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An advertisement for Bitcoin is displayed on a building in Hong Kong.Kin Cheung/The Associated Press
Getting caught up on a week that got away? Here’s your weekly digest of The Globe’s most essential business and investing stories, with insights and analysis on the biggest headlines, stock tips, personal finance strategies and more.
U.S. expects USMCA to remain in place, with ‘separate protocols’ for Canada and Mexico
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Trucks cross the Blue Water Bridge between Port Huron, Michigan, and Sarnia, Ontario, carrying goods between the United States and Canada.Emily Elconin/Reuters
The United States’ top trade official, Jamieson Greer, says negotiations over the North American free-trade pact will likely extend beyond July 1, and ultimately result in separate arrangements with Canada and Mexico built on top of the existing trilateral agreement.
A key question heading into the review is whether the deal will survive as a trilateral pact, or be split into two separate bilateral agreements. U.S. President Donald Trump has previously mused leaving the agreement, calling it “irrelevant.”
The agreement lays out three possible paths forward. On July 1, the partners can agree to renew the deal for 16 years. If they don’t, they begin a process of annual reviews that continue for 10 years, after which the agreement ends. Any of the three partners can also withdraw from the agreement with six months’ notice. Mr. Greer suggested that the U.S. will pursue the second option.
Broken CN Rail bridge at Vancouver port saps energy superpower ambitions
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CN’s Second Narrows rail bridge sits next to and underneath the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge that connects North Vancouver to Burnaby B.C.Paige Taylor White/The Globe and Mail
What’s undermining Canada’s ambition to be an energy superpower? The answer comes where you’d least expect it – a 57-year-old railway bridge over Vancouver’s harbour.
When Canadian National Railway Co.’s Second Narrows Rail Bridge, which is raised to allow ships to enter the port, got locked in its lowered position on Feb. 22, it took four days to fix the malfunction. The bridge halted traffic in the country’s busiest port – each day, roughly $1-billion worth of goods travel through, including oil shipments to Asian consumers.
The failure of aging critical infrastructure such as the rail bridge, and its impact on a broad range of exporters, is emblematic of the challenges facing Canada as governments and businesses attempt to pivot away from U.S. customers to markets in regions such as Asia and Europe.
Canada, U.S. and Britain seize more than US$12-million in crypto scam proceeds during Operation Atlantic
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An advertisement for Bitcoin, one of the cryptocurrencies, is displayed on a building in Hong Kong.Kin Cheung/The Associated Press
Canadian, American and British law enforcement agencies have frozen more than US$12-million of fraudulently obtained funds during a week-long blitz aimed at tackling cryptocurrency investment scams.
Dubbed Operation Atlantic, investigators also identified more than 20,000 cryptocurrency wallets linked to fraud victims in more than 30 countries. Victims are tricked into clicking a pop-up or alert that gives scammers access to their cryptocurrency wallets. The criminals then transfer funds out of the victims’ wallets, making them difficult to recover because the transactions are irreversible.
The war in the Middle East is restructuring energy markets
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Cargo ships in the Gulf, near the Strait of Hormuz, as seen from northern Ras al-Khaimah, near the border with Oman’s Musandam governance, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in United Arab Emirates.Stringer/Reuters
The conflict in Iran is shaking up the structure of the global oil and gas market, as countries facing a severe supply crunch look for stable supplies and to increase their energy independence.
The resulting opportunities for Canadian fossil fuel companies are significant, say energy watchers, as governments and oil majors assess the fallout from the war and the market eventually settles into whatever comes next.
Even when peace prevails, the energy market is unlikely to go back to business as usual, says Andrew Botterill, the global financial advisory leader for energy, resources and industrials at Deloitte. Mr. Botterill expects oil super majors will look to diversify the markets where they invest, for example, to avoid being beholden to individual countries, regions and supply chains.
Shaken by break-ins, an affluent Toronto neighbourhood takes action
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Security video shows four masked intruders breaking into a Rosedale home.Supplied
Private security cars patrolling the streets, door braces and hammer-proof glass: These are some of the protections being taken in Rosedale, one of Toronto’s most prestigious neighbourhoods, where home invasions and break and enters having risen by 145 per cent from 2015 to 2025.
Residents have reported more sophisticated break-ins, with groups of masked men show up at front entrances in the early morning, bodychecking doors until they give way or smashing windows. Police have informed some residents that thieves are also mounting battery-powered trail cameras to monitor the comings and goings of homeowners.
The announcement of “Muse Spark” sent one company’s stock soaring this week. Which company was that?
a. Alphabet
b. Apple
c. Meta Platforms
d. Spotify
c. Meta Platforms saw its stock price jump after it unveiled Muse Spark, an artificial intelligence model. Muse Spark is the first product to come from the spectacularly expensive team that Meta assembled last year, when it began handing out pay packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars to attract AI experts to its new superintelligence team.
Get the rest of the questions from the weekly business and investing news quiz here, and prepare for the week ahead with The Globe’s investing calendar.
