Canada’s immigration policy is undergoing a major rethink. After years of rising admission numbers, Ottawa is now reducing immigration levels to try and relieve pressure on the country’s tight housing supply. In this move toward what policymakers describe as a more sustainable immigration system, the government is approving fewer temporary residents in order to lower permanent resident admissions.

The political logic is understandable. Public concern about housing affordability and population growth has made immigration management one of the government’s most sensitive policy issues. Federal officials frame the current shift as a way to align immigration levels with infrastructure capacity, while remaining committed to economic growth and talent attraction.

However, while the public focuses on how many and what types of immigrants Canada should admit, another critical aspect of immigration governance is receiving far less attention: how the system’s more opaque procedures — notably immigrant security screening — are being administered.

In Canada’s immigration system, prolonged screening is not limited to permanent residence applicants, but also to temporary streams including work permits and study permits. Applicants frequently get referred for extended review for a wide range of possible reasons. Yet because the details of screening procedures are confidential, and applicants are rarely told why they’re being subjected to closer scrutiny, the process remains largely unclear to the public, as reflected by the fact most national security complaints relate to immigration and citizenship screening delays.

Many observers assume that anyone undergoing extra screening must have triggered some sort of security alert, but the lack of transparency makes this difficult to know. Once a case enters extended screening, it can remain under security review for months or years. Thousands of permanent residence applicants experience delays of up to 65 months — more than five years.

Most troubling is that little or no information is available to applicants, employers or institutions who are awaiting a decision. Updates are rare, timelines uncertain and inquiries constrained by the confidentiality that national security procedures require. This leaves many students and workers in protracted uncertainty that seriously disrupts careers, studies and families.

Immigration security screening itself is not controversial. Every country must ensure that individuals entering its borders do not pose threats. Canada’s system involves several agencies — including Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) — whose coordination is essential to protecting national security.

The challenge lies not in the existence of screening, but how the process functions.

Indefinite timelines and administrative uncertainty

Having your immigration application referred for security screening can become a period of prolonged uncertainty with huge consequences. Employment offers, academic appointments, research collaborations and family reunification plans often depend on predictable timelines. When screening stretches on indefinitely, opportunities of a lifetime can vanish.

Canada’s immigration backlogs became particularly acute when applications increased following the pandemic. By 2023, parliamentary documents were reporting bottlenecks of hundreds of thousands of applicants. Referrals to CSIS alone increased more than 150 per cent between 2022 and 2024.

Screening adds another layer to an already strained administration.

The organizational logic of delay

Large bureaucracies operating with limited transparency often develop predictable dynamics. When performance measurements and timelines are unclear, systemic delays can accumulate undetected.

The costs and impacts of prolonged delays fall largely on applicants, families and employers waiting for decisions, while the institutions conducting the screening experience little pressure over efficiency. This imbalance creates what is known as an “accountability gap”, where those making administrative decisions do not directly experience the consequences of delay.

Such dynamics rarely reflect negligence or ill intent. Rather, they emerge from the structural features of complex bureaucracies, particularly those operating under conditions of confidentiality and administrative privilege. Without clearer service expectations or reporting mechanisms, policymakers and the public have difficulty even knowing if the system is operating efficiently.

Over time, this opacity can erode confidence in and the effectiveness of the entire immigration process.

A risk to Canada’s talent strategy

These institutional undercurrents also matter because immigration policy today is about more than national security. As global geopolitics shift, immigration systems have also become key to the fierce international competition for elite talent.

Canada’s economic and research strength relies heavily on attracting internationally mobile professionals. Universities recruit scholars globally, and tech companies depend on foreign engineers and scientists. Even government initiatives like the Global Skills Strategy are aimed at attracting attract highly skilled workers.

Immigration systems therefore function not only as border controls but as indicators of how efficient and predictable a country’s institutions are.

In emerging sectors such as AI, biotechnology and advanced manufacturing, the ability to attract international talent is crucial to success. The United States, European Union, Australia and several Asian economies have policies to attract highly skilled migrants in precisely these sectors.

In-demand researchers, engineers and entrepreneurs often have multiple offers of career opportunities. If they become mired in one country’s immigration bureaucracy they simply redirect their path to another destination. Such outcomes rarely appear in statistics or news reports; applicants who abandon Canadian opportunities just disappear from the system without a trace.

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One group of foreign graduate students frustrated with ongoing delays is taking Canada’s immigration department to court, claiming their applications have been unfairly stalled in security screening. And when Vancouver East MP Jenny Kwan recently presented a House of Commons e-petition regarding screening delays, it had drawn more than 10,000 signatures from Canadian citizens and residents within 10 days of its March 11 launch.

Most consequences are less visible than these instances — and they are not harmless. Reputational signals spread rapidly through academic, professional and personal networks, tainting Canada’s standing among the skilled researchers and professionals it seeks to attract.

Aligning security with national strategy

Canada also faces another tricky paradox as it updates its immigration process. Reducing intake levels to align with housing capacity may be politically and economically reasonable, but when a country admits fewer immigrants, the quality and results of its immigration process become all the more crucial. Administrative systems must be unfailingly efficient, predictable and transparent as each individual admission becomes more valuable.

Maintaining robust security screening is unquestionably necessary, but it does not require administrative cloudiness. Ottawa can introduce reforms that align security screening with policy goals, but also dictate clearer practices for extended screening cases, giving applicants and employers more predictable expectations. For instance, by:

• Embracing transparency by publishing anonymized statistics, stripped of all personal information, to track extended cases, thus helping policymakers monitor systemic issues while preserving confidentiality.
• Ensuring that prolonged cases trigger automatic reviews if the case passes a set deadline. This would help prevent files from stalling indefinitely, and make delays subject to institutional accountability.
• Finally, requiring improved communication with applicants and employers affected by delays. This would reduce confusion and uncertainty, helping individuals make informed decisions about their futures.

Canada remains a top preference for skilled immigrants, however our credibility depends not only on the numbers we admit but on our institutional reliability and fairness.     

A strategic immigration policy should ensure that screening remains transparent, accountable and efficient. Otherwise, the country risks discovering too late that the real cost of cumbersome processes is measured not in delayed applications but in eligible and desirable people who go elsewhere.

Canada’s ambitions in artificial intelligence are often framed around software innovation, computing power and digital services. Policy debates focus on generative AI, productivity tools and automated decision-making in offices, schools and government.

These discussions matter. But they overlook an emerging frontier of artificial intelligence that is beginning to transform how societies manage living systems.

The next frontier of artificial intelligence will not only be digital. It will be biological.

Across agriculture, food production and environmental monitoring, a new class of systems is beginning to emerge: biological digital twins. These systems create dynamic computational models of living environments by integrating continuous data from animals, infrastructure, climate conditions and operational activities.

Unlike traditional monitoring tools, digital twins do not simply report what is happening. They simulate how a living system is likely to respond before decisions are made.

In sectors such as aerospace, advanced manufacturing and energy, digital twins have already transformed how complex infrastructure is managed. Engineers can test changes in virtual models before applying them to physical systems. Equipment failures can be predicted earlier and performance can be optimized continuously.

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A similar transformation is beginning to take shape in food production and that creates an opportunity for Canada.

If the country engages early, it can help shape both the technological and institutional architecture surrounding biological digital twins. If it waits until these systems are standardized globally, Canadian producers and policymakers may instead find themselves adapting to frameworks designed elsewhere.

There are three practical steps that Ottawa can take now: recognize biological digital twins as emerging strategic infrastructure rather than simply another category of agricultural technology; invest in real-world demonstration environments; and develop governance frameworks alongside technological innovation.

A fast-changing agri-food world

Modern farms already generate large volumes of data. Sensors monitor animal behaviour and health. Cameras track movement and feeding patterns. Environmental systems measure air quality, humidity and temperature. Automated equipment records production levels and operational conditions.

Yet these technologies often operate as separate tools. One system monitors barn climate. Another tracks feeding patterns. Another detects potential health problems. Farmers receive alerts from multiple platforms but rarely see how decisions affect the biological system as a whole.

Biological digital twins change that.

A digital twin creates a continuously updated model of a farm as an integrated living environment. It connects animal welfare, barn climate, energy consumption, productivity and emissions indicators within a single analytical system. Farmers and managers can evaluate management strategies virtually before implementing them.

Feed adjustments can be assessed for their potential impact on methane intensity and milk production. Ventilation strategies can be evaluated against both animal comfort and electricity use. Early disease signals may appear through combined analysis of behavioural, acoustic and environmental data.

In effect, the digital twin becomes an operating system for biological production environments.

Leadership needed

Canada should recognize that this emerging technology represents more than another agricultural innovation. It signals the development of a new layer of infrastructure at the intersection of artificial intelligence, climate accountability and food-system governance.

Globally, the race to lead in AI is often framed around large language models, semiconductor supply chains and consumer software platforms. Those areas are important, but they are also crowded. Many countries are competing for leadership in the same technological spaces.

Canada’s strategic opportunity may lie elsewhere: in applied artificial intelligence for complex real-world systems.

Biological digital twins sit precisely at the intersection of several Canadian strengths. The country has a globally significant agri-food sector, strong research capacity in artificial intelligence and environmental science, and a tradition that emphasizes responsible technology governance.

Food systems are also entering a period of rapid transformation. Producers face increasing pressure to document environmental impacts, demonstrate animal-welfare standards and provide traceability across supply chains. Markets and regulators are demanding more reliable data about how food is produced and how production systems interact with climate and ecosystems.

In this environment, the ability to model and manage biological systems with intelligent infrastructure will become increasingly valuable.

However, the emergence of biological digital twins also raises important policy questions that existing AI strategies rarely address.

Who governs the data generated by living production systems? Who owns predictive models derived from animal behaviour, environmental signals and operational performance? What reliability standards should apply when AI systems operate continuously in biological environments rather than controlled digital settings?

Governments will also need to consider how these systems interact with environmental reporting, food certification programs and animal-welfare oversight. If digital infrastructure becomes necessary for market participation, policymakers must ensure that smaller producers are not structurally disadvantaged.

These questions are beginning to surface internationally, but governance frameworks remain largely undeveloped.

Three practical steps that Canada can take

First, recognize biological digital twins as emerging strategic infrastructure rather than simply another category of agricultural technology. These systems connect artificial intelligence with climate monitoring, environmental verification and food-production management.

Second, invest in real-world demonstration environments. Canada needs living laboratories where researchers, producers and regulators can evaluate digital-twin technologies under realistic biological and climatic conditions.

Third, develop governance frameworks alongside technological innovation. Standards for data stewardship, interoperability and system reliability should evolve in parallel with technological development rather than after widespread adoption.

Public trust will depend on demonstrating that intelligent systems embedded in food production operate transparently, responsibly and in the public interest.

The significance of biological digital twins extends well beyond agriculture.

Climate change, biodiversity pressures and rising global food demand are increasing the complexity of managing living systems. Governments and industries will increasingly rely on predictive tools to balance productivity, environmental sustainability and risk management.

Artificial intelligence capable of modelling living environments responsibly will become a critical capability.

Canada often describes itself as a leader in responsible artificial intelligence. Achieving that ambition will require looking beyond software platforms and urban applications.

Some of the most consequential AI systems of the coming decades will operate in farms, forests, supply chains and environmental monitoring networks where digital intelligence interacts directly with living systems.

Biological digital twins represent one of the earliest manifestations of that shift.

Canada has the research capacity, agricultural diversity and governance credibility to help define this emerging field. Doing so would not only strengthen domestic innovation. It would position the country at the forefront of the emerging intersection of artificial intelligence, climate adaptation and food security.

If Canada wants to lead where AI, climate and living systems converge, biological digital twins are a frontier worth claiming.

National security concerns have taken centre stage as Canada faces cascading crises related to affordability, environmental and geopolitical disruptions to global trade and supply chains and threats to our sovereignty. However, the fundamental importance of food security to national security – and food sovereignty to Canadian sovereignty – remains under-recognized and narrowly understood.

This disconnect is reaching a breaking point as food insecurity across Canada reaches historic levels, affecting approximately 10-million Canadians with that number expected to rise. CEOs of Canada’s largest hunger relief organizations argue that the growing inability of one quarter of Canadians to secure adequate food is a threat to Canada’s resilience, safety, and sovereignty.

Increasingly, this link is being made. A recent commentary in Policy Options explained how the omission of food from Canada’s new Defence Industrial Strategy leaves strategic autonomy over the food system’s critical supply chains unexamined and unprotected. The co-founder of the Council of Canadian Innovators argues that Canada must adopt the mindset that food sovereignty is the ‘next frontier’ of national security investment. Leading agri-food scholars and investment organizations are calling for Canada to seize a sustainable future through increased investment in agri-food resources, technological innovations, and export superpower.

While such investments are imperative, our approach to navigating this ‘next frontier’ must be multi-pronged and multi-scaled ensuring that the benefits of national security investment are most directly felt across Canadian communities, dinner tables, and backyards. To this end, it is critical that community food systems be understood and treated as critical, multi-use infrastructure that is foundational to national sovereignty and resilience.

Canada’s food security disconnect with national defence

In January, the Government of Canada announced plans to develop a national food security strategy to strengthen domestic production and improve access to affordable, nutritious food. This was followed in February by the unveiling of Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy, which notably makes no mention of food, despite one of the key pillars being “securing supply chains for key inputs and goods.”

In his recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that a country that cannot feed itself has few options. Article 3 of the North Atlantic Treaty views civilian preparedness, which rests upon food and water systems, as a central pillar of Allies’ collective resilience and defence. Indeed, the vulnerability of food-insecure populations is evident worldwide, with contemporary examples including the Russian / Ukrainian and Israeli / Palestinian conflicts. Increasing aggression and growing conflict in the Middle East add fuel to the fire.

Canada is not immune.

Food supply chain weaknesses and heavy reliance on foreign imports and processing capacity render Canadian communities vulnerable. Scientists estimate that 30 per cent of all food and beverages are imported, including 80 per cent of fruit and 60 per cent of vegetables. Canada depends on foreign ports, global shipping routes, intercontinental trucking networks, and “just-in-time” distribution models to feed its residents, which assumes uninterrupted energy, transportation, and communications. The Center for Security Policy warns that a typical supermarket chain only has enough food in its stores and warehouses to support a local population for 1-3 days.

Prioritization of export-oriented models, low-cost, high-choice consumption, and centralized efficiencies have compromised regional self-sufficiency. In a volatile era, dependency is liability, and Canadians are being further strapped by exceptionally high levels of corporate concentration that enable record-breaking profits for retail giants despite unparalleled growth in food insecurity.

The community food sector as critical, multi-use infrastructure

Multi-use infrastructure refers to systems that strengthen civilian wellbeing and economic opportunity while enhancing national security. Beyond pipelines, energy grids, transportation corridors, communications networks, and emergency services, community food system infrastructure is critical.

While large-scale agricultural productivity is essential, the community food sector remains underestimated and framed narrowly as emergency relief for those dependent upon charity. This sentiment is mirrored in our social policy and budget allocations by the federal government. Of the $670 million recently pledged, as part of new measures to make food more accessible for Canadians, only three per cent will be directed to community food sector infrastructure (predominantly food banks), while 97 per cent of the funds are directed to industrial production and conventional grocery retailers.

This misses the mark. We must diversify and regionalize supply chains and better illuminate and support the full range of infrastructure, expertise and capacity encompassed by the community food sector.

Community food infrastructure and resilience

Across Canada, a vast community food sector has developed in response to food insecurity. This includes food banks, but also food hubs, social/solidarity supermarkets, community pantries, kitchens, gardens, cooperatives, farmers’ markets, urban agriculture projects, and small-scale retailers that form alternative access points outside the mainstream industrial supply chain.

In more recent years, due to policy gaps, immigrant settlement agencies, community health centres, afterschool programs and religious and cultural organizations are increasingly serving as food access points. A 2022 report by Second Harvest examines this “hidden food network,” detailing that community-based food initiatives outnumber traditional grocery stores roughly four to oneand yet operate with no centralized database or coordinated record of impact. Their scale may be modest individually, but collectively they form a resilient web.

This is not peripheral activity. It is critical infrastructure that requires federal attention and support. These sites diversify and shorten supply chains, provide affordable and culturally appropriate food, facilitate storage and redistribution, support local producers and processing, divert food waste, and create value-added pathways for surplus food.

Community organizations frequently provide wraparound services beyond food distribution, including health and social services, entrepreneurial and employment supports. They also address inequities produced by market withdrawal from low-income neighbourhoods.

Further, in the event of border closures, energy disruptions, or transportation breakdowns, localized food networks buffer shocks and maintain some continuity. They were vital to emergency response capacity during the COVID-19 crisis, where municipalities like the City of Toronto leaned on the community food sector as “last-mile” infrastructure to distribute food. Similar mobilizations occurred nationwide, spurring municipal and regional governments to reconsider their role in bolstering community food infrastructure.

From charity to national security

Local recognition and investment are important. However, the lacklustre support for community-based food system infrastructure at the federal level undermines the realities of their prevalence and potential as assets to be strategically leveraged for Canada’s sovereignty.

Currently, community food infrastructure remains underfunded and framed as emergency relief rather than critical infrastructure, obscuring its dual role in meeting immediate needs while strengthening systemic resilience and national security.

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If food security is national security, food systems must be embedded in infrastructure planning, emergency preparedness, and national defence at multiple scales. Canada's national food security strategy must not only bolster domestic production and export strength but also leverage existing community infrastructure and capacity, and ensure investment dollars flourish at the scale within which Canadians live their daily lives.

This could include formally designating community food hubs, regionalized distribution networks, storage facilities, commercial kitchens, cold storage and refrigerated transport as critical infrastructure, and increasing investment through broadening capital funding and eligibility criteria for programs like the Local Food Infrastructure Fund.

It could also include ramping up public procurement policies to prioritize regional sourcing for Canada’s National School Food Program, hospitals and other government institutions to stabilize local producers, build redundancy and economic multiplier effects. Competition policy reform could address excessive retail concentration and support cooperative, public and community-owned food enterprises. It also means ensuring that food is part of future iterations of the Defence Industrial Strategy.

A sovereign nation must be able to feed itself and prioritize resilient, equitable regional food systems and empowered communities. Local and regional systems of food production, processing, distribution and access require priority investment to fully leverage their capacity as key pathways for bolstering Canadian security.

About nine million Canadians currently share their online banking passwords with third-party apps to get help with budgeting, financial planning or doing taxes. The practice is called screen scraping and the federal Finance Department has warned it is a security risk. All but one of the country’s Big Six banks formally prohibit sharing passwords, but clients do it anyway because there has been no alternative.

The Consumer-Driven Banking Act, to take effect this year, will provide open banking and make screen scraping illegal. Consumers will be able to direct their bank to share specific financial data with authorized third parties through a secure portal (API). The choice will be stark for every financial technology company (fintech) that currently relies on customers to supply passwords to tap into its product: Become accredited under the new law or stop operating.

Canada’s big banks have a built-in advantage. They hold all their customers’ financial data and, until now, no one else could use it. The idea is to give fintechs secure, authorized access to that same data and more competitive financial products will follow. That is correct as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough. Data access alone isn’t enough if the companies meant to use it can’t afford a way in.

Two countries with different results

A case in point is what happened in Australia, which launched its Consumer Data Right in 2020. Australia’s assistant treasurer subsequently said the idea needed a reset. Industry groups called for going back to the drawing board. The government ordered a strategic review.

The review showed that, by the end of 2023, just 0.31 per cent of bank customers had an active data-sharing arrangement. The banking industry had spent 1.5 billion Australian dollars (C$1.45 billion) since 2018 building the infrastructure, but with minimal consumer benefit to show for it.

Compliance costs were a big problem. Australia’s open banking law included a single standard for accreditation. It was more than twice as burdensome for mid-tier banks as it was for major financial institutions. Early-stage fintechs fared worse still. Australia eventually allowed smaller players to receive data through accredited intermediaries at lower cost — an overhaul that took years and arrived after much of the damage was done.

The United Kingdom tells a more successful story. Open banking launched there in 2018. Last year it reached more than 16.5 million users and generated more than 4 billion pounds (C$7.3 billion) in economic value.  The U.K. created a dedicated body, called Open Banking Limited, that developed shared security standards, provided certification services and offered technical assistance to banks and fintechs alike. This reduced the cost of meeting standards and created easier paths to market for the smaller startups the policy was meant to support.

Canada’s open-banking legislation carries the risk of Australia’s initial model without the backstop of the U.K.’s oversight body. While the Consumer-Driven Banking Act streamlines accreditation for already-regulated financial institutions, it rejects tiered accreditation for all other entrants, including small fintechs and technology firms. This means compliance requirements aren’t adjusted for firm size or the level of data access sought. Australia’s comparable single-tier approach choked innovation by smaller players and eventually forced the government to retrofit its legislation.

An engineering problem on top of a financial one

Canada faces the same problem. When the screen-scraping ban takes effect, a startup with 12 engineers will face a higher compliance bar than a regulated bank that qualifies for streamlined accreditation. This compliance moat is real. It gives an advantage to financial institutions and fintechs that already have legal, security and technical infrastructure to meet rigorous standards. They are the very players the policy was designed to challenge.

This matters because building financial products Canadians will use requires more than secure access to a service. It requires engineering expertise to connect software systems securely and reliably. Design capability to make products people trust. Brand recognition in a sector where consumer confidence is everything. Acquiring customers at a cost that makes the economics work. And capital to absorb early losses and survive the years it takes to build a financial brand from scratch.

Canada’s fintech sector is comparatively thin on all of these. In 2025, Canadian fintech investment totalled US$2.4 billion, a fraction of the US$56.6 billion invested in the United States. And most of Canada’s figure came from just three large transactions. The capital available to experiment with and refine a product, absorb compliance costs and compete on quality is not distributed evenly among the participants Ottawa has said it wants to support.

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The new law does include some important safeguards. Any company, foreign or domestic, that wants access to Canadians’ financial data must open its own data to them in return. And financial institutions don’t have to share the tools and models they’ve built from that data, which protects their competitive edge.

But these protections don’t solve the core problem of competitiveness. Sharing data in both directions doesn’t give a small Canadian startup the team or money to build something better with it. Shielding in-house insights from competitors mostly benefits the Big Six — who already hold almost 95 per cent of Canadian banking assets — not the challengers the legislation is meant to help make competitive.

A way forward

Two changes would improve the odds of success for Canada’s open-banking law.

The first is meaningful tiered accreditation for new entrants. As shown by Australia’s experience, compliance requirements that are uniform and demanding, prevent smaller fintechs from entering the mix. The competitive diversity promised never materializes.

The second is a Canadian equivalent to the U.K.’s Open Banking Limited to help develop shared technical infrastructure, reduce integration costs and make standards accessible to smaller participants. The Bank of Canada has been designated as the supervisory authority over the Consumer-Driven Banking Act, but the central bank’s mandate is accreditation, compliance oversight and enforcement — not development of the infrastructure itself.

Open banking promises Canadians better financial products, lower fees and real alternatives to the Big Six banks. That promise depends on a domestic fintech sector capable of building products people choose. Ottawa has opened the door. The question now is who can afford to walk through. 

As the federal government moves ahead with creating a new Financial Crimes Agency (FCA), a key question emerges: Will it transform Canada’s response to terrorist financing or simply add redundancy to an already crowded, ineffective system?

Terrorist organizations rely on complex networks to move funds across borders. To disrupt these flows, Canada needs an agency capable of bridging intelligence and enforcement. The success of the FCA will depend on whether it becomes a dedicated national police force capable of targeting the financiers of terrorism at home and abroad.

Canada’s largest metropolis is now joining global cities such as London and Paris, where tactical officers armed with rifles patrol high-risk public places. The Toronto Police’s new Counter-Terrorism Security Unit is a visible reminder that terror attacks are not distant threats. However, increasing police resources is only part of the solution. Going after the financial lifelines that enable terrorist activity is just as critical.

The FCA can do just that if it is designed to deliver real impact. It should be housed within Public Safety Canada to achieve a security purpose and operational autonomy; absorb FINTRAC to strengthen co-ordination and collaboration; and operate as a full-fledged law enforcement agency with police powers to investigate, arrest and charge perpetrators.

Intelligence gathering alone doesn’t dismantle terrorist networks

Canada’s current approach still suffers from an intelligence‑to‑enforcement gap. Despite a two-decade-old system for monitoring suspicious transactions, the country lacks effective financial crime enforcement.

FINTRAC, the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, is a civilian body that collects and analyzes reports from banks, credit unions and money services businesses. It is not a law enforcement agency. It does not directly fight criminals and terrorists. It cannot conduct criminal investigations, freeze or seize funds, obtain warrants or make arrests. Its role is purely information sharing when certain thresholds are met.

It typically provides personal identifiers and transaction details to law enforcement, which must then follow the paper trail. If the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) want to dig deeper, they must obtain a court order. In the fast-paced, high-risk counterterrorism arena, the point at which intelligence becomes evidence is critical.

Canada has no shortage of legal tools to fight terrorism. Financial institutions are obligated to report suspicious transactions to FINTRAC. However, whether these reports make it to the RCMP, CBSA or CSIS depends on FINTRAC’s analysis.

Further, 90 terrorist entities are listed under the Criminal Code, enabling financial institutions to freeze assets and restrict dealings. However, reporting and listing go only so far. Tangible outcomes require tough enforcement measures. More reporting may produce more data, but it does not automatically generate arrests or prosecutions.

Compliance is not a substitute for policing and police work should not be delegated to banks and credit unions.

The Cullen Commission into money laundering in British Columbia bluntly called out FINTRAC’s inability to pass timely, actionable intelligence to police, despite the high volume of reports it receives from financial institutions, but also found the RCMP’s response to complex financial crimes to be lacklustre.

The commission was not alone in that observation. The RCMP’s Management Advisory Board and the National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians questioned the force’s ability to effectively fulfil its national security policing mandate.

Much of this shortcoming can be attributed to the force’s exceptionally broad mandate, which requires it to balance federal policing priorities with provincial and municipal contract policing obligations.

The RCMP has historically struggled to have the essential financial investigative capacity to fight terrorist financing. As the federal government responds to calls for RCMP reform, there is a clear opportunity to review the force’s role in combating terrorist financing with the establishment of the FCA.

The FCA must be built as a law enforcement agency

Taken together, these challenges suggest that Canada has an opportunity to strengthen its approach to combating terrorist financing through institutional transformation.

First, the new FCA should sit within Public Safety Canada alongside the RCMP, CSIS and CBSA. Criminal investigations require operational autonomy, professional discipline and the ability to pursue complex cases over long periods without political intervention.

Housing the agency within the operational side of government reinforces its security purpose and supports investigative independence.

Second, FINTRAC should be integrated into the FCA so analysts and investigators can work in the same operational environment. The United Kingdom’s National Crime Agency and Ireland’s An Garda Síochána are examples of how this approach can enable effective case management and improve the chances that intelligence becomes admissible evidence.

The Financial Action Task Force, the global money laundering and terrorist financing watchdog, and the Egmont Group, the international body of financial intelligence units, require FINTRAC to be operationally autonomous. With the right firewall, this requirement can still be met when part of the FCA. Moreover, being part of a law enforcement agency provides greater independence from political interference.

Third, the FCA must have the full authority of a police force. While integration would narrow the distance between intelligence and enforcement, it is not enough unless the FCA can conduct investigations, obtain warrants, restrain assets, make arrests and lay charges.

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FCA investigators must receive law enforcement training and hold police powers. They need skills in surveillance, evidence gathering, digital forensics and covert techniques.

Done poorly, the FCA risks becoming another bureaucratic layer that produces reports rather than arrests. Done properly, it can fill the gap between solid intelligence and impactful enforcement. Canada already has tough laws, from terrorist listings to mandatory reporting and asset freezing. The next step is ensuring that those laws are matched by a modern law enforcement organization.

A properly designed FCA, integrated with FINTRAC, staffed with trained specialist investigators and equipped with full police powers, could provide Canada with something it currently lacks – a national law enforcement agency built to disrupt terrorist financing at a large national and global scale, rather than relying on piecemeal enforcement.

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Canada now has a window to build an institutional weapon to help confront national security threats. The FCA must be empowered to effectively and quickly dismantle the Canadian networks that fund terrorism.

Artificial intelligence tools, including ambient listening devices or AI scribes, are transforming the health-care sector. However, they have also opened a new area of clinical risk in terms of privacy, accuracy and potential bias.

To address this, the Office of the Information & Privacy Commissioner for British Columbia released guidelines in January for health-care organizations that have adopted or plan to adopt these tools. At the same time, the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario released guidelines for all provincial entities, including the health-care sector, on privacy and AI tools in general.

Since Canada does not have a comprehensive AI regulatory framework in this area after Bill C-27 died in the previous Parliament, health-care providers and their institutions must ensure that their use of these devises does not violate the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act, health privacy laws and various other frameworks and guidelines.

What is an AI scribe?

The Ontario Medical Association defines an AI scribe as “a digital tool that’s designed to automate time-consuming tasks, like data entry or note-taking. AI scribe technology uses artificial intelligence to summarize or capture spoken conversations and compile them into electronic and clinically relevant medical notes.”

Physicians then review the AI-generated information before it is added to the patient’s record.

The OMA says a provincial study has shown an average decrease in documentation time of 70 to 90 per cent with AI scribe tools when compared to physicians completing the paperwork on their own.

However, scholars and practitioners such as Rahul Mehta warn that these AI scribes often prioritize conversation flow over clinical nuance and that could lead to the omission of critical details that may have been mentioned briefly.

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There may also be errors where the device may add incorrect information due to noise, accents, multiple speakers or even misheard words. Contextual errors may occur during the transcription process because the AI scribes lack an understanding of clinical reasoning. It is possible that the devices may incorrectly transcribe a physician’s prescription, details and more.

As well, there’s always the danger of AI hallucination, which happens when the software generates an output that appears to be correct or plausible but is false or misleading.

More needs to be done

The Ontario privacy commissioner and the Ontario Human Rights Commission recommend proceeding with caution because the risks and benefits remain unclear. That’s a step in the right direction, but overall AI governance measures are both lacking and needed.

Last May, Prime Minister Mark Carney established a new cabinet position, the minister of artificial intelligence and digital innovation, and appointed Evan Solomon to that role.

However, one month later, Solomon said his goal was to put less emphasis on AI regulation and more on finding ways to harness the technology’s economic benefits. In addition, the 2025 federal AI Strategy Task Force was dominated by industry and lacked equal participation from independent researchers, equity-seeking groups and civil society.

A growing trend

The speed of innovation in the health-care sector without clear regulations about the use of these tools is concerning.

Many third-party vendors are also offering AI tools beyond scribes, with features such as recommendations for diagnosis, medications, treatment plans and more. As a result, new risks may emerge because even small errors can have significant consequences in terms of transparency, privacy, safety, equity, access, accountability and informed consent.

Transparency

Last July, Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto announced its emergency department had started a trial of DAX Copilot, an AI scribe. The Ottawa Hospital, the Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre in Barrie, Ont., and Hamilton Health Sciences, among others, are doing the same.

The trials are still underway but according to Sunnybrook and Microsoft’s FAQs, DAX Copilot is expected to reduce the time spent for documentation by around seven minutes per encounter. They say this should allow doctors more time to interact with patients.

The hospital is looking to both technology and private donors to address its long wait times, though it remains unclear whether the AI pilot specifically received third-party funding or whether patients and staff were consulted before adoption.

Risks to privacy and safety

Using ambient listening devices and AI in clinical settings poses real privacy risks.

At Sunnybrook, recorded clinician-patient conversations are retained for 30 days before secure destruction. Since these tools capture confidential health information, explicit patient consent is required before use. When patients do consent, they agree that their data can be used to train the AI model. Those who wish to opt out are informed of this option at registration and may do so at any time.

Overall, many issues also remain unaddressed nationwide, including data protection, informed consent challenges in the emergency department and the accuracy of documentation created by this tool.

For example, the B.C. privacy commissioner warns that health-care practitioners should not rely on implicit consent and that expressed consent should be in writing.

Patients are also encouraged to review their medical records for accuracy, which begs the question of whether the onus is partially shifted to the patient to ensure the accuracy of their medical records.

Equity and accessibility

Research on AI scribes has found that there is a documentation gap between what is said during consultation and what is transcribed. For example, in the United States, there are higher error rates for African American patients than their white counterparts.

Patients from different cultures, disadvantaged groups or individuals who have low literacy levels may face challenges when advocating for themselves. Moreover, due to power asymmetry, they may be more susceptible to potential errors in their recorded conversation as well as being more likely to opt in.

What does this mean for Canadians?

In Ontario, health information custodians who plan to develop, procure or use AI systems must follow Ontario’s Personal Health Information Protection Act when releasing health information via AI scribes and tools, and third-party vendors may be subject to the terms of the federal Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

The provincial privacy commissioner recommends that data custodians stay updated on technological developments and risks.

As AI evolves to include treatment, diagnosis, prescription and lab test recommendations, there needs to be more action to ensure privacy, data security, human oversight and consent.

You cannot build the roof of a house before you pour the foundation. Yet, in the Canadian Arctic, policymakers are attempting a feat of structural impossibility.

Capital is being aggressively mobilized for the Inuit Nunangat University (INU), a prestige project slated to open in 2030 in Nunavut. To date, the project has secured approximately $156 million in commitments, including $52 million from Nunavut Tunngavik Incorporated (NTI) and $50 million from the federal government.

However, the foundational systems required to sustain this institution — public health, primary education and housing — are effectively being left to crumble. This is a “sequence failure,” the prioritization of a capstone academic institution over the biological survival and educational readiness of its intended beneficiaries.

The evidence suggests the Crown and regional Inuit corporations are building a prestige roof on a cracking foundation.

The foundational crisis: Biology and education

The viability of any university depends on the health and educational attainment of its feeder population. In Inuit Nunangat, both are in crisis.

As of 2024, the TB incidence rate in Inuit Nunangat was 246.4 per 100,000 residents, which is more than 600 times the rate of the Canadian-born non-Indigenous population. Transmission of this airborne disease is fueled by a housing crisis where 51.7 per cent of Inuit live in crowded conditions, compared to 8.5 per cent of the non-Indigenous population.

Despite a 2019 federal apology for mismanaging federal funding for TB elimination still falls short of needs. The Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami says: “Cumulative federal TB funding now totals $70.7 million ($27.5M initial, $16.2M reinvestment, and $27M new), leaving a $60.9-million gap against ITK's $131.6 million need."

INU’s capital cost is $1.56 million for each of the expected initial 100 students. This is starkly disproportionate to the federal commitment for TB elimination on both a total and per-person basis. It also constitutes a “triage of prestige,” where high capital value is assigned to a symbolic project while Ottawa is underfunding fixing the lungs of the children who are supposed to fill INU classrooms.

The educational pipeline is equally fragile. Nunavut’s high school graduation rate currently sits at 44.8 per cent. Similar numbers exist across all four Inuit regions from which INU intends to draw students, with rates ranging from approximately 30 per cent in Nunavik to 65 per cent in Nunatsiavut.

A sequence of failure

According to the Nunavut government’s 2024 workforce analysis, the education system faces a deficit of 416 Inuit teachers to meet Article 23 of the Nunavut Agreement’s representative target of Inuit being 85 per cent of total employment in the sector. Furthermore, many teacher positions remain vacant across the territory today.

Without first fixing the K-12 pipeline, INU risks becoming a “ghost campus” — a high-capital asset operating as a stranded liability.

We have seen this before. In the Northwest Territories, the pursuit of a polytechnic university occurred alongside the closure of 19 community learning centres because full-time enrolment across these 19 centres collapsed to just 22 students. This is the logical conclusion of sequence failure: building infrastructure for a student body that the K-12 system has failed to produce.

This sequence failure creates significant legal vulnerabilities for the Crown.

Under Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, as articulated in Carter v. Canada, governments have a duty not to increase the risk of death through arbitrary or grossly disproportionate policy choices. Prioritizing a university while TB receives only 20 per cent of required funding arguably meets this threshold of risk.

Furthermore, the Article 23 gap cannot be closed without a functioning K-12 system. The Supreme Court’s 2025 decision to allow the NTI’s Inuktut education discrimination lawsuit to proceed to trial — although no date has been set — underscores the legal gravity of this failure.

READ MORE: Northern infrastructure needs northern talent

Beyond checkboxes: why reconciliation requires systems thinking

The Crown's fiduciary duty, established in Guerin v. The Queen, is further complicated by private trust law. Inuit-managed wealth is often bound by a “fiduciary cage” that prevents trustees of multi-million-dollar funds from liquidating capital for social emergencies. Under precedents such as Wewaykum Indian Band v. Canada, trustees face personal liability if they take such action.

Without trust law reform, the onus to fund the territory’s core health and educational needs falls squarely on the federal government.

Reversing the institutional brain drain

In addition, an administrative disconnect persists. While national organizations advocate for the “Inuit Nunangat Approach” of building capacity in the North, their senior policy roles frequently require a 100-per-cent in-office presence in Ottawa. This creates an institutional brain drain, requiring the best Inuit minds to leave the North to build the North.

This geographic displacement is compounded by the misapplication of the Inuit Post-Secondary Education Strategy (IPSES), which frequently forces students into debt — directly undermining the very self-reliance the university claims to foster.

Building a university in a region suffering from a 19th-century respiratory disease is a strategic choice. The federal government can help fund INU — a symbol of reconciliation — or prioritize the biological survival of the people with whom it is reconciling.

The choice is clear. The federal government must urgently close the $104.1-million funding gap for tuberculosis elimination and increase fiscal transfers to enable the Nunavut government to address its Inuit teacher shortfall before proceeding with construction of Inuit Nunangat University.

Until the foundations of health and primary education are secure, INU will be not a triumph of higher learning, but a $156-million monument to building the roof before the foundation. Legacy must not overshadow life.

The recently concluded Olympic and Paralympic Games in Italy were the most gender-balanced in history.

At the Olympics, women were 47 per cent of the competitors, 45 per cent of the senior leadership of the organizing committee and 55 per cent of the volunteers. Twelve of the 16 Olympic disciplines were completely gender-balanced. Similarly, at the Paralympics, a record number of women athletes competed. Canadian women brought home 21 of the country’s 36 Olympic and Paralympic medals.

Yet, a dark cloud looms over the future of women’s sport due to efforts taken to exclude transgender women and women with sex variations by certain international sport federations, the U.S. and Alberta governments, and most recently, the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Proponents of such exclusions argue that transgender women and women with sex variations are “biologically male” and therefore have certain physiological characteristics that could provide an unfair edge or pose injury risks to “biologically female” athletes, potentially jeopardizing the integrity of women’s sports categories.

These concerns are unsupported by scientific evidence and unpersuasive.

In the case of women with sex variations, there is an absence of high-quality, independent evidence showing sport performance advantage.

Alberta’s new sport legislation built on fear and discrimination

The fight for trans rights is a women’s rights issue

Further, as geneticists, ethicists and human-rights experts have repeatedly argued, focusing on a single biological characteristic of women with sex variations (such as the presence of a Y chromosome or their natural testosterone levels) ignores the many other factors that contribute to athletic success and remain unregulated, such as height, reach, concentration of fast-twitch muscle fibres, other genetic variations and socioeconomic status.

In the case of transgender women, the scientific research is inconclusive due to small sample sizes and limited generalizability to specific sports, disciplines and events at all levels. This lack of evidence recently led a Belgian court to conclude that a ban on transgender women in international cycling was discriminatory and therefore unlawful.

Proponents of exclusion also ignore those not infrequent cases where transgender women competed in the women’s category without issue, such as women’s flat-track roller derby, where the international sport-governing body has adopted a gender-inclusive eligibility policy.

In keeping with its commitment to gender inclusion and its longstanding opposition to sex testing in international sport, the federal government must denounce efforts to ban transgender women and women with sex variations from women’s sport.

It must:

• make unrestricted gender inclusion mandatory for federally funded sports organizations;
• fund more scientific research into the issue; and
• prohibit international sports events from being held in Canada if they restrict or exclude transgender women athletes or women athletes with sex variations.

A disturbing, growing trend

The IOC just announced a new policy requiring all athletes seeking to compete in the women’s category at IOC events, such as the Olympic Games and Youth Olympic Games, to undergo mandatory genetic screening for the sex-determining region Y (SRY) gene.

The purpose is to identify and exclude transgender women and women with sex variations. Athletes who test positive for the SRY gene are ineligible for the women’s category, except for a limited exemption available only through invasive clinical evaluations.

The new policy was informed by a review conducted by an anonymous working group and replaces the IOC’s 2021 policy framework, which encouraged gender inclusion and was based on consultations with hundreds of athletes and human rights, medical and legal experts.

The new IOC policy amounts to an endorsement and extension of the genetic sex testing practices recently adopted by the international sport federations for athletics, swimming, boxing, and skiing and snowboarding. It paves the way for other international federations to implement the same or similar measures for their non-IOC events, even though sex-testing practices were previously discredited and abandoned in the 1990s on scientific and ethical grounds.

In the United States, President Donald Trump previously took steps to restrict the participation of transgender athletes in women’s sports, including at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics — a decision that now is aligned with the IOC’s new policy. In Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith’s government has banned transgender women and girls aged 12 and older from women’s sports in that province.

In February, the use of mandatory genetic sex testing and categorical bans on transgender women and women with sex variations were condemned by several United Nations human rights experts.

They said such practices are rooted in stereotypes and generalized assumptions of performance advantage rather than robust and sport-specific substantiated evidence. They said this also risks violating the human-rights principles of non-discrimination, bodily and psychological integrity, dignity and privacy.

Three steps for the federal government to take

First, Ottawa must strengthen its existing policies on gender inclusion in sport and make compliance a requirement for federally funded sport organizations. This should incorporate the principles from the IOC’s 2021 Framework on Fairness, Inclusion and Non-Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity and Sex Variations, as well as the 2024 Statement on Trans and Gender-Diverse Inclusion in Sport by former federal minister of sport Carla Qualtrough.

Both emphasize starting from a place of inclusion and restricting eligibility only on sport-specific, evidence-based assessments.

A federal gender-inclusion policy could have a meaningful impact at multiple levels. It could require national sports organizations to ensure that their eligibility rules — and those of their provincial/territorial organizations — comply with human-rights standards.

Such a federal policy could result in a transgender woman or woman with sex variations winning at the national level in an event but being unable to compete at the international level in the same event.

The policy could also encourage national sport organizations that are members of international sport federations to vote against or otherwise oppose sex-testing rules and blanket bans proposed by their international federations. The federal government took this approach during the international campaign to isolate apartheid South Africa in sports.

Similar resistance was recently displayed by the Canadian Paralympic Committee when it voted against the International Paralympic Committee’s decision to readmit Russia, despite its ongoing invasion of Ukraine and history of state-sponsored doping.

Second, Ottawa must fund more scientific research into the regulation of gender in sport. This is essential in light of the lack of peer-reviewed, sport-specific evidence assessing whether performance differences exist between transgender women, women with sex variations and other women athletes.

Third, the federal government must strengthen its policy for hosting international sports events to prohibit such events in Canada where sex testing is required or where transgender women athletes or women athletes with sex variations are categorically banned.

Such an action could encourage other countries to follow suit and could send a powerful message to international sport federations and the IOC that national governments will not be an accomplice to human rights violations in sport.

This measure would also pre-empt the staging of international sport events likely to violate Canadian human-rights laws and therefore alleviate the burden that would otherwise fall on women athletes to bring their own legal challenges to the eligibility rules governing an international sport event being held in Canada.

Only by taking these three steps will the federal government be on the right side of protecting women’s sport.

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Canada faces two intertwined crises: a housing affordability crunch and a climate challenge, with emissions from the housing sector declining too slowly to meet climate targets. Both issues are steadily undermining the country’s housing stock.

Home energy efficiency must be at the centre of public policy, both to meet climate commitments and to ease the single largest expense for most households over the long term.

Over the past twenty years, the average living space per person in Canada has increased by about 20 per cent, a significant trend that automatically increases the need for heating, cooling and maintenance. Energy efficiency in residential housing stock is improving in all provinces, but growing homes partially offsets these gains. This means some Canadians are living in larger, better-equipped spaces, while a growing number of others struggle to afford adequate housing.

At the same time, the energy transition requires a rapid reduction in emissions from the residential sector, which account for 12 per cent of national emissions. Most of these emissions come from the use of natural gas for heating. Decarbonizing the residential building stock—through electrification, improving the thermal performance of buildings, and integrating renewable energy—is a major driver for reducing the country’s carbon footprint.

This raises a key question: how can housing be made more affordable while accelerating decarbonization? Solutions exist, but they require a significant shift in public policy, as well as better co-ordination among federal, provincial, and municipal governments.

Prioritizing the most vulnerable households

The housing crisis does not affect households uniformly. Low-income individuals often spend more than 30 per cent—up to 36 per cent in British Columbia—of their income on housing. This level of financial strain leaves very little room to invest in energy-efficient renovations, even when these would reduce bills in the long term. To prevent the energy transition from exacerbating inequalities, policies must first target these households.

This involves redirecting more resources toward the construction and renovation of community housing with affordable rents. These investments should also incorporate the highest energy efficiency standards from the design phase to ensure lasting affordability. Housing a person in a well-insulated, electrified, and energy-efficient home is a far more cost-effective social and economic investment than multiplying ad-hoc programs to help pay bills.

Optimizing the use of residential space

The steady increase in living space per person is one of the main drivers of rising costs and a barrier to reducing emissions. Encouraging more efficient use of space must become an explicit goal of housing policies. This can be achieved through tax incentives that reward households living in smaller spaces or promote the creation of shared housing.

Ultimately, a re-evaluation of property taxes could help discourage the widespread under-occupancy of certain housing units, while financing new affordable units for those who need them most.

Raising standards and accelerating renovation

Structural improvements to the housing stock are imperative. The average energy performance of homes remains far below international standards, particularly those of passive houses, which consume up to 80 per cent less energy for heating.

Modernizing the National Building Code to require standards close to net-zero energy use for all new construction would represent a major turning point. Some provinces—such as British Columbia with the BC Energy Step Code—are already demonstrating that such an approach is possible.

But the most difficult challenge lies in retrofitting the existing housing stock. Most Canadian homes are poorly insulated, leak air, and are equipped with inefficient heating systems. A national energy retrofit strategy, accompanied by mandatory targets and robust support programs for low-income households, is essential to reduce bills and emissions.

Technologies and economic incentives: underused tools

The arrival of new technologies—home automation, smart water heaters, home energy storage, and bidirectional charging of electric vehicles—is opening the door to greater energy flexibility in homes. These tools help reduce consumption during peak hours, when electricity is most expensive to produce and is more carbon-intensive.

However, their deployment remains too limited. To encourage their adoption, electricity rates must better reflect the actual costs of the grid, while providing financial protection for vulnerable households. More transparent pricing, combined with targeted subsidies for energy-efficient technologies, would help align consumer behavior with the needs of a decarbonized electricity grid.

Toward an integrated housing-climate strategy

The housing crisis and the climate crisis are not two separate issues. Policies that increase the energy resilience of buildings also make housing more affordable by sustainably reducing utility bills. Conversely, accessible and well-designed housing facilitates the transition to a low-carbon society.

To succeed, Canada must adopt an integrated strategy that combines three pillars:

• Social: targeting low-income households and promoting shared living arrangements.
• Structural: building and renovating to high energy-efficiency standards.
• Technological and economic: supporting innovation and sending the right price signals.

With such an approach, the country can transform the residential sector into a driver of social equity and climate success.

This article is excerpted from a study  conducted for the Institute for Research on Public Policy (IRPP) in partnership with the Action Council on Affordability.

Prime Minister Mark Carney’s recent announcement of billions in new investments for northern infrastructure and defence signals a major shift in Canada’s approach to Arctic and northern development. Strengthening transportation networks, energy systems and security capacity across the North is increasingly seen as essential to Canada’s economic resilience and sovereignty.

But infrastructure alone will not build resilient northern communities. What’s needed is investment in educational pathways that allow these communities to train and retain their own professionals.

Roads, energy grids and ports require people to design them, maintain them and sustain the institutions that allow communities to thrive. Engineers, health professionals, educators, administrators and skilled trades workers are as critical to northern development as capital investments.

Yet across northern and rural Canada, many communities face persistent shortages of these professionals. Clinics struggle to recruit physicians. Schools experience chronic teacher vacancies. Infrastructure projects often depend on external consultants and rotating staff from southern cities.

These shortages are typically framed as recruitment challenges. In reality, they reflect a deeper problem: Canada’s professional workforce pipeline is unevenly distributed across the country.

If Canada is serious about northern development and national resilience, it must address the upstream barriers that shape who is able to enter professional training in the first place.

Workforce shortages begin long before recruitment

Canada has long struggled to recruit and retain skilled professionals outside major urban centres. Studies consistently document shortages of physicians, nurses and allied health professionals in rural regions. Similar patterns exist in education, engineering, infrastructure management and other professions essential to community development.

Indigenous communities – particularly those in northern and fly-in regions – often experience the most severe effects. Many rely on temporary staffing arrangements such as rotating clinicians, short-term teaching contracts or external consultants.

Policy responses have traditionally focused on downstream solutions: recruitment incentives, locum programs and international recruitment. These approaches can help address immediate shortages, but they do little to change the structural conditions that determine whether communities can produce their own professionals.

Communities cannot recruit professionals they were never structurally positioned to train.

The overlooked role of secondary education

One of the most significant – and least discussed – barriers shaping the professional workforce pipeline is access to secondary education.

Post-secondary and professional programs in fields such as medicine, nursing, engineering and education typically require prerequisite courses in advanced mathematics and science at the high school level. Yet many rural and remote schools struggle to offer these courses consistently. Teacher shortages, limited laboratory infrastructure, small enrolment numbers and insufficient student supports often make it difficult to sustain such programs.

For many students, pursuing these courses requires leaving their home communities to attend high school elsewhere.

While families often welcome these opportunities, relocation can present significant challenges. Students may face separation from family networks, financial pressures and educational environments that do not reflect Indigenous cultures, languages or histories.

By the time university applications are submitted, many potential professional pathways have already narrowed.

Education is not the only structural barrier shaping workforce shortages in rural Indigenous communities. Infrastructure gaps, economic inequities, jurisdictional complexities between federal, provincial and territorial systems, and the ongoing impacts of colonial policies all play important roles.

But access to secondary education remains one of the most powerful upstream determinants of whether Indigenous youth can pursue professional careers in fields such as health care, engineering, education and public administration.

Without those pathways, workforce shortages are not simply difficult to solve – they are structurally reproduced.

Education policy is workforce policy

This issue is also closely tied to Canada’s commitments under reconciliation and Indigenous rights frameworks.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Calls to Action urge governments to close education gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students and increase the number of Indigenous professionals in fields such as health care. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples affirms Indigenous Peoples’ rights to education systems that reflect their cultures and support participation in shaping programs affecting their communities.

Improving access to education pathways in rural and northern Indigenous communities is, therefore, not only a workforce strategy. It is part of Canada’s broader responsibilities under reconciliation.

At the same time, strengthening local professional capacity contributes directly to national resilience. Communities that can educate and train their own professionals are better positioned to sustain stable health systems, functioning schools and reliable infrastructure.

In remote regions where external recruitment can be unpredictable, local capacity becomes essential.

Community-based education offers a path forward

Several initiatives across Canada demonstrate that community-based approaches to professional education can help address upstream barriers.

Teacher education programs developed in partnership with Indigenous communities offer one example. By delivering coursework locally, these programs allow students to pursue professional training while remaining connected to their communities.

READ MORE: Why does the U.S. support Chinese interests in the Arctic?

ALSO: The great paradox of the North

The Indigenous Teacher Education Program at Queen’s University illustrates this model. Through partnerships with Indigenous communities, the program delivers teacher education programming within community settings, allowing students to complete their training while remaining close to family and culture. Many graduates return to teach in their home communities, strengthening local education systems and providing visible role models for younger students.

Programs like these demonstrate that when professional education is accessible and grounded in community partnerships, participation and retention improve.

Policy priorities for governments

If Canada’s northern development strategy is to succeed, workforce and education policy must be aligned. Several policy priorities could help move this work forward:

• Invest in secondary education capacity in rural and northern communities. Teacher recruitment, science laboratory infrastructure and reliable digital connectivity are essential to ensure students can access prerequisite courses for professional programs.
• Expand community-based professional education models. Distributed and hybrid training programs in teaching, nursing, medicine and engineering allow students to pursue professional education without leaving their communities.
• Develop targeted bridging and preparatory programs. Pre-professional courses in mathematics and science along with academic skills-building can help students meet admission requirements for post-secondary and professional programs.
• Integrate workforce and education planning. Federal and provincial workforce strategies should explicitly incorporate education access as part of long-term workforce development.
• Support Indigenous-led partnerships. Education and workforce initiatives must be developed collaboratively with First Nations, Inuit and Métis governments to ensure programs reflect community priorities and governance structures.

Building northern capacity from the ground up

Canada’s workforce shortages are often discussed in terms of vacancies in clinics, classrooms and infrastructure projects. But these gaps reflect deeper structural dynamics that shape who has access to education and professional opportunity.

Across the country, Indigenous youth express strong interest in careers that support the well-being of their communities – in health care, education, engineering and public leadership.

Ensuring those aspirations can be realized requires sustained attention to the systems that shape educational opportunity.

Federal investments in northern infrastructure may build roads and energy systems. But building resilient northern communities will require investing in something equally foundational: the education pathways that allow these communities to train and retain their own professionals.

The war in the Middle East, precipitated by an attack on Iran by the United States and Israel, has reopened debate in Canada about oil exports, global strategic petroleum reserves and what it could all mean for our country’s energy sector.

Human cost should always be the first consideration in times of war, but how this conflict will affect oil supplies cannot be ignored. Some see it as an opportunity to expand Canada’s industry, but they have mistaken a temporary price shock for a durable market signal. In fact, the war highlights the Canadian oil sector’s exposure to global risk and the dangers of staking our economic future on that industry’s long-term outlook.

Major Canadian energy and climate policy questions are at issue right now in ongoing negotiations between Canada, Alberta and oilsands producers. Some are attempting to use recent conflicts in Ukraine, Venezuela and the Middle East to advance their goals in these talks.

This conflict has, predictably, caused a spike in oil prices to well over US$100 a barrel. The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has restricted near-term supply and driven up consumer prices. Four years ago, we also saw prices rise when Russia, a major oil and gas producer, invaded Ukraine.   

War-related price increases provide a windfall for producers, including Canadian firms, and for governments such as Alberta that collect royalties. These spikes tend to be short-lived, because prices settle down as the market develops a workaround. Options can include increased production from other suppliers, rerouted shipping, governments dipping into oil reserves or, in Russia’s case, evasion of sanctions.

Price spikes are temporary, volatility is permanent

Price shocks can work the other way too. In 2014, a price crash caused by a confluence of circumstances led to the restructuring of Alberta’s oilsands. The world was not using less oil. Demand was growing steadily. But China’s economic growth was slower than expected, a lot of new U.S. production came online very quickly and, instead of reducing output to keep prices high, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) decided to stay the course and fight it out for market share.

A barrel of Western Canadian Select lost 80 per cent of its value inside of two years. This led to a recession in Alberta and a huge provincial deficit. The industry learned an important lesson about the volatility of oil markets, even if successive Alberta governments have not.

Oilsands producers now protect themselves from future price crashes by focusing tightly on cost-cutting through layoffs, efficiency through automation and economies of scale through corporate mergers. Employment in the oil and gas sector for every thousand barrels per day of production fell to 22 jobs in 2023 from 38 in 2012. That’s a 42 per cent drop, even though production grew by 47 per cent over the same period.

The 2014 crash permanently changed how oilsands companies approached risk in their capital investment. They abruptly stopped putting money into new megaprojects meant to increase oil production in the future, while creating many construction and engineering jobs in the meantime. Despite wholly new facilities, called greenfield projects, receiving regulatory approval, not one has gone ahead in years. The Alberta Energy Regulator predicts that from 2025 to 2030, capital expenditures in the oilsands will be about 45 per cent of the 2014 peak.

Beyond the headlines caused by geopolitical shocks, there are deeper trends in the world’s energy use that should give pause to anyone hoping to revive capital investment in Alberta’s oilpatch, including a new pipeline to the West Coast.

Modelling published last year by two major multinationals, BP and Shell, examines the expected future of global energy. BP’s model estimates that, despite substantial demand from China in the past decade, global oil growth will peak at 103.4 million barrels per day in 2030. Consumption will be slightly lower by 2035 and decline significantly after that to below 85 million barrels a day in 2050.

Shell published three different scenarios: One is focused on reducing carbon emissions. Another posits isolationism and energy security concerns as top priorities. The third involves artificial intelligence (AI) and quantum computing, which create extreme demands on electricity generation. In all three, electric vehicles (EVs) are the main reason for the world reaching peak oil demand within the next few years, while a growing supply of low-carbon fuels contributes to the decline that follows.

The Economist Intelligence Unit estimates EV sales in China reached 13.8 million in 2025 — more than 37,000 each day. As BP and Shell note, this is creating a permanent hole in global oil demand that will only grow larger, especially when coupled with China’s aggressive export of electric cars.

Global demand trends point to long-term decline

Regardless of short-term shocks, we can expect downward pressure on oil prices.  Earlier this month, the Chinese government released its latest five-year plan, which includes reaching peak petroleum consumption through 2026-2030 before reducing its dependency by increased use of green energy.

China’s planning is driven by economics and geopolitics. The cheapest and most secure way for 1.4 billion people to get around is with EVs charged, in large part, by low-cost domestic wind and solar generation. And China isn’t alone in wanting to reduce its exposure to global energy markets. European governments scrambled to find alternate sources of natural gas after Russia invaded Ukraine. Four years on, Europe is doubling down on low-cost renewables — swapping a temporary workaround for a permanent transition.

READ MORE: Canada’s rising oil exports to U.S. refineries have become a risk

In a world characterized by unpredictable U.S. trade policy and potential supply chain disruptions, wind and solar electricity that is locally generated is an attractive proposition, especially with an electrified passenger vehicle fleet. This is a proven, low-cost alternative for policymakers fretting about high oil. The war in the Middle East underscores the urgency of reducing exposure to global oil and gas markets by building up low-cost, clean electricity generation.

The world won’t stop burning oil any time soon. But the business case for multibillion-dollar, multi-decade oilsands projects is eroding quickly. This is also why Prime Minister Mark Carney must deliver on his repeated promise that no taxpayer money will be put toward a new oil pipeline. Canadians should not be asked to take on a risky investment that the private sector won’t.

Politicians and lobbyists will always frame the news of the day as another reason to advance their preferred goal, whether that news be the conflict in the Middle East or U.S. intervention in Venezuela. But Canadians should consider the bigger picture. The long-term economics of Canada’s oilsands are influenced far more by global demand trends than by short-term disruptions to supply. The oil industry already seems to know this. Decision-makers should recognize it, too.

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The federal government recently released a new defence industrial strategy, with $6.6 billion of new funding attached. It comes with the lofty goal of eventually producing 70 per cent of our defence equipment in Canada.

There are many moving pieces to the strategy, but the question on many people’s minds is this: Can’t we just buy planes and ships from other countries? It’s a logical thought, but one that doesn’t stand up to recent history.

Considering the threats to Canada’s sovereignty and economy from U.S. President Donald Trump, let alone a scenario where tensions persist beyond his second administration, it would be useful to have the capability to build advanced military hardware ourselves, as well as to have a greater diversity of international suppliers and partners in building facilities here.

That’s called strategic autonomy. Its value has been shown around the world.

Strategic autonomy and the invasion of Ukraine

In February 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin launched an immoral and illegal full-scale invasion of Ukraine. While the free world was quick to denounce the move and introduce measures to punish Russia and to aid Ukraine, Putin had leverage.

After all, Europe had long allowed itself to become dependent on Russian natural gas exports. The world experienced an inflationary shock as energy, fertilizer and wheat prices increased. This arguably caused some of our allies to be less aggressive in starving the Russian war machine through sanctions and in arming Ukraine – thus prolonging the war.

Leverage can force uncomfortable compromises. However, it can also work both ways in a highly integrated global economy.

In March 2022, Boeing announced it would join rival Airbus in cutting off aircraft parts and services to Russia. Given the highly specialized components required to keep jets in the air, Russia has had to find ways to circumvent sanctions to keep its struggling airline industry going. It’s not clear that it is sustainable. Indeed, Moscow is making a major push to develop its own aerospace industry, which isn’t going well.

Parts aren’t the whole story, though. Services such as software updates and support are also important. When you’re buying complex equipment, you’re buying a relationship. If that relationship deteriorates, so does your fleet. That’s why Russia is trying to build strategic autonomy in critical sectors – hopefully too late.

Boeing and Airbus cutting off Russia is a reminder that corporate actors can also reassess their relationships with various countries.

That brings us to a more worrisome example: Starlink. SpaceX granted Ukraine access to its satellite internet service when the war began in February 2022. It was immensely helpful for Ukrainian defences. However, the company refused to allow its use in Russian-occupied Crimea, despite Ukrainian requests.

“We will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3,” SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted at the time – despite the fact that the U.S. government was explicitly on the side of Ukraine then.

This is top of mind because rumours emerged recently about an alleged “kill switch” that can disable the $19-billion F-35 fighter jet fleet that Canada is buying from Lockheed Martin. The story was so alarming that the Pentagon felt the need to deny it.

Canada’s dilemma: efficiency versus security

It doesn’t have to be true, though. The companies – on their own or at the request of their government – could simply not send customers parts or software updates. Indeed, Vice Admiral Mark Norman noted in a recent interview: “Significant aspects of the F-35’s advanced capabilities would be nullified [if we lost American support.]”

Relations with the United States aren’t as assured as they once were. Scenarios of being cut off from critical supply chains are something Canada needs to contemplate, not just with the United States, but with all our allies. As we’ve learned the hard way, one election can shift an ally from a friend to an unreliable partner.

It’s difficult to restore assurances of security and stability once they’ve been called into question in such an unprecedented manner. In the end, increasing trade with a greater variety of countries helps hedge against the possibility that one of our suppliers might become unreliable.

We also need to build more ourselves because that’s the only relationship over which we have full control. We’re not going to become totally autonomous, but we can minimize the odds of having our security compromised by foreign surprises by building and protecting strategic industries such as defence manufacturing, mining and steel production.

There are trade-offs between the efficiency of free global commerce and threats to security. Protectionism tends to be inefficient, but as Prime Minister Mark Carney noted in Davos, we need to take the world “as it is.”

Defence procurement in a changing world order

When it comes to strategic goods such as military equipment, the risk of a supplier weaponizing trade is enough to warrant forgoing a bit of efficiency.

Some critics rightly worry that giving preference to domestic firms might lead Canada to buy inferior equipment at a higher cost. Another concern is the government’s potential use of defence spending as an inefficient and unsustainable job-creation program. In a perfect world, Canada wouldn’t need to focus on domestic production.

Indeed, supply chains are so highly globalized because that’s efficient. If every country aimed for self-sufficiency, the world would be far less productive. Having 195 commercial jet manufacturers wouldn’t be as efficient as having a few large manufacturers with deep expertise and global scale.

There’s no guarantee that new or expanded Canadian defence companies will be as cost-effective as current vendors.

Much of this country’s military hardware comes from a small number of suppliers mostly based in the U.S. If we simply put in new orders with existing firms, we’re in line with everyone else.

One way to get around that line is to build our own. One cannot simply go shopping for an off-the-shelf submarine or fighter jet. Having the capacity to build and maintain such complex equipment through partnerships is one way that Canada can not only build resilience into our supply chain, but also build additional supply.

Sending a market signal to domestic producers can help move the needle on overall defence production. Building factories requires years of lead time, so committing to buying domestic content gives potential suppliers and producers a measure of certainty. Otherwise, companies may worry that lofty pronouncements will fade away if geopolitical concerns settle down. Tangible financial commitments would ease those concerns.

Of course, none of this is easy. Industrial policies can easily go sideways whether through bad luck or poor execution. But Canada doesn’t have much choice except to try.

That isn’t to say Canada should build everything itself. But building more domestically would reduce our supply chain risks while also making meaningful contributions to NATO, which has underpinned Canada’s security since the end of the Second World War.

While we don’t want to be as reliant as we have been on allies for weapons production, we nevertheless want to be good allies for as long as our friends remain friendly.

Finding the right partners

Partnering with foreign companies willing to locate production in Canada can help develop local talent and build out the broader defence ecosystem.

For extremely complex equipment developed over generations, it can make more sense to sign agreements with foreign producers that are willing to open factories in Canada, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. One key benefit of this is that know-how and facilities don’t just disappear if situations change.

Consider fighter jets. Trump’s talk of annexation led Ottawa to review its planned purchase of new F-35 fighter jets. This isn’t a mere trade issue. If the American government is serious about using economic coercion against this country, its control over the technology that underpins our defence comes with risks.

While it remains true that our air defences are deeply intertwined, the U.S. government has mused about altering or eliminating NORAD more than once – most recently over the prospect of Canada choosing Swedish-built Gripen jets.

In 2021, the Department of National Defence deemed the F-35 superior to the Gripen “by a mile.”

However, it would be useful to have a greater diversity of suppliers and to have the capability to build advanced military hardware ourselves. This is why the federal government does not appear to be ruling out the Gripen.

The maker of the Gripen, Saab, has made some lofty promises about job creation. While this consideration should not be the primary aim of Canada’s defence industrial strategy, it does present an opportunity to accelerate the rebuild of our defence industrial base and to bolster our already strong aerospace industry. Canadian companies already build commercial jets, business jets and turboprops, so it’s not like starting from scratch.

Some have argued that choosing the Gripen over the F-35 would be a mistake. Others have argued that each serves a need. There are technical questions involved that are difficult for civilians.

READ MORE: Odd innovations in Canadian defence policy

ALSO: A defence budget increase will need a policy rethink

But these questions are inextricably linked with our future relationship with the United States – something that is largely beyond the control of Canada alone.

Interoperability with NORAD is one of the reasons cited for the F-35. That is now being used by American officials to suggest that bad things may happen if we don’t buy more F-35s. That feels like the opposite of strategic autonomy.

The federal government must weigh all these considerations against purely operational ones. As Carney argued in Davos, if great powers go it alone, middle powers will have to come together. Two middle powers partnering on fighter jet production may well be an example of that approach in action.

The same principle applies to submarines. Canada is considering buying new subs from either South Korea or Germany. In both cases, the negotiations appear to be about more than dollars and cents.

Ottawa is shopping for strategic partners, after all. There are no guarantees it will get it right. But bringing physical production onshore means that if one of them becomes an unreliable partner – either through an election or other event – at least we’ve got the capacity to adapt.

British Columbia is no stranger to housing policy controversy.

In 2024, the provincial government amended its residential tenancy regulations to better define supportive housing as non-profit permanent housing paired with support for people who have experienced homelessness or are at risk of homelessness to live independently. Those changes also gave operators new tools, including the ability to manage guests and conduct wellness checks.

The changes were well intentioned, but the process drew criticism from advocacy organizations which felt that tenant rights were eroded by the changes.

Two years later, the province has returned with Bill 11, which includes more expansive proposed amendments to the province’s Residential Tenancy Act. The bill, which is in first reading, amends the act to even more explicitly define supportive housing and the rules governing it.

This time, the government did consult widely. But having listened more carefully, did it hear the right things? More importantly, did it respond with the right policies?

The answer is no. The bill contains provisions that could significantly hurt many vulnerable people. The province should go back to the drawing board on its most punitive provisions and build in proportionality tools that tenants, providers and adjudicators need to navigate these issues with fairness and humanity.

What Bill 11 proposes

Bill 11 introduces several significant changes.

It creates new grounds for supportive housing operators to end a tenancy if a tenant or anyone they permit on the property is found in possession of a weapon or if a weapon is observed in plain view during a “lawful entry,” such as a person responding to a maintenance request.

It also expands the grounds for eviction due to misconduct. Previously, evictions on these grounds were limited to conduct affecting the landlord and other tenants. Bill 11 extends protections to any “authorized person” on the premises – a broad category that includes contractors, health-care workers, guests and others.

As well, Bill 11 grants supportive housing operators the ability to temporarily restrict tenant access to part or all of a property in critical situations and enables them to apply for a temporary order to limit tenant access to other parts of the building, without requiring that the tenant be notified of the application. This is consistent with emergency orders elsewhere that give landlords tools to quickly respond to urgent situations.

The bill also attempts to clarify where and how the act applies to supportive housing by distinguishing it from transitional housing, which is exempt from the Residential Tenancy Act and which has a defined end date (i.e., is time-limited). This clarification includes new regulation-making powers to formally designate certain addresses as transitional housing.

On paper, these changes respond to genuine operational pressures facing supportive housing operators. However, in practice, several provisions raise serious concerns about proportionality, tenant rights and the unintended consequences of blunt legislative tools applied to deeply complex situations.

The problem with weapons-based eviction

The new weapons-related grounds for eviction are perhaps the most alarming element. Under the proposed changes, a tenant can be evicted not only for personally possessing a weapon, but because someone they permitted on their property had one or because a weapon was simply observed during a lawful entry.

The first problem is that "weapon" is not clearly defined in the bill. Items that might be classified as weapons could include common things such as a kitchen knife or a baseball bat. This matters enormously when someone's home is on the line.

The second problem is scope. Holding a tenant responsible for the actions of a visitor introduces a form of liability that is particularly dangerous in cases of gender-based violence and intimate partner violence. Following separation, victims of such violence often face continued threats and coercion, and may not have the option of moving out of the unit or building.

Allowing those circumstances to become grounds for eviction, without any mechanism to account for coercion or vulnerability, is not just a policy gap. It is a potential pathway to punishing survivors.

The third and perhaps most systemic problem is the complete absence of proportionality mechanisms. Bill 11 includes no option other than eviction on weapons-related grounds, no pathway to mediation and no conditional order process through which tenants and landlords could negotiate an agreement that avoids eviction.

Comparative research on eviction protections across Canadian provinces and territories places British Columbia among the weakest jurisdictions for conditional orders. In a context where supportive housing tenants who are evicted frequently have nowhere to go but the street, the absence of any off-ramp is not a minor oversight. It is a structural failure.

Broadened misconduct grounds: Who is actually protected?

The expansion of misconduct grounds to include incidents involving contractors, health-care workers and other authorized persons on the property addresses a real gap. Previously, behaviours that threatened anyone outside the limited landlord-tenant relationship were covered only narrowly by the act. The intent to protect frontline workers is legitimate and deserves acknowledgment.

But the implementation raises difficult questions. Under the proposed rules, a conflict — such as a heated exchange — between a tenant and an “authorized person” could potentially constitute grounds for eviction if the authorized person reports feeling their safety was affected.

This is an extremely low bar, particularly given that supportive housing tenants often live with mental health challenges, substance use issues, trauma histories and chronic stress. The same circumstances that make someone vulnerable enough to need supportive housing may also make them more likely to experience and express conflict in ways that could trigger these new provisions.

More troubling still, these changes apply to all rental properties in British Columbia, not just supportive housing. The absence of mediation requirements or conditional orders before eviction means the threat of losing one's home becomes possible as a consequence for a much wider range of interpersonal conflicts, with no obligation to explore less disruptive remedies first.

Temporary access restrictions and the right to possessions

Bill 11 also allows supportive housing operators to temporarily restrict tenant access to their property and their personal possessions. The exemption from Section 26(3) of the act, which otherwise limits a landlord's ability to seize personal property, is especially concerning.

Research by scholars such as Alexandra Flynn and Nick Blomley has documented the profound significance of personal possessions for people experiencing poverty and homelessness. Objects that may seem insignificant to outside observers often carry deep personal, practical and emotional weight for these people.

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Breaking down government silos to address the crises of homelessness and housing

Policies that erode access to those possessions, even temporarily, extend a long history of regulatory frameworks that treat the belongings of low-income people as lower status or more disposable.

In the coming weeks, it will be important to see what clarifications are made in the  regulations. The bill includes no maximum time for access restrictions, no mechanism tied to meeting agreed-upon conditions and no expiration clause. Without these safeguards, what is framed as a temporary emergency tool could function as an indefinite punitive measure.

Transitional housing designation: Clarity or new bureaucracy?

The bill's attempt to clarify the scope of the act through formal designation of transitional housing does address genuine legal confusion. The B.C. Court of Appeal decision in McNeil v. Elizabeth Fry Society highlighted how housing can be legally classified as transitional even when tenants have lived there for years with no concrete transition plan, meaning they lack the protections of the act despite having genuine homes.

Designating specific addresses as transitional may reduce some of this ambiguity, but it risks creating a new problem: that bureaucratic classification, rather than lived reality, determines legal protection.

A better approach would establish clear guidelines on maximum residency lengths in transitional housing and create an explicit pathway through which long-term residents can access the fuller protections of supportive housing tenancy, regardless of how their building is formally categorized.

The bigger picture

Bill 11 did not emerge in a vacuum. British Columbia's affordable housing crisis is decades in the making. The province faces a shortfall of hundreds of thousands of affordable homes, with estimates suggesting Vancouver alone needs more than 50,000 units.

Supportive housing providers operate at the sharp end of this crisis — understaffed, underfunded and caught between the needs of vulnerable tenants and the limits of strained operating budgets.

In that context, providers have sought more robust funding models but instead have been given legislative tools to manage increasingly difficult situations.

It is important that the government has responded. But the solutions offered in Bill 11 are in critical ways the wrong ones. Making it easier for providers to evict tenants does not reduce the underlying pressures they face. It simply relocates the problem to the street.

What is actually needed, and notably absent from Bill 11, is a serious investment in proportionality mechanisms: mandatory mediation before eviction filings, conditional orders that allow landlords and tenants to set fair expectations, and options that give tenants a genuine path to keeping their homes when the underlying concern can be addressed.

British Columbia has made real progress in recent years in protecting tenants from no-fault evictions. Bill 11 risks undermining that progress by introducing fault-based grounds so broad, and remedies so one-dimensional, that the net effect is a significant weakening of housing security for some of the province's most vulnerable residents.

Getting housing policy right is difficult. But getting it wrong again has consequences that cannot be papered over with consultation processes or regulatory amendments.

Women’s progress in Canada is often discussed in general terms, yet one reality still largely absent from national conversations is the gendered cost of disability‑related caregiving.

In a survey of 902 Ontario mothers of autistic children, our research team found that mothers earned only 66 per cent of fathers’ incomes. This disparity does not result from ambition or choice. It reflects a system that relies on mothers’ unpaid labour when formal supports fall short, placing them at heightened risk of burnout and labour‑market withdrawal, either partial or complete. 

Flexible, caregiver-friendly work arrangements and accessible, adequately funded government support services could help close the gap and achieve gender equity.

Personal, economic costs of caregiving responsibilities

Raising an autistic child typically requires parents – most often mothers – to act as advocates, co-ordinators, educators and case managers across school, health and social-service systems. In our study, mothers reported spending an average of 9.4 hours per week managing these responsibilities. More time spent navigating services predicted poorer maternal mental health, even after accounting for income, education and a child’s support needs.

In other words, system design – waitlists, paperwork, inconsistent eligibility and being called upon during the workday to assist with their child – has measurable consequences for women’s well‑being and employment stability.

Open‑ended survey responses revealed the personal and economic costs of these caregiving responsibilities. Many mothers described career sacrifices they felt compelled to make.

One wrote: “I am not able to secure the executive-level job and pay I am qualified for because of the unpredictability of my child's outbursts and inability of the school to provide [educational assistant] support which he requires…This puts financial pressure on the family and forces us to choose the types and levels of support our child receives.”

Others recounted losing jobs when daytime appointments and care needs collided with inflexible schedules. “I loved my job and losing it was really hard for me,” one participant said. “They were not happy that I often had to leave because of my son’s appointments.”

For many, the daily reality was an unsustainable balancing act. One mother explained that after being denied flexible hours and time for appointments, she ultimately quit. “I couldn’t cope with the stress and pressure of maintaining employment there when my child needed to be cared for,” she said.

Another described working extra hours to pay for therapies, only to see marital stress and burnout rise: “This way of life is unsustainable in the long run. Either I will burn out, or divorce or both.”

Flexible work arrangements

These are not isolated stories but recurring patterns consistent with broader evidence. Primary stressors – direct-care demands – give rise to secondary stressors such as lost income, stalled careers and strained relationships. The cumulative effect is a feedback loop: reduced income limits access to private support; limited support increases time spent navigating systems; more navigation time is linked to poorer mental health, which can further undermine job stability.

Importantly, our findings also point to solutions. Mothers consistently identified flexible work arrangements – remote or hybrid options, adjustable hours and protected time for appointments – as the difference between staying employed and stepping back. When workplaces were accommodating, job satisfaction and retention improved. As one mother shared, “I found the most amazing employer…He allows me to tailor my schedule to fit my son’s school and therapies.”

MORE READING: Stability and good governance needed for national autism strategy

Well-being of children with disabilities calls for rights-based policies

Policies that normalize flexibility and recognize caregiving as part of life – and not a personal failing – benefit both employees and employers.

Service systems matter just as much. Families need timely, stable, adequately funded supports: accessible and affordable child care that accommodates diverse needs; dependable therapy pathways without years‑long waits; schools equipped to support all children without exclusions or shortened days; navigation or case co-ordination to reduce bureaucratic burden; respite to prevent burnout; and transportation when needed so care logistics do not cost a workday.

Disability, labour policy must work together

These are not luxuries – they are the infrastructure that makes equitable participation possible. Yet in Ontario (and throughout much of the country), families face the opposite: high rates of school exclusions, years-long waitlists for therapy and significant delays in respite funding. These inadequate services have profound impacts on caregivers’ financial, emotional and physical well-being.

If Canada is serious about gender equity, disability and labour policy must work together. Employers can lead by adopting flexible, caregiver‑friendly practices. Governments can fund accessible services that do not require a parent to function as a full‑time care co-ordinator. Both can recognize caregiving as essential to our health and education systems.

As one participant remarked, “Society needs to change and be more accepting of mothers and the dual role they often play.” 

Parents deserve structural support so they do not have to choose between caring for their children and safeguarding their own economic security and well‑being. Gender equity is impossible without caregiver equity. Policy should reflect that.

Some policy changes arrive with a bang. They dominate headlines because their intent is obvious and their consequences are immediate.

Others are more pernicious. Their effects are not felt first in Parliament or at news conferences, but in clinics, classrooms and communities far from capital cities and power centres.

The latest expansion by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration of what was known as the Mexico City policy fits squarely in the latter category.

The policy is often referred to as the global gag rule. It was introduced in 1984 by former president Ronald Reagan and attaches conditions to aid. Non-U.S. organizations receiving funding from the United States government must guarantee that they will not provide abortion services, refer patients for abortion, counsel on abortion or advocate for abortion-law reform — even with funds obtained from non-government donors.

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The policy seeks to dictate not only how U.S. government funds are spent, but the narrow path organizations must walk to remain eligible for financial support. Long embraced by anti-abortion advocates, it has the effect of restricting the activities of international organizations that provide or advocate for abortion care.

In late January, the U.S. announced an updated policy governing foreign assistance. It now extends into new areas of global health and rights-based international development programming.

The policy is being implemented through a broader set of standardized conditions that extend beyond abortion, including programs that support LGBTQI+ communities and those framed around diversity, equity and inclusion.

These are binding terms embedded in funding agreements. They seek to limit which partners can participate in major global health efforts, what services can be included and which communities should be reached.

The implications are significant for Canadian organizations working in global health. Some receive U.S. government funding directly. Many more partner with international and local organizations that do. Even when Canada is the primary funder of a project, Canadian-supported programs are often part of broader partnerships that include organizations funded by the U.S. government.

Canadian organizations and their partners deliver life-saving care in some of the most difficult operating environments in the world — from providing maternal and reproductive health services in rural Tanzania to supporting front-line health clinics for women and girls affected by conflict in South Sudan. When funding rules force organizations to pull back, self-censor or step away from co-ordinated health systems built on evidence and best practice, it is women, girls and marginalized communities who pay the ultimate price.

The people most affected are those with the fewest alternatives. A woman denied accurate information about her reproductive health options. An adolescent cut off from sexuality education. An LGBTQI+ person pushed further away from safe services. A community left with fewer health-care providers as organizations are defunded or entangled in bureaucracy. 

Past iterations of the global gag rule have shown that these impacts extend well beyond abortion-related care. Sexual and reproductive health services are deeply integrated into broader health delivery. When organizations withdraw or are excluded, continuity of care breaks down across maternal health, HIV prevention, vaccination and primary care.

At a moment like this, Canada’s voice matters

Canada positions itself as a steady partner in an increasingly fragmented global landscape. As Prime Minister Mark Carney noted recently in his speech before the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, middle powers like Canada will be judged not only by what they say they value, but by what they choose to defend. The mounting opposition to sexual and reproductive health and rights worldwide is a prime test case.

The benefits of Canada taking a firm stand are tangible. Consistent and evidence-informed leadership in global health reinforces our reputations as a reliable partner, protects the effectiveness of past Canadian-funded programs and strengthens co-operation in health care that helps prevent crises from escalating across borders. In an increasingly volatile world, this leadership is not peripheral to Canada’s interests — it advances them.

Canada has pledged $1.4 billion a year through 2030 as part of a 10-year commitment to global health and rights. At least $700 million annually is set aside for sexual and reproductive health and rights. That commitment prioritizes life-saving work too often relegated to the “optional” category — comprehensive contraception, safe abortion care, adolescent sexual health and the advocacy required to protect services when they come under political and ideological attack.

A recent report from the Guttmacher Institute underscores what is at stake. In the fiscal year 2023-24, Canada funded $76.2 million in international assistance for family planning. That support helped provide modern contraceptives to 4.7 million women and couples worldwide. It averted about 1.6 million unintended pregnancies, prevented nearly half a million unsafe abortions and helped avoid more than 2,100 maternal deaths in low- and middle-income countries.

But progress in sexual and reproductive health does not sustain itself. Gains can be reversed quickly when services are disrupted, providers and experts are silenced and funding becomes politicized. That is why the current moment demands clarity and resolve from Canada.

The federal government must wholeheartedly fulfil its 10-year commitment and reaffirm, publicly and unequivocally, that sexual and reproductive health and rights remain central to its dealings with other countries. We must signal that assurance to international partners facing uncertainty and to communities depending on continued access to care and information. There must be no doubt about Canadian values and commitments.

Amid endless and chaotic news cycles, the expansion of the Mexico City policy arrived quietly. Its consequences will be anything but.

In these days of global upheaval and politicized funding decisions, leadership is measured by what we choose to defend and with whom we stand. Canada must ensure that, as Carney said in Davos, “legitimacy, integrity and rules” — not political convenience — guide that choice. 

Nuclear power is experiencing a resurgence worldwide and Ontario is no exception. The province has a long history with this awesome and terrifying energy technology, and it is once again turning to nuclear power in response to concerns over national sovereignty, economic growth, electrification and decarbonization.

The persistent shortcomings of nuclear power

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Looking back over Ontario’s troubled history with nuclear energy, it is concerning to see the Ford government stumbling back to the bar for another round of nuclear cool-aid. Yet Ontario’s plan shows little evidence of having done its homework. Contrary to the government’s claims, it is fiscally irresponsible, incapable of delivering the energy the province needs in the time required, and compromises Ontario’s energy security.

When it should be investing in much cheaper and more easily deployed renewables, the province is recklessly doubling down on nuclear despite the evidence against it.

A legacy mired in debt

To understand Ontario’s nuclear trajectory, it is helpful to reflect on its origins. When civilian nuclear power was commercialized after the Second World War, its advocates promised it would be “too cheap to meter.” Buoyed by encouragement and financing from both provincial and federal governments, Ontario Hydro duly invested in a fleet of 20 CANDU reactors at three nuclear power stations over the course of 30 years.

By the turn of the millennium, Ontario Hydro’s nuclear obsession had saddled it with $38.1 billion in debt — $20.9 billion of it stranded (unsupported by assets). This burden was so immense that it toppled the once proud flagship Crown corporation. Ontarians continue to pay for this nuclear hangover today. As of March 2023, ratepayers were still on the hook for $13.8 billion.

Even as late as 1989, with Ontario Hydro already buckling under its crushing debt, the utility was forecasting the need for 10 to 15 new reactors by 2014. Reality proved otherwise, with peak electricity demand in 2014 lower than it had been 25 years earlier.

After a generation of staggering cost overruns and catastrophic international incidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power fell out of favour in much of the developed world. Cheaper, more flexible and faster-to-deploy alternatives took its place, first gas and then renewables.

Today, China is the only country in the world that can bring three to four new reactors online every year while steadily improving cost efficiency and construction timelines. China is also installing nearly 100 times more renewable capacity annually, accounting for more than half the world's newly added generation.

Lessons from the U.K. and Ukraine

However, Ontario should learn from the United Kingdom, not authoritarian China. The experience of Hinkley Point C, the first new nuclear power plant to be built in the U.K. in more than 20 years, should be a cautionary tale.

At least five years behind schedule and two times over budget, Hinkley Point C will likely be the most expensive nuclear power plant yet. The electricity generated by this colossal waste of rate-payer dollars will cost between two to four times more than renewable energy, which can be brought online in half the time. This is what the provincial government has in store for Ontario.

The scale of Ontario’s plan is immense. In addition to the CANDU refurbishments at Darlington and Bruce, Ontario has announced the refurbishment of Pickering B, one of the oldest and most urban nuclear power stations in the world.

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Sovereignty concerns

Ontario has also contracted with GE Vernova Hitachi to build up to four small modular reactors (SMRs) at the Darlington site. It is unclear why the government has committed to building four SMRs before even the first is constructed. The greater concern with this arrangement is GE Vernova Hitachi is a U.S.-controlled company and the fuel supply chain is in the U.S. and France, not Canada.

To understand how fragile such a dependency can become, consider the situation facing Ukraine and its Soviet-built RBMK reactors. After Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea and Donbas in 2014, Ukraine found itself dependent on its aggressor to fuel the reactors. At the time, nuclear power generated approximately half of Ukraine’s pre-war electricity, similar to the proportion of Ontario’s reliance on nuclear energy. Ukrainians are now facing severe energy insecurity, with freezing temperatures and blackouts.

As if this were not concerning enough, Ontarians are subsidizing the first commercial demonstration of an unproven foreign nuclear technology while the government continues to naively claim Ontario will remain the industrial base from which the U.S.-controlled company will scale. Given the trade policies of the current U.S. government, not least of all its efforts to gut Ontario’s auto sector, it is hard not to see this belief as a fool’s hope.

No price tag and no certainty it will pay

Despite these red flags, Ontario’s nuclear ambitions do not stop there. The government is also considering building two new large nuclear power stations at the Bruce site and at a new location near Port Hope. This despite the fact that, like the U.K., the domestic nuclear supply chain has all but vanished. This is precisely the kind of multi-billion-dollar, multi-decade infrastructure lock-in that bankrupted Ontario Hydro.

The government has been silent on how much this plan will cost. No one can predict whether demand will materialize to justify this massive supply expansion, or what electricity prices will be when these reactors finally come online. Committing to decades of investment in such an uncertain environment is sheer folly.

To top it all off, nuclear power is not even operationally flexible. Generation cannot be adjusted rapidly enough to follow demand, and the reactors can only be quickly turned off, but not back on again (it took Ontario more than a day to restore power after the 2003 Great Northeastern Blackout due to neutron poisoning in the reactors).

Renewable options

It does not have to be this way. Much has changed since the last wave of nuclear infatuation. Renewables are now the cheapest source of energy on a levelized basis. While renewables may be intermittent, they are reasonably predictable, and for the first time since the inception of the electricity industry, generation no longer needs to coincide perfectly with consumption. Rapidly falling battery costs have made energy storage a commercially viable reality.

It is true that China currently dominates the supply chains for solar, wind and batteries, but once the equipment is installed it is virtually impervious to foreign interference. Unlike the supply of nuclear fuel, the sun shines everywhere.

Ontario and Canada should be collaborating with other democratic allies to reduce dependence on Chinese suppliers. In the meantime, the fact remains that unsubsidized renewables and batteries outperform nuclear and gas on cost and deployment time. Sadly, instead of embracing this more affordable and distributed future, the provincial government remains stuck in an inflexible and fiscally reckless past.

Nuclear power can provide energy security, but only if it is supported and fuelled by a domestic supply chain, like the original CANDUs. Its unmatched energy density makes sense where land is scarce, but that is hardly the case in Ontario. It may even be a defensible form of industrial policy if you believe in that kind of state interventionism. But above all else, nuclear power is neither nimble nor affordable (outside China) and it’s about time the Ontario government stopped posturing otherwise.

More Policy Options articles on nuclear power:

• Ontario’s nuclear option is the wrong path to meet green energy targets
• Canada’s newest nuclear industry dream is a potential nightmare

Coercive control rarely starts with a bruise. It begins with isolation, humiliation, surveillance and fear. By the time violence becomes visible, it has already inflicted profound harm. Across Canada, women are living under domination that leaves no outward marks but inflicts lasting harm on mind, body and spirit. Parliament now has a chance to confront this invisible but devastating reality. 

Last December, the federal government introduced Bill C-16, which would amend the Criminal Code to recognize what survivors and advocates have long known: coercive control is violence in everything but name.

The invisible architecture of abuse

For decades, criminal law has focused primarily on assaults, threats, and sexual and physical violence. While this is essential, intimate partner violence — almost always against women — is rarely insular and sporadic. It has a pattern. It is cumulative. It is strategic.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines intimate partner violence as behaviour by a current or former partner that causes physical, sexual or psychological harm. This includes intimidation, controlling acts, monitoring of a woman’s movements and reproductive coercion — not only physical assault.

Research over the past two decades has shown that psychological abuse and coercive control should not be considered “less serious” forms of violence. They are often the foundation upon which physical violence builds.

Systematic reviews have linked intimate partner violence to depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, substance use and thoughts of suicide. Unintended pregnancy and miscarriage, sexually transmitted infections and low birth weight in infants often accompany such violence.

The evidence is clear: This is both a criminal justice issue and a public health crisis.

What Bill C-16 would change

Bill C-16 includes a proposal to add new language to the Criminal Code that would make it an offence to coerce or control an intimate partner. Such behaviour would include:

• Compelling or attempting to compel a partner into having sex.
• Monitoring a partner’s location, movements or communications.
• Controlling finances, employment or education.
• Restricting access to health care or medication.
• Regulating dress, diet, gender expression or access to their culture or spirituality.
• Threatening suicide or self-harm to manipulate a partner.

The bill acknowledges vulnerability. It directs courts to consider whether the accused specifically targeted a partner’s weaknesses. If the bill is passed into law, coercive control will carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.

Canada would join jurisdictions, including England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland and Australia, in formally criminalizing coercive control, thereby recognizing that patterns of domination can be as dangerous as physical assault.

Why coercive control matters now

Research consistently shows that coercive control is a predictor of intimate partner homicide. Patterns of isolation, financial domination, surveillance and threats often precede lethal violence.

The central purpose of the proposed law should be to get the justice system involved early. By recognizing coercive control, law enforcement and courts can act before it escalates to a fatal act.

This aligns with well-established research that shows violence is not spontaneous. It follows an identifiable course. Intervening earlier can reduce harm, reduce deaths and reduce long-term health and social costs.

The WHO has repeatedly emphasized that violence against women is preventable. Randomized control trials and prevention programs show that shifting social norms, addressing gender inequality and stopping controlling behaviours reduce violence over time.

Neurodiverse women overlooked

Any serious conversation about coercive control must also acknowledge who is most at risk.

Neurodiverse women are often overlooked. Women with autism, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or cognitive disabilities are more vulnerable to a coercive partner in relationships.

There is also increasing evidence that neurodiverse women are more likely to experience violence and may face additional challenges. Difficulties reading social cues and interpreting other people’s intentions can make it harder to recognize abuse early. They may also encounter obstacles to reporting it or being believed.

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Coercive partners often exploit neurodivergent women’s different ways of communicating, their heightened sense of trust in individuals, their literal interpretations and struggles with day-to-day tasks. For example, someone who interprets language literally may take a partner’s words at face value and miss manipulative cues or hidden meanings. Difficulties with organizing tasks, managing time or juggling competing demands can be exploited by partners who deliberately create chaos, pressure or dependence.

These women are left particularly unprotected when the law fails to recognize coercive control. Bill C-16’s attention to vulnerability is particularly essential for these women. A justice system that ignores psychological domination effectively abandons those who are least equipped to resist it alone.

The law is necessary, but not sufficient

Prevention requires naming the harm accurately. And coercive control has too long remained legally invisible. Making such behaviour a crime is a step, but it cannot stand alone. Canada must invest in “upstream prevention,” which emphasizes evidence-based, people-focused interventions to protect potential victims before violence starts.

Intimate partner violence is learned behaviour shaped by gender norms, a sense of entitlement and social reinforcement of dominance. If coercive control is to decline, Canada’s support must include:

• Programs that teach boys problem-solving skills.
• Early education and mentoring on healthy relationships.
• Programs addressing harmful masculinity.
• Community-based intervention for men prone to violence.
• Survivor-informed policing and prosecution
• Culturally safe and disability-informed support services

Public health models emphasize that prevention works best when approached on multiple levels. Legal reform, education, economic support and changes to social norms must operate in tandem to reduce risk. They also need to include individual, relationship, community and societal factors.

Canada must also work to prevent men from turning to control in the first place by addressing harmful gender norms and integrating prevention strategies into key institutions, including education, health care and social support services.

Punishment reacts. Prevention transforms

Legislation alone cannot undo the conditions that produce violence. If we want real change, Canada must commit to preventing violence before it begins. Research on prevention is clear. Early childhood supports, school-based programs that teach about consent and how to control emotions, and addressing economic and social inequities reduce the likelihood of coercive control taking root.

The urge to dominate, isolate and deprive a partner does not form in a vacuum. It grows in environments shaped by inequality, rigid gender norms and unaddressed trauma. Criminalization may deter some of this controlling behaviour, but prevention changes the conditions that produce it. The real test of our commitment will not be how we punish offenders, but how we stop them in the first place.

Law can respond to harm. Prevention reshapes the future.

(Version française disponible ici.)

Organizations are operating under sustained pressure. In this environment, performance depends less on speed or scale than on judgment, coordination, and trust under load. These are not soft attributes; they are core operating capacities, and they are shaped by how work is designed, governed, and experienced.

In many organizations, however, workplace performance suffers because of poor decisions about workload, pace, role expectations, decision authority, and conflict management. For many employees, work is a source of chronic stress and harms.

Quebec is moving to change that, and its strategy will be a valuable test case for all of Canada.

The province has enacted heavy obligations for workplaces to improve working conditions and take concrete steps to protect their workers. New legal provisions governing psychosocial workplace risks came into force in October as part of a sweeping modernization of health-and-safety laws.

Employers have until October of this year to formulate their plans, and how they do it will be critical.

Similar laws introduced in Europe and Australia are a cautionary tale. Impact will depend entirely on interpretation of the new regulations. Employers will need to treat them as more than a narrow compliance requirement.

Jurisdictions that treat psychosocial risk as a source of organizational intelligence — rather than an administrative burden — are better positioned to sustain performance without exhausting their people.

“Compliance theatre” isn’t enough

Psychosocial risks in the workplace arise from how work is organized and managed. Examples include excessive workload and continuous stress; low autonomy, recognition or support; harassment and incivility; and unfair treatment.

The law now obligates employers to better identify, assess, and prevent psychosocial risks, and it brings these dynamics squarely into the realm of governance. Organizations and institutions that meaningfully regulate psychosocial risk will function more reliably under pressure.

Legally, employers can no longer merely respond to the consequences of psychosocial risk. The fundamentals of prevention are well established. Decades of management research and occupational health practice point to the same drivers of healthier work: manageable workloads, role clarity, decision latitude, predictable communication, supportive leadership, and fair treatment.

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The law requires these principles to be taken seriously — and acted on. They must go beyond “compliance theatre,” a temptation for many companies, whereby policies are updated, training is delivered, documentation is produced, yet the lived experience of work often changes little.

It’s a problem of follow-through that has been noted in Europe and Australia.

Employers tend to focus on low-disruption measures like awareness campaigns, individual resilience training, or wellness initiatives — while actual improvements in working conditions are limited. Improvements are more durable when psychosocial risk is treated as an operational and governance issue requiring monitoring and adjustment.

Regulation must be operationalized properly. That is the lesson.

Who is responsible — and where it starts

Responsibility for psychosocial risk sits with those who design and govern work — employers, boards, and senior leadership teams. They are duty-holders under the law.

This stewardship is continuous and inseparable from organizational justice because psychosocial risk is unevenly distributed. Workload, emotional labour, conflict, and ambiguity tend to concentrate in particular roles and groups — requiring attention to fairness in who carries which demands, how decisions are made, and how strain is addressed. Perceived unfairness is one of the strongest predictors of psychosocial strain.

Those with authority over work design must treat psychosocial risk with the same seriousness as other operational risks — with clear executive ownership, leadership visibility, and authority to adjust conditions upstream.

Psychosocial risk should be reviewed alongside other enterprise risks, with attention to misalignments in workload, role expectations, and decision authority.

Information flow follows. Line managers and teams are in a position to notice early signs of strain and unfairness in daily work. But systems must allow those signals to be raised and acted on in time. Human resources and health and safety functions support this process by paying attention to how work is actually experienced across roles and backgrounds — recognizing that two people can encounter the same situation with very different impacts — and by helping leaders make practical changes where strain or inequity appears.

The sequence matters. Without commitment from the top, data collection becomes symbolic. Without safe channels, signals remain unheard.

Why feedback from lived experience matters

Traditional approaches to psychosocial risk rely on policies, workload metrics and lagging outcomes. But they show only what has gone wrong, not how work is experienced day-to-day.

Psychosocial risk operates through the nervous system. When work conditions signal threat — through overload, unfairness, harassment, or unpredictability — the physical toll on workers is significant. Cognitive bandwidth narrows, defensive responses increase, and coordination degrades, often well before harm is formally visible.

It shows up as persistent frustration, vigilance, withdrawal, moral distress, or disengagement. These responses are not random. They signal demand overload, unfairness, or leadership practices that amplify strain.

Crucially, these signals are measurable, and can register strain earlier than conventional indicators. This advance notice allows organizations to detect emerging risk while there is still time to intervene.

Psychosocial risk is not experienced evenly. Certain groups encounter strain earlier and more intensely. LGBTQ+ employees, ethnocultural minorities, persons with disabilities, Indigenous employees, and women in traditionally male-dominated settings may face additional layers of risk, including harassment, reduced autonomy, biased competence assessments, uneven workload allocation, or weaker informal support. Where identities intersect, strain can intensify in ways aggregate metrics may obscure.

Such disparities reveal misalignment in fairness, authority, and recognition. Without mechanisms to surface the realities experienced across diverse groups, organizations risk mistaking structural imbalance as individual underperformance.

Responding to these early signals requires emotional agency — the capacity, at individual and organizational levels, to notice emotional cues, interpret what they reveal about work conditions, and act deliberately rather than defensively. Emotional agency is a skill set organizations can cultivate. Emotions offer early system-level indicators of accumulating psychosocial risk.

Psychosocial risk governance is not only about preventing harm. It is about protecting the conditions that allow organizations to function under pressure: sound judgment, coordination across complexity, trust in leadership, and institutional legitimacy. These qualities increasingly determine how organizations perform in uncertain environments.

Closing the loop

Quebec’s new law gives necessary weight to the problem of psychosocial risk. It matters. The question is whether organizations are prepared to sense strain early, respond intelligently, and adjust conditions before harm becomes entrenched.

Doing so requires stewardship with follow-through: clear responsibility at the top, meaningful feedback from lived experience, and the authority — and willingness — to act on what that feedback reveals.

In a world where pressure is unlikely to ease, governing work in ways that are fair, adaptive, and grounded in real conditions is not simply a compliance exercise. For Quebec, this is now a legal obligation. For the rest of Canada, it is a strategic lesson worth heeding — and a competitive advantage the country cannot afford to overlook.

A few weeks separated Prime Minister Mark Carney’s well-received speech at Davos from the publication of Canada’s Defence Industrial Strategy (DIS). The strategy’s “Build-Partner-Buy” framework identifies 10 sovereign capacities Canada must prioritize. Surprisingly, food didn’t make the cut.

Canada is one of the world’s largest food exporters, and trade agreements exist to guarantee market access, but these assurances fall short if we lose the capacity to cultivate our lands, breed livestock, and feed our citizens. By leaving food out of the DIS, Canada has left strategic autonomy over the food system unexamined and unprotected.

Food system beholden to foreign inputs

Like the military, Canada’s agrifood sector is largely dependent on imports for inputs, equipment, and digital technologies. More than 80 per cent of active antibiotic ingredients originate from China and India, vital for both human and animal health. Pesticides are predominantly manufactured in India, China, the United States, Germany, and Japan. Canada holds a genuine global advantage in nitrogen and potash through the company Nutrien, but relies on China, Russia and Morocco for phosphorus, and input distribution remains vulnerable to infrastructure disruption, a demonstrated weakness.

Canada is also heavily reliant on imported large-scale machinery. A short-line manufacturing sector exists, but unresolved interoperability questions limit how effectively it can fill that gap. The dependency runs deeper than hardware: since 2024, major equipment providers like John Deere and CNH have embedded Starlink terminals directly into their machines, routing Canadian farm operations through a privately controlled U.S. satellite network.

Investment concerns

The layered foreign dependency that alarms defence planners is taking root in the food system, and Canada is doing little to build its way out of it. Public and private investment in agrifood has sharply declined – by 15 per cent since 2010 – and a lack of strategic alignment to foster innovation continues to hinder farm productivity and food processing for value addition.

The $5 billion pledged by a Farm Credit Canada-led coalition earlier last month is a welcome signal, but the test will be whether it reaches the risk takers who can move the sector forward.

Complicating matters further is the murky issue of foreign investments and land ownership. Foreign investment is technically subject to the Investment Canada Act, and sensitive agricultural technologies fall within its scope. The Act’s updated guidelines name food as one of the 10 critical infrastructure sectors. But land purchases, without large-scale farm operations, will likely not fall under its scrutiny.

Provincial differences create vulnerabilities

All the while, provinces impose differing regulations on land acquisition by non-Canadian entities, leaving the door open not just to economic opportunism but to deliberate interference. Food systems are vulnerable to agrocrime – including the biowarfare tactic of agroterrorism – whether for economic or political motivations. Synthetic biology has lowered the barrier to producing biological weapons capable of targeting large-scale production and disrupting supply chains and localized food systems.

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Take for example Canada’s poultry sector, where a credible agroterrorism threat isn’t a sophisticated pathogen but the deliberate introduction of a common viral or bacterial disease into flocks. Many of these diseases are zoonotic, like avian influenza or salmonella, posing a risk to humans.

Coordinated cyberattacks on supply chain infrastructures are also on the rise. As the industry digitalizes, new vulnerabilities open for exploitation, and food is a particularly attractive target because spoilage creates immediate leverage. Dairy farms, meat processing plants, and industry giants like RECIPE Unlimited Corp (which owns Swiss Chalet and Harvey’s) have fallen victim to ransomware attacks. The sector is aware of the risks, but safeguards are cost and human resource intensive. Job cuts at AAFC and the Canadian Food Inspection Agency are moving us in the wrong direction.

DIS-placed workers and materials

The DIS will reshape the agricultural economy in ways nobody seems to be talking about. Creating 125,000 new defence sector jobs intensifies competition for skilled workers – already in short supply in the agrifood sector – raising the real possibility that rural industries lose talent to heavily subsidized defence manufacturing hubs. Defence procurement’s push to secure domestic supplies of metals, critical minerals, and industrial chemicals risks tightening markets agriculture depends on too. A strategy designed to fortify national sovereignty may unintentionally strain Canada’s agrifood system unless policymakers explicitly account for these pressures.

Food critical to Canadian sovereignty

Strategic autonomy in agriculture means reducing critical dependencies and securing supply chains, a priority that becomes more complex given Canada’s export-oriented model. But export strength and domestic resilience pull in the same direction. Reinforcing local food networks, diversifying farming systems, and ensuring food is also produced for Canadian consumers are all part of that.

The average age of farm operators in Canada is 56. A resilient agriculture system needs to be designed at a regional level, built to attract the next generation of farmers, not just optimize the current one.

Prime Minister Carney’s government has acknowledged that sovereign capabilities will evolve with the threat landscape. That opening should be used. Food systems belong in any credible defence framework, and action plans need to move beyond stockpiling toward building adaptive capacity. Canada is a world-class agrifood exporter with a hard-earned reputation for food safety. The DIS hasn’t caught up to that yet.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Mark Carney was the adult in the room. In his speech he told the world that the American-led, rules-based international order — the foundation for the prosperity and security of liberal democracies for 80 years — is over.

His remarks were, in some ways, a bookend to Winston Churchill’s famous 1946 “Iron Curtain speech” in Fulton, Missouri, which called on the West, led by the United States and Britain, to collectively confront the menace of Soviet communism. The global order that Carney pronounced dead in Davos was arguably born in Fulton.

For Canadians, the implicit message is that the bedrock assumption underpinning our public-policy architecture — that we willingly accept a very high degree of dependence on the United States for economic prosperity and national defence — has come to an end. The implication is a need for national resolve and tough choices.

Carney has declared that Canadians are “under no illusions” and must prepare for sacrifices. He has yet to say what those sacrifices will be. 

Complacency is our greatest risk in the world the prime minister has described.

This complacency is evident among Canadian businesses. Export-oriented firms have been deeply embedded in the U.S. market for decades, cemented by successive trade agreements stretching back to the 1965 Auto Pact. That dependence was a deliberate policy choice. It is understandable, then, that Canada-U.S.-Mexico Agreement negotiations dominate business attention. But U.S. market access now carries a far higher risk premium than ever before. Does anyone seriously believe a Trump-signed agreement will be worth the paper it is printed on?

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Ottawa has talked about trade diversification for generations, to no avail, because business has never fully embraced the agenda. In the past, diversification was a nice-to-have. Today it is an imperative. But the federal government cannot do it alone. Business must co-lead this effort, just as an earlier generation of business leaders helped build support for the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement in the late 1980s. To date, Canada’s business leadership has not taken up this mantle. It is time they did.

There is some complacency among the premiers as well. This time last year, the provinces appeared resolute about dismantling internal trade barriers — which a recent International Monetary Fund (IMF) report estimates are equivalent to a nine-per-cent tariff.

There has been progress, most notably a November agreement eliminating interprovincial trade barriers on goods except food and alcohol. But in services, significant protectionism persists.

Services account for four-fifths of the $210-billion potential increase to Canadian GDP the IMF estimates would result from fully eliminating internal trade barriers.

Internal trade barriers need to be eliminated. Reforms like mutual recognition of professional credentials in construction, health care, and education would liberalize services and drive long-term productivity gains. The federal government should offer financial adjustment support to provinces in exchange for removing all remaining barriers — as it did in the 1990s and early 2000s to persuade provinces to harmonize sales taxes with the GST in the name of economic efficiency.

Now is obviously not the time for disunity, yet separatist referenda are on the horizon in Alberta and perhaps in Quebec.  

In Quebec’s 1995 independence referendum we came perilously close to losing the country, and that was long before the age of disinformation and foreign interference in Canadian politics. We can expect both of those forces to come into play this time, particularly in Alberta, with encouragement from the MAGA movement in the U.S.

Here too, the prime minister must lead and make the case in both Alberta and Quebec that this is not the moment for independence votes. Unity is essential to our national security.

Finally, Canadians need to be told the truth about public finances. Tax increases will be required. The government’s commitment to raise core defence spending to 3.5 per cent of GDP — a level last seen when John Diefenbaker was prime minister — cannot be financed under the current tax structure without running large, perhaps unsustainable, fiscal deficits indefinitely. Young Canadians — already the most pessimistic about the country’s future — should not be saddled with a massive debt overhang. Older Canadians need to lead by example and accept higher taxes to lessen our defence dependence on the United States and reduce the intergenerational equity burden.

Carney’s core message in Davos was that the rupture we face is permanent. There is no return to the status quo ante; that “pleasant fiction” is gone.

Our new harsh reality demands a difficult national conversation. It will require candour about taxes, the provincial versus the national interest, and acceptance that economic and security independence carries costs that everyone must bear. It may even require, as is occurring in parts of Europe today, a discussion about national service.

Prime Minister Carney had his Churchillian moment in Davos. Now it is time to invoke former president John F. Kennedy’s civic challenge: “Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”