Ottawa business targeted by ‘friendly fraud'
An Ottawa business was targeted by a 'friendly fraud,' when customers knowingly or mistakenly refute legitimate purchases with their credit card company. CTV's Katelyn Wilson reports.
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Former Olympian from Quebec City making affordable bikes for children
Former Olympian Louis Garneau has switched gears and is launching a company to make bicycles for children. (Louis Garneau) He's a familiar name in cycling and after selling his original company, former Quebec Olympian Louis Garneau is back in the saddle with a new business geared towards making cycling accessible for kids. Garneau, 66, said he was supposed to be retired, but his passion for cycling just wouldn't slow down. 'I decided to do a bicycle for children,' said the president of LG Art Factory. Former Olympian Louis Garneau with children Former Olympian Louis Garneau has switched gears and is launching a company to make bicycles for children. (Louis Garneau) His new brand is called Louis Louis, which makes affordable bikes for kids from three to 12. At only a few hundred dollars, they're designed for learning and inspired by his grandchildren. 'It's a big venture. I have a lot of motivation because I'm, a grandfather of three little children,' said Garneau. After facing some financial setbacks that led him to sell his original company, Garneau said he's happy to be back in business. While he's still selling some higher-end bikes for adults, his real goal is to get more children into the sport. 'We need this culture, and we need to push it up, and it's it's correct for all the children,' he said. Each bike comes with an Olympic-style medal to give young riders a boost of confidence and something to aspire to. 'So maybe you can be an Olympian, or you can be a good, a good cyclist or a good traveller, but it's something special,' he said. Garneau said he wants the youth to put down their phones and pick up a helmet, something he did with his father when he was just three years old. 'One day I was free on my bike and I said, 'Oh, this is wow! This is magic on two wheels,' he said. He expects his company to be available to ship orders in November.
CTV News
an hour ago
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Montreal Jewish museum reopens century-old sewing shop as a pop-up exhibit
H. Fisher & Fils, a sewing supply shop located on St-Laurent Boulevard, in Montreal on Wednesday, June 25, 2025. The Museum of Jewish Montreal has created an exhibit with tours to explore the history of the shop, which was open from 1922-2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Christinne Muschi MONTREAL — For 100 years, H. Fisher & Fils was a fixture of Montreal's garment industry, serving up orders of buttons, bolts of cloth and sewing supplies from its storefront on St-Laurent Boulevard in the city's Plateau neighbourhood. As the area transformed and other garment stores moved away, H. Fisher & Fils remained, operated until 2022 by Esther Fisher, the widow of the original owner's son. Earlier this month, the store reopened, but this time with a transformation of its own: as a pop-up museum exhibit and heritage space paying tribute to Montreal's garment industry and its role in the city's Jewish community. The space appears largely unchanged from its working days. Fisher and her husband Mitch seem to have rarely thrown anything away, from vintage sewing machines and old cash registers on the counters to old newspaper clippings on the wall. 'There's been so much change in this neighbourhood and you can't necessarily feel that anymore, and this is a really tactile and physical way to understand what once was,' said Taryn Fleischmann, cultural programming and exhibitions co-ordinator for the Museum of Jewish Montreal, which opened the space earlier this month. 'I think it's a really accessible way to comprehend our history, and it would be like a shame to let that go.' When it opened in 1922, the store was one of many garment businesses on and around St-Laurent Boulevard -- known as the Main. They were often owned and staffed by Jewish tailors and seamstresses who had arrived from Eastern Europe. While it originally opened a few blocks away, it soon moved to the modest storefront where the exhibit now resides, with the Fisher family living in the apartment above. It was a notions supply store, meaning it didn't make garments but rather provided the supplies to customers including the Cirque du Soleil, opera productions, suit-makers and fashion schools. Guests who step into the museum are greeted by rolls of cloth running from floor to ceiling, while shelves and boxes are packed with zippers, snaps and other supplies. A screen plays a brief interview with Esther Fisher, filmed when she was in her 90s. In the clip, she described taking over the store after her husband's death, with little formal work experience outside of raising her children. Fisher, who died shortly after the store closed in 2022, is a presence throughout the space. Her handwriting and that of her husband, Mitch, is scrawled on the walls, the order sheets, the ledger that sits on the counter, and on the labels affixed to bolts of cloth. Guests who book a tour with the museum are encouraged to touch the cloth swatches, spools of thread and button and zipper samples. 'I think it's a very sensory experience as well as a learning experience,' said Austin Henderson, the museum's arts programming and communications manager. 'I think it's a great way for people to feel history, to touch it, to see it with their own eyes as opposed to behind a display case or perhaps in a more conventional museum space.' While the museum plans to eventually add more exhibit features, including stories collected from people who knew the Fisher family, Henderson says he enjoys the personal touches. His favourite object has nothing to do with sewing: it's a coffee mug stuffed with tools and utensils customers left behind. Fleischmann said the store is part of the shmata industry -- Yiddish for rag or cloth -- and which was an important source of jobs and security for Jewish immigrants in the early 20th century. 'I think that a lot of individuals who are not so tied to the community don't realize that a huge reason why Jewish immigrants came to Montreal was for the garment industry history,' she said. 'A lot of seamstresses in Eastern Europe, they had to flee, and came here and took up jobs in a similar way.' In the 19th and 20th centuries, St-Laurent Boulevard was home to successive waves of immigrants who lived, worked and set up shop in the dense, bustling neighbourhood. Over time, Jewish immigrants spread out to different parts of the city, while the garment industry moved northwest, to an area above Highway 40. Today, the street is lined with trendy restaurants, boutiques and cafés rather than sewing shops. 'This store, as it stands, is really the last fixture of that specific time,' Fleischmann said. This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 30, 2025. Morgan Lowrie, The Canadian Press
CTV News
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Canada cancelled its digital services tax. What was it and why did the U.S. hate it?
President Donald Trump, right, and Prime Minister Mark Carney participate in a session of the G7 Summit on Monday, June 16, 2025, in Kananaskis, Canada. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein) OTTAWA — Tech giants such as Amazon and Google will not have to shell out close to $2 billion as expected today, as Canada moved to cancel the controversial digital services tax on Sunday, just one day before the first payment was due. The announcement from Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne came late Sunday evening, following a phone call between Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump. That call concluded a flurry of discussion between the two countries since Trump suddenly announced on Friday afternoon that he was ending all trade talks with Canada and threatened new tariffs. But the standoff had really been building for years. Here's a brief look at what the tax was about and why Trump made such a drastic move to try and kill it. What is the digital services tax? The tax was announced in 2020, but the legislation to enact it didn't pass until last year. While it has been in effect for a year, the first payment, retroactive to 2022, was to be submitted on June 30. The government intended it to overcome what Canada saw as a tax loophole, with big tech companies operating in Canada digitally, making money off Canadian users and data, but not paying tax on it in Canada. The tax was to apply to companies that operate online marketplaces, online advertising services and social media platforms, and those that earn revenue from some sales of user data. It meant companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, Uber and Airbnb, would pay a three-per-cent levy on revenue from Canadian users. The tax was only to cover large companies, those that have worldwide annual revenues greater than 750 million euros per year and Canadian digital services revenue greater than $20 million per year. The parliamentary budget officer had estimated it would bring in $7.2 billion over five years. Because the first payment was retroactive to cover three years, the expectation was the companies collectively could be on the hook for an initial payment of around US$2 billion. Why did Canada impose it? Work has been underway for years at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development to set up a multilateral tax approach meant to replace digital service taxes imposed by individual countries. But after that work stalled, Canada went ahead with its own tax. Other countries, including France and the United Kingdom, also have digital taxes. The Liberals had long maintained Canada would go ahead on its own if the OECD deal fell through. In a 2024 release, the government said while 'Canada's priority and preference has always been a multilateral agreement,' many of Canada's allies have digital services taxes in place. 'Canada has been at a disadvantage relative to these countries which have continued collecting revenue under their pre-existing digital services taxes,' it said. Why do some oppose it? Critics of the tax took issue with Canada's refusal to wait for a global deal. They also opposed the retroactive application of the tax, which means companies will have to pay several years' worth of taxes at once. U.S. businesses and politicians argued the tax targets U.S. companies. The tax applied to all large tech companies no matter where they were based, but because so many of those companies are American, U.S. firms would have paid the bulk of the money. In a letter earlier this month, 21 members of Congress said U.S. companies will pay 90 per cent of the revenue Canada will collect from the tax, and that first payment will cost U.S. companies US$2 billion. That opposition isn't new. The Biden administration also pushed back against the tax, and the stance isn't isolated to Canada, with the U.S. also opposing digital service taxes imposed by other countries. Before the tax was rescinded on Sunday, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Canada said its 'members have been warning for years that this tax would become a flashpoint in the Canada-U.S. relationship. That moment has arrived.' The tax is 'retroactive, one-sided, and deeply damaging to cross-border trade,' Rick Tachuk said in an emailed statement, which encouraged Canada to cancel its tax. Michael Geist, Canada research chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, wrote in a blog post Saturday the current conflict shouldn't come as a surprise. 'Canada pushed ahead despite efforts at an international agreement on the issue and later dismissed the increasing friction over the issue with the U.S., which has been signalling its opposition to the DST for many years,' he said. Geist said once Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne confirmed on June 19 Canada would be going ahead with the tax, the government 'virtually guaranteed the U.S. would respond as it did.' Where does Trump come in? While opposition to the tax has been brewing south of the border for years, Trump escalated it abruptly Friday afternoon with an online post. He wrote he was 'terminating all discussions on trade with Canada' because of the tax and called it a 'direct and blatant attack on our country.' He also complained about Canada's dairy-sector protections that include high tariffs on imports of American milk and cheese. Canada and the U.S. have been in a trade war for months, triggered by Trump's imposition of tariffs. At the G7 summit in Alberta earlier this month, Carney and Trump agreed to work on reaching a deal by mid-July — work that Trump said was halted Friday. Friday afternoon, shortly after Trump's post went live, Carney told reporters he hadn't spoken to Trump that day but that 'we'll continue to conduct these complex negotiations in the best interests of Canadians.' So what happened on Sunday? A flurry of activity followed Trump's post on Friday, culminating Sunday night in the call between Trump and Carney. The decision opened the door for trade talks to restart, and Carney said in a statement, the overall results of those talks were paramount. 'In our negotiations on a new economic and security relationship between Canada and the United States, Canada's new government will always be guided by the overall contribution of any possible agreement to the best interests of Canadian workers and businesses,' he said. 'Today's announcement will support a resumption of negotiations toward the July 21, 2025, timeline set out at this month's G7 Leaders' Summit in Kananaskis.' This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 30, 2025. Anja Karadeglija, The Canadian Press
