The Logic

Alberta wants to be a model for how the public sector and other large organizations employ AI, and host the compute capacity that powers it, Technology Minister Nate Glubish says. Over the last 18 months, provincial staff have used in-house tools built on top of commercially available AI models to scan all the code in its software systems for security vulnerabilities, check which applications need upgrading and develop some of the replacements.

The economy added 18,000 jobs in the month as the employment rate ticked up 0.1 percentage points and unemployment ticked down 0.1 percentage points to 6.5 per cent, the agency’s labour force survey found. (The Logic) Talking point: The essentially flat headline numbers masked a shift in employment from the public sector (which lost 31,000 jobs) to the private sector (which gained 32,000), as gains in the hospitality sector helped offset losses in tariff-slammed manufacturing.

Prime Minister Mark Carney visited the country this week to court investment, and said he expects to sign a foreign investment agreement with Saudi Arabia early next year. (The Logic) Talking point: Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, who travelled with the prime minister, plans to return to Saudi Arabia with a delegation of Canadian pension funds to explore investment opportunities as well.

The subsidiary of the publicly traded tech firm announced the deal for Toronto-based TouchBistro on Tuesday. Neither side disclosed deal terms, or responded to The Logic’s request for comment. (The Logic) Talking point: TouchBistro, which sells point-of-sale terminals and software to restaurants and bars, was once a sizzling Canadian tech scaleup. Former e-commerce entrepreneur Alex Barrotti founded the firm in March 2011 to take hospitality tech mobile on the then-new Apple iPad.

The Vancouver-based fashion retailer reported $951 million in net revenue, up about 43 per cent from the same quarter a year earlier, with sales up 35 per cent and gross profits surging over 50 per cent. Net income jumped year-over-year from 36 cents per diluted share to 99 cents for the quarter ended May 31. (The Logic) Talking point: The company credited strong demand for its spring and summer product lines for helping drive the growth.

OTTAWA — A Quebec software company now has the security credentials to compete for sensitive Canadian government contracts alongside U.S. giants like Microsoft and IBM, but the firm says it took more than a year of government audits to qualify. The experience of Nakisa, a Montreal-based enterprise software firm, has highlighted the challenges for Ottawa as it tries to procure more Canadian technology—part of a wider push for greater sovereignty over the country’s data.

The Aishkat Agreement with the Innu First Nation of Pessamit would see the province and Hydro-Québec compensate the community of about 4,000 for existing and past damages, and guarantee its participation in hydroelectric projects on its lands.

The Toronto-based company said combined second-quarter losses were $247 million above expectations in two categories: catastrophe and large-loss insurance. Extreme weather in Canada, including torrential storms that caused water and wind damage, pushed up losses, as did commercial fires in the U.K. and Ireland. The insurer has seen a broad-based increase in fire claims. (The Logic) Talking point: Intact is not the first to warn that extreme weather could lead to more insurance claims.

Other investors in the San Francisco-based startup’s Series A round include the venture arms of Nvidia, Intel and Dell Technologies. (The Logic) Talking point: Prime Intellect is one of a new batch of so-called neolabs that are building frontier AI models to rival those of market leaders Anthropic and OpenAI.

The Riyadh-based arm of the kingdom’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) is committing at least 50 megawatts of processing power to host and run the Toronto-headquartered company’s AI models and tools. Cohere and Humain will also work together on new Arabic-language systems and industry-specific products. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. (The Logic) Talking point: This is Cohere’s first announced compute deal outside North America.