The Daily Chase: Collision conference underway, and a major deal in Canadian tech

Here are five things you need to know this morning.

Collision conference kicks off in Toronto: One of the main technology conferences of the year is underway in Toronto right now, with Collision drawing a technology-minded audience from around the world. It’s hard to pick a headliner, but artificial intelligence pioneer Geoffrey Hinton is one of them. The former Google exec is among the loudest critics of the nascent technology. Hinton sat down with BNN Bloomberg’s Jon Erlichman ahead of his appearance at Collision this week, so you can check out their thought-provoking conversation here. BNN will be broadcasting live from the conference today, so expect to hear from a wide variety of voices, including ex-NBA star and budding venture capitalist Metta World Peace. We’ll also hear from the founder and CEO of self-driving startup Waabi, which this week announced a major funding round and plans to expand its self-driving truck technology to real-world testing.

WestJet cancels 40 flights in anticipation of maintenance engineer job action: Calgary-based airline WestJet is proactively cancelling several dozen flights across its network, impacting as many as 6,500 passengers today and tomorrow. The airline is taking the action as talks between it and the union representing its maintenance engineers and other tech ops seem to have broken down, and the union will soon be in a strike position. The airline is calling on the Canadian Industrial Relations Board to intervene and find a solution. In order to minimize long term disruption and potentially stranding aircraft, the airline says in the next 48 hours it “will work to park aircraft, in a measured, phased and safe approach.”

Data centre company eStruxture gets $1.8B investment from alternative asset manager: There’s an interesting deal happening in Canada’s technology space today as data centre company eStruxture has struck a deal to sell a controlling interest in its company to Toronto-based alternative asset manager Fengate. With a price tag of $1.8 billion, the deal is the largest single transaction ever to be made in Canada’s data centre industry. We’ll speak to the CEO of the company this morning about what the deal means for the company and the growing industry.