 Welcome to Mind Your Business ! Consider this your weekly guide to understanding what’s happening in the worlds of economics, business and finance. By Peter Armstrong
|  | The long-awaited meeting between Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump is set to take place at the White House this week. (rawf8/Shutterstock) | | | I feel like we have been waiting for this since November.
As soon as Donald Trump was elected, questions about the Canada-U.S. relationship started growing.
Obviously, a lot has changed since then.
The spectre of tariffs turned into the stark reality of a trade war.
The threats of turning Canada into the 51st state went from some kind of joke to an existential threat.
Justin Trudeau resigned. Mark Carney became the Liberal leader and then went on to win an election.
And now, Prime Minister Carney is going to Washington to meet with President Trump.
"I think we're going to have a great relationship," Trump said last week. "He called me up yesterday and said, 'Let's make a deal.'"
Carney has been more circumspect about the relationship with Trump. But he's maintained he will only meet on terms of mutual respect.
"We deserve respect. We expect respect and I'm sure we'll get it in due course again, and then we can have these discussions," Carney told the BBC.
But Carney also made some key points you can expect to hear a lot about this week.
"Remember that we supply them [the U.S.] with vital energy. Remember that we supply their farmers with basically all their fertilizer," Carney told the BBC.
Indeed, Canada is far and away the biggest foreign supplier of oil to the United States. | | |  | | | | | That chart comes via the wonderful energy newsletter Commodity Context, put together by Rory Johnston.
In a research paper for the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, Johnston illustrates how over the last two decades, Canada has become the largest source of U.S. crude imports.
"Canada has steadily, and then rapidly, consolidated that position, now accounting for more than half of total U.S. foreign crude purchases, or nearly 4 million barrels per day," he wrote.
Four million barrels is a lot. The U.S. only consumes about 20 million per day. So American refineries will need crude from somewhere.
If you subtract Canada's oil imports to the U.S., the trade deficit quickly turns into a trade surplus. Americans sell way more stuff to Canada than Canadians sell to the Americans.
But that balance is offset by the decision to buy Canadian oil instead of crude from other countries. That was a deliberate decision, made years ago.
Last week, Canadian ambassador Kristen Hillman did a Q&A with the Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg in Washington.
Their whole conversation is worth a listen. Hillman said Americans have a choice about where to source those four million barrels.
"You're going to buy them from someone else? And is it going to be Belarus or Venezuela? Where is this going to come from? Why wouldn't you buy it from us, an ally, a steadfast ally and friend, an ideologically aligned country that you know wants democracy and rule of law," she said.
But Hillman didn't confine her comments to oil.
"I believe that the U.S. benefits from the Canadian energy relationship, from our manufacturing relationship," she told Goldberg.
Manufacturing is like the flipside of the coin. Especially auto manufacturing. Oil feeds the trade deficit, while the auto industry is heavily tilted the other way.
According to the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers' Association, Canada builds nine per cent of the vehicles Americans purchase annually. Meanwhile, U.S.-manufactured vehicles are responsible for more than 40 per cent of Canadian vehicle purchases.
And in terms of investment (which Trump seems to focus on), the field is very U.S.-heavy. |  | | | That chart (and statistic) come via this excellent report from the CVMA.
It's a handy thing to keep in your back pocket this week as the leaders meet in Washington.
As always, stay tuned, we will have full coverage from our team of reporters in D.C., our parliamentary bureau in Ottawa and me and the business unit.
It's going to be another busy week. Another consequential week.
I am down in Washington as part of our coverage. Tune in on TV, Radio and on-line at CBC.CA/News.
Buckle up.
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forwarded to you. | | |  | | Prime Minister Mark Carney will travel to Washington to meet with U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday. It will be the first face-to-face meeting between the Canadian and U.S. leaders. | | | | | | The U.S. central bank, the Federal Reserve will meet on Wednesday. President Trump has been trying to pressure the Fed to cut interest rates. Economists expect rates to stay where they are for now. | | | | | | Jobs numbers for April will be released at the end of the week. Economists expect Friday's jobs data will show a further slowdown in the labour market. Trade numbers on Tuesday will update the trade deficit data. | | | | | Three things to read, watch and listen to this week | | |  | Thunderbolts* aims to restore Marvel to the top of the movie business. (Warner Bros.) | | | 1. Is Marvel back? | | | There was a time there where it looked like comic-book movies were going to devour the movie business.
Specifically, it looked like Marvel was going to own the industry. Then along came COVID-19, and people stopped going to theatres quite as much.
Barbie and Oppenheimer showed us audiences are drawn to other kinds of movies, and — let's admit it — most of the comic-book fare then was pretty flat.
But with the new film Thunderbolts*, Marvel is trying to re-establish dominance.
"Thunderbolts is easily one of the best MCU movies in a long time," said film writer Emily Murray.
Variety's Jack Dunn also sings the film's praises, focusing on its darker edges.
"It may not be the flashiest, funniest, or strongest Marvel film, but its rough edges and imperfections somehow all feel fitting for this anti-hero team of misfits," he writes.
Studios have been trying to figure out what audiences want in a post-COVID world. And Marvel is clearly convinced the old model can still work.
"Marvel is hoping for a win with Thunderbolts after February’s Captain America: Brave New World failed to achieve commercial and critical success. However, if Thunderbolts fizzles, MCU fans have The Fantastic Four: First Steps to look forward to in July," writes Dunn.
He points out the studio also has the Avengers sequels, Doomsday and Secret Wars, set for release in May 2026 and 2027, respectively.
Check out the trailer for Thunderbolts* here.
Read the Variety piece on Marvel's plans here. | | | 2. Hillman's Q&A | | | I mentioned this in the top section. But I figured the content of the whole interview was worth revisiting in longer form.
Canada's ambassador to the United States had a Q&A with the Atlantic's editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg.
Kirsten Hillman is a force. A veteran of the trade wars during Trump's first presidency, she has an uncanny ability to pin down what really matters in any given moment.
Early on in the interview, she was asked what Canadians make of the turmoil emerging from the White House.
"We are your biggest customer. We buy more from you than China, Japan, the U.K. and France combined," she said. "It's a huge relationship, in all ways, not just economic. And the president and his administration are seeking to change that in ways that I think are quite consequential."
I feel like that is one of the most important messages to Americans in all this.
Anyone who listens to Donald Trump will come away believing Canada (and everyone else) is ripping off the United States. It's not true, of course. But what is the best way to counter that message?
Hillman is focusing on the ways in which the economic relationship overwhelmingly benefits American companies, American workers and American consumers.
"Seventy per cent of what we sell to you are inputs
that you put into products that you manufacture in the United States and often sell back to us," she told Goldberg. "That's energy, lumber, minerals, small bits of machinery that go into bigger bits of
machinery, steel, aluminum."
Hillman says Canada sells critical supplies to companies and makes Americans richer.
"That, coupled with inexpensive reliable energy, is a good deal for America," she said.
And that, I think, will be the heart of the message Mark Carney will take to Washington this week.
Watch Hillman's Q&A here. | | | 3. The future (battery) is solar | | | This story about the (potential) future of batteries is fascinating.
I've been wondering about the future of batteries for a while. For all the technological advances we have seen, batteries are still largely built the same way they always were.
Well, a company called Ambient Photonics is trying to carve out a new path. A new way of building the battery.
"The basic technology behind Ambient Photonics’s solar cells is so simple that it’s routinely assembled as a high school science experiment. In labs across the U.S., students sandwich blackberries’ potent pigment between glass to create dye-sensitized cells capable of harnessing energy from the sun," writes Bloomberg's Brian Kahn.
The piece describes window pane-sized glass sheets assembled in a new factory in Scotts Valley, Calif.
"The company is deploying the technology to power what chief executive officer Bates Marshall calls the 'vast universe' of low-power electronics, including remotes, store shelf displays, sensors and a recently launched keyboard from Lenovo Group," writes Kahn.
These are called solar cells, and while they work in the same basic way solar panels on your roof function (by converting photons into energy), these batteries use "dye treated with a unique mix of molecules placed between two thin sheets of glass to capture the photons," explains Kahn.
The concept has been around and in use for years.
"While in the 1980s, small electronics like calculators relied on solar cells, they were extremely inefficient. Ambient Photonics’s version harvests three times as much energy," writes Kahn.
The idea is moving ahead. The company has sent an initial shipment and is now working at mass production level.
“This is really our kind of coming-out year," said one company executive.
Check out the Bloomberg piece here. | | | How the economy looks beyond Bay Street | | | GDP update | | | Last week, we were looking at Canada's upcoming GDP numbers.
We knew they were going to be weak. Statistics Canada's preliminary estimate for February was that the economy contracted.
The latest numbers confirmed that, though the preliminary estimate for March shows a decent little rebound.
But the team at StatsCan also threw this amazing little graphic in with the release.
The map shows which sector contributed the most (and which subtracted the most) to real GDP in each province and territory in 2024. | | |  | Most of this isn't a surprise. Of course mining and oil and gas extraction contributed the most to Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador.
But look at the drag manufacturing had on the provincial economies in 2024.
And that was before Donald Trump's tariffs were even floated.
I find the whole graphic a very informative way of looking at the Canadian economy.
What do you think?
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