 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
|  | Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Diana Fox Carney arrive in New Delhi, India (Adrian Wyld/Canadian Press) | | | It's Sunday night and I'm updating this before the newsletter launches Monday morning.
The world is still absorbing the U.S. lead airstrikes on Iran. There are still more unknowns than knowns. Like you, I'm watching and reading and listening to see what the next phase of this will look like.
I have a deep, professional distrust of those who say they know for certain what will come next.
We simply don't know.
There are a lot of things to watch for including of course how Monday morning markets react to the attacks and more specifically what will happen in the Strait of Hormuz where 20 per cent of the world's oil is handled.
So in the meantime, I will focus on what we do know.
Prime Minister Mark Carney is on another whirlwind trade mission this week.
This time he's headed to India, Australia and Japan.
The potential on these trips is enormous.
"At last year’s G20 Leaders’ Summit, Canada and India agreed to formally launch negotiations for an ambitious Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement that will support Canada’s goal to more than double two-way trade to $70 billion by 2030," wrote the Prime Minister's Office in a release ahead of the trip.
I was back in Ottawa again last week hosting Power & Politics. We had extensive coverage of the India trip, its potential and the immensely fraught political environment in which it takes place.
We spoke with the minister of international trade, New Brunswick Premier Susan Holt, who is also going on the trip (click here to watch that interview), and Vina Nadjibulla, a vice-president at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada (click here for that).
India is the most populous country in the world, with the fastest-growing middle class. Like much of the world, it wants what Canada produces.
Trade between the two countries has a lot of room to grow. | | |  | | | After the India leg of the trip, the prime minister and his entourage will travel on to Australia and Japan.
India, Canada and Australia have already agreed to form a trilateral partnership on several key sectors.
Ahead of Carney's trip, there is a growing push for Australia to work more closely with Canada on mining critical minerals.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (funded in large part by the Australian Department of Defence) released a paper calling for a strategic alliance with Canada.
"Canada, Australia's closest minerals peer in scale, capability and commitment to sustainable mining, should be treated not as a competitor but as a strategic collaborator in shared supply-chain development," wrote Ian Satchwel.
There will be plenty of people weighing in on the potential for a global mining pact with Australia at PDAC, the world's biggest mining conference, in Toronto this week.
Heather Exner-Pirot, director of energy, natural resources and environment at the MacDonald Laurier Institute and a special advisor to the Business Council of Canada, posted this on social media this week.
"Canada is good at mining, but it's the best in the world at mining finance, beating London, AUS, NY and Hong Kong. What an asset for Canada, which must be intentional in maintaining this competitiveness," she wrote. | | |  | | | After years of stasis in the Canadian mining industry, there are flickers of hope right now.
A crucial copper mine in Saskatchewan is set to open later this year, the first base metal mine to open in a decade.
A new report from the Fraser Institute found Ontario is now the most attractive jurisdiction in Canada for mining sector investment. The province also jumped from 15th spot globally to second in the world after only Nevada.
And just last week, the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada said it has seen a big jump in the number of major projects being submitted for approval.
In all but one of the last six years, between six and eight projects were submitted.
"Since the end of March 2025, a total of 23 major project plans have been submitted under the Impact Assessment Act. That is more than double the historic annual average," wrote the agency in a social media post.
What do you think?
Email me at peterarmstrong@cbc.ca. | | | Share this newsletter | | or subscribe if this was
forwarded to you. | | |  | | We will get the latest U.S. jobs numbers on Friday. Economists expect to see growth in the labour force continued to slow in February. | | | | | | The premier mining conference takes place in Toronto this week. The meetings kicked off on Sunday and will continue through the week as Canada experiences a boost in mining actovity. | | | | | | Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem will speak in Toronto on Wednesday. The central bank will make its next interest rate decision in two weeks | | | | | Three things to read, watch and listen to this week: | | |  | Stock markets were rattled last week by a report painting a dystopian view of the world with AI agents. (Cherdchai101/Shutterstock) | | | 1. A scenario, not a prediction, rattles markets | | | It seems like every week, there is some mind-boggling development in the world of AI.
This week's focus is on an essay posted on Substack that sent software stocks tumbling.
The post by Alap Shah, a managing partner with Citrini Research and Lotus Technology Management, certainly caught the world's attention. The tweet that alerted the world to the essay has been viewed 10.4 million times.
"What follows is a scenario, not a prediction,” wrote Shah. He said the intent was to model a scenario that’s been relatively underexplored.
“Hopefully, reading this leaves you more prepared for potential left tail risks as AI makes the economy increasingly weird," he wrote.
The post is really a sort of fictional projection of a future in 2028 that looks back on what happened as AI took hold and reshaped the economy.
Unemployment was holding steady at 10.2 per cent. The stock market had suffered a steep correction. Software as a service companies were clobbered as they had to dramatically drop prices to avoid being replaced by AI tools.
The post is fiction, but it reads like an analyst's report on something that's already happening. And markets, already unsettled by the rapid changes being brought about by AI, sold off.
Companies specifically mentioned in the report — inlcuding giants like Uber, American Express and DoorDash — lost between four and six per cent.
The S&P dropped more than one per cent the day the piece came out. The software component of the index fell to its lowest level since Trump's so-called Liberation Day last April.
Read the report that set off the latest jitters here. | | | 2. Apple's American chips | | | There has been much talk during the Trump administration about bringing high-tech manufacturing to the United States.
But we haven't seen much evidence of progress.
The Wall Street Journal released this amazing piece looking into what's really being done, how big of a shift we're really talking about and why it's so hard to move chip-making facilities.
WSJ reporter Rolfe Winkle visits a handful of facilities making chips for Apple in the United States.
He starts in Texas, where a company called GlobalWafers is turning sand from the mountains of North Carolina into silicon. They cook the sand into silicon and cut it into wafers.
Those wafers are shipped to Arizona, where the American wing of the Taiwanese chip giant TSMC uses immense, complex and expensive machines to cut tiny transistors into the wafer.
The machines there cost hundreds of millions of dollars each.
"It's really complicated in terms of the structures, because remember, what we're building is atom-level that really requires a complex infrastructure, requires a complex equipment set that you can't just plop in from anywhere," said Rose Castanares, president of TSMC Arizona.
Winkle also visited the U.S. facility of ASML, the Dutch company that fabricates the machines that do the etching in Phoenix.
"ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography machine works by shooting lasers into molten tin to create a wavelength of light that doesn't exist naturally on Earth. The light paints hundreds of chips onto wafers," said Winkle.
Those machines cost up to $400 million to make.
Just 12 per cent of ASML's sales last year were in the U.S.
And even with the equipment they have, the American facilities still can't make the most complex, smallest, most important chips needed to fuel the AI boom.
The piece is visually striking and a great inside look at how complex the process of building a chip is.
Watch the WSJ video on Apple's chip plans here. | | | 3. One man's army of robot vacuums | | | They say necessity is the mother of invention. And that's probably true. But don't sleep on the guy who just wants to see how much weird stuff he can do. Case in point, The Verge has this excellent piece about a guy who bought a DJI robot vacuum. For some reason he didn't like using the app and wanted to see if he could program it so that he could operate it using his PS5 game controller. Sammy Azdoufal used the Anthropic AI agent Claude to crack the robot vacuum's code. And it worked. Well, it worked even better than he imagined. "When his homegrown remote control app started talking to DJI’s servers, it wasn’t just one vacuum cleaner that replied. Roughly 7,000 of them, all around the world, began treating Azdoufal like their boss," wrote The Verge's Sean Hollister. Hollister was amazed. But he wasn't sure he actually believed this was possible. So, he reached out to a colleague who just happened to be completing a review of the latest DJI robot vacuum. The colleague sent him the serial number of the model he was using. "With nothing more than that 14-digit number, Azdoufal could not only pull up our robot, he could correctly see it was cleaning the living room and had 80 per cent battery life remaining. Within minutes, I watched the robot generate and transmit an accurate floor plan of my colleague’s house, with the correct shape and size of each room, " he wrote. DJI has since plugged the hole, but the incident raises real and weird questions about how secure these kinds of machines really are. Check out the original piece here in The Verge. | | | How the economy looks beyond Bay Street | | | GDP | | | Last week, we were looking ahead to Canada's GDP growth.
The numbers came in softer than expected.
Overall, GDP in the final three months of the year contracted at an annualized pace of 0.6 per cent.
That means the Canadian economy grew just 1.7 per cent over the course of 2025, which is the lowest run of growth we've seen since the worst of the pandemic. | | |  | | | But there are some significant caveats to this print.
On the one hand, the contraction was pretty much entirely due to a drawdown in inventories (businesses ran up pretty major stockpiles in the second quarter of the year).
"Actual activity in the economy performed not too badly. Final domestic demand (all spending excluding trade) was up a decent 2.4 per cent annualized. Flows of both wages and profits rose, reflecting higher employment and activity in the quarter, and supporting higher household consumption," wrote Jim Stanford, the economist from The Centre for Future Work.
Clearly, the public sector is doing too much of the work to keep Canada's economy on the right side of the ledger.
But the underlying details in this report aren't quite as bad as the headline sounds — a sort of reversal of last quarter, which saw growth in the headline but lousy details under the hood.
What do you think?
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