Maclean's April 2023

Late last year, my ancient Hyundai reached the end of its life. It started making an ominous noise and needed costly repairs and, well, pouring money into my hard-working old car didn’t seem like a good investment. So instead I bought a newer model. Now I’m enjoying the fact that my car is not on the brink of dying all the time. But I purchased it with some ambivalence. For one thing, I had the bad luck of needing a car when the industry was still struggling with a global semiconductor chip shortage, so the price was pretty steep. I also felt like I was buying a dinosaur. My car is not an electric vehicle or even a hybrid. How long until it’s obsolete? In downtown Toronto, where I live,…

JAY BARUCHEL IS EVERYWHERE: in slashers, sex farces and sports movies; opposite mythical lizards in Disney’s How to Train Your Dragon franchise; and he’s worked with directors as varied as David Cronenberg, Judd Apatow and even himself. If you’re wondering how an Ottawa-born, Montreal-raised kid with a Gumby body and a voice like a twisted balloon has been working steadily since 1995 (he’s now 40 and busier than ever), the answer is simple: Jay Baruchel loves movies—loves them. Baruchel loved his BlackBerry, too. He hung on to it until 2019. It makes sense, then, that his next movie is, well, Black-Berry, which chronicles the rise and fall of Research in Motion, the Waterloo moonshot whose founders had the zany idea to merge computers with cellphones. Baruchel plays Mike Lazaridis, the…

LAST SUMMER, my colleagues and I published a paper in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, insisting that pharmaceutical security needed to become a national priority. Months later, we saw why: in the midst of a “tripledemic” of COVID, flu, and respiratory syncytial virus, or RSV, panicked parents scoured pharmacies for children’s Tylenol and found only empty shelves. Sick adults couldn’t get their hands on over-the-counter cold medicines. Out west, the antibiotic amoxicillin was scarce. As Canadian health-care professionals know, this was an extreme example of an old issue. One quarter of all Canadian drugs (over-the-counter and otherwise) were running short well before the pandemic, but there’s nothing quite like a global health crisis to expose a country’s weak points. To make sure shortages like this don’t keep happening, we need…

SOME MIGHT THINK Andrea Jin’s trademark sweet-then-dark jokes about, say, China’s onechild policy, veer into too-far territory, but 250,000 TikTok followers can’t be wrong. Mulan, her grandparents—all of it is fodder for the Vancouver comedian, who has channelled her dry, yeah-I-said-it sensibility into online acclaim and a ticket to Los Angeles (where she now lives). Now 27, Jin was just 10 when her family immigrated from China to Vancouver. After school, she received English lessons from Family Guy and Russell Peters’s stand-up—stuff no kid should hear. “My parents didn’t speak English either, so they couldn’t tell,” she says. She got hooked on performing during a five-minute set at a campus comedy event at Western University, where she studied business. Everyone was eating and doing homework, but Jin wasn’t fazed. She…

The first-ever Maclean’s Ideas Summit, inspired by the magazine’s recent Year Ahead issue, featured discussions about Canada’s future with brilliant thinkers at venues around Toronto. The three-day event—held in partnership with signature sponsor Uber Canada, as well as the UHN Foundation and Colliers Canada—included a live Q&A with environmentalist David Suzuki, a fireside chat with public-health expert Andrew Boozary and a panel of mini talks from industry leaders on innovation in health care, business, education and more. For full event coverage, visit Macleans.ca/events GREAT MINDS As part of the three-day summit, guests were invited to a mini-talk series at OCAD University. The evening began with networking and drinks, followed by speeches about the future of innovation from top thinkers including OCAD U president Ana Serrano; Stefan Raos, head of public affairs…

After three pandemic-pllagued years, Canadians have emerged, squinting and, disoriented, into a new world order. While we were baking sourdough in lock-down, artificial intelligence evolved from the stuff of movie magic into big business, Basketball and soccer closed in on hockey to join the ranks of Canada’s national games. We finally began taking climate change seriously, churning out electric vehicles by the thousands and building skyscrapers out of renewable timber, And the coolest place to film a prestige 1V show was suddenly.., Alberta? Commanding this weird, cool, occasionally scary new reality is a cohort of Canadians whose ideas and inventions are forging new industries and reinventing old ones-more than 100 of whom are catalogued in the following pages. There’s Kris Collins, a former hairdresser who entertains some 48 million Gen…