Plus: malls are now mini theme parks. February 23, 2026 Sign Up | View online In This Issue 8 min read 💅 Mall makeovers 💸 Dollar dilemmas 🛒 Generative grocery lists The iconic ’80s mall is getting an extreme makeover to court a much younger demographic (and their parents). We explain below. | Netflix The Week in Markets All eyes on the Strait of Hormuz Much as we’d prefer to skip past these subjects, we feel obliged to begin with a quick acknowledgement that (1) U.S. President Donald Trump responded to the Supreme Court’s nixing his “emergency” tariffs by using a different trade statute to declare a fresh 10% — no, 15%! — global tariff, but it won’t apply to Canadian exports covered under the USMCA trade deal, and (2) we lost the men’s and women’s ice hockey gold medals in overtime, but we can’t remember who won. OK, now let’s talk about something, anything else. How about oil! The search for safe harbours from AI instability continues, and last week it was crude oil’s turn to rally, abetted by the looming threat of a U.S. military attack on Iran that could strain supply and drive up barrel prices. Prediction markets currently put the odds of a strike before March 15 at 50%, with the key question being whether it’d be a one-off like last summer or a protracted bid at regime change. Of course, pump price shock isn’t what it used to be; crude went for US$66/barrel in 2005 and it goes for $66 now, so a 5% or even 10% hike isn’t going to spark a panic … but if Iran were to close the Strait of Hormuz and the price of a barrel shot north of $100? Stay tuned. TSX: +3.6% (+6% YTD) S&P 500: +1% (+0.7% YTD) The Chart of the Week What Happened Last Week Important Someone has to deal with the Americans. Canada picked Janice. We’re suckers for that movie trope where the retired hero emerges from seclusion to save the world one … last … time. Well, last week Mark Carney pushed the big red button on his desk, summoning Janice Charette — public-servant emeritus, best known for urging Ottawa to invoke the Emergencies Act to clear the Freedom Convoy protestors in 2022; someone well known, in other words, for not blinking first — to lead Canada’s USMCA trade-deal renegotiations. She’ll have plenty of time to get back into fighting shape: round one isn’t until July. AI is coming for your grocery list. Annual e-commerce sales via AI platforms are forecast to hit US$144.5 billion by 2029 — that’s a 2,575% jump from 2025 — and now Big Grocery is scrambling to grab its cut: Loblaw is partnering with Google to introduce in-app shopping through its Gemini AI platform. Say you’re hosting a dinner party? Gemini will spit out a grocery list from Loblaw. It might make shopping easier than ever, but it might also exacerbate the same problem — a few giant companies with a stranglehold on the marketplace — that shoppers are already furious over. Interesting A 21-year-old flew to the Super Bowl with a bird mic to win a bet. Our favourite ingenious prediction-market ploy last week came courtesy of 21-year-old Caden Booth, who claims he won “many thousands of dollars” by correctly wagering that the Super Bowl rendition of the U.S. national anthem would clock in at under 117 seconds — and he did it by leaving nothing to chance. Booth, who’s from Ohio, flew to the Bay Area pregame and stood outside the stadium with one of those parabolic wildlife microphones so he could hear, and time, the rehearsal. Now is that technically cheating? 🤷 It’s definitely very clever. Malls are turning into mini theme parks. A struggling industry is trying to course correct by converting square footage into sprawling play spaces for kids, according to this colourful Bloomberg report. A mall in Guangzhou, for instance, has introduced snow tubing (YES), magic shows, an indoor zoo, and an aquarium. The business theory here is that if the kids are occupied, the parents will shop. Canadian malls seem to be doing OK (and some, like the West Edmonton Mall, already have kid-friendly attractions). But department stores have been hurting. Two words: laser tag. —Claire Porter Robbins and Jared Sullivan From Our Sponsor The FOMO Index by Stacey Woods Important 💀 Meta has patented an AI model that keeps posting for you after you die. In the future, you’re never not DJing. Source 🌚 The moon is shrinking and cracking. Told you we should’ve let it cure before we walked on it. Source ❄️ Trump’s threats have inspired a wave of tourism to Greenland. Americans determined to ruin that place one way or another! Source 🧺 Doug Ford tells students to avoid “basket weaving courses,” as if there’s no future in crafting storage solutions for the weekly grain ration. Source Crash & Burn To the Moon 🛣️ Anne Murray sounds off about the pothole problem in Halifax. Guess you’ve just been sleeping on this one, Holly Cole? Source 🚘 Waymos are paying DoorDash drivers to come close their doors. See? We’ll all still have jobs. Source 🐔 U.S. judge rules boneless wings are still wings. But don’t let him catch you playing drums with drumsticks. Source 🥤 Tim Hortons permanently brings back the Roll Up the Rim to Win cup. It’ll be nice to get out and stretch your thumbs again. Source Who Cares? The Big Important Story The U.S. Has the Almighty Dollar. Canada Needs Its Own Economic Sledgehammer President Trump’s latest tariff salvo has resurfaced age-old questions about how Canada can become less vulnerable to the whims of the U.S. government and generate more leverage with a country that’s still our top trading partner — and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. Economic warfare is a delicate business, and few people know more about it than Edward Fishman, a former top U.S. sanctions official and the author of the new book Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare. He gave us some lessons in the dark arts via phone last week. What are the basic ways nations gain economic leverage? For economic power to work as a geopolitical weapon, you need to control a chokepoint. By that, I mean you need a high concentration of market share in something that’s hard to substitute, like China’s rare-earth minerals, and you need the ability to weaponize it in a way that will cause substantially more pain on the target than on yourself. The dollar is the U.S.’s most influential chokepoint. Given that it’s the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. can impose sanctions on almost any company or bank and freeze it out of the global economy. What could Canada do to develop a chokepoint of its own? It’s hard for a government to set out and build a chokepoint; their development hinges on the organic growth of new industries and technologies (e.g., Taiwan’s semiconductor industry). What governments can do is address the chokepoints that make their country vulnerable. Stockpiles and strategic reserves help. In Canada’s case, it’s good that it has built pipelines to the coast, giving itself more options for exporting oil and gas. People have argued that the Trump administration is eroding the U.S.’s standing as the world’s financial hub. Why should Canada care? Ninety percent of global foreign-exchange transactions involve the U.S. dollar. Say a Saudi company is importing rice from an Indian firm. They likely don’t hold each other’s currencies, so the Saudi company converts their riyals through a New York bank into dollars and then into rupees to pay the Indian company. Trade would get far more complex if this neutral infrastructure were compromised or degraded. Do you foresee that happening? I see why U.S. allies might worry about an American president abusing the dollar, but it hasn’t been weaponized against allies. The U.S. has only isolated a small handful of countries: Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and, until recently, Syria. Not even China has been cut off from the dollar system. The United States benefits far more from having allies than from coercing them, and even the Trump administration has started to see that. As for Canada and the U.S. specifically, our alliances are built on more than individual leaders; they’re built on people-to-people and cultural ties. Which is why I believe that, setting aside the politics of the moment, the U.S.-Canada relationship, though bruised, will endure. This interview was edited for length and clarity. The Long Read 🤖 The Media Theory That Explains ‘99 Percent of Everything’ Joe Weisenthal, who co-hosts Odd Lots, one of our favourite podcasts, went on one of our other favourite podcasts, Plain English With Derek Thompson, to discuss what he considers one of “the most important trends in the world”: humans reverting from literacy back to orality, thanks to the rise of video platforms and a decline in reading. Two great minds discussing how it happened and why it matters = one fun chat. | Plain English Post of Wisdom Thoughts on Today’s Issue? Love it Good So so This week’s newsletter contributors: Brennan Doherty (writer), Devin Gordon (writer), Claire Porter Robbins (writer), Stacey Woods (writer), Ambrose Martos (fact checker), Ciara Rickard (copy editor), Maude Campbell (copy editor), Sara Black McCulloch (fact checker), Eva Grace Clement Cruz (specialist, product engagement), Setareh Sarmadi (senior editorial producer), Matthew Karasz (markets editor), Jared Sullivan (senior editor), Peter Martin (senior editor), and Devin Friedman (editor-in-chief). TWIM: Total returns for Feb. 16 – Feb. 20 shown in local currency, via TradingView. Special thanks to Brent Donnelly for help with The Week in Markets. Wealthsimple Media Inc. 80 Spadina Ave Suite 400 Toronto, ON, M5V 2J4 Have questions? Contact us. 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