Here are five things you need to know this morning:
Canada Post workers on strike: More than 55,000 Canada Post workers walked off the job at midnight after failing to reach a deal for a new labour pact with their employer. The strike will bring nationwide postal activity to a grinding halt headed into the holiday season, normally a busy one for retailers who use the postal service to ship packages across the country. It’s the latest job action to spill out from unionized workers in recent months, after contracts signed before and during the pandemic didn’t allow them to adjust compensation levels during the era of high inflation. Workers are asking for wage increases to catch up with inflation, plus cost-of-living adjustments, other top ups to benefits, paid time off and protections against technological change.
Labour board orders Montreal dockworkers back to work: The Canada Industrial Relations Board has ordered dockworkers at the Port of Montreal to get back on the job as of tomorrow morning. The board has also directed workers and their employers at Canada’s second busiest port to engage in binding arbitration. The board made a similar move earlier in the week ordering dockworkers in Vancouver to do the same, a request that was complied with. The board is taking the action after Canada’s labour minister requested the board end the lockouts in both places as more than $1 billion worth of imports piles up every day.
Housing market warming as weather cools: Canada’s housing market showed signs of heating up last month, as total sales on the Canadian Real Estate Association’s MLS system rose by 7.7 per cent, and they’re now at their highest level since April 2022. The jump was a “surprise,” the realtor group said in a release this morning, attributing it both to a rate cut the previous month and the surge of new listings. On the price side, things aren’t quite so red hot as the House Price Index declined by 2.7 per cent over the past year. That’s the smallest decline since May but still a negative number. CREA says it expects those declines to continue but shrink mostly due to beneficial comparisons to a year ago when prices were depressed.
GM slashing 1,000 jobs to cut costs: General Motors will cut about 1,000 salaried workers around the world in a move to streamline costs, Bloomberg is reporting this morning. Most of the layoffs will impact staff in North America but there is no breakdown on how many specifically will come from the company’s Canadian operations.
Bluesky is mooning: Shares in a tiny Toronto-based company called Bluesky Digital more than doubled on Thursday, and even the company admits it doesn’t really know why. Bluesky, whose shares list on the Canadian Securities Exchange and trade under the ticker symbol BTC, has gone parabolic, rising from 0.05 cents at the start of the week to 70 cents before markets open today. On Tuesday, the company announced in a press release that its new AI and blockchain units will be “ready to produce revenues in January 2025” and the stock more than doubled. But the rally continued for the next two days, prompting the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization to ask them if anything was going on. The company said in a release it is “unaware of any material change in the corporation’s operations that would account for the recent increase in market activity.” While penny stocks can be volatile all the time, it’s hard not to notice two factors that might be helping to fuel the rally. Firstly, the company’s ticker symbol of BTC is the same as that of Bitcoin, which has been on a torrid run since Donald Trump’s election. And secondly, the company is called Bluesky, which is also the name of a fast-growing social media network which is exploding in popularity since Trump’s election. The service which was created by ex-Twitter execs now counts more than 15 million users including more than a million new ones in barely a week. That’s a drop in the bucket compared to Musk’s X, but the app is growing so quickly that functionality has started to seize up under the deluge of new activity. The app is currently the top ranked free app in Apple’s App store. With all those downloads, it’s not hard to imagine a few investors falling into a trap of mistaken identity.