The purchase offer for Cirque du Soleil from its secured creditors risks eliminating Quebec’s longstanding presence as a shareholder and causing losses of tens of millions of dollars to two of the province’s largest institutional investors. A US$1.2-billion takeover proposal by a group of debt holders, which was approved on Friday as the benchmark bid […]
The federal government is easing eligibility rules for the government’s emergency wage subsidy and changing the amounts businesses can receive. The government had been under pressure to make the subsidy more accessible, specifically by loosening the requirement of a 30 per cent drop in revenues, so more companies under that cut-off can qualify. Speaking in Toronto […]
The coronavirus pandemic has pushed women’s participation in the labour force down to its lowest level in three decades and rebounding won’t be easy, according to a new study by the Royal Bank of Canada. The report showed 1.5 million Canadian women lost their jobs in the first two months of the pandemic and said […]
Industrial conglomerate Siemens is allowing more than 100,000 of its employees to work away from the office for two or three days a week on a permanent basis. The Munich-based company said the coronavirus crisis has “shown that working independently of a fixed location offers many advantages and is possible on a much wider scale […]
In a split decision, the Supreme Court of Canada has upheld a federal law that forbids companies from making people undergo genetic testing before buying insurance or other services. The Genetic Non-Discrimination Act also outlaws the practice of requiring the disclosure of existing genetic test results as a condition for obtaining such services or entering into a contract. The act […]
Statistics Canada says the economy saw its largest monthly drop on record in April as it came to a near standstill due to the pandemic, but early indications point to a rebound in May as businesses began to reopen. The agency said Tuesday gross domestic product fell 11.6 per cent in April with non-essential businesses […]
Canada’s new top central banker says the Bank of Canada has no intention to raise interest rates given the current economic circumstances created by the coronavirus pandemic. Governor Tiff Macklem says the central bank is focused on delivering low interest rates for the foreseeable future to support an economic recovery. That should also help lower […]
The federal New Democrats say all Canadians require access to two weeks of sick leave benefits as provinces start moving to reopen their economies while fighting the coronavirus and the federal government should pay for it. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh said Wednesday that workers without sick leave who are put back on the job during the pandemic […]
Canadian equities were the worst performing traditional asset category in the first quarter, according to a report that sizes up the financial impact of the novel coronavirus pandemic and concurrent decline in world oil prices during the first three months of 2020. The CIBC Mellon report says Canadian equities had a first-quarter median return of […]
The governor of the Bank of Canada says the central bank would have likely slashed its key interest rate in response to plunging oil prices, if that alone had been the only shock to the domestic economy. The cut might even have been to the current 0.25 per cent level it reached as the COVID-19 […]