Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Nolan Maugourd, PhD Candidate in Chemical Engineering, Université Laval

Cancers that were once considered incurable now have new treatment options. Among these innovations are CAR-T (chimeric antigen receptor T cell) therapies that modify a patient’s T cells, which play an important role in immune systems.

The T cells are modified to induce the expression of a receptor that is capable of recognizing and attacking cancer cells. These therapies have provided therapeutic responses in previously untreatable forms of leukemias and lymphomas.

However, they’re associated with significant accessibility challenges in Canada due to their high cost and complexity. To address these issues, Canadian academic researchers and public institutions are developing non-commercial CAR-T therapies that promise to improve accessibility by reducing costs while keeping comparable clinical outcomes.

As a PhD candidate at Université Laval in collaboration with the National Research Council, my research focus is cell engineering to produce lentiviral vectors needed in CAR-T therapies. I’m interested in making CAR T-cell therapy more broadly available.

CAR-T cell therapy process

These personalized treatments are called ex vivo autologous therapies. They use the patient’s own cells, which are harvested from blood, modified outside the body and then re-injected into the patient.

The process follows several key steps. First, apheresis is performed to filter the patient’s blood and collect only T lymphocytes. Once isolated, the T lymphocytes are exposed to a modified virus carrying the CAR gene, programming them to express the CAR receptor and target cancer cells. Once modified, cells are cultured until sufficient quantities are produced. After expansion in culture, the T lymphocytes are reinfused into the patient’s body, creating a personalized therapy.

Various types of CARs can be expressed on the surface of T lymphocytes to target different types of cancer cells. For example, antiCD-19 CARs and antiCD-22 CARs are used to treat leukemia and lymphoma while anti-BCMA CARs are used for myeloma.

A complex and costly centralized model

Currently, six CAR-T therapies are available in Canada. These treatments are made by pharmaceutical companies at few sites where all the stages of production occur for several regions or countries. In this centralized model, cells collected from patients are sent to these companies, modified there and then distributed to the point-of-care location for reinjection into the patient.

This process takes four to six weeks between cell collection and reinfusion. This delay can be critical depending on the patient’s condition, and often necessitates a temporary therapy, called bridging therapy, to stabilize the progression of the disease. This prolonged turnaround time is attributed to the multiple preparation steps and the logistical complexity of centralized manufacturing.

These treatments cost between $440,000 and $630,000, which represents a high cost for public institutions and a big impact on provincial budgets. This pricing limits patient access to these treatments depending on the province of residence. For example, Kimriah an antiCD-19 CAR therapy is only reimbursed in Alberta, Ontario and Québec.

Furthermore, these therapies are only offered in large hospitals due to the expertise and infrastructure required. These geographic barriers prevent patients in remote areas from receiving the same care, resulting in unequal treatment for the same disease.

Non-commercial academic production

Academic therapies are those developed by public institutions such as research institutes, universities and hospitals. In Canada, three academically developed CAR-T therapies are currently undergoing clinical trials targeting forms of lymphoma and leukemia.

Two of these trials target the CD19 antigen (ACIT001/EXC002 and CLIC-1901), while one targets CD22 antigen (CLIC-2201). Because these therapies are in the clinical trials phase, they aren’t yet commercially available, but data is being collected.

The CLIC-1901 therapeutic treatment is unique in that it involves collaboration among different Canadian stakeholders: viral vector components are manufactured in Vancouver at BC Cancer, viral vectors are then produced in Ottawa at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute and the patient’s cells are engineered into CAR-T cells back in Vancouver at BC Cancer. Finally, treatment re-injections are performed at the same clinical sites, either Vancouver General Hospital or The Ottawa Hospital, where they were originally collected.

The ACIT001/EXC002 treatment relies on two production sites in Alberta to supply four centres spread across the province.

Ultimately, the CLIC clinical trials aim to validate the efficacy of a CAR-T cell treatment made in Canada, paving the way for broader access to other sites and provinces across the country.

Benefits for the health system

These academic therapies present several advantages for the Canadian health-care system. Unlike centralized commercial therapies, this approach benefits from in-house production, avoiding the shipment of patient cells to distant manufacturing facilities and reducing turnaround time between collection and reinfusion.

The median vein-to-vein time is only 15 days for CLIC1901 and ACIT001/EXC002. This rapid production notably eliminates the need for bridging therapy.

Although the cost of CLIC-1901 has not yet been determined, researchers expect it to be significantly lower than commercial alternatives currently available. For ACIT001/EXC002, the announced cost is less than $100,000. By comparison, academic production of CAR-T therapy at Hospital Clínic in Barcelona, Spain has reduced costs to approximately €89,000 (equivalent of $145,000). For CLIC-2201, no cost estimate is currently available

These academic CAR-T therapies align with the accessibility principles outlined in Section 3 of the Canada Health Act, guaranteeing all Canadians access to health services, without financial or other barriers. With these three clinical trials, patients from three provinces already benefit from this treatments. The goal for the CLIC therapies is also to extend the distribution to six provinces: British Columbia, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, New Brunswick and Alberta.

This decentralized model helps reduce access inequalities both geographically, through the presence of these treatments across more provinces, and economically through their reduced cost.

Finally, these academic therapies demonstrate promising efficacy. Until now, CLIC-1901 shows clinical results that are equivalent, or even superior, to certain commercial treatments. Preliminary results suggest that CLIC-1901 may have a lower toxicity rate than commercial products. However, conclusions are limited by the sample size on this point.

For ACIT001/EXC002, the results for safety and efficacy are comparable to those currently available on the market, while results for CLIC-2201 are still awaited.

The success of these various clinical phases paves the way for advanced stages and the widespread development of academic CAR-T therapies in Canada.

Nolan Maugourd works for National Research Council Canada.

– ref. Treating previously untreatable cancers: How CAR-T cell therapy could be made accessible to more patients – https://theconversation.com/treating-previously-untreatable-cancers-how-car-t-cell-therapy-could-be-made-accessible-to-more-patients-270937

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Henry Giroux, Chaired professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University

The language of war has long wrapped itself in the rhetoric of courage and the honour of vengeance, drawing on moral and religious appeals to make violence appear necessary, even just.

Today, that language has returned. As war stretches across Gaza and Lebanon, Ukraine and Iran, the words used to justify it are as brutal, self-assured and distant as ever from the suffering they conceal.

A glaring example are the social media posts of United States President Donald Trump, who has in recent days threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages” and called Iranians “crazy bastards” in a demand that they open the Strait of Hormuz.

The ongoing and cascading conflict with Iran, in fact, has been portrayed by Israel and the U.S. as an existential struggle between good and evil.

This is not the messaging of strategy or international law — it’s the renewed language of the Crusades, driven by ideological fervour and staged as a performance of power in which, in Trump’s world view, “might makes right.”

Biblical references

The tone is even more pronounced within segments of Trump’s political orbit, where the conflict is interpreted through apocalyptic and biblical narratives.

References to divine purpose and destiny, including Trump’s claim that he was “saved by God,” draw on a broader evangelical language that frames political conflict in theological terms.

In this environment, war is no longer a tragic necessity but a sacred obligation. This reflects a dangerous fusion of militarism, religious fundamentalism, spectacle and authoritarian politics that is redefining how military power is justified, experienced and normalized.

Religious fundamentalism doesn’t just accompany this violence; it sanctifies it. It functions as an alibi for power, cloaking destruction in the language of destiny while rendering its victims invisible. It turns domination into virtue and makes the machinery of death appear necessary, even divinely ordained.

War as sacred

This isn’t unintentional. It signals a shift in which war becomes a sacred imperative. Trump’s inner circle and his supporters often invoke scripture and religious imagery to cast violence as part of a divine plan. Some of them, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, have described the ongoing war in Iran as a civilizational or even religious war.

Pete Hegeseth, Trump’s defense secretary, expresses this world view most chillingly. He has declared that the mission of the U.S. military is “to unleash death and destruction from the sky all day long,” and has called for “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” as its guiding principle.

This reveals a policy of stripping war of restraint or law and openly aiming for annihilation. Hegseth has also invoked Crusader imagery and claimed that Trump has been ordained by God to wield military power. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth writes that those who value western civilization, freedom and equal justice should “thank a crusader.”

Domestic militarism

The same language that sanctifies violence abroad, like in Gaza and Ukraine, is similar to Trump’s calls for aggression at home — against protesters, immigrants and political enemies.

He has targeted political opponents, including James Comey and Letitia James, revoked visas for international students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, and dismissed critics, including his Democratic opponent in the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris, as “radical left lunatics.”

Retribution and regarding opponents as mortal enemies are treated as justified, even necessary, blurring the lines between war-making and domestic repression.

In this environment, it’s easy for the lines between politics and theology to dissolve as well, weakening ethical restraint and defining conflict as sanctioned, even righteous, violence.

Beyond simply justifying war, the U.S. is once again framing itself as a white Christian nation, which normalizes exclusion, disposability, historical erasure and racialized violence.

Nonetheless, this fusion of faith and force is not universally accepted. As Pope Leo XIV said in his first Palm Sunday address, God is the “king of peace,” rejecting any claim that war can be divinely sanctioned.

War as entertainment

The religious framing of the war in Iran is converging with another shift: the transformation of war into spectacle.

Under Trump, violence is not only being justified; it’s being staged, estheticized and consumed, as White House promotional videos blend action-movie imagery with real footage of Iran bombings. This renders the war a stylized performance designed to excite, entertain and showcase technological power.

In this spectacle, human suffering recedes. Targets become co-ordinates, destruction appears cinematic and violence is stripped of its moral weight. What remains is the seductive image of power — war emptied of judgment.

When these efforts fuse with religious fundamentalism, the consequences can be profound. The theatrics of destruction become a sacred drama and the capacity to kill is defined as evidence of both national strength and divine purpose.

Under such conditions, war is no longer constrained by law, reason or democratic accountability. It is propelled by belief, emotion and spectacle.

Trump provides the script as his rhetoric intensifies this convergence. His suggestion that war might end when he “feels it in his bones” or his remark about bombing Iran “just for fun” shows how ignorance can become governance.

Making fascism possible

The human costs of the war in Iran are devastating. Bombing campaigns have inflicted widespread destruction across the country, with civilian casualties mounting steadily. Yet this death toll is increasingly obscured by the spectacle of war itself, reduced to background noise beneath the American celebration of military power.

The economic costs of the war to Americans are also staggering, estimated at roughly $1 billion per day, resources that could support social needs. Yet in a culture steeped in militarism, concentrated power and inequality, such considerations recede.

History offers stark warnings about such moments. The horrors of the past — from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War, the Rwandan genocide, the Pinochet dictatorship and the Iraq war — reveal how societies can be mobilized through propaganda, fear and the erosion of critical thought.

Read more:
War sent America off the rails 19 years ago. Could another one bring it back?

They remind us what happens when violence is normalized, power is unchecked and human life is stripped of its value. Those conditions are visible again. But authoritarianism can only endure in a culture that enables it — where war, both at home and abroad, becomes a permanent feature of social life.

What’s at stake is not only the violence unleashed abroad but the political culture it legitimizes at home. When war is staged as entertainment and justified as a moral duty, its human costs disappear from view.

A society that embraces cruelty as virtue, ignorance as governance and violence as destiny risks losing its capacity for judgment. Under such conditions, democracy does not simply erode. It is obliterated, giving way to forces that make fascism possible.

Henry Giroux 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. Donald Trump’s profane threats against Iran expose the unhinged language of war – https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-profane-threats-against-iran-expose-the-unhinged-language-of-war-279801

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Henry Giroux, Chaired professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University

The language of war has long wrapped itself in the rhetoric of courage and the honour of vengeance, drawing on moral and religious appeals to make violence appear necessary, even just.

Today, that language has returned. As war stretches across Gaza and Lebanon, Ukraine and Iran, the words used to justify it are as brutal, self-assured and distant as ever from the suffering they conceal.

A glaring example are the social media posts of United States President Donald Trump, who has in recent days threatened to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages” and called Iranians “crazy bastards” in a demand that they open the Strait of Hormuz.

The ongoing and cascading conflict with Iran, in fact, has been portrayed by Israel and the U.S. as an existential struggle between good and evil.

This is not the messaging of strategy or international law — it’s the renewed language of the Crusades, driven by ideological fervour and staged as a performance of power in which, in Trump’s world view, “might makes right.”

Biblical references

The tone is even more pronounced within segments of Trump’s political orbit, where the conflict is interpreted through apocalyptic and biblical narratives.

References to divine purpose and destiny, including Trump’s claim that he was “saved by God,” draw on a broader evangelical language that frames political conflict in theological terms.

In this environment, war is no longer a tragic necessity but a sacred obligation. This reflects a dangerous fusion of militarism, religious fundamentalism, spectacle and authoritarian politics that is redefining how military power is justified, experienced and normalized.

Religious fundamentalism doesn’t just accompany this violence; it sanctifies it. It functions as an alibi for power, cloaking destruction in the language of destiny while rendering its victims invisible. It turns domination into virtue and makes the machinery of death appear necessary, even divinely ordained.

War as sacred

This isn’t unintentional. It signals a shift in which war becomes a sacred imperative. Trump’s inner circle and his supporters often invoke scripture and religious imagery to cast violence as part of a divine plan. Some of them, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, have described the ongoing war in Iran as a civilizational or even religious war.

Pete Hegeseth, Trump’s defense secretary, expresses this world view most chillingly. He has declared that the mission of the U.S. military is “to unleash death and destruction from the sky all day long,” and has called for “maximum lethality, not tepid legality” as its guiding principle.

This reveals a policy of stripping war of restraint or law and openly aiming for annihilation. Hegseth has also invoked Crusader imagery and claimed that Trump has been ordained by God to wield military power. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth writes that those who value western civilization, freedom and equal justice should “thank a crusader.”

Domestic militarism

The same language that sanctifies violence abroad, like in Gaza and Ukraine, is similar to Trump’s calls for aggression at home — against protesters, immigrants and political enemies.

He has targeted political opponents, including James Comey and Letitia James, revoked visas for international students protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, and dismissed critics, including his Democratic opponent in the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris, as “radical left lunatics.”

Retribution and regarding opponents as mortal enemies are treated as justified, even necessary, blurring the lines between war-making and domestic repression.

In this environment, it’s easy for the lines between politics and theology to dissolve as well, weakening ethical restraint and defining conflict as sanctioned, even righteous, violence.

Beyond simply justifying war, the U.S. is once again framing itself as a white Christian nation, which normalizes exclusion, disposability, historical erasure and racialized violence.

Nonetheless, this fusion of faith and force is not universally accepted. As Pope Leo XIV said in his first Palm Sunday address, God is the “king of peace,” rejecting any claim that war can be divinely sanctioned.

War as entertainment

The religious framing of the war in Iran is converging with another shift: the transformation of war into spectacle.

Under Trump, violence is not only being justified; it’s being staged, estheticized and consumed, as White House promotional videos blend action-movie imagery with real footage of Iran bombings. This renders the war a stylized performance designed to excite, entertain and showcase technological power.

In this spectacle, human suffering recedes. Targets become co-ordinates, destruction appears cinematic and violence is stripped of its moral weight. What remains is the seductive image of power — war emptied of judgment.

When these efforts fuse with religious fundamentalism, the consequences can be profound. The theatrics of destruction become a sacred drama and the capacity to kill is defined as evidence of both national strength and divine purpose.

Under such conditions, war is no longer constrained by law, reason or democratic accountability. It is propelled by belief, emotion and spectacle.

Trump provides the script as his rhetoric intensifies this convergence. His suggestion that war might end when he “feels it in his bones” or his remark about bombing Iran “just for fun” shows how ignorance can become governance.

Making fascism possible

The human costs of the war in Iran are devastating. Bombing campaigns have inflicted widespread destruction across the country, with civilian casualties mounting steadily. Yet this death toll is increasingly obscured by the spectacle of war itself, reduced to background noise beneath the American celebration of military power.

The economic costs of the war to Americans are also staggering, estimated at roughly $1 billion per day, resources that could support social needs. Yet in a culture steeped in militarism, concentrated power and inequality, such considerations recede.

History offers stark warnings about such moments. The horrors of the past — from the Holocaust to the Vietnam War, the Rwandan genocide, the Pinochet dictatorship and the Iraq war — reveal how societies can be mobilized through propaganda, fear and the erosion of critical thought.

Read more:
War sent America off the rails 19 years ago. Could another one bring it back?

They remind us what happens when violence is normalized, power is unchecked and human life is stripped of its value. Those conditions are visible again. But authoritarianism can only endure in a culture that enables it — where war, both at home and abroad, becomes a permanent feature of social life.

What’s at stake is not only the violence unleashed abroad but the political culture it legitimizes at home. When war is staged as entertainment and justified as a moral duty, its human costs disappear from view.

A society that embraces cruelty as virtue, ignorance as governance and violence as destiny risks losing its capacity for judgment. Under such conditions, democracy does not simply erode. It is obliterated, giving way to forces that make fascism possible.

Henry Giroux 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. Donald Trump’s profane threats against Iran display the unhinged language of war – https://theconversation.com/donald-trumps-profane-threats-against-iran-display-the-unhinged-language-of-war-279801

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Martine Rhéaume, Coordinator of Technological Innovation and Artificial Intelligence in Language Education, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

A pervasive narrative has taken hold in education: generative AI (genAI) is an unstoppable force, and educators must adapt or be left behind.

Technology companies market AI tools as the ultimate classroom assistants, while popular media warns that essay writing is dead.

Teachers have long been labelled or framed by technology enthusiasts and policymakers as “resistant” and “risk averse.” Discourse about technology in classrooms has amplified notions that teachers either embrace or reject tech.

Yet research with educators is showing that a binary framing of AI innovators versus Luddites obscures what is actually happening in classrooms.

To better understand this, I turned to my own institution, the University of Ottawa’s Official Languages and Bilingualism Institute (OLBI). I consulted English as a second language (ESL) and French as a second language (FSL) instructors to examine their attitudes toward, and current use of, AI-assisted tools. I did this through conducting a bottom-up institutional survey.

Twenty-four of 60 eligible staff members responded, yielding a 40 per cent response rate. In the context of institutional research, this is a robust turnout that provides a representative cross-section of our department.

Because my goal was to understand the nuances of educators’ decision-making, this qualitative sample offers deep insights into front-line teaching realities. The findings point to a thoughtful majority of instructors navigating complex pedagogical terrain with considerable nuance.

The myth of the resistant teacher

As educational historian Larry Cuban has argued, teachers are not inherently resistant to technology; they’re resistant to tools that don’t solve their problems. Data from my study supports this distinction.

Research in acquiring a second language suggests experienced language educators, keen to see their students progress, seek normalization of novel technologies — the stage at which a tool becomes invisible and learning takes centre stage.

My survey confirms this orientation. When asked to identify their stance on AI integration, the majority of OLBI staff did not select “skeptic.”

The majority of respondents are best characterized as “pragmatists” — educators who recognize the potential of genAI tools but are withholding full adoption pending credible pedagogical evidence.

A significant minority, however, expressed substantive and philosophically grounded concerns. One FSL instructor described genAI as “une menace à l’autonomie de la pensée” (“a threat to the autonomy of thought”).

This is a considered defence of the critical thinking capacities that higher education exists to cultivate.

Read more:
The ‘slow professor’ could bring back creativity to our universities

The ‘hidden AI’ problem

My survey also suggests a striking inconsistency in how educators conceive of AI. Several respondents reported that they “never” use generative AI. Yet, in subsequent questions, they acknowledged regular use of tools such as Grammarly for writing assistance or DeepL for translation.

Grammarly introduced generative AI to its earlier AI technology integrating machine learning and natural language processing, and the genAI feature can be turned off. DeepL has also developed a genAI model.

However, the bigger point is instructors appeared to distinguish between AI they perceived as assisting existing work and AI they perceived as generating new text. That distinction reflects different understandings of authorship, agency and acceptable use.

What the data reveals, then, is an intuitive taxonomy: instructors are broadly comfortable with tools that refine or correct their existing work (assistive AI) and considerably more cautious about tools that produce content on their behalf.

Such a distinction is reflected in my own process with this article. As a francophone writing in English, I used Anthropic’s Claude to clarify sentence-level phrasing in a draft I had already written.

A differentiation between refining existing work and producing content reflects broader discussions taken up elsewhere related to learning and academic integrity.

Read more:
ChatGPT is in classrooms. How should educators now assess student learning?

The efficiency shield

The most significant finding from the survey concerns how instructors are deploying genAI primarily as an administrative efficiency tool, using it to generate lesson plans, draft course communications and create short texts for classroom use. Such tasks consume significant time but don’t directly mediate student learning.

One ESL instructor shared their enthusiasm about this:

“The possibilities for lesson planning and activity ideas are endless.”

Yet the same instructors who embraced AI for their own productivity expressed marked reluctance to introduce these tools into student learning.

The reasoning is grounded in cognitive science. Language acquisition depends on what psychologists Robert Bjork and Elizabeth Bjork term desirable difficulties — the effortful cognitive processing that consolidates new linguistic knowledge into long-term memory.

When a student offloads a grammatical decision to an auto-complete function, or delegates argument construction to a language model, they bypass the neural engagement that makes learning durable. This phenomenon, known as cognitive offloading, may produce a polished written product while leaving the underlying competency undeveloped.

One respondent articulated this concern:

“If [students] get away with that, then they will never learn how to write.”

Such positions align with UNESCO’s 2023 guidance on generative AI in education and research, which cautions that the pace of genAI adoption in educational settings must not outstrip our collective understanding of its cognitive and ethical implications.

Our instructors are, in effect, applying an instinctive precautionary principle — one that is well-supported by the empirical research.

Read more:
What are the key purposes of human writing? How we name AI-generated text confuses things

Policy must follow pedagogy

The OLBI consultation illustrates why meaningful AI education policy cannot be imposed from above. If universities issue broad mandates to embrace innovation without consulting those who understand the cognitive architecture of learning, they risk producing policies that are administratively tidy but practically incoherent.

Conversely, blanket prohibitions ignore the reality that students will graduate into a labour market saturated with AI tools, and must develop the critical literacy to engage with them responsibly.

The path illuminated by our “pragmatist” majority is one of critical AI literacy. Concretely, this involves three institutional commitments:

Distinguishing between functions of AI: Institutions must teach students to distinguish between AI tools according to their function rather than their underlying technology. This means considering tools that operate in an assistive capacity — correcting, refining or translating work that the student has already produced — and a generative capacity by producing content on the user’s behalf.

This said, both categories of “assistive” and “generative” AI warrant scrutiny. It’s relevant to note that some educational or accessibility rights bodies are discussing using generative AI as an assistive technology, particularly for people with disabilities.

Protecting the learning process: Assessment design should value the process of writing and argumentation — drafting, revision, reflection — rather than privileging only the final product, which a language model can readily simulate.

Repositioning the instructor: As the OECD has noted, the educator’s role is shifting from knowledge transmitter to critical evaluator and learning architect. AI tools can support this transition — but only if instructors retain the agency to define the terms of engagement.

The question facing universities is whether institutions will trust the educators who understand their students’ cognitive needs to draw the lines that matter.

Martine Rhéaume 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. AI pragmatists: How language teachers are navigating AI with nuance – https://theconversation.com/ai-pragmatists-how-language-teachers-are-navigating-ai-with-nuance-279041

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Alissa Overend, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, MacEwan University

Militarized surveillance systems are becoming the new normal in many Canadian grocery stores, marking a disturbing symptom of an already fraught food retail system.

At a FreshCo in Toronto and a Superstore in Calgary, staff have begun wearing body cameras in response to rising theft at self-checkouts, organized retail crime where high-value items such as meat are stolen and resold and increased food insecurity.

Surveillance systems in commercial retail are nothing new; cameras, mirrors and store design have long been used to deter shoplifting. But these newer, more militarized approaches seem both heavy-handed and misguided.

The new measures raise important questions about the camera’s effectiveness in theft detection, impacts on consumers and employees and freedom of information and privacy concerns.

Surveillance expands as theft rises

Despite the growing costs for employees and consumers, retailers say they are facing significant losses from retail crime, which the Retail Council of Canada has called a “national crisis.”

Retailers reported an average profit shrink of 1.5 per cent in 2024, which is almost double what it was in 2019. Grocers and retailers have both cited self-checkouts as a top contributor to this shrink.

Meanwhile, police-reported incidents of shoplifting are rising. Toronto police reported that 105 incidents of shoplifting goods over $5,000 occurred in 2024, up from just 32 in 2020. Winnipeg police reported a 46 per cent increase in retail theft in 2024 compared to the year prior.

In response, retailers are spending millions on police, security and other forms of surveillance. Superstore, for example, has spent more than $12 million in the last five years on special duty police officers to patrol checkouts. Walmart started using special duty officers in their Winnipeg stores in 2022, costing the U.S. conglomerate $1.4 million.

Persistent food insecurity

These developments cannot be separated from the fact that food insecurity in Canada is widespread and growing. About one-quarter of all Canadians find themselves food insecure, with disproportionately higher rates among Indigenous, Black, disabled, newcomer and senior populations.

This persists despite Canada having the ninth-largest global economy and despite the global food system producing more food now than at any time in history.

The problem is not a lack of food but a lack of affordable, equitable access to food. Food insecurity has been growing for decades, even as corporate food retailers report high profits.

At the same time, workers’ wages in the retail food sector remain stagnant. The industry relies heavily on migrant and immigrant labourers and routinely pays minimum wage. While the federal minimum wage was just raised to $18.15 per hour, it remains lower in some provinces, including $15 in Alberta.

For many workers, an hour’s wages barely covers the cost of a 10-ounce steak or its vegan equivalent. According to the Canada Food Price Report, Canadians are spending between three and five per cent more on groceries, with the highest increases seen in meat.

As fuel costs increase due to the U.S.-led invasion of Iran, grocery prices are likely to increase even more.

Rising profits for companies

Commercial food retail in Canada, and elsewhere around the world, is big business.

A handful of companies dominate the market. Loblaw Companies Ltd., whose parent company is led by CEO Galen Weston Jr., operates chains including Loblaws, Real Canadian Superstore, No Frills, Zehrs, T&T Supermarket and Shoppers Drug Mart. He was the third-wealthiest Canadian in 2025, with a net worth of $20.6 billion.

The company’s stock has more than tripled since the COVID-19 pandemic, with earnings up 11.6 per cent in 2025. This is despite paying out $500 million in a class-action settlement from a bread price-fixing scheme.

Read more:
Show me the money: Canada Bread penalty raises questions about criminal fines

The other “Big Five” food companies in Canada include Sobeys (that owns Safeway, IGA, FreshCo and Farm Boy), Metro (that owns Super C, Food Basics and Jean Coutu), Costco and Walmart. Together, the Big Five control roughly 80 per cent of the grocery market.

Rethinking food systems

The bottom line is that people are hungry and food is expensive. We’ve replaced human labour with automated self-checkouts. Misshapen vegetables are wasted at the farm due to strict grocery store specifications of shape and size.

Food is spoiled in transit or held up at borders. Grocery stores purposefully over-buy to give the sense of abundance in store aisles all while throwing a lot of it out.

The problem lies not in people ringing in organic bananas for the non-organic ones, but in the way we buy and sell food more broadly. Canadians are already fed up with the business-as-usual of large commercial retail grocery stores — perhaps the recent militarized surveillance might serve as a collective breaking point.

There are better alternatives: farmers’ markets, community supported agriculture and the mounting support for public grocery stores are all more sustainable on several social, ecological and economic markers.

Food should be a human right, not one protected by pricey surveillance systems to protect corporate profits. Our collective purchasing power can exercise the kinds of food systems we want, and the ones we can no longer tolerate.

Alissa Overend received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada through a SSHRC Institutional Grant at MacEwan University.

– ref. Policing the grocery store checkout won’t fix Canada’s food retail crisis – https://theconversation.com/policing-the-grocery-store-checkout-wont-fix-canadas-food-retail-crisis-279419

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Arif Ashraf, Assistant Professor, Department of Botany, University of British Columbia

When plants face biting cold, floods or parched soil, they can’t run away or seek shelter like animals. Instead, they have to develop ways to overcome and survive them until the weather improves.

Some plants do this by putting a pause on productivity until the weather improves. In our recently published research, we discovered which genes control the “pause-and-play” mechanism of plant growth and are key for the survival of Canada’s crops.

Our goal is to understand the genetic factors that control growth so they can eventually be used to improve the resilience of crops grown in Canada and around the world.

A changing climate means extreme weather events are becoming more frequent. These findings could help create climate-resilient, genetically engineered crops that can recover faster and more efficiently after climate shocks.

These plants might be more likely to complete their life cycle and produce food during the harvest season, even after experiencing snowstorms, heat waves or flooding.

How plants respond to stress

To get an idea of how plants tolerate stress, we measured root growth under a series of environmental stresses that Canadian and globally relevant crops commonly face throughout their life cycles. These included cold temperatures, salt stress and drought-like conditions. For our first experiments, we used thale cress (Arabidopsis thaliana).

Roots are particularly useful for this type of research because they grow continuously and respond quickly to environmental change.

By measuring root length over time, we could see when growth slowed down and when it resumed. We tested the root length in model organism.

We found that tested plants paused their root growth when exposed to cold or salt stress. When the stress was removed and the plants returned to normal growing conditions, root growth resumed as normal within about 24 hours.

However, plants did not respond the same way to every type of stress. We found that plants can recover from osmotic or drought stress, but it takes a little longer for them to do so. We referred to that dynamic as “pause and push” because plants need time to push through and recover.

To test whether the same stress response occurs in other plant species, we partnered with researchers from the United States Department of Agriculture. Together, we repeated the experiments using two wild grasses that are closely related to major cereal crops: brachypodium (Brachypodium distachyon) and annual ryegrass (Lolium multiflorum).

The grasses showed similar patterns of stress response and recovery. That suggests the mechanism that pauses and restarts growth may be shared across many plant species.

Pinpointing stress-recovery genes

Observing these dynamics is one thing, but how can scientists figure out what’s going on at the genetic and molecular level?

One common approach is to attach a fluorescent marker to genes of interest. Scientists often use a green fluorescent protein, originally discovered in jellyfish, that glows under specific light.

When this protein is inserted into a plant genome, researchers can fuse it to a gene of interest to see when and where that gene becomes active as it lights up inside cells.

We knew that the lack of growth during stress was due to a decrease in cell division, so we targeted genes related to cell division. Using fluorescent markers, we observed how the plant cells lit up differently in response to stress and stress recovery.

After counting thousands of cells for months, we could see certain genes were present in fewer cells when plants were under cold, drought and salt stress. However, within about 24 hours of being put back into optimal growth conditions, their numbers returned to normal.

One gene stood out in particular: Cyclin-dependent Kinase A;1 (CDKA;1). This gene helps regulate the cell cycle, the process that controls when cells divide and grow. A related gene named CDK1 exists in animals and humans, where it performs similar functions.

After performing more experiments targeting CDKA;1 in plants, we found that inhibiting the gene prevented plants from recovering from cold and salt stress. This suggests CDKA;1 plays a vital role in helping plants resume growth once environmental conditions stabilize.

Supporting food security

Our focus is on helping crops recover faster. We can’t stop heat waves or snowstorms. Pinpointing genes, however, can help plants recover from these events and still produce in time for harvest.

Understanding these genes opens the door to new approaches in crop breeding. Researchers could look for natural variants of these genes that already exist in crop populations. Traditional breeding programs could then select for varieties that recover faster after stress.

Another option is modern gene-editing tools such as CRISPR. This tool allows scientists to make precise changes to a plant’s DNA, including strengthening or adjusting genes involved in stress recovery.

As our research progresses, we hope to adjust the genetics of these Canadian crop varieties and create our own CRISPR-edited lines that are better able to cope with a changing climate.

Improving stress recovery could also expand where crops can be grown. Regions that currently experience unpredictable weather or short growing seasons may become more suitable for agriculture if crops can recover quickly after stress.

For Canada, this could help stabilize production in areas where climate variability is increasing. For the global food system, it could make crops better equipped to handle the environmental uncertainty expected in the coming decades.

By identifying the genes that allow plants to pause growth during stress and restart, we’re beginning to understand a critical survival strategy in plants. This knowledge can eventually help ensure crops continue to produce reliable harvests in a changing climate.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Understanding how plants pause and restart growth can help develop climate-resilient crops – https://theconversation.com/understanding-how-plants-pause-and-restart-growth-can-help-develop-climate-resilient-crops-278392