Category: The Conversation – Canada

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By David Sidhu, Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Carleton University

Think about a word that looks like its meaning. For instance, the word bed kind of looks like a bed, with the vertical lines resembling the posts at either end. Loop looks very loopy.

Some words are more subtly evocative — like blizzard, whose zigzagging letters might evoke something chaotic.

The term for this is “iconicity” and it has typically been studied in the sounds of words. For example, the word meow resembles the sound of a cat. The word teeny sounds like something small.

My recent study explored iconicity in the visual appearance of words in English for the first time. I found that people processed words faster and more accurately when the words physically resembled their meanings.

English letters began as visual symbols

The letters we use in English (which is a Latin script inherited from the Roman alphabet) actually started out as visual symbols. They likely evolved from Egyptian hieroglyphs.

One possibility is that these Egyptian symbols were adopted by speakers of a North Semitic language, around 1800-1600 BC, into what is called the “Proto-Sinaitic” script.

This script used symbols to code for the first sound of the pictured thing. This is called the acrophony principle. For example, our letter M comes from a symbol for water, taking the first sound of the word mayim.

The letters have changed so much that these ancient origins aren’t relevant to reading English today. But there is some evidence that the shapes of letters have some relationship to the sounds they convey. For example, one study assembled letters for the sound /i/ (as in bee) and /u/ (as in boo) from 56 different languages and asked people to guess which was which. It turned out that people could do this, more often than expected by chance.

But this isn’t quite what I was interested in here. Rather than asking if the shapes of letters are related to the sounds of words, I was interested in whether those shapes are related to the meanings of words.

Bubble, hoop, wiggle

In this research, I asked participants to rate more than 3,000 words according to how much the shape of their letters resembled their meaning, using a scale of one to seven.

This is a common approach in the study of psycholinguistics. We often ask people to rate words on one dimension — for example, how concrete a word is, or how positive a word is — and then use those ratings to understand how people process word meaning.

The first thing to note is that there was agreement across participants, at least on par with ratings of other word properties in the past.

The highest-rated words included bubble, look, wiggle, hoop, puppy and bed.

It’s easy to come up with explanations for these ratings. Puppy looks like it has legs and a tail. There is something wiggly about the two G’s in the middle of wiggle.

But can we actually tell how participants made their ratings? We can get some clues by looking at the kinds of words that get higher ratings.

Round letters, spiky letters

Words with high ratings tended to refer to things you can see. This makes sense if participants were actually considering a resemblance between the word and its meaning.

Getting more specific, when a word for a round thing contained round letters (for example, O, G and C), it was rated higher. When a word for a spiky thing contained spiky letters (like W, Z and X), it was rated higher. Words for small things tended to be rated higher when they contained fewer letters.

All in all, it seems like the ratings actually did capture a resemblance between the look of a word and its meaning.

This is all well and good, but does it matter? To answer this, I used three existing databases with information on how quickly people can process individual words. These are from studies that, for example, present participants with strings of letters (for example, spoon or flarg) and have them identify them as real or invented words as quickly as possible.

In all three databases, I found that people were faster and more accurate at processing words that looked like their meanings. This was after accounting for all kinds of things like how common a word is, how many letters it contains and how easy a word’s meaning is to picture. Not only that, these words tended to be learned at an earlier age.

There is a growing appreciation that language is more than words and their meanings. It involves all kinds of things like tone of voice, gesture and gaze. We can now add one additional subtle cue: the shapes of letters.

David Sidhu receives funding from NSERC and SSHRC.

– ref. When words look like their meaning, we process them faster, new research reveals – https://theconversation.com/when-words-look-like-their-meaning-we-process-them-faster-new-research-reveals-282228

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Srdjan Vucetic, Professor, Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

Canada has been chosen to house the Defence, Security and Resilience Bank (DSRB). Originally dubbed “the NATO bank,” the new institution will help NATO and non-NATO countries more easily direct funding toward defence and security needs.

This translates to hundreds of new jobs in finance, research and analysis in Montréal, Ottawa, Toronto or Vancouver — all potential host cities.

This comes as a boost for Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former banker who has sought to craft a bold new foreign policy for Canada.

As Carney argued in his acclaimed Davos speech, the ongoing geopolitical “rupture” requires countries to “hedge against uncertainty.”

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Read more:
Mark Carney’s Davos speech marks a major departure from Canada’s usual approach to the U.S.

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Rethinking global co-operation

In Canada’s case, the primary concern is the aggressive behaviour of the Donald Trump administration south of the border.

To unwind longstanding dependence on the now-unpredictable superpower neighbour, the federal government has set out on an ambitious nation-building plan that includes both retaliatory tariffs on American goods and a rapid expansion and diversification of trade and investment.

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Read more:
Coronavirus shows why Canada must reduce its dependence on the U.S.

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Carney’s emerging foreign policy doctrine extols the influence of middle powers alongside a commitment to “variable geometry” multilateralism — his term for the once controversial idea that institutions and coalitions should be shaped by the issue or mission at hand, rather than the other way around.

Could this approach also work in defence and security? Geography and history have bound Canada and the United States through countless formal and informal agreements, including a mutual commitment to come to each other’s defence in the event of an attack.

However strained relations between Canada and the U.S. have become, the partnership is not simply an either/or choice. Canada must instead carefully balance its relationships and interests.

The Carney government’s opening moves have included a sweeping expansion of military spending and security-related infrastructure, pushing investment toward levels not seen since the Cold War, alongside a landmark strategic defence and security partnership with the European Union and Canada’s first-ever Defence Industrial Strategy.

Combined, these initiatives reveal the core logic of the approach: to bolster Canada’s capacity for strategic autonomy over the long term.

In theory, changing where defence supplies come from is less complicated than helping Canadian companies find new markets.

Yet the hardest challenges still lie ahead.

Biggest obstacles

First, boosting current spending to meet NATO’s new spending target of five per cent of GDP will be impossible without a combination of cutting back non-defence expenditures, increasing taxes and borrowing more. No democracy can achieve this quickly without a declaration of a war economy.

Second, as a three-ocean country — nearly 40 per cent of Canadian territory is in the Arctic — Canada faces competing defence priorities.

The challenge for the government, therefore, is not just to spend more on defence, but to ensure new investments are aligned with the objectives set out in its policy and strategy documents.

Yet the Carney government is still working on these initiatives. The delay once again has to do with Trump.

From the new defence policy (last updated in April 2024) to the new intelligence priorities (first issued in September 2024) and — most significantly — a long-overdue national security strategy (last released in April 2004), these initiatives must set clear goals for the relevant government ministries and agencies while piloting the political interplay between the Trump White House and largely anti-Trump Canadian public opinion.

The Trump influence

This is a delicate dance in which every word matters. Before Trump, every new Canadian defence policy statement was predictable, emphasizing the same three roles — domestic; NORAD and other North American operations; and NATO and other multilateral operations.

Now the government often struggles to communicate even the prime minister’s own basic talking point — that intensifying rivalries among major powers makes Canada more vulnerable because of its deep dependency on its unreliable, unpredictable but powerful neighbour to the south.

The same goes for the new intelligence priorities statement. The 2024 version outlined 14 areas of focus, spanning Arctic security and cyber- threats to technological change and violent extremism.

With the risk of another global economic crisis rising, the updated statement should rethink this list.

The Carney government won’t entertain the idea of a “royal commission for securing Canada’s future” — which could be a comprehensive, non-partisan review of the nation’s long-term stability and adaptability in the new geopolitical context

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What comes next

This makes the long-awaited national security strategy even more important. Meant to guide resource allocation and capability development throughout at least Carney’s tenure as prime minister, this policy should not only fully acknowledge the scale of the security challenges confronting Canada but also assess the country’s comparative advantages and structural vulnerabilities as a middle power.

This, in turn, would require incorporating key dimensions of climate and economic security, as well as science and technology policy, into the strategic framework.

With some luck, this would mark a step forward in answering some of the most pressing questions about Canada’s future, including:

• What security issues should Ottawa prioritize in its “variable-geometry” multilateralism?
• How should the government approach the creation of a new agency to collect foreign intelligence — if it chooses to pursue one at all?
• What about a national industrial strategy to better catalyze all investments in defence and security?

If the Carney government is serious about both preparing for different scenarios and following through on its plans, clear communication will be essential.

Politicians and the public alike recognize the need to rethink the assumptions and decisions that have shaped Canadian life over the past 50 years, if not longer. The more Canadians understand why some risks are being prioritized over others, and why resources are being directed accordingly, the better equipped the country will be to handle what comes next.

Srdjan Vucetic has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Mobilizing Insights in Defence and Security (MINDS) program of the Department of National Defence. He is also the co-author, with Hager Ben Jaffel, of the forthcoming book Beyond Five Eyes Intelligence: An International Political Sociology.

– ref. Canada to host new NATO-linked defence bank as Mark Carney pushes security overhaul – https://theconversation.com/canada-to-host-new-nato-linked-defence-bank-as-mark-carney-pushes-security-overhaul-282773

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven, PhD Candidate, Political Science, Western University

The Men’s World Cup will be a unique sporting event for Canadians — and not merely because it’s being co-hosted on Canadian soil or because soccer is now the most-played youth sport in Canada.

The Canadian men’s national soccer team has the unique opportunity to forge a different vision of Canadian national identity — one that looks quite different from what hockey has historically offered.

This tournament will be especially unique when compared to recent sporting events including the Four Nations Faceoff, the Milan Cortina winter Olympic Games and the Toronto Blue Jays’ World Series run last year.

The difference lies not in the sport itself, but in who is wearing the Canadian jersey and the stories they carry onto the pitch.

National sports and nation building

In Canada, hockey has historically been the sport used to symbolize Canadian national excellence and foster collective identity. However, it’s also an expensive sport that has long reflected a white, European conception of Canadian identity.

The National Hockey League employs a workforce that is 84 per cent white across players and team staff, a reality reinforced by the composition of Canada’s men’s hockey team at the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Olympics.

The Toronto Blue Jays’ extraordinary run to the 2025 World Series was a moment that genuinely galvanized the country around baseball in ways not seen since the back-to-back championships of 1992 and 1993. The 2025 World Series prompted the entire country to root for “Canada’s team.”

Canadians rallied enthusiastically behind a team that played in Canada and wore the maple leaf, something their owners were happy to emphasize throughout the Jays’ run.

Yet the Blue Jays presented their own identity puzzle. The team that Canada adopted as “Canada’s team” had only one Canadian player on its World Series roster: Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — who was born in Montréal and whose father played for the Montreal Expos — in a majority-American lineup.

A lot of the national enthusiasm was likely stoked by Canada’s tense trade relationship with the United States and not Blue Jays players being directly representative of the lived experiences of most Canadians.

A squad built on multiculturalism

Canada’s men’s soccer team presents a different image: a racially diverse squad whose players embody stories of immigration, offering a more inclusive vision of what Canadian identity can look like.

No player embodies this more than Canada’s team captain, Alphonso Davies. Born in the Buduburam refugee camp in Ghana to Liberian parents who had fled the civil war, he arrived in Edmonton at age five through Canada’s resettlement program. He is now a Champions League winner and a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador.

But it goes beyond Davies. Head coach Jesse Marsch, who took over from John Herdman in 2024, has made the recruitment of dual nationals an explicit priority.

He recruited players like Tani Oluwaseyi, who could have declared for Nigeria; Niko Sigur, who played for Croatia at the under-21 level; Marcelo Flores, who competed for Mexico at various youth levels; and Alfie Jones, an English-born centre-back who learned the Canadian national anthem from a teammate before taking his citizenship oath at training camp.

The result is a squad built largely from immigrants and dual nationals who were actively courted to represent Canada, reflecting a vision of the country shaped by multiculturalism rather than ethnic homogeneity. This carries historical resonance: Canada’s past policies once explicitly favoured white, European immigrants, provoking a countervailing push toward official multiculturalism.

It is precisely this multicultural framework that’s made the squad possible and given Canada unprecedented strength and depth.

The power of recognition

National sporting events are powerful vehicles for building shared identity. When people connect to sporting events in ways that make their sense of belonging to a country feel personal, sport becomes something more than entertainment.

This World Cup arrives at a politically charged moment, with the United States — a co-host alongside with Mexico — planning to involve immigration enforcement in tournament security. Canada’s multicultural squad offers a counter-narrative in a tournament already shadowed by debates about immigration and belonging.

For the millions of Canadians who immigrated to Canada or who carry their family’s immigration story as a major part of their sense of identity, the men’s national soccer team offers something that the men’s Olympic hockey squad and the Toronto Blue Jays never quite delivered: the possibility of seeing themselves in a more complete representation of Canada’s team.

That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the realization of the full potential of sport in building Canadian national identity.

Noah Eliot Vanderhoeven 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 2026 World Cup team reflects the country’s multicultural identity — in a way hockey never has – https://theconversation.com/canadas-2026-world-cup-team-reflects-the-countrys-multicultural-identity-in-a-way-hockey-never-has-280329

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jayanthan Sriram, PhD Candidate, Centre for Sensory Studies, Public Scholar, Concordia University

In Hanau, Germany, on Feb. 19, 2020, after Vili-Viorel Pǎun witnessed the beginning of a mass shooting and tried to stop the gunman by chasing him down with his car, he called emergency services three times. No one answered, and Pǎun was shot dead.

Later, Pǎun’s father overheard police officers using a common racial slur while commenting on the supposed impossibility of a Roma person showing civic courage. This was not an aberration; it was a part of the same systemic racism that’s left the victims’ families without true justice six years later.

As sensory studies scholars who focus on racism and migration, we argue that racism is not only interpersonal or even simply structural, it’s also multi-sensory. It shapes how minorities see, hear and move through the world, with consequences that extend from everyday interactions to life-or-death institutional failures.

Systemic failures shaped the tragedy

The gunman , a firm believer in the “Great Replacement” theory, scouted out places where minorities were thought to gather — shisha bars, youth centres and kebab shops — to carry out his attack.

And on that day, Vili-Viorel Pǎun, Ferhat Unvar, Hamza Kurtović, Said Nesar Hashemi, Mercedes Kierpacz, Kaloyan Velkov, Fatih Saraçoğlu, Sedat Gürbüz and Gökhan Gültekin lost their lives. All were ethnically either Turkish, Afghan, Romanian, Bulgarian or Bosnian.

The aftermath and investigation into the event revealed how in Germany the devaluation of minority lives that drove the gunman’s worldview is also present in the way justice, media and politics operate.

What happened at the Arena Bar & Café, the final site of the attack, serves as another example for the families of the victims who argue that the racism in this tragedy is also evidence of systemic issues within policing. The exit had been illegally locked to facilitate police raids, largely driven, investigators found, by racial profiling linking hookah bars with criminality.

The London-based research agency Forensic Architecture, which uses architectural techniques and digital technologies to investigate human rights violations, revealed that five of the nine victims could have escaped through the emergency exit and survived.

There were questions about why it took hours to apprehend the perpetrator, even though his location was known. The special forces stood by his house and waited, which gave the perpetrator time to kill his mother and commit suicide. They never offered a reason for their delayed intervention.

Other investigations later revealed that some of the special forces were members of a chat group sharing right-wing extremist ideologies.

These failures create a reminder of how the racism faced by minorities feeds back into societal structures that can cost lives and obstruct justice.

Multi-sensory impact

Our research shows that racism is a multi-sensory experience that transforms the ways in which minorities feel and interact with the world. Qualitative research and statistics confirm that people face a loss of trust and the development of health issues when faced with institutional discrimination.

Multi-sensory racism can present through a visual categorization based on skin colour — the discomfort of entering predominantly white spaces, for example. It can manifest through olfactory perception such as comments on “smelly” foods.

It affects everyday social interactions like how and where people choose to safely socialize — and why they may prefer to spend their time within their own communities rather than “integrating.”

These experiences culminate in how institutional behaviour sets up or fails to sanction individual racism.

Beyond moments of tragedy

In the case of Hanau, the failure by politicians and police to acknowledge the ubiquity of the racist worldview that motivated the perpetrator and made his violence possible has prompted survivors and their families to begin a multi-pronged anti-racist effort.

Most prominently, the survivors founded Initiative February 19 Hanau to create a platform that pushes for social action and solidarity for the victims of racist violence. Guided by the principles of remembrance, investigation, justice and accountability, the initiative calls for state responsibility while embracing the notion of #SayTheirNames.

The hashtag underscores the importance of naming those who have been murdered as an act of resistance against racism and systemic violence.

Both Said Etris Hashemi — who still carries shrapnel from the perpetrator’s ammunition in his body — and Çetin Gültekin, brother of the murdered Gökhan Gültekin, released memoirs that deal with the inherent racism of German society and situate it within a broader political struggle of growing far-right movements and their popularity in Germany.

The 2025 documentary Das Deutsche Volk follows the lives of the survivors and their families over the years and captures the ongoing fight for a memorial in Hanau’s city centre.

At one point, Çetin Gültekin suggests a landmark that showcases the deceased as pillars encircling the Brothers Grimm National Monument. The indifference that follows this suggestion has been interpreted by advocates as a lack of recognition for dignified remembrance.

The Hanau attacks, and the ongoing struggle for recognition of migrants’ experiences in a system where German institutions often treat them as third-class citizens, expose a troubling fallacy. It was captured by the words of Ta-Nehisi Coates in his 2015 non-fiction book Between the World and Me: “Race is the child of racism, not its father.”

In societies where race is still treated as a biological fact — rather than a colonial construct used to place people into arbitrary hierarchies — and where structural inequalities are only beginning to be acknowledged, there is still limited understanding of racism as a multi-sensory reality that shapes the everyday lives of minorities.

The work of addressing racist injustice requires sustained, long-term institutional and social change.

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. The Hanau far-right extremist shooting exposed how racism costs lives — and how institutions let it – https://theconversation.com/the-hanau-far-right-extremist-shooting-exposed-how-racism-costs-lives-and-how-institutions-let-it-278960

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Sarah Foster, Program Leader, Project Seahorse and Senior Researcher, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia

Bottom trawlers extract one-quarter of the world’s fisheries catches by weight and raise significant ecological, economic and social concerns. Given that, you’d think there would be an answer to basic questions in fisheries: how many fish species are being caught, and what are they?

In reality, though, bottom trawling is often proceeding blindly.

Bottom trawling is widespread and problematic. Gears operate by dragging large weighted nets across the ocean floor (some as wide as a 45-storey building is tall), sweeping up most of the life they encounter along the way and destroying habitat.

Hundreds of thousands of bottom trawlers operate all over the world, often dependent on subsidies, implicated in human rights violations and exacerbating climate change.

We lead a conservation team called Project Seahorse, dedicated to ensuring there are more fish in the ocean in healthier ecosystems. We focus our work on securing healthy populations of seahorses — and to save seahorses, we have to save the seas.

By far the biggest threat to seahorses is their incidental capture in bottom trawls. As such, seahorses provide an index of the tremendous intensity of bottom trawling.

It was while developing a briefing on bottom trawl impacts that we realized no one knew the actual tally or diversity of fish getting caught up in nets. So we set out to provide an answer and in so doing unveiled more about the pressure bottom trawling is placing on marine species, ecosystems and fisheries worldwide.

Endangered species

Our research was anchored in tedious work as our co-authors took a deep dive into studies and reports hosted on the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) document repository, supplemented by an ad hoc exploration of additional literature.

The FAO is an intergovernmental organization that, among other things, collates worldwide fisheries data. We extracted more than 9,000 reports of fish species in bottom trawl catches, spanning from 1895 to 2021.

The first of our worrying findings is that a huge number of species are affected. We documented around 3,000 different fish species in bottom trawl catches but our modelled estimates suggest the true number could be double that.

Our data also showed that bottom trawls extract all or most species in some fish families. These include both the ocean’s most nutritious and commercially critical fish, such as jacks and croakers, and rare, distinct fish such as giant guitarfish and plough-nosed chimera.

Our second discovery is that many of the species we documented are already known to be of conservation concern. Among those on the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List, about one in seven are classified as threatened or near-threatened with extinction. Bottom trawling was also cited in threat assessments for two-thirds of those species.

Insufficient data

Our third finding was that there is limited information on the conservation status for many of the fish caught in bottom trawls. About one-quarter of the species we recorded were listed as “data deficient” or “not evaluated” by IUCN, meaning their conservation status is essentially unknown.

People tend to focus on the threatened species, which certainly need our attention; seahorses among them. However, we also need to be concerned about the species in trawls that lack conservation assessments, which may also be faring badly.

Finally, we found that many species are not even being recorded. Our database includes relatively few records of smaller demersal species (animals that live near the bottom of the sea), with fisheries often just lumping them together as “various” or “trash fish.”

As many fish are so often overlooked or ignored in catch records, we often don’t actually know what bottom trawlers are catching. When species are not recorded, we lose critical information about biodiversity, population status and ecosystem impacts, not to mention the loss of resources that people depend on for food and livelihoods.

Bottom trawl fisheries should be required to demonstrate that they are ecologically, economically and socially sustainable before being considered acceptable. As it stands, the burden of proof falls on those trying to demonstrate harm — not on the industry causing it. This needs to be reversed, paying full attention to all the fish in the nets.

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. Bottom trawling is scraping oceans of wildlife – https://theconversation.com/bottom-trawling-is-scraping-oceans-of-wildlife-280780

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Noelia Calvo, Research Associate, Neuroscience, University of Toronto

Why do some people maintain good memories and have healthy brains even as they age?

Research that my colleagues and I recently published in Alzheimer’s & Dementia: Diagnosis, Assessment & Disease Monitoring, explored the effects and interactions of social, linguistic and endocrinological factors on cognitive health.

With Canada’s aging population, the question of brain health is a relevant one. The most recent census in 2021 indicated that one in eight Canadians is aged 70 or over, and there are 1.7 million who are age 80 or older. These numbers show a growing population of older adults at increased risk of cognitive decline, highlighting the need to examine protective factors.

Previous research indicates that bilingualism may be a possible protective factor. Notably, the 2021 census indicated that bilingualism is also increasing among Canadians, with four in 10 (41 per cent) speaking more than one language.

While bilingualism may be one piece of the puzzle, other cognitive or biological factors also influence brain health. Verbal memory — the ability to remember words — has been linked to cognitive resilience. The presence of sex hormones such as estrogen and testosterone, which are present in both men and women, may also influence how the brain ages.

Studying a trio of factors

The relationship between these three factors — bilingualism, verbal memory and sex hormones — has not been studied before. To address this gap, my colleagues and I conducted a new study in Canada. We found that bilingualism may interact with verbal memory and sex hormones to influence dementia risk in unexpected ways.

Our study included data from 335 older adults with mild cognitive impairment and 170 patients with Alzheimer’s disease drawn from the Comprehensive Assessment of Neurodegeneration and Dementia (COMPASS-ND) cohort, which is part of the Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration and Aging.

COMPASS-ND includes more than 1,200 Canadian adults aged 50–90 years recruited across more than 30 sites nationwide. Using this rich and current database, we examined how sex hormones, verbal memory and bilingualism jointly influence cognitive resilience, brain structure and blood-based markers of Alzheimer’s disease.

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This article is part of our ongoing series The Grey Revolution. The Conversation Canada and La Conversation are exploring the impact of the aging boomer generation on Canadian society, including housing, working, culture, nutrition, travelling and health care. The series explores the upheavals already underway and those looming ahead.

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We created a resilience index for each participant that incorporated sex hormones, verbal memory, bilingual proficiency, education, age and immigration status. Age, education, and immigration status were included as covariates because they may influence cognitive resilience through differences in language experiences, educational opportunities and sociocultural adaptation across the lifespan.

Each unit increase in the resilience index was associated with a significant reduction in the odds of dementia-related pathology. Higher resilience index scores were also linked to better performance on clinical diagnostic tools such as the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA), as well as lower levels of key markers associated with neurodegeneration and glial activation, a process in which the brain’s support cells become reactive in response to injury or disease.

Overall, bilingual participants showed the highest resilience index scores, but with notable differences in how these effects manifested across biological sex.

Our findings challenge the idea that risk and resilience can be understood by looking at biological or social factors in isolation. By studying bilingualism and sex hormones together, we reveal how these factors may interact to shape brain resilience.

Bilingualism and verbal memory

Another important finding of our study was related to verbal memory. Consistent with previous research, women showed better performance in verbal memory. This sex difference is clinically important because verbal memory is often used as a proxy for general cognitive function, meaning it can influence how dementia is diagnosed in women.

One might expect that bilingual women would be especially protected, since they have both the bilingualism benefit and strong verbal memory.

Surprisingly, our study found the opposite: bilingual men showed greater brain protection. Our findings suggested that a combination of two factors may be a mechanism behind enhanced verbal memory and cognitive resilience in aging men: aromatization — the conversion of testosterone into estradiol — and bilingual language experience.

In people with mild cognitive impairment, higher estradiol levels produced through aromatization, together with bilingualism, may work synergistically to protect verbal memory, making older bilingual men more resilient to cognitive decline and neurodegenerative pathology.

Overall, our study suggests that bilingual men may have greater resilience to neuropathology and that sex hormones could influence dementia risk in aging women. These findings underscore the need for more research on how sex hormones affect brain health, as well as the importance of using measures beyond verbal memory to improve the accuracy of cognitive decline diagnoses in Canada.

The research discussed in this article was supported by external funding from the Synapse Challenge award, Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration (CCNA). The funding period has now concluded.

– ref. Bilingualism and sex hormones may provide a new link to brain resilience and dementia risk – https://theconversation.com/bilingualism-and-sex-hormones-may-provide-a-new-link-to-brain-resilience-and-dementia-risk-279490

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Meera Karunananthan, Assistant Professor, Human Geography, Carleton University

In November 2025, the Ontario government rushed through new legislation to dramatically restructure public drinking water and wastewater services without any public consultation.

The Water and Wastewater Public Corporations Act (WCA) authorizes the province’s minister of municipal affairs and housing to remove water and wastewater services from local governments and assign them to arms-length governance structures by classifying them as “water and wastewater public corporations (WCCs).”

Despite being buried among other controversial measures in the omnibus Bill 60, the WCA drew considerable public backlash. A broad-based coalition was formed, bringing together water workers, environmental organizations, physicians and anti-poverty activists to push back against what seemed like the stealth privatization of provincial water infrastructure.

In response, Premier Doug Ford’s government tabled amendments to restrict shareholders in WCCs to “a municipality, the Province of Ontario, the Government of Canada or an agent of any of them” under Bill 98, which is now in third reading.

But University of British Columbia law professor Joel Bakan has concluded these amendments don’t rule out privatization. The possibility of shares being held by the ambiguously termed “agent” of the state opens the door for any number of public-private configurations.

Financialization

While critical details might be clarified in upcoming regulations, a troubling picture emerges when connecting the dots. Whether the WCA leads to outright privatization, its proposed reforms are consistent with an insidious global push to make municipal water and sanitation systems more amenable to private investment. This essentially transforms them into tradeable assets.

This process, known as financialization, would erode the public health and social mandate of public water infrastructure, undermining the capacity of communities to cope with growing ecological and financial stresses.

Around the world, fierce public opposition has resulted in the termination or non-renewal of private contracts in hundreds of communities around the world. Even the staunchest proponents of privatization now view water as too politically risky and insufficiently profitable for private sector engagement.

At the same time, there has been a growing appetite for “bankable” water infrastructure projects in the face of growing economic uncertainty. In response, international financial institutions and other powerful entities are pushing for policy reforms to pave the way for the integration of water into global financial markets.

Extracting profit

Privatization is not a necessary precursor to financialization. Corporatized public utilities, argues British water researcher Kate Bayliss, can perform the same function of laying the groundwork and creating revenue streams that can eventually be captured by financial markets.

In fact the World Bank, the largest funder of water projects in the Global South, promotes reforms to publicly owned and operated utilities to improve their risk-return profiles for commercial investment. In other words, public institutions are restructured to absorb risk and shift costs to local communities in order to ensure greater extraction of private profit.

The Ontario legislation follows this model by dismantling municipal services and restructuring them into arm’s-length WCCs.

By removing water and sanitation services from local control, WCCs create a more streamlined system for profit generation. Key decisions — including finances, contracts and water rates — would be made by corporate boards with little direct accountability to communities.

Deepening existing inequities

Measures that generate value for shareholders will likely take precedence over public health and equity-related considerations.

As Brock University water management expert Lina Taing warns, the proposed consolidation of operations will ultimately undermine hard-won accountability provisions. It will also diminish the “site-specific knowledge” that is central to the multi-barrier approach developed in the aftermath of the Walkerton contaminated water crisis in May 2000.

The plan would take effect most immediately in Peel Region, one of the most racially diverse municipalities in the country. By 2029, jurisdiction over water and wastewater services will be transferred from Peel to its three lower-tier municipalities, which will then be required to deliver services exclusively through a newly created WCC.

The financial implications for Peel are deeply troubling. Water and wastewater infrastructure in Peel was built over decades with public funds. Under the new Ontario law, this infrastructure would be transferred to a WCC while Peel’s existing debt remains with the municipal government.

In other words, the assets are transferred while the liabilities stay behind. Peel will be left servicing legacy debt with no corresponding revenue stream, while revenues generated from water bills flow to WCC shareholders who bear no responsibility for that debt.

This is a textbook example of what scholars describe as risk socialization and profit privatization. Simply put, the public bears the burden while shareholders capture the reward.

Flint water crisis

In the words of American geographer Laura Pulido, racialized places often become the “testing ground for new forms of neoliberal practice.”

The Flint, Mich., water crisis also began with a state-level decision to place the city under emergency management.

The unelected city manager switched the city’s drinking water source to the highly contaminated Flint River as a cost-cutting measure, but failed to ensure the water was treated with corrosion inhibitors. This caused lead to leach from aging pipes and trihalomethanes (TTHMs) to form in tap water. TTHMs are a carcinogenic by-product formed when chlorine reacts with organic matter in water.

Likewise, ongoing challenges in First Nations communities underscore the inadequacies of top-down federal initiatives to resolve the drinking water crisis with blanket solutions that are inappropriate, inadequate or unacceptable to local communities.

A recent study found high concentrations of TTHMs in tap water samples from three Manitoba First Nations reserves as a result of treatment processes that weren’t suited to local environments and climate conditions.

Stripping communities of power

Both Bill 60 and Bill 98 align with broader efforts to expand the financialization of Ontario’s public infrastructure.

The Building Ontario Fund was established precisely for the purpose of including private capital in priority infrastructure projects. Unless challenged, the new legislation will strip communities of their power to shape services according to their needs, will make it easier to extract private wealth from public infrastructure and will erode the social mandates that make public water services central to building just, equitable and sustainable societies.

Experiences with water financialization in the United Kingdom and elsewhere show an intensified form of the harms associated with water privatization.

Water rates often rise sharply to generate returns for shareholders, while revenues are paid out as dividends instead of being reinvested in system maintenance and upgrades. Over time, this can erode environmental protections, social equity and labour rights.

The Ontario government is seeking public input on Bill 98 until this Thursday.

This is an opportunity for Ontario residents to join the Ontario Federation of Agriculture, the Canadian Union of Public Employees, the Canada Green Building Council, Environmental Defence Canada and many other organizations in demanding a better future for their water systems.

Meera Karunananthan sits on the boards of the Blue Planet Project and Peace Brigades International- Canada. They are both volunteer positions enabling her learn from and collaborate with water defenders, organizations and networks involved in frontline struggles for water justice around the world.

– ref. New Ontario water and sanitation law could pave the way for the financialization of public water – https://theconversation.com/new-ontario-water-and-sanitation-law-could-pave-the-way-for-the-financialization-of-public-water-281685

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Elliot Goodell Ugalde, PhD Candidate, Political Economy, Queen’s University, Ontario

For the first time since the Second World War, excluding the COVID-19 pandemic, public debt in the United States has surpassed the entire economy’s GDP. As of late March, debt held by the public reached US$31.27 trillion, just ahead of the GDP of US$31.22 trillion.

This threshold is often treated as a long-term fiscal issue, but the economic costs of this debt are now moving to the forefront. The most immediate pressure comes from the possibility that major foreign holders of American assets begin pulling capital out of U.S. markets.

Gulf states — whose confidence in U.S. fiscal and military protection has been shaken by the U.S.-Israel attacks on Iran — collectively hold roughly US$2 trillion in U.S. assets through their sovereign wealth funds.

Officials across the Gulf are already reassessing their positions. In March, one Gulf official said three of the four largest economies in the Gulf Cooperation Council were reviewing their sovereign wealth fund positions to offset the impact of the Iran war.

Why the U.S. cannot simply block a selloff

The U.S. has limited options to prevent foreign investors from selling. The freedom to enter and exit what the Federal Reserve Bank calls “the deepest and most liquid fixed-income market in the world” is exactly what makes U.S. assets attractive. That same openness creates a structural vulnerability.

The U.S. economy relies heavily on stretched asset valuations — elevated prices in stocks, bonds and real estate — where market values far exceed their underlying fundamentals.

When holders lose confidence and these inflated markets correct, a run is triggered and prices fall sharply, as happened in the 2008 financial crisis. The real economy ends up paying the price.

The present situation carries similar risks. If Gulf states start selling U.S. assets amid ongoing regional instability, falling prices would reduce the value of collateral across the system.

As leveraged institutions see their balance sheets weaken, they cut borrowing and sell assets. This pushes prices down further, setting off a chain reaction that spreads financial stress internationally.

Swap lines as a stop-gap

As these pressures build, one tool has come back into focus: central bank swap lines. These are arrangements between central banks that let countries access U.S. dollars without selling their American assets. Forced selling would push prices down and spread financial stress.

During the 2008 crisis, the Fed used swap lines as an emergency backup to extend dollar liquidity to banks and governments that suddenly needed it.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently said that several American allies in the Gulf region and Asia had requested swap lines, saying the arrangements would prevent the “disorderly” sale of U.S. assets.

But where does this dollar liquidity come from? For decades, the global role of the U.S. dollar allowed it to spend more than it earned, while other countries earned dollars through trade and invested them back into U.S. markets. Gulf states were central to this, using oil revenues to buy U.S. bonds, stocks, real estate and weapons.

This was part of a broader arrangement known as the petrodollar system, which traces back to a 1974 agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Oil was priced in U.S. dollars, money flowed into the U.S. and in return Gulf countries received political and military backing.

This allowed the Federal Reserve to expand the money supply through quantitative easing at home and by extending liquidity into the global system through swap lines.

Though this can stabilize markets in the short term, it also deepens reliance on repeated intervention, buying time rather than resolving underlying pressures.

A fracturing arrangement

The petrodollar system only works as long as Gulf states keep sending money back into U.S. markets. Swap lines reverse that condition: dollars must now flow to the Gulf instead of from it.

Iran’s pressure campaign on Gulf states, including attacks on economic assets and leveraging the Strait of Hormuz, are creating uncertainty in oil markets, government budgets and regional stability.

Gulf sovereign wealth funds have responded by placing greater emphasis on liquidity and flexibility.

The United Arab Emirates’ exit from OPEC on May 1 shows how far the old energy-financial bargain has fractured. Gulf states now want more control over production, revenue and liquidity than the cartel system allows. The move also likely reflects U.S. pressure to bring oil prices down in the short term.

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Read more:
The UAE is leaving the OPEC oil cartel. What could that mean for oil prices?

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That strategy cannot last. Lower oil prices may help the U.S. and other importers in the short run, but Gulf states still depend on strong revenues to fund budgets, sovereign wealth funds and diversification.

Gulf states are also signalling a willingness to expand the use of alternative currencies, including China’s yuan, for portions of their oil trade if regional instability disrupts dollar liquidity. The shift would merely accelerate the growing trend among emerging economies to move away from U.S. dollar dependence.

Extending swap lines to Gulf states may slow that process, but it may not be enough to reverse the currency diversification already underway.

A system under pressure

The global financial system was already moving toward greater fragmentation and weaker reliance on the U.S. dollar long before the Iran war.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s escalation with Iran has accelerated that process by shaking confidence in the political and military foundations that sustained the petrodollar system for decades.

Behind the scenes, policymakers are increasingly relying on swap lines, monetary expansion and emergency co-ordination measures to stabilize dollar liquidity and reassure allies. These tools were once reserved for acute crises, but are now becoming part of the normal functioning of the system and undermining U.S. asset credibility.

Underlying all of this is a global economy shaped by decades of financialization, growing dependence on inflated asset markets and mounting geopolitical rivalry, all of which are placing increasing strain on the old U.S. centred order.

Elliot Goodell Ugalde is affiliated with the Centre for International and Defence Policy.

Natalie Braun 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. How the U.S.‑Israel war against Iran is exposing the limits of the petrodollar system – https://theconversation.com/how-the-u-s-israel-war-against-iran-is-exposing-the-limits-of-the-petrodollar-system-282226

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Richard Lachman, Director, Zone Learning & Professor, Digital Media, Toronto Metropolitan University

A billboard tries to sell you something. So does a used car salesman. But no matter how smooth the pitch, you’re quite aware of the profit motive, and you can walk away at any time.

What if that pitch is invisible, plays to your unique fears and vanities, and is delivered in a voice that sounds like a trusted friend? Generative AI has changed the equation of persuasion entirely: chatbots can now deliver a personalized, adaptive and targeted message, informed by the most intimate details of your life.

Large language models (LLMs) can hyper-target messages by drawing from your social media posts and photos. They can mine hundreds of previous chatbot conversations in which you asked for relationship advice, discussed your parenting fails and shared your health concerns and financial woes. They can also learn from each interaction, refining their manipulation in real time, targeting your unique and individual tastes, preferences and vulnerabilities.

Studies show this kind of personalized content to be 65 per cent more persuasive than messages from humans or from non-personalized AI. It is four times as effective at changing political opinions as advertising. It could be a powerful tool for social change — used for the good, or for nefarious purposes.

This makes one feature especially troubling: Each conversation is private. It is not monitored, never audited and doesn’t happen in the public eye.

This isn’t advertising. It’s something we don’t have words for yet, and we’re living inside it.

Convincing arguments

In my book Digital Wisdom: Searching for Agency in the Age of AI, I explore how large language models introduce a new frontier in persuasion — one where AI systems can draw upon a huge amount of data about the world, language and you to tailor a highly personalized pitch.

Consider how this might work: You’re a nurse. Through your employer’s AI platform, you’ve shared your sleep problems, burnout and the financial stress of a recent divorce. Now the hospital is short-staffed and offering shifts at a reduced rate calculated by software they license.

You ask the AI chatbot whether you should take them. It knows you’re exhausted. It knows you’re behind on bills. It knows exactly which argument could convince you one way or the other. Who is it working for in that moment?

As companies like Meta and IBM explore how AI can hyper-personalize ads for specific audiences, the dividing line between tools that help users find what they genuinely want, and those that manipulate them against their interests, becomes increasingly important.

Friend or stranger?

Let’s look at another example. Imagine the following messages from your favourite AI chatbot or companion:

I noticed your sleep patterns haven’t been great lately, averaging only 5.4 hours, with lots of restless periods. That’s common when dealing with relationship stress. Your partner just went back to work and 76 per cent of couples experience strain during career transitions.

A new sleep medication has shown effectiveness for relationship-linked insomnia. Your insurance would cover it with just a $15 contribution. Would you like me to schedule a telehealth appointment for tomorrow at 2 p.m.? I see you have a break in your schedule.

This might feel great, like advice from a thoughtful friend who knows you well. It might also feel terrifying, as if a manipulative stranger has read your diary.

Given that people are increasingly turning to AI for medical or mental health advice, despite studies showing this advice to be problematic almost 50 per cent of the time, a manipulative stranger could cause real harm.

The danger here isn’t just the precision of the targeting. This content is also impossible to police. What you view can’t be tracked by watchdogs, since you’re the only person who ever sees it.

While governments don’t typically police the content of political ads, beyond transparency about their funding, we often rely on public outcry and the media to expose campaigns that spread falsehoods. If an AI personalizes every message for an individual, there is no trace left behind.

Reshaping our worldview

Perhaps most concerning is that these systems could gradually reshape our worldview over time.

Scholars have long argued that the algorithms used by social networking sites and search engines create filter bubbles, in which we are fed well-crafted text, video and audio content that either reinforces our worldview or exerts influence towards someone else’s.

By controlling what information we see and how it’s presented, AI systems could slowly shift how we think about and interpret the world around us, and even change our understanding of reality itself.

This capability becomes particularly concerning when combined with emotional manipulation. Vendors suggest their AI systems can gauge a user’s emotional state through text analysis, voice patterns or facial expressions, and adjust their persuasive strategies accordingly.

Are you feeling vulnerable? Lonely? Angry? The system could modify its approach to exploit those emotional states. Even more troubling, it could deliberately cultivate certain emotional states to make its persuasion more effective.

Preliminary research shows that AI models tend to flatter users, affirming their users’ actions 50 per cent more than other humans do, even when the actions involve potential harms. Further research shows that chatbots use deliberate emotional manipulation strategies — such as “guilt appeals” and “fear-of-missing-out hooks” — to keep us chatting when we try to say goodbye.

There have also been cases of AI chatbots allegedly endangering users, encouraging suicidal thoughts or giving detailed advice on how a user could harm themselves.

The guardrails set up by corporations to protect users from harm have also proven surprisingly easy to bypass.

Design matters

Persuasion is not a side effect of technology — it’s often the point. Every interface, every notification, every design decision carries with it an intent to influence behaviour.

Sometimes that influence is welcome: reminders to take medication, encouragement to exercise or nudges to donate blood that reinforce values we already hold. But sometimes persuasion serves someone else’s agenda — nudging us to buy, to scroll, to work harder or to give up privacy.

The same persuasive techniques can empower or exploit, depending on who controls the system, what goals they pursue and whether they have meaningful consent.

Design matters. Whether in public health, the workplace or daily life. We must ask hard questions about intent, agency and power. Who benefits from a design? Who is being persuaded and do they know it?

The technologies we build should support reflective choice, not undermine it. As AI continues to shape how we think, feel and act, our ethical obligations grow sharper: to create systems that are transparent, that prioritize user dignity and that reinforce our capacity for independent judgment. We don’t just need innovation — we need wisdom.

Richard Lachman 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. Is your AI chatbot manipulating you? Subtly reshaping your opinions? – https://theconversation.com/is-your-ai-chatbot-manipulating-you-subtly-reshaping-your-opinions-280800

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Marycarmen Lara Villanueva, PhD Candidate, Department of Social Justice Education, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

What would it take to stop Black boys from disappearing into drug trafficking networks across northern Ontario? Not more policing, argues prison abolitionist and scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore, but more safe housing, funded schools and community spaces where youth can gather safely.

That is what a growing body of Black community leaders is arguing in response to a crisis that The Fifth Estate documentary Missing Black Boys brought into national view in January: Black boys as young as 14 are lured into gangs and sent to remote parts of the province to sell drugs.

Youth gang recruitment is not a matter of individual choice or criminality, but one shaped by inequality, institutional neglect and racialized perceptions. And punishment alone cannot solve it.

Indigenous youth from northern reserves, where some communities have declared a state of emergency, are also part of this troubling reality. The same conditions that leave Black boys vulnerable to recruitment into exploitative and violent economies leave Indigenous youth vulnerable too.

Anishinaabe journalist and author Tanya Talaga has described this as an insidious web of drug-related violence in which Indigenous and Black youth are disproportionately impacted.

Black leaders respond

In recent months, community leaders, educators and public workers have come together to ask what makes Black youth vulnerable to recruitment, and what kinds of structural interventions can prevent it?

Black boys are not just going missing. They are being drawn into exploitative economies and transnational and intercity webs of violence. Recruitment often begins on social media, where older youth lure boys with promises of fast money.

Until recently, media outlets did not pay enough attention to these cases, reflecting broader racialized ideas about violence, innocence and vulnerability.

And if the problem is not straightforward, neither is the solution.

Shana McCalla, founder of Find Ontario Missing Black Boys, and Camille Dundas, who in 2025 authored a three-part investigative series, have been instrumental in bringing this issue into public view.

Recently, McCalla submitted a brief to Ontario Solicitor General Michael Kerzner outlining 15 recommendations to address the crisis of Black boys being groomed into drug trafficking networks. Like other Black leaders, she insists that boys recruited into criminal activity should be treated as victims of exploitation and human trafficking, not as criminal offenders.

This means being connected to victim services, trauma-informed care and culturally relevant support. In their advocacy, these leaders have pointed to education, media and lack of opportunities as some areas that need urgent attention.

Classrooms and courtrooms

Anti-Blackness in education is well-documented. The treatment of Black youth as adults when they make mistakes starts in school, often leading to disproportionate suspensions.

But when rethinking the school-to-prison pipeline, Black studies scholar rosalind hampton notes that practices of control found in prisons were established earlier within public education, bringing our attention to the carceral connections between schools and prisons.

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Read more:
How to curb anti-Black racism in Canadian schools

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How is this racialized perception produced? For race scholars, the answer is complex.

My research suggests that visual cultures of everyday institutions, schools, media and digital platforms play a vital role and influence how children and youth are seen and how they come to see themselves.

Masculinity, money and risk

Images shape how we understand the world and our place within it. Cultural theorist Nicholas Mirzoeff, for example, explains that we live in a visual global environment where the connection between images and how we think of race has a long history.

Youth are immersed in visual cultural production circulating across digital platforms, from social media to music videos, influencing how they see themselves and how they want to be seen.

Bizz Loc, a Toronto rapper featured in The Fifth Estate documentary, is currently serving a 7.5-year sentence for his involvement with the Eglinton West Crips street gang. In music videos of his like “I’m Bacc Crodie,” imagery of youth flashing gang signs, mimicking gun gestures and referencing rivalries circulates a version of Black masculinity tied to risk, conflict and money.

Transfeminist philosopher and essayist Sayak Valencia’s concept of gore capitalism helps explain how, in contexts of inequality, violence can be turned into something that attracts attention and generates value.

In Bizz Loc’s case, masculinity is constructed through proximity to risk and money, offering young men a way to be seen and valued when other opportunities are limited. This visual language is part of a broader web that helps sustain violence through its aestheticization.

At the same time, as American sociologist and author Tricia Rose notes, hip-hop doesn’t just describe street life shaped by chronic Black joblessness, it also educates, critiques injustice and pushes for safer, more just communities.

Yet the versions that are most visible today often narrow these stories.

An abolitionist approach

Dundas raises a pressing question: if it costs close to $97,000 a year to keep a youth in custody, how might those resources be better invested in supporting young people?

Precise figures vary and remain difficult to calculate. There isn’t clear and up-to-date data on governments’ spending on the youth justice system.

What is clear, however, is that Black and Indigenous youth are disproportionately represented within it. Whether it’s $57,000 a year or over $1,400 a day, provincial governments spend heavily on incarcerating youth.

Abolition, Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains, is about the presence of the conditions that sustain life like food security, secure employment, parks and access to nature, clean water and clean air.

In the absence of these conditions for Black and Indigenous youth, other systems step in.

Or as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Black studies and critical theorists, put it, the target of abolition work is not prisons, but a society that makes prisons necessary. Rather than punishment, the abolitionist question is how do we build communities where fewer young people are vulnerable to recruitment before they encounter violence at all.

Marycarmen Lara Villanueva 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. How structural inequality fuels Black youth recruitment into cycles of violence – https://theconversation.com/how-structural-inequality-fuels-black-youth-recruitment-into-cycles-of-violence-280516