Category: The Conversation – Canada

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Alison Taylor, Professor, Department of Educational Studies, University of British Columbia

The skills “every student needs” for the 21st century include competencies in technology, problem solving and communication — and character qualities like adaptability and grit.

This is according to the World Economic Forum, but by now, we should be familiar with this kind of rhetoric. Think tanks, employers and policymakers amplify similar ideas around what graduates need to get good jobs and contribute to economic growth.

Such discourse and policy put pressure on universities to be more responsive to a labour market that is more precarious than the one faced by previous generations.

In turn, university students feel pressure to make the best decisions. It’s small wonder that more students are adjusting their study and career plans in efforts to secure their futures.

My recent book, Juggling Rhythms, frames university students’ diverse tactics (and survival skills) as “circus arts.” This way of examining student experiences is deeply informed by what I heard in interviews with students, and reveals aspects of their experiences that would not otherwise be apparent.

Working while studying full-time

I gained insight into these questions during a research study that I led between 2018 and 2023, which focused on undergraduate students who work while studying full-time at two research-intensive universities in Canada.

We approached this research aware of the plethora of advice for students to make themselves employable. We wondered: What do students themselves think? How are they feeling about their future careers — excited and eager, anxious and pessimistic or somewhere in between?

More than half of undergraduates engage in term-time work while studying and many pursue other forms of work-integrated learning as well.

Undergraduates are recognizing the importance of 21st century “circus arts” as they labour to learn in today’s economy, characterized by extreme wealth inequality, globalization and the dominance of multinational corporations.

Circus arts metaphors

The “circus arts” metaphors were sparked by qualitative research with 57 students at one university between 2020 and 2022. Our methods included focus group interviews, life maps, audio diaries and one-on-one follow-up interviews.

Of these 57 students, 39 identified as female, 40 were racialized, 16 were international and 17 were first-generation Canadian. They were enrolled in a range of programs across campus, many in the largest faculties of arts and science.

In my book, I consider how students are concerned with:

• How to manipulate different “objects” (juggling)

• How to adjust and recalibrate their activities and expectations (high-wire walking)

• How to learn their limits and bend in ways that don’t compromise care for self and others (contortion); and

• How to expend energy instrumentally and avoid burnout (sword swallowing).

Varying degrees of freedom and ease

Different students take up these “circus arts” in varied ways and degrees of freedom and ease. For instance, many students juggle more than paid work and studies.

Women are more likely to juggle volunteer work required for admission into feminized professional programs as well as care work in families. International students add the labour of acclimatizating to a new country with employment to offset disproportionately high tuition.

I observe that the art of high-wire walking tends to be less challenging for students who enter university with varied experiences and who have strong safety nets provided by families.

In contrast, financially insecure students, especially those who are racialized or live with disabilities, navigate more cautiously as they try to anticipate obstacles.

For example, one interviewee, Lucy, relayed how her disability required her to adjust studies and work when she was close to the point of burning out. First-generation student, Michael, had little room for error as he lived “paycheque to paycheque” on earnings from his retail job while pursuing full-time studies.

Costs of contortion and competition

Dominant discourses frame youth as autonomous, independent decision-makers who exhibit Gumby-like capacities to stretch and compress themselves into education and employment systems.

However, I observe that the “art of contortion” also involves discovering the costs of hyper-flexibility and limits on the ability to stretch in different directions.

For example, Kay came “pretty close to dropping out” because of mental health issues that were exacerbated by the competitive climate on campus. Fortunately, support from her parents and a sympathetic employer on campus helped her persevere.

Similarly, Janice, a racialized international student, compared her cohort to a “herd of lions trying to kill each other.” Her perception of steep competition for work placements coupled with her challenges to “fit in” to Canadian systems led to her realization that “there’s only so much we can take” and “you don’t have to take the path that every other person takes.”

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Read more:
International students’ stories are vital in shaping Canada’s future

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Sword swallowing

Students learn their limits as they bump up against the rigidity of demanding education and employment systems and as they navigate family expectations.

Pressure to take on too much can be irresistible in a context where a bachelor’s credential is no longer seen as sufficient and the smorgasbord of extra-credential activities is dizzying.

The dangers of sword swallowing — which involves suppressing one’s natural defence mechanisms — are reflected in students’ comments about burnout, exhaustion and poor mental health.

For example, Helena’s disability meant that she was always playing “catch up” despite the long hours she put into her studies. When combined with a retail employer who wasn’t accommodating, she reflected, “my mental health isn’t that great” and “my personal battery is dead.”

Erosion of familiar pathways

Participants in the study perceived an imperative to be planful, employable and productive (what I call “PEP talk”) because of the erosion of familiar institutional pathways and institutional safety nets coupled with the uncertain value of university credentials.

What could universities do to reduce the time pressure on students who experience the most precarity? There are calls to tie universities even more closely to job markets: mandating work-integrated learning, adding micro-credentials and packing more into programs.

I’m not convinced these approaches will do the trick. Instead, I think we need to move away from universities trying to meet the demands of constantly shifting global labour markets by producing graduates who can “hit the ground running.”

Paradigm shift needed

A paradigm shift is needed for three main reasons. First, the timescale of universities is (and should be) longer than the economic quarter. Innovation and responsiveness to communities does not mean reacting to every report on business.

Second, everything is not up to universities. Employers must take more responsibility for creating rewarding and sustainable entry-level positions with training. This does not mean adding more unpaid internships.

Finally, more institutional supports are needed to create the space and time for students to decide who they aspire to be, explore possible directions for work and career and discover what they value (including things beyond economic returns on educational investments.

This could mean lower tuition, more financial support for financially insecure students and the equitable distribution of work opportunities on campus.

It also means instructors and researchers modelling the kind of patient and careful scholarship that will help us see our way forward in a complex and crisis-prone world.

Alison Taylor received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

– ref. To survive today’s economy, university students are using circus-like tactics – https://theconversation.com/to-survive-todays-economy-university-students-are-using-circus-like-tactics-264839

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Ilona Dougherty, Managing Director, Youth & Innovation Project, University of Waterloo

Every year on Remembrance Day, I think about my grandfathers — my American grandfather who flew his Stinson L-5 along the coast of Burma and my Hungarian grandfather who fought in the Second World War.

I also reflect upon my grandmothers, one of whom used her language skills to translate for army officers and the other who suffered the loss of her first child while her husband was overseas.

These stories are often shared in our family as remembrances of young people who served and sacrificed during difficult times.

Buried deep in the Liberal government’s recently released 2025 budget is a line that is worth paying attention to: “Modernizing the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) enhances opportunities for youth to serve and lead.” With that one sentence, the federal government connected the dots between Canadian sovereignty, youth employment and youth service.

But if Canada hopes to see its current generation of young people thrive, it must ensure that youth employment and youth service programs are expanded.

The only way this will happen, given the investments outlined in the federal government’s budget, is if organizations dedicated to youth employment issues and youth service work closely together to ensure the Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) figures out how to recruit and meaningfully retain young Canadians.

Paltry investments

As outlined in the budget, there is a clear commitment from Mark Carney’s Liberals to rebuild and reinvest in the CAF to protect Canadians and lead internationally. This commitment includes an investment of more than $9 billion in 2025-2026.

An important part of this rebuilding will require recruiting and retaining new members, which is being facilitated by a significant pay increase for the lowest paid recruits.

But as young people in Canada face the worst job market in more than a decade, which is only projected to worsen with the widespread adoption of AI, it was troubling that funding related to tackling youth unemployment was limited in this year’s budget.

The investment in Canada Summer Job placements, while up from the investment made in the 2024, was only brought back to pre-pandemic funding levels, not actually increased.

The Youth Employment and Skills Strategy investment in the budget was up slightly from 2025-2026, but down significantly from 2024-2025 and far below investments made in 2019-2020.

The only significant increase came with the investment in the Student Work Placement Program, which increased by more than $100 million per year.

The most generous read of investments in youth employment-related programs in the 2025 budget would suggest the government is investing approximately $220 million more per year. But this pales in comparison to the $20.4 billion over five years that the government has committed to investing in recruiting and retaining “a strong fighting force” for the CAF.

When it comes to youth service, supporting young people who are struggling to enter the job market — and providing them with opportunities to serve their communities — can be achieved in part through the Youth Climate Corps and the Canada Service Corps. Combined, their budgets represent a moderate increase in spending of about $20 million per year.

But it’s unclear whether the Canada Service Corps will receive additional funding in the future, parallel to the Youth Climate Corps funding, or whether it will be phased out and replaced.

Despite it being touted as a budget containing generational investments, the government has made minimal investments to seriously tackle the youth employment crisis in the 2025 budget.

Recruitment challenges

It’s no secret that recruiting and retaining new members is a significant challenge for the CAF. A 2025 Auditor General of Canada’s report outlines how the CAF is not recruiting and training enough candidates to meet its operational needs.

To make matters worse, even when a recruit does join, a recently leaked internal report suggests that many leave in frustration shortly after joining due to their inability to get trained and to secure roles within the CAF that they’re interested in.

Adding to this is the CAF’s well-documented issues with radicalization and hate speech, racial discrimination and sexual harassment. As an external monitor outlined in a recent report, “a culture that is largely misogynistic has created an environment that allows and sometime encourages unprofessional conduct to persist.”

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Read more:
Not just a few bad apples: The Canadian Armed Forces has a nagging far-right problem

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Despite recent apologies and signs that things are changing for the better within the CAF, these issues make the institution unattractive for young Canadians even if they don’t feel as though they have any other employment options.

There is also the perception that joining the army means going into active combat. Around 65.2 per cent of CAF members ever deploy — and deploying doesn’t necessarily mean active combat. In fact, it can very often mean humanitarian missions either domestically or internationally.

Making the CAF attractive to youth

All of this presents a unique opportunity for Canadian policymakers.

There are many organizations in Canada working to tackle youth employment — and the CAF has just been given what can actually be called a generational investment. That investment could significantly enhance existing government initiatives aimed at addressing the youth employment crisis and preparing young people for the future of work.

For this to happen, youth employment and service organizations must leverage the government’s investment in the CAF to expand their impact. At the same time, the CAF will need to engage with civilian organizations that specialize in recruiting and supporting young people. CAF recruiters should adopt best practices in youth-focused recruitment, training and retention to ensure meaningful participation and long-term success.

Young people will only be attracted to and stay in the CAF if they feel valued, if they’re offered meaningful opportunities to contribute and if intergenerational collaboration is prioritized.

In a time of multiples crises, none of them can be viewed in isolation. Disparate groups need to work together to address their unique challenges.
Canadian young people have a lot to offer — they’re the most educated generation in Canadian history, they have the desire to make a difference, their brains are wired to be bold problem solvers and they have diverse and relevant lived experiences.

This is a generation Canada can’t afford to leave on the sidelines of its economy or in the fight for Canadian sovereignty.

Ilona Dougherty 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. Remembrance Day: How the Canadian Armed Forces could help solve the youth employment crisis – https://theconversation.com/remembrance-day-how-the-canadian-armed-forces-could-help-solve-the-youth-employment-crisis-268433

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Jason Walker, Program Director & Associate Professor Master of Psychology Health and Wellness & Master of Industrial-Organizational Psychology, Adler University

You did everything they told you to do. You earned the credentials, spent hours on your resume and revised multiple cover letters. You worked side gigs, volunteered, learned new software and perfected your LinkedIn profile. Yet, you can’t get a callback for an interview.

It’s as if your application vanished into the abyss of a company database, and the “thank you for applying” emails are piling up. So-called entry-level jobs now need years of experience, and junior roles expect postgraduate degrees.

You are likely wondering what you’re missing, but it’s not you — it’s the system. Across the United States, Canada and United Kingdom, automation now does the screening before a human ever has a look. Companies say they can’t find talent, yet many have stopped training people.

On paper, the labour market looks healthy, but in practice, it feels impossible to navigate. However, there are ways through it, backed by data and success stories. Here’s how to outsmart a system that seems to have forgotten the people part of hiring.

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No one’s 20s and 30s look the same. You might be saving for a mortgage or just struggling to pay rent. You could be swiping dating apps, or trying to understand childcare. No matter your current challenges, our Quarter Life series has articles to share in the group chat, or just to remind you that you’re not alone.

Read more from Quarter Life:

• A robot stole my internship: How Gen Z’s entry into the workplace is being affected by AI

• ‘I have multiple side-hustles … It’s exhausting’: the challenges facing young freelance creatives

• Why is it so hard for young people to get jobs?

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A generation struggling to find work

Whether you’re in London, New York or Toronto, the pattern is the same: a generation of qualified people blocked from the job market, and companies insisting they can’t find talent.

In Canada, job vacancies have dropped by half from approximately 984,000 in 2022 to roughly 505,000 by mid-2025. Unemployment has skyrocketed to 7.1 per cent, the highest in the last four years.

In the U.S., a similar story rings true. Unemployment hovers around 4.1 per cent — what economists call “full employment,” but the reality behind the statistics is less than stable. Job openings have fallen dramatically since the post-pandemic peak from 12 million in 2022 to about 8.8 million this year. That means fewer employment opportunities and more qualified candidates competing for the same positions.

Among younger workers, unemployment stands at approximately 8.5 per cent, nearly double the national average. Over one-third of graduates are employed in jobs that don’t require their degree.

Across the Atlantic, approximately 12.5 per cent of young people in the U.K. are currently not in education, employment or training — the highest rate in more than a decade. The unemployment rate holds at 4.8 per cent.

The International Labour Organization estimates 262 million young people — nearly one in four — are outside both work and education. The jobs exist, but the access and opportunity don’t.

Entry-level jobs no longer exist

If it feels like getting hired is impossible, there’s a reason for that. The “entry-level job” is effectively dead — the bridge between education and work has literally vanished.

In the U.S., more than 65 per cent of employers are expecting “prior experience” for entry-level roles. Meanwhile, the OECD reports that corporate spending on education and training has stagnated across almost all advanced economies.

Employers want it all — the education, the certifications and the experience — but rarely invest in developing it. As I wrote recently in Forbes: “We’ve built a work culture that glorifies resilience while quietly producing exhaustion.”

That pressure now starts long before people even get an interview. Candidates are somehow expected to be flexible, adaptable and endlessly qualified even before they’ve earned their first paycheque.

The math doesn’t add up.

Automation has also made things worse. A recent Harvard Business School study found that 80 per cent of resumes are filtered out automatically before being read.

The National Bureau of Economic Research notes that time-to-hire has doubled since 2010, with most delays happening before human review. In other words, most candidates have lost before they ever enter the race.

5 ways to beat the modern job market

The new hiring landscape rewards strategy, not volume. Here are five evidence-based approaches that will increase your odds of breaking through the job search barriers:

1. Stop applying to everything, and start applying smarter.

Sending 100 resumes isn’t a strategy, nor is it productive. Refocus on 10 to 15 roles that align with your skills and expertise. Customization still matters: one study found tailored applications triple response rates.

2. Build proof, not promises.

Applications that provide real-world work examples are twice as likely to receive a callback for an interview, even if they don’t quite have all the competencies being asked for. You can achieve this by building a visible portfolio: think of a dashboard, a writing sample or anything that demonstrates what you can do.

3. Make the algorithm work for you.

Pay attention to the job descriptions, use the exact keywords, avoid columns and keep it simple — remember, AI isn’t looking for how fancy your resume looks. The same Harvard Business School report showed that formatting alone disqualifies thousands of strong applicants every day.

4. Bypass AI and talk to humans.

Your network will typically save you. Sixty to 70 per cent of hires happen through networking and direct referrals. Get on people’s radars by reaching out to peers and building your network.

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Read more:
Networking doesn’t have to be a chore — here are 3 ways to make it more enjoyable and effective

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5. Reframe career gaps.

Career breaks are not a risk nor an indicator of someone’s performance, but that’s often how employers see it. Flip the narrative by talking about the skills you gained during gaps, like a new certification or volunteering. Interestingly, non-linear career paths are the norm, not the exception, in every major economy today.

If you’re an employer, the way forward is also data-driven: start reinvesting in training, invest in mentorship and rethink what you need from a new employee.

OECD data shows that organizations offering early-career development gain measurable returns in productivity and retention within two years. The solution isn’t finding ready-made talent — it’s creating it.

We need to get back to being human. Many organizations are demanding to “do more with less” and complaining about lack of talent, but we have to remember that talent, like a fine wine, takes time.

The bottom line

The old rules — get the degree, work hard and wait your turn — no longer apply. Today, what actually matters isn’t how many jobs you apply to, but how clearly you can show your value and connect with people.

If you’re job hunting in 2025, don’t wait for a system to discover you. Instead, make it impossible to be ignored. Show your worth publicly, tangibly and confidently. Remember, although the screening process may be automated, hiring decisions are still made by humans.

The problem isn’t a lack of talent. It’s a lack of vision — from the systems that stopped looking for potential and started chasing perfection.

Jason Walker 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. Feel like you can’t get a job? You’re not alone — but here’s how to work around it – https://theconversation.com/feel-like-you-cant-get-a-job-youre-not-alone-but-heres-how-to-work-around-it-268355

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Treena Orchard, Associate Professor, School of Health Studies, Western University

Most Canadians have access to workplaces that are safe, promote health and autonomy and, most importantly, are protected by the law. But for people in criminalized professions, including sex work, it’s a different story.

In Canada, sex work itself is legal. But most aspects associated with doing sex work — purchasing sexual services and communicating for that purpose — are illegal.

R. v. Kloubakov, a recent Supreme Court of Canada case, demonstrates how basic elements of the workplace for sex workers are not only contested under the law, but they’re also being decided upon without the input of people in the profession.

This ruling upholds the constitutionality of Canada’s sex work legislation, which many sex workers advocated against in 2014 when the laws were changed to include the criminalization of clients. This legislative shift negatively impacts sex workers because it creates a climate of anxiety among clients, who can become more aggressive with workers because they fear being “outed” or arrested by police.

For more than two decades, I have had the privilege of learning about these issues directly from women, men and transgender people in India and several Canadian cities, including Vancouver, London and Kitchener-Waterloo, who do this work.

Alongside their intelligence, wit and deep insights into human nature, the sex workers I’ve known cultivate profoundly meaningful communities and care for one another in exemplary ways.

The ‘legal-but-illegal’ paradox

When it comes to sex work, there are three primary approaches to legislation, beginning with the abolitionist framework, sometimes called the Sex Buyer Law or the Swedish or Nordic model. This system decriminalizes people who sell sex, provides supports to help workers exit sex work and makes the purchase of sex a criminal offence.

Canada adopted this framework in 2014 as part of Bill C-36, the Protection of Communities and Exploited Persons Act.

Next is legalization, a legislative model in which governments introduce specific laws and regulations allowing certain forms of sex work to take place under controlled conditions. Authorities can impose a very controlled framework governing numerous aspects of the sex industry, including forced HIV/STI testing, restrictions on advertising and strict workplace-licensing rules.

Examples of this legislative approach are seen in countries like the Netherlands, Germany and Greece.

The third approach is decriminalization, which removes all laws and regulations that criminalize or penalize sex work, including its sale, purchase, advertisement and involvement of third parties such as managers and brothel keepers. This framework allows sex workers to retain agency and control over their work.

New Zealand and Belgium are examples of countries that have decriminalized sex work.

Over the past decade, Canada’s sex work laws, however, have grown increasingly punitive, even though the number of arrests has decreased. Canadian sociologist Chris Smith found sex work–related arrests peaked at nearly 2,800 in 1992 and fell to just 11 by 2020.

And, as Smith argues, there is a mismatch between legislation and the actual crime, which significantly affects sex workers’ conditions and safety.

Inside the R. v. Kloubakov decision

In a unanimous decision on July 24, 2025, the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the constitutional challenge by Mikhail Kloubakov and Hicham Moustaine against Canada’s sex work laws. At issue were two parts of Canada’s sex-work criminalization legislation: receiving material benefits from sex workers and the procuring of sexual services.

The men, who were drivers for an escort agency in Calgary and were also responsible for transferring money earned by sex workers to the agency operators, pleaded guilty of separate charges related to human trafficking.

The trial judge had found them guilty of violating the Criminal Code by profiting from sex workers. She stayed proceedings on whether current sex work laws impacted the safety of sex workers.

The case challenged the constitutionality of the sex work laws, but ignored the difficulties of working in a criminalized profession subject to intense police surveillance stemming from receiving material benefits and procuring offences.

These offences make sex workers vulnerable to a range of harms, including institutional abuse, targeted violence, xenophobic raids leading to deportations and closures of safe indoor workspaces, constant threats of surveillance, and unwanted contact with law enforcement.

Research shows that in some Canadian cities, fears associated with police surveillance (such as being outed as a sex worker and racially profiled) are so prevalent that sex workers hesitate to contact police after facing violent armed robberies.

The court overlooks dignity

In R. v. Kloubakov, the Supreme Court of Canada did not prioritize the safety and security objective in its analysis. Instead, it treated it as just another issue among others. The court also failed to engage meaningfully with evidence relating to the lived experiences of sex workers. Decisions about sex workers’ rights under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms should not be made without sex workers at the table.

Criminalizing sex work is not a benign act with abstract consequences.

It isolates sex workers from society and resources, and positions them as targets for violence, discrimination and labour exploitation. It also contravenes regulatory approaches from the United Nations Human Rights Council, which views the criminalization of sex workers as a form of gender-based discrimination and advocates for a human-rights framework that aligns with decriminalization.

In a country that claims to care about all of its citizens, it’s imperative that we stand with those among us who are forced to struggle for basic human rights in their chosen profession — whether taking up that profession is dictated by pleasure, empowerment or survival.

What to expect going forward

This debate is far from over. Some of the issues the court declined to rule on will be raised in the Canadian Alliance for Sex Work Law Reform v. Canada case that is currently pending before the Ontario Court of Appeal after being struck down in 2021 by the Ontario Supreme Court.

This case challenges several sex work prohibitions on the grounds that they violate sex workers’ rights to freedom of expression, life, liberty, security of the person and equality, all of which are protected by the Canadian Charter.

While the case is on hold, Canadians can enhance what they know about sex work from organizations who advocate for sex worker rights, sex workers who write about their experiences and a host of other cultural spaces.

Treena Orchard has received funding from CIHR, SSHRC, and Western University, but no research funds were used in the creation of this article.

– ref. Sex work on trial: What the recently dismissed constitutional challenge means – https://theconversation.com/sex-work-on-trial-what-the-recently-dismissed-constitutional-challenge-means-267163

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Rashid Sumaila, Director & Professor, Fisheries Economics Research Unit, University of British Columbia

The world’s oceans are vital for life on Earth. Drifting phytoplankton provide almost half the oxygen released into the atmosphere. Marine and coastal ecosystems provide food and protect communities from storms.

Nearly 30 per cent of the world’s population lives in coastal areas. However, rapidly changing climate and massive biodiversity losses represent an unprecedented threat to these ecosystems and to life on Earth as we know it. Research shows that coastal regions bear the brunt of climate change and extractive impacts.

Industrial fishing can extract in a day what a small boat might take in a year. Since 1950, carbon dioxide emissions from global marine fisheries have quadrupled. Bottom trawling — where a ship tows a large net along the seafloor — adds further damage by disturbing carbon-rich seafloor sediments.

Scientists estimate that between 1996 and 2020, 9.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere due to bottom trawling — about 370 million tons annually, double the emissions from fuel combustion of the entire global fishing fleet of four million vessels.

By the middle of this century, 12 per cent of nearshore ocean areas could be transformed beyond recognition. In the tropics — Earth’s life ring — human-driven impacts are expected to triple by 2041-60. Our planet’s oceans are facing a critical risk, and we must act urgently to protect them in ways that also benefit the people who rely on them.

As COP30 gets underway in Belem, Brazil, developing measures to protect the world’s oceans and fisheries must be on the agenda.

The key lies in empowering those who have long stewarded these ecosystems: Indigenous and coastal communities. Their traditional fishing practices, passed down through generations, offer a model for balancing ecological recovery with human well-being. Governments must listen to and learn from them.

The industrial threat

To include climate-regulating habitats in global conservation goals, governments must develop policy solutions that prioritize small-scale fishers and Indigenous and coastal communities and mitigate the destructive impacts of industrial fishing fleets.

One in every 12 people globally — nearly half of them women — depend at least partly on small-scale fishing for their livelihood. In contrast to destructive industrial fleets, small-scale fisheries are among the most energy-efficient, animal-sourced food production systems, with low environmental impacts in terms of greenhouse gas and other stressors and outsized economic and social value.

An important measure that could both support small-scale fisheries and contribute to countries’ contributions under global frameworks such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals is the formal exclusion of destructive industrial fishing from nearshore waters.

Inshore exclusion zones (IEZs) — also called preferential access areas — are coastal areas that prohibit certain methods of industrial fishing and grant preferential access to small-scale fishers.

When paired with co-management between governments and communities, IEZs can help restore fish populations and strengthen food security and livelihoods.

A promising example is in Ghana, where a bill has just been signed by the president to extend IEZs from six to 12 nautical miles, protecting more coastal waters for small-scale fishers.

An inclusive solution

To support these essential producers while meeting climate and biodiversity goals, governments must apply existing policies in ways that centre people.

The UN’s Global Biodiversity Framework, adopted in 2022, recognizes Indigenous Peoples and local communities as custodians of biodiversity. It also commits governments to protect at least 30 per cent of land and sea by 2030.

But governments must avoid the trap of “paper protection” — designating areas as protected without real enforcement or community involvement. Instead, we need practical, inclusive approaches that uphold both conservation and equity.

Locally led protection

I’m an adviser to Blue Ventures, a non-governmental organization working with coastal communities to restore their seas and build lasting prosperity. The organization helped pioneer the Locally Managed Marine Area (LMMA) model, which blends traditional knowledge and spiritual belief with modern conservation science.

LMMAs protect coral, mangrove and seagrass habitats, increase participation in biodiversity stewardship, enhance food security and build climate resilience.

Supporting coastal communities to establish functional and legal LMMAs — while excluding carbon-intensive industrial fishing from these areas — and recognizing and embedding the approach into global biodiversity frameworks and targets would mark an important shift in valuing conservation outcomes in areas where humans and marine life coexist.

If inclusive marine protection methods, like LMMAs and similar areas under traditional governance, were recognized as key tools to protect biodiversity, we could see a welcome alliance of formally protected areas and those under local governance, all contributing to global conservation targets.

Ultimately, governments should aim to protect more than just 30 per cent of the ocean. To do so, they must pursue equitable, inclusive solutions that align with global goals. We need a future where community-led management of nearshore waters supports both people and nature. We owe it to each other, and to the ocean that gives us life.

Rashid Sumaila receives funding from SSHRC, NSERC and the World Bank. He is affiliated with Blue Ventures, Oceana, Pew Charitable Trusts, and the Tyler Prize Foundation as a board member.

– ref. Governments can protect marine environments by supporting small-scale fishing – https://theconversation.com/governments-can-protect-marine-environments-by-supporting-small-scale-fishing-265651

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Nadia Delanoy, Assistant Professor, Leadership, Policy, and Governance and Learning Sciences, Werklund School of Education, University of Calgary

Since ChatGPT and other large language models burst into public consciousness, school boards are drafting policies, universities are hosting symposiums and tech companies are relentlessly promoting their latest AI-powered learning tools.

In the race to modernize education, artificial intelligence (AI) has become the new darling of policy innovation. While AI promises efficiency and personalization, it also introduces complexity, ethical dilemmas and new demands.

Teachers, who are at the heart of learning along with students, are watching this transformation with growing unease. For example, according to the Alberta Teachers’ Association, 80 to 90 per cent of educators surveyed expressed concern about AI’s potential negative effects on education.

To understand comprehensive policy needs, we must first understand classrooms — and teachers’ current realities.

As a researcher with expertise in technology-enhanced teaching and learning at the intersections of assessment, leadership and policy, I interviewed teachers from across Canada, with Erik Sveinson, a Bachelor of Education student. We asked them about their experiences with generative AI (GenAI) in the classroom.

Their stories help contextualize a reality of AI in a K-12 context, and offer insights around harnessing AI’s potential without harming education as a human-centred endeavour.

AI policy and teaching wisdom

This qualitative study involved 10 (grades 5 to 12) teachers from Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario and British Columbia.

We recruited participants through professional learning networks, teacher associations and district contacts, seeking to ensure a variety of perspectives from varied grade levels, subjects and geographic locations.

We thematically coded interview data, and then cross-referenced this with insights from a review of existing research about GenAI use in K-12 classrooms. We highlighted convergences or tensions between theories about assessment, teaching approaches in technology-enhanced environments, student learning and educator practices.

Across interviews, teachers described a widening gap between policy expectations and the emotional realities of classroom practice.

What we heard

The following themes emerged from our interviews:

1. The assessment crisis: Longstanding tools of assessment, such as the essay or the take-home project, have suddenly become vulnerable. Teachers are spending countless hours questioning the authenticity of student work.

All teachers interviewed consistently said they struggled with their current assessment practices and how students may be using GenAI in work. Confidence in the reliability of assessments have been challenging. The majority of teachers shared they felt they needed to consider students cheating more than ever given advancing GenAI technology.

2. Equity dilemmas: Teachers are on the front lines of seeing firsthand which students have unlimited access to the latest AI tools at home and which do not.

3. Teachers perceive both opportunities and challenges with AI. Great teaching is about fostering critical thinking and human connection. Ninety per cent of teachers interviewed faced complex challenges relating to equity and how best to support critical thinking in the classroom while building foundational knowledge. In particular, middle and high school teachers in core subject areas indicated students were using GenAI tools in their own time outside class without ethical guidance.

‘One more thing piled on’

One teacher from central Alberta said:

“AI is definitely helpful for my workflow, but right now it feels like one more thing piled onto an already impossible workload. The policy says, ‘embrace innovation,’ but where’s the guidance and support?”

Classrooms are dynamic ecosystems shaped by emotion, relationships and unpredictability. Teachers manage trauma, neurodiversity, language barriers and social inequities while delivering curriculum and meeting student achievement expectations.

Teachers say there’s little recognition of the cognitive load they already carry, or the time it takes to vet, adapt and ethically deploy AI tools. They say AI policies often treating educators as passive implementers of tech, rather than active agents of learning.

A high school teacher from eastern Canada shared:

“AI doesn’t understand the emotional labour of teaching. It can’t see the trauma behind a student’s meltdown. As much as I appreciate professional learning, when it is all about what tools to use, it misses the mark.”

This perspective highlights a broader finding: teachers are not resisting AI per se; they are resisting implementation that disregards their emotional expertise and contextual judgment. They want professional learning initiatives that honour the human and relational dimensions of their work.

Burnout, professional erosion

This disconnect is not just theoretical, it’s emotional. Teachers are reporting burnout, anxiety and a sense of professional erosion. A 2024 study found that 76.9 per cent of Canadian educators felt emotionally exhausted, and nearly half had considered leaving the profession. The introduction of AI, without proper training or support, is compounding that stress.

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Solving teacher shortages depends on coming together around shared aspirations for children

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There’s also a growing fear reported by the Alberta Teachers’ Association that, if not implemented properly with support for teachers new to the profession, AI could deskill the profession.

A teacher in Vancouver shared:

“I am a veteran teacher and understand the fundamentals of teaching. For beginner teachers, when algorithms write report cards or generate lesson plans, what happens to teacher autonomy and the art of teaching?”

Turning teaching into a checklist?

Overall, the interview responses suggest what’s missing from AI policy is a fundamental understanding of teaching as a human-centred profession. As policymakers rush to integrate AI into digitized classrooms, they’re missing a critical truth: technology cannot fix what it may not understand.

Without clear guardrails and professional learning grounded in teacher and student-informed needs, AI risks becoming a tool of surveillance and standardization, rather than empowerment.

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Children’s best interests should anchor Canada’s approach to their online privacy

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This tension between innovation and de-professionalization emerged across many teacher responses. Educators expressed optimism about AI’s potential to reduce workload, but also deep unease about how it could erode their professional judgment and relational roles with students.

A northern Ontario teacher said:

“There is hope with new technology, but I worry that AI will turn teaching into a checklist. We’re not technicians, we’re mentors, guides and sometimes lifelines.”

Teachers fear that without educator-led frameworks, AI could shift schooling from a human-centred practice to a compliance-driven one.

Responsible AI policy

If we want to harness AI’s potential without harming education as a human-centred endeavour with students and teachers at the core, we must rethink approaches to AI innovation in education. That starts with listening to teachers.

Teachers must be involved in the design, testing and evaluation of AI tools. Policies must prioritize ethics, transparency and equity. That includes regulating how student data is used, ensuring teachers can ascertain algorithmic bias and ethical implications and also protecting teacher discretion.

Third, we need to slow down. The pace of AI innovation is dizzying, but education isn’t a startup. It’s a public good. Policies must be evidence-based and grounded in the lived experiences of those who teach.

Nadia Delanoy receives funding from the University of Calgary.

– ref. We asked teachers about their experiences with AI in the classroom — here’s what they said – https://theconversation.com/we-asked-teachers-about-their-experiences-with-ai-in-the-classroom-heres-what-they-said-265241

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Kashif Raza, Postdoctoral Fellow, Faculty of Education, University of British Columbia

When Zohran Mamdani campaigned for New York City mayor, he didn’t sound like a typical American politician, speaking only English at his rallies and public appearances.

Instead, he switched between Arabic, Bangla, English, Hindi, Luganda, Spanish and Urdu to connect with diverse communities. He also made appearances on transnational media outlets to discuss issues that crossed borders.

I am a post-doctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, studying the integration patterns of immigrants and how they’re shaped by the intersection of language, ethnicity and migration.

For me, Mamdani’s story is more than a local success. It signals how politics is being reshaped by migration and multilingualism and how language itself has become a foundation of belonging in diverse democracies.

Multilingual politics

Mamdani’s campaign began with a simple but powerful line:

“It’s time to take back our power and unleash the public sector to build housing for the many.”

This message resonated across the city’s working-class neighbourhoods — taxi drivers, nurses, delivery workers and students, many of them immigrants trying to make ends meet. What made it even more effective was how he delivered it: not just in English, but in the many languages New Yorkers speak.

He repeated his call for affordability and fairness in Arabic, Bangla, Urdu-Hindi, and Spanish. His campaign videos and flyers mixed languages the way people do in everyday life, switching easily between English and the languages of home.

This was about more than translation; it was about recognition and connection with people.

New York is one of the most linguistically diverse cities in the world, with more than 800 languages spoken. Nearly 35 per cent of its residents are born outside the United States.

Mamdani understood that voters don’t leave their languages behind when they migrate. They use them to make sense of work, community and politics. By speaking to them in those languages, he showed that their voices mattered in shaping the city’s future.

Political integration

This approach reflects what scholars of migration linguistics — the study of how language and mobility shape one another in the process of migration, settlement and belonging — describe as multilingual political integration.

It is a way migrants connect identity to civic participation. Mamdani’s campaign turned that bridge into a political strategy: one that viewed multilingualism not as an obstacle to democracy, but as its living proof.

It also serves as a quiet reality check on the long-standing “melting pot” ideal in the United States, which assumes immigrants must shed their languages and traditions to blend into a single American identity.

A transnational campaign

Mamdani’s multilingual strategy also reflected the transnational reality of modern migration. His Urdu interview on Pakistan’s Geo News and his criticism of India’s Narendra Modi during conversations with Indian-origin voters in the U.S. blurred the line between domestic and global audiences.

These appearances were not campaign gimmicks; they acknowledged that diaspora communities are shaped by more than one national story.

Migration linguistics helps explain this dynamic. It studies how language practices move across borders and connect places of origin, settlement and diaspora. In Mamdani’s case, multilingual communication created what scholars call transnational publics — shared spaces of conversation that stretch from New York to Karachi and Delhi.

When a politician addresses issues such as Islamophobia, immigration or housing in multiple languages, they are not only appealing to voters at home. They are engaging with a wider world of shared experiences that migration has woven together.

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Read more:
How Zohran Mamdani’s ‘talent for listening’ spurred him to victory in the New York mayoral election

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Culture as communication

Language was only part of Mamdani’s strategy. His campaign also used cultural expression — food, music and festivals — as forms of communication.

From Iftar gatherings during Ramadan to Diwali celebrations and South Asian street fairs, these events became spaces of multilingual interaction where taste, sound, and ritual carried political meaning.

Migration linguistics views such practices as intercultural competence: the use of cultural forms to express belonging and solidarity.

Mamdani’s campaign showed that civic participation doesn’t only happen in speeches or debates; it also happens in shared meals, songs and celebrations that remind people they belong to the same city.

Lessons for Canada

Mamdani’s brand of of politics holds lessons for Canada. Since I wrote on this topic earlier this year, immigrant and racialized voters are already changing how campaigns are organized and how communities mobilize.

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Canada’s largest cities, in particular Toronto and Vancouver, are among the most linguistically diverse in the world. Yet a lot of political outreach still assumes an English- or French-only audience.

Mamdani’s campaign suggests another path. By engaging multilingual voters through their languages, stories and digital networks, politicians can build deeper, more authentic relationships.

It’s time for Canadian politicians to move beyond teleprompters and translators and learn and use minority languages as a genuine way to connect with multilingual voters as they make up a significant portion of the electorate.

Kashif Raza receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada.

– ref. Zohran Mamdani’s win shows how multilingualism bridges divides in diverse democracies – https://theconversation.com/zohran-mamdanis-win-shows-how-multilingualism-bridges-divides-in-diverse-democracies-269232

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Robert Chernomas, Professor Of Economics, University of Manitoba

Canada’s 2025 federal budget, and those that follow in the coming years, may prove to be the most important since the beginning of the Second World War.

Canada’s longstanding, co-dependent economic relationship with the United States has abruptly and involuntarily ended following U.S. President Donald Trump’s imposition of tariffs and threats of annexation.

These actions have forced Canada to rethink its economic future and reduce its dependence on the U.S. Canada can no longer assume that 75 per cent of its merchandise exports will go to the U.S. in key sectors like energy and manufacturing, which together accounted for 19 per cent of Canada’s GDP in 2023.

No other country accounts for more than five per cent of Canadian exports, and about 45 per cent of foreign direct investment still originates from the U.S. Canada is in an economic war, with national security at risk and thousands of industrial jobs on the line in the immediate future.

How Ottawa responds through an alternative comprehensive economic strategy, beginning with the 2025 federal budget, will determine whether Canada can navigate this new geopolitical and economic reality.

Lessons from history

Canada’s history provides guidance on how to deal with a crisis of this scale. Given the isolationism south of the border, the only serious option for Canada is a national industrial policy similar to the one Canada (and the U.S.) had during the Second World War. That policy transformed Canada into a dynamic, advanced industrialized economy that paid dividends for decades

In 1933, the Canadian unemployment rate was 30 per cent, while 20 per cent of the population became dependent on government welfare for survival. The unemployment rate remained above 12 per cent until the start of the Second World War.

Between 1939 and 1945, as Canada restructured its economy for the war effort, gross national product more than doubled, the unemployment rate fell to one per cent and wages grew nearly 70 per cent.

This transformation was driven by William Lyon Mackenzie King’s government, which took control of the economy in the form of a publicly funded and a directed supply-side industrial policy. Resources and labour were channelled to produce for the war effort and the core needs of the community.

Twenty-eight Crown corporations were established, factories multiplied, corporate taxes were doubled and excess profits were taxed, generating revenue for these investments.

Canada’s ‘Golden Age’

The decades that followed the Second World War from the 1940s through to the early 1970s is often referred to as the Canadian “Golden Age.”

It was a time of unprecedented prosperity for Canada, characterized by rapid and stable economic growth, rising living standards, improved health outcomes, education-based upward mobility and Canada’s most income-equal period.

The extraordinary debt-to-income ratio that existed at the end of the Second World War (109 per cent) shrank to a fraction (20 per cent) as the Canadian gross domestic product expanded, driven by progressive government supply-side policy.

Public programs were not cut during this period, but expanded as spending for health care, education and welfare grew. The debt rose again as economic growth slowed after Canadian corporate tax rates were reduced by more than 50 per cent between 1960 and 2020, while corporate prerogatives replaced industrial strategy.

The Carney promise

Only weeks after the April 28 federal election, the newly re-minted finance minister, Françoise-Philippe Champagne, indicated that wartime industrial policies were serving as at least a reference point for the Liberal government.

“When I look at 2025, it reminds me of 1945, where C.D. Howe kind of reinvented modern industrial Canada. It’s one of these moments in history where we’re really rebuilding the nation,” he said.

Champagne was referring to Canada’s wartime industry minister, C.D. Howe, who implemented the War Measures Act in 1939 and the War Appropriation Act to rapidly industrialize the Canadian economy. In Howe’s words: “If private industry cannot or will not do the job, then the state must step in. The need is too great to wait.”

Today, Canada’s current private for-profit sector is a notorious laggard when it comes to research, development and investment compared to its G20 and OECD counterparts. Canadian companies are currently holding $727 billion in cash deposits, a situation once called out by Prime Minister Mark Carney as “dead money.”

The collapse of Canada’s corporate-led free trade and deep-integration model with the U.S. has presented a window of opportunity to influence a state-led, national industrial policy.

Does Carney’s budget come to the rescue?

The 2025 budget includes several important investment plans, including the new Build Canada Homes agency, science research and development, clean technology manufacturing, transit and health-care infrastructure, and digital transformation programs.

However, the Canada Strong budget remains too small in scale and relies far too much on indirect incentives for private-sector investment. These measures may or may not materialize, given the tariff threats and profit opportunities south of the border.

The budget’s claims of generational increases in investment — much of which was announced before budget day — appear to be more optics than anything meaningful.

The only significant new corporate tax measure, the “productivity super-deduction,” is tied directly to investment spending in targeted industries, and is a model supported by many progressive economists.

Canada needs to meet the moment

It’s worth remembering that the Mackenzie King government raised corporate taxes to finance direct investment. The higher tax rate corporations paid during the Golden Age were used to fund targeted investments and the expansion of Canada’s care economy, which in turn contributed not only to the welfare of the Canadian population, but also productivity growth in the economy.

By contrast, the 2025 budget provides modest increases to total public investment, but does not meet the challenge of the moment, despite the exaggerated narrative of a generational investment in Canada’s future.

A greater scale of investment and conditionality imposed on the private sector would make Canada a leader in green energy, sustainable agriculture, green transportation, biotechnology and a resilient and digitized, high valuated economy. Canada is now embroiled in a full scale economic war and needs to respond accordingly.

Robert Chernomas is a Professor of Economics at the University of Manitoba and a member of Elbows Up: A Practical Program for Canadian Sovereignty. I am not affiliated with a political party or industry association but I am politically active.

– ref. Why the 2025 federal budget won’t really make Canada strong – https://theconversation.com/why-the-2025-federal-budget-wont-really-make-canada-strong-268984

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Victor Kuperman, Professor, Department of Linguistics and Languages, McMaster University

Reading is a complex cognitive skill that predicts career prospects and social mobility throughout our lifetimes. For newcomers to a country, success often depends on learning to read fluently in a new language.

In fact, language proficiency, including reading fluency, has been found to be the most important factor for successful employment and social participation.

With record numbers of immigrants settling in Canada and migrating globally, understanding how to support reading skill development in a second language is essential.

Writing systems across the world

The foundation of our scientific understanding of the reading process has been narrow, with a majority of studies focusing on reading in English.

But languages are not all written the same way. Some writing systems use letters (like English, Turkish), others use logographs (Chinese, Japanese), syllable characters (Hindi), and more. Some languages are read left to right (Russian, Spanish), and some right to left (Arabic, Hebrew).

Considering how diverse languages are, an interesting question is whether we develop strategies to understand text in our native language and transfer these strategies to additional languages. These are just two of the many research questions that the Multilingual Eye-Movement Corpus (MECO) aims to answer.

What is MECO?

MECO connects researchers from more than 40 countries — including the three of us, the authors of this analysis — to collect eye-tracking data on reading. Eye-tracking uses a camera set-up to record eye movements during reading. It shows where the eyes are fixating, rereading or skipping words, and reveals how the brain processes text in real time.

Participating labs use an identical procedure so that results can be compared across languages. Participants read the same English texts, but each lab then also tests readers in their native language using translated texts, allowing for the data to be compared.

One key finding has been that the way someone reads in their first language leaves traces on their second language. In fact, the study reports that approximately half of the variance in eye movement measures in the second language is explained by respective measures in the first language.

For example, writing systems like Korean pack a lot of information into smaller units, and eye-tracking data reflect this: Korean readers skip many words and have shorter eye movements, but make a lot more of them. In a language like Finnish, where words are much longer, information is more distributed and readers tend to spend more time on words and don’t skip them often.

These are strategies that they carry over to their second language, even when the writing system is different.

MECO has also reported a dissociation between comprehension and eye-movement behaviour. In their second language, readers often achieved similar comprehension scores to native speakers of English, but their eye movements showed more effortful reading (longer fixations, less skipping and more re-readings).

This strategy, the authors note, could be due to the benefits of understanding written materials in an educational or workplace setting outweighing the benefits of speed.

MECO, applied

Language researcher Yaqian Borogjoon Bao joined the network of MECO researchers while studying the cognitive aspects of her native script, traditional Mongolian, at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

She had this to report in an interview with our team:

“MECO gave me the framework and support to conduct rigorous research. I hope it will inspire others to explore understudied languages and scripts.”

At the Federal University of Minas Gerais in Brazil, Marina Leite joined MECO as a collaborator while pursuing a degree in Teaching and Education. She told us:

“I hope the MECO data can be used to enlarge the amount of available data about reading in Brazilian Portuguese. The findings could improve education strategies to boost reading comprehension and literacy skills in my country.”

In classrooms where students are balancing multiple languages, research on how native languages affect additional ones can help researchers, educators and policymakers design better strategies for teaching.

MECO aims to fill this gap. All collected data is open access, allowing other researchers to use the data pursue their own research questions about reading.

Victor Kuperman receives funding from NSERC, as Canada Research Chair in Psycholinguistics (Tier 2).

Nadia Lana receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.

Olga Parshina 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. New global research shows eye movements reveal how native languages shape reading – https://theconversation.com/new-global-research-shows-eye-movements-reveal-how-native-languages-shape-reading-268698

Source: The Conversation – Canada – By Katrina Barclay, Executive Manager, Telfer Family Enterprise Legacy Institute (FELI), L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa

Like previous federal budgets, the recently released Budget 2025 fails to acknowledge a pressing generational shift for Canada’s economy: the succession crisis facing most Canadian family-owned businesses.

Over the next decade, 60 per cent of family enterprises will change hands — if those ownership transfers happen at all.

When ownership transfers stall or fail, jobs, investments and tax revenues are lost — not to mention the loss to the social fabric in communities across the country. Yet, despite these stakes, Budget 2025 offers little recognition of this looming challenge.

The government states that it is “ensuring Canadian workers and businesses have the tools they need to drive this transformation and thrive from it.” Yet there is no evidence of any measures to support and equip entrepreneurs and family business owners for generational transitions.

Family businesses are the backbone of the economy

In Canada’s private sector, family firms own nearly two-thirds of all businesses, from mom-and-pop shops to international and global leaders in their respective sectors. Together they employ more than half of workers and generate nearly half of our private sector GDP.

The economic pressures and uncertainties — looming tariffs, the affordability crisis, inflationary price increases, to name a few — currently facing Canada make this moment more perilous.

Without thoughtful policy support, Canada risks losing not just businesses, but the jobs and community investments they sustain.

The looming succession crisis

Succession is notoriously difficult to navigate for businesses. Two-thirds of businesses don’t have a formal succession plan.

Of those that do, most rely on accountants and lawyers for guidance. While accountants and lawyers are needed, they’re rarely equipped for the family dynamics and communication breakdowns that derail even the best financial plans.

Even more worrying, 39 per cent of business owners surveyed by the Canadian Federation of Independent Business said they relied on no one or did it themselves.

Running a business and successfully transferring ownership are two very different skill sets. Yet Ottawa continues to treat succession as a matter of tax incentives for the owners — for example, by cancelling the proposed capital gains increase — while ownership succession is also (and often foremost) a deeply human and strategic challenge.

The government must confront the most complex parts of succession: enabling solid business governance, responsible next-generation owner development and fostering healthy family dynamics to support smooth ownership transitions that ensure the continuity and growth of the firm.

This is especially important as more enterprising families begin to exit their firms to invest in family foundations or offices, or bring in outside investors and leadership for the first time.

The incumbent generation of business owners who built this country will only pass on their business once. The government need to give them the tools to do it right.

3 things the government should do

If Budget 2025 truly aims to ensure that Canadian businesses “thrive from transformation,” it must invest in succession readiness. Here’s what the government should do to accomplish this:

1. Assess the state of Canada’s family businesses

Canada lacks comprehensive, detailed and continuous national data about family firms. The government should support the collection of nuanced family business data. This should be done by Statistics Canada in partnership with universities and institutes like ours, the Family Enterprise Legacy Institute at the University of Ottawa. This would provide reliable evidence to measure the pulse of the largest part of our economy, highlight major issues and inform effective policy.

2. Scale owner empowerment

Few programs exist to help businesses navigate succession. The current offering amounts to a few paragraphs on the Government of Canada website. The government should support the creation and delivery of multilingual programs to train any potential successors in best practices on topics such as family dynamics management, succession processes, resilience in times of uncertainty and effective governance.

3. Build hubs of excellence

Canada already has world-class family business researchers, advisers and peer networks, but they are disconnected and underfunded. What’s missing is a federally supported institute bringing together associations, institutes, centres, foundations and organizations to pursue a co-ordinated strategy to connect research, training and advisory support. Along with owners and successors, the hub could help prepare advisers, accountants and lawyers.

A high-yield investment in Canada’s future

Supporting successful succession is not a subsidy. It is a high-yield investment with returns for every community and society at large. It is also a safeguard for the 6.9 million Canadians who depend on family businesses for jobs and nation-building projects.

Consider the federal Major Projects Office, which has been tasked with fast-tracking nation-building projects. As with every project in Canada, they are supported by small, medium and large family-owned construction firms, trucking companies, suppliers, tradespeople, Indigenous enterprises, manufacturers, fabricators and other service providers.

Without healthy, well-transitioned family businesses, those projects and the jobs they sustain are at risk.

Succession planning is about preserving Canadian ownership during the largest intergenerational transfer in our history. Without thriving family businesses, our economy will not prosper. Ignoring succession could end up being not just a policy oversight, but a nation-building failure.

Peter Jaskiewicz receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC). He has collaborated on research, teaching, and knowledge dissemination with all major associations in the national and global family enterprise ecosystem, including Family Enterprise Canada (FEC), Family Enterprise Foundation (FEF), the Family Business Network (FBN), and the Family Firm Institute (FFI).

Katrina Barclay 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. Budget 2025 ignores the looming succession crisis facing Canada’s family businesses – https://theconversation.com/budget-2025-ignores-the-looming-succession-crisis-facing-canadas-family-businesses-269249