Good morning. Philadelphia is staring down an unprecedented tourism blitz – hosting six World Cup matches, the MLB All-Star Game, and a massive 250th-anniversary celebration of the United States. Today, we look at how America’s sixth-largest city aims to parlay a US$1-billion economic windfall into long-term growth, even as it fights a federal legal battle over how much of its complex history it is allowed to tell.

Artificial intelligence: Ottawa is launching a new investment fund to support artificial intelligence startups as part of its coming AI strategy, The Globe’s Joe Castaldo reports.

• The federal government’s artificial intelligence strategy will also include up to $100-million in funding to expand an Ontario-based health data initiative to the rest of Canada, Castaldo and Sean Silcoff write.
• Ottawa is expected to unveil its AI strategy this week – more than five months later than it was originally promised.

Trade: Canada’s top trade representatives will meet their counterparts in Washington today as Ottawa seeks to jumpstart stalled talks over the review of the North American free-trade pact.

Investing: Robinhood – the U.S. online brokerage at the heart of the GameStop meme-stock frenzy – is launching its popular trading app in Canada following its acquisition of crypto company WonderFi.

Oral arguments will be heard today over the removal of exhibit panels from the open-air President’s House Site on Independence Mall. Displays that chronicled the lives of nine people enslaved by George and Martha Washington were dismantled as part of a sweeping federal enforcement of President Donald Trump’s “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” executive order.

The legal battle is coming to a head just as Philadelphia enters the biggest tourism season in its history, hosting mega-events as the City of Brotherly Love also marks its pivotal role in the foundation of America. (Am I the only person who didn’t know the name stems from the Greek philia, love, and adelphos, brother?)

I spoke with Gregg Caren, the president and CEO of the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau, about how the city plans to use a high-stakes year to prove Philadelphia has much more to offer than just history, even as the city fights a battle to preserve it.

Can you talk about the magnitude of everything happening in Philadelphia this year, tied also to the 250th anniversary of the country?

Any one of those events would be a big deal in any other major North American city. If we just had the World Cup – one match, much less six matches – that would make for an extraordinary year of 2026 for Philadelphia. When you look at those five or six major events, all in the same year for us, it’s on steroids almost in terms of what the impact is in our city.

All of that is with the backdrop of America’s semiquincentennial.

How do you treat a run of events that is unlikely to repeat at this tempo?

The immediate impact is critical for us because tourism, like Toronto and like a number of other major cities in Canada, is a key, key part of our economy.

The flip side of it is clearly what it means to the future of our city and our tourism economy. Every one of these, while they stand alone in terms of their value to the city and to the region economically, presents an opportunity for promotion and priming the pump for the future.

But it’s hard to walk around Philadelphia without seeing history everywhere. How do you balance that with telling the story of what else the city is?

We start as a history town because we’re historical. But then you layer on, we’re a sports town. You layer on, we’re a foodie town, being in the new Michelin guide as of last year. You layer on a life-science town and “eds and meds” – life science, education, academia.

I wanted to ask you about the Liberty Bell and the President’s House. I spoke with a few people in line to see what drew them there. Is the legal battle a concern from a tourism perspective?

When we look at the news stories of the day, I try to take a step back and say, this is when we lean in on who we are as a city.

When we talk about things that may be in the news about historic references or our national parks, I remind people that democracy is a swinging pendulum. Democracy has its challenges, and it’s always going to be a moving target.

It wasn’t easy to form our democracy. It wasn’t easy, and it shouldn’t be easy to live it day to day, year to year or century to century.

The missing displays may not deter tourists, but are you actively addressing the issue or trying to minimize the spotlight?

Not minimizing at all. In some ways it is business as usual because our story isn’t changing. The fact that there are political or social events surrounding us, we can’t ignore.

But given even the politics and the headlines of the day, it’s probably more of a reason to come here and more of a reason to understand that this is a point in time – not as severe perhaps as the Civil War, and not as severe as other major issues that have occurred in the last 250 years.

Whatever’s going on under the 47th presidential administration of our country, there are 47 more presidential administrations to come and more beyond that.