Innehållsförteckning för November 2023 från Maclean's

HEAT WAVE Anne Shibata Casselman’s September 2023 cover story, predicting Canada’s climate future, was a wake-up call for many readers: I am gobstruck after reading Anne Shibata Casselman’s article. Holy smoke—literally. And yet Casselman has left me with hope, despite the tragedy of this summer’s climate exhaustion, despite the catastrophe I’m seeing all around me. We can change our consumption of fossil fuels and convert to green energy, we can come together to force our government to act. The lives of our children and our grandchildren are at stake. I live in an out-of-the-way-place in southern Ontario but I will travel to rallies and protests; my old legs will march. If you breathe, you must come with me. Thank you to Casselman for opening my eyes. Now it’s time for…

MONEY-GRABBING SCAMS have been happening for longer than we can remember: con artistry, Ponzi schemes, online phishing, even snail mail gambits. But the advent of more sophisticated AI will soon make these tricks far more common, complex and convincing. Knowing who or what to trust online is about to get much more challenging—and we had better be prepared. Photographs and videos used to be one way of verifying if things are true. Now, AI programs have opened the door to forms of scamming that are much harder to detect. Criminals can simply use software like Midjourney or DALL-E 2 to generate any kind of realistic photos. AI can also mimic someone’s voice, and soon AI-generated videos will be able to clone their appearances and facial expressions too. There are already…

EVERY FEW DECADES, a new technology comes along that fundamentally redefines society. The last significant one was the internet, and before that was computers. AI is the technology of our age. How the transformation will unfold is not entirely a mystery. Disruptive technologies, from electricity to computers to the internet, have all followed a similar three-stage path of adoption. In the initial “replace” phase, the new technology displaces the old—and the old technology is often people. Electric light bulbs replaced gas lighting and, in factories, the electric engine replaced the steam engine. However, it was not until the second phase—the “reimagine” phase, where people reinvent processes and business models around the new technology—that electricity created radical change. Factory layouts, no longer constrained by the need to connect each work station…

FOR THE PAST DECADE, farmers and grocers have already been using AI’s predictive and analytical prowess to figure out what and how we eat. For example, Canada generates some 35.54-million metric tonnes of food waste each year, and this technology can help businesses reduce how much food they throw away. In one application, past consumer demand data is fed into a predictive model, which will tell a company how much food they should produce in the future—like the food-industry version of a weather app. Going forward, we’ll be able to fine-tune these demand forecasts by determining the important factors—how much to produce, who the likely buyers are, when people will consume these goods and why they are being consumed. It’s astonishing to step into modernized food factories and see streamlined…

WORKING IN CYBERSECURITY is like playing a game of chess. On one side, we have bad actors—criminal groups, disgruntled employees or internet trolls—trying to hack into power grids, electric car networks and election databases. On the other, groups like mine build computing-based mechanisms to protect critical systems from cyberattacks. The war on cybersecurity is as old as technology itself, but artificial intelligence is changing the game at an eye-popping rate. Historically, it was more challenging to hack into networks like a power grid, because such systems were not connected to widespread communication infrastructure and had their own unique operating systems, sensors and communication channels. To launch a cyberattack on a power grid, malware would penetrate a system through information technology, reside in it for years unnoticed then communicate data and…

At the dawn of the atomic age, the Canadian government created a new crown corporation, Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL), with a mandate to develop peaceful uses of nuclear energy. “AECL was created by an Act of Parliament in 1952,” says Amy Gottschling, Vice-President of Science, Technology, and Commercial Oversight at AECL. “Its mandate was to define, direct, and build the nuclear industry for Canada. It was a driver and a technology push, building on that domestic security framework that was so needed at the time.” An evolving mission Today, AECL still plays a vital leadership role in the nuclear sector, and owns Canada’s largest nuclear science and technology laboratory. Its role has evolved, though. AECL continues to own the Intellectual Property of the CANDU reactors that it developed…

In Vancouver, a small practice immigration lawyer is expecting a package of documents from abroad that will allow her to finally reunite the family of her client. In Grand Prairie, Alberta, a bespoke manufacturing startup with half a dozen employees eagerly awaits the new piece of equipment that will allow them to punch well above their weight class on the international market. In northern Saskatchewan, a single mom has transformed her hobby into an income stream and she’s just finished her biggest commission yet. But now her kitchen table is buried under dozens of custom-made wedding decorations that need to be in New York City before the weekend. Small business is the lifeblood of the Canadian economy and it’s the beating heart of the countless eminently human stories that interweave…

FOR MOST OF MY LIFE, home always felt like a temporary place. I was born in Trichy, India, in 1994; when I was three months old, I moved to Abu Dhabi, where my dad worked as an engineer. We were treated like second-class citizens in the UAE. If my dad ever lost his job and couldn’t find a new one, we would have to consider moving back to India. Starting at age 17, I roamed around for a decade: I moved to India in 2011 for a design degree, then switched to an illustration program in Southampton, U.K. In 2016, I found a nearby web design job and later started a full-time master’s degree in digital design. I always felt uncertain about my future in the U.K. Permanent residency required…

This month, to accompany our issue on the future of AI, Maclean’s art director Anna Minzhulina created a striking cover using AI image-making software called Imagine. Anna chose Imagine from among a bunch of other AI design programs such as Dall-E 2, Midjourney and Fotor because, frankly, it was cheap. It costs just $81 a year for a subscription, an all-you-can-create image-generation buffet. Services like Imagine are trained on massive image banks and designed to interpret users’ prompts to produce an infinite number of illustrations and designs. For almost two decades, Anna has commissioned artwork the old-fashioned way, assigning jobs to illustrators and photographers. She’s an artist herself and a firm believer in the power of human-made art. She even wrote her master’s thesis on the importance of hand-drawing. She…

IN 2016, my sister, Paula, was working as a chef for a catering company in Toronto. One night after an event, she called me and said, “I just threw out $4,000 dollars worth of food.” Initially, I laughed in disbelief, then she continued: “My boss stood over my shoulder as I shovelled it into the trash. Then I walked home past a bunch of unhoused people—people who need that food the most. I feel awful.” I’d always hated the idea of wasting food, but after that call, I started reading obsessively on the topic. I came across a National Geographic article, which explained that when food stacks up in landfills, it emits methane, a substance 25 times more damaging than carbon dioxide. If food waste were a country, it would…

It’s weird. Toronto and Montreal were the birthplaces of artificial intelligence. Not Silicon Valley, not Beijing, not London, not Paris, not New York. Back in 2012, a Canadian team—including the AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton—entered the ImageNet challenge, a contest that evaluated computer algorithms’ abilities to detect objects and classify images at scale. Hinton’s team outdistanced the competition by such a wide margin that every other approach to computer vision became practically obsolete. They used neural networks, a system of machine learning that imitates how the human brain recognizes patterns and, for decades, was widely considered an eccentric, if not outright bizarre, approach to computation. That victory was the moment that a bunch of prophets in the wilderness moved from conceiving mindlike algorithms to creating them. It’s an unusual position for…

LESS THAN A YEAR ago, ChatGPT was unleashed upon the world—and in that short time, generative artificial intelligence has already become as ubiquitous in university lecture halls as laptops and desks. Students use gen AI for everything: getting an answer to a simple question, researching complex topics, producing text for written assignments. Faculty use it as well, to respond to emails, write reference letters and even grade papers. The lightning-rod issue surrounding AI and academia is the future of the university essay. Historically, professors and students alike have assumed that the person whose name is on the cover page is the person who wrote the paper. But this idea has been eroding for a long time—for example, universities have spent years grappling with the epidemic of students contracting out their…

I’VE BEEN RESEARCHING artificial intelligence and machine learning for more than 30 years. Some people call me one of the “godfathers of AI.” And yet I have grown very concerned that this technology—like the atomic bomb—will grant humanity powers that could destabilize the world. If we do not create policy and guardrails around the use of AI, we could be looking at new and major threats to democracy and humanity. Right now, AI-powered systems are advanced enough to both pilot drones and use high-powered facial recognition technology to target specific people. There have already been reports of such drone attacks in civilian areas in Syria and Ukraine. This is just the beginning. It is becoming shockingly easy, for example, to use AI-generated code to invent new toxic compounds—potential chemical weapons.…

FOR SOME PEOPLE, the words AI in health care might evoke the image of a robot conducting their physical exam. In reality, it is less sci-fi and far more hopeful: AI is leading us toward an era of preventive and personalized health care that could change our medical system for the better. The pandemic revealed to the Canadian public what healthcare workers already knew: our system is stretched thin, and our hospitals are at capacity. People wait months for surgeries and MRIs, emergency rooms are clogged, and doctors and nurses are overworked. A big reason for that is that health care in Canada is often reactive: we rush to treat people only once they are already sick. If we instead identified specific risk factors in patients and treated them preventively,…

SOME FOLKS WORRY that AI will eventually make art that is better than what people can create, rendering human artists obsolete. I don’t think so. While AI may produce something surprisingly good once in a while, it will never be a serious competitor to the Rolling Stones, or Beyoncé, or any other performers and creators. Fine art comes from human emotions and experiences, whereas AI just averages a bunch of art pieces together and approximates them. But of course, not all human art is great art. Historically, we have hired people to produce more prosaic materials like book covers, music jingles or graphics. That's where AI will come in. Now, if someone wants a logo of, say, a robot riding a horse, they are less likely to pay someone to…

MACLEAN’S ANNUAL university rankings continue a tradition established in 1991: to provide essential information in a comprehensive package to help students choose the university that best suits their needs. Maclean’s puts universities into three categories, recognizing the differences in types of institutions, levels of research funding, diversity of offerings, and breadth and depth of graduate and professional programs. Primarily Undergraduate universities tend to be smaller and have fewer graduate programs and graduate students. Universities in the Comprehensive category have a significant degree of research activity and a wide range of programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels, including professional degrees. Medical Doctoral universities offer a broad range of Ph.D. programs and research; all universities in this category have medical schools. In each category, Maclean’s ranks institutions in five broad areas…

CHOOSING A UNIVERSITY is one of the most important decisions students make in their post-secondary careers. Another is deciding what to study. And sometimes, the second decision helps inform the first, with students selecting a certain university because of a particular program it offers. In our ninth annual program rankings, we evaluate how Canadian universities measure up in the programs they offer in five popular fields in the sciences and social sciences, based on the programs’ reputations for quality and research strength. Maclean’s contacted faculty and senior administrators at universities across Canada, seeking their views in an online survey. We asked academics if their area of expertise was in any of the following five disciplines: business, computer science, education, engineering or nursing. If so, they were asked to list up…

Northern Ontario plays host to an incredibly diverse population of over 800,000 and is home to nearly half of Ontario’s Indigenous population. Small communities and municipalities are scattered amongst the area’s lakes, valleys, and forests, some hundreds of kilometers from the region’s hubs like Sudbury and Thunder Bay. While many of these residents have called Northern Ontario home all their lives, a lack of access to healthcare services means that many of those living within these communities are susceptible to common health concerns including vision-affecting disorders. For decades, healthcare organizations and non-profits have advocated for this often-forgotten patient group, working to increase access to healthcare in the north. Run by Vision Loss Rehabilitation Canada, the VLRC Eye Van is one such program aiming to bridge the gap in eye care…

For years — even as Canada and the world set bold emissions targets in the face of the climate crisis — the future of Ontario’s nuclear energy generation program remained uncertain. Despite nuclear power being inarguably the most practical source of low-emission baseload electricity, there was reluctance to commit to the aggressive reinvestment in nuclear infrastructure that would enable a transition to responsible and sustainable growth. Recently, however, it’s become clear to all that the only viable road forward is through a strong nuclear sector, and Ontario is once again speaking in one voice, asking the nuclear workforce to help us walk that path. “This means more jobs in Canada,” says Michelle Johnston, President of the Society of United Professionals, the trade union representing Ontario’s nuclear professionals. “And it’s not…

Medical isotopes are advancing health care — and McMaster University is paving the way for the next-generation of medical isotope research and innovation. Used to diagnose and treat over 1.5 million Canadians every year for a range of health conditions, medical isotopes hold great promise for patients at home and abroad. “Medical isotopes are undergoing tremendous growth as researchers discover new ways of harnessing their potential to image, track, and treat cancer and other diseases,” says Dave Tucker, Chief Nuclear Officer and Associate Vice-President, Nuclear at McMaster. McMaster’s global leadership McMaster has been a global leader in nuclear medicine for some 65 years. The McMaster Nuclear Reactor — Canada’s largest research reactor — provides neutrons for medical isotope production and scientific research and anchors the university’s suite of world-class nuclear…

Exporting can be a scary word, especially for early stage entrepreneurs. It’s this fear that persuades many founders to restrain all operations to local markets — forced to squeeze more juice out of the same lemon. In reality, involvement in international markets offers founders expanded customer bases, diversified supply chains, and improved stability amidst periods of localized economic uncertainty. Startup Canada’s Startup Global program connects a cohort of early stage entrepreneurs with networks of international ecosystem partners and celebrates those making waves in the global marketplace. This year’s Startup Global Pitch Competition finalists — selected at hybrid competitions as part of our cross-country Startup Canada Tour — are proving that Canada’s innovative, early stage ventures are internationally competitive. 1. Hinterland Flour Mill — Whitehorse, Yukon The Yukon’s first flour mill,…

Vaughan is a prosperous community and one of Canada’s fastest-growing cities. “Home to nearly 345,000 people, Vaughan’s globally competitive economy includes more than 19,500 businesses, and has seen employment growth that exceeds that of the province and country,” says Mayor Steven Del Duca, City of Vaughan. “A recent forecast by York Region suggests that by 2051, Vaughan’s population will increase by more than 66 per cent to over 576,000 people.” With this growth, people need options to travel around the city, which has spurred the City to proactively find new methods and technologies to meet Vaughan’s transportation needs of today and tomorrow. “We see the enhancement of people and goods movement as key opportunities to provide better service to our community,” says Raphael Costa, Director, Economic Development for the City…

TWO YEARS AGO, when Canada’s federal government made the pledge to ban sales of new combustion-engine cars and trucks by 2035, many wondered if such a lofty goal could be achieved. The announcement was backed by a series of funding incentives designed to shock drivers, automakers, and alternative fuel companies into action—with several billion dollars pledged since the initial announcement. With a penchant for automotive innovation, Volvo Cars was one of the first premium car manufacturers to announce their ambitious plans for full electrification, and long before the government mandates, planning to sell only fully electric vehicles by 2030. Today, Canada’s electric vehicle revolution is ramping up fast, with data showing a healthy new e-mobility ecosystem of drivers, car manufacturers and charging services companies that all rely on one another…

The buyers: Marty Butler (above left), a 31-year-old registered nurse and organ-donation coordinator, and Stefan Palios (above right), a 31-year-old sales and marketing consultant for tech startups. The budget: $600,000 The backstory: After two years of dating, Marty moved into Stefan’s one-bedroom, 450-square-foot apartment in downtown Toronto in May of 2019. The place was small but a steal. Together, they only paid $1,450 a month, thanks to rent control. Soon after Stefan and Marty started cohabitating, they began questioning how long they’d stay in the city. At the time, Marty had just started through a master’s degree in nursing at the University of Toronto, so they figured they’d postpone moving—or talk of moving—until after he graduated. That timeline accelerated dramatically when Stefan and Marty found themselves cooped up inside with…

HUMANITY HAS RELIED on antibiotics for the better part of 100 years. Most of the ones we currently use in clinical and agricultural settings were discovered between the 1940s and 1960s by looking for antibacterial molecules produced by microbes living in soil. Eventually, this method led to the discovery of the same antibiotics over and over again, and our rich well seemingly dried. More recently, researchers assembled libraries of millions of synthetic chemicals and individually tested which ones kill pathogenic bacteria. This process—called high-throughput screening—is time-consuming and expensive. Unfortunately, we’ve discovered zero clinically used antibiotics with this approach. Our antibiotic pipeline is now alarmingly lean. In 2019, there were approximately 1.3 million deaths due to drug-resistant bacterial infections. By 2050, that number is expected to increase to 10 million per…

FOR THE PAST 10 to 15 years, social media bots have been the primary way misinformation is distributed. Often, state actors use these bots, either domestically or to shape international opinion. In the run-up to the 2016 American election, for example, Russia set up Twitter bots pretending to be Black Lives Matter activists—they told people to stay home from the polls, that voting would be pointless. Black Americans are a reliable Democratic voting bloc, and since Russia was backing Trump, the idea was to suppress African American votes. In 2022, when people were protesting the repression of the Uyghurs during the Beijing Olympics, China deployed bots to present a happy facade. The use of this technology is a longstanding tactic—and AI will only help this misinformation spread. Today, researchers are…

EARLIER THIS YEAR, there was a mass cold-shouldering event—by way of software update. These are the times we live in. Replika is an AI chatbot, launched in 2017. Users could customize an avatar, choosing its name, skin tone, age and more, and selecting a relationship status. The default and only free option was friend, but by upgrading to the paid version, users could opt for an AI sibling, girlfriend or boyfriend, spouse or mentor. Then they chatted, by text (free) or voice (paid). Paid users could also spice things up, engaging in erotic roleplay and getting NSFW selfies from their Replikas. Then, in February of this year, the Italian Data Protection Agency banned Replika from processing Italian users’ data, due to safety concerns for children and emotionally vulnerable people. Replika…

CHLOE, WHO IN 2022 was an athlete and student council president with excellent grades, seemed like the kind of Grade 12 student who could get into any university in Canada. (She asked me to withhold her surname, not wanting to jinx her chances of getting accepted.) Ambitious and organized, she’d had her heart set on McGill for a couple of years, but applied to nine other schools to round out her options. She found herself stressed out by the process: many schools required her, in addition to submitting grades, to write supplemental essays detailing her personal experiences and goals, a common requirement among competitive programs. The support available at her public high school in Toronto was underwhelming, especially when she compared it to the level of attention received by her…

The eyes are our window to the world. As we mature, however, eye health can often take a backseat. For most Canadians, sight will deteriorate with age. Because it happens so gradually, many don’t realize how much they aren’t seeing. One of the most common culprits behind vision loss is cataracts. A cataract causes a clouding of the natural lens of the eye resulting in blurry vision. It happens progressively, first impacting small portions of vision and then growing with time. “Cataracts are probably the most common cause of reversible, treatable vision loss,” says Dr. Darren Albert, Ophthalmologist and Associate Professor at McGill University (Dr. Albert is a consultant for Alcon). Dr. Albert explains that, with age, the eye’s natural lens grows cloudy, like a dirty window. To treat the…

The winds are changing and a new sun is rising in the Canadian energy industry. Renewable generating capacity is joining the grid at a rapid pace, but the wind and the sun will not be enough to meet the aggressive decarbonization targets necessary in the face of the ongoing climate crisis. These technologies must be augmented by a reliable low-carbon source of baseload energy. In Canada, we’re fortunate to have an ideal solution to this conundrum buried right beneath our feet. The reascendance of clean and reliable nuclear energy There was a time when the word uranium could hardly be uttered without Canada being mentioned in the same breath. As recently as 2016, Canada produced more than a fifth of the global uranium supply. Today, we contribute less than half…

Over the past decade, the federal and provincial governments have come to see nuclear power, and small modular reactors (SMRs) in particular, as an important part of the solution to lowering greenhouse gas emissions. The Centre for Nuclear Energy Research (CNER) at the University of New Brunswick (UNB) has emerged as a leader in research and training thanks to a concerted effort to build its capacity that began nearly a decade ago. In 2014, CNER welcomed a new director, Dr. William Cook, Professor and Chair of the Department of Chemical Engineering. With that transition, the research and development institute began to blossom, growing from a staff of just one to over 25 associates, support staff, and students. “Throughout the past 30-plus years, UNB has been actively engaged in the nuclear…

As the nuclear renaissance blossoms in Canada and we begin planning for a future increasingly reliant on uranium for green and sustainable baseload power, great strides are being taken to modernize — and lower the environmental footprint of — the mining projects that make that power possible. At the Wheeler River property in Saskatchewan’s Athabasca Basin, Denison Mines is now bringing the Canadian legacy of innovation to the mines themselves, beginning with its Phoenix project. Mining without the mine: from theory to reality "Now, with in-situ recovery (ISR) technology, we believe we can achieve a superior standard of sustainability — with a very small surface footprint and no open pits or underground mine workings,” says Denison President and CEO David Cates. The technology behind ISR mining involves drilling a series…

IN 2016, when Kate Inglis and her husband, Nick Bakker, bought their home in Lunenburg County, Nova Scotia, Inglis had the uncanny feeling she was signing a contract with history. The three-storey Victorian, built in 1901, is a 4,000-square-foot “grand old dame,” as she puts it. But by the area’s standards, the home is young: Old Town Lunenburg is a UNESCO heritage site and one of the best-preserved 18th-century British colonial towns in North America. Owners there adhere to strict remodelling rules to preserve the architecture. “Even interior changes are hotly debated,” Inglis says, “but everyone is generally on board with it because we know we’re only borrowing these houses from history.” The home’s original owner was Captain Edwin Backman, a master mariner who made his fortune during Prohibition sailing…

As recently reported by Statistics Canada, nearly 1.2 million small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) do business across the country. Together, they employ 8.2 million Canadians, representing 67.7 per cent of the total private workforce. A prosperous ecosystem of SMBs provides far-reaching benefits to the broader economy and within local communities. These businesses provide job opportunities, foster community identity and involvement, and build diversified, innovative local marketplaces. Purolator – a leading Canadian integrated freight, package, and logistics solutions provider – understands the important role SMBs play in driving this country’s economic engine. To that end, it launched its True North Small Business Grant in 2021 to provide support to these vital organizations. More than $330,000 in funds will have been awarded by the end of 2023. “SMBs are critical to the…

For over two decades, Futurpreneur has been a driving force behind Canada's young entrepreneurs. As a national non-profit organization, their unique focus is on providing early-stage financing, mentorship, and invaluable resources to aspiring entrepreneurs aged 18 to 39, empowering them to launch successful businesses. Melissa Gladue, Business Development Manager of the Indigenous Entrepreneur Startup Program at Futurpreneur, emphasizes their commitment to this mission. Established in 1996, Futurpreneur has enabled more than 17,700 diverse young entrepreneurs to realize their dreams, launching over 13,900 businesses spanning every province and territory. They've facilitated over $200 million in capital, coupled with one-on-one mentorship. Acknowledging the specific challenges faced by Indigenous businesses, Futurpreneur introduced its Indigenous Entrepreneur Startup Program in 2019. Financial obstacles, including limited access to banking services and capital, have pushed many Indigenous…