What’s Telus’s new AI tool being used for?Justin Tang/The Canadian Press
Welcome to The Globe and Mail’s business and investing news quiz. Join us each week to test your knowledge of the stories making headlines. Our business reporters come up with the questions, and you can show us what you know.
This week: The Lang family has made a major donation to a Canadian university and Telus is trying out a new AI tool. What is it being used for? Take our quiz and find out.
d. Believe it or not, the CRA is getting better. The much maligned tax agency fielded 46 per cent fewer calls this tax season thanks to an improved website and new digital tools that allow taxpayers to resolve issues online. The single biggest reason that phone volume plunged by nearly a quarter-million calls was a change that allowed taxpayers to reset their log-in credentials online. Previously, Canadians who found themselves locked out of their CRA accounts had to call the agency for assistance.
b. AirAsia announced the massive deal for 150 Canadian-made jets and said it would double the order if Airbus makes an even larger version of the aircraft. It is the largest order to date for the A220 and the largest ever for a Canadian-made commercial plane, according to officials.
a. Does this sound creepy to you? Telus is deploying technology that alters the accents of customer service agents. The AI-related system encodes the speaker’s voice, modifies pronunciation-related features and then decodes the speech back into audio. This preserves the speaker’s voice but improves clarity and reduces “accent-related friction,” according to the company.
d. Only about 40 per cent of Canadians aged 25 to 39 were parents in 2021, a big drop from the levels that prevailed three decades earlier. The fall in family formation is part of a larger trend, according to a new study from Statistics Canada. The report shows Canadian millennials are entering the housing market later and postponing families, in large part because of affordability challenges.
c. Mr. Turner was one of the world’s leading environmentalists, one of the largest landowners in the United States and a major philanthropist. In 1997 he made headlines by announcing that he was donating US$1-billion to fund United Nations operations. In 2017, after the last instalment of the donation, Mr. Turner called it “the best investment I’ve ever made.”
b. Silly season is now officially upon us: GameStop, a video-game retailer popular among meme-stock traders, is attempting a half-cash, half-stock buyout of a company nearly four times its market value.
a. Mr. Abel, a University of Alberta graduate, spoke at Berkshire’s annual meeting in Omaha, Neb., four months after succeeding the world’s most famous investor as chief executive officer. Mr. Buffett used to pack an 18,000-seat arena when he ran the show. Mr. Abel drew a smaller crowd, but struck several of the same notes as his illustrious predecessor, reassuring investors that he had no intention of splitting up Berkshire.
The Carpenters’ Regional Council, one of Canada’s largest construction unions, has been placed under the supervision of its U.S. parent organization and will undergo an internal probe after The Globe and Mail reported that it had quietly purchased a multimillion-dollar Toronto-area home for the use of its top official. The union’s executive board was not told about the house and its intended purpose and did not vote on the purchase, according to a source familiar with the union’s decision.
d. The Langs donated the money to the Gordon S. Lang School of Business and Economics at the University of Guelph. The school is named after Mr. Lang’s father, who founded Toronto-based CCL in 1951.
c. Honda has indefinitely suspended its plan to build an EV complex in Ontario, according to a report from Japan’s Nikkei news agency. Honda announced the project in 2024 and suspended it for two years in 2025 amid slowing demand for EVs and the United States’ abrupt turn against the technology. Nikkei reported this week that Honda is now about to make the suspension of the Ontario plant indefinite, with the possibility of scrapping it altogether.
b. OpenAI broke laws when handling personal information for the initial release of ChatGPT, according to a three-year-long investigation by Canadian privacy regulators. The San Francisco-based company collected vast amounts of personal information without adequate safeguards and left many users unaware that their data was being captured and used to train AI models. OpenAI says it has made changes to address major concerns. Um, right.
a. A proposed Alberta-to-Wyoming pipeline is close to securing the minimum commitments from oil companies that the project needs to go ahead, according to Reuters. The pipeline, proposed by Canadian pipeline company South Bow Corp. and its U.S. partner Bridger Pipeline, could increase Canada’s crude exports to the U.S. by more than 12 per cent if it goes ahead.