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.

In the latest official scrutiny of a prominent American business in China, the authorities visited the Shanghai offices of the U.S. management consulting firm Bain & Company this month to question its employees, the New York Times reported. In a written statement, Bain said that it is “cooperating as appropriate with the Chinese authorities,” but declined to comment on the nature of the investigation and whether its employees’ phones and computers had been seized during the visit.

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.

Mexico’s inflation eased roughly in line with analysts’ expectations in early April as the central bank weighs ending a record monetary tightening cycle in Latin America’s second-biggest economy, Bloomberg News reported. Consumer prices rose 6.24% in the first half of the month compared to the same period a year earlier, down from 6.58% in late March, the national statistics institute reported Monday.

Richard Branson's Virgin Orbit Holdings Inc and its subsidiaries in the United States filed a chapter 11 bankruptcy plan with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware, the company said in a statement on Wednesday, Reuters reported. Earlier this month, Virgin Orbit filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after the satellite launch company struggled to secure long-term funding following a failed launch in January.

Credit Suisse has lodged a $440 million claim against Japan's SoftBank Group Corp in London as it presses ahead with formal proceedings in a dispute borne from the failure of Greensill Capital, a finance firm, Reuters reported. The Swiss lender is trying to recover client funds that Greensill had lent to Katerra, a SoftBank-backed U.S. construction group that filed for bankruptcy in 2021. SoftBank has vowed to vigorously fight the claim. The collapse of Greensill, along with a string of scandals, helped dent confidence in the 167-year-old Swiss bank.

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.