Voyageur 106
Canadian Companies Ate the Tariff Bill. Shoppers Barely Felt It, and Ottawa Wants Your Metadata. Signal Says It Will Leave First.
News for residents of the “11th province”: Canadians abroad.
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Canadian Companies Ate the Tariff Bill. Shoppers Barely Felt It.
A new Bank of Canada study put numbers on something Canadian businesses have been feeling in their bones. When Ottawa hit back at Washington with counter-tariffs last year, companies (politely?) ate most of the cost themselves.
The bank ran the math on just over 100,000 products. The cost of goods caught by the counter-tariffs rose about 6% more than goods that weren't, but only about a quarter of that tariff cost made it all the way to store shelves, adding around 0.3 percentage points to inflation. Firms swallowed the rest.
It turns out that the deciding factor was timing, because when companies expected the tariff to be short-lived, they took it on the chin while waiting it out. When companies thought that the tariffs were going to stick, they felt liberated to pass more of it along. After Ottawa pulled the counter-tariffs on September 1, 2025, prices fell again within about 90 days.
So far, the trade war’s hit corporate balance sheets harder than grocery bills - a bigger problem for investors than consumers.
Read more: Western Standard
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A photo from the old country:
Ottawa Wants Your Metadata. Signal Says It’ll Leave First.
Signal would rather leave Canada than weaken its own encryption. So would Windscribe, a Canadian VPN company.
Both are making noise in response to Bill C-22, Ottawa's “lawful access” bill, which, as drafted, would force electronic service providers to save metadata and hand over user data when the government asks for it. Signal's vice-president of strategy, Udbhav Tiwari, said the bill is a threat to encryption and will turn private messaging platforms into a target for cyberattacks. Windscribe said it would rather leave Canada than store the mandated data.
Both of them are in good company. Meta (formerly Facebook) said the bill would turn tech firms into a surveillance arm of government. Members of the United States Congress were quick to point out the cybersecurity risks such a move would put on Americans. Canada's intelligence review body, NSIRA, didn’t even think the bill, as written, had enough oversight written in.
For Canadians abroad who rely on Signal to stay in touch with family back home, the most private way to message Canada might soon run around it.
Read more: The Globe and Mail / The Globe and Mail