A demonstration against AI data centres outside the council chambers at city hall in Hamilton in July, 2026. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Nick Iwanyshyn

When a nurse in Thunder Bay opens a patient’s chart or a shopper in Halifax taps a bank card, the request travels somewhere physical — a building humming with servers, storage, network equipment, backup power and cooling systems.

Data centres are not mythical “AI factories” or innocuous warehouses, but industrial infrastructure with real appetites for electricity, water and land.

Current debate about data centres seems to offer a false binary: stop these facilities or accept them unconditionally.

There is a better option. We need to develop projects that are transparent, low-carbon, grid-responsible, respectful of Indigenous rights and that leave durable public value where they stand.

A baseline, not a permit

On Sept. 3, the federal government and the Federation of Canadian Municipalities unveiled Canada’s Responsible Data Centre Development Principles, backed by 23 industry signatories. The principles say projects should:

• Create lasting local benefits.
• Avoid shifting project-driven electricity costs onto households and existing businesses.
• Minimize freshwater use and environmental impacts.
• Provide transparent, independently verifiable information on local impacts and commitments.
• Deliver lasting strategic value for Canada.

The principles are a common national framework, a baseline of expectations that complement provincial, territorial, municipal and Indigenous processes. They are not binding federal law, a permit or an approval.

These principles are a necessary start. Ottawa acknowledges that Canada relies significantly on infrastructure abroad for computing power, cloud and data storage. If we build domestic capacity, we can strengthen our resilience, keep critical services running and support innovation here.

However, location is not sovereignty. A Montréal server run by a firm subject to foreign law may still face foreign legal demands.

No two facilities are alike

A facility’s impacts depend on several things: its workload (AI or conventional); IT load (the power the computers themselves draw) and how fully it runs; cooling design; water source and local water stress; electricity mix; grid connection; backup generation and location.

Power usage effectiveness (PUE) is calculated by dividing a facility’s total energy by the energy its computers use; the theoretical ideal is one. Water usage effectiveness (WUE) counts litres of water consumed per kilowatt-hour of computing energy. Carbon usage effectiveness (CUE) does the same for emissions.

Natural Resources Canada’s best-practice guide notes that PUE ignores the useful work servers perform. It also reports that only about 22 per cent of Canadian data centres report their PUE. And these ratios measure efficiency, not absolute local impact or public value. An efficient university campus, for example, can still strain a regional grid or a stressed watershed.

In Alberta, companies have requested about 19,565 megawatts (MW) of new data centre load. That is more than the province’s record hourly peak of roughly 12,800 MW. The International Energy Agency projects that global data centre electricity use will roughly double between 2025 and 2030.

Energy and water stewardship

Principles and expectations are not enforceable outcomes, however. We need to test these principles on a project-by-project basis, using data that communities, regulators and Indigenous rights holders can inspect and commitments they can enforce.

This begins with mandatory disclosure before approval. Proponents should report:

• Peak and average electricity demand, and expected load shape.
• New transmission, generation and substation needs.
• Water withdrawal and consumption by source.
• Cooling design and backup generation.
• Noise, emissions and land impacts.

We then need independent measurement, public reporting and enforceable consequences when a project deviates materially from its commitments.

Those building data centres should bear the connection, grid-upgrade and reliability costs their projects directly cause, not households or existing businesses. Clean-power rules should fit the local grid. A project should be judged against the capacity and emissions of its regional grid, not a one-size-fits-all national rule.

They should also disclose whether a company’s clean-energy claims rest on annual matching (balancing yearly totals) or hourly matching (clean supply at the time power is used). Research has found that hourly matching could substantially cut long-run system emissions in the western United States, although the cost is contested.

Water stewardship should start from basin conditions and drought planning. Cooling choices trade water against energy, so no single technology is always best. Waste-heat recovery should be assessed in contexts where a viable heat customer and infrastructure exist.

Communities must benefit

Community benefits should be enforceable and should outlast the construction of data centres. Benefits can include training, Indigenous and local procurement, research partnerships, municipal infrastructure and local access to computing power.

When a government decision could negatively affect Indigenous or treaty rights, the Crown must consult the affected Indigenous Peoples and, where needed, adjust the decision or reduce the harm. Consultation is not consent. A data centre also does not automatically trigger a federal impact assessment. Engagement should begin early and be grounded in rights.

Advocates of rapid expansion have a point. Blanket bans on data centres could forfeit economic and resilience gains, push impacts to other jurisdictions and deepen dependence on foreign infrastructure. But that argument supports conditions, not their absence. It does not excuse opaque projects, subsidized grid costs or disregard for host communities.

Canada has an opportunity to lead, if we can turn principles into proof. The question is not whether Canada should build more data centres, but what it should ask of them before they draw on public systems and local landscapes.

The post Data centres: Opposing them and developing them are not the only two choices appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Repeated exposure to advertising can shape consumers’ expectations about how they should look, live and behave. (Unsplash+)

Have you ever bought something not because you wanted it, but because you were afraid of what might happen if you didn’t? Maybe you worried about looking older, falling behind at work or simply not fitting in.

While marketing often promises an aspirational lifestyle, some of the most effective campaigns work in the opposite direction: making you feel bad about your current reality, then presenting a product as the solution.

This is the logic of pain-point advertising, and emotions are central to its efficiency.

Emotional content in advertising can be framed positively or negatively. When advertisers choose to frame it negatively, they aim to show that not using their product could lead to negative experiences, often illustrated by the characters’ negative emotions in the ad.

How pain-point advertising works

Companies that develop goods and services need to establish a presence in the market, stimulate consumer demand and generate profits. Advertising uses a range of strategies to achieve those goals, but emotional content remains a staple across the industry.

Research in cognitive and behavioural science suggests that consumers don’t make decisions through rational calculation alone, and that emotions play an important role.

One reason may be the way our brains make sense of the world. The human brain is a predictive machine that constantly uses past experiences to anticipate what will happen next.

Throughout our lives, we accumulate experiences that help us form increasingly accurate expectations and make better decisions. When our experiences confirm those expectations, there is little reason for the brain to change course. We can continue relying on what we already know.

But when reality contradicts what we expected, the mismatch can trigger a negative emotional response. The discrepancy signals that something about our expectations or behaviour may need to change.

This is the very mechanism that pain-point advertising exploits. For instance, an advertisement might draw attention to a gap between how we see ourselves, and how we believe we should look. The advertised product is then presented as a way to close that gap.

Advertising shapes out expectations

But where do those expectations come from? Much of the knowledge and information we use to form our assumptions is socially constructed. We learn from family, friends, institutions, media and the broader culture around us.

We live in a hyper-competitive society shaped in part by the ideology of meritocracy. Resources, like money and job positions, are limited, and consumers are encouraged to invest in solutions that will help them succeed.

Health, education, appearance, careers and personal fulfilment can all be framed as problems that have a purchasable solution. Social validation reinforces this process. When we make what appears to be the right choice, approval from others strengthens our assumptions and makes the behaviour more likely to continue.

Advertising contributes to this process by defining and sharing social standards of success that consumers can use as a baseline for judging themselves and making purchase decisions.

Consider the pressure teenagers feel to buy products when scrolling on social media platforms in order to conform to unattainable physical standards. When brands use pain-point advertising, they reinforce the social standards consumers are expected to meet and link their achievements to purchasing their goods.

Pain-point advertising can expose consumers to the risk of social pain. If they do not purchase the advertised product, they may fear experiencing negative emotions such as shame, embarrassment or rejection by their social group.

Our brain processes social pain in a similar way to physical pain. Negative emotional experiences are physically felt; this is one of the reasons why pain-point advertising is so effective.

How you can resist

The good news is that not every advertisement has the same power over us. Our brain pays attention to what is relevant to our mental model of reality. A car advertisement has little chance of gaining the attention of a non-driver.

The challenge is greater when an advertisement speaks directly to our goals, fears and expectations. Resisting these messages requires us to build and continually revise our mental models using sources beyond the products being marketed to us.

Developing critical-thinking skills, considering alternatives and learning from other people’s experiences can all help you deal with pain point marketing.

So can seeking knowledge and experience outside commercial marketing, which can give us different ways of understanding what is normal, desirable or necessary.

In other words, we can make mainstream standards less desirable so the brain no longer pays attention to these triggers. The goal is to recognize when an advertisement is fabricating a problem for us before offering to sell us the solution.

The power of repetition

A single advertisement may make us feel insecure for a few seconds. We can ignore it, scroll past it or decide that the product is not for us. The larger concern is what happens when these messages are repeated.

We experience two types of emotions: esthetic and utilitarian. Esthetic emotions are experienced vicariously or at a distance, such as when watching a movie, and do not normally trigger an immediate response in us. In contrast, utilitarian emotions arise in response to immediate threats and motivate us to take action.

Pain-point advertising is unlikely to trigger utilitarian emotions or an immediate response. The emotional experience remains at a distance, and the gap between seeing an advertisement and making a purchase may be long enough for the initial emotional response to fade.

However, repeated exposure to pain-point advertisements can affect our mental models of reality, including assumptions about how we should look, behave and live, and what a good life is supposed to be.

The post How advertising turns our insecurities into profit — and how you can resist the manipulation appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Are friends important to teens’ lives? Absolutely.

So, why does the question need more consideration? While some might think the number of friends is most important, what may matter more is the quality of those friendships.

There is no question that friendships help shape adolescent well-being. As children move into adolescence, friendships often shift from being based on proximity and shared interests to becoming sources of crucial emotional support.

This evolution is especially salient as young people navigate the many social, academic and biological changes associated with being a teen.

Quality versus quantity

Unlike friendship quantity (for example, number of friendships), the definition of friendship quality is somewhat more nuanced.

Generally, the quality of friendships considers the broad range of positive and negative experiences and interactions that adolescents have with their friends. For example, experiences of support, companionship, intimate disclosure and security can occur in the same friendships where people also experience conflict or feel unseen or criticized.

Considering both friendship positivity and negativity allows us to better understand how different types of friendships relate to adolescent well-being.

High-quality friendships, for instance, are described as having high levels of positive qualities and low levels of negative ones. These friendships are considered optimal because they are most often associated with better social and emotional outcomes for adolescents.

Mere presence may not be enough

Other profiles of friendship are possible. For example, teens can have engaged or “affect-intense” friendships (high positivity and negativity), similar to the classic love-hate sibling relationship.

Though less common, teens may also have low-quality friendships (high negativity, low positivity).

Interestingly, some research shows that having more friends is linked to fewer internalizing problems, such as anxiety or depressive symptoms. At first, this seems to favour quantity. However, one possible explanation is that having more friends can increase teens’ chances of finding a high-quality friendship among them, which may be driving these results.

In fact, direct comparisons between friendship quantity and quality indicate that the high quality of friendships can buffer social and emotional challenges youth face and potentially have a longer-lasting impact. This shows that the substance of teens’ close friendships plays a greater role than merely the presence of friendships at large.

Voluntary, reciprocal relationships

Why might having a high-quality friendship matter more than having many average or low-quality friendships?

Friendships, as voluntary and reciprocal relationships, are often closer through shared interests and likes that also build feelings of trust and loyalty towards one another. As a result, multiple friendships are possible.

As adolescents develop closer bonds with their friends, they come to understand and predict how different friends can offer support, companionship and security to each other — things that are essential for us as social beings. Naturally, teens can and do build closer friendships with some people and not others.

These positive qualities may be especially salient in closer friendships, which can provide significant benefits to adolescents. Research shows that adolescents who feel more secure in their friendships report less anxiety and greater friendship satisfaction than youth who feel less secure.

This is not to suggest that the number of friends is not a relevant indicator at all. Clearly, we need friends to have high-quality friendships. However, friendship quantity does not necessarily allow us to know about other important details about the friendship — like whether the substance quality of the friendship mutually drives their association.

Thinking about the quality of friendships allows us to see the effort and work adolescents put in to form and maintain their friendships. It also lets us consider the different elements that promote safety, support and security for both teens in the relationship.

How parents can play a role

Parents and families can play a vital role in how their teenaged children form and maintain high-quality friendships.

One way is for parents to model healthy relationships with each other and with their children.

Modelling positive and constructive interactions between adults (for example, between parents and parents’ friends) provides a foundational understanding for teens on how to navigate the positive and negative aspects of friendships.

This includes modelling healthy communication (like active listening), encouraging self-disclosure to demonstrate trust (sharing personal thoughts and feelings with others), receiving and offering support, as well as navigating conflict.

Avoiding conflict is not always possible or feasible. Even in the best and highest quality friendships, conflict can and does occur.

When it does, teens who have more knowledge about how to constructively handle conflict (discussions about the issue, being attentive to others’ goals, encouraging compromise), are less likely to report decreases in the quality of their friendship, or worse, to end them.

Support teen independence, structure

Another practical way parents can facilitate their teen’s healthy friendship is to support their independence at a pace that fits the teen’s developmental readiness.

This includes showing genuine interest in their teen’s worlds and encouraging them to take part in activities outside of the school that build on their interests. At the same time, other considerations are having some flexibility with a teen’s decision-making and trying to not overstep too much.

What comes with empowering teens to make autonomous decisions is finding a balance with authoritative parenting. While love and support are important for healthy parent-teen relationships, so is structure.

For parents, some structure can come from providing justifications and reasoning behind their decisions about boundaries or behavioural expectations they have for their kids.

Conversations can include explanations that help teens understand the potential consequences of certain choices they may be thinking about. Together, these types of behaviours and conversations set teens up well to have healthy friendships.

There is no doubt that having friends is good for teens, but having healthy and high-quality friendships can be even better.

The post How high‑quality friendship supports teen well‑being appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

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For more than two centuries, authorities in India have tried to remove free-ranging dogs from public life. Yet efforts to eliminate them have repeatedly encountered not only practical difficulties, but fierce resistance.

Why have dogs proven so difficult to dislodge from India’s streets?

Colonial culling drives provoked the Bombay dog riots of 1832, prompting authorities to experiment with relocating dogs rather than simply killing them.

In 2007, a culling drive in Bangalore, launched after a child was killed by a dog pack, drew activist protests over indiscriminate killing and cruelty. It was suspended until more shelters could be built.

More recently, in August 2025, the Indian Supreme Court’s order to remove street dogs permanently from Delhi sparked protests across India. Within days, the court reinstated the existing policy of sterilizing, vaccinating and returning healthy dogs to their neighbourhoods.

Later rulings partially reversed that retreat, allowing dogs to be permanently removed from institutional spaces while recognizing inadequate shelter capacity. The principle that healthy street dogs should ordinarily remain in their neighbourhoods survived — though only narrowly.

The people/dog bond

To understand the street dog’s persistence and the determined defence it inspires, it’s important to recognize what removal policies repeatedly underestimate. These dogs are deeply embedded in the places they inhabit and in the relationships of the people who live alongside them.

For some Indians, the street dog represents precisely what modern India was meant to leave behind: unruly nature intruding into organized human space. The dogs can also be embarrassing to governments anxious about how Indian cities appear to the outside world.

Ahead of the 2023 G20 summit, for example, authorities moved to round up street dogs so Delhi would present well to visiting dignitaries.

Yet street dogs are not outsiders to human space. Indian cities make this especially clear, since much of urban life is negotiated rather than formally planned, running on relationships, accommodations and workarounds as much as rules.

Consider a shared auto running a fixed but unofficial route, tolerated by authorities and filling a transport need that the formal system leaves unmet.

Indian urban theorist Ananya Roy argues this kind of informality is often treated as a residual failure awaiting correction, when it is actually produced by the processes that transform cities.

Street dogs are also part of this improvised urban landscape, though in a different way. They are sustained by resources produced by the city, particularly food waste that formal collection leaves behind. Eliminating dogs does not remove the conditions that sustain them. As long as food remains available, the ecological niche remains, allowing dog populations to replenish.

But this ecological niche alone cannot explain why attempts at removing the dogs generate such intense resistance.

For that, we need to consider care.

Sources of companionship

Indians form relationships with particular dogs, feeding them, naming them and effectively making them part of the communities in which they live. This is why many activists prefer the term “community dog.”

A 2019 study in Chennai found human-dog attachments across socioeconomic groups, including strong relationships among poorer residents, who described particular dogs as sources of companionship and security.

There may even be a biological dimension to this attachment. Research has found that mutual gazing between dogs and humans can produce an oxytocin-mediated bonding response in both.

For some, the roots run deeper still in the cultural traditions of the subcontinent. In Hindu tradition, dogs are the sacred companion of Bhairava, while for Parsis, they are said to be gatekeepers of the heavens. But the more immediate explanation may simply be familiarity: affection grows through proximity and repeated contact.

This combination of ecological and social embeddedness helps explain why street dogs have proved so resilient.

India is hardly alone in producing environments in which animals come to thrive. In Canadian cities, coyotes are drawn into urban spaces partly by abundant food, including rodents thriving on urban waste. Researchers increasingly argue that culling provides no lasting solution and advocate co-existence instead, which means accepting the presence of coyotes while reducing the conditions that bring them into conflict with humans.

Care matters here too. A coyote nicknamed Kip became a familiar campus presence at the University of British Columbia after years of being fed by people. But that care also left him vulnerable. Habituation made him less wary of human environments, and he was killed by a car in 2024.

Kip the coyote became a beloved figure at UBC before his tragic death in 2024. His story now helps researchers understand urban wildlife and promote safe coexistence between coyotes, people and pets. news.ubc.ca/2025/10/rip-…

— UBC News (@news.ubc.ca) 2025-10-22T16:04:36.281Z

Street dogs likely here to stay

Like Canada’s urban coyotes, India’s street dogs are entangled with human life, for better and for worse. People love and protect them, but that same proximity leaves them vulnerable to traffic, deliberate cruelty and the sudden reach of the law.

There is no pristine animal world on one side and organized human space on the other. Street dogs inhabit a world humans have helped to make.

India may eventually have far fewer street dogs. Effective sterilization may reduce populations over time, while better waste management and changes in the built environment may shrink the ecological spaces that sustain them. For now, however, the street dog cannot simply be ordered out of existence.

The post Street dogs: Why India can’t — and shouldn’t — evict its canines appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Learning to use an AI system is not the same as becoming AI literate. Students need more than the ability to write effective prompts or complete tasks faster. (Solen Feyissa/Unsplash)

As students return to Canadian colleges and universities soon, many will enter classrooms where generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is already part of everyday academic life. Many might use tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini to brainstorm, summarize readings, revise writing and prepare job applications.

The pressing question is no longer whether students will use AI. It’s what universities will teach them about using it with judgment and accountability.

This question has gained urgency since Canada’s government launched its new national artificial intelligence strategy, AI for All. The strategy connects AI with public trust, economic opportunity and Canadian sovereignty. It also includes a National AI Literacy Initiative aimed at post-secondary students and educators.

However, learning to use an AI system is not the same as becoming AI literate. Students need more than the ability to write effective prompts or complete tasks faster. They need accountable AI literacy: the ability to explain why they used AI, assess what it produced and take responsibility for the resulting work.

I have taught professional communication and worked on curriculum innovation that connects classroom learning with changing professional practices. My recent research on prompt engineering has led me to a clear conclusion: teaching students how to communicate with AI can be valuable, but only when it develops rather than displaces human judgment.

Good prompts don’t guarantee good answers

Prompt engineering refers to how we devise and revise instructions to obtain a useful response from GenAI. A strong prompt may identify the task, audience, context, relevant evidence and desired format. These are familiar principles in communication education. Someone writing a policy brief, news release or workplace report needs to consider the audience and purpose before deciding what to say and how to say it.

Prompting can be a legitimate part of learning. A systematic review of prompt engineering in higher education found that structured prompting can support learning when students deliberately formulate, test and refine their interactions with AI. Other researchers describe prompt design as a rhetorical process shaped by purpose, context and audience, rather than a set of technical tricks.

Instructors might, for example, ask students to compare several prompts, explain why they revised them and evaluate how those changes affected the results. Used this way, prompting makes parts of a student’s reasoning visible.

Yet a polished response can still be false, biased or poorly supported. GenAI systems can produce falsehoods with unwarranted confidence. They may fabricate sources, obscure uncertainty or generate claims that students lack the subject knowledge to assess.

Therefore, we should be cautious about relying on AI systems as dependable tutors or collaborators. These systems can produce confident answers without bearing responsibility for whether those answers are true.

That responsibility remains with the person who uses the material.

What accountability requires

Calling for “accountable” AI use raises an obvious question: accountable to whom and for what?

Students are answerable to the people who read, evaluate or rely on their work. These include instructors, classmates, employers, clients and members of the public. In professional settings, AI-assisted communication may also affect patients, employees, customers or communities that had no role in deciding whether AI would be used.

Responsibility begins with factual accuracy, but it does not end there. Students should be able to explain how they used AI in an assignment, how the AI’s claims were checked, whether confidential information was entered and why the final work meets the standards of the course or profession.

UNESCO’s AI competency framework for students combines practical knowledge with ethics, human agency and responsible citizenship.

Students need enough knowledge of a subject to recognize weak or misleading outputs. Consequential claims require verification rather than acceptance simply because they sound authoritative. When disclosure is required, students also need to identify AI’s contribution while remaining clearly responsible for the final work.

AI literacy also includes knowing when not to use AI. Entering private information into a commercial platform, outsourcing high-stakes decisions or automating an assignment designed to develop a foundational skill may be inappropriate even when the technology is capable of doing so.

Students should not carry the burden alone

Accountability should not mean transferring every risk to individual students. Universities have a role in setting clear expectations and designing assessments that make students’ reasoning visible.

Instead of relying mainly on AI-detection software, instructors can also ask students to document revisions, defend their choices and reflect on where AI did and did not improve their work.

One pilot study on incorporating GenAI into educational assessments recommends instructors distinguish between tasks in which AI is prohibited, permitted or actively incorporated. This gives students clearer guidance than either blanket bans or vague permission.

Universities, colleges and schools need to consider which platforms they bring into classrooms. Requiring students to use a commercial AI product may expose their data and deepen universities’ dependence on private technology providers.

AI companies, in turn, remain responsible for system design, data practices and claims about what their products can reliably do. Teaching students to verify outputs does not absolve technology providers of responsibility for faulty systems.

Communication education belongs at the centre

Canada’s AI literacy agenda therefore extends beyond computer science programs, workplace training and tutorials produced by technology companies.

Communication and other humanities and social sciences programs already teach students to ask who is speaking, what evidence supports a claim, which audience is being addressed, what has been omitted and whose interests are served. These questions are central to evaluating AI-generated material.

They also matter in the workplace. An OECD study of changing skill demands in Canada found that occupations highly exposed to AI increasingly require communication, social, language and digital skills.

Preparing students for AI-shaped workplaces does not mean replacing these capacities with technical training. It means teaching students how to apply them when AI becomes part of the work.

Canada needs graduates who can use AI effectively. It also needs people who can challenge unreliable outputs, defend their decisions and recognize when automation is the wrong choice.

If the AI for All strategy is to build public trust rather than simply accelerate adoption, Canadian students will need more than technical fluency. They will need judgment to decide which answers to accept, which systems to question and when AI should not be used at all.

The post Students need more than AI skills — they need accountable AI literacy appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Protesters shout slogans during a demonstration demanding educational reforms as part of the Cockroach Janta Party’s ongoing protest movement in Mumbai, India, on July 24, 2026. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

In response to a derogatory remark made in May 2026 by India’s chief justice, who called unemployed youth in India “parasites” and “cockroaches,” the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) was born. Rather than reject the label, Gen Z claimed it defiantly and turned it into a symbolic reassertion of identity.

Described as unprecedented due to its reach, impact and speed, as well as its creativity and courage, this Gen Z movement shares a playbook with other recent youth-led uprisings in South Asia and internationally.

Why this story matters

The movement began with a demand for the government to take responsibility for the leaked national medical entrance exam, NEET, which quickly spiralled into a nationwide push for educational reform and broader institutional accountability. Huge momentum grew online as protesters flooded Instagram with satirical reels, mocking memes and irreverent language.

That energy spilled into the streets on July 20, when a peaceful protest at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, was violently disrupted by police wielding lathis and using tear gas and pellet guns, injuring hundreds.

In the days that followed, hundreds of thousands of citizens of all ages showed up in solidarity, joining the movement from other Indian cities. Parallel protests were sparked internationally in support of the students in Delhi. The numbers of protesters and the speed at which they grew forced the Indian state to the negotiating table, culminating in the resignation of the education minister. Government crackdowns on protesting youth, however, have continued both offline and online.

As an interdisciplinary social science researcher whose work focuses on migration, social justice and storytelling, I study the way narratives affect how we view the world. Stories also become the lens through which we come to understand ourselves in relation to the world we live in.

The post What India’s ‘cockroach’ protests reveal about youth, solidarity and hope appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Toronto’s rental market is unforgiving for everyone. But for students, it exacts a cost that has gone largely unmeasured in housing-affordability debates: academic performance.

Where a student lives can shape how much time they have to study, how easily they can participate in campus life and whether they have access to academic and social support. A lack of affordable housing can affect student mental health and reinforce social hierarchies on campus.

Housing is therefore one of the most powerful, and unequally distributed, factors affecting whether students thrive at university.

We are a team of four researchers — a real estate economist, an architect and planner, a business school dean and a housing researcher — brought together through StudentDwellTO, a multi-university initiative. It was launched by four Toronto university presidents after they kept hearing that students’ housing situations were undermining their university experience.

Our new research, recently published in Housing Studies, draws on more than 750,000 student records from four Toronto universities. It combines more than a decade of administrative academic data with National Survey of Student Engagement responses on educational satisfaction, commuting and living arrangements.

We found that where a student lives is linked to measurable differences in academic performance and satisfaction.

A city where residence is the exception

Only between seven and nine per cent of Toronto’s university students live in on-campus housing in a given year. That figure has fallen since provincial funding for this purpose was cut to Canadian universities in the 1990s, and more recently as universities have faced provincial constraints on their debt loads.

Decades ago, student residence was one of the more equalizing experiences a university offered: students from a wide range of incomes and backgrounds lived in similar conditions. But that’s changed as universities have scaled back on building student residences, even as they have publicly committed to equitable access and student success.

Now, where and how a student lives is determined to a large extent by what they or their families can afford. One of university life’s most formative shared experiences is no longer shared by all.

Residence is now effectively rationed. Many universities can guarantee a room only to first-year students, and some cannot guarantee even that.

After first year, most students are pushed into a rental market where rising rents and record-low turnover have kept vacancy tight in cities like Toronto. Students who cannot afford to live near campus must often accept long commutes.

Commuting is linked to lower grades

Students who live off campus, even at short distances, report significantly lower grades, our study found.

The effect grows with commute time: each additional hour spent commuting during the week is associated with a measurable drop in academic performance. Students facing long commutes of 10 or more hours a week see the steepest declines.

There are several plausible reasons for this: commuter students have a less immersive university experience, less socialization and fewer friends, less time for study and less access to on-campus programs.

We also tested this against a student’s prior ability. Using student “fixed effects,” we compared the same person’s grades when they lived on campus with their grades when they didn’t. The on-campus advantage held.

The results show students living in university residence consistently earn higher grades and report greater satisfaction than students living off campus. The gap is largest for lower-performing first-year students, the group most most vulnerable to Toronto’s housing affordability gap.

Proximity isn’t enough on its own

Living close to campus in private off-campus housing does not replicate all the benefits of on-campus residence. The advantage appears to come less from proximity itself than from the institutional and social infrastructure that on-campus living includes: residence staff, peer programming and a built-in living environment that pulls students into the rhythms of university life.

Much of the private-sector response to student housing shortages — purpose-built student accommodation financed as a real estate asset class — replicates proximity but not support. These buildings may place students near campus, but they don’t necessarily provide the same repeated, low-effort engagement and support systems as on-campus university residences.

Earlier research by two of our team members, Shelagh McCartney and Ximena Rosenvasser, helps explain why design matters as much as location. Their research found corridor-style units with shared common areas foster more student socialization than private studio apartments.

Their earlier study showed that as privacy levels in residence design have risen, so has evidence linking that shift to changes in student success.

These differences can have lasting consequences for students. Grades influence eligibility for graduate programs, scholarships, internships and other opportunities. A housing-related academic penalty in first year can compound into a narrower set of options years later.

Living with parents isn’t a safety net

Our study also complicates the assumption that living with parents is a straightforward safety net.

Students who live with their parents report levels of educational satisfaction similar to those of students in residence. But commute time still predicted lower grades regardless of who a student lived with.

That means the well-documented pattern of young Torontonians staying in the family home longer doesn’t fully offset the academic cost of distance from campus. That’s the equity problem hiding inside what looks like a housing problem.

Affordability and access are not the same problem, and solving one does not automatically solve the other.

What governments could do

If access to housing shapes academic outcomes this directly, on-campus residence construction belongs in the same policy conversation as tuition, academic infrastructure, programs and grants. It shouldn’t be treated as a side issue.

The federal government’s 2024 housing plan marked the first time students were formally named among vulnerable populations in national housing policy. Housing gets discussed almost exclusively as an affordability crisis, but our findings show it’s also a learning and equity crisis.

While important, current federal financing tools for developers require guarantees of affordable student units for shorter periods than the multi-decade horizon university housing requires. They also don’t prioritize on-campus residences over private developers building student housing that can later be converted to condos.

In 2025, Ontario announced an $83-million investment in student housing in downtown Toronto. While it’s a good start, it isn’t enough to support the student population as a whole or to reach students across the province. What’s needed is sustained, predictable funding that allows universities to plan for years to come.

Whether governments, cities and universities treat on-campus residence construction as core academic infrastructure will help determine whether higher education in Canada can genuinely function as a public good. Student residences were originally built in part on that premise.

If governments that fund universities are serious about student outcomes, on-campus housing must be funded and built at scale, as core academic infrastructure, with priority given to first-year and lower-income students. The market cannot provide on-campus housing — only universities can.

The post Toronto students who live in residence get better grades, study finds appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

In mid-2026 Cape Town’s city council ended the use of ShotSpotter, a US-developed gunshot detection system and a form of dragnet surveillance. The system was first piloted in 2016. The council said it was reviewing a renewal of the contract. The acoustic system was marketed as being able to detect and alert police officers to gunfire within 60 seconds.

Information systems researcher Grant Oosterwyk and his colleagues unpack a recent paper that raises questions about accountability, commercial interests and community participation in the context of surveillance technology.

What is dragnet surveillance?

People often imagine surveillance as targeted: police following a suspect or gathering evidence in a specific investigation.

Dragnet surveillance works differently. It monitors a whole area rather than a particular person. Examples include city-wide CCTV networks, automatic number-plate recognition, bulk communications monitoring and acoustic sensors that listen for possible gunfire.

Instead of beginning with an individual suspect, dragnet surveillance begins with a location. People are monitored because they live, work, or move through an area covered by the system. Surveillance of an individual normally requires some justification, and often judicial authorisation. Dragnet systems require none: everyone within range is monitored, whether or not they have done anything wrong. And some neighbourhoods live under permanent monitoring; others never do.

South Africa’s constitution protects privacy, and laws regulate the processing of personal information. But the issue is also power: who decides where surveillance is deployed, how it is evaluated and how affected communities can influence its use.

What is ShotSpotter?

ShotSpotter is an acoustic gunshot-detection system developed by the US company SoundThinking. Sensors placed on buildings or poles detect sounds that may be gunfire. When several sensors detect a possible gunshot, the system estimates its location and sends an alert to police.

The technology is used most widely in the United States, where SoundThinking says it operates in more than 180 cities and communities.

Cape Town first piloted ShotSpotter in Hanover Park and Manenberg in 2016. These are settlements on the Cape Flats where families were forcibly resettled under racial laws in the 1960s and 1970s.

The project was stopped in 2021 due to budget constraints, then revived and expanded, also to apartheid-era settlements. This formed part of the city’s broader investment in technologies like CCTV, drones and aerial surveillance.

The investment responds to a severe problem. Cape Town has among the highest murder rates in South Africa. Cape Flats communities accounted for roughly three-quarters of murders recorded in the Cape Town policing district in the first nine months of 2025. Gang conflict drives much of it. Of 242 gang-related murders recorded nationally in one quarter of 2025, more than 90% occurred in the Western Cape province. Policing capacity is stretched, so technology that promises to pinpoint gunfire is politically attractive.

City of Cape Town reports suggest that the system was useful. In the 2024/25 financial year, ShotSpotter logged 3,893 alerts and 9,223 rounds fired, about 30% lower than the year before. Between April and June 2025, more than half of all firearms recovered by city enforcement agencies were in areas covered by ShotSpotter.

But there has not yet been an independent public audit of the system’s accuracy, false alerts, response times, or effects on policing outcomes.

The public doesn’t know whether it reduced gun violence.

Why is it controversial in Cape Town?

At first glance, the case for ShotSpotter is straightforward: faster gunfire detection could help police respond more quickly, and might save lives. The controversy is not about whether detection can ever be useful, but about evidence, placement, and how violence is framed.

First, the evidence is contested. In the US, ShotSpotter has faced scrutiny from public oversight bodies independent of the police. A court found that fewer than one in ten alerts produced evidence of a gun-related crime; Chicago cancelled its contract in 2024.

Our recent study argues that Cape Town imported not only the technology but also the language promoting it, without independent scrutiny. In the US, that scrutiny came from institutions independent of both police and vendor: inspectors general, an elected comptroller, and courts.

Cape Town has no standing equivalent for policing technology. The city assessed its own programme largely using data generated by the supplier. An independent evaluation could have come from the auditor-general of South Africa, which audits municipal performance; from council oversight committees commissioning external review; or from researchers granted access to the raw alert data. None was published.

Second, placement. The system is concentrated in poor, working-class areas shaped by apartheid spatial planning. Are these communities being better protected, or simply more closely monitored, with little say in how the technology is governed?

Third, our research found a gap between official and community framing. Officials and vendors speak of precision, rapid response and smart policing; residents speak of fear, trauma, unemployment and mistrust of police.

There is also opportunity cost. Money spent on surveillance is money not spent on the conditions that drive violence. The central question is who decides that surveillance comes first.

What needs to happen?

First, Cape Town needs independent audits. Claims about accuracy and effectiveness should be tested by bodies with no financial or political stake in the system.

Second, scrutiny should happen before and during deployment, not only after controversy emerges. A review should ask whose definition of safety a technology encodes, which institutions it assumes exist and whose knowledge it treats as authoritative.

Third, affected communities should have a stronger voice. Residents and community organisations should help define what safety means, how impact is measured and what safeguards are needed.

Finally, detection is not prevention. Sensors may identify where shots were fired, but they cannot explain why violence persists. Lasting improvements in public safety require investment in the social conditions that shape violence, including unemployment, trauma, weak social infrastructure, illicit firearms and strained trust between residents and police.

The central question is whether a surveillance system strengthens public accountability, community safety and democratic trust.

The post Did Cape Town’s gunshot detection system work? Why jury is still out on what ShotSpotter achieved appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Birds are facing a crisis — nearly three billion birds have been lost across North America since 1970 as a result of human activities impacting birds and their habitats.

Each year, billions of birds migrate across vast ranges spanning the Americas. For many, the journey is fatal. In Canada, tens of millions of birds are killed annually by crashing into glass on buildings, most of which are low-rise or residential. This makes collisions with glass a leading direct cause of bird fatalities.

Yet governments lack momentum to address the causes. Nearly two decades after Toronto became the first city in the world to consider bird safety in its planning process, Canadian cities are now trailing behind global peers in protecting birds from colliding with buildings.

The Ontario government recently passed legislation that prohibits municipalities from enforcing green building standards, including bird-safe design, through their local planning process.

This change appears to conflict with federal laws protecting birds that apply to building owners. Canada’s Migratory Bird Regulations and Species at Risk Act prohibit killing birds by causing collisions, even unintentionally. Fines can range up to $1 million per animal for killing a listed Species at Risk.

Our new research explores strategies for designing bird-safe cities. Using Toronto as a case study, we examined how collaborative planning can balance development with ecological sustainability, reducing bird collisions with buildings.

Lessons from building professionals

Reducing bird collisions with buildings starts with following design guidelines during the planning process. Birds drawn to green spaces in cities do not understand reflections on glass and cannot see glass that appears transparent.

In some Canadian cities, buildings have patterns of dots applied on windows and glass railings. These visual markers — first invented in Toronto — are proven to help birds detect glass and avoid colliding.

Designing cities that are safe for birds also involves considering how birds move between habitats and interact with threats in the built environment.

In our study, we convened experts and professionals who work in fields ranging from architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and facilities management to integrate perspectives on bird safety across disciplines.

Through a co-design workshop, we identified key barriers and opportunities to promote wider adoption of bird-safe city building practices. Our paper translates lessons learned in Toronto for a global audience and highlights needs and progress at institutional, local and regional scales.

Our results inform how professionals can be educated by our collaborators at FLAP Canada — a charity dedicated to raising awareness of bird safety in cities.

Some real estate developers argue that bird-safe building design is too costly, “prescriptive” and is a barrier to housing construction.

But researchers and architects point out that bird-safe glass represents a negligible increase in construction costs for typical buildings, and solutions involve using the same manufacturing techniques as popular privacy glass and heat-reduction coatings.

The success of Toronto’s approach demonstrates how engaging across disciplines in the design of bird-safe planning tools results in more effective applications. Our research presents a model for bridging disciplinary silos to develop these tools.

Cities where birds thrive

As Canada steps back, other countries are stepping up. Cities elsewhere are adapting, using design and policy to create environments where birds and humans coexist safely.

In the United States, strategies originally developed in Toronto are now being applied more widely than in Canada. Bird-safe design is required by code in cities like New York and Washington, D.C., and other countries are following suit.

This growth coincides with greater co-ordination between nations and sectors such as through the international Bird Collisions Prevention Alliance.

The Canadian government recently adopted a 2030 Nature Strategy aligned with the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework.

Numerous targets under this strategy align with principles behind bird-safe cities. While federal commitments are encouraging, the authority to regulate building construction lies with provincial and territorial building codes. It remains to be seen how governments will co-ordinate the strategy’s implementation between jurisdictions and policy areas.

As governments set plans to build, now is a critical time for regulators and industries in Canada to adjust outdated building practices, mitigate their impacts and support ecologically resilient cities that are safer for people and for wildlife.

The post Bird‑safe glass must become the norm to prevent collisions with buildings appeared first on TMU Research Blog.