Shares of the company, which had jumped more than 40 per cent on the TSX since being listed in December, rose another 7.7 per cent on Tuesday to $51.96. They gained 7.1 per cent at $41.49 in New York.

U.S. chain Burger King bought Tim Hortons for $12.64 billion in August, creating the world’s third-largest fast-food restaurant group. The two restaurant chains are being managed as distinct and separate brands under the parent company.

“Whenever you do a transaction like that, there’s going to be a lot of one-time fees,” Restaurant Brands chief financial officer Josh Kobza said in an interview.

“The underlying businesses are doing really well and that gives us a lot of confidence about the results that are going to come over the next few years.”

Comparable store sales grew 4.1 per cent at Tim Hortons and three per cent at Burger King in the quarter, Oakville, Ont.-based Restaurant Brands said. On a constant currency basis, system-wide sales grew 7.4 per cent at Tim Hortons and 7.7 per cent at Burger King.

Investors and industry experts have said Tim Hortons’ coffee products can help Burger King chip away at McDonald’s Corp.’s dominance in the quick-serve breakfast market, while Burger King can help Tim Hortons expand in the U.S. and abroad.

Last month, the company cut some 350 corporate jobs at Tim Hortons as part of the post-merger reorganization.

“We executed our organizational restructuring up front, which really focused on back office, corporate areas where we said we’d see overlap in the business,” CEO Daniel Schwartz told Reuters. “We have no plans to have any more job cuts.”

Executives said they would focus on deleveraging and reinvesting in the business. Tim Hortons’ U.S and international growth would be a top priority, but something that would take time, they added.

Restaurant Brands, which has more than 19,000 restaurants in 100 countries, posted a net loss attributable to shareholders of $514.2 million ($2.52 per share) in the fourth quarter ended Dec. 31, in its first quarterly results after the merger.

The company reported total revenue of $416.3 million in the quarter.

— Solarina Ho is a Reuters correspondent covering Canadian retail markets from Toronto. Additional reporting for Reuters by Sneha Banerjee in Bangalore.

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Shares of Target, which was granted creditor protection for its money-losing Canadian subsidiary, rose three per cent after the news.

The company is shutting all of its 133 Canadian stores and said it expects to report about $5.4 billion in pretax losses for its fourth quarter, which finishes at the end of January. Losses are mostly due to the writedown of the Canadian investment, along with exit costs and operating losses.

Minneapolis-based Target, the No. 2 discount chain in the U.S., has struggled in Canada since its 2013 launch. It faced huge supply chain problems that left stores poorly stocked. This disappointed shoppers who had eagerly anticipated the retailer’s arrival in a market where the discount space had long been dominated by Wal-Mart Stores Inc.

Store checks by Reuters in Vancouver, Toronto and Ottawa before and after Christmas showed improvements in product selection, but holiday traffic still appeared moderate.

The company said in November it would review the future of the Canadian business after the holiday season.

“The analysis was rigorous. Unfortunately, we were unable to find a realistic scenario that got Target Canada to profitability until at least 2021,” CEO Brian Cornell said on Target’s online magazine.

“The losses were just too great.”

Some analysts had called for a complete exit from Canada so Target could focus on U.S. operations. But the move was still a surprise as the most likely scenario was that Target would try to fix the unit by closing only the poorest-performing stores, said Craig Johnson, head of Customer Growth Partners.

“Anything you could have gotten wrong in the playbook, they got wrong,” said Antony Karabus, CEO of retail consultant firm, HRC Advisory.

He said Cornell displayed strong leadership and that trying to fix a broken business would have taken years, distracting Target from beefing up its online business and recapturing its “cheap chic” magic.

“Entirely their fault”

The failed international expansion bodes poorly for Target’s long-term growth prospects, said Jim Danahy, director of the Centre for Retail Leadership at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto.

“There isn’t a bigger implosion and it needs to be really understood (that) it’s entirely their fault,” Danahy said.

Target has acknowledged it took on too much too fast in Canada and the disastrous launch spurred the exit of top executives last year.

Target does much of its own distribution in the U.S., but hired Eleven Points Logistics, a subsidiary of Pittsburgh-based Genco, to run its Canadian warehouses.

The company had also reached a long-term wholesale agreement with Empire Co. Ltd.’s Sobeys to supply it with groceries in Canada. Empire and Genco could not immediately be reached for comment.

Former Target and Eleven Points employees had told Reuters about a myriad of problems at the warehouses, stores, and headquarters, especially in the first year. They said a combination of new technology and systems, inexperienced hires and poor training all contributed to supply chain woes.

Barcodes on many items did not match what was in the computer system, they said, causing massive warehouse logjams, while store backrooms were stacked from “floor to rafters”, making it difficult to locate products to put on shelves.

Target said stores would remain open during liquidation, and that with court approval it would pay all of its Canadian employees a minimum of 16 weeks of compensation.

— Solarina Ho is a Reuters correspondent covering the retail sector from Toronto. Additional reporting for Reuters by Susan Taylor, Euan Rocha, Allison Martell, Nathan Layne in Chicago, Julie Gordon in Vancouver and Leah Schnurr in Ottawa.

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“It will take more than the summer, continue into fall, into next year,” Claude Mongeau, CEO of the country’s biggest railway, told Reuters.

Delays in moving the 76 million-tonne crop, nearly 50 per cent higher than average and 20 million tonnes higher than the previous record, have angered farmers and prompted Canada’s Conservative government to order railroads to dramatically ramp up shipments or face penalties. [Related story]

That move, along with a break in the extreme winter chill, has helped CN spot an average 4,320 grain hopper cars per week over the last two weeks, up from an average 2,964 cars per week in February, the company said earlier this week. Spotting means to place a rail car in position for loading or unloading. [Related story]

CN has already hired more crews and added locomotives and 1,000 additional hopper cars since last fall to cope with the surge in volume, Mongeau said, adding that the assets are in place for CN to outperform its record pace last fall of more than 5,000 cars per week.

A deep freeze between December and February, which saw one of the worst Decembers in Winnipeg since 1893 and the worst January in Saskatoon since 1955, drastically hampered CN, said Mongeau.

The combined government target for CN and its rival, Canadian Pacific Railway (CP), is 11,000 cars a week. Grain companies have said they would like to see 13,000 rail cars per week.

“To go to 11,000 is a tall order. And it’s not just a tall order for the railroads,” said Mongeau, noting that rate would surpass the rail industry’s peak in the last decade of 9,800 cars a week.

“We will find out as we ramp up here, that it’s also a tall order to align all of the participants in the supply chain.”

New legislation

Transport Minister Lisa Raitt acknowledged on Tuesday that the weekly shipping targets the government has set represented historical highs for rail companies and said grain companies, elevators and shippers must co-ordinate in getting the country’s grain to markets around the world.

Ottawa plans to draft legislation to make sure railroads deliver grain shipments in a timely way, a move Mongeau opposes.

“Threatening to add legislation… would be a very grave mistake for the government to make,” he said.

“Penalties don’t move traffic… Finger-pointing and exaggeration and blaming of railroads is not constructive. You don’t do regulation in the heat of moment.”

The provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan are also asking the government to pull together legislation so that competing rail companies can use each other’s tracks, a practice called running rights.

Mongeau said being forced to share tracks would be “very damaging to the rail industry” because it would complicate logistics and add to problems in an already challenging environment.

The grain transportation legislation will be introduced when Parliament resumes, according to Jeff English, a spokesman for Agriculture Minister Gerry Ritz. The next session begins on Monday.

Crude not crowding out grain

The grain bottleneck has also spurred charges that rail operators are supplanting grain shipments with more lucrative oil. Crude via rail has seen an unprecedented surge in North America as production exceeds pipeline capacity.

“The notion that crude by rail is crowding out the movement of other commodities like grain is not the truth,” said Mongeau, noting that crude made up only 1.4 per cent of CN’s entire volume last year.

— Solarina Ho is a Reuters correspondent covering the Canadian transportation and retail sectors from Toronto. Additional reporting for Reuters by Rod Nickel in Winnipeg.

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