Monday, October 19, 2026
Cenovus Energy agreed on 5 October to buy Athabasca Oil for C$12.00 a share in cash and Cenovus stock, an implied enterprise value of C$5.7 billion. Athabasca puts the equity value at about C$5.8 billion and the premium at 14 per cent to its 20-day average price. Athabasca shareholders vote in late November, and the deal is not expected to close until December.
Statistics Canada reported on Friday that employment fell by 68,000 in September, the second straight monthly decline, and the unemployment rate rose to 6.5 per cent. Economists had expected a gain of about 9,200. The public sector accounted for more than the whole drop.
Emera and Canadian Utilities agreed on Tuesday to combine in an all-share deal that the companies say is the largest merger ever between two Canadian companies, with a combined enterprise value of about C$72 billion. ATCO, the family-controlled group that has held Canadian Utilities since 1980, will give up that control and spin its housing, defence and ports businesses into a new company.
Unifor will ask more than 9,000 Stellantis workers in Canada to authorise a strike on 17 and 18 October. The union says the company has made the wage and benefit pattern already agreed at Ford and General Motors conditional on the union accepting the closure and sale of the idled Brampton assembly plant to Roshel, an armoured vehicle maker.
Shell and its four partners have taken the final investment decision on LNG Canada's second phase, which will double the Kitimat plant from 14 to 28 million tonnes a year. Neither the joint venture's release nor Shell's gives a capital cost, and Shell says commercial operation will begin in the early 2030s.
In her State of the European Union address in Strasbourg on Wednesday, Ursula von der Leyen invited Canada to become the EU's first associate member. The treaties make full membership impossible, because Canada is not a European state. What she is offering is a new category, to be negotiated, with a summit in Montreal next month.