National Business

NEW YORK (AP) — Paramount will become the new home to Ultimate Fighting Championship events across the U.S. next year, through a seven-year agreement announced with TKO Group on Monday.

EDMONTON — ATB Financial has signed a deal to acquire Cormark Securities Inc., an independent investment bank with offices in Toronto and Calgary. Financial terms of the deal were not immediately available.

TORONTO — Software company Open Text Corp. has named veteran company executive James McGourlay as interim chief executive, effective immediately.

OTTAWA — Statistics Canada says the number of Canadian-resident return trips from the U.S. by automobile in July dropped 36.9 per cent compared with a year ago, the seventh consecutive month of year-over-year declines.

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — Ford Motor Co. will invest nearly $2 billion retooling a Kentucky factory to produce electric vehicles that it says will be more affordable, more profitable to build, and will outcompete rival models.

MONTREAL — Bell Canada is partnering with Perplexity, an AI-powered conversational search engine, to give its customers a year of free artificial intelligence services.

TORONTO — The Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan Board says it earned a six-month net return of 2.1 per cent for the first half of 2025. The fund's 12-month net return was 7.1 per cent. The pension fund manager says net assets totalled $269.

Jeremy Guenette was sitting in an Idaho parking lot waiting for his kids to finish back-to-school shopping two years ago, when he noticed business was booming at a nearby truck mixing colas, cream and fruity flavours.

TORONTO — Ontario's final tally for housing starts in 2024 is well off what's needed to achieve Premier Doug Ford's goal of getting 1.5 million homes built, even with various new categories the government is adding such as university dorms.

VICTORIA — BC Wildfire Service said an out-of-control wildfire burning on Vancouver Island near Cameron Lake could generate smoke for the "coming weeks, and potentially the coming months.