Business Report: Air Canada scraps unpopular fee

Let’s turn to business news. Air Canada is walking back at controversial fee. Which ones that? Yeah, so it turns out you can fight City Hall. Air Canada decided to implement a new fee for seat selection and it was not received well online. So for years, Air Canada customers with economy fares have been able to change the seat automatically assigned to them at check-in free of charge. But travel agents received notice less than two weeks ago. The lower tier passengers who had not purchased a seat in advance would have to pay a fee if they wanted to change their automatically designated. Spot. Starting April 24th and the fee could be up to $50. Air Canada says, at least for the moment, it suspended the policy, but it doesn’t plan to cancel it altogether. It will announce the next step, Cynthia, at the appropriate time. So more to come on this, more to come. Indeed. All right, economic growth appears to be stalling and that could have major implications when it comes to interest rates, right? So it’s sort of a good news, bad news story. It looks like our economy did stall towards the end of the first quarter, but. That could increase the likelihood of an interest rate cut in June, maybe in July. It sounds like it’s really going to hang on the inflation data that will be out on May the 21st. But as of today, Cynthia, a better than 50% chance that we see that cut in June. Annualized growth of 2 1/2% in Canada in the first quarter, slightly below the Bank of Canada’s expectation of 2.8%, so much slower growth. Could translate into interest rate cuts soon. I was going to say next month, but we’re not quite in May yet so almost. It’s the last day of April and April wasn’t necessarily a great month for investors. Chris. No was actually the worst month for U.S. markets so far this year. The Dow was the biggest loser in North America. It was down by about 5%. An awful sell off today to cap off this awful month. The Dow dropped by more than 500 points data out of the US today actually showing the opposite of what we’re seeing in Canada. Likely higher interest rates for longer. The next interest rate announcement in the US is tomorrow. No change expected. The TSX today down by almost 300 points. It dropped by about 2% this month. Now shares in the parent company of Tim horton’s, Burger King and Popeyes jumped by about 3% after that chain saw its profits rise 18% in its latest quarter. So one of just a few bright spots on Bay St. today.