Maclean's magazine

Even as inflation and interest rates eased in 2024, Canadians had trouble paying their bills. Here are our top 10 stories about the cost of living crisis. https://lnkd.in/e5D9S-9Z

Here are the best interviews in Maclean's this year, featuring: Teresa Resch Nigara Shaheen Jane Philpott Diana Beresford-Kroeger Richard Ireland Tanya Talaga Daniel Drucker Rick Mercer Yannick Nézet-Séguin Naheed Nenshi https://lnkd.in/gQStF3Ff

A recent American poll conducted by experts with the Council on Contemporary Families found that as many as half of adults were estranged from a close relative. A whopping fifth of estranged respondents pointed to “political differences” as the trigger. Saunia Ahmad, a clinical psychologist and director of the Toronto Psychology Clinic, confirms that more and more, polarizing topics like vaccines, Donald Trump and pronouns are becoming fodder for family drama—even if they didn’t start it in the first place. "What’s happening politically can’t be ignored, whether that relates to health care, the economy or something else. It’s hard to be at ease with people whose views differ so much from yours on major matters, especially ones that have led to long-term or serious emotional, economic and social turmoil for you. For one person, abortion might be a huge issue; another person might be happy with how Trump’s decisions are helping them economically and see abortion as less of an issue. I will say: change does happen, even in adulthood. People stop supporting politicians they used to support. But it depends on how open they are to understanding and questioning their views. To me, what repairing an estrangement really hinges on is people’s ability to appreciate complexity—to see where someone’s coming from, without judgment. But often, these conversations come with a lot of anger and pain." https://lnkd.in/g3ZGbwdt

In the future, cyberattacks on hospitals could disable life-saving equipment. Infrastructure breaches could bring transportation and electricity systems to a halt. Hacks targeting internet-of-things devices—gadgets and gizmos connected to the web—could expose our homes to breaches. Global-scale outages are likely to remain rare, for now. But our systems are only growing more exposed, writes Kami Vaniea, an associate professor of computer engineering at the University of Waterloo. "Smaller outages and data breaches—due to both accidents and malicious attacks—will happen more often in 2025, as companies increasingly rely on third-party software and suppliers. And those disruptions will occur almost instantaneously, with no warning. The logic is simple: more complex systems contain more vulnerabilities. For example, software engineers today often rely on open-source code, which performs simple tasks like calculating time zone differences. The code is free and saves time. But it can also be buggy and plagued with compatibility problems, leading to accidental disruptions. This past March, a misconfiguration in OpenSSL—an open-source software library that encrypts a large volume of internet traffic—triggered crashes in web services and databases. It took days to patch the issue." https://lnkd.in/gTpkyFnk

In 2025, Ed Rogers will buy out Bell’s stake in Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment—and, by extension, the Toronto Maple Leafs—for $4.7 billion. It’s a massive shakeup in the world of Canadian sports and, in the year to come, he’ll be working furiously behind the scenes to make his investment pay off. He won’t do it through playoffs or sportscasts, but by leveraging the new golden goose of sports business: real estate. The consequences, writes Michael Naraine, Ph.D, a professor at Brock University, could reshape Toronto entirely. "These days, the business of sports is about unlocking value in associated assets. Sports teams—and their owners—make money by building stadiums and towers and leasing out commercial spaces. Ottawa’s Lansdowne area is a great example. Long desolate, it was rejuvenated when the city of Ottawa and a private consortium redeveloped Lansdowne Park, home to the Redblacks, and its surrounding areas for condos and retail spaces. It’s now a city within the city, where residents can go to the gym, get their pets groomed, buy groceries, see a game and then go to a bar—constantly spending money in the area. Similarly, in Edmonton, pharmacy billionaire and Oilers owner Daryl Katz has spent $2.5 billion on a mixed-use entertainment district surrounding Rogers Place, revitalizing the city’s downtown. With the Toronto Maple Leafs, one of the most prized assets in all of North American professional sports, Ed Rogers now has the vehicle to unlock that kind of value.Since at least 2019, Rogers has been in talks with Brookfield Asset Management’s infrastructure arm to possibly replace the Rogers Centre with a new, smaller stadium and transform the surrounding land into a mixed-use district. If the company is smart, it will want to build condos, retail, movie theatres and everything else people want. Ed has the vision. Now we’ll see how he executes it." https://lnkd.in/g9xK9MTW

In December of 2024, the federal government softened its rules around mortgage lending. The idea behind the new policies, writes Andrey Pavlov, a professor of finance at the Beedie School of Business at Simon Fraser University, is to make housing accessible to more homebuyers—and that’s what they’ll do, at least on paper. But in reality, the results may be far different. "In the end these rules will backfire, flooding the housing market with more buyers and driving prices even further out of reach. This will be most noticeable in our most expensive housing markets: big cities like Toronto and Vancouver, as well as smaller communities with insufficient supply, like Victoria. In these markets, the new rules will jump-start demand for the same limited stock of homes. And it won’t just be renters trying to get on the housing ladder for the first time; we’ll also see existing homeowners, who wouldn’t previously have qualified for bigger mortgages, looking to upgrade their housing situation. That will especially increase demand for homes in the $1 -million to $1.5 -million range.” https://lnkd.in/eF4pEm5U

It’s all but certain, writes Stephen Maher, that, by the end of the year, Pierre Poilievre will become our new prime minister. We don’t know when the election will be, or even who will lead the Liberals. What we do know is that the Conservatives have been ahead in the polls by double digits since September of 2022, when Poilievre became leader. He’ll probably win a majority—and then he’ll move fast and break things. "Since childhood, Poilievre has been a devotee of University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman, who argued that government should only involve itself in citizens’ lives when absolutely necessary. That has never been the governing philosophy of Canada, where citizens have come to expect a European-style welfare state and businesses are protected from international competition by regulators. Poilievre would like to reduce the size of the welfare state—he has declined to make any promises about maintaining the pharmacare and dental programs the Liberals brought in with the NDP—but history shows that voters often punish governments that take away benefits they are accustomed to receiving. It will be a great reckoning, cheered by some, feared by others." https://lnkd.in/g7NRz7r6

Offering kids easy access to nutritious food at school, where they spend most of their waking hours, is a great way to improve their diets and reduce health inequities. Rachel Engler-Stringer, a professor of community health and epidemiology at the University of Saskatchewan, explains why all kids need access to a great lunch. “Poor diet is not just a problem for low-income families. Canadian kids across the socioeconomic spectrum are eating badly—not enough fruits and vegetables, and too many processed foods like granola bars and candy. Those items are easy to put in a lunch, don’t need to be heated up and can be consumed on the go. I have a Ph.D. in nutrition, but even my kids don’t eat well during the school day." https://lnkd.in/gC8QX8MC

Amol Verma, a physician at Unity Health Toronto and a professor of AI research and education in medicine at the University of Toronto, created AI software that cuts hospital deaths by 26 per cent. It’s just the beginning. “Some people may be concerned that AI and robotics could replace doctors and nurses—that an intelligent robot could listen to your chest, prescribe medication or perform surgery. These things may come to pass one day. But AI isn’t yet capable of handling the complex physical and mental tasks that health-care workers perform. The applications we’re working with today aren’t designed to replace humans—they’re designed to help them to deliver better care for their patients. Right now, our focus should be on understanding what AI can do, what it can’t do and how it can be safely integrated into health care, helping clinicians to do their jobs better. In 2025, we can begin building a system that starts to harness the power of AI, to give Canada’s overworked medical system some much-needed breathing room.” https://lnkd.in/gpU_ckHQ

Canada’s cities are visibly rattier than ever. Rats have been found swimming in toilets, gnawing through garbage cans and children’s car seats and, in Waterloo, Ontario, crawling out of the ceiling of a Tim Hortons. The question Jadine Ngan now asks is: how do we take our cities back? https://lnkd.in/gK_z-Kp7