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Two provincial privacy watchdogs say they have received data breach reports from Sobeys, which has been dealing with “IT system” issues for much of the past week affecting customers seeking prescriptions at some pharmacies it operates. Quebec’s access to information commission confirmed Thursday it received a declaration of a “confidentiality incident” from the grocer. It said confidentiality incidents occur when there is unauthorized access, use or loss of personal information or or any other breach of the protection of this information. Alberta’s privacy commission also confirmed that it has been notified by the company about the incident and is aware that it is being investigated. At the federal level, the Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada says it is in communication with the company to obtain more information and determine next steps. On Monday the parent company of Sobeys, Empire Company Ltd. EMP-A-T, released a statement on the issue, saying some pharmacies were havi...

Raquel Urtasun at the University of Toronto campus on June 5, 2021. Tausi Insider Autonomous driving luminary Raquel Urtasun is ready to take her show on the road. Ms. Urtasun’s Waabi Innovation Inc. is officially rolling out its artificial intelligence-powered self-driving system Wednesday, targeting truck makers and trucking companies looking to replace humans on long-haul routes. The chief executive officer and founder of the Toronto company said in an interview a handful of trucks are “ready to be deployed” on U.S. roads immediately, albeit with human safety drivers and safety engineers on board as the technology remains under development. “You are going to see our trucks driving in North America as we speak.” Ms. Urtasun declined to say which manufacturers Waabi is working with, but company images of Waabi-mounted trucks bear the logo of U.S. manufacturer Peterbilt Motors Co. Waabi’s technology includes both hardware sensors mounted on the vehicle and automated driving software....

Gordon Dean hands groceries to a customer (Will and his dog Sammi) in his store in Chesterville, Ont., on Nov. 10. Christinne Muschi/Tausi Insider At Gordon Dean’s small-town grocery stores in Ontario and Quebec, the rattle of coins in the checkout tills is a more infrequent sound than it used to be. The five stores in the Mike Dean Local Grocer chain are seeing customers pay with credit cards much more often. Before COVID-19, about 40 per cent of purchases were made in cash; these days, it’s closer to 18 per cent. And that has taken a bite out of the bottom line. “It’s chewed it up,” Mr. Dean said. “It basically increased our monthly processing-fee bill by 30 per cent.” Credit cards are the most common form of payment in Canada, and their use has skyrocketed during the pandemic. But how the credit-card system actually works is something most of us rarely think about – to the chagrin of some business owners, who subsidize the cost of that system. “Your travel points or your rebates –...

Enbridge Inc ENB-T is increasing apportionment on its Mainline pipeline system, which ships the bulk of Canadian crude exports to the United States, as demand to transport barrels climbs due to rising production and colder weather. Enbridge will apportion December deliveries on its heavy crude system by 11% and ration space on the light oil system by 13%. The rationing is the highest it has been since last winter and comes after a period of very low or zero apportionment in 2022. Higher apportionment, or rationing of pipeline space, on the 3.1 million-barrel per day (bpd) Mainline system could lead to crude getting backed up in Alberta and weigh on prices at the Hardisty storage hub, where benchmark Canadian heavy oil is already trading at a steep discount to U.S. grades. “If this is the beginning of real additional tightness it’s going to really hurt,” said Rory Johnston, founder of the Commodity Context newsletter. “Having a transportation backlog on top of the quality discount wou...

Sam Bankman-Fried speaks at the Crypto Bahamas conference in Nassau on April 27. ERIKA P. RODRIGUEZ /The New York Times News Service Chris Clearfield is the co-founder and chief executive officer of Clearfield Group. Andras Tilcsik is a professor with the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management. They are the authors of Meltdown: What Plane Crashes, Oil Spills, and Dumb Business Decisions Can Teach Us About How to Succeed at Work and at Home . The bankruptcy of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange displays the classic elements of the failure of what is known as a “complex” system. It’s like the remake of a famous movie franchise: a story with the same plot and basic characters, only played by different actors. The same factors that underlie the collapse of FTX are at the root of the financial crisis, the Enron bankruptcy, and frauds such as Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme and Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos. These factors are also at the root of plane crashes, ...

TD Bank Group says it paused the MyMoney lending program it recently launched with Canada Post. Andrew Vaughan/The Canadian Press TD Bank Group TD-T says it paused the MyMoney lending program it recently launched with Canada Post after it detected suspicious activity on its system. Spokeswoman Amy Thompson says processing was affected when the bank’s security system noticed “early warning signs of irregular activities” and the bank decided to pause the program to investigate. She says it is disappointing that “bad actors” tried to take advantage of the lending program, officially launched Oct. 12, that is meant to expand access to loans through the partnership with Canada Post. Thompson says the bank, which is in charge of running the program, hopes to reopen applications as soon as it feels it is appropriate. The program, offering loans of between $1,000 and $30,000 at variable interest rates currently ranging from about 10 and 20 per cent, is designed to fill a gap between payday l...

Meta Platforms’ META-Q Oversight Board recommended on Tuesday that the company revamp its system exempting high-profile users from its rules, saying the practice privileged the powerful and allowed business interests to influence content decisions. The arrangement, called cross-check, adds a layer of enforcement review for millions of Facebook and Instagram accounts belonging to celebrities, politicians and other influential users, allowing them extra leeway to post content that violates the company’s policies. Cross-check “prioritizes users of commercial value to Meta and as structured does not meet Meta’s human rights responsibilities and company values,” Oversight Board director Thomas Hughes said in a statement announcing the decision. The board had been reviewing the cross-check program since last year, when whistleblower Frances Haugen exposed the extent of the system by leaking internal company documents to the Wall Street Journal. Those documents revealed that the program was...

New Canadians, including Zahra Aminmoghaddam, centre, from Iran, take the oath of citizenship during a special Canada Day ceremony in West Vancouver on July 1, 2017. DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press David Green is a professor in the Vancouver School of Economics at the University of British Columbia and an international fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies in London. “When all you have is a hammer, all the world’s a nail.” This saying isn’t usually seen as a complimentary description of any policy approach but it appears to capture Canada’s immigration policy. Immigration, undoubtedly, touches on nearly every aspect of our economy – from employment to output growth to health care to housing. And to hear the government speak, you would think it’s the right tool for the job in every one of them. The problem is, it’s at best an ineffective hammer for every one of them, and using it more will cause more problems than it will solve. The size of the hammer is big and getting bigger. At...

Travellers wait in the terminal as an Alaska Airlines plane sits at a gate at Los Angeles International Airport, on Jan. 11. STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP/Getty Images A computer outage at the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration brought flights to a standstill across the U.S. on Wednesday, with hundreds of delays quickly cascading through the system, including at Canadian airports. The White House initially said that there was no evidence of a cyberattack behind the outage that ruined travel plans for millions of passengers. President Joe Biden said Wednesday morning that he’s directed the Department of Transportation to investigate. Whatever the cause, the outage revealed how dependent the world’s largest economy is on air travel, and how dependent air travel is on an antiquated computer system called the Notice to Air Missions, or NOTAM. Before commencing a flight, pilots are required to consult NOTAMs, which list potential adverse impacts on flights, from runway construction to the potent...

Flight status boards at Harry Reid International Airport, in Las Vegas, on Jan. 11. John Locher/The Associated Press U.S. air travel returned mostly to normal Thursday, a day after a computer system that sends safety information to pilots broke down and grounded traffic from coast to coast. By midafternoon on the East Coast, about 150 flights had been cancelled and more than 3,700 delayed – much lower figures than on Wednesday, when more than 1,300 flights were scrubbed and 11,000 delayed. Attention turned to the federal agency where the technology failure apparently started hours before it inconvenienced more than 1 million travellers. The Federal Aviation Administration said a damaged database file appeared to have caused the outage in the safety-alert system. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg promised a thorough examination to avoid another major failure. “Our immediate focus is technical – understanding exactly how this happened, why the redundancies and the backups that we...

Toronto-based Hydrostor Inc. will employ the company’s advanced compressed air energy storage technology in a proposed energy storage project in California. Handout A California community electricity distributor has signed a 25-year power purchase agreement with Toronto-based Hydrostor Inc., a deal worth almost US$1-billion that moves a long-duration energy storage project closer to fruition. Under the agreement, Central Coast Community Energy will contract for 40 per cent of the offtake from Hydrostor’s Willow Rock Energy Storage Center, a proposed development near Rosamond, in Kern County, Calif. The project will employ the company’s advanced compressed air energy storage technology. Willow Rock is one of two planned Hydrostor developments in California. The plants, which can store energy longer than lithium-ion batteries, will allow more renewable energy onto grids by smoothing out the inherent supply variability of wind and solar farms. The company is also developing a project in...

New York City comptroller Brad Lander and three of the city’s pension funds are offering shareholder proposals calling on several banks including Royal Bank of Canada RY-T to disclose absolute greenhouse gas emissions targets for 2030. The shareholder proposals call for an absolute reduction target aligned with a science-based net-zero emissions pathway and request a report within one year. The pension funds backing the plan are the New York City Employees’ Retirement System, Teachers’ Retirement System, and Board of Education Retirement System. The funds combined to hold 293,000 shares of Royal Bank of Canada as of November 2022. The proposals filed at Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Royal Bank of Canada request the absolute GHG emissions targets cover lending and underwriting for oil and gas and power generation sectors. At Bank of America, the proposal co-filed with the New York State Common Retirement Fund asks the emissions reduction targets cover lending and underwriting in t...

Some users of a system that sends messages to pilots reported delays on Wednesday, but federal officials said the problem was not affecting flights. It is the same pilot-alerting system that broke down spectacularly earlier this month, leading the Federal Aviation Administration to briefly stop all departing flights around the country. An FAA spokeswoman said Wednesday the system that sends NOTAMs – notices to air missions – was online and operational. “Some users have reported slower response times due to high demand, but there have been no reports of impact to flight operations,” she added. The FAA posted an advisory saying that a NOTAM manager application was offline but other methods of entering alerts were working. The notice said that a hotline had been set up between the FAA’s air traffic control command centre “and industry” – presumably meaning airlines. The system is critical to aviation because pilots are required to check NOTAMs before they take off. The FAA said last wee...

Canada’s financial services industry is strong, stable and competitive, and Canadians have plenty of choice when it comes to where to park their money. Duane Cole/Mark Blinch/Tausi Insider Leonard Waverman was the dean of the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University and the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. He is a former director of BNP Paribas Canada and the C.D. Howe Institute. As a former business school dean and as an economist, I’m happy competition policy is in the headlines these days, even for the wrong reasons. Why do people suddenly care? The Rogers-Shaw drama is certainly a big part of it. The Competition Bureau repeatedly lost in opposing a deal that gives it everything it wants. The Canadian debate always remains focused on the wrong things. We point a finger at the Rogers-Shaw takeover but endure trade barriers between provinces, supply management in sectors such as dairy and government monopolies in alcohol. Then there’s the public re...