Maclean's December 2024

In the days before my 12-year-old daughter started middle school this fall, I was bombarded with emails from her school board heralding the new smartphone ban, which would forbid any mobile phone use in the classroom. Over Labour Day weekend, newspapers were full of opinion pieces about this pivotal moment in our culture. The whole world, it seemed, had come to realize that smartphones are an obstacle to learning. Schools in Canada were finally going to do something about it. Now, a few months into the school year, my daughter says not much has changed. Kids sneak their phones onto their desks, hide them behind books, look down at them in their laps. She also reports that every teacher enforces the no-phone policy differently. Some make a point of keeping…

CREATED FOR When it comes to driving Canada’s economy, small businesses are anything but small. But they have unique challenges and needs that mean one-size-fits-all business solutions often won’t cut it. “Small businesses are the beating heart of the Canadian economy. They make up 98 per cent of Canada’s businesses, and employ over 10 million Canadians, making them vital contributors to the nation’s economic growth,” says Balinder Ahluwalia, senior vice-president and group head of market development and digital partnerships at Mastercard, Canada. Take a stroll through any neighbourhood in the country and it’s clear just how big this community is. But while they may form our economic backbone, Ahluwalia notes that Canada’s small businesses are weathering challenging times. “For these businesses, the past few years have been difficult. They are…

TRILLION-DOLLAR BABIES Readers got worked up over “The Jackpot Generation,” Katrina Onstad’s October cover story about Canada’s trillion-dollar generational wealth transfer. Some boomers were especially piqued by the suggestion that they had better fortune than their millennial heirs. I am so tired of reading about how “lucky” our generation was to buy a home. We worked three jobs, took in boarders, pinched pennies for years, all with the goal of homeownership. When we built a lovely house in the country, people who worked with my husband asked how we could possibly afford such a beautiful home. “I am so tired of reading about how ‘lucky’ our generation was to buy a home”LINDA HARMAN Nanaimo, B.C. These people made the same salary that my husband did, but they lived a different lifestyle.…

Created for Dr. Amin Madani, a general surgeon and director of the Surgical AI Research Academy at University Health Network (UHN), has spent most of his career obsessed with making surgery better—both for patients and surgeons. While completing his PhD in surgical education, Dr. Madani aimed to understand how errors occur in the operating room and what characteristics and behaviours define elite surgeons. “For the longest time, I’ve been focused on mapping that out,” he says. “It’s not so much about having good, steady hands but instead it’s about how they use their brain and make decisions.” As technological capabilities and accessibility advanced, Dr. Madani realized there were exciting opportunities to use computer brains—or artificial intelligence (AI)—to supercharge surgeons’ skills. “I met people doing computer vision AI research who started…

DIANA BERESFORD-KROEGER’S early life reads like the stuff of myths, or at least the most heart-wrenching of Disney movies. Orphaned at 13, she bounced around southern Ireland to stay with extended family, an eccentric bunch of highly educated aristocrats who schooled her in math, astronomy and the art of Celtic plant medicine. They had a couple of predictions, too: she’d use her newly gleaned Druidic wisdom to save an endangered modern world, and she’d live in a land of lakes and evergreens. In the late ’60s, that’s exactly where she ended up. After collecting a few degrees—including two Ph.D.s, in biology and biochemistry—Beresford-Kroeger gained international recognition as a champion for the world’s forests, doing for trees, some argue, what Jane Goodall did for chimps. In addition to films and sold-out…

I CAN EASILY PINPOINT the origins of my obsession with public transportation. Growing up in a rural part of Langley, B.C., it took me an hour to bike to the nearest corner store; if I wanted to get anywhere fast, I had to hitch a ride with my parents. I longed for more: accessible shops, a main drag for people-watching or even a SkyTrain, like they have in Vancouver. During high school, I spent a lot of time online in transit-focused forums and, by the time I moved to Toronto for university, I’d travelled to Europe and Asia, comparing their networks to the ones back home. In 2016, I started my own YouTube channel, RMTransit. My videos get into the specifics of America’s terrible buses and Helsinki’s excellent trams, but…