The Canadian Returnee Podcast

Canadian Returnee
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Passionate writer and observer navigating life in Canada, exploring topics like culture, politics, and personal growth, after living abroad for years. Sharing honest insights and sparking thoughtful conversations. canadianreturnee.substack.com

  1. 2d ago

    Freeland’s book on Trump, Trudeau and her firing

    If you want one takeaway from Chrystia Freeland’s new memoir, “Unreliable Boyfriend”, it’s this: she thinks conceding to Donald Trump gets Canada more demands, not goodwill. She says Trump reads every concession as submission. So she backs Mark Carney’s decision to walk away from the trade talks, because in her telling, the U.S. asked too much and offered too little. She also says Canada has to retaliate on tariffs. Her evidence is Trump’s first term, when the steel and aluminium tariffs came off without Canada giving anything up. Her playbook is what she calls the doughnut strategy, which she used during the NAFTA renegotiation (the rewrite of the old North American trade deal). You skip the White House and work everyone around it: Congress, governors, mayors, unions, business leaders and ordinary Americans. The pitch is local and factual. Canada is the top customer for more than 24 U.S. states and supplies almost all the natural gas the U.S. imports. Once those people feel it, they lean on Washington for you. She also likes the provincial unity she saw, citing Manitoba’s Wab Kinew and Ontario’s Doug Ford. She gives Justin Trudeau real credit: the Canada Child Benefit, national child care, trade deals with Europe and Asia, and the COVID-19 response. Then she gets blunt about how he ran things. Her main complaint is that he sweated the details of his own public appearances and stayed out of the details of big files like NAFTA. She points to the 2018 India trip as an example. She also says he stayed distant from senior colleagues. In nearly a decade as his top deputy, she could count their one-on-one meetings on one hand. Crying at cabinet was routine, she writes, and Kleenex was always handy. When a minister said “crazy,” Trudeau scolded her and told ministers to say “bananas” instead. Organisational psychologist Laura Hambley calls this the showman paradox. A leader who’s charming on stage but avoids one-on-one relationships drains trust and curiosity from the team. I think that fits the picture Freeland paints. In fall 2024, Trudeau fired her as finance minister on a Friday morning Zoom call, 3 days before she was due to deliver the fall economic statement. She calls it the third worst day of her life. She resigned from cabinet with an open letter less than a week later. Jean Chretien had already told her that as long as she kept supporting Trudeau, he’d stay on, lose to Pierre Poilievre, and part of that would be on her. She later left Parliament to run the Rhodes Trust in the UK as warden and CEO. A 1980s KGB file on her student activism concluded she’d make an excellent spy. She disagrees, since she can’t keep a poker face. In 2000, a seven-month-pregnant Freeland interviewed Vladimir Putin for the Globe and Mail, and he patted her belly. She says she’s probably the only G7 finance minister that’s happened to. Trump has called her toxic. Howard Lutnick, his commerce secretary, just called her the worst. Carney praised her intelligence and principle. If this was useful, hit like and share it with someone who follows Canadian politics. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. If you can, consider a paid subscription or buy me a coffee. It keeps the free content coming. Thank you. #CanadianPolitics #Freeland This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Freeland’s book on Trump, Trudeau and her firing

  2. Oct 25

    Alberta Votes 75% to Stay, but Cracks Show

    If you want one number from Alberta’s October 19 referendum, it’s 87%. That’s the share of Albertans who told Abacus Data the cost of living was a top concern. Only 6% put independence first. Question 10 asked whether Alberta should stay in Canada or start a legal process toward a binding separation vote. About 75% to 76% chose to remain, and 24% to 25% chose the separation process. Premier Danielle Smith says she won’t call another independence referendum while she’s premier. Who actually voted for Option 2 Option 2 wasn’t a clean independence vote. In the Abacus survey (1,021 voters, October 7 to 13, margin of error 3.1%), only 32% of Option 2 voters said they wanted actual independence. Others wanted a better deal inside Canada (23%), a direct say (22%) or a way to send Ottawa a message (19%). Overall, just 18% of Albertans wanted an independent Alberta. The split inside the governing United Conservative Party (UCP) is the part to watch. Current UCP supporters went 52% for Option 2 and 44% for Remain. UCP voters made up 77% of all Option 2 ballots. Meanwhile, 93% of NDP supporters voted Remain. The attachment tells you the rest. Option 2 voters felt strongly attached to Alberta (68%) but not to Canada (21%). Edmonton and Calgary weren’t close. Edmonton hit 77% Remain, and 22 of Calgary’s 26 ridings topped 80%. Option 2 won only 2 of Alberta’s 87 ridings. Central Peace-Notley went to Option 2 by 100 votes (6,515 to 6,415), and Rimbey-Rocky Mountain House-Sundre went 51.1% to Option 2. Several other rural ridings were close, including Grande Prairie-Wapiti at 48.9%. The other 9 questions Voters also faced 9 other questions, and the counting ran past the legislated 48-hour window. The count covered nearly 1.9 million ballots. Early on, “Yes” led on all of them. By the time 97% of polls had reported, “No” led on the 4 constitutional ones: provincial selection of judges, abolishing the Senate, opting out of federal programs without losing funding, and putting provincial laws ahead of federal ones in shared areas. The opt-out question was the tightest, at 300,000 to 281,000 against. “Yes” kept its lead on the 5 policy questions. Those cover more provincial control over immigration, a 12-month residency wait for social supports for non-permanent residents, fees for their healthcare and education, and proof of citizenship to vote. Don’t expect most of this to happen soon. Constitutional scholar Errol Mendes called the Senate and opt-out ideas “dead in the water” because of the amending rules. Abolishing the Senate needs all 10 legislatures, the House of Commons and the Senate itself. The others need 7 provinces with 50% of the population. The residency and fee questions could face Charter challenges over equality rights. Chiefs from the Bearspaw, Chiniki, Goodstoney and Tsuut’ina Nations wrote to Smith saying the vote caused lasting division and that Treaty rights can’t be settled by a provincial referendum. Siksika Nation Chief Samuel Crowfoot said polling stations on reserves had long delays and ran out of ballots, in communities that had earlier beaten separation petitions in court. He wants Elections Alberta to explain. 🤝 What comes next Smith faces a UCP leadership review in late November, and separatist groups say they’ll push against her. Alberta Prosperity Project’s Jeffrey Rath says the independence push will continue. Keith Wilson of Let Alberta Decide reads the 25% as a quarter of the province feeling shortchanged by Confederation. Opposition leaders called the vote a waste. Alberta NDP Leader Naheed Nenshi pegged it at $200 million, and federal NDP Leader Avi Lewis put it above $100 million. Prime Minister Mark Carney called it a clear choice for unity. Pierre Poilievre backed Remain too, and also backed the immigration proposals. Elections Alberta releases verified results October 29. I think the vote ended the separation question for now, but not the grievance behind it. If you’re in Alberta, watch the November leadership review. If you’re anywhere else, ask what a 25% protest vote would look like in your province. If this helped you make sense of Alberta’s vote, please like, share and subscribe. It’s the easiest way to help more people find the show. And if you can, consider a paid subscription or Buy Me a Coffee. It keeps the work going. Thanks for listening. #Alberta #CdnPoli This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Alberta Votes 75% to Stay, but Cracks Show

  3. Oct 18

    Wildfires, Pipelines and a Stalled Status Bill

    A Bill Stuck in Committee About 29% of status Indians could lose the legal ability to pass status to their children. The cause is the Indian Act’s second-generation cut-off, which blocks status when one parent is non-status and the other only got status through a single status parent. The Senate voted unanimously in December 2025 to pass Bill S-2. It would end that cut-off and the 1985 one, and go back to an equal one-parent rule. Since February 2026, it has sat in the House committee on Indigenous and Northern Affairs. Amnesty International Canada and other groups want it passed now. The cut-off carries forward an older sex discrimination, when First Nations women who married out lost status and men didn’t. Single mothers and survivors of violence or abuse who can’t or won’t name a father on a birth certificate get hit hardest. Sharon McIvor of the Lower Nicola Band has been fighting this for her whole adult life. Losing status affects reserve housing, cultural programs, land rights and inheritance. Advocates call the rule a legislated extinction date for bands. I think a unanimous Senate vote followed by months of committee silence is hard to defend. One Project, One Review, One Year Prime Minister Mark Carney is pushing energy and infrastructure projects as US tariffs bite. Bill C-39, the Build Canada Strong Act, sets a 1-year decision deadline for permitting. He has also named the Pacific Link oil pipeline a project of national interest, and critics are asking how deep the consultation can go. Mark Podlasly runs the First Nations Major Projects Coalition, which speaks for 205 nations seeking equity in 20 energy, utility and mining projects. He supports ownership stakes but says a year is too short for real engagement. Wet’suwet’en Hereditary Chief Na’Moks says no to the whole approach. He sees equity offers as a way to buy people off with short-term jobs while environmental protections and rights shrink. He also says Ottawa is using tariffs as cover to undo 20 years of progress on UNDRIP, the UN declaration on Indigenous rights. For context, Ottawa offered 129 First Nations a combined 15% stake in the Trans Mountain pipeline. Meanwhile, Indigenous Watchdog reports the corporate sector has made no progress on Call to Action #92, which asks businesses to adopt UNDRIP, including free, prior and informed consent, as its framework. The Assembly of First Nations puts the reserve infrastructure gap at $376.1 billion over 10 years. 36 communities have gone more than a year without safe drinking water. Fire Season and the Budget Cuts Ontario cut $121 million from its 2026-27 firefighting budget while more than 730,000 hectares burned. 14 First Nations were evacuated, and over 1,800 people in all. In mid-July, residents of Namaygoosisagagun First Nation got no alert or warning and crossed Collins Lake in their own boats with no official rescue. Ontario chiefs want a full public inquiry. They also want the cuts reversed and the federal-provincial red tape removed. British Columbia saw 24 First Nations affected and 16 evacuated, and it trimmed its fire management budget by $2.3 million. Leaders are asking Premier David Eby to build Indigenous fire stewardship, meaning low-intensity controlled burns, into the provincial plan. Across Canada, 83 reserves were hit this year. Manitoba’s Checkpoint Fight Bloodvein River First Nation set up a checkpoint for moose conservation, food security and safety. Premier Wab Kinew sent a cease-and-desist letter on September 19 and shared it with the RCMP on September 21. The Manitoba Wildlife Federation also wanted police involved. Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Kyra Wilson says it’s troubling to see police action urged against a First Nation while the problems that pushed it to act go unaddressed. She’s especially disappointed that a First Nations premier chose enforcement over talks with Bloodvein, Misipawistik Cree Nation and Pimicikamak Cree Nation. On September 30, Manitoba and the City of Brandon marked the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation by buying Turtle Crossing Campground, south of the former Brandon Indian Residential School. The site was a cemetery from 1895 to 1912, and the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation estimates more than 50 children are buried there. It was sold as a private campground in 2001, and a memorial now stands on it. What to Watch Keep an eye on the House committee, because S-2 is the item here Parliament could finish quickly. If you follow the pipeline, ask who holds equity and who gets a real say inside a 1-year clock. Also, if you live in Ontario or BC, check what your province is spending on fire response, since the numbers above are on the books. If this was useful, please like it, share it, and subscribe. If you can, consider a paid subscription or buy me a coffee. It keeps the free content coming, and I really appreciate it. #FirstNations #CdnPoli #Reconciliation This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Wildfires, Pipelines and a Stalled Status Bill

  4. Oct 11

    Canada Plans for the Worst Case With the U.S.

    Ottawa is Planning for the Worst Prime Minister Mark Carney has Ottawa planning for “extreme tail risk,” meaning a scenario that’s very unlikely but would be severe if it happened. That now includes U.S. military action. President Trump keeps calling Canada the 51st state and has pointed to our water, oil and gas, and rare earth minerals. He’s said he’d use economic force, not the military, on Canada. He hasn’t ruled out military options for Greenland and the Panama Canal, though. The economic pressure is already here. The U.S. put 25% tariffs on Canadian autos, steel and aluminium, with some goods hit at 50%. For vehicles, that adds roughly US$3,000 to US$12,000 per car. Carney calls it a direct attack on sovereignty and says the era of deep economic integration is over. Aisha Ahmad, a political scientist who studies insurgencies (armed resistance against an occupying force), says annexation can’t happen without violence, and violence would breed resistance. Her math: if just 1% of Canadians resisted, that’s 400,000 people, about 10 times the size of the Taliban when the Afghan war started. She points to our forests, mountains and winters as ideal for ambushes and sabotage. She thinks a decades-long insurgency could bankrupt the U.S. and hand Russia and China room to grow. Howard Coombs, who directs the Queen’s Centre for International and Defence Policy, expects Washington would use limited force and try to keep the population cooperative. He doubts rebels could keep secure supply lines. Military historian Eliot Cohen calls the whole idea absurd and reminds us that the U.S. failed to conquer Canada in 1775 and 1812. I think the 400,000 figure is a thought experiment. It rests on one assumption about how many people would resist. Still, nobody in this debate claims the Canadian military could stop a conventional U.S. invasion. What Ottawa is Changing Carney says Canada will “no question” reduce its reliance on Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet. The government is also reviewing the F-35 stealth fighter purchase and looking at non-American jets. A new Defence Investment Agency is supposed to rebuild and rearm the military. Procurement experts warn that the agency has to beat the slow, paper-heavy habits that have stalled past purchases. Carney also wants alternatives to the U.S. dollar in global finance. His argument is that a system built entirely on the greenback leaves every other country exposed to U.S. pressure. What Canadians Think A GEF Consulting poll of 1,000 Canadians in January 2026 shows how rattled people are. About 72.4% say an invasion is possible, and 12.8% call it very likely. Two-thirds (66.1%) expect it before Trump’s term ends. Confidence in our defences is low. 79.3% don’t believe, or aren’t sure, that our forces could defend the country. Only 33.1% somewhat trust Canadian intelligence to catch invasion plans early. And 41.3% name procurement delays as the biggest obstacle. People see Ontario’s border with New York as the likeliest target (49.2%), then Ontario-Michigan (33.7%) and British Columbia-Washington (33.2%). Energy topped the list of vulnerable sectors at 13.79%. Still Talking The two leaders haven’t stopped talking. Carney says he speaks with Trump frequently and describes the calls as cordial and positive. Trump has sometimes dropped the 51st state line in favour of formal titles. Meanwhile, Ottawa keeps steering trade toward Europe and other middle-power allies. Carney’s message is that Canadians run their own house and set their own course. If this helped, give it a like and share it with someone who’s been asking whether the invasion talk is real. Subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. If you can, consider a paid annual subscription or buy me a coffee. Free content is harder to get in front of people as algorithms keep changing, and your support keeps it coming. Thank you. #CanadaUS #Carney This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Canada Plans for the Worst Case With the U.S.

  5. Oct 4

    Russia's Tourism Boom Hides a Domestic Collapse

    Russians took 31.5 million trips abroad in 2025. That’s up 8% from the year before, and outbound travel spending hit $49.7 billion, the second-highest total since 2001. Sounds strange for a country under heavy Western sanctions consisting of trade and financial restrictions meant to cut off money and goods, doesn’t it? Analysts are calling it the “war middle class”: high government spending tied to the war in Ukraine, plus high interest rates on savings, has left a chunk of Russians with more disposable cash than they had a few years ago. Economists call this pattern military Keynesianism, basically government war spending propping up parts of the domestic economy. Some of that money is going straight into vacations. Turkey is still the top pick, with over 5.5 million visits in the first 9 months of 2025. China opened visa-free entry in September 2025, and tour bookings jumped right away. Vietnam saw visits grow 173% year over year, helped by new charter flights from 18 Russian cities into Nha Trang and Phu Quoc. Japan saw visits more than double in 2024 despite having no direct flights. Africa is next on the list. Russia already has visa-free arrangements with 11 countries, including South Africa and Morocco, and it’s negotiating with Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Eswatini. The United States now requires some African travellers to post refundable visa bonds of up to $15,000 just to visit. Russia is positioning itself as the easier option. Europe is where things get weird. There are no direct flights anymore, so a Moscow-to-Paris trip that used to take 2 hours and cost €200 now takes 12 hours through Turkey or Serbia and runs about €2,000. Hotel bookings in Italy were up 35% for summer 2025; Spain saw a 65% jump. Under Schengen rules, Russians used to get multi-entry visas. Now only 28.4% do, down from 41.3%, so most get a visa good for the exact dates of one trip and nothing else. A 2015 law lets Russians hold two passports at once, which helps them apply for multiple visas or quietly hide travel to countries Moscow considers unfriendly. Meanwhile, Crimea’s hotel bookings dropped 30% in early 2024, with the industry losing an estimated $18.8 million. Ukrainian strikes on supply routes have caused fuel shortages, and the beaches are sitting empty. Sochi bookings are down 25% as people skip it over drone strikes and air raid sirens. Anapa only reopened its beaches in June 2026 after a massive oil spill cleanup, and fresh slicks are still showing up. Staying in Russia is often pricier than leaving it. Domestic accommodation prices rose over 9% in 2024, while trips abroad only got 4.6% more expensive. A 5-day ski trip in the North Caucasus, with 30-minute lift lines for short runs, can cost about 400,000 rubles, roughly $5,200, close to what you pay for Courchevel in France. For most regular Russians outside the cities, a “vacation” just means haymaking and gardening to get ready for winter. Rosstat, Russia’s official statistics agency, stopped publishing salary data for federal and municipal officials in late 2024. So right as this travel boom for some hits the headlines, the public lost one of its few tools for tracking how far that boom actually reaches. If this is useful to you, the best thing you can do is share it with one person who’d find it interesting. Hit like; it helps more than you’d think with how these things get seen. If you’re not already subscribed, subscribing keeps this coming for free. If you want to go further, a paid annual subscription is 40% off right now; it’s the single biggest way to keep this independent and ad-free. Can’t commit to a subscription? A one-time coffee goes a long way too, especially with how unpredictable algorithms have gotten for independent creators lately. Thanks to everyone already supporting this: paid subscribers, free readers sticking around, folks who’ve referred a friend, and everyone chipping in however they can. It genuinely keeps this going. #RussiaTourism #WarEconomy #Sanctions This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Russia's Tourism Boom Hides a Domestic Collapse

  6. Sep 27

    Canada's Immigration Backlog Could Take 50 Years to Clear

    Ottawa’s Immigration Backlog Due to Staffing Right now, newcomers from Hong Kong, Ukraine and Sudan all sit in the same queue: the Humanitarian and Compassionate program, or H&C, the category for people who don’t fit Canada’s normal immigration streams but have a strong enough case to stay. As of January 2026, those three groups made up 48% of the entire H&C waitlist. The 2026-2028 Immigration Levels Plan sets crisis-response admissions at 5,800 for 2026, dropping to 4,000 for both 2027 and 2028. Internal estimates say some applicants could wait up to 50 years for a decision. Look at the programs, and it gets bleaker. The Hong Kong Lifeboat pathway closed on August 31, 2026, after roughly 30,315 applications covering about 48,560 people, most of whom won’t get a decision until after 2027. Around 300,000 Ukrainians arrived under CUAET (the Canada-Ukraine Authorisation for Emergency Travel, a temporary status, not permanent residence) before 2024, and most are still renewing work permits over and over just to stay legal. Sudan’s pathway opened on February 27, 2024, capped at 3,250 applications, and closed within months because demand blew past that cap. IRCC (Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada, the department that actually processes these files) doesn’t have the people to keep up. At the same time, anger over housing and jobs is landing on the wrong target. Hate crimes against South Asian Canadians rose more than 200% between 2019 and 2023. Anti-South Asian slurs online jumped 1,350% between 2023 and 2024. That’s what happens when a government expands the Temporary Foreign Worker (TFW) program and international student visas without building the oversight to match, then leaves the public to blame immigrants. By 2024, Ottawa itself admitted temporary immigration had outgrown the country’s capacity to absorb it. Housing demand does go up with immigration. However, researchers point to decades of underbuilding, restrictive zoning and land-use rules, piled up under Harper and Trudeau governments alike. There’s a quieter bias running through all of this too. Some people call it polite racism: a racialised professional gets praised for their English or watches their idea get ignored until a white colleague repeats it minutes later. Returnees and dual citizens get a version of it too, treated as less Canadian for having lived somewhere else for a while. That links to something bigger: Canadian Exceptionalism, the assumption that Canada is just naturally more tolerant than America. It’s also why Mi’kmaq fishers in Nova Scotia still get arrested for exercising treaty rights the Supreme Court confirmed back in 1999, because Ottawa never wrote the regulations to enforce them. It’s why, until the 2023 Bjorkquist ruling and Bill C-3 in 2025, a second-generation cutoff buried in the Citizenship Act stopped Canadians born abroad from passing citizenship to their own kids. People call them Lost Canadians, and the name fits. There’s foreign interference too. A public inquiry led by Justice Marie-Josée Hogue named the People’s Republic of China as Canada’s most active foreign interference actor, often working through local consulates to downplay what Hong Kong arrivals are actually going through. That’s transnational repression: a state reaching past its own borders to pressure or discredit its own diaspora abroad. Fixing any of this means hiring more IRCC officers, closing the gaps in workplace policy, and actually enforcing court rulings on Indigenous rights, instead of announcing another program for the headline. If this hit a nerve, hit like, send it to someone who needs the real numbers instead of the press release, and subscribe so you don’t miss the next one. Paid annual subscriptions are discounted right now, and they’re what keep us ad-free and independent. Can’t swing a subscription? A one-time coffee on Buy Me a Coffee helps just as much. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Canada's Immigration Backlog Could Take 50 Years to Clear

  7. Sep 20

    RBC, BMO sell Moneris to US firm for $2 billion

    RBC and BMO are selling Moneris, the payment processing company they’ve jointly owned for 25 years, to Francisco Partners. That’s an American private equity firm based out of San Francisco. The price tag: $2 billion cash. Split evenly, so $1 billion each. RBC says it’ll book an after-tax gain of about $475 million on the deal. Moneris handles one in three business transactions in Canada. Over 5 billion transactions a year, across more than 325,000 merchant locations. Almost 2,000 employees work there in Toronto, Sackville, Montreal, Calgary, and Burnaby. TD already handed off merchant contracts to Fiserv. Scotiabank teamed up with Chase Payment Solutions. CIBC went with Global Payments. Now RBC and BMO are the last of the Big Five to step back from owning their own payment processor outright. The banks say Moneris keeps its Canadian head office and tech infrastructure. RBC and BMO also signed exclusive referral deals to keep sending business clients its way. Jeff Sloan, the former CEO of Global Payments, is coming on as Moneris’s new Chairman. Three American companies (Amazon, Microsoft, and Google) already control 85% of Canada’s public cloud market. Now add payments infrastructure to the list of things flowing south. Economist Moshe Lander at Concordia put it plainly: Canadian firms scaling up big infrastructure tend to need access to U.S. capital and the U.S. market to make it work. Why’d the banks do it? Payments tech needs constant, expensive upgrades to keep pace with global fintech. RBC and BMO would rather spend that money on core banking and let a specialist handle the payments side. The deal still needs sign-off under the Competition Act and the Retail Payment Activities Act. Expected to close by the end of Q1 fiscal 2027. If you liked this breakdown, give it a like, share it, and hit subscribe. Want to help keep this independent and ad-free? A paid subscription or a coffee goes a long way. Thanks for listening. This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    RBC, BMO sell Moneris to US firm for $2 billion

  8. Sep 13

    Are Screens Making Gen Z Dumber?

    For nearly a century, every generation has scored a little better on IQ tests and school assessments than the one before it. Scientists call it the Flynn Effect, and it’s been one of those reliable facts about human progress. Well, Gen Z is the first generation where that trend has flipped. Researchers out of Norway and Denmark tracked hundreds of thousands of military conscripts and found IQ scores peaking decades ago and sliding since. The OECD noted reading and math scores dropped noticeably between 2018 and 2022, roughly three-quarters of a school year’s worth of learning lost. Same story in the US with the latest “Nation’s Report Card.” The timing lines up closely with when screens really took over classrooms and daily life, starting around 2010. Neuroscientists studying this say the average attention span now clocks in around eight seconds. The theory is that constant scrolling and swiping trains the brain to skim for bullet points instead of actually reading. Add in leaning on AI for essays and homework, and you get a generation that can pass a test without understanding what they wrote. There’s a great line from one researcher in the piece: information isn’t the same as wisdom. You can read a hundred tweets and still miss what’s actually true. There are behavioural shifts where workplaces are noticing more sensitivity to feedback, less eye contact. So what’s being done about it? Denmark’s leading the charge here, pulling phones and laptops out of classrooms entirely this school year and bringing back physical textbooks and handwriting. If you enjoyed this one, give it a like, share it, and hit subscribe. If you want to help keep this content free and independent, consider becoming a paid subscriber or buying me a coffee; every bit helps keep the lights on. Thanks! This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit canadianreturnee.substack.com/subscribe

    Are Screens Making Gen Z Dumber?
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Passionate writer and observer navigating life in Canada, exploring topics like culture, politics, and personal growth, after living abroad for years. Sharing honest insights and sparking thoughtful conversations. canadianreturnee.substack.com

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