Canada

President Biden’s revocation of a permit for TC Energy Corp.’s Keystone XL pipeline is raising pressure on Canada’s energy industry to seek new markets for oil and gas, its top export, the Wall Street Journal reported. Biden revoked the Keystone XL permit last Wednesday, hours after taking office, effectively shutting down a 12-year, cross-border project that would have carried 830,000 barrels a day from Alberta to Nebraska and eventually to refiners on the Gulf Coast. His executive order, which fulfilled a campaign promise, cited concerns about climate change.

Canada’s unemployment rate in December was revised to 8.8% from 8.6% on Monday, while the net decline in jobs for the month was amended to 52,700 from 62,600, as Statistics Canada completed a historic review of its labor force data, Reuters reported. The revision, undertaken to ensure the data was aligned with recent population and geographical boundary estimates, had “virtually no effect” on employment estimates for the pandemic period of March to December 2020, the agency said.

U.S. President Joe Biden on Wednesday formally revoked the permit needed to build the Keystone XL oil pipeline (KXL), dashing Ottawa’s hopes of salvaging the $8 billion project that the struggling Canadian crude sector has long supported, Reuters reported. The move represents another set-back for the beleaguered Canadian oil industry, in particular its energy heartland Alberta, kills thousands of jobs, and marks an early bump in Biden’s relationship with Canada, a key trading partner.

Kimmeridge Energy Management Co. said it’s prepared to nominate directors to the board of Ovintiv Inc. if the oil and gas producer fails to take the necessary steps to improve its performance and restore investor confidence, Bloomberg News reported. The private equity firm, which said it owns a 2.4% stake in Ovintiv, argues in a new 18-page presentation that the company is falling behind its peers as a result of its misguided spending, expensive acquisitions, poor governance and inadequate environmental stewardship.

As the code red lockdown continues past the holiday season, the pulse of Winnipeg small business is growing weak despite injections of government survival cash. Jonathan Alward, director of provincial affairs for the Manitoba branch of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) told the Winnipeg Sun on Tuesday that many Winnipeg small businesses are considering bankruptcy.

The Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) was the unlucky recent buyer of a 5 percent stake in SolarWinds, the Texas-based business software maker that was compromised by a far-reaching Russian espionage attack discovered this month, the Washington Post reported. The largest shareholders in SolarWinds agreed to sell CPPIB the stake for $315 million on Dec. 7, just days before tech company’s public disclosure of the hack crushed its stock price more than 20 percent.

Canada on Thursday temporarily waived a C$844 million ($664 million) debt payment for the construction of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Muskrat Falls hydroelectric power plant, bailing out a troubled project in a province already laden with debt, Reuters. Since the announcement of the project in 2010, Canada has guaranteed a total of C$7.9 billion in debt for the project, which has faced major cost over-runs and now represents a large portion of the remote and sparsely-populated Atlantic province’s overall debt.

The United States and United Kingdom subsidiaries of Montreal-based flexible workspace company Breather have reportedly filed for separate insolvency processes, amid financial troubles and significant downsizing happening at the startup, BetaKit reported. According to The Globe and Mail, the subsidiaries filed for insolvency this week, around the same time Breather decided to pull out of hundreds of leases. The 315 office spaces Breather leased in the US and 40 in the UK will be assigned to third parties to “wind them down” and repay creditors.