Category: Academic Reportage

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Chloe Sher, PhD Candidate, Kinesiology and Physical Education, University of Toronto

Health disparities across racial and ethnic groups persist in Canada. But how the country can effectively address them hinges upon how it can better study these differences.

In a recent paper I co-authored, we examine how researchers study racial and ethnic inequalities in health. We identify four persistent problems: unclear categories of race and ethnicity, a white-centred lens, heavy reliance on majority-defined health outcomes and limited explanation of why these disparities arise.

We discuss these issues drawing heavily on evidence from the United States. This reflects the state of the field: Much of the research and many of the frameworks used to study racial and ethnic health inequality come from the U.S. and have been widely applied in Canadian research.

Canada and the U.S. share a history of colonialism, structural racism and white dominance that continues to shape persistent health inequalities across racial and ethnic groups.

But Canada is also different in several important ways. It has a larger immigrant population shaped by selective immigration policies, wider variation in social and economic conditions across regions and communities and a higher proportion of Indigenous Peoples. Data are often more limited, and policies such as universal health care shape how inequality is experienced and addressed.

To better understand and address health inequalities in Canada, Canadians must rethink how race and ethnicity are studied and ground approaches in the Canadian context.

Canada is not the U.S.

Canada’s social policies are distinct from American policies. To begin with, the racial and ethnic makeup of the populations differ. Canada, for example, has a smaller Black population and a larger Asian population than the U.S.. These differences reflect broader historical and institutional contexts that shape how racial and ethnic inequalities are structured in each country.

At the same time, Indigenous Peoples are more central to health inequality in Canada. This is because Canada has a relatively high percentage of Indigenous Peoples compared to the U.S. and many other more economically developed nations. The health of Indigenous Peoples is shaped by a long history of colonialism and ongoing structural disadvantage.

Immigrant population also differs. About one-quarter of Canada’s population is foreign-born, compared to about one in seven in the U.S. Canada’s selective immigration system means many immigrants arrive with relatively high levels of education and good health. This contributes to patterns like “the healthy immigrant effect.”

Research has shown that Canada exhibits the healthy immigrant effect, in which newly arrived immigrants tend to have better health than the Canadian-born population, though this advantage often declines over time with longer residence. Inequality does not line up neatly with race.

Policy matters too. Canada promotes multiculturalism, while the U.S. emphasizes assimilation into a single national culture. Canada has universal health care, which reduces financial barriers to basic care.

But this coverage is partial. Services such as prescription drugs, dental care and mental-health support are not fully covered and often depend on employment benefits or where people live. Since health care is organized at the provincial level, access and quality also vary across regions. These gaps shape who gets timely care and who falls through the cracks.

The problem with ‘visible minority’

The term “visible minority” is prevalent in research on racial and ethnic health disparities in Canada. But it often does more harm than good.

At its core, it lumps all non-white, non-Indigenous people into one group. That means populations with vastly different histories, migration paths and socioeconomic status are treated homogeneously. The ability to see meaningful differences in health across groups like Chinese, South Asian and Black communities is diminished.

Read more:
The diversity within Black Canada should be recognized and amplified

It also mixes up race and immigration. Many studies don’t separate immigrants from Canadian-born racialized populations. This matters because of the healthy immigrant effect. If newer immigrants are healthier on average, combining them with long-settled groups can make inequalities look smaller than they really are.

The term itself is also ambiguous. People do not always understand or interpret it in the same way, and it’s often taken literally to include anyone visibly different, such as those with disabilities or who are transgender, which complicates its use in health research.

In many ways, the problem stems from data. Canada has limited, inconsistent race-based data. Racial categories are not standardized, and detailed race-based data are often hard to access. Due to limited data availability, researchers could only rely on broad racial terms. This aggravates the problem: instead of revealing inequality, it hides it.

We measure health too narrowly

Another issue is how health is defined in the first place. Most studies rely on standard measures such as life expectancy, chronic illness or mortality. These measures are important, but they only tell part of the story. They reflect a narrow, biomedical view, often omitting how diverse racial and ethnic groups actually experience health and well-being.

Considering Indigenous communities as an example, health is not solely about the absence of disease. It includes connections to land, culture, community and spirituality, alongside physical and mental well-being. Defining health narrowly can marginalize groups by neglecting how different groups understand and experience health.

A narrow focus also makes inequality harder to see. Different groups face distinct health risks and barriers. When we rely on only a few measures, important health problems and inequalities can be overlooked.

A Canadian approach

Studying racial and ethnic health inequality in Canada requires a distinctly Canadian approach. The population, data and policy context differ from those in the U.S., and these differences shape both how inequalities emerge and how they should be studied.

This means moving beyond broad categories, improving race-based data, and using more meaningful and diverse measures of health. It also requires closer attention to context, including Indigenous and rural settings, as well as Canada’s social, immigration and health policy landscape.

To effectively address health disparities, research needs to be grounded in Canada’s realities, not simply adapted from models developed elsewhere.

Chloe Sher previously received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC).

– ref. Studying racial and ethnic health inequality in Canada: What we need to get right – https://theconversation.com/studying-racial-and-ethnic-health-inequality-in-canada-what-we-need-to-get-right-279104

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Paul Calluzzo, Associate Professor and Toller Family Fellow of Finance, Queen’s University, Ontario

Prime Minister Mark Carney recently announced Canada’s first national sovereign wealth fund, the Canada Strong Fund. It’s aimed at investing $25 billion in domestic projects while offering Canadians a chance to invest alongside the government.

The fund has a dual mandate to deliver market-rate returns while also investing in Canadian projects that build a stronger and more resilient economy.

But these goals can conflict, and the fund’s current design raises questions the government has not yet fully answered.

What is a sovereign wealth fund?

A sovereign wealth fund is a pot of money owned and invested by a government to generate returns and build national wealth over time.

More than 100 exist globally, collectively managing more than US$10 trillion in assets. Most are funded from commodity surpluses or foreign-exchange reserves.

They differ from other public funds in important ways. Public pension funds manage money on behalf of retirees. Public banks and development funds lend or invest at below-market rates to achieve policy goals. Central bank reserves are held as a financial buffer, not invested for return.

Sovereign wealth funds are explicitly in the business of growing state capital. Governments can also use them to achieve geopolitical and economic goals.

Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global, valued at approximately US$2.2 trillion, is the best-known example. It invests oil revenue in a globally diversified portfolio to preserve the country’s resource wealth for future generations.

The Santiago Principles — a set of voluntary governance standards adopted by the international sovereign wealth fund community in 2008 — outline what responsible management looks like.

How does Canada Strong compare?

Canada’s new sovereign wealth fund fits the criteria of being government-owned and seeking market-rate returns. However, it diverges from standard practice in three notable ways.

First, it will be funded from a budget that is already in deficit. Canada’s projected deficit for 2025-26 is $66.9 billion. The $25 billion for the fund will be drawn from the federal budget over three years, meaning the fund is being prioritized over debt reduction and other spending commitments.

Second, the fund will focus on domestic investment. Most sovereign wealth funds invest globally, following best practices from the Santiago Principles to diversify risk.

A fund concentrated in one country’s economy heightens financial risk and is more exposed to political pressure. This concern is serious enough that some sovereign wealth funds have banned domestic investments completly.

Third, it will include an option for retail investors to directly invest in the fund. No existing sovereign wealth fund offers this.

Asset recycling and its risks

To grow the fund over time, the government is also considering raising funds through what it calls “asset recycling” or “asset optimization.”

Pioneered in Australia through a 2014 federal initiative, asset recycling involves selling or leasing public assets to fund new infrastructure.

Early reporting suggests the federal government is considering selling or leasing airports and reinvesting those funds into the Canada Strong Fund.

When asset managers take over public infrastructure, it introduces an additional dimension of risk. The Thames Water company’s record of sewage dumping, crumbling infrastructure and high levels of debt in the United Kingdom offers one cautionary case study.

Research on the privatization of both the Heathrow and Brussels airports highlights increased costs for airlines and passengers, with poorer levels of service.

A dual mandate and its trade-offs

In addition to higher risk, the Canada Strong Fund’s dual mandate may also lead to lower returns. If the fund invests on fully commercial terms alongside private investors, it risks crowding out private capital in projects that would have been funded anyway.

If, instead, it accepts lower returns when supporting strategic projects, it quietly abandons the market-rate mandate and the promise of creating wealth for Canadians.

Where the government identifies infrastructure priorities without a clear business case, it could consider direct public ownership rather than routing investment through the Canada Strong Fund.

When mixing priorities, the trade-off against financial performance is unavoidable. To have a genuine impact, the Canada Strong Fund will need to behave less like a sovereign wealth fund and more like the Canada Infrastructure Bank or the Canada Growth Fund.

Unlike the Canada Strong Fund, however, those two vehicles are upfront about accepting below-market returns to advance their priorities.

What about retail investors?

The most novel feature of the Canada Strong Fund is the retail investment product. The government has said the product will be broadly accessible to Canadians, simple to purchase and structured so investors share in any upside while their initial capital is protected.

According to a 2024 survey conducted for the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada, there has been a significant drop in the retirement readiness of Canadians since 2019. A retail product tied to Canadian nation-building could, in principle, help address that gap.

Yet challenges remain. The promise of shared upside with limited downside risk introduces complexity to the product. The performance of complex instruments is lower than the performance of simpler instruments. Retail investors may also struggle to gauge the risk-reward trade-offs associated with the Canada Strong Fund’s dual mandate.

There is also the question of what happens if the fund loses money. The government has stated they will protect the initially invested capital of retail investors, but it is not clear where this money will come from.

If retail investors effectively pay an embedded insurance premium, that premium reduces their return. If the government subsidizes the cost of that protection, it amounts to a cross-subsidy from Canadians who do not participate in the fund to those who do — an outcome that could be regressive, depending on who invests.

What would make it work?

A well-designed Canadian sovereign wealth fund has genuine potential to grow our nation’s generational wealth and financial resilience.

Other sovereign wealth funds have achieved these ends through a focused mandate to invest for financial objectives, as outlined in the Santiago Principles. The odds of Canada Strong Fund succeeding would be improved by pivoting towards these principles.

Canada could follow Norway’s model of running two separate funds. It could leave the existing Canada Growth Fund to pursue domestic strategic investments, and have the Canada Strong Fund invest abroad with the sole goal of building national wealth.

That separation would reduce internal conflict, clarify accountability and give the retail product a cleaner return profile.

Paul Calluzzo receives funding from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Dan Cohen receives grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: one on monetary policy (grant number 435-2022-0069) and one on social finance (grant number 4030-2020-00085). He is also a member of the New Democratic Party.

Evan Jo 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. Canada’s new sovereign wealth fund is ambitious, but its design raises questions – https://theconversation.com/canadas-new-sovereign-wealth-fund-is-ambitious-but-its-design-raises-questions-281836

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Lindsey McMaster, Instructor, English Studies and Academic Writing, Nipissing University

Writing the dreaded English essay spikes anxiety for thousands of students, but is there a way for writing to boost students’ well-being instead?

I wanted to know if a new approach to teaching literary studies could tap into the feel-good side of writing and make essays a path to wellness, so I designed an English course to try it out at Nipissing University.

We know that university students are at risk of mental-health struggles, particularly depression and anxiety. If writing can help instead of stress them out, it could be a refreshing change for English studies — and a new way for teachers to introduce essay writing.

Studies show that writing can boost your mental and physical health if you focus on expressing your emotions and digging for insight.

Paying more attention to the positives in our lives, specifically by writing them down, could further enhance short- and long-term well-being.

Read more:
Why you’re wise on Tuesday and foolish on Sunday: Practising wisdom in uncertain times

Starting with journalling

Students first need to find out that writing can actually support well-being.

In the course, they took up a journalling habit, but it wasn’t just about venting their feelings or writing whatever came to mind. We looked at studies on how writing can reshape your thinking and boost positivity.

Three methods stood out:

• Write down “three good things” about each day and, importantly, your own role in bringing them about. This technique was pioneered in a study led by psychologist Martin Seligman. Participants who adopted the approach reported feeling happier and less depressed at the one-month, three-month and six-month points. It’s now been widely shared, and it’s a great way to start a new journalling habit because it’s straightforward and effective.

• Look to the future and write about your best possible self. When you imagine a fulfilled version of yourself, it will motivate you to do the hard work to get there. According to psychologist Laura A. King, when you imagine a fulfilled version of yourself, you can experience the health benefits of writing without revisiting negatives from the past.

• Add creativity to your journalling. Turn a moment from your day into a comic; narrate your day as if it were happening in Middle Earth; write a haiku about your toothpaste. A diary-based study of more than 600 young adults led by psychologist Tamlin Conner showed a straightforward effect where being creative one day boosted well-being the next.

Case study on the self

Where journalling provides a space to play around with techniques, essays give students a place to reflect on their efforts, report on the results and hypothesize about positive effects of the experience.

One of the fascinating things about writing for well-being is that no one knows for certain why it works. Across studies it shows reliable, modest benefits, but the underlying mechanism for its effects hasn’t been pinned down — so students’ own theories could contribute to solving a real mystery.

Writers feed off inspiration. Showing students that authors have been using writing for well-being — and making great art in the process — gives them that extra push to keep writing and go deeper.

Inspiration from literature

Among Canadian authors, L. M. Montgomery’s story is especially compelling. Her famous books like Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon have made a utopia of Prince Edward Island; but inwardly, Montgomery experienced deep mental anguish, leading to addiction in her later life.

Her journals detail this other side to her life and show how she used writing to ease her mental suffering. As she memorably notes in an entry from 1904:

“I feel better for writing it out. It is almost as efficacious as swearing would be and much more respectable.”

Read more:
Playing detective with Canada’s female literary past

Looking to Montgomery as a mentor helped students realize how creative and immersive personal writing can be, in turn motivating them to push forward with their own journalling.

Discussing Montgomery’s life writing in their essays made sense because they could see how her efforts to find solace through writing were relatable to their own.

Easing back on literary jargon

Poetry can beautifully map a state of mind. But traditional approaches to teaching it have a tendency to suck the life out of literature that should be a joy and a delight.

Instead of taking what some teachers call a “technique spotting” approach where you count up the metaphors, teaching English from a well-being perspective taps into poetry’s healing qualities.

In the United Kingdom, the Poetry Pharmacy movement spearheaded by publisher and arts advocate William Sieghart focuses on the healing power of poetry.

His curated poetry collections pair thoughtfully selected poems with one-page prescriptions, highlighting each work’s curative potential for conditions like insecurity, regret, loneliness and more. Both the poem itself and the interpretation serve to advance self-knowledge and alleviate mental suffering.

Students easily ran with this idea. They found joy in poems that spoke to their lived experience, used empathy to recommend poems to others in need and wrote movingly in essays about the mental-health issues they face most often — like academic pressure, fear of failure, homesickness, social anxiety, perfectionism, procrastination and more.

The poetry-remedy concept also lent itself to experiential approaches where students could tape a chosen poem on their mirror, make it the lock screen on their phone, share it with a loved one, create a painting or visual, text it to a distant friend — and ultimately share the story of what happened in essay form or classroom discussion.

Read more:
Why reading and writing poems shouldn’t be considered a luxury in troubling times

Turning away from AI

Essays are a notoriously difficult part of academic life, which is why generative AI presents such an irresistible pull to the stressed-out student. If essay writing is no more than a tedious recital, it’s no wonder they would gladly pass along what AI spews out on such topics.

Writing instead about your own interior world, finding evidence in your own experience and using literature to light a personalized path to growth are tasks that cannot be easily farmed out to a text-generator — because they speak directly to your own humanity.

The idea that writing can offer fresh avenues for growth and betterment is a welcome reminder of what genuine human writing is truly for.

In teaching a course on it, I found writing for well-being to be an exciting expansion of English studies broadly and essay writing in particular. It can support students’ writing and communication skills while genuinely enriching their lives, and it can help us inspire students with what’s most important in the study of literature: a lifetime love of reading and a willingness to take up the pen.

Lindsey McMaster 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. Writing for well-being: How it could be a new way to teach the essay and resist AI – https://theconversation.com/writing-for-well-being-how-it-could-be-a-new-way-to-teach-the-essay-and-resist-ai-263703

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Rahul Ravi, Professor of Finance, Concordia University

Millions of people around the world now use AI companions — for friendship, emotional support, mental health counselling and romantic interactions. This includes 72 per cent of adolescents, according to one study from the United States.

Meanwhile, human-caused climate change has already led to widespread impacts and rising risks, some of them irreversible. Yet emissions remain high.

As a professor of finance, I see these phenomena as different expressions of the same underlying bias: we apply too high a discount rate to the future.

The idea of a discount rate is straightforward. A dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow. The discount rate tells us by how much. Set that rate too high, and you systematically undervalue what lies ahead. Set it too low, and you over-invest in distant outcomes.

In many parts of life, we set this rate too high. Behavioural economist David Laibson showed that people place disproportionate weight on immediate rewards, even when this leads to worse outcomes over time.

In finance, we understand that valuation depends critically on the discount rate applied to future cash flows. In life, we continue to apply a discount rate that is too high, marking down the future to the point where it no longer meaningfully constrains the present.

What feels good now

Psychologist Hal Hershfield’s research on the future self helps explain why. People often perceive their future selves more as another person than as a continuation of who they are now. This makes it easier for the self that benefits today to shift costs onto the self that must bear them tomorrow.

Looking at this through a finance lens, it resembles a “principal-agent problem,” where managers may prioritize short-term incentives over the long-term interests of shareholders.

In both cases, the person making the decision does not fully bear the long-term cost. But the future does not disappear. It simply becomes easier to ignore.

Investment in relationships

This logic becomes easier to see if we look at how we build relationships. Strong relationships require time and a willingness to tolerate discomfort.

Trust and intimacy involve immediate effort but the benefits accumulate gradually. By contrast, autonomy and flexibility offer immediate rewards. They preserve options and reduce constraints, making it easy to defer relational investment.

But relationships, like other forms of capital, depend on sustained investment, and delayed investment is often hard to recover later.

The same logic can also be seen in family structures and broader social connections. Strong ties in families, friendships and communities depend on time and repeated interaction. Without it, those ties weaken.

As those ties weaken, loneliness becomes more likely. Research shows that loneliness and social isolation are associated with significant health risks. In this sense, loneliness can be understood as the long-term consequence of insufficient investment in connection when it was easier to build.

These patterns are not only individual. They also reflect the way modern life is increasingly organized around immediacy and convenience. Technology makes interaction faster, easier and more responsive, but many of the things that matter most in the long run still require time, patience and discomfort. The result is a social environment that increasingly rewards responsiveness over endurance.

Immediate benefits

Seen in this light, AI companions are not an anomaly. They are emerging in an era of widespread loneliness, where many people are seeking connection that feels reliable and low in emotional cost.

Back in 2002, pioneering research by Clifford Nass and Youngme Moon showed that people apply social rules to computers even when they know they’re not human. Almost 25 years later, research now suggests AI can provide emotional support and a real sense of companionship in the short term. From today’s perspective, this is an efficient solution: the benefits are immediate and reliable.

The concern is not that AI companionship fails. It’s that it succeeds too well in the present. By reducing effort, uncertainty and emotional risk, AI companions make connection easier to access but may also shift expectations in ways that are harder to sustain over time in human relationships. In that sense, they reflect the same trade-off: immediate comfort at the expense of longer-term relational depth.

The same logic extends beyond individual life and helps explain how societies respond to long-term problems.

Climate change is perhaps the clearest example. The impacts of our warming planet are already very evident and yet we’re slow to act. This is, in part, because the economic benefits of extraction and consumption are immediate, while many of the costs are delayed and dispersed across time.

A voiceless future

Across many human domains, from AI and personal relationships to climate change, the structure is the same: The present is immediate and rewarded; the future is abstract, distant and silent. So, decisions skew toward today.

This is not simply a matter of awareness or intention. It is structural. The future has no meaningful representation in present decision-making. It has no voice, no urgency and no direct claim. And so it’s discounted.

This is what Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called the “tragedy of the horizon.” Whether in the climate crisis or the loneliness epidemic, the catastrophic impacts will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of investment cycles and political terms.

Because the future has no seat at the board table, it is treated as an externality — a cost we don’t have to account for today, but one that is compounding at an unsustainable rate.

Until we find ways to give the future a real stake in present decisions, we will continue to choose what is easier now and pay for it later.

The tendency to discount the future is deeply human. But in a world increasingly shaped by AI systems, weakening social ties and accelerating climate risk, the costs of doing so are becoming harder to ignore.

Rahul Ravi 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. From AI companions to climate action, we  undervalue what lies ahead – https://theconversation.com/from-ai-companions-to-climate-action-we-undervalue-what-lies-ahead-279838