GoBolt

If you haven't seen yet, 321 through Mexico for Apparel is over, effective immediately. Quick Q&A. Add questions below. 1. Why? Mexico wants to to save the remaining textile jobs in Mexico. 321 means for US customers Chinese goods are cheap, which is killing the Mexican textile industry. 2. This is temporary? Not really. It's set to end April 23, 2026 which is so long, every brand who uses 321 for apparel through Mexico will leave now. No one is waiting until April 2026 to see if the tariff is removed. 3. When? Now. If you have a container of apparel on the water and you bring it into Mexico, you will pay Mexican customs. 4. What about 321 via Canada? Not affected. This change only affects Mexico. Add your questions below.

This weekend The Globe and Mail published a feature story that I’ve been thinking about for well over a year, and which I’ve spent several months preparing: A look at Canadian scaleup tech and tech-enabled companies. I’ve covered the Canadian tech scene since I joined the Globe nearly 13 years ago. Things were pretty moribund then: Nortel was gone, BlackBerry was on the decline and tech made up a dismal 1.6 per cent of the S&P/TSX Composite Index. Companies were small, underfunded, prone to foreign takeovers at bargain prices and venture capitalists were asking for help from Ottawa. Shopify was still a small startup occupying an old building in the seedier part of Ottawa’s ByWard Market. But I could see that something interesting was happening. It was much easier to start a tech company than a decade earlier. New opportunities had opened up everywhere, thanks to the explosion of mobile data communications, cloud computing and artificial intelligence. I convinced my editors we should really lean into covering the sector, because I felt these trends would power an explosion of successful software companies around the world – and Canada would have its share of them. By the 2020s, it was evident that this had come to pass. I started to compile a list of companies that had reached the US$100m mark in revenues – a sign of maturity and enduring success in tech. Companies that reached that size would have options when the prolonged tech downturn ended – and many of them would go public. And that IPO wave would be a lot different than the previous two in Canada. The companies would be mature, big, profitable – and valuable. The question was, would many of them skip the Toronto Stock Exchange and just head straight to NYC? Last spring, I started to put more effort into figuring out who was missing. The list turned out to be lot bigger than I thought it would be – 71 companies, and counting. Some of them are more than 40 years old and have gotten new life in recent years. Some are rocket ships that are barely a decade old. Most have attracted private capital. And a lot of them want to build “heavy” companies, as Jeff Bezos aspired to do in Amazon’s early days. The US$100m club features some of Canada’s best-known tech brands: 1Password, Wealthsimple Questrade Financial Group and Hopper and others you'll be hearing a lot about (or already have) like GeoComply, Geotab, Clio - Cloud-Based Legal Technology and StackAdapt. Why does a story on Canada’s US$100m club matter? The narrative about our tech sector has been exceedingly negative of late. To be sure, the sector overall is in a funk. But these successes should be a bigger part of Canada’s economic story. They are a testament to the fact the sector has depth, breadth, maturity and scale it once lacked. It has come of age. Some say we have a “go for bronze” mentality. I beg to differ. What do you think?