Canada

Binance said on Friday it was withdrawing from Canada, weeks after the country issued a series of new guidelines for cryptocurrency exchanges including investor limits and mandatory registrations, Reuters reported. Canada has tightened regulations for crypto asset trading platforms in recent months, with the introduction of a pre-registration process. The companies that do not adhere to the rules will face potential enforcement action, according to the website of the Ontario Securities Commission.

Manitoba (Canada) could see a spurt in people filing for bankruptcy over the summer months, an insolvency trustee warns, CBC.ca reported. New data from the federal government shows 200 individual Manitobans filed for bankruptcy in the first quarter of this year, which is up from the first quarters of 2021 and 2022. And experts say the second quarter could see even more.

The Bank of Canada said on Monday it launched public consultations on the features that could be included in a digital Canadian dollar, in a exploratory move to gauge the viability of a digital version of the currency, Reuters reported. "As the world becomes increasingly digital, the Bank - like many other central banks - is exploring a digital version of Canada's national currency," the central bank said in a statement. The consultation opened on Monday and runs until June 19. Read more.

The Canadian government is starting a month of consultations on how to better protect post-secondary institutions when they become insolvent, so they can avoid the same fate at Laurentian University, CBC.ca reported. In February 2021 the Sudbury, Ont. university filed for insolvency. Laurentian became the first public university to use the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act (CCAA) to restructure after its financial troubles. Through that process, which has previously been used for corporate restructuring, Laurentian cut 69 programs, and nearly 200 staff and faculty members lost their jobs.

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.