Category: Academic Analysis

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Subhadip Ghosh, Associate Professor, School of Business, MacEwan University

Since American and Israeli missiles began striking Iran, global oil prices have jumped sharply. The conflict has resulted in the disruption of tanker traffic through the Strait of Hormuz, which carries about one-fifth of the world’s oil shipments.

For Canadians, the effects have been immediate, with higher prices at the gas pump.

A familiar refrain has already surfaced in Canadian political commentary: higher oil prices are good for Canada. That intuition is understandable, given that Canada is the world’s fourth-largest oil producer, with oil and gas being Canada’s highest export earner.

But that claim misses two key points. First, while Canada as a whole might gain from higher oil prices as a net energy exporter, those gains are unevenly distributed across sectors and provinces. Second, the mechanism that softened that pain — a stronger Canadian dollar — has weakened.

Together, these two facts clarify why rising oil prices are hitting Canadians harder than they did in previous decades.

Not all Canadians benefit

Oil and gas are undeniably important to Canada. Oil and gas extraction alone has averaged about five per cent of national GDP since 2000, and the sector supported approximately 446,600 direct and indirect jobs in 2023.

The importance of oil also varies dramatically across provinces. In Alberta and Saskatchewan, for example, oil and gas production accounts for roughly 22 per cent and 16 per cent of provincial GDPs, respectively.

By contrast, in Ontario and Québec — home to about 60 per cent of Canadians — the sector contributes only a small fraction of provincial output.

When crude prices rise, Alberta and Saskatchewan collect more royalties, and energy company revenues climb. For that slice of Canada, conflict in the Persian Gulf can bring economic benefits.

Yet windfall gains are also constrained by infrastructure. Pipeline capacity and production limits mean Canadian producers cannot expand quickly when global prices surge.

The completion of the Trans Mountain Expansion Project in 2024 increased access to Pacific markets, but production cannot be scaled overnight and bottlenecks still blunt the swift supply response needed to realize a windfall gain.

For most Canadians, the picture is simpler and less pleasant. Higher oil prices means higher costs not only at the pump, but also gradually in grocery stores and heating bills, and reduced purchasing power.

A sustained $10 increase in oil typically raises Canadian inflation by roughly 0.3 to 0.4 percentage points over the following year.

How oil shocks spread

Economists typically analyze oil shocks through four transmission channels: terms of trade, income, costs and monetary policy.

The first is the terms-of-trade channel. Because Canada exports more energy than it imports, higher oil prices mean the country earns more for its exports relative to what it pays for imports. That improves Canada’s purchasing power in global markets.

The second is the income channel, which determines who receives those gains: higher oil prices raise producers’ revenues and governments’ royalties, concentrating much of the windfall in oil-producing regions and among shareholders.

The third is the cost channel: oil is a key input into transportation, manufacturing and agriculture, so higher energy prices ripple through supply chains and into household budgets.

The fourth is the monetary policy channel, which often shapes the broader economy. Central banks like the Bank of Canada aim to keep inflation near a stable target. If rising oil prices keep inflation elevated for long enough, policymakers may delay interest rate cuts or keep borrowing costs higher.

Higher interest rates help contain inflation but slow spending and investment across the economy. In short, the same oil shock that boosts Canada’s energy sector can, via inflation and interest rates, slow other parts of the economy.

A weaker currency cushion

Perhaps the most consequential shift over the past decade is the changing relationship between oil prices and the Canadian dollar.

As noted by the Bank of Canada, for most of the 2000s and early 2010s, the Canadian dollar behaved like a petrocurrency. When oil prices rose, the loonie often strengthened as well.

A stronger currency made imported goods cheaper and helped offset some of the inflationary pressure from higher gasoline and energy prices. The exchange rate acted as a natural shock absorber.

That cushion has weakened substantially. Research by Alberta Central, CIBC Capital Markets and several economists all point out that the relationship between oil prices and the Canadian dollar weakened in the mid-2010s and continues to remain weak.

One reason is that investment in Canada’s oil and gas extraction fell 55 per cent from 2014 to 2019, then dropped a further 36 per cent in 2020. This decline reduced the foreign investment flows that once pushed the Canadian dollar higher when oil prices rose.

Second, energy companies are now more likely to return profits to shareholders through dividends and buybacks than to launch new projects. However, many of those shareholders are foreign investors, and even domestic holders, such as pension funds, distribute returns across global portfolios.

As such, the reinvestment of oil windfalls back into the Canadian economy has declined significantly compared to the investment-led boom years of the 2000s. Other factors, like the rise of U.S. shale, have also weakened the oil-currency link.

The practical consequence is that when oil spikes today, Canadians absorb more of the inflationary impact and receive less of the offsetting currency benefit they did a decade ago. For Canada, war-driven oil price spikes are therefore less a national windfall than a redistribution across sectors, provinces and from consumers to energy producers.

With the Canadian dollar no longer rising alongside oil as it once did, price spikes now translate more directly into higher living costs for Canadians.

The author would like to thank Vinh Nguyen, a research assistant and undergraduate student at MacEwan University’s School of Business, for her contribution to this article.

Subhadip Ghosh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Middle East conflict is pushing oil prices higher — and most Canadians will feel the costs – https://theconversation.com/middle-east-conflict-is-pushing-oil-prices-higher-and-most-canadians-will-feel-the-costs-277811

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Cate Cleo Alexander, Postdoctoral research fellow, University of Toronto

Would it be obvious if artificial intelligence (AI?) created your new favourite song?

Millions of listeners have recently encountered that question through a viral Afro-soul cover of Papaoutai, the 2013 hit by Belgian artist Stromae. The cover has skyrocketed in popularity across streaming platforms and social media.

But unknown to most audiences, it was created using AI, according to Deezer, a French music-streaming service.

The Afro-soul cover highlights a growing challenge — the difficulty identifying when generative AI has been used in production — and how audiences, platforms and artists are struggling to respond.

When Stromae first released the upbeat dance song Papaoutai as part of the album Racine carrée, it topped the charts in Belgium, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands and Switzerland. More than a decade after release, it’s still one of the most-viewed French-language songs on YouTube.

Some 12 years later, in December 2025, an Afro-soul cover of Papaoutai was uploaded to Spotify. While it’s hard to track the exact reach of the song due to various removals and re-uploads on YouTube, Instagram and TikTok, the song currently has almost 80 million streams on Spotify.

The authorship of the Afro-soul version is commonly attributed to mikeeysmusic — a Swedish musician with a verifiable social media presence and discography — Chill77, whose identity is difficult to verify, and Unjaps, an independent record label. None of the artists have made a public statement about the controversy.

Why does all of this matter? Most music platforms lack clear labelling for AI music, and this places the difficult task of identification on listeners.

Identifying AI use in music production

AI-generated music has become a very broad category. As machine learning engineer and researcher Christopher Landschoot argues, the term AI-generated music “is casually tossed around whether AI is used to emulate an effect, automatically mix or master, separate stems, or augment timbre. As long as the final audio has been touched in some way by AI, the term gets slapped on the entire piece.”

It’s hard to tell how and to what extent AI was used in the making of the cover of Papaoutai. Did mikeeysmusic and Chill77 upload Stromae’s original song into an AI program, like OpenAI’s Sora, give it a command and upload the AI-generated result? Did they train an AI program on the vocals of another musician, Arsene Mukendi, to generate choir vocals? Or was the cover an iterative process where the artists fine-tuned and edited the output?

Does it matter when the lyrics and melody were written by someone else?

Identifying AI use in music is difficult, even for scholars like us who study generative AI. A study published by Deezer-Ipsos, which surveyed 9,000 people across eight countries, found that 97 per cent of people couldn’t tell the difference between fully AI-generated music and human-authored music.

A big contributor to the confusion is the lack of response from platforms. While Bandcamp has taken a clear anti-AI stance and works to keep AI-generated music off the platform entirely, other platforms like Spotify have gestured towards governance changes but largely allowed AI music to rack up streams without clearly disclosing the use of AI.

The popularity of short-form videos (like on TikTok), in which users encounter uncontextualized song snippets, further propels the prominence of AI-generated music.

As one journalist argued:

“If listeners cannot tell the difference — and if platforms decline to tell them — then consent becomes impossible.”

Emotional responses on social media

In comment sections, audiences are often surprised to learn that the song was created using AI. Many have praised the cover, describing it as “a lot more instrumental, emotional and grand.”

But these positive feelings abruptly shift upon learning about AI use in the song’s creation. As another Reddit user commented:

“I’m actually so sad it [is AI]-generated. It sounds wonderful, but I personally can not support [AI] taking over creative industries such as music and art. And I know there are plenty of African choirs who could have nailed the vision without the use of [AI].”

Whether audiences choose to listen to AI-generated music is often framed as a moral decision. This is complicated, however, when it becomes increasingly difficult to discern what music is AI-generated or how generative AI was used in its creation.

According to the same Deezer-Ipsos study, 73 per cent of people surveyed “think it’s unethical for AI companies to use copyrighted material to generate new music without clear approval from the original artist.”

Stromae has remained quiet on the issue so far, with audiences speculating about his response to what some see as an AI appropriation of a very personal song written about his father, who died in the Rwandan genocide.

Many English-speaking users, unaware of this context, have used the heavy drums of the Afro-soul version to soundtrack everything from fashion haul videos to comedy shorts. As one TikToker asked:

“Did you ever think that the song about losing your father in the Rwandan genocide would be used, in your lifetime, to post gym thirst traps?”

AI as a tool for remixing

Artists have been grappling with the possibilities and concerns of AI use in music production, but there has been a precedent for “playing” with original songs.

Remix — through cassettes, spin tables and synthesizers — has been a part of music fan culture for decades. There is a rich tradition of fans using technology to cut, copy, paste, play, reimagine and recontextualize music.

Can AI-generated covers — the newest way of using technology to “play” with music — be understood as part of this legacy of remix?

Read more:
How I used AI to transform myself from a female dance artist to an all-male post-punk band – and what that means for other musicians

On the legal side, all seems above board — at least in France. In the case of the Papaoutai cover, the French Society of Authors, Composers and Music Publishers has upheld its legality. They note that Stromae is “properly credited” and that royalties will be shared between Stromae and the record label that produced the cover.

So is it remix? Maybe. Is it legal? Apparently.

But as seen in this example, audiences still struggle with songs extracted from their original context and created with AI technologies, which are themselves inherently extractive.
Does this context shift the perception of this song as a form of extractive remix production?

The Afro-soul cover of Papaoutai illustrates how quickly AI-generated music can circulate. It also signals an increasing amount of debate as artists, audiences, and platforms navigate the future of AI-generated music.

Cate Cleo Alexander has received funding from SSHRC (Doctoral Canadian Graduate Scholarship) and is a member of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) project.

Lauren Knight receives funding from SSHRC (Doctoral Canadian Graduate Scholarship) and is a member of the Creative Labour and Critical Futures (CLCF) project.

– ref. Could you tell if your favourite song was made with AI? The viral ‘Papaoutai’ cover controversy suggests not – https://theconversation.com/could-you-tell-if-your-favourite-song-was-made-with-ai-the-viral-papaoutai-cover-controversy-suggests-not-274607

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Kelly Summers, Assistant Professor of History, Department of Humanities, MacEwan University

Vietnam War veterans are suing to block construction of United States President Donald Trump’s proposed triumphal arch in Washington, D.C., arguing that it would detract from the solemnity of nearby Arlington Cemetery.

Having demolished the White House’s East Wing and shuttered the renamed Kennedy Center for “complete rebuilding,” Trump plans to install what he calls an Independence Arch to mark the country’s 250th anniversary this July.

Since Trump’s re-election, Catesby Leigh of the Claremont Institute — a California think tank at the forefront of the “MAGA new right” — has urged him to erect a classical arch to proclaim the “universal significance” of the Declaration of Independence.

Leigh insisted the “nation has had enough of sackcloth and ashes, whether in the form of wokedom’s historically illiterate memes or modernism’s esthetic anorexia.”

Trump embraced the idea. A patriotic landmark would complement his efforts to purge what he called “improper ideology” from Washington institutions like the Smithsonian museum and the National Zoo.

A grand monument would also serve one of the top priorities of the current government: gratifying the president’s ego. When asked who the arch is for, Trump was honest: “Me.”

But the project professes a nobler mission. Trump’s executive order to “make federal architecture beautiful again” praised the Founding Fathers’ use of neoclassicism to “visually connect” the American republic “with the antecedents of democracy” in ancient Athens and Rome.

As a historian who studies the French Republic’s slide into military dictatorship in the early 19th century, what troubles me about this rationale is that there is nothing inherently democratic about arches.

In fact, some of the most famous iterations in ancient Rome and Napoleonic France warn us of the tendency of republics to devolve into autocratic empires.

Recalling Rome

The U.S. founders wanted to avoid the pitfalls of imperial ostentation, militarism and personality cults as they planned their new capital.

An early test was how to commemorate the nation’s first president after his death in 1799.

A hero of the War of Independence, George Washington served two terms as president and set a key precedent by refusing to seek a third.

If he had a Roman forebear, it was the humble farmer Cincinnatus rather than Julius Caesar, whose insatiable ambition toppled the republic and laid the foundation for empire.

Read more:
Which Roman emperor was most like Donald Trump?

Early Americans were well-versed in the Roman republic’s rise, corruption and fall.

Under the Republic (509 BCE to 27 BCE), the Roman Senate rewarded victorious generals and their armies with triumphs, celebratory processions under temporary wooden arches. The enduring marble arches of Titus, Septimius Severus and Constantine, meanwhile, were erected during the Empire (27 BCE – 476 CE) to glorify their imperial namesakes.

According to classicist Mary Beard, the parading of captives and loot under triumphal arches underscored the “power of the Roman war machine and the humiliation of the conquered.”

Art historian Kirk Savage notes that early Americans preferred to honour exemplars of civic virtue with “words, not stones or statues.” The nation’s capital already bore Washington’s name — no need to sully it by aping Roman tyrants.

The American republic developed what R. Grant Gilmore, a specialist in historic preservation, calls a “clear, democratic architectural language” that spurned the strident jingoism of Roman monuments.

As later generations warmed to the idea of honouring the country’s great men on the National Mall, the capital’s designers continued to embrace neoclassicism while eschewing triumphal arches.

Instead, they favoured obelisks (the Washington Monument) and temples (the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials), which foreground public service and national unity.

An effort to build an arch honouring Ulysses S. Grant in 1901 was nixed in favour of a grand equestrian statue. While George Washington eventually got an arch, it was in Manhattan as part of the City Beautiful movement.

The absence of arches in Washington, D.C. was not an oversight but a conscious feature of a restrained brand of republicanism.

From Triomphe to Trump

Trump’s desire for an arch was sparked by a more recent precedent set by America’s first ally, France. However, Paris’s famous arch, the Arc de Triomphe, dates from one of the French Republic’s own detours into empire.

When Trump visited Paris in 2017, he was so impressed by the country’s Bastille Day demonstration of “military might” that he instructed his advisers to “top it.”

When Trump hosted his own parade in June 2025, it coincided with two birthdays: the U.S. Army’s 250th and his own 79th. He then set his sights on the Arc de Triomphe, which anchors the Bastille Day parade on the Champs-Elysées.

In 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte overthrew France’s First Republic by donning a Caesarean laurel wreath. The next year, Emperor Napoleon commissioned a Roman-style arch to mark his Grande Armée’s victory at Austerlitz. Its foundation stone, dedicated to “Napoleon the Great,” was laid on his birthday in 1806.

Never mind that Napoleon died in exile long before his arch’s completion, several regime changes later, in 1836. Trump vowed to “blow it away in every way” with a 250-foot behemoth soon nicknamed the “Arc de Trump.”

Global arches

From Mexico City to Baghdad, diverse political movements have used arches to commemorate foundational moments, pivotal leaders and military triumphs and sacrifices.

Empire-building is a recurrent theme. London’s Wellington Arch stands as imperial Britain’s post-Waterloo refutation of Napoleonic invincibility. Benito Mussolini’s Arch of the Philaeni in colonial Libya featured engravings of Il Duce (“the Leader”) resurrecting the Roman Empire.

Had the Second World War played out differently, architect Albert Speer’s German triumphal arch would have loomed over the Third Reich’s imperial capital.

The meaning of arches, however, can evolve. After the First World War, the U.K. installed New Delhi’s India Gate as a tribute to Commonwealth casualties. Since India’s independence, it has anchored the country’s Republic Day celebrations as its National War Memorial.

The focus of Napoleon’s triumphal arch has likewise shifted to include both fallen soldiers and the victims of French imperialism. Since 1920, the Arc de Triomphe has housed France’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. In 1999, a plaque acknowledged that the Algerian War (1954-1962) was an actual war, not a “pacification operation.”

Trump’s blasé attitude to the human costs of war (not to mention colonialism and slavery) is well-documented: will his arch acknowledge them?

A monument in search of meaning

Critics have expressed concerns about the proposed arch’s regulatory oversight, funding and impact on existing commemorative spaces. But another pressing question relates to its symbolism.

The U.S. is bitterly divided and mired in constitutional crisis. The president targets domestic opponents as well as the resources and territory of foreign allies and adversaries.

From imperial Rome to Napoleonic Paris, history’s arches glorified conquest, plunder and the strongmen who erected them.

Is this truly the message the Trump government wants to send as the American republic prepares to mark a major milestone?

Kelly Summers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Trump wants an ‘Independence Arch’ — How famous arches warn about dangers to republics – https://theconversation.com/trump-wants-an-independence-arch-how-famous-arches-warn-about-dangers-to-republics-268748