CANADA

🇨🇦 Buying Canadian is nasty

Canadians saw Trump’s threats earlier in the year and decided to accept the challenge, boycotting industries such as tourism and the American beverage industry. When annexation threats and tariffs began, one of the first moves provinces made was instructing stores to remove American alcohol from shelves.

Mean and nasty: The US ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra, said President Trump considers Canadians to be “mean and nasty” to deal with for boycotting travel to the United States and American products, such as beer and wine. To President Trump, this doesn’t send the signal that Canada treats the United States “well.” If you’re rolling your eyes reading this, I don’t blame you.

BC’s Premier, David Eby, responded by saying Canadians don’t take attacks on their jobs, economy and sovereignty lightly.

The result: A Canadian liquor trade group said the trade war has led to a steep drop in sales for American liquor, as U.S. spirit sales dropped over 66% between March 5th and the end of April. Spirits Canada said the decline in U.S. spirits sales in Ontario alone was 80%.

• Spirits Canada notes that because the two industries are deeply connected, it has ultimately led to a drop of 12.8% of total spirit sales nationwide.

• Spirits produced in Canada fall under the USMCA trade agreement, which means they would be exempt from any current and planned tariffs for August 1.

Bottom line: President Trump seemingly didn’t see this coming, but to anyone else, this was an obvious reaction to what seemed like very serious and constant threats to Canada’s freedom as a country and its economic activity. Canadians continue to lead with a “Buy Canadian” as they seek more Canadian products on shelves and avoid the United States for their summer travels.

CANADA

🇨🇦 Canadian Stories

🤝Ontario leads the charge. Doug Ford’s been at work and has now signed an Ontario-BC trade agreement and a trade agreement with the three territories. Ontario is the only province with agreements with all provinces and territories in the country.

💰Businesses hold the bag. With inflation worries cooling, businesses have opted to cut their margins rather than push price increases on Canadian shoppers during a time of weak demand amid tariffs.

👋Waving goodbye to unreliable Canada Post. Constant labour interruptions have caused businesses to take their business elsewhere. Despite this, CUPW urged employees to vote against the latest offer.

‼️Over 5 million above-ground pools recalled. Of the 5 million, 260,000 were recalled in Canada and affect Bestway, Intex and Polygroup pools sold since 2002, following 9 deaths in the United States.

More stories:

• In a “does this even need to be said?” headline, PM Carney told premiers he only plans on accepting the best deal for Canada in trade talks with the United States. He also says a trade deal may come after the August 1st deadline.

• Pierre Poilievre stands up for… the freedom convoy. Again. And he wonders why Canadians baulked in March.

• Canada is keeping an eye on Chinese vessel activities in the Arctic.

• If someone says Canada isn’t safe the crime index hasn’t gotten the hint. Canada’s crime severity index dropped 4% last year.

• Cleveland-Cliffs CEO claims he believes in Canada, but isn’t sure the government believes in Canada if they won’t protect their own steel industry as he calls for them to adopt tariffs to protect their own industry.

SOCIAL

What is real anymore?

A social media figure, going by the name Mia Zelu, leads a life of luxury on her social media page. She went viral this weekend as a captivating figure chronicling her time at Wimbledon to her audience of over 165,000 followers. There’s just one problem.

She’s not real.

While her profile bio lists “AI-influencer,” it’s a very easy detail to overlook, enough that it even roped in a professional cricketer which led to him being mocked. The anonymous creators say she’s an “AI storyteller” and even has an AI influencing sister with over 220,000 followers of her own.

Meta tried to launch AI users on their platform earlier in the year, but the accounts were laughed off by many users and joked about. Without inspection of Mia Zelu’s account, you wouldn’t be able to immediately confirm suspicions of AI. There is no obvious tell; people in the background look like they actually belong there, and Mia has 5 fingers on each hand.

What it means: More questioning, more head scratching, more wondering if what you’re seeing on social media is real or if it’s something cooked up by anonymous creators. The question for brands is whether they value authenticity in brand ambassadors or latch onto safe and predictable AI-influencers in the future.

NEWS

🚨 More Headlines

🇪🇺Europe is prepared to fight back. The EU is ready to push the nuclear button (not actually) in its trade war with the United States. If a deal isn’t agreed upon, the EU is strongly considering a measure never used before: the Anti-Coercion Instrument. This would allow the 27 countries in the EU to apply new taxes against US tech companies, reduce investment in U.S. firms in the EU and prevent American companies from bidding on public European contracts.

💻Microsoft hit with global hack. Three hacking groups with links to China are being blamed for the global hack into Microsoft’s SharePoint application. The SharePoint application allows people to access internal files from their place of employment. Linen Typhoon, Violet Typhoon (not to be confused with Salt Typhoon and their breaches of American and Canadian corporations) and Storm-2603 were named by Microsoft.

🚗Automakers feel tariff pain. Stellantis and GM revealed the pain that tariffs are causing so far. Stellantis reports $350-million in losses and a 25% decline in shipments to North America in Q2, while GM reports $1.1-billion in losses and a 21% hit to their net income in the same period.

🤯ChatGPT put to work. OpenAI revealed ChatGPT is now receiving 2.5-billion prompts A DAY. For comparison, Alphabet says Google (the search engine, not the Gemini AI) receives 14-billion search queries a day on average.

STAT

Out of this world deal on Martian rock

A rock from Mars made its way millions of miles through space to land on Earth just to find its final resting place: a private vault, most likely. The Martian rock sold at an auction for $5.3-million and became the most expensive meteorite ever sold.

The rock, named NWA 16788, weighs 54 pounds and is quite easily the largest rock on Earth that has come from Mars. The next heaviest rock from Mars is less than half the weight of NWA 16788.

The rock is of interest to scientists in particular due to the low number of Martian rocks that have ever been found on Earth and the fact that a rock of that size survived.

Like looking at another planet. Scientists are particularly interested in this Martian rock due to its appearance and the size it maintained despite crashing into Earth as a meteorite. In comparison, the other, smaller rocks from Mars that arrived as meteorites look like regular rocks you could find anywhere else.

It’s said that this rock crashed into Earth after a larger meteor crashed into Mars. There’s been sadness expressed as the rock will likely live in a private vault of a millionaire, rather than in a museum for people to see and study.

FOOD

Food prices are rising and there’s not much we can do

A new study revealed that extreme weather events such as floods, heatwaves and droughts are the second most visible effect of climate change, just behind rapid temperature increases… and it’s affecting how much food we can buy.

Prices are going up. As these extreme weather events became more frequent, prices continue to increase, and supply becomes an issue.

• Vegetable prices increased 80% in the U.S. following a 2022 drought.

• Potato prices increased 22% in the UK following heavy rains.

• Cocoa prices have tripled due to heat, raising the price of coffee and chocolate.

With other environmental factors, such as bird flu, risks exist in meat, dairy and egg products. Eggs were in the news cycle for months when the bird flu constricted supply and raised prices nearly 30% on a dozen eggs.

What it means: The fear used to be that extreme weather events would be what we had to worry about, but climate change is affecting people all over the world in similar ways, with higher prices for grocery staples. As extreme weather events become more frequent, prices will spike, supply will be restricted, and the worst part is that it’s difficult to predict where an extreme weather event will hit next and what’s affected.

STORIES

💭 What else is going on?

• Pepsi is introducing a prebiotic Pepsi as it focuses on gut health along with taste. They’re not the only ones making a change, as Coca-Cola announced they’re reintroducing cane sugar into their Coke drinks in the United States after President Trump preemptively told the public they would. So it’s old, new, old Coke.

• A week after announcing Stephen Colbert’s show would not be renewed, Paramount reached a $1.5-billion agreement with the creators of South Park to bring the show to Paramount+ in the U.S. and order 10 shows per season for the next 5 years.

• Wall Street Bets is at it again, and their next bet is Kohl’s. On Tuesday, the stock was paused for trading due to extreme volatility. The trade volume for the retail business was 17 times higher than its 30-day average.

• In what seems all too common from generation to generation, one in four Gen Zs surveyed say they wish they either hadn’t gone to college or had picked an industry that paid more.

• Researchers from the University of Colorado found erythritol, an ingredient in “stevia,” is linked to an increase in health issues, such as stroke, heart attack and can affect brain cells.

• Malcolm-Jamal Warner, known for his role as “Theo” in the “Cosby Show,” passed away at 54 after drowning on Monday.

• Ozzy Osbourne, Black Sabbath frontman, passed away at 76 on Tuesday.

REFERRAL

🍁 ENJOYING READ MAPLE?

If you’re enjoying Read Maple, please refer your friends who may be interested in staying informed with everything going on in an easy way.

Want to see a particular piece of content added into the mix? Reply to this email and let me know.

Have peace of mind in knowing that we’ll ALWAYS be free.