The trade spat between the U.S. and China managed to entangle Canada after authorities arrested a Huawei executive in Vancouver at the request of the U.S. government. China took immediate retaliation by arresting two Canadians – a diplomat and an entrepreneur – followed by the arrest of a Canadian woman teaching in China. The Chinese immediately said it would impact future trade relations with Canada. While there’s been a lot of huffing and puffing going on, at the end of the day it’s quite likely there will be virtually no effect on short or long-term trade because both sides have too much to lose. We take a look at the history of the Canada-China trade relationship in our cover story.

Amazon will soon be adding another 600 jobs in Toronto in the fields of software development, machine learning and cloud computing. The online retail giant announced the expansion as it gets set to open an expanded office in the downtown core. There are currently 800 people working for the company in Toronto, which made the shortlist to host the company’s highly coveted second headquarters with 50,000 jobs, but eventually lost out to New York City and Arlington, Virginia.

Former CBS CEO Les Moonves will not be getting his $120 million severance package following a sexual misconduct probe at the company. Moonves, who was forced to resign in September, was alleged to have sexually harassed at least a dozen women. He denies the allegations and has said any sexual relations were consensual, including one woman who repeatedly performed oral sex on him in his office. After the probe, CBS announced it was introducing new polices to combat all types of misconduct, so there’s at least something positive that has come out from this sordid episode.

Google Plus has turned out to be a Google Minus for the multi-billion dollar California based company, with a nightmarish inability to protect users’ personal information on at least two occasions that have been made known. Google Plus was designed to be a direct competitor to Facebook, but the social media site was never able to gain significant traction and trailed far behind in user accounts. Already destined to be shut down, Google is accelerating plans to have Google Plus disappear. It had a lousy, cold interface that seemed anything but engaging. While Google may have paid a lot of money to get it up and running it sure looked and felt like a very half-hearted effort. Apparently most other people felt the same.

Did you know?… Google initially ran under Stanford University’s website, with the domains google.stanford.edu and z.stanford.edu. Google was launched in January 1996 as a research project by Larry Page and Sergey Brin when they were both PhD students at the school. Google’s original name was “BackRub” because the system checked backlinks to estimate the importance of a site.

Angus Gillespie
[email protected]
@CanBizJournal

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