Plus: budget winners and losers November 10, 2025 Sign Up | View online IN THIS ISSUE 8 min read 🎤 CEOs go wild 🚜 Caterpillar climbs 🎶 AI hits the charts Carney’s first budget doesn’t flinch from the big questions: yes, there’s a line item to help bring a Eurovision title to Canada. | Sean Gallup/Getty Images THE CHART OF THE WEEK BUDGET SPECTACULAR 2025 Canada’s 2025 budget is here, and it’s big news! As no Canadian needs to be told, the country is facing some tough geopolitical and economic challenges, and the budget is one of the government’s best tools for addressing them. Here’s who stands to benefit the most — and the least: The Winners! 🤪 The military! As The Globe pointed out, the budget mentions the word “defence” more than 150 times, compared to fewer than 20 in Justin Trudeau’s first budget. Ottawa plans to shell out $81.8 billion over the next five years, gradually boosting Canada’s defence spending from less than 2% of the GDP to more than 5%. (Just for comparison, the U.S. spent 3.4% last year.) Anyone who wants to switch banks! Ottawa says it intends to ban fees for transferring your investing accounts, like your TFSA or RRSP, from one institution to another (which currently cost Canadians an average of $150 per switch), and it plans to enable open banking (which allows people to securely share their bank info with approved third parties, e.g., budgeting apps). Those are two very big wins for Canadians eager for a more flexible and competitive financial market and (ahem) for fintechs. Young Canadians! The budget sets aside $594.7 million over the next two years to create 100,000 summer jobs for students, along with $635 million to create a work-placement program for 55,000 new postsecondary grads — part of a push to reverse a youth-unemployment rate that hit nearly 15% in September. It also funds the creation of a Youth Climate Corps to train young workers for weather-emergency response. Construction companies! Ottawa aims to build heaps of new stuff as part of what it’s calling “generational infrastructure investments.” Over the next five years, it intends to spend $115 billion to upgrade roads and community centres nationwide. Plus $60 billion on five major projects, including a high-speed rail corridor and a mine expansion. Plus it earmarked $13 billion for its new Build Canada Homes agency, which presumably will … do that. 🤞 The Losers 😞 Renters. The government will scrap last year’s secondary-suite loan program, which offered low-interest loans for homeowners to build basement or laneway suites. It’s also killing the 1% tax on vacant or underused housing, which was meant to slap (mostly non-Canadian) homeowners for leaving properties unoccupied and (arguably) exacerbating rental shortages. Deficit hawks. There’s plenty of cuts in this budget — e.g., a 10% reduction of the federal workforce, along with slashes to foreign aid, green-home retrofits, and public transit — but it’s not exactly austerity. In fact, the budget is projected to double the deficit that Trudeau’s government forecasted a year ago. Crypto skeptics. Following on the heels of the U.S.’s GENIUS Act, Ottawa is wading into the debate over whether stablecoins should be treated as digital currency (i.e., primarily used for payments) or as a security (i.e., largely traded like stocks and subject to similar regulations). And — currency it is. Stablecoin issuers will have to make sure they have enough cash on hand to back their coins and manage risk, which will make the coins more mainstream — a setback for alt-currency skeptics. FROM OUR SPONSOR THE FOMO INDEX by Stacey Woods IMPORTANT 🌳 Carney reduces Trudeau’s goal to plant two billion trees by a billion. Don’t worry — once they fill out, you’ll hardly notice. Source 🌊 Orcas are hunting young great white sharks for their livers. Want to eat them with some sea bream and a nice shrimp scampi. Source 🎤 New budget includes funding to explore Canada’s participation in Eurovision. Bryan Adams, start making your sequined headdress! Source 🦉 Hooters founders begin “re-Hooterization” with a return to the old, more modest uniforms. Remaining true to their original vision of simple bad taste. Source CRASH & BURN TO THE MOON 📃 Mom group launches petition against Wheel of Fortune over puzzle with unwholesome innuendo. Wheel tells them to buy a vowel and G_T ST_FF_D. Source 🥷 Thieves steal $80K of whipped cream from a fridge trailer in Guelph. Nation’s pie-tin factories beef up security. Source 🥃 Alberta wants to legally define what makes an Alberta whiskey. It’s not just antifreeze and Clamato aged in a Smithbilt hat. Source 🍔 World’s oldest Quarter Pounder turns 30. In lieu of gifts, please make a donation to the Home for the McAged. Source WHO CARES FIVE INTERESTING THINGS FROM LAST WEEK (AND ONE FAREWELL) Ottawa says Stellantis can leave Canada — as soon as we get our $15 billion back. According to the government, the automaker’s decision to lay off thousands at its Brampton factory and move those jobs to the U.S. puts it in breach of contract, since that contract included more than $15 billion in taxpayer-funded subsidies. The government’s message: either the jobs come back or the money does. Earnings calls keep getting wilder. They used to be staid affairs for finance insiders, but they’re increasingly becoming more like CEO theatre/pep rallies targeted at retail investors. On November 1, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong closed his Q3 call with a brazen bit of market shenanigans, purposefully shouting out catchphrases that would settle bets on Polymarket. Then last week, Palantir CEO Alex Karp delivered a chest-thumping monologue, calling Palantir’s Q3 numbers “arguably the best results that any software company has ever delivered” (to his credit, he did say “arguably”) before taking a “slightly political” detour into ICE, fentanyl, dropping nuclear bombs on South America, and the merits of being “completely anti-woke.” Big yellow trucks are beating Nvidia. We’re always intrigued by boring-seeming companies whose stock unexpectedly skyrockets. The latest example: Caterpillar, whose shares are up almost 57% YTD (Nvidia: +36% YTD), reflecting tech-like growth expectations. It’s a literal picks-and-shovels story: it’s minting money by supplying the earthmovers for building AI data centres and the gas turbines that keep them running. Companies are hiring! Kind of! Canada’s unemployment rate reversed last month, edging down from 7.1% to 6.9%. The hitch is that nearly all the gains were for part-time work. So are the numbers a blip or a bellwether? That’s the question the Bank of Canada will have to grapple with when deciding whether to keep cutting rates or to hold them steady. AI “artists” are taking over streaming. At least six AI or AI-assisted artists have landed on Billboard charts over the past few months. One “artist,” Xania Monet, is the creation of a real poet who generates the backing track and singer’s voice with AI (specifically via an AI service that’s been accused of “unimaginable” plagiarism). Tech has always been a tool for music production — think T-Pain’s Auto-Tune — but now the entire industry, from artists and labels to awards shows, faces existential decisions about where to draw the line. Breaking news: this is my last newsletter. After 184 issues and 95 podcasts, I’m moving on from TLDR — though sadly not for that $320,000 writing job at Anthropic that went viral last week and which I still don’t believe is real. It’s been such a treat hearing about your personal-finance challenges and triumphs over these past few years; now I’m excited to join your ranks as a TLDR reader. —Sarah Rieger (Keep in touch!) OTHER VERY GOOD READS 💰 Carl Icahn Is Trying to Right His Empire The 89-year-old investor is still at it — when he isn’t betting six figures on NFL games. | WSJ* 🪦 Battle of Wills The dramatic war over filmmaker Norman Jewison’s estate. | Toronto Life 🎙️ Hatred of Podcasting Are we using white noise to block out our thoughts? | The Baffler *Article is paywalled, which, yeah, is kind of annoying. But we think good journalism is worth paying for. THE WISDOM OF SOCIAL Fact check: this was actually the museum’s password back in 2014. Presumably it has since been updated to Louvre1. THOUGHTS ON TODAY’S ISSUE? Love it Good So so àThis week’s newsletter contributors: Brennan Doherty (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Sarah Rieger (news writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Maude Campbell (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Mohini Tailor (lifecycle marketing manager), Eva Grace Clement Cruz (lifecycle marketing associate), Setareh Sarmadi (senior editorial producer), Matthew Karasz (markets editor), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Have questions? Contact us. VIEW IN BROWSER PRIVACY POLICY UNSUBSCRIBE Apple Promo: From November 4 to December 16, 2025, eligible Wealthsimple clients who register for this offer and initiate deposits or transfers of qualified amount into their Wealthsimple Self-Directed Investing, Managed Investing, Crypto, or chequing account within 30 days of registration will receive one of the following based on the cumulative transfer amount less withdrawal and any margin debit balances during the funding period (a “Reward”): $100,000 - $199,999.99: 1 x iPhone 17 or 1 x MacBook Air; $200,000 - $299,999.99: 1 x iPhone Air or 1 x MacBook Air; $300,000 - $499,999.99: 1 x iPhone 17 Pro or 1 x MacBook Pro; $500,000 - $999,999.99: 1 x iPhone 17 Pro and 1 x MacBook Pro; $1,000,000+ 1 x iPhone 17 Pro and 1 x MacBook Pro and 1 x Apple Studio Display. Limit 1 Reward per qualified client. Minimum fund holding period required. Full Terms and Conditions here. Registration Contest: No purchase required. 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