Here are five things you need to know this morning:

A new market for Canadian oil – in Hollywood? The Trans Mountain Pipeline Expansion is set to open any day now, and while the business case for the massive project has always been the potential to move landlocked Canadian crude to terminals in B.C. for export to global markets such as Asia, an interesting new customer base is opening up in the short term. Three oil tankers carrying almost 2 million barrels of Canadian crude have sailed from Vancouver to Los Angeles this month. That’s the biggest surge in four years, and at least two of the shipments were heavy crude bound for Marathon Petroleum Corp.’s Los Angeles refinery, the largest on the West Coast. While a lot of the expanded capacity is expected to be bound for fuel-hungry markets in Asia, refineries like Marathon’s on the West Coast may become a preferred customer due to proximity to Vancouver and the fact that the tankers coming in and out of the city are Aframax-sized, comparatively smaller vessels which are less likely to want to embark on long and expensive voyages to Asia if there is a closer customer. Canadian crude may displace oil from Iraq, Saudi Arabia or Latin America on the West Coast, Erik Broekhuizen, tanker researcher for Poten & Partners, was quoted by Bloomberg as saying. “The short shipping distance from Vancouver gives the TMX crude competitive transportation costs,” he said. The Canadian invasion of Hollywood is well documented in the entertainment world, so it’s interesting to think it might start happening in the energy sector, too.

Can Q1 strength continue? Today marks the end of the first quarter, one that has seen North American stock markets hit record high after record high. One might imagine that such a strong start to the year augurs well for the rest of the year, but if history is any guide, that is not always the case. BNN Bloomberg’s Jon Erlichman crunched the numbers on a recent instalment of The List and tabulated that of the 15 best first quarters on the S&P500 since World War II, the average Q1 return was 12.5 per cent. In those years, the second quarter return averaged just 3.7 per cent, and in four of those years, the second quarter was actually negative. As with most things market related, the longer the time frame, the better things tend to look, and in 14 out of those 15 years, the market ended up in positive territory by the end of the year, even when it declined earlier. The lone exception to that trend was the infamous year of 1987 when a strong start was met with a miserable finish known as Black Monday in October.

SBF to be sentenced today: Sam Bankman-Fried, the wunderkind behind defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is due to be sentenced in a New York courtroom today for his role in the collapse of the company. His rise and fall has been one of the most fascinating stories in the business world in recent years, as the saga of FTX has had many twists and turns along the way. Convicted of fraud mostly on the testimony of other executives at the company, prosecutors are seeking as much as 50 years in prison for Bankman-Fried. His lawyers say a sentence of about one tenth of that would be more appropriate. We’ll find out this morning which argument won out with the judge.

B.C. moves to seize assets from Quadriga cofounder: In other crypto news, officials in British Columbia are trying to force the surviving cofounder of QuadrigaCX to explain how he came by $250,000 in cash, 45 gold bars, a diamond-studded Rolex and other baubles via legitimate means, or he’ll lose them. The Director of Civil Forfeiture in British Columbia on Wednesday sought a court order to compel Michael Patryn to explain how assets found in a safety deposit box in his name in Vancouver in 2021 were acquired. Quadriga founder Gerald Cotton died on his honeymoon in India in 2018, just as the crypto exchange was starting to collapse. Only a fraction of the hundreds of millions of dollars of customer funds have ever been recovered. An official probe into the collapse concluded that cofounder Patryn ceased to be associated with QuadrigaCX long before the collapse, but investigators have uncovered communications between Cotten and Patryn from 2014 and 2015, in which they appear to discuss stealing customer funds and staging Patryn’s public exit from the exchange while remaining involved privately. Patryn, who was once known as Omar Dhanani, changed his name twice following past criminal charges, Bloomberg reported previously.

4 Ontario schoolboards suing Big Tech: There’s a fascinating lawsuit underway in Canada as four of the biggest school boards in Ontario are suing the parent companies of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, alleging the social media platforms are disrupting student learning. The lawsuits claim the platforms are negligently designed for compulsive use and have rewired the way children think, behave and learn, leaving teachers and schools to manage the fallout. They claim students are experiencing an attention, learning, and mental health crisis because of prolific and compulsive use of social media products and they are seeking in excess of $4 billion in damages in Ontario Superior Court. The boards are the Toronto District School Board, the Peel District School Board, the Toronto Catholic District School Board and the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board, but it’s hard to imagine the case won’t be closely watched by every single school board grappling with these issues.