The luxury housing markets in Toronto and Vancouver are undergoing a major slowdown, with sales plummeting from year-ago levels and once-rapidly-rising prices now under pressure, according to new reports released this week.

And a recovery within the next year looks unlikely.

Sales of luxury homes in the Greater Toronto Area fell by nearly 68 per cent in the first quarter of this year, compared to the same period a year earlier, realtor Royal LePage reported on Thursday.

Watch: The best places in Canada to buy real estate, according to MoneySense

In Vancouver, sales were down 38.2 per cent from a year earlier, the report said.

The luxury condo market fared only slightly better, with sales down 28.2 per cent in Toronto and 26.5 per cent in Vancouver.

Royal LePage defines “luxury” housing as any home that costs more than three times the median house price in a given city. For Toronto, the threshold is $3.046 million, and in Greater Vancouver, it’s $4.63 million.

“Overall, sales activity declined in Greater Vancouver and the GTA luxury real estate market as both sellers and buyers adjusted to federal and provincial measures affecting both domestic and foreign buyers,” the report said.

The new mortgage rules introduced by Canada’s federal banking regulator at the start of the year “created market turmoil as buyers moved to the sidelines in order to gauge the impact on luxury home prices,” it added.

Those falling sales are putting downward pressure on luxury house prices, which fell 0.2 per cent from a year earlier in Toronto, though condo prices still rose 10.4 per cent.

Luxury house prices still managed to eke out a 5.2-per-cent gain, year on year, in Greater Vancouver.

“The price appreciation that we are witnessing in Greater Vancouver’s luxury market this spring is largely a result of momentum being carried over from 2017,” Royal LePage President Phil Soper stated in the report.

But Soper doesn’t see that continuing. Royal LePage forecasts luxury house prices in Greater Vancouver will fall by three per cent over the next year. In Toronto, it sees prices flat for the coming year.

“Contrary to popular belief, wealthy homebuyers are price sensitive too,” Soper said. “They didn’t reach the point in their lives where they have the capacity to acquire high-value real estate without being financially astute.”

Plunging in the global rankings

With their markets in “turmoil,” as Royal LePage put it, the days of Toronto and Vancouver riding high in the rankings of luxury real estate appear to be definitively over.

In the past year, both cities have steadily plunged in the Knight Frank Prime Global Cities Index, which measures the state of the top five per cent of housing markets in more than 40 major cities around the world.

Vancouver is in 31st place in the rankings for the first quarter of the year, down from 10th in the first quarter of 2017. Toronto is in 18th place, down from third. It’s a clear sign that, relative to other luxury housing markets, Toronto and Vancouver are losing steam.

LONDON (Reuters) – A Cambridge Analytica whistleblower said on Tuesday that Canadian company AggregateIQ worked on software called Ripon which was used to identify Republican voters ahead of the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

AggregateIQ did not immediately respond to request for comment on the remarks by Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower formerly of British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

Wylie has previously disclosed how users’ data from Facebook was used by Cambridge Analytica to help elect U.S. President Donald Trump.

Ripon, the town in which the Republican Party was founded in 1854, was the name given to a tool that let a campaign manage its voter database, target specific voters, conduct canvassing, manage fundraising and carry out surveys.

“There’s now tangible proof in the public domain that AIQ actually built Ripon, which is the software that utilised the algorithms from the Facebook data,” Wylie told the British Parliament’s Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

AggregateIQ told Reuters on March 24 that it had never been and is not a part of Cambridge Analytica nor ever entered into a contract with Cambridge Analytica.

It said it works in full compliance within all legal and regulatory requirements and had never knowingly been involved in any illegal activity.

Cambridge Analytica said on Tuesday that it had not shared any of the Facebook profile data procured by a Cambridge academic with AggregateIQ. It said it had not had any communication with AggregateIQ since December 2015.

(Reporting by Alistair Smout, Andy Bruce and Eric Auchard, editing by Guy Faulconbridge)

TORONTO — Tim Hortons will pilot all-day breakfast in a dozen Ontario locations and look to introduce a kids menu, delivery and loyalty program, in a bid to regain the trust of franchisees and customers.

The fast-food giant’s president Alex Macedo told The Canadian Press that the all-day breakfast experiment will begin at a handful of Hamilton and Brampton locations later this summer and include all of the menu items typically available at the store in the morning. If it is successful, he said the company would consider rolling it out further.

“The demand is loud and clear,” he said. “Any time we bring up the idea of breakfast at any time, the response is very favourable and very strong.”

‘Things are looking much better’

Macedo’s announcement came as the company has publicly been struggling to fix its strained relationship with some franchisees, who have been sparring with the company in recent months over everything from cost-cutting measures made in the wake of Ontario’s minimum wage hikes to delays in supply deliveries to a $700-million renovation plan that they say will cost store owners $450,000 per restaurant.

Last month, Macedo admitted that “we could have done a few things better” and started touring the country to meet with franchises and promise them that he would fix the relationship.

This week, he said the visits had concluded and added that “it can take some time to get exactly where we want to be, but right now, I think things are looking much better than they were at the beginning of the year.”

Watch: Restaurant Brands International announces a plan to improve Tim Hortons. Story continues below.

His attempt at easing the tensions have coincided with an intensification of Canada’s breakfast wars. In early May, McDonald’s, one of Tim Hortons’ biggest rivals, announced it had begun serving bagels across the country and in recent years. A&W, Taco Bell and Burger King have all upped the ante with breakfast offerings to compete with Tim Hortons, Starbucks and Country Style.

Macedo said Tim Hortons’ all-day breakfast launch wasn’t triggered by the McDonald’s bagel announcement, adding that “something as big as this would never be a reaction to anything a competitor would do.”

The company, he said, had done a market test on all-day breakfast in 2013 and found it was “generally successful,” but ultimately chose not to roll it out, in part because “the guests weren’t asking for it as much as they are now.”

Since then, he said consumer interest in breakfast has grown, as evidenced by research companies NPD Group and Nielsen calling it the fastest-growing part of the day for restaurants since 2012.

Looking at kids menu, kiosks, loyalty programs, delivery

In addition to all-day breakfast, he revealed that the company would also be looking to a kids menu, new packaging, kiosks, loyalty programs and delivery to entice customers and regain franchisee confidence, but he said he wasn’t prepared to share more details on any of those plans yet.

“I don’t think there is one answer to driving brand love,” Macedo said. “My only concern is to work with franchisees all over the country. … I think they are very willing to work with us to get the brand where we want it to be.”

Among those franchisees is Aron Burch, who will offer all-day breakfast at five of his seven locations. He said he was eager to get on board with the pilot because he owns a handful of locations near McMaster University in Hamilton and finds most of his customers are students who like to sleep in, often making it to his restaurants just as breakfast is winding down for the day.

He said the months of tension between Tim Hortons and the franchisees, and the rise in the cost of living, had caused his stores to see “a little bit” of a decline in transactions in same-store sales, but he was confident that all-day breakfast would help them lure more customers.

“Being able to offer all-day breakfast definitely is going to help us go to the customer who might have gone somewhere else or have it at home because of the convenience,” he said. “The busier the stores are, the better the day goes.”

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Single-use plastics have become a scourge on the planet, and the amount of plastic in the ocean could outweigh the amount of fish by 2050, the federal government says.

Canadians generate about 3.25 million tonnes of plastic waste, or about 140,000 garbage trucks’ worth, each year, according to Greenpeace Canada.

The federal government has yet to introduce any policies at the national level aimed at curbing plastics waste, though Canada was one of five nations that agreed to a G7 plastics charter on Sunday.

But several businesses and lower levels of government in Canada have taken on the task of tackling the polymer beast. Here are a few of them:

A&W Canada

Canada’s second largest burger chain announced Friday it would be eliminating all plastic straws by the end of 2018.

In order to keep 82 million plastic straws out of landfills every year, customers will be given the option of paper straws, which are 100% biodegradable and will last 2-3 hours in a drink, the company said in a release.

Tyler Pronyk, A&W Canada’s director of packaging, said “packaging innovations that reduce waste” is key to the company’s environmental strategy.

“By using compostable packaging, real mugs, plates and cutlery, we are diverting millions of single-use packaging from landfills every year,” Pronyk said in a release.

IKEA Canada

Swedish home furniture giant Ikea has promised to phase out all single-use plastics by 2020.

It will stop using products such as plastic straws, plates, cups, freezer and garbage bags, and will phase out disposable plastic from its restaurants.

The changes are expected to take effect in 2019 in 29 countries, including Canada. But Ikea Canada sustainability head Brendan Seale told CTV News the company is going to make them happen “as soon as possible.”

Environment minister Catherine McKenna tweeted her support for the move.

P.E.I.

A bill to prohibit retailers from giving out single-use plastic bags passed its third reading in P.E.I.’s provincial government on Friday, and could make the island province the first one to ban them.

Starting July 1, retailers will have to charge customers 15 cents for a plastic bag. That fee would go up to 25 cents in July 2019. In January 2020, businesses will face fines for giving away single-use sacks.

The Plastic Bag Reduction Act is meant to encourage retailers to sell paper or cloth reusable bags, which would cost no less than 15 cents or a dollar each, respectively.

Montreal

Montreal’s ban on giving away plastic bags took effect this year, and penalties for businesses that violate it began earlier this month.

The ban includes oxo-degradable, oxo-fragmentable, oxo-biodegradable and biodegradable bags. The only exception is small bags used for hygienic reasons, like produce bags in grocery stores.

Regional Municipality Of Wood Buffalo

In Alberta, the regional municipality of Wood Buffalo adopted a bylaw in 2010 that prohibited most retailers from using single-use plastic shopping bags. Thin plastic bags used for dry cleaning, produce, or otherwise hygienic purposes are allowed, and restaurant businesses are allowed to use single-use bags.

Victoria

British Columbia’s capital has already passed a bylaw banning plastic bags (to take effect July 1), but is eyeing a ban on other single-use items like plastic-foam cups.

Victoria’s plastic-bag ban is similar to the one P.E.I. has introduced, which will phase out plastic bags with fees, and will eventually prohibit retailers from providing them for free. Businesses could also face fines if they provide one without asking.

Mayor Lisa Helps said the bag ban is part of an overall zero-waste strategy, according to the Victoria Times-Colonist.

“Really, what the aim is overall is to create strategies and programs to minimize all single-use materials.. so that really we do get to a zero-waste circular economy where there is no garbage,” Helps said.

Vancouver

In a bid to become zero-waste by 2040, Vancouver became the first major Canadian city to ban plastic straws in May.

The city council motion also bans the distribution of foam cups and takeout containers, and will come into effect on June 1, 2019.

Vancouver is also putting restrictions on other disposable cups and paper and plastic shopping bags in order to limit their use. If the city doesn’t hit its target waste reduction rate by 2021, it will fully ban the distribution of single-use bags and cups.

Other cities

In Edmonton, city councillors have agreed to look at what other municipalities are doing to reduce single-use plastics.

Municipal officials in Toronto are awaiting the results of a report on how best to curb single-use items like plastic cups, takeout containers, and straws before moving forward.

With files from The Canadian Press

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