Tabla de contenidos para May 2024 en Maclean's

Created for From next-generation drugs to advances in AI and robotics, we’re in a golden era of leveraging innovation to help people live their healthiest lives. In downtown Toronto, University Health Network (UHN) is leading the charge to deliver better care, not only for Canadians but for patients around the world. “At University Health Network, we’re constantly challenging old thinking to change the status quo in health care and provide a better experience for both patients and providers,” says Dr. Kevin Smith, President and CEO of UHN. Collaboration and community support But breaking new ground requires the participation of more than just UHN’s community of 5,000+ research staff. As the world’s number one publicly funded hospital, UHN needs the help of Canadians to deliver on its mission to revolutionize health…

01 Marc Miller MINISTER OF IMMIGRATION, REFUGEES AND CITIZENSHIP He’s reining in a runaway international-student market—and making sure a Canadian degree is still worth something When Marc Miller became minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship last July, Canada’s international-student population was nearly one million strong—and up by 200,000 from only a year prior. On paper, those numbers might frame Canada as a global incubator of young minds, poised to reap the economic benefits of a supercharged education pipeline. But Miller realized they were telling a different story: Canada’s ostensibly successful international-student program had become a cash cow for underfunded universities and colleges and a booming private-college industry, as well as a back door for people seeking permanent residency. It was also a golden opportunity for unscrupulous international-education consultants luring students…

01 Tiff Macklem GOVERNOR, BANK OF CANADA He’s damned if he raises interest rates and damned if he doesn’t. Our central banker is the reluctant main character in Canada’s housing drama. In Canada, you can’t escape winter, taxes or, these days, red-hot housing-market inflation, whether you’re in a big city or a small town. The benchmark price for a single-family house in Greater Vancouver is now $2 million. Some bungalows in rural P.E.I. have doubled in price since the start of the pandemic. Renting in Toronto has become so competitive that tenants require a spotless resumé. Homelessness has skyrocketed everywhere. At the centre of the housing fracas is Bank of Canada governor Tiff Macklem, who in mid-2022 began steadily raising the central bank’s interest rates in a bid to slow…

01 Olivia Chow MAYOR, TORONTO Unwilling to see her city decline, Olivia Chow pressured all levels of government to step up. She has the money to show for it. Lately, a swirling mix of pressure points—unforeseen pandemic costs, historic immigration highs, scarce housing supply, an uptick in violent crime—has frayed tensions between Toronto and the feds. The city receives just nine cents of every federal tax dollar paid yet maintains 60 per cent of Canada’s core public infrastructure. In recent years, Toronto has also shouldered much of the burden of affordable housing, once a federal file. For Olivia Chow, the onetime NDP MP elected mayor of Toronto last July, the costs of that lopsided arrangement have more than manifested in the streets of Canada’s largest city. For one, she inherited…

JOHN MACFIE GREW UP IN THE 1920S AND ’30S on a family farm in Dunchurch, Ontario, with his father, a schoolteacher mother who owned a camera, and six siblings. He later flew planes for the Royal Canadian Air Force and, after the Second World War, returned home to plot weather maps and log trees with his father. Eventually, he met an employee from the province’s Department of Lands and Forests, now known as the Ministry of Natural Resources, who scaled their logs. He was interested in the work and, in 1949, joined the ministry, scaling logs in the winter and fighting forest fires in the summer. The next year, Macfie became a trap management officer and moved to Sioux Lookout, a small town and key administrative hub for remote northern…

CONVERSATIONS WITH THE NATION’S NEWSMAKERS WHEN RICK MERCER, Canada’s favourite satirist son, retired from the rant game in 2018 after a blazing 15-season run of the Rick Mercer Report, he could have gone quietly. For a while, he got into amateur potato farming. But, every day in his shed overlooking the Atlantic, he was also writing, a new loquacious hobby that resulted in not one but two back-to-back instant bestsellers. There’s 2021’s Talking to Canadians, which charts Mercer’s course from his school days to getting CBC’s green light, and The Road Years, released last October, which chronicles everything after, including the drum lessons with Rush’s Neil Peart, the hilariously reckless adventures in dogsledding and bear-tagging, and loads of facetime with the country’s apex predators: politicians. Mercer soon realized he still…

KYNE SANTOS’S INTRODUCTION to math was highly practical. His late father, a Filipino immigrant who worked as an engineer for Toyota in Cambridge, Ontario, told his young son that excelling in the subject would help him land a good job. By high school, math was Santos’s best mark, and he competed in contests—in his case, exams provided by the University of Waterloo. “I didn’t win often, but they exposed me to the creative side of math,” Santos says. “Like trigonometry proofs, where there weren’t right or wrong ways to do them.” Around the same time, Santos began experimenting with makeup, wearing red lipstick and eyelashes to school—a “superhero cape,” as he explored his gender expression. By 2016, when Santos was a first-year math major at Waterloo, he saw a live…

Let’s face it: Canada is going through a rough patch. More people are living here than ever before at a time when it’s harder to live here than ever before. Housing is expensive, food is expensive, everything is expensive. Our underfunded, overloaded public infrastructure is collapsing like a body in organ failure. And every time you pick up a call from your mom, you have no idea if it’s going to be her or an AI-powered scambot on the other end of the line. And we thought the pandemic was dystopian. The most important people in Canada right now are the ones stepping in to patch up these institutional potholes—and they’re doing so in utterly surprising ways. For example, Tiff Macklem, a career-long central banker, is the guy determining the…

01 Hamed Shahbazi FOUNDER AND CEO, WELL HEALTH TECHNOLOGIES “Private” used to be a dirty word in Canadian health care. Well Health is trying to change that. In 1997, the day after he completed his civil engineering degree at the University of British Columbia, Hamed Shahbazi launched Info-Touch Technologies, his first startup. It began as a chain of internet-enabled kiosks in convenience stores across America, designed to help the digitally underserved get online. When the internet went global, Shahbazi pivoted his kiosks to email, PalmPilot syncing, video teleconferencing and, finally, bill payments. His last switch stuck: catering to the many Americans, including immigrants, who lacked bank accounts and needed a way to pay their bills fast, Shahbazi rebranded Info-Touch as Tio—or “uncle” in Spanish. Its revenue grew from $8 million…

01 Sophia Mathur ACTIVIST Governments are dragging their heels on emissions cuts. In Ontario, this 17-year-old activist is suing over it. Sophia Mathur has been showing up for the environment since she was quite literally in the womb—her mother, Cathy Orlando, was pregnant when she was protesting Big Fossil Fuel in the 2000s. Mathur grew up in Sudbury, Ontario. At seven years old, she was tagging along with her mother to MPs’ offices and Parliament and, at age nine, to Capitol Hill, politely refusing diversionary trips to local zoos with her dad. “At the time, I was obsessed with big cats, and I thought, If we were more on track to solve the climate crisis, these animals would be saved!” Mathur remembers. Mathur’s advocacy picked up speed in 2018 when,…

01 Ryan Reynolds ACTOR, PRODUCER AND BUSINESSMAN He’s pumping out billion-dollar companies alongside his billion-dollar movies Ryan Reynolds never set out to be one of Hollywood’s most bankable venture capitalists. As the story goes, the actor made his first big investment play buying ownership interest in Aviation Gin in 2018, after he tried the product and it was just that good. Celebrity-backed booze brands are as common as celebrity Ozempic prescriptions, but the difference is that Reynolds didn’t just put his face on the product—he also rolled up the sleeves of his superhero suit and got involved. Taking charge of Aviation’s branding efforts, he produced cheeky, self-deprecating ads that put an unknown alcohol brand on the map (i.e., trending on Twitter) and drove profits up by 100 per cent the…

01 Shai Gilgeous-Alexander BASKETBALL PLAYER This Olympic-bound basketball star is claiming the title of Canada's next Great One If standing atop the hockey world feels like a Canadian birthright, dominating men’s basketball is another story. Though a Canadian invented the game, Canada has struggled to be relevant within it: one of our only two NBA teams relocated to the U.S., we have yet to win an international basketball championship and we haven’t climbed an Olympic podium for the sport since 1936. We had a brief moment of glory in 2019, when Kawhi Leonard and the Toronto Raptors won the NBA title and sent the city into a frenzy even the Leafs would be jealous of. But five years later, we’re starving for the next big thing. For that, there’s a…

01 Tate McRae MUSICIAN After conquering TikTok, this 21-year-old pop phenomenon is ready to win over the world In September of 2023, Tate McRae’s single “greedy” started a sprint up the charts, hitting No. 1 around the same time as she performed on Saturday Night Live and landed on the cover of Billboard magazine. Who was this suddenly unavoidable presence whipping her hair, with more TikTok followers than Beyoncé? In response to her sudden ubiquity, a particularly aggressive army of web trolls cried “industry plant”—a term that has been used to dismiss a certain type of well-packaged, label-backed talent since the boy-band era. The new main pop girl (an actual term) seemed to have come out of nowhere. McRae would like to set the record straight. She did not, of…

01 Yoshua Bengio FOUNDER AND SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR, MILA As one of the godfathers of AI, Bengio unleashed an age-defining innovation. Now he's trying to tame it. When ChatGPT, DALL-E and other generative AI products went mainstream in 2022, some people thought the sky was falling. The technology could wipe out millions of jobs, make creativity a thing of the past, even destroy democracy, they said. For Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, two of the Canadian scientists whose pioneering research made those tools possible, the news was even more dire. Generative AI, they argued, was a harbinger of imminent artificial general intelligence—AI that’s capable of doing any cognitive task that we can. Soon enough, AGI would become superintelligent and, left unchecked, could spell the end of humanity. Bad actors could weaponize…

01 Anna Sainsbury CEO AND CO-FOUNDER, GEOCOMPLY She's shoring up a multibillion-dollar online betting industry, and enhancing cybersecurity while she's at it This year’s Super Bowl was the most-watched television event since the moon landing, thanks in large part to an American pop star named Taylor Swift. It was also the most bet-on Super Bowl in history, thanks in large part to a Canadian tech entrepreneur named Anna Sainsbury. Online sports gambling may be the only thing that has blown up bigger than Swiftmania in recent years—up from US$47 million in 2018 to US$7.26 billion in 2023 in the U.S. alone, and predicted to nearly double that over the next four years. And Sainsbury’s GeoComply, a geolocation program that enables gambling platforms to enforce out-of-state betting laws, is the technology…