The two countries aim to finish talks on two free trade agreements by the end of 2026, Prime Minister Mark Carney said Thursday, as Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. visited Vancouver. One is a bilateral deal between the two countries and the other is between Canada and the larger Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) bloc, which the Philippines currently chairs. The leaders met between Carney’s pipeline-related news conferences in Vancouver and Calgary. (The Logic)
Pembina Pipeline and its partners announced a final investment decision Thursday on the first phase of a massive natural gas-fired power plant northeast of Edmonton known as the Greenlight Electricity Centre. The 932-megawatt facility is poised to become Canada’s first dedicated natural gas power plant built specifically to supply a hyperscale AI data centre, Pembina said. The project is also the first test of Alberta’s “bring your own” power strategy, in which big tech firms secure dedicated electricity supplies rather than relying on power purchases from the provincial grid. (The Logic)
The plan, launched in partnership with the province’s municipalities, will subsidize the development of new water infrastructure in cities and towns, Quebec Premier Christine Fréchette said. In order to qualify for funding, 75 per cent of the planned residential units resulting from the new infrastructure must have at least two bedrooms and have a market value of less than $350,000. (The Logic)
NEA and Naver’s venture arm co-led the round for the San Francisco-based startup, with participation from investors like Index Ventures and Toronto-headquartered Radical. TwelveLabs also signed a deal to use Amazon Web Services as its main cloud provider, powered by the tech giant’s Trainium chips. (The Logic)
Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System said Thursday it is shuffling its investment leadership, following Ralph Berg’s departure to Singapore’s Temasek last month, with CEO Blake Hutcheson taking direct oversight of the pension fund’s senior investment executives. (The Logic)
The American fintech giant is only offering crypto trading for now, not the full range of stock trading, prediction markets and other services available in the U.S. (The Logic)
The province plans to announce more details on Thursday, potentially including information around a route or a corridor for the proposed one-million-barrel-per-day oil pipeline, The Logic has learned. For now, no private proponent is publicly attached to the pipeline, and the Alberta government is leading efforts to shepherd it through the initial federal approval process, The Globe and Mail reported. (The Logic, The Globe and Mail)
The technology firms—Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla—have all seen their share prices fall this month, with the Windows maker dropping the most at 17.5 per cent through Tuesday afternoon. It’s the Mag 7’s worst collective month in over a year. (Financial Times)
The San Jose, Calif.-based startup has raised US$800 million in total, including a US$500 million round in December at a US$5-billion valuation. Investors include TSMC-linked VentureTech Alliance; trading firms like Jane Street and Two Sigma; AI lab CEOs, including Cohere’s Aidan Gomez, World Labs’s Fei-Fei Li and Mistral AI’s Arthur Mensch; and prominent Canadian computer scientists Geoffrey Hinton and Andrej Karpathy. (The Logic)
An Ontario manufacturer that makes casing connections for pipes used in U.S. energy infrastructure is getting welcome relief after Ottawa granted indefinite remission from its 25 per cent counter-tariffs for many more steel mill products not made in Canada. (The Logic)