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Explainers
When a chart, map, or visualization needs context the picture alone can't carry, this is where the longform expansion lives — usually a few pages, always with the objections engaged honestly rather than ignored.
Canadians rate China above the U.S. again, and by the widest margin yet
Pew finds 44% of Canadians view China favourably against 33% for the United States, the lowest U.S. reading in Canada since 2002. It is the second time Canadians have rated China the higher of the two, after a narrower crossover in 2017 and 2018.
One shipment in six years: Canada's forced-labour import ban exists mostly on paper
The United States has stopped 42,807 shipments under its forced-labour import ban. Canada, bound by the same trade commitment, has stopped one, and later let it go. A June committee hearing put the reasons on the record.
Seniors Are More Worried About Climate Change Than Gen Z
New StatCan survey data flips the usual climate-anxiety script. Canadians 65 and older report the highest concern of any age group, while 15-to-24-year-olds report the least.
After 306 Million Dollars in Federal Funding, Bombardier Asks to Hire Record 40 Foreign Workers
The request coincides with 306.5 million dollars in federal funding for Bombardier's aerospace business, and lands during a technical recession, with manufacturing unemployment rising.
Canada spent 14 billion Canadian dollars on foreign aid in 2025: here's where it actually went
While the United States slashed foreign aid by 57 percent and the rich-country average fell by nearly a quarter, Canada trimmed just over 2 percent. Yet a look at where the money went shows more than half of it now goes to Ukraine or is spent inside Canada on refugees, leaving the smallest share for the developing world in years.
Every major Canadian airport lost US flights in 2026
The 52.8 percent cross-border collapse was mostly car trips. In the air the US pullback is milder, about 10 percent nationally, but it lands unevenly. Toronto and Vancouver carry the most US exposure. Edmonton and Winnipeg fell the hardest.
Canada's electricity grid in 2050, in one chart
The CER's net-zero scenario maps every technology from 2024 to 2050. Wind grows ninefold to become the biggest source of capacity, hydro stays roughly flat, gas keeps a smaller but real role, and nuclear stays modest. It is the regulator's modelling of one pathway to net-zero, not a forecast.
Canada's nuclear strategy is built on a number the regulator's own model doesn't deliver
Canada's new National Nuclear Energy Strategy promises to supercharge atomic power. The regulator's own net-zero model hands nuclear 5 percent of new capacity through 2050 — and assigns wind 62 percent. Ontario alone faces a potential 14.6 GW nuclear delivery gap by midcentury.
The outsized power of the supply lobby
Tariff-protected dairy, poultry and eggs earn about 16 percent of Canadian farm revenue. Measured against that revenue, they lobby Ottawa harder than any other part of agriculture, and the pace is climbing ahead of a 2026 trade review.
Ontario EI rolls surged 24 percent since 2024 — factories are not the reason
In the two years since January 2024, Employment Insurance beneficiaries in Ontario grew by nearly 36,000 to 185,010 — a 24 percent jump at nearly double the national rate. Manufacturing and utilities occupations, the ones cited most in tariff coverage, account for none of it.
Every major Metrolinx transit line is opening years behind schedule
Measured against the opening date first committed for each project, every major transit line in the Greater Toronto Area is landing three to five years late. Two have finally opened. Three are still under construction, and their targets keep moving.
Canada TFW: How a Low-Wage Hiring Ban Pushed Restaurant Managers Into the High-Wage Stream
When Ottawa banned low-wage foreign-worker hiring in struggling cities in September 2024, approvals for low-wage restaurant managers collapsed. The same job reappeared in the high-wage stream, which the ban does not cover.
Canada's best pension fund? We ranked all 8 — the benchmark winner isn't the famous one
After Ontario Teachers trailed its benchmark, we pulled the latest annual report of all eight of Canada's pension giants and built one standardized scorecard. Over a decade, only HOOPP clearly beats the benchmark it sets for itself — by 2 full percentage points a year. CPP and PSP earn the highest raw returns. And on the question that started this — private companies — almost no fund reliably beats its own private-equity benchmark once you stop looking at a single year.
Canada's road and water networks are aging back to 2005 levels
Canada's headline measure of infrastructure health has climbed for two decades. The data underneath tells a different story: the country's roads are back where they stood in 2005, and waterworks have fallen every year since 2014. The national average hides the decline of two networks people use daily.
Carney talks like an economist. Trudeau talked like an advocate.
Two Liberal prime ministers, the same job, sharply different vocabularies. We counted every word in their House of Commons speeches. Mark Carney governs in the language of budgets and the economy; Justin Trudeau spoke in the language of care and climate. It shows in the words each man reaches for most.
Canadians are scared of AI. Their employers keep using more of it.
Two-thirds of Canadians want Ottawa to rein in artificial intelligence, even if it slows the technology down. Over the same stretch the share of businesses actually using AI has tripled, to about one in five. The fear and the reality have drifted apart, and the StatCan numbers on who is adopting, and why everyone else is not, tell a stranger story than the panic does.
Canadians aren't leaving in record numbers
A viral headline says 120,640 people emigrated in 2025, a record. They did. But as a share of the population the rate barely moved — and the real exodus is nearly a million temporary residents leaving as their permits expire.
CPP sold Nvidia all the way up — and it became its biggest stock anyway
Before the AI boom, the Canada Pension Plan held 120 million Nvidia shares. It spent five years selling three-quarters of them — through the launch of ChatGPT, through the greatest stock run of the decade — then bought back in near the top. The shares it sold would be worth more than fifteen billion dollars today.
Asking rents fell. The rent people pay went up.
Statistics Canada says asking rents fell over the past year. It also says rents rose almost four per cent. Both are correct. One number prices the apartment you would move into, the other the one you already live in, and the difference explains most of the confusion.
Ontario Teachers got into SpaceX early. A plain index fund still beat them in 2025.
Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan bought into SpaceX in 2019, and the stake could be worth as much as 11.6 billion U.S. dollars if the company lists at its targeted valuation. Yet in 2025 the fund returned 6.7 percent — below its own 11.7 percent benchmark and less than half the S&P 500's 17.9 percent. Its private equity lost money for the first time in 16 years. A look at what the windfall hides, and how Canada's pension giants are quietly changing what they invest in.
BC's opioid deaths are falling everywhere but one Vancouver neighbourhood
British Columbia's illicit-drug deaths fell 21% in 2025, to 1,826. But one Vancouver neighbourhood still loses people at ten times the provincial rate. Mapped by all 88 Local Health Areas.
Canada has an "entrepreneurial drought," small-business group tells MPs
Appearing before the House Finance Committee on the spring economic update, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business said more businesses are closing than opening across several sectors, for as long as 12 straight quarters. It warned that 55 percent of current owners would not recommend starting a business today, and pressed for a lower tax rate and a deduction threshold that has not moved since 2009.
Canada was 90th in the world in 2013. It hosts the 2026 World Cup as its strongest team ever.
When Canada plays a home World Cup match for the first time this June, it does so as the strongest men's team in its history. A decade ago it sat 90th in the world. Measured in Elo, soccer's results-based strength rating, the climb since has carried Canada past the United States and into second place in North America, behind only Mexico.
A 4.2 billion dollar fix for a problem that's two-thirds not the system
Canada is rushing a new payroll system in to replace Phoenix. But its own Auditor General told a committee that most of the remaining pay errors aren't the software's fault at all — which raises an awkward question about what the 4.2 billion dollars is actually buying.
As Dunkin' prepares for its Canadian relaunch via Foodtastic, public LMIA data shows the master franchisee hires foreign workers at nearly the same rate as Tim Hortons
Foodtastic, the Montreal company that just signed an exclusive deal to bring Dunkin' back to Canada with "hundreds of locations," has approved 109 Temporary Foreign Worker positions across its existing portfolio over the past two years. Normalized by workforce, that works out to roughly 5.7 per 1,000 employees — about 85 per cent of Tim Hortons' rate. Tim Hortons got every front page for promising to cut its TFW use. Foodtastic, with a similar per-worker rate, is opening hundreds of new stores under a "Dunkin' is back" headline.
Canada blamed Tim Hortons. McDonald's hired more foreign workers — and stayed quiet.
Tim Hortons said this morning it will cut Temporary Foreign Workers and hire 10,000 Canadians instead. The chain's full franchise network — every "12345 Ontario Inc o/a Tim Hortons" plus the two big franchisee groups whose corporate names don't carry the brand — has 747 LMIA-approved positions for 2024-2025. Roll up McDonald's the same way and you get 907. The chain making headlines about foreign-worker cuts isn't even Canada's biggest fast-food user of the program.
More cops, less crime? Not in Canadian cities.
Calgary spends roughly a third less per resident on policing than Montréal, and has less violent crime to show for it. Across 29 major Canadian metropolitan areas, the correlation between officers per 100,000 residents and the violent Crime Severity Index is essentially zero. Built from the 2025 Police Administration Survey, released Wednesday.
Canada was the world's 4th-largest carmaker in 2000. It now ranks 14th.
In 2000 Canada built 2.96 million vehicles and sat fourth in the world. In 2025 it built 1.24 million and slipped to 14th, behind the Czech Republic and Turkey. Mexico now builds 3.3 times as many vehicles as Canada does.
Canadian millennials are twice as likely to live with their parents as boomers were
16.3 percent of millennials aged 25 to 39 lived with at least one parent in 2021. Boomers at the same age in 1991 — 8.2 percent. The rate has roughly doubled, and the figure is from the last census, before mortgage rates and rents climbed further.
Canada's 2026 Census is being collected now — here's when each result lands, and what's worth watching
The fieldwork started in May. Statistics Canada hasn't published its 2026 release calendar yet, but the 2021 cycle gives a tight template — first headline counts about nine months after census day, full picture about eighteen. Ten things the new data is set up to settle.
Canada's military recruitment hit a 30-year high. Female officer intake nearly doubled.
466 women enrolled as Canadian Armed Forces officers in fiscal year 2025/26 — a 94 percent year-over-year jump and the largest single-year shift for any subgroup in 28 years of DND open data. The composition of the 2025 cohort doesn't match the working-class enlistment story most coverage told.
Canada will pay 107 CRS points for a French speaker
A French-speaking Express Entry candidate gets accepted at a score 107 points lower than an otherwise-equivalent candidate. The gap is the policy, and almost nobody is talking about it.
Three categories did 86% of Express Entry's 2025 invitations. Three more were dormant. One has never drawn.
Canada lists seven federal "priority" categories on its Express Entry page. In 2025, French, CEC, and Healthcare did 86,350 of the 113,998 invitations issued. STEM hasn't drawn since April 2024. Agriculture has never drawn at all.
Canada has lost 111,000 full-time jobs since January. Quebec is taking the worst of it.
April was the fourth straight monthly decline in full-time employment. Unemployment hit a six-month high. Wages still grew 4.5 percent year-over-year. The headline number of minus 18,000 hides what is happening underneath it.
When Canada closed the side door to permanent residency, 100,000 'students' vanished
New first-time international college entries fell 75 percent in two years. Universities fell 46 percent. The gap is the story.
Ontario's opioid crisis is concentrated in the North — Thunder Bay's death rate is nearly 4× the provincial average
Ontario as a whole had 2,242 opioid toxicity deaths in 2024 — a rate of 13.9 per 100,000, well below Canada's 17.7 national rate. But the provincial average hides a sharp split: five northern Public Health Units sit between 35 and 54 per 100,000, while Toronto and Peel sit near or below the average.
How Canadian provinces took control of immigration policy — and what got cut along the way
Ottawa called the 2026 Provincial Nominee expansion "historic." Provinces had already overshot their 2025 cap by 30,000 admissions. The 2026 plan formalizes it — and cuts family reunification, refugees, and federal merit selection to keep the total flat.
Canada's EV market didn't slow — it was switched off
Honda is shelving its largest-ever North American EV investment, citing 'sluggish U.S. demand.' The Canadian story is sharper — ZEV market share fell from 18% to 9% in one quarter when both major rebates ended within weeks of each other.
Toronto rates its apartments two ways — and they almost never agree
500 Dawes Road is the only building both of Toronto's parallel rating systems flag as one of the worst — and that agreement is unusual enough it might be why Mayor Chow went there.
1 in 4 — how India became Canada's dominant immigration source
From 5 % of PR admissions in 1990 to a 31.5 % peak in 2021. Holding at 25 % even as the total falls. Four mechanisms explain the shift, including Express Entry's 2015 launch.
The boom is over — every immigration stream is now declining
Study permits −47 %. PR admissions −24 %. TFW work permits −9 %. The October 2024 cap is hitting its target faster than the announced trajectory required.
52.8 % — Canadian trips to the US have collapsed since August 2024
4.17 M monthly trips at the peak → 1.97 M by Feb 2026. Fourteenth consecutive month of YoY decline. Overseas travel didn't move. The mechanism: January 2025 tariffs.
What's actually delaying the TTC subway
1,385 hours lost across 10,087 incidents. Disorderly patrons top the chart by total time but Line 1 carries 56 % of all delay. Built directly from the open-data file.
The 987 — what Ontario's 2024 police use-of-force data on youth says
Black youth 6.3× their population share. Middle Eastern 4.4×. Indigenous 1.7×. The four objections that survive scrutiny, and what the chart can and can't tell you.
Why Canada's opioid death rate just passed the US
17.7 vs 16.4 per 100,000 in 2024 — but the headline depends on whether you count British Columbia. Strip BC out and Canada drops to 14.0, well below the US rate.
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