We’ve made it to mid-August, which means here in Ontario, we’ve officially made it to PEACH SEASON. I’ve been known to talk about peach season the way others talk about decorative gourd season, so yes, I’ve already gotten in trouble for cursing within earshot of coworkers and even a few toddlers. But it’s a good year to be bullish on stone-fruit beauts: new varieties are allowing harvests to start earlier than ever (thank you, science), and it turns out that those swampy, sweaty July heat waves created ideal conditions for a real bumper crop. 

Almost nothing else at the grocery store is having a good year, so let’s celebrate this one win: peaches are relatively cheap, abundant, and on THIS side of the border right now. Maybe it’s all them natural sugars talkin’, but if we could trade futures on this stuff, I’d be all in.

– Shazia Khan, Social Media Strategy Manager

The takeaway: Cooling inflation carried this week’s markets on its back, but not for everybody. Following softer-than-predicted CPI and PPI numbers, the S&P 500 set a new record above 7,800 points on Thursday, cutting the odds of a September rate hike from 50% to about 35%. The Nasdaq also surfed that wave, but it couldn’t help the Dow this week: the US and Iran keep playing the same expensive song on repeat, Big Tech saw significant losses, and Cisco’s (NASDAQ:CSCO) post-earnings call slump all contributed to the Dow’s lackluster performance. On the TSX, mining and bank stocks saw boosts from a gold rally and the same reduced rate hike odds, managing to outdo the major American indices. We'd be lying if we claimed not to feel a little bit smug.

Is anyone feeling a sense of déjà-vu? Once again, Trump threatens sky-high tariffs, the feds have to scramble, and businesses across Canada are quaking in their boots. It’s all very ‘Liberation Day’ 2025, but this time the date is Aug. 19, and there’s no snappy name for it. (Email us your ideas!)

A quick recap: on June 20, the White House reached for a never-before-used law, Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, to threaten 50% tariffs on 400 different Canadian exports to the US, purportedly in response to “discriminatory” treatment of US booze, cars, and dairy exports. 

Naturally that caused a bit of a panic, and ever since, Canada’s trade negotiators have been darting between Ottawa and Washington, DC, trying to hammer out a deal. Last week, government sources told CTV they were feeling cautiously optimistic about a deal that would avert the tariffs and even give Canada a lower rate on several goods, in return for concessions in autos, dairy, and alcohol. But as of Wednesday, CBC reports the Americans aren’t happy with Canada’s latest offer. 

With five days left until the US’s self-imposed deadline, it’s infuriatingly murky how the negotiations will go. For now, we’re on tenterhooks.

Bottom Line: By now, we all kind of know how this game is played. Trump threatens something ridiculous, everyone is forced to take him seriously, the markets swing, and then… well, prior to Trump’s, ahem, decisive actions in Iran, the pattern was that he’d just backtrack. Now, though, that’s less certain. With the US midterms coming up and his approval ratings down, Trump is desperate for a win. It’s entirely possible that Aug. 18 will be another TACO Tuesday – but you never know what a cornered animal will do.

by Louisa Eunice

This is an excerpt of an article originally run in full on The Margin.

Amara Miller thought her retirement plan was simple: Winters in Guyana with her siblings, and summers in Toronto with her kids and grandkids. You know, that whole back-and-forth thing that some people talk about like it’s just a normal commute.

“I thought once I hit retirement age, I’d just be able to travel freely,” Amara says. Born in Jamaica, her family moved to Guyana when she was 13; at 41, she moved again, this time to Toronto. Now 65, Amara has spent the past 24 years raising her children in Canada, working 12-hour shifts in long-term care homes, and paying into Canada’s system.

But catching up with a friend near Trinity Bellwoods Park one day, the conversation drifted to retirement, and the friend mentioned something about Canada's Old Age Security pension that didn’t sit right with Amara. She went home and pulled out the paperwork, and what she found stopped her cold: yes, collecting her pension while living in Canada took 10 years of residency. But if she wanted to keep receiving her OAS pension when she went to Guyana, she'd need 20 years of Canadian residency, and she needed to make sure she could meet the requirements.

The 20-year export rule is a relic of the 1970s, when the federal government locked the OAS framework into place. The criteria treat immigration as a one-way, permanent move, and don't account much for international, jet-setting retirement plans.

Read more

Shazia Khan, Social Media Strategy Manager: If you, too, are still watching the Blue Jays grind through their historically cursed 2026 season, you might’ve seen Monday's bizarre game get stopped for 15 minutes because no one could figure out how many outs there were. Confusing AF (welcome to baseball!), but this Reddit comment explained things surprisingly well AND struck me as a perfect candidate for “copypasta” – you know, one of those blocks of text so peculiar that people copy and paste them everywhere, forever, for no reason. Like when new MLB fans ask what a ‘balk’ is (do not do a balk, please).

This makes me think we’ve been going about this whole AI thing completely backwards. Every tech company is burning mad capital to build models that write better than Hemingway, sending us on increasingly difficult quests to detect them – and so far, the primary return has been public outrage. But in their earlier, jankier days, these tools were actually brilliant copypasta creators. Phrases such as "I'm sorry but I cannot fulfill this request it goes against OpenAI use policy" and "as an AI language model, I cannot" were gleefully shared by real humans across social media, Amazon reviews, and group chats. It brought the masses joy and laughter instead of fear and anger. 

So here's my pitch to the engineers: Stop pushing for Pulitzer-level prose. Keep your models ludicrously, deliciously undercooked. It's cheaper and kinda delightful, which will do a heckin’ lot more for your public image than any dystopian commercial or influencer trip ever could. That’s how you’ll truly deliver on that ‘human in the loop’ promise: no amount of infinite output will have value until a human finds it funny and shares it everywhere, forever, for no reason.

From The Margin group chat:

If you liked this newsletter, hated this newsletter, or are totally indifferent to it, hit the reply button and tell us why! We’re so lonely.

This week’s contributors: Louisa Eunice (writer), Tyler Haw (audience engagement), Amarah Hasham-Steele (staff writer), Shazia Khan (social media strategy manager), Anthony Milton (content lead), Kat Angus (deputy editor), and Eric Wainwright (editor in chief).

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