Team Trudeau gets a shout-out it can live without. Steve Bannon sees the PM’s right-hand man Gerald Butts “as a sort of left-wing version of himself,” reports Ryan Lizza of the New Yorker, and the two talk regularly. Butts, who never lacks for commentary on Twitter, has shared nothing of this bromance. Nonetheless, they made a tweet out of it:

North Hatley, Quebec taken with a different president (and his wife). Bill and Hillary Clinton are spending the week in the Eastern Townships, probably wondering why people there put up American flags. Bill hopes to spend his birthday on Saturday with verified friend Jean Chrétien. (That is, if Chrétien ever bothers to return his calls.)

Hudson’s Bay takes down an even more contentious symbol than Ivanka Trump’s clothing line. The department store still sells products branded by the First Daughter despite protests, but after months of requests to remove its downtown Montreal plaque commemorating the memory of Confederate States president Jefferson Davis, the company sensed it was the right time to take it down. The store at Union Street was once the location of the home of John Lovell, who gave refuge to Davis at the end of the Civil War in 1867.

Three freelance contributors quit The Rebel this week. Brian Lilley's resignation from Ezra Levant’s firm was less than cordial—and he has deleted his diplomatic departure statement. Barbara Kay and John Robson have now followed Lilley out the door, while other pundits pen premature obituaries for this unregulated producer of free content. It seems Candice Malcolm is sticking around, though she just published a Facebook post that's explicity critical of Rebel sympathies for the idea of “white genocide.”

Margaret Wente doesn’t sound like she wants to learn how to code. “Coding can be a lot of fun,” proclaims the Globe and Mail columnist. “But does the future of our children and our nation depend on it? Give me a break.” In the wake of the Google manifesto firestorm, this rant earned Wente a new dimension of backlash, in part because of her belief that coding is just a fancy way of telling a computer what to do. “It’s irrelevant for the most of us,” she writes. “There are a million apps for that.”

Deadmau5 spent $15,350 for some 1998-style Szechuan dipping sauce made for McNuggets. Mouse-headed Niagara Falls DJ Joel Zimmerman might've never figured out how to have hit records like Drake, but his social media stunts can still make headlines, including some recent photos of his pyrotechnic wedding. Cash gifts no doubt helped offset the eBay bill for one of four Mulan-branded bottles of Szechuan McNugget sauce, a throwback delicacy that McDonald’s reproduced for a contest tied to the cartoon Rick and Morty.

Cost of higher minimum wage is not exactly as advertised. The Ontario Chamber of Commerce got some ink for claiming a $15 minimum wage would cost the average household $1,300 a year—but they retracted that statistic after it was disputed. Regardless, grocer Metro is determined to beat back the wage hike with automation. Meanwhile, those laid off without severance from Sears Canada have won a $500,000 hardship fund, which works out to $172 per laid-off employee.

Word of the moment


President's Choice is getting out of the daily banking business, and CIBC will give it this new name.

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