Stripe is helping Ford scale its e-commerce strategy through a five-year deal to strengthen the carmaker’s online payment process. 

 

Canada’s busiest airport and largest airlines are putting pressure on the federal government to drop arrival testing requirements for vaccinated air travellers and go back to random testing (dropping pre-arrival negative PCR tests is a different story).

The feds warned Canadians to avoid travelling to Ukraine over concerns about possible “Russian aggression,” a sign that conflict in the region is becoming more likely. 

China’s zero COVID-19 strategy (ZCS) may worsen supply chain problems for manufacturers and slow the country’s economic growth this year. 

Netflix hiked up prices on its standard and premium plans for the first time since late 2020 to fund original content for the platform. 

The federal government’s vaccine mandate for truckers kicked in this past weekend, but its “botched messaging” has led to chaos in the transportation industry. 

 

I spy with my little eye… the year’s first mega-IPO for a Canadian company. Bausch & Lomb, the Quebec-based maker of contact lenses and other eye health products filed to go public on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges. 

Catch-up: Bausch & Lomb started off making monocles (by the way, whatever happened to those?) in New York way back in 1853. They later created Ray-Bans for pilots and pioneered the soft contact lenses many of us wear today.

In two huge votes of confidence in returning to office, Zara’s billionaire owner Amancio Ortega is buying Toronto skyscraper Royal Bank Plaza for over CA$1 billion, and Google plans to spend another $1 billion on office space in London. 

What happened: Just when you thought you’d be working at home, in your bathrobe, with your dog, forever, newly released data by CBRE shows the demand for office space in Toronto remains strong, with vacancy rates sitting well below the national average. 

What goes up must come down, unless we’re talking about Canadian housing prices. At least that’s the conclusion we’re reached after reviewing new reports on our overheated housing market, that predict rising prices well into 2022.

What happened: The price of a home in Canada rose 17.1% in Q4 of 2021, according to real estate brokerage Royal LePage’s latest House Price Survey, bringing the aggregate cost of a Canadian home to $779,000 heading into the new year.

The plant-based meat market in is booming, driven by high adoption mostly in Ontario and BC (the Prairies and Martimes have resisted the craze so far). 

In fact, 20% of Canadians are looking to limit or eliminate their meat consumption, which is why your grocery store shelves are filling up with veggie patties, sausages, and whats-its.