Business Brief: Checking our bank balance

Good morning. I’m Stefanie Marotta, the banking and financial regulation Reporter at The Globe. Earlier this month, a wild event happened on my beat. The President of the United States called out Canada’s banking sector for being a clique. Mean Girls “you can’t sit with us” level cliquey.

I dug into what Donald Trump’s comments could mean for looming trade negotiations with Canada, and how that could trigger a shakeup in the country’s banking system. More on that, but first:

In the news

The Business Development Bank of Canada is recapitalizing its in-house growth equity investment program, citing the need to help entrepreneurs access capital.

Canadian institutional investors increased their support for climate-related shareholder proposals in 2024, with a dozen supporting every measure put to them in shareholder proxy voting.

Good for creditors, bad for debtors: Not enough Canadians are filing for bankruptcy, new research argues.

On our radar

• We’re tracking the fallout of a plane crash yesterday in Toronto. Delta Air Lines flight 4819 was on its way from Minneapolis when it crashed at Pearson International airport, injuring some passengers on board.
• Statistics Canada reports January’s Consumer Price Index. The federal government’s tax holiday might distort the data until March, RBC says.

In focus

Back to The Street

The President said that U.S. banks are not allowed to operate in Canada. “Can you believe that?” he told reporters, referring to his phone call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

You definitely should not believe it. His comment was incorrect.

U.S. banks can and do have businesses in this country, albeit on a much smaller scale than their Canadian counterparts. But Trump was inadvertently poking at a broader issue about the difficulties for foreign banks to enter and compete in Canada’s insulated banking market. That results in fewer choices for Canadians.

Catching up

I started my career as a bank teller in the final months of the great financial crisis. That launched an eight-year era working at one of Canada’s biggest banks before I pivoted into financial journalism.

In more than 15 years, I have never seen Canada’s typically “sleepy” banking industry produce the avalanche of news that it has in the past few years. But the U.S. President waging a war against Canada’s banking market was not on my 2025 bingo card.

He’s been dropping hints for weeks. Then on Feb. 3, he brought it up during a critical conversation with Mr. Trudeau about potential tariffs that could launch a trade war and cripple the economies of both countries. That’s a big deal.

Trudeau also mentioned this during an economic summit with 200 business leaders, trade experts and union executives in Toronto earlier this month. In a scoop from myself and senior parliamentary reporter Steven Chase, sources told us that Trump’s…