Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s business and investing news quiz. Join us each week to test your knowledge of the stories making the headlines. Our business reporters come up with the questions, and you can show us what you know.
This week in business and investing: Five years after the Trudeau government legalized recreational cannabis, the early promise of Canada’s legal recreational market has largely gone up in smoke. The industry’s biggest companies – Canopy Growth, Aurora Cannabis and Tilray – are downsizing and grappling with a longer march to profitability than many once imagined. Other companies have folded, declared bankruptcy or been sold off. Deloitte once forecast a Canadian legal cannabis industry worth more than $22-billion – but what is the state of it now?
Meanwhile, two airlines made waves this week: One walked back its controversial bid to tweak its loyalty program, and another is experimenting with a new approach to boarding (for some, lucky passengers). Plus, more ads, more robots and more job cuts topped the business headlines.
Do you remember these stories? Take our quiz below to test your recall for the week ending Oct. 19.
a. $10.8-billion. Canada legalized recreational cannabis on Oct. 17, 2018. Yet the early promise of the industry – Deloitte predicted it could be worth $22.6-billion – has gone up in smoke. In its place is a sobering reality: Legalization has fallen well short of expectations.
c. Title sponsorship of programming. Frito-Lay is on board to sponsor Netflix’s reality show Love is Blind. Other ad formats include the “binge” ad, which allows users to watch a longer ad, followed by several ad-free episodes. Meanwhile, the company’s shares rose 15 per cent Thursday – the biggest single-day gain since January 2021.
d. Martin Imbleau. The chief executive officer of the federal high-frequency rail team says target travel time for the Montreal-Toronto journey is less than four hours.
b. Prescription medicine. The company announced that customers in College Station, Tex., can now get prescriptions delivered by a drone within an hour of placing an order. The drone, programmed to fly from a delivery centre with a secure pharmacy, will travel to the customer’s address and drop a padded package.
c. The One. Under development since 2015, the One was marketed as Canada’s tallest commercial condo building. It is now in receivership after its senior lender asked an Ontario judge to put a third party in control of the project.
b. Declined. Focusing on the economy overall, the report from the independent competition watchdogs found competition has declined as industries have become more concentrated and less dynamic.
b. 1.3 in 1,000. Just 1.3 out of every 1,000 Canadians started a business in 2022 – compared with three out of 1,000 in 2000, according to the BDC report.
a. Delta Air Lines. “I have read hundreds of your e-mails, and what’s been most clear to me is how much you love Delta and the disappointment many of you felt by the significance of the changes,” Delta Air Lines chief executive officer Ed Bastian said in an e-mail.
d. Giving priority boarding to economy passengers with window seats. The move is said to potentially speed up boarding by two minutes.
b. Scotiabank will trim its global workforce by 3 per cent ahead of launching its strategic turnaround plan.
a. Charging $1 a year for new users. According to X (formerly Twitter), the annual charge is part of an effort to reduce bot and spam accounts on the platform and is “not a profit driver.”
b. Below. The rate dipped from the previous month and came in lower than expected, which could alleviate pressure on the Bank of Canada to resume hiking interest rates on Oct. 25.
Jessie Willms