Canadian Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry François-Philippe Champagne yesterday launched a consultation seeking feedback from universities, experts, lenders and other stakeholders on how to better protect the public interest functions of public post-secondary educational institutions when they become insolvent, according to a press release. "What happened at Laurentian University has raised concerns as to whether our current insolvency laws are fit for purpose to help publicly funded post-secondary institutions resolve financial distress," Champagne said.

A British Columbia company has filed for bankruptcy in the U.S., GlobalNews.ca reported. Known for creating engineered wood products, also known as mass timber, Structurlam of Penticton announced on Monday that it had entered into a purchase agreement to sell all of its assets in B.C. and Arkansas for US$60 million. Mass timber is wood that’s been glued or laminated together, then digitally cut out in various shapes, sizes and lengths. Those custom pieces are then shipped and precisely assembled on-site.

Canadian inflation excluding food and energy costs is expected to remain above 3% until the fourth quarter of this year, the median forecast of seven economists recently surveyed by Reuters showed, which could dash hopes of an early Bank of Canada shift to cutting interest rates, Reuters reported. The readings for core, or underlying, inflation, such as the widely-tracked Consumer Price Index excluding food and energy, are showing greater persistence than the headline rate after price pressures spread from goods into slower-moving items, such as wages and services.

The Bank of Canada will hold interest rates at the 15-year high 4.50% until the end of 2023, before starting to cut rates at the start of next year, a median of market participants said in the central bank's survey released on Monday, Reuters reported. The survey, the second iteration of the poll of market participants first released in February, showed a median of the participants forecasting interest rates dropping to 3.00% by the end of 2024. Market participants in the first survey released in February had said rates would fall to 4.0% by the end of the year.

Inflation drifted lower to the slowest pace in nearly two years, a reprieve for the Bank of Canada amid a jobs market and economy that continue to defy expectations for a stall, Bloomberg News reported. The consumer price index rose 4.3% in March from a year ago, the lowest headline number since August 2021, Statistics Canada reported Tuesday in Ottawa. That matched expectations in a Bloomberg survey of economists and was down from 5.2% in February. On a monthly basis, the index rose 0.5% in March, also matching economist forecasts.

Canadian Pacific Railway Ltd. has emerged as an unlikely target for a few distressed-debt investors. It wasn’t because of the railroad operator’s creditworthiness, but rather because rising interest rates pummeled the value of some of its bonds in recent months ahead of its roughly $30 billion acquisition of U.S. rival Kansas City Southern, according to a WSJ Pro Bankruptcy commentary. Canadian Pacific sold bonds in December 2021 to finance the acquisition, including $2.4 billion in notes due 2031 and 2041, with coupons of 2.45% and 3%, respectively.

Canada’s recent moves to impose stricter rules on crypto companies show that US regulators have allies in cracking down on the asset class after last year’s turmoil, Bloomberg News reported. Canadian securities regulators in February gave a 30-day deadline for unregistered crypto trading platforms operating in the country to commit to a so-called pre-registration undertaking. Firms are required to follow tougher regulations on segregating customer assets and prohibited from offering margin or leverage to users in Canada.

Interest rates in Canada may have to stay restrictive for longer to ensure inflation declines to the Bank of Canada's 2% target, Governor Tiff Macklem said on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Macklem, speaking after the bank announced that it was holding its key rate at 4.50%, said the central bank's governing council had discussed whether rates had been raised enough. Macklem said that while the bank was encouraged inflation was dropping, the job of monetary policy was not done.

The Bank of Canada is expected to take in stride surprising recent economic strength and leave interest rates unchanged at its meeting on Wednesday, pinning its hopes on activity cooling as higher borrowing costs sink in, analysts said, Reuters reported. Last month, the Bank of Canada became the first major global central bank to pause its rate-hiking campaign, after lifting its benchmark rate to a 15-year high of 4.50%. It said no further tightening would be needed if the economy slows, or even moves into a slight recession, as it expects.