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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.

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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.

The 2026 FIFA World Cup is now underway, with fans who are coming from all over the world to the 16 North American cities (including Toronto and Vancouver) hosting a record 48 teams.

Reports from New York City, where an estimated 1.2 million football fans have descended for the tournament, suggest many international visitors have yet to adopt local tipping customs.

The World Cup presents an interesting cultural challenge for hospitality workers. Millions of visitors are expected to arrive from countries where tipping practices differ significantly from North American norms.

Restaurants, hotels, bars, taxis and other tourism businesses should anticipate that many international visitors may tip less than local customers or even not tip at all — not because they are dissatisfied with service, but because they are following the social norms of their home countries.

As a hospitality management professor who has lived and worked in Europe, the United States and Canada, I have always been interested in how cultural differences affect service management and consumer behaviour.

Tipping fatigue

Much has been written in Canada, Mexico and the U.S. about tipping fatigue in the last couple of years. In fact, a recent survey found two-thirds of Canadians believe the practice should be abolished.

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Ernest Hemingway and Robert McAlmon, another American writer, in Spain in 1923. During his four years with the Toronto Star, Hemingway produced nearly 200 pieces, 170 under his own name plus around 30 with verified pseudonym bylines. (Ernest Hemingway Collection/John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum/Wikimedia)

In January 1924, two young women on a Toronto Queen St. streetcar caught sight of Ernest Hemingway’s battered green hat.

They giggled among themselves that he might be Red Ryan, the city’s fugitive bank robber.

So reported John Hadley in the Toronto Star story “The Freiburg Fedora: Must Wear Hats Like Other Folks If You Live in Toronto” on Jan. 19, 1924. Hadley was Hemingway’s wife’s name, and John, the name of their infant son.
Today, it’s clear that Hemingway wrote the story. Journalist and literary historian William White first collected many of Hemingway’s Toronto Star pieces in Dateline: Toronto (1985).

Journalist William Burrill, author of Hemingway: The Toronto Years (1994), later uncovered some 30 additional long-lost stories, including several written under pseudonyms like John Hadley or Peter Jackson. By cross-referencing Hemingway’s papers at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Burrill demonstrated that “The Freiburg Fedora” was indeed Hemingway’s.

As Burrill notes, Hemingway adopted pseudonyms after reaching his quota with the Star, allowing him to sell additional stories and earn much-needed income for his young family. He first used the John Hadley signature only weeks after the birth of his first son.

With scholars gathering in Toronto in July 2026 to re-examine Hemingway’s Canadian years, “The Freiburg Fedora” offers a compelling opportunity to revisit a neglected moment in Hemingway’s literary development.

Evolution of fiction strategies

The significance of “The Freiburg Fedora” extends beyond its authorship.

Under the guise of Hadley, Hemingway was able to explore the less appealing aspects of himself. The sketch captures him at a pivotal moment when newspaper reporting begins to evolve into literary self-fashioning, anticipating themes and narrative strategies that would later define his fiction.

Although researchers established Hemingway’s authorship of the story decades ago, it has received remarkably little literary attention. During the July 2026 Toronto Hemingway conference, visitors to the Toronto Reference Library (where the Toronto Star collections are held), can see the original newspaper story on display.

The making of an outsider

Hemingway had covered Red Ryan’s escape for the Toronto Star, making the comparison he explored in “The Freiburg Fedora” especially apt. Contemporary newspaper photographs of Ryan wearing a fedora bear a striking resemblance to the young Hemingway.

The “Freiburg Fedora” opens with the wry observation: “There is one thing Toronto demands in clothes. That thing is conformation.” This first-person piece goes on to see “John Hadley” narrate Hemingway’s irritation in being mocked by the two women. Where another traveller might have laughed at the comparison, Hemingway’s alter ego begins to prepare a counterattack.

The story quickly becomes a satire of Toronto itself. On the eve of his return to Paris, Hemingway used the protection of a pseudonym to mock what he presents as the city’s social conformity and provincialism.

The hat is pivotal in this transformation. “John Hadley” never defends its appearance. Instead, he recounts its travels. It has weathered “the hot sun of the Thracian desert,” been worn beneath heavy snow glasses and even landed in “the sunbaked sand of the bull ring.”

The hat becomes almost a passport, bearing the marks of experience rather than fashion. What the Toronto passengers dismiss as an oddity, Hemingway presents as the visible trace of an adventurous life deliberately lived beyond convention. The battered fedora embodies the identity of a young writer consciously fashioning himself as an outsider character.

From streetcar quarrel to literary technique

Recent scholarship has increasingly emphasized the continuities between Hemingway’s journalism and fiction. Marcos Todeschin, for example, argued in his doctoral thesis that Hemingway’s newspaper writing and fiction should be understood as part of the same evolving literary practice. “The Freiburg Fedora” offers one of the clearest examples of that transition.

The fedora story reveals a characteristic that would recur throughout Hemingway’s fiction: the tendency to transform minor social encounters into contests of will. Rather than inviting sympathy, the Hemingway character steadily escalates the exchange through increasingly extravagant claims. He depicts himself as a provocateur who seems almost compelled to intensify the conflict.

He insists the hat was a gift from the late Emperor Charles of Austria, provoking fellow passengers by invoking the recently defeated First World War enemy who had died in exile. This prompts a male passenger to threaten him with “a sock on the jaw.”

At the height of the “Freiburg Fedora” confrontation, Hemingway steps off the streetcar at Queen and Bay streets, announcing that he has “an appointment with the new mayor.” Toronto readers would immediately have recognized the reference. Mayor William Wesley Hiltz had taken office only days earlier.

Whether Hemingway, as a reporter, had business at Old City Hall or simply fashioned a theatrical exit for his first-person narrator is impossible to know. Either way, he leaves the streetcar, and the argument, entirely on his own terms.

From journalism to fiction

“The Freiburg Fedora” introduces a narrative pattern that would become central to Hemingway’s later fiction. Social encounters become tests of will.

“The Freiburg Fedora” displays the irony, character construction and carefully controlled endings that would later distinguish Hemingway’s fiction. The newspaper story begins to assume the shape of literature while Hemingway simultaneously turns himself into an anti-hero of his own autobiographical narrative.

It also overturns the Toronto Star Weekly’s carefully cultivated public image of Hemingway. A staff profile published on May 6, 1922, presented him as a medal-decorated war veteran, who was “tall, dark, of distinguished appearance” and “a general favourite by his ability and his bonhomie.”

A strikingly different self-portrait emerges. Here, Hemingway depicts himself as quarrelsome, provocative and quick to escalate conflict rather than defuse it. Instead of reassuring readers, he leaves confusion in his wake.

Toronto’s lasting legacy

“The Freiburg Fedora” also reshapes understanding of Toronto’s place in literary development.

During his four years with the Toronto Star, Hemingway produced nearly 200 pieces, 170 under his own name plus around 30 with verified pseudonym bylines. These satirical pieces and literary reportage, including many short, character-driven autobiographical sketches, reveal a writer already experimenting with narrative voice, characterization and dramatic conflict.

On the pages of the Toronto Star Weekly, Hemingway also reflected on William Butler Yeats’s Nobel Prize in Literature. In a Nov. 24, 1923, column, he lamented that his literary hero, Joseph Conrad, had not received the honour and observed that “no American author has won the Nobel Prize.”

Three decades later, in 1954, Hemingway himself received it. The Nobel Committee praised him “for his mastery of the art of narrative” and for “the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.”

The foundation for that mastery was laid not only in Paris but also in Toronto.

“The Freiburg Fedora” deserves to be read not simply as an amusing newspaper sketch but as one of the earliest literary examples of Hemingway beginning to invent the writer he would become.

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