Indholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2026 i Maclean's

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE NATION’S NEWSMAKERS ADAM SHOALTS IS a member of a dying breed. For one thing, he had to be pressured by his now-wife into getting a smartphone. And service tends to be sparse where he works. Shoalts, originally from Fenwick, Ontario, is one of Canada’s greatest living explorers—our very own bearded, millennial Indiana Jones. He’s done archeological digs in four countries, hosted guided hikes focused on edible mushrooms and has faced down gale-force winds, rapids and entirely too many bears for comfort. It’s all part of a larger project: to keep Canadians in touch with the country’s wild side. Shoalts has faithfully chronicled his many treacherous expeditions. In his latest bestselling book, Vanished Beyond the Map, he recreates the Arctic journeys of Hubert Darrell, a fellow wanderer whose…

A lot can change in a year. Who’d have guessed that our closest ally would become our closest threat? That tariffs and sovereignty would become national obsessions? That Justin Trudeau would hook up with Katy Perry? This issue of Maclean’s is a cheat sheet for everything and everyone that will matter in the next 12 months. To start, the government will invest billions in defence and trade diversification, giving Canada a fighting chance on the world stage. Canada will show off its maple-leaf mania at the Winter Olympics (where Sidney Crosby will dominate) and the World Cup (where Trump, as usual, will steal our thunder). Meanwhile, AI will begin to out-think us, biohacking will go mainstream and Ryan Gosling will save the planet from climate disaster (on the big screen,…

1 A New Drug Will Revolutionize Alzheimer’s Care Canada’s battle against Alzheimer’s has a new weapon. Health Canada has conditionally approved lecanemab, a lab-made antibody designed to slow early-stage Alzheimer’s by targeting amyloid plaques in the brain. Unlike existing drugs that only mask symptoms, lecanemab is the country’s first disease modifying therapy, offering the possibility of changing the trajectory of the illness for patients diagnosed early. It’s no panacea: lecanemab cannot restore memories or reverse the disease, and eligibility is limited to those in the early stages who meet certain criteria. But with roughly 750,000 Canadians living with dementia, and treatment costs in the U.S. hitting $26,000 a year, the drug will provide some measure of hope. 2 Generic Ozempic Will Flood the Market Weight-loss drugs are about to hit…

1 A Teen From the Yukon Will Be the NHL’s Top Draft Pick At just 17, Gavin McKenna is already touted as hockey’s Next One. The Yukon-born lefty is Canada’s biggest pre-draft phenom since his own distant cousin, Connor Bedard, in 2023. The comparisons don’t stop there: shifty skating, a devastating shot and high hockey IQ all run in the family. But McKenna is charting his own course. He’s set to be the first top draft pick from the territories in June and has become the rare Canadian talent to controversially jump ship from junior hockey for the NCAA (he’s at Penn State). The hockey world can’t wait to see what he’ll do next. 2 BMO Field Will Get a Makeover Toronto’s lakefront soccer pitch is getting the World Cup…

1 A New Player Will Flood the Prefab Pipeline Mattamy Homes CEO Peter Gilgan’s first prefab-housing push was a bit too ahead of its time. In the late ’90s, investors weren’t quite picking up what he was putting down with Stelumar, a prescient startup specializing in speedy builds of single-family detached homes. In 2026, Gilgan will meet his moment. Stelumar Advanced Manufacturing Inc., a shinier version of his early modular-home factory, is slated to produce roughly 3,000 of them annually. This time, it’ll focus on six-storey, city-friendly builds, shrinking per-unit assembly timelines to six months with the help of some 2020s-era tech: AI. 2 Many, Many Mortgages Will Roll Over This year marks a time of literal renewal in Canada’s mortgage sector. By the end of 2026, roughly 60 per…

Despite a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it growing season, our country is, in fact, a major food exporter—some $100 billion a year, mostly to the U.S. Yet our food-manufacturing sector is barely growing. After NAFTA came into effect in 1994, multinational companies like J.M. Smucker and Unilever relocated factories to the U.S. and Mexico, or anywhere with cheaper workers who’ve never met a union. In 2004, for instance, Smucker’s bought Bick’s and soon moved its pickling operations from small-town Ontario to Wisconsin. Aside from the couple hundred people who lost their jobs, the average Canadian didn’t care where their cukes were pickled, provided a 1L jar of baby dills never became a luxury buy. Then Donald Trump mused about the 51st state, and everything in the supermarket became instantly politicized. Shoppers turned U.S. products…

When most people picture AI in education, they imagine students using ChatGPT to do homework and write essays. But that’s only one facet of what this technology can do in the classroom. My work focuses on something different: having students learn by teaching AI agents. The idea builds on a long-established maxim: that the true mark of expertise is being able to explain a subject clearly to someone else. In 2019, I developed Curiosity Notebook, a webbased platform where students could select a learning task and teach a robot. I ran a study during a four-week after-school program at an elementary school in the Waterloo, Ontario, area. Students broke off into small groups and read information about rocks, then taught their robot to classify them as metamorphic, sedimentary or igneous.…

The robots are here at UHN, and more are on the way. UHN’s Sprott Department of Surgery is home to Canada’s largest robotic surgery program, and once the new surgical tower is built at Toronto Western Hospital, UHN will also have the country’s largest concentration of surgical robots under one roof. These machines aren’t replacing surgeons—they’re amplifying them by extending expert capabilities to benefit patients in new ways that go beyond the most sophisticated surgical teams. As home to some of the only robots of their kind in Canada, UHN’s advanced technology also enables surgeons to train the next generation in pioneering techniques reshaping health care. “Using robotics allows surgeons to push the boundaries of surgery even further, decreasing the severity of surgery, making procedures less invasive and ultimately improving…

1 Justin Bieber Will Headline Coachella The world’s biggest music festival will go by a new moniker this spring: #Bieberchella. Four years after he stepped away from music to focus on his health—and social media spats—the boy wonder from Stratford, Ontario, came back big in 2025. He released Swag and Swag II, topped the Billboard charts and signed a record-breaking, seven-figure deal to headline Coachella. For Bieber, it’s a flex that quashes nagging questions about how he would fare in his post–Scooter Braun era. (He split from his long-time manager and mentor in 2023.) For Beliebers, it’s a reason to flock to the desert: festival passes sold out in three days. 2 Ryan Gosling Will Save Humanity If the trailer’s reception is any sign (400 million views in the first…

IN 2020, I LAUNCHED Good Juju, a small home-and-body-care business, with my partner, Alexa Monahan. We started with shampoo and conditioner bars, then moved into laundry detergent strips, thin PVA sheets that we had manufactured in China. Each pack saved one plastic bottle from the landfill. Customers developed an almost cult-like devotion to our products. And we did it all remotely: Alexa is in Vancouver and I’m in Toronto. Within our first two years, we expanded into stores like Indigo and London Drugs, and we hired two employees—one full-timer and one parttimer. By the end of 2022, we broke into American retail: we landed deals with Grove Collaborative and Thrive Market, two major U.S. e-commerce platforms significantly larger in scale than Well.ca. Our online business was soon flourishing, and 500…

FEW CANADIANS SEE the impact of climate change on their livelihoods as directly as farmers. In 2020, after years of community farming in downtown Toronto, I rented some land from a retired farmer in Caledon, Ontario. Since then, I’ve run my own operation, Shade of Miti, which harvests and sells ecologically grown South Asian crops like okra, bitter melon, callaloo and ginger—mostly by word of mouth. I love what I do, but right now the future of my business feels uncertain. I’m typically able to get my equipment out into my fields and start planting sometime between mid-April and the beginning of May, after the frost and snowmelt are gone. This year, I had to wait until the end of May—a painful example of the weather variability that comes with…

1 The Military Will Prep for an Arctic Incursion… Canada’s military is finally treating the Arctic like the wild frontier it is: strategically positioned, resource-rich and increasingly crowded. China is coveting the North’s vast deposits of copper, nickel, lithium and cobalt, while melting sea ice is opening new shipping lanes through the Northwest Passage, giving Chinese submarines and research vessels (a.k.a. spy ships) new routes through Canadian waters. (Russia, too, is known to deploy “ghost” ships to snoop.) Canada is gearing up with new helicopters, rapid-response navy capabilities and a joint project with Australia to build a next-gen Arctic radar system. 2 … While Carney Will Invest Billions in Defence If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that our relationship with our southern neighbour is nowhere near as…

During the FIFA Congress in Moscow in June of 2018, Canada, Mexico and the United States defeated Morocco for the right to co-host the 2026 World Cup. Their bid was based on the strength of a united North America, and FIFA member countries voted overwhelmingly in favour of the collective offering. Canadians hoped it would cement our rise as a legitimate soccer nation and bring the country together with the world watching. Toronto and Vancouver were selected to host Canada’s matches, along with three Mexican and 11 American cities. On a grander scale, the united North American bid was expected to calm the political waters swirling around FIFA after four controversial host selections—South Africa, Brazil, Russia and Qatar—generated significant criticism. Returning the World Cup to an economically and politically stable…

Toronto and Vancouver’s condo industries collapsed spectacularly in 2025. Projects were cancelled, and buyers of pre-construction units were left with homes worth far less than what they paid for them. Pre-construction sales all but dried up, and some early-stage developments were converted to purpose-built rentals. This coming year, the dysfunction will bleed past Toronto and Vancouver and become a problem that affects all major urban centres. This housing collapse will extend beyond high-rise condos: pre-construction sales of all forms of ownership housing are now declining. Eventually, this will translate into fewer housing starts and sales across the country. To understand where we’re headed, we first have to understand how we got here. In the last few years, home prices rose at different rates across the country. Due to several factors—including…

This past October, the 2025 Maclean’s Ideas Summit: Education explored what it means for Canada to pursue sovereignty as an economic strategy—and how being on the frontier of scientific research could get us there. The event, hosted at the MaRS Centre’s Jewel Box and presented by Moderna Canada, included several of the country’s top scientific and medical thinkers. On their minds? How to translate our many advancements into IP, jobs and more resilient supply chains. For full event coverage, visit macleans.ca/events CANADA WHO? Maclean’s editor-in-chief Sarah Fulford (left) kicked off the evening by explaining Canada’s current evolution within the larger global realignment. “We are, as a country, redefining who we are,” she said, “and redefining what sovereignty means.” SCIENCE RULES The evening’s panel of experts included (below, left to right) Teresa…

1 Workers Will Return to the Office (Under Duress) The work-from-home honeymoon is over. Canadian bosses will drag workers back to the office—four days a week, for the most part. TD, BMO, RBC, Scotiabank, Rogers and several branches of the Canadian government have all issued near-identical memos, calling employees back in and citing the need for collaboration and culture-building. Some workers, who were hired remotely, will argue that mandatory office returns breach their contracts. Unions, meanwhile, will push back hard: the one that represents Ontario public servants says the provincial government doesn’t even have enough space for returning employees. 2 Door-to-Door Mail Delivery Will End In 2026, Canadians will check their PO boxes, not their front porch. In September, Canada Post received approval to end home delivery for the four…

1 Canadians Will Build a Nuclear Reactor for the Moon The Canadian Space Mining Corporation, a Toronto-based startup, has secured a $1-million grant from the Canadian Space Agency to develop LEUNR, a lowenriched uranium microreactor designed to power lunar operations and sustain human presence on the moon. The goal is to get the reactor up and running by 2029—a year before the target for NASA’s lunar reactor and five years ahead of Russia and China. Even if Canada doesn’t beat the superpowers, its efforts won’t be wasted: the same reactor technology is slated for Earthly use, powering remote communities with round-the-clock clean electricity. 2 Carney Will Hit the Brakes on Electric Vehicles… Mark Carney’s government has paused the Trudeau-era policy that would have required 20 per cent of new cars…

1 Elon Musk Will Make AI Movies Scorsese, Spielberg—and Grok? Elon Musk is turning his chatbot into an auteur, promising a “great” video game and a movie “that is at least watchable” by the end of 2026. Grok Imagine is being trained on snippets from existing games and movies. Of course, the whole endeavour raises the same complicated questions around copyright that have upended the publishing world. Rumours that Grok is training on Hellboy II hit especially hard—the movie’s director, Guillermo del Toro, recently said he would “rather die” than use AI in his films. 2 Bell Will Build Data Centres Galore In May, Bell unveiled a $300-million plan to open six new data centres in B.C., leveraging its fibre network and positioning the telecom and media giant as the…

Canada’s relationship with China resembles a Rubik’s Cube, where every attempt to solve one problem scrambles the rest of the puzzle. Mark Carney, of course, has been doing his level best to court Beijing as part of a broader effort to diversify Canada’s trade partnerships and reduce its economic dependence on the U.S. This past fall, he snagged a 40-minute bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping—the first such encounter between the leaders of the two countries in eight years. Though no deals came out of the meeting, Carney accepted Xi’s invitation to visit China this year. So where do these shifting dynamics lead in 2026? In one scenario, trade talks with Trump collapse, Washington imposes sweeping new tariffs and the Canadian economy goes into freefall. Millions are out of…

AFTER I GRADUATED from Queen’s University in 1993, I moved to Toronto. I couldn’t believe how hard it was to meet new people as an adult. My initial plan was to join a soccer team, but all I could find were super-competitive leagues, and I hadn’t played since I was eight. Then I heard about casual recreational leagues for adults in other cities, like Chicago and San Francisco. That inspired me to build my own. JAM Sports was born out of my basement apartment nearly 30 years ago—a multi-sport league accessible to former varsity athletes and total newbies alike. The first sport I joined was co-ed ultimate frisbee. It changed everything. Initially, my teammates were just nacho-and-beer buddies. Over time, they became concert and weekend-getaway buddies and, eventually, some of…

1 Fewer People Will Go Out to Eat—and Restaurants Will Suffer As restaurants roll out all-you-can-eat specials, shift their focus from dinner to brunch and flood inboxes with more coupons than ever, diners might see a bargain bonanza. But this kind of desperate courting strategy signals a less mimosaworthy truth: restaurants are in trouble. Once-packed hot spots now have empty tables, and Restaurants Canada reported that three in four Canadians are dining out less. Nearly half of full-service restaurants are either losing money or just breaking even, thanks to slowed demand and double-digit spikes in operating costs. The picture is even bleaker among under-30s, who are drinking less and opting for experiential adventures over good, old-fashioned group dinners. 2 We’ll All Scream for (Canadian!) Ice Cream Chapman’s started developing its…

1 Police Officers Will Return to Schools School resource officer programs, which stationed uniformed police in public schools, were largely phased out in the 2010s due to budget cuts and reports that police made kids feel unsafe. But violent incidents have been rising in schools nationwide, prompting calls to bring cops back to class. In Victoria, officers were barred from schools in 2023 but returned in 2025. Police have come back to Edmonton schools after four years away. And Ontario’s Bill 33, if passed, will require boards to bring officers onto campuses. Some students and parents feel police make schools safer; others feel they create an atmosphere of surveillance and distrust. 2 Political Feuds Will Proliferate on Campus Universities have long been hubs of activism. People demonstrated against the Vietnam…

Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men, with an estimated one in eight Canadian men expected to develop it during their lifetime. “About 5 to 10 per cent of patients are diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer when they first present,” says Dr. Ricardo Rendon, a professor in the Department of Urology at Dalhousie University, Chair of the Canadian Urologic Oncology Group, and Immediate Past-President of the Canadian Urological Association. “Most patients are diagnosed with localized disease, but research shows that about 20 to 30 per cent will eventually see their disease progress.” Despite its prevalence, prostate cancer’s mortality rate is declining, reflecting both progress in screening and diagnosis. An evolving care landscape Treatment options for advanced prostate cancer are evolving. “We’ve been giving hormone treatment since the 1950s,”…