This week, The Margin office was divided into two camps: those who had ‘seen everything’ and those who had only seen Digger. The former was a camp of one, inhabited by yours truly. I alone scored tickets to You Can See Everything, my fellow Canadian Nathan Fielder’s magnum opus that's already breaking records (more on that later). I am therefore cursed with terrible knowledge that, for fear of revealing spoilers, I simply can’t share with anyone else in the office. I have no mouth, and I must scream.

– Anthony Milton, Content Lead

The takeaway: A week of mood swings for the markets, mostly tied to the same two worries: whether all that AI spending is ever gonna pay off, and just how long rates are gonna stay high. Meta announced plans to spend even more on AI, and escalating tensions in the Middle East sent Brent crude above US$110. Higher oil means higher inflation, and higher inflation means those rates will stay high a while longer. And the TSX took a hit this week as gold and copper slid. Now, to wait on tenterhooks for the Bank of Canada’s rate call next week…

All eyes were on Alberta this past week, as residents voted on whether to begin the legal process of separating from Canada. In the end, voters answered with a resounding 'nope!' The ‘yes’ side garnered only 24.8% of the vote.

As the dust settles, pundits have been hard at work arguing what this means for the vote’s most confusing figure: Alberta Premier Danielle Smith herself. Despite coming out as a champion of the ‘no’ vote (albeit somewhat belatedly), Smith changed the law twice to permit the referendum to happen in the first place. That means the results can be read as a humiliating loss for Smith, as the Globe and Mail’s Andrew Coyne has already argued.

And yet, if the country’s national newspaper of record is any indication, Smith’s gambit has made the province – and its resource sector – more popular than ever before. On Wednesday, the Globe’s editorial board called a new west coast oil pipeline “a demonstration that Confederation works,” a sentiment reflected in two other op-eds and two letters to the editor supporting Alberta’s right to mine, pump, and export the fruits of the earth.

As our colleague Amarah Hasham-Steele has previously detailed in The Walrus, Smith knows a bargaining chip when she sees one. If the referendum was intended to get Ottawa’s attention (as a majority of separatist voters said it was), then mission accomplished. This week, at least, Canada is tuned in to the Albertan agenda.

What this means…

Bottom Line: Brinksmanship is a risky game, but it appears to have worked for Danielle Smith. She got Ottawa’s attention, with few immediate consequences. Now, however, that balance has to hold long enough for Smith to secure a new pipeline – or face voters in an election, whichever happens first.

by Andrea Yu

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

After working in public relations for 20 years, Aisha Dhalla had enough of the grind. Feeling burnt out, she left her director role in 2022 and moved from Toronto to the small community of Enniskillen, an hour east of the city. Three years later, in 2025, she set out to buy a business.

Dhalla considered a few businesses for sale before zeroing in on a small garden centre in Bowmanville, Ont., about 15 minutes from home. The centre’s 79-year-old owner was ready to retire, so after thorough due diligence and a months-long get-to-know-you process between buyer and seller, the purchase was complete by January 2026.

Stefan Kurhan, the one selling the garden centre, fielded multiple bids for the purchase of his business, but Dhalla’s intention to keep it running as a garden centre gave him faith. “If they want to switch [the business] to something else, that would hurt my feelings,” Kurhan explains.

Increasingly, boomer owners of small businesses looking to retire aren’t just seeking out the highest bidder, but the one with heart. According to a 2026 survey of business owners in Western Canada planning to sell, 44% stated their most important priority is ensuring the continuation of the business. That actually ranked above maximizing financial return from the sale (39%), while almost an equal proportion said that finding the right person or people to take over the company was their priority.

It’s not that money doesn’t matter, but carrying on the ethos of a business could matter as much, or more.

Read more

Anthony Milton, Content Lead: You’ve heard it before: our attention spans are shot. Years of social media scrolling have transformed us into impatient dopamine fiends. Even film students can’t sit through a movie, as one professor bemoaned in The Atlantic earlier this year.

And yet, even as attention spans reportedly get shorter, movies are getting longer, and audiences are rewarding the trend. The Odyssey scored over US$1 billion internationally, and You Can See Everything’s US$15.6 million domestic opening set records of its own. Both films run nearly three hours.

As a notably reluctant movie-goer, I can offer one explanation: people crave something to talk about. Even before runtimes ballooned, longform content remained stubbornly relevant. Digital magazine articles – like 2023's “Who is the Bad Art Friend?" and the Boston Globe’s recent viral deep dive into a lesbian bar – have spawned countless threads. Longform allows enough space for tricky nuances and contradictions, things that have to be considered, analyzed, and talked out to understand. In other words, they’re viral catnip. 

Tell that to Netflix, whose recent failures to entice audiences have cost it US$135 billion in market share. The company is now looking for “more premium, conversation-driving originals.” My advice for the big N: Go long. Audiences will follow.

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: Tyler Haw (audience engagement), Amarah Hasham-Steele (staff writer), Shazia Khan (social media strategy manager), Anthony Milton (content lead), Martin Molpeceres (social video producer), Kat Angus (deputy editor), and Eric Wainwright (editor in chief).

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