you graduate unethical doctors, you breed unethical practice. You’re laying the foundation for systemic fraud. People who believed in India’s healthcare system feel utterly betrayed.”
Well, they can always drive truck.
A recent addition to the news category of No Surprise There. Average Joe Voter would happily choose lower debt service costs and more free stuff from the government over unaffordable housing any day, since he cannot grasp the connection between those two phenomena in the first place.
Nearly two-thirds of Canadians (64 per cent) say they desperately need interest rates to fall, given the financial constraints they’re under. Over one-third (36 percent) report feeling anxious or stressed about their financial situation, while one-quarter say they’ve had to stall life plans (26 per cent) or are constantly putting out financial fires due to an endless stream of unexpected costs (24 per cent).
David Clinton- Cannabis Legalization Is Starting to Look Like a Really Dumb Idea
The new concerns follow the recent release of a couple of groundbreaking Canadian studies: Cannabis Use Disorder Emergency Department Visits and Hospitalizations and 5-Year Mortality which found evidence relating cannabis use to early death, and Convergence of Cannabis and Psychosis on the Dopamine System which describes a possible biological mechanism linking cannabis use to psychosis.
Higher interest rates coupled with rising unemployment are throwing the marginal consumer out of the cottage market in a big way.
One three-bedroom cottage sold for $735,000 in April — a 33 per cent loss for the previous owner who purchased it in 2021 for $1.1 million.
“You’ve got to be struggling financially to take a $300,000 loss,” Blenkarn said. “Nobody wants to sell for a loss like that.”
Blenkarn said he is also seeing cottages being leased out and up for sale at the same time, an indicator that the owner is having trouble affording the property in the interim.
