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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Upholding the promise of Canadian birthright citizenship requires more than legal action — it needs leadership with the courage to reverse racist reproductive rhetoric and question false narratives. (Eyasu Etsub/Unsplash)

The United States Supreme Court recently struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to limit birthright citizenship for children based on their parents’ migration status.

This reflects a broader trend where policymakers target migrant women’s reproduction to justify stricter citizenship laws. Our research shows that Canada is not immune to such influences.

What can the U.S. ruling teach Canada about the importance of upholding birthright citizenship?

Global debates

Birthright citizenship via what’s known as  jus soli allows children born in a country to automatically acquire its citizenship at birth. Trump falsely claims that the U.S. is the only country with birthright citizenship, but 36 countries — including Canada — currently maintain unrestricted jus soli citizenship provisions.

Birthright citizenship has become a point of debate as some governments adopt more restrictive policies aimed at limiting citizenship for certain migrants. While the latest American attempt failed, successful rollbacks of birthright citizenship in other countries serve as a warning.

At the heart of these debates is reproductive racism — the systemic control or regulation of people’s pro-creative capacities based on their race. The political reasons for restricting citizenship policy are tied directly to anti-immigrant, racist and sexist sentiments that stigmatize migrant women’s reproduction.

This was at play in the 1986 Australian Citizenship Act amendment, following the Kioa v West case where Tongan parents of an Australian-born child sought to avoid deportation; the 2004 Irish citizenship referendum, which maligned African women asylum-seekers’ reproduction; New Zealand’s 2005 Citizenship Act amendment, which restricted citizenship for children born to transient migrants; and the Dominican Republic’s 2010 constitutional reform, which was rooted in anti-Haitian racism and sexism.

Baseless birth tourism arguments

In the U.S., proponents of restricting birthright citizenship allege that birth tourism is on the rise. Nonetheless, the Supreme Court found “there is scant evidence for this dramatically revisionist view.”

In Canada, similar arguments rely on questionable evidence. In 2025, Conservative MP Michelle Rempel Garner moved an amendment to Bill C-3 that would end unrestricted birthright citizenship to children born to non-resident parents.

As she cited an alleged rise in birth tourism, Rempel Garner warned that allowing birthright citizenship to remain in place eroded the integrity of Canada’s immigration system. While narrowly voted down, the amendment marked the latest legislative attempt to end unrestricted Canadian birthright citizenship.

The entry of non-residents who are pregnant into Canada isn’t tracked by the Canada Border Services Agency. Researchers, media and politicians have relied on hospital “other country resident self-pay” codes to claim that birth tourism is an issue that needs attention.

When newborn delivery rates under this code increase, the assumption is that the rate of birth tourism increases. But this data only provides a proxy measure for quantifying birth tourism because the population captured in this pay code includes any non-resident giving birth.

Reliance on this billing code assumes a singular motivation, glossing over the overlapping reasons non-resident parents give birth on Canadian soil in the first place. Labelling all non-citizens and permanent residents as “tourists” is inaccurate, serving as a strategy to advance a broader anti-immigration agenda.

In both Canada and the U.S., there are similar high-profile attempts to target migrant women’s reproduction. Republicans claim that birth tourism offers an illegal immigration pathway for those south of the border, while Canadian critics associate birth tourism primarily with Chinese women.

While political rhetoric about the threat of birth tourism is ongoing, successive Canadian governments have reached similar conclusions: the available data don’t justify a substantive overhaul of Canadian birthright citizenship.

Birth-registration bordering practices

In the lead-up to the U.S. federal challenge to birthright citizenship, states like Texas curtailed access to birth certificates by refusing to accept Mexicans’ national ID cards and requiring a passport with valid visa. This administrative practice was successfully challenged in court. But it shows how birth registration can function as a bordering practice — the social and legal actions that create boundaries between people — before any legislative changes take hold.

In Canada, the Birthing Canadian Citizens project identified similar digital and administrative practices that can block access to a birth certificate for a baby.

In Québec, some hospital administrators withhold birth forms to pressure the uninsured to pay exorbitant fees out of pocket. This illegal practice has been contested before the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women.

Online systems requiring digital authentication can be inaccessible to migrant parents in the midst of securing their own status. Their children are born Canadian citizens, but may lack a birth certificate and health card proving as much. This type of institutional bordering in the health-care system is on the rise, partly in response to panic about birth tourism.

Restricting birthright citizenship would require costly administrative changes to how births are documented. Even conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court questioned the viability of implementing such a policy change.

Our birthright citizenship victory was 2 years in the making: we started planning when Project 2025 flagged it as a target, so we were ready on day 1Trump tried to rewrite who counts as an American & the court said noMore on this & our 250th anniversary anthology on @contrariannews.org -TN👇

— Norm Eisen (@normeisen.bsky.social) 2026-07-04T19:16:15.127408Z

In Canada, cracking down on birthright citizenship would require shifting federal immigration enforcement to provincial health-care and civil registration authorities — a move that would conflict with their mandate to uphold and fulfil human rights to health and identity.

It’s also worth noting the likely increase in statelessness among children born to parents with precarious status. Documents submitted as part of the U.S. Supreme Court challenge noted the potential for dramatically expanding the number of stateless people and unauthorized migrants in the U.S. — a result at odds with Trump’s policy aims.

Protecting birthright citizenship

While the U.S. Supreme Court justices have preserved birthright citizenship for now, the battle is likely to continue in congress.

Unlike the U.S., birthright citizenship in Canada isn’t protected as a constitutional right. Our research shows that access to birthright citizenship is being undermined for some Canadian children through policy debates, online authentication systems and administrative practice.

This runs counter to longstanding Canadian commitments to equality, multiculturalism, human and reproductive rights. Making it harder for newborn Canadians to be recognized as citizens seems counterproductive at a time when the country urgently needs population growth.

Upholding the promise of Canadian birthright citizenship requires more than legal action. It needs leadership with the courage to reverse racist reproductive rhetoric and question false narratives. It needs a policy to prevent and address statelessness. It needs transparent bureaucracies that protect reproductive and citizenship rights together. And most of all, it needs a population committed to keeping a promise too easily broken.

The post The U.S. narrowly upheld birthright citizenship. What about Canada? appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Canada’s run at the 2026 FIFA World Cup made history, making a first-ever trip to the round of 16, the country’s best-ever men’s World Cup result.

The Canadian men’s team, playing in just its third World Cup after 1986 and 2022, won its first-ever men’s World Cup match on June 18, defeating Qatar 6-0 during the group stage. Canada then beat South Africa 1-0 in the Round of 32 before its run ended July 4 with a 3-0 loss to Morocco.

However, Canada’s run may have been more about what happened off the field than on it. Families watched games together, fans gathered in public spaces, jerseys appeared in schoolyards and clips circulated across social media. These are the moments where casual interest can turn into fandom and a sporting event can become a broader moment of national connection.

Hockey has long been central to Canadian sport identity. However, the participation numbers tell a more complicated story, one shaped by cost, accessibility and Canada’s cultural mosaic.

Surge in World Cup viewership

A pre-tournament poll found that only 28 per cent of Canadians planned to follow the World Cup closely. However, the emotional capital generated by hosting translated into a significant surge in viewership.

Canada’s group-stage victory against Qatar became the most-watched group stage match, drawing an average audience of 5.3 million viewers. Canada’s round of 32 win against South Africa attracted 5.2 million viewers, followed by 5.4 million viewers for the round of 16 match against Morocco.

This growth appears to extend beyond the World Cup itself. Major League Soccer reported an average of 7.9 million live match viewers per week across streaming and linear platforms during the first three months of the 2026 season, a 62 per cent increase from 2025, which MLS said was their strongest three-year period of fan growth.

However, Canadian soccer consumption does not necessarily mirror that of traditional soccer nations. Soccer fandom in North America grew by approximately 11 per cent between 2020 and 2025, while 33 per cent of Canadian fans prefer short-form content such as highlights and social media content.

Soccer is Canada’s most-played sport

A 2026 national report by Canadian Tire Jumpstart Charities identified soccer as the most played youth sport in Canada, with 50 per cent of youths reporting that they participated.

This is consistent with data from the Canadian Fitness and Lifestyle Research Institute, which has also shown soccer consistently ranking first in youth sport participation.

According to the Jumpstart report, the popularity of soccer is attributed to cost, broader accessibility and its connection to community roots. At an average cost of $450 to participate in soccer, they found hockey to be almost five times more expensive.

Across youth leagues, community fields, immigrant communities, school programs and recreational sport, soccer has had a strong presence in Canada. With nearly one million registered participants across 1,200 clubs, soccer is the most played sport in both Canada and the world.

From participation to fandom

While Canada may be a soccer playing nation, participation does not automatically make it a soccer-fandom country.

Exposure through participation can support awareness and attraction to a sport, but lasting fandom requires a deeper movement toward attachment and allegiance. That shift happens when a sport or team becomes personally and socially meaningful.

Historically, Canadian soccer suffered from a participation paradox. While many played the sport, viewership was not matched, compared to a sport like hockey. Co-hosting the 2026 World Cup has highlighted how that paradox has changed.

For World Cup interest to become lasting fandom, Canadians need repeated opportunities to attach meaning to the sport through recognizable players, media visibility, community rituals, shared memories and identity-based connections.

Building on women’s soccer success

Canada’s current soccer moment builds on decades of success by the women’s national team. Canada won Olympic bronze in London 2012 and Rio 2016, then gold at Tokyo 2020, the country’s best-ever Olympic soccer result.

The women’s team also produced Canada’s best World Cup performance, finishing fourth at the 2003 FIFA Women’s World Cup.

Athletes like Christine Sinclair, Karina LeBlanc and Diana Matheson became nationally recognizable names, helping build the visibility and credibility of the game in Canada. Sinclair’s legacy is especially significant: with 190 international goals, she remains the all-time leading goal scorer in international soccer, across both the men’s and women’s game.

That legacy is now reflected in the creation of the Northern Super League, founded by Diana Matheson, which signals a growing market for professional women’s soccer in Canada.

Men’s professional soccer has also helped build this momentum. Toronto FC’s 2017 MLS Cup victory made it the first Canadian club to win the league title, while the launch of the Canadian Premier League in 2019 created a domestic professional pathway for men’s players across the country.

A broadening Canadian sport identity

Soccer’s rise is perhaps a reflection of a shift toward a more diverse sport identity in Canada. Basketball offers a useful comparison. The Toronto Raptors’ 2019 championship and “We The North” campaign showed how a sports moment can become a national identity moment, while youth participation and Canadian representation in the NBA point to basketball’s continued growth.

Rugby and cricket also reflect this changing landscape, through women’s rugby success, grassroots rugby development and cricket’s growth in immigrant and community sport spaces.

Soccer’s rise does not erase hockey’s place in Canada; rather, it broadens the story of what Canadian sport identity can look like.

From a fandom perspective, Canada’s historic run matters because it gives people a reason to care. It creates emotional entry points: moments when casual viewers begin to say “we,” wear the jersey, follow the players and feel that the team’s success reflects something about them too.

This is especially powerful in national-team sport, where fans are seeing a version of them represented on a global stage. Canada’s World Cup run may therefore be strengthening the link between soccer and Canadian identity by giving people shared memories, recognizable players and repeated emotional moments around which fandom can form.

However, lasting fandom depends on what happens next. If media coverage, youth pathways, domestic league visibility and access to Canadian soccer continue, this World Cup run could help turn a long-standing soccer participation culture into a more lasting national soccer fandom.

The post Canada was already a soccer nation: Its historic World Cup run proved it appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Displaced Palestinians gather to collect water from a truck at a makeshift tent camp in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, in April 2026. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)

When millions of people fled Ukraine following Russia’s invasion in 2022, governments and humanitarian organizations used mobile phone and online platform data to track movements and identify where support was needed.

Similar approaches have been used to monitor population displacement in Cameroon, and in Gaza during the Israel-Hamas war. This is part of a wider shift in which governments, organizations and researchers are using a new generation of data — including mobile phone records, social media activity, satellite imagery and online search patterns — to understand migration.

The value of these tools is clear. Migration is dynamic. These digital traces reveal population movements in real time, often months or years before official statistics become available.

But every form of measurement captures some realities while obscuring others. As researchers working on migration and digital technologies, we have found that while digital data are analytically valuable, they exclude key populations and cannot capture migration as a lived experience.

Migration’s digital traces

In 2024, Canada’s population grew by 744,324 people; 97.3 per cent of them were international migrants, according to Statistics Canada. Yet the number of migrants in Canada at any one time depends on how we measure migration in the first place — what counts and who is included?

For instance, the Canadian Census counts country of birth. Administrative records track visas and immigration status. Surveys can capture intentions, experiences and settlement trajectories. Data on temporary migrants are based on temporary work or study permits, but such data were not even part of the immigration policy debate until 2023.

None of these sources measures migration directly. Each is a proxy — a stand-in for something that is difficult to track — that captures just one aspect of a complex reality.

As Canada now advances its national AI strategy, we must ask: what happens when migration is increasingly understood through digital proxies that do not directly observe migrants themselves?

Elderly, digitally excluded

Digital data are not inherently flawed. On the contrary, they often reveal patterns that traditional sources cannot.

Consider mobile phone data. Researchers often infer movement from changes in the location of a device. This can reveal important mobility patterns at a scale that surveys could never achieve.

A moving phone does not automatically indicate migration, however. It may reflect commuting, tourism, temporary displacement or even a device being shared among family members. The data show movement, but not necessarily migration.

The same challenge appears with social media data. Researchers can use online activity to study migrant networks, integration processes and migration-related discussions. Yet social media users are not representative of all migrants. Those who are older, digitally excluded, undocumented or economically vulnerable are often less active and hence less visible in these datasets.

The people most affected by migration policies may therefore be among the least represented in the data used to study migration.

Lived experience matters

Migration has always been measured through proxies such as country of birth, nationality and status. But none of these dimensions fully capture a person’s migration history, identity or sense of belonging. What is new about digital proxies is their scale, speed and growing role in decision-making.

This is where artificial intelligence enters the picture. AI systems do not generate migration knowledge from scratch. They learn from existing data, including mobile phone records, social media activity, administrative databases and other digital traces.

In other words, AI does not observe migrants directly either. It relies on the same measures. The difference is that AI can process these data at unprecedented scale and speed, turning proxy-based indicators into forecasts, classifications and decision-support tools. As a result, the assumptions built into migration data become increasingly consequential for policy development, enforcement or support for integration.

This distinction matters because migration is not simply movement. A satellite image can reveal population change. A phone signal can reveal mobility. An online search can indicate interest in moving abroad. Yet none of these signals can tell us why a person moved, whether that movement was voluntary or forced, how long it will last or what it means for the people involved.

These dimensions of lived experience matter more than recording movement in real time.

Data-driven governance

The challenge for policymakers is not whether to use digital data. Increasingly, these data are too useful to ignore. The challenge is understanding what each source can and cannot tell us.

No single dataset offers a complete picture. Administrative records provide legal and demographic precision but often arrive slowly. Surveys reveal motivations and lived experiences but are costly and difficult to conduct during crises. Digital traces offer speed and scale but may overlook important populations and contexts.

Each source captures different dimensions of migration. Together, they provide a richer understanding than any could alone.

As governments invest in artificial intelligence and data-driven governance, this lesson becomes increasingly important. The availability of real-time big data should not obscure other types of data that complement the picture.

If AI is truly to work for all, as the Canadian AI strategy suggests, we must look beyond algorithms themselves and pay closer attention to the data on which they depend.

The question is not whether we use proxies to understand migration. We always have. The real question is which proxies we use, what they reveal and what they leave unseen.

The post How AI and digital data shape our understanding of migration appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Some new Canadians celebrated in nationwide citizenship ceremonies on Canada Day — but countless migrants are facing the reality that they may never reach that milestone.

The Canadian immigration system is changing rapidly, challenging Canada’s reputation as the “gold standard” for immigration policy. Amid growing uncertainty and xenophobia, temporary migrants, including international students, are left with fewer choices.

Some have depleted all their savings — paying tens of thousands of dollars in tuition,, getting paid $7 an hour, if at all — only to find out that the permanent residency route they’d invested in for years has now been removed.

Drastic reductions

Rapid policy changes are, as the Migrant Rights Network notes, “pushing people out at more than 3,000 per day.”

The International Study Program that sets out rules for foreign nationals studying in Canada has seen more than 25 changes since 2023, drastically reducing numbers beyond previous targets. The Liberal government has adopted Bill C-12: Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act that introduces major amendments across multiple federal laws.

Ontario, British Columbia and Manitoba have also removed dedicated pathways for international graduates.

Although some changes aim to “make it clear that asylum is not a shortcut to permanent immigration,” as many have repeatedly pointed, framing international students as “queue-jumpers” sidesteps real questions.

‘Chutes and ladders’ immigration system

Within Canada’s “two-step” immigration system, migrants first enter the country temporarily through work or study permits. Once they meet certain criteria, such as gaining “Canadian work experience,” they may be invited to apply for permanent residency.

But this has changed rapidly. As a settler-colonial state, Canada has historically preferred predominantly white, European permanent residents. Although explicitly exclusionary policies are less obvious today, there are still inherent problems in the system that must be addressed.

While presented as a win-win solution, Canada’s emphasis on temporary migrants since the mid-2000s has been criticized for creating what some call “probationary precarity.” In fact, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery reported that Canada’s temporary foreign worker program is a “breeding ground for modern slavery.”.

Although the government has addressed some concerns, issues remain.

From ‘study, work, stay’ to stronger borders

Our ongoing research found that international students came to Canada with drastically different expectations. Backed by government-endorsed slogans like “study, work, and stay”, these students were aggressively recruited.

But during the last federal election campaign, international students officially became easy scapegoats for issues that were already urgent. Since then, there has been a surge in anti-immigrant sentiment.

At the same time, more than 25 policy reforms were introduced to the International Student Program from 2023 to 2025. These changes range from restrictions on work permits to a cap on international students and, for the first time, targets on temporary migrants.

As a recent Auditor General report found, these changes have resulted in much greater reduction of international students than targeted, disproportionately impacting smaller provinces.

Public colleges, too, are impacted significantly, suffering from unprecedented job losses and program closures.

These reforms were introduced while international students were largely blamed for the increase in asylum claims and faced allegations they use this pathway to prolong their stays in Canada.

As such, despite criticisms from the Senate and more than 300 civil society organizations, the Strengthening Canada’s Immigration System and Borders Act became law in March 2026.

It introduced security-focused provisions, including expanded discretionary powers, personal data-sharing powers and restrictions on asylum claimants that critics argue are inconsistent with Canada’s Constitution and international obligations.

The myth of the back door

The notion of a “back door” or shortcut to permanent residency is false; Canada has a robust visa and asylum process. Despite claims that most asylum-seekers are international students, only seven per cent of asylum claims came from study permit holders in 2023 and 13 per cent in 2024.

General migration trends such as post-COVID 19 backlogs, the rise in global displacement and changes to the temporary visa requirements led to an increase in asylum claims. Painting an entire group as responsible is inaccurate and dangerous.

These changes often mislead migrants and also reduce legal pathways towards permanent residency. For example, Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC) announced that it would introduce a temporary resident-to-permanent resident pathway. But this much-awaited change was merely about faster processing.

Better together?

Restricting immigration will not fix Canada’s systemic social and economic problems.

Temporary migrants like international students, who are members of our communities, are facing greater barriers, inequalities and uncertainty due to Canada’s abrupt policy changes.

The question remains as to whether Canada will pursue increasingly restrictive immigration policies or tackle divisive xenophobia?

The post Broken immigration promises are based on false narratives appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

But what happens when AI increasingly decides who gets access to those opportunities in the first place?

As migration scholars at the Bridging Divides initiative at Toronto Metropolitan University, we are researching how AI is reshaping immigrant access to employment. We see a growing intersection between Canada’s immigration agenda and its AI agenda, both of which are essential to Canada’s economic future. Yet these agendas are rarely discussed together.

As AI becomes increasingly embedded in hiring, the question is no longer just who Canada admits, but how opportunity is distributed once immigrants arrive.

The technologies shaping recruitment today may play an increasingly important role in determining whether Canada’s skilled immigrants can fully contribute to the economy tomorrow.

Canada’s reliance on immigration

Across the OECD, immigrants represent a growing share of the workforce. They are increasingly central to economic growth, demographic sustainability and innovation.

In Canada, immigrants accounted for four-fifths of labour force growth between 2016 and 2021, underscoring Canada’s continued reliance on immigration to sustain its workforce.

At the same time, Canada is rapidly embracing artificial intelligence. The use of AI across workplaces is expanding quickly, including in recruitment, hiring and workforce management. Recent evidence from Statistics Canada suggests that AI adoption among Canadian businesses has doubled in the past year.

These developments are often discussed separately. They should not be. The future success of one may increasingly depend on the other.

Immigrants are underemployed

Canada’s immigration system is widely regarded as one of the world’s most developed systems for selecting skilled migrants. Yet labour market integration remains one of the most persistent challenges facing immigrants.

Despite high levels of education and professional experience, immigrants continue to face higher rates of underemployment and over-qualification than Canadian-born workers. Statistics Canada reports that nearly one-third of recent immigrants with post-secondary education are overqualified for their jobs, compared with fewer than one in five Canadian-born workers.

Many continue to encounter barriers linked to foreign credential recognition, limited professional networks and demands for so-called “Canadian experience.” Research has long documented how internationally acquired skills and experience are often undervalued in Canadian labour markets.

These challenges are not new. What is new is the infrastructure through which they increasingly operate.

Algorithms as gatekeepers

Historically, access to employment was mediated largely through human institutions and judgments, from credential recognition bodies and hiring managers to recruiters and professional networks that determined whose skills were recognized and whose were overlooked. Today, many decisions occur earlier, within digital systems that evaluate, rank and filter applicants before a human recruiter reviews an application.

Across Canada and other OECD countries, recruitment is being transformed by applicant tracking systems, automated screening tools, predictive analytics and AI-enabled hiring platforms.

A growing body of research has raised concerns about how these systems can reproduce existing inequalities through the data and assumptions on which they rely. A study from Cornell University found that many claims about fairness in algorithmic hiring remain difficult to verify because hiring systems often inherit patterns embedded in historical recruitment data.

Similarly, Safiya Noble, a professor of gender studies and African American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles has shown how seemingly neutral digital systems can reproduce broader social inequalities in her book, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.

The OECD Employment Outlook warned back in 2023 that AI systems used in employment can raise significant concerns around transparency, explainability, accountability and discrimination, particularly for groups already facing labour market disadvantages.

AI is moving beyond simply providing advice to increasingly exercising authority in decisions that affect people’s lives and livelihoods. Hiring is one of those decisions.

‘Black box’ screening systems

Preliminary findings from our recent Bridging Divides study, based on interviews with immigrants, employers and recruitment professionals across Canada, suggest many immigrants experience digital hiring systems as a “black box” that shapes outcomes but remains largely invisible to those affected.

One participant described repeatedly applying for positions that matched their qualifications:

“By the description itself, you felt that you are the right candidate, but somehow your resume is not picked up because of some reason that they said, like your resume is not matching the criteria.”

Another participant explained:

“I applied for seven jobs without response. That’s when I went to ChatGPT and researched why I might not be getting responses.”

Many participants described learning to adapt their applications not for recruiters, but for algorithms. In effect, job seekers are increasingly required not only to demonstrate competence but also to make themselves legible to machines.

Equity in Canada’s AI future

None of this means that AI is inherently discriminatory, nor does it mean employers should abandon digital hiring technologies. Used responsibly, these tools can improve efficiency and help employers identify qualified candidates.

But Canada has spent decades refining how it selects skilled immigrants. Less attention is being paid to the technologies increasingly shaping whether those skills are recognized after arrival.

As AI becomes embedded in recruitment, we need to consider how opportunity is governed once immigrants enter the labour market. If immigration policy selects skilled immigrants, AI is increasingly shaping whether they are seen as skilled workers.

Canada’s future depends on both immigration and artificial intelligence. Ensuring that these two ambitions reinforce rather than undermine one another may become one of the defining policy challenges of the AI era.

The post Are algorithms unfairly screening out immigrant job applications? appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

As Toronto hosts the 2026 FIFA World Cup, the city is welcoming large crowds, international visitors and volunteers into stadiums, transit hubs, fan spaces and public areas.

For many people, the World Cup is about soccer, national pride and global celebration. But for host cities, it’s also a public health event.

Toronto is hosting six FIFA World Cup matches and the FIFA Fan Festival is running until July 19. The city and FIFA26 Canada sought to recruit 3,000 volunteers to support fan experience, accessibility, media operations, logistics and ambassador roles and received hundreds of thousands of applications.

This raises an important question: could major sporting events strengthen public health by engaging nursing students as supervised volunteers?

Our research suggests they could, but only if students aren’t treated as a convenient source of unpaid labour. For future sporting events like the FIFA World Cup, nursing students could be engaged as future health professionals whose roles are clear, supervised, connected to their skills and designed with equity in mind.

Pressure on public health systems

Large sporting events are often discussed in terms of tourism, economic impact and global visibility. Those are important, but that’s not the whole story.

The World Health Organization describes mass gatherings as events that can place pressure on public health resources and require planning across risk assessment, emergency preparedness, response and health services. The United States Centers for Disease Control and Prevention also notes that mass gatherings raise concerns related to infectious diseases, heat, crowd movement, injuries and co-ordination with local health systems.

This doesn’t mean major sporting events are unsafe; it means they require public health planning that goes beyond security and transportation. Preparedness also includes clear communication, accessibility support, early recognition of risk, culturally responsive interaction and knowing when to connect someone to qualified professionals.

Nursing students could contribute to this broader public health ecosystem, but only when they are properly prepared and supervised.

Motivated by career development

In a recent study published in the Canadian Journal of Nursing Research, myself, nursing scholars Kateryna Metersky from Toronto Metropolitan University and Yasin M. Yasin from the University of New Brunswick surveyed 241 nursing students in Toronto about volunteering at the 2026 FIFA World Cup.

The findings challenge a common assumption. Nursing students are not mainly motivated by love of sport or patriotism. Their strongest motivations were career development, expression of values and recognition. In other words, students were interested because volunteering offered a chance to grow professionally, contribute to the community and gain experience relevant to their future nursing careers.

This matters for organizers because recruitment that focuses only on excitement, soccer fandom or national pride may miss what nursing students actually value. For many students, global events offer the chance to learn, serve and apply health-related knowledge in a real-world setting.

In a second qualitative study currently under peer review, our research team interviewed 21 nursing students about their expectations, support needs and concerns related to FIFA 2026 volunteering in Toronto.

Students described volunteering as a possible pathway to workforce development. They saw the event as a chance to build communication skills, work with diverse communities, practise teamwork and gain confidence in busy public settings. But they were also clear that generic volunteer roles were not enough.

Students wanted roles connected to their nursing education, including first aid support, health communication, crowd-safety awareness, accessibility assistance, emergency response support and public health information. They also wanted to know what they would be expected to do, who would supervise them and when they should ask for help.

Nursing students have a role to play

This distinction is critical. Nursing students are learners, not licensed nurses. They should never be placed beyond their competence or used as substitutes for paid health professionals. But with proper boundaries, they could help visitors navigate services, support culturally responsive communication and connect people to trained professionals.

Willingness to volunteer also doesn’t mean students can easily participate. Many nursing students balance course work, clinical placements, paid employment, commuting and family responsibilities. Some students in our qualitative study were interested in volunteering but worried about time, transportation, cost and fatigue.

That raises an equity issue. If volunteering requires unpaid time, transportation costs or schedule flexibility, participation becomes easier for students with more financial security and fewer responsibilities. Students who work, commute long distances or support family members may be left out.

A fair volunteer program should not assume all students can give time in the same way. Flexible scheduling, transit support, meals, certificates, references, digital badges and academic recognition could make participation more accessible. These supports would also help organizers recruit and retain a more diverse volunteer workforce.

Preparing students

To make nursing student roles meaningful and safe, nursing schools and event organizers could develop strategically designed learning modules before and during volunteering. These modules should not be designed to turn students into emergency responders or substitute for licensed professionals. Instead, they should equip students to contribute in clearly defined, supervised roles during public health responses at large-scale events.

Training could include crowd safety, first aid awareness, heat-related illness, infection prevention, accessibility support, culturally responsive communication, emergency escalation, trauma-informed interaction and ethical boundaries.

Simulation and online learning modules would be especially useful. Students could practise helping a distressed visitor, recognizing urgent care needs or supporting people with mobility needs.

These modules could be offered as micro-credentials or integrated experiential learning within nursing programs. Reflection after volunteering could help students connect the experience to nursing competencies, public health preparedness, team work and professional identity formation.

These experiences would support skills that matter in nursing practice: communication, teamwork, situational awareness, cultural humility, public health thinking and emergency preparedness. Clear role descriptions, liability coverage, occupational health guidance and supervision by qualified professionals are essential.

Supporting cities when the world arrives

Mega-events are often remembered through matches, ceremonies and tourism numbers. But they can also leave a public health legacy.

Large sporting events like FIFA 2026 could help build models to involve health-care students in safe, supervised public health preparedness. Such models could be useful beyond soccer.

Cities increasingly face climate-related emergencies and disease outbreaks, while festivals and cultural events also put pressure on health systems. Future nurses must be ready to work in hospitals and clinics, but also in community spaces and during public emergencies.

As Toronto hosts FIFA 2026, the city has an opportunity to think about volunteers not only as event helpers, but as part of a broader public health strategy.

The lasting legacy of the World Cup may include how host cities prepare future health professionals to care for the public when the world comes to town.

The post Major sporting events could offer a public health role for nursing students appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Ongoing research on the labour market in Canada draws attention to disparities in outcomes for workers according to gender, race or immigration status. Often these social identities intersect to form unique barriers that have a marked impact on key labour market outcomes like employment status, income and job segregation.

Racialized immigrant women, for example, have been found to experience a “triple disadvantage,” reporting higher-than-average unemployment rates and lower income levels than other workers. Such findings underscore the fact that the Canadian labour market is not a meritocratic space but one shaped by systemic barriers that produce unequal access to opportunity.

It’s within this context that my recent report sought to investigate the labour market experiences of Muslims in Canada. My co-researchers and I conducted a pilot study, “Working While Muslim,” which drew on data from the 2021 census and an original survey of 423 Muslims in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area.

Our results point to significant gaps in labour market outcomes between Muslims and non-Muslims that persist even when the data are broken down by gender, immigration status or visible minority status. Muslims in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area have higher unemployment rates, face employment segregation and earn lower incomes than their non-Muslim counterparts.

Why this study matters now

One intention of our study was to show how Islamophobia in Canada has a systemic impact on the well-being of the Muslim community. We released our report to coincide with the five-year anniversary of the June 6, 2021, attack in London, Ont., in which a man deliberately drove a truck into the Afzaal family as they walked in their neighbourhood, killing Salman Afzaal, his wife Madiha Salman, their 15-year-old daughter Yumnah Afzaal, 15, and Salman’s mother Talat Afzaal.

Nathaniel Veltman was convicted of four counts of first-degree murder in November 2023 and automatically sentenced to life in prison. The sentencing judge ruled the attack was an act of terrorism.

What occurred in London — and the ongoing surge in hate-motivated violence against Muslims across Canada — should not be understood or confronted as random or individual acts of violence.

They are symptoms of broader systemic issues rooted in fear and hatred of Muslims that permeate the education system, health-care system, the criminal justice system and the labour market.

The earnings gap

Using census data, we focused our analysis on full-time, full-year workers of prime working age (25 to 54 years). Within this group, Muslims had a median employment income of $61,000 compared to $73,000 for non-Muslims — a $12,000 gap.

This disparity grew when we broke the data down by gender and visible minority status. Muslim women working full-time had a median employment income of $54,000, or 64 cents for every dollar earned by white non-Muslim men. White non-Muslim women earned 87 cents, and visible minority non-Muslim women earned 73 cents, for every dollar earned by white non-Muslim men.

Using statistical analysis that controlled for other variables affecting employment income, we found that Muslims in the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area face a wage penalty owing to religious affiliation, resulting in an estimated aggregate annual income loss of $1.2 billion.

Limits of the ‘immigrant effect’

Such disparities in economic standing are often explained as an “immigrant effect” rather than evidence of systemic bias. The idea is that immigrant workers simply take time to integrate, and may face hurdles such as language barriers, unrecognized credentials or a lack of relevant work experience that are not due to discrimination.

Anticipating this, our study included generation status as part of our intersectional analysis. Reducing our sample again to full-time, full-year, prime-age workers, we noted an overall difference in earnings between first- and second-generation workers. But once we accounted for visible minority status, gender and religious affiliation, the degree of “generation benefit” was conditional.

First-generation non-Muslims had a median employment income of $67,000, rising to $78,000 for second-generation non-Muslims. Muslim workers earned $60,000 at first generation and $72,000 at second generation.

Visible minority Muslim women continued to earn the least: second-generation workers in this group had a median employment income of $64,000 — less than that of first-generation non-Muslim workers.

Household income and poverty

The income disparities extended beyond individual workers to Muslim families and households across the Greater Toronto and Hamilton Area. Overall, an estimated 56 per cent of non-Muslim households had a total household income at or above $110,000, compared to 45 per cent of Muslim households.

We also drew on Statistics Canada’s low-income measure, after tax — a poverty indicator measuring the share of people living on less than half the national median after-tax income, adjusted by household size.

Results suggest that 17 per cent of visible minority Muslims and 18 per cent of non-visible minority Muslims fall below the low-income threshold, compared to eight per cent of the non-visible minority non-Muslim population and 11 per cent of the visible minority non-Muslim population.

Our findings echo what research has consistently shown: that regardless of level of education, expertise or credentials, a worker’s immigration status, gender, race or religion — or some combination of these — dictates what opportunities they can access.

The Canadian labour market — the terrain that shapes the livelihood of millions of workers and their families — is one constrained by systemic discriminatory barriers. The marginalization fostered by these barriers are of particular concern at a time when xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiment and Islamophobia continue to find mainstream acceptance, and as rapid changes to the economy continue to unsettle the lives of working people.

What the COVID-19 pandemic taught us is that in a time of economic change and uncertainty, those most marginalized in the labour market are the first to bear the cost.

The post The Muslim wage gap in Canada’s largest metro area costs workers an estimated $1.2 billion a year appeared first on TMU Research Blog.

Artificial intelligence and digital innovation minister Evan Solomon speaks before taking part in a panel discussion, ‘AI for All & Canada’s Innovation Advantage,’ during the Liberal Party of Canada convention in Montréal on April 10, 2026. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham Hughes

When Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation went to court recently to challenge Alberta’s handling of the proposed Wonder Valley AI Data Centre Park project, the dispute underscored a question that is increasingly difficult to ignore: What does Canada’s artificial intelligence future require from land, water and energy systems?

Wonder Valley, which would be located south of Grande Prairie, has been advertised as the world’s largest AI data centre park. Alberta’s major projects listing describes its first phase as a 1.4-gigawatt off-grid power system leveraging the provincial natural gas and geothermal resources.

The project is only one example of a broader trend. The federal government’s new “AI for All” strategy links AI to economic growth, jobs and national competitiveness. The strategy also points to expanding “sovereign compute” and supporting the construction of large-scale AI data centres.

AI is resource-dependent

These ambitions make the environmental debates significant. AI is often described as if it lives in “the cloud.” The persistent controversies regarding Wonder Valley illustrate the fallacy of this metaphor.

Artificial intelligence relies on material resources: land, electricity, water, cooling systems, transmission lines, gas infrastructure, minerals and servers. When those demands become concentrated in one place, AI becomes an environmental and energy issue.

My research focuses on environmental communication, including the politics of fossil fuel development in Canada. In my recent book on Alberta oilsands communication, I examined how oilsands projects are framed as matters of prosperity, national interest and technological progress. As someone who follows Alberta’s energy politics closely, the media coverage of Wonder Valley caught my attention.

My analysis of articles published by mainstream Canadian outlets about the project’s launch phase revealed a telling pattern. Coverage was limited for a proposal of such scale, but the stories that did appear carried strong symbolic weight.

Wonder Valley has been touted for the substantial investment it could bring, and as an opportunity to convert Alberta’s energy resources into a competitive edge in the AI economy. That narrative, however, deserves scrutiny.

AI’s use of resources

AI data centres are industrial facilities built to keep servers running continuously. This requires reliable electricity, cooling and backup systems.

The International Energy Agency predicts that global electricity consumption from data centres, primarily driven by AI development, could more than double by 2030, reaching about 945 terawatt-hours.

Water is also crucial. Depending on design and location, data centres may use large amounts of water directly for cooling or indirectly through electricity generation. Reporting by The Narwhal has raised serious concerns about Canada’s data centre boom, especially where projects are proposed in water-stressed regions or on contested land.

The main concern raised by Sturgeon Lake Cree Nation regards the project’s potential water use and the duty to consult Indigenous nations on developments that could impact them.

This is why the Wonder Valley debate cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of “Alberta is open for business.” It is also about who gets access to water, whose power system is reorganized and whose land and resources are made available for AI infrastructure.

What the cloud hides

The cloud metaphor makes these material demands less visible. It encourages us to think of digital services as weightless, clean and placeless. Researchers of digital infrastructure have long challenged this view. Media scholar Mél Hogan’s research on data centres’ alarming water consumption shows how digital systems are bound to local ecosystems.

Similarly, scholars like Sean Cubitt, Richard Maxwell and Toby Miller have argued that media technologies are never environmentally neutral. They depend on extraction, energy use and waste.

Another useful idea is the “digital sublime,” which describes how new technologies are often surrounded by myths of transformation, inevitability and national renewal. Such myths can make infrastructure projects appear almost beyond ordinary political debate.

The promotional language surrounding Wonder Valley are consistent with this pattern. The emphasis on scale, innovation and Alberta’s future as an AI hub resulted in environmental concerns being either disregarded or treated as technical issues to be resolved at a later time.

Data as the new oil

One of the most revealing phrases in coverage of Alberta’s AI ambitions is that “data is the new oil.”

In one sense, the phrase is meant to signal opportunity. It suggests Alberta can use its energy expertise, gas reserves, cold climate and industrial land to compete in the global AI economy.

But it also reveals continuity. The project is not presented as a break from Alberta’s fossil fuel economy. It is framed as its next stage. Natural gas is positioned to power artificial intelligence.

Recent reporting by The Tyee has shown how data centres are being discussed as “creating new markets for Canadian natural gas producers.” This should concern Canadians. If AI infrastructure becomes a new justification for fossil fuel expansion, then the language of innovation may end up extending older forms of resource dependence.

Rethinking AI infrastructure

Canada needs a comprehensive AI strategy; however, a strategy that lauds data centres without adequately considering energy, water, land and Indigenous rights is insufficient.

Before governments promote AI data centres as engines of economic growth, they should require transparent public disclosure of expected electricity demand, water use, emissions, land impacts and consultation processes. Treaty obligations should not be treated as procedural hurdles. They should shape whether and how projects proceed.

The key challenge confronting Canada is whether it will build AI infrastructure through the same old resource development playbook or whether it will use this moment to set stronger rules for a more accountable digital economy.

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