Maclean's October 2025

As soon as Trump mused about Canada becoming the 51st state, I joined many Canadians in a quiet boycott of American products. I now make sure my grapes come from Chile or South Africa, not California. I switched to locally produced whisky. Lettuce has been tricky to source, but Maclean’s did a story about an innovative agri-tech venture in Ontario that mass-produces lettuce year-round in an automated greenhouse. Now I buy from that company whenever I can. Grocery store packaged goods are trickier. You never really know where they come from. Out shopping, I see a spectrum of labels emblazoned with maple leaves, appealing to my newfound patriotism. But is “Made in Canada” the same as “Processed in Canada”? And what am I supposed to do when a box or…

POOR THING “Confessions of the Working Poor,” Jeni Gunn’s cost-of-living memoir in the August issue, drew universal praise for its humour, vulnerability and frankness about her financial situation. Many readers confessed they were also struggling. Jeni’s article was persuasive, effective and relatable. I have the highest-paying job I’ve ever had but, as a newly single person after 30 years of marriage, my financial situation has destabilized, and I now worry that I’ll live too long in my retirement years, and the paltry amount of money I’ve socked away will run out. Jeni, please write more. Your tone, wisdom and humour is appreciated. Dominique Lavigne Thunder Bay “As Jeni Gunn shows, being poor is a full-time job, and poverty reduces your mental bandwidth”David esdaile Ottawa As I sat in the Ottawa airport…

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE NATION’S NEWSMAKERS IT’S HARD TO KNOW how to feel about AI when its capabilities advance seemingly by the hour. One day, it’s solving Canadians’ online-banking snafus and patiently robo-splaining the origins of our anxious attachment styles, and the next, we’re dating the chatbots themselves. AI monitors our real-time forest-fire emissions while its data centres furiously guzzle our water. It disrupts our jobs and, every once in a while, creates them: just ask Evan Solomon, Canada’s very first minister of AI and digital innovation. A few months in, Solomon—a veteran journalist whose previous political involvement was hosting CBC’s Power and Politics—is still in the honeymoon phase of his portfolio. He’s trumpeting the economic upsides of AI to the country’s private sector and calling this our “Gutenberg moment,” a…

RADICAL SOLUTIONS TO THE COUNTRY’S PROBLEMS WHEN I TELL PEOPLE I WORK in urban mining, they sometimes (incorrectly) picture me sporting a hard hat and chipping away at old office towers with a pickaxe. In the past, the main way to obtain in-demand materials—like those precious critical minerals everyone’s fighting over—was through primary mining, digging deep into the ground in remote locations to extract them. But since 2014, in my chemical engineering lab at the University of Toronto, I’ve been plumbing another abundant source in Canada’s cities: e-waste, a term for the discarded electronics and batteries rusting in our landfills. For a culture that’s constantly tapping on technology, we rarely think about the untapped resources inside it. Critical elements power many of our modern machines: for example, smartphone and computer…

BOLDLY CANADIAN POINTS OF VIEW EARLIER THIS YEAR, I was in the plush boardroom of the wealth-management division of a major Canadian bank. My investment manager wasn’t happy. The strategy I’d recommended, she explained, could lead me to pay quite a bit more money to the CRA. “That’s okay,” I responded. “I’m comfortable paying more in taxes.” She laughed nervously: “Well, this is the first time I’ve ever heard that.” I’m rich. At 30, I sold my small Canadian tech company, Dabble DB—an early online database tool—to Twitter. For the next decade, I worked in senior technical roles at Silicon Valley startups, sometimes in person but mostly remotely from Galiano Island in B.C. I retired at 40 with enough wealth to do pretty much anything I wanted for the rest of…

Created for Just a short drive from Edmonton is the idyllic city of Beaumont, Alberta. With its sustained residential growth, business-friendly environment and proximity to Edmonton’s innovation economy, Beaumont offers tremendous promise for businesses and commercial investors on the lookout for untapped potential. Here are the top reasons why this gem of a city is a prime destination for commercial and business expansion. Sustained population growth Beaumont is the fastest-growing municipality in the Edmonton Metro Region and the third fastest in Alberta. Over the past two decades, its population has tripled, reaching an estimated 24,688 residents in 2024—a 5.85 per cent increase over the previous year. It’s also a primary trade area that extends to 66,937 people. Its thriving downtown, excellent amenities, health care services and infrastructure create a welcoming…