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Issue #16 10.07.2026
The weekly standup
Everything you need to know before you have to microwave your coffee (for the first time).
🍤
AI food photos are testing a new rule: fake shrimp, real consequences
🏗
Canada just fast-tracked its first nation-sized bet
🏭
The trade war found a postal code in Hamilton
The office chatter ☕
What everyone’s pretending not to read during meetings.
🏗
Canada remembered it knows how to build things
Ottawa designated the Pacific Link pipeline as its first-ever project of national interest, fast-tracking approvals for a line projected to create up to 140,000 jobs and add up to $30 billion to GDP annually. The goal: sell more oil to markets that aren’t currently tariffing us. Approval processes measured in months instead of decades? In this economy? Apparently so (CBC).
🏭
Steel gets caught in the crossfire
Stelco is idling part of its Hamilton plant, affecting up to 500 employees, calling it a move to “ensure the survival” of the company under U.S. steel tariffs. Ottawa says the company has legally binding job commitments and intends to pursue them. The trade war stopped being abstract a while ago. This week it got a postal code (CBC).
Like what you’re reading?
The breakroom bulletin 📌
What’s hot, what’s not and what’s all for show.
Getting promoted 📈
🦄
Canada’s newest unicorn shops second-hand
Toronto’s Biossil hit a $1 billion valuation after a US $153 million round led by OpenAI. Its pitch: use AI to find failed drug trials worth a second shot. One company’s flop is another’s funding round (The Peak).
🍗
Four restaurants, five markets, zero hesitation
Toronto’s Honestly Good Chicken Fingers signed a joint venture to expand across Canada, the U.S., Asia and the Middle East. You have to respect a business plan that skips “crawl” and goes straight to “fly.” (Retail Insider)
On a PIP 📉
🍁
The trade war has a weird shopping list
Hockey sticks, maple syrup, honey: hear from three Canadian businesses whose products landed on the tariff hit list, seemingly at random. Coping strategies vary. Confusion is universal (The Peak).
🍽
Record sales, invisible profits
41% of Canadian restaurants operate at a loss or break even, up from 12% in 2019. Profit margins have always been tight. Now, they’re thinner than the cheese on your burger. (Restaurants Canada).
Corporate Theatre 🎭
🕺
The mall tour is back, and it brought a business plan
Gap is reviving the ’90s boy band mall tour with newcomers JYT, the first act in its new “fashiontainment” platform. Docuseries, capsule collection, food-court performances: the whole playbook. Somewhere, an Orange Julius is being poured in celebration (CBC).
👟
The Tims run is now a sanctioned sporting event
Tim Hortons and Adidas dropped a nine-piece Tims Run Club collection. Finally, athletic gear for Canada’s true national sport: the 10:30 double-double (Retail Insider).
Ideas worth stealing 💡
📋
Your supply chain is about to get homework
New research pegs $63.3 billion in Canadian imports as intersecting with documented labour-risk categories. If you import, start mapping your suppliers past the first tier now. Paperwork beats stranded inventory (Retail Insider).
🛒
Put your best salesperson on the website
AI shopping assistants can now answer product questions, compare options and walk customers to checkout. With 39% of Canadians already shopping with AI tools, your “chat” button is ready for a promotion (Retail Insider).
The Thing I Can’t Stop Thinking About 🧠
Your customers can tell when you didn’t try
📖
The story
AI-generated food images are showing up on menus and sandwich boards, and diners have noticed, sharing suspiciously geometric shrimp and rubbery-looking sandwiches online. But plenty of restaurants are quietly using the same tools well: one Canadian burger franchise shoots its food on staff phones and uses AI to polish the photos for menus and ads.
📶
The signal
Customers aren’t reacting to AI. They’re reacting to effort. A real burger, enhanced, reads as a business that cares about the details. A fictional shrimp reads as a business that might cut corners elsewhere too. The tool is the same: the difference is what you point it at.
🛫
The takeaway
AI just made professional-looking marketing accessible to every SMB with a phone. That’s genuinely great news. But it moved the bar, not removed it: the businesses winning with AI are using it to make real things look better, not to make fake things look real (CBC).
Smart people saying smart things 💬
One post, tweet or take that’s making people in the world of work stop scrolling.
This week, entrepreneur and investor Gary Vaynerchuk offered a reminder that the person running the business counts as part of the business. You can’t build something that lasts on an empty tank.
What you need to do is make one person happy first: you. Get yourself right, and everything else you want to give the world gets easier. It won’t be perfect. But things will get a little easier. You can’t run on empty and expect to build something that lasts, and you definitely can’t pour into other people from a place of resentment about your life.
— Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) September 29, 2026
My music at work 🎵
One song helping us survive another week of impromptu Slack huddles.
The last thing before we jump 🦘
This week had a strange sense of scale. A country greenlit a $30 billion pipeline, a four-restaurant chicken finger chain planned its conquest of Asia and a burger franchise polished its menu photos with a phone and an AI tool.
Different budgets. Same instinct: don’t wait for conditions to be perfect, because they won’t be. The businesses that define the next few years won’t be the ones that picked the right moment. They’ll be the ones that stopped waiting for it.
See you next week.
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