1.04: Natural gas prices in western Canada and the northwestern US are at historic lows as local producers continue to ramp up production. At the latest reading, the benchmark cost for a million British thermal units of gas was $1.04. British Columbia producers have been expanding output ahead of the opening of a liquefied natural gas export facility on the B.C. coast next year.
5 million: A Canadian solar panel firm has launched a lawsuit against border authorities over their wrongful detainment of $5 million worth of panels from China suspected of having been made with forced labor. In 2020, Canada adopted rules to stop the import of products made with slave labor, above all in China’s Xinjiang province, where Beijing operates forced labor camps. Since then, about 50 shipments have been intercepted — only one was proven to violate the rules.
6: As the Thanksgiving holiday approaches in the US, Americans can be grateful for this: prices for turkey, the centerpiece of the holiday spread, are down 6% this year, in part because of ebbing demand for the bird. Still, Turkey prices are 19% higher than they were before the pandemic.
10,000: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom president-elect Donald Trump tapped to lead the US Health and Human Services Department, is reportedly devising a plan to remove the American Medical Association from its decades-old role in setting prices for the more than 10,000 medical services reimbursed by Medicare, the US insurance scheme for the elderly. The AMA has long argued that doctors aren’t compensated fairly, but critics decry the fees that the AMA itself takes for setting the price codes.
