Latest news with #UniversityOfToronto
CBC
13 hours ago
- Health
- CBC
Ozempic, Mounjaro linked to vision loss in diabetics
Researchers at the University of Toronto have found GLP-1 weight loss and diabetes drugs like Ozempic and Mounjaro double the risk of a severe form of vision loss among diabetics, affecting daily activities such as reading and driving.
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Health
- Yahoo
Coffee Could Be The Secret to Healthy Aging For Women, Scientists Discover
The daily ritual of imbibing a hot cup of freshly brewed and fragrant coffee isn't just good for the soul – it may be one of the ways to smooth the road to healthy aging for women. In a study of 47,513 women in the US with data spanning 30 years, scientists have found that long-term moderate coffee consumption in mid-life is positively correlated with the markers of healthy aging. "While past studies have linked coffee to individual health outcomes, our study is the first to assess coffee's impact across multiple domains of aging over three decades," says Sara Mahdavi, nutrition scientist at Harvard University and the University of Toronto. "The findings suggest that caffeinated coffee – not tea or decaf – may uniquely support aging trajectories that preserve both mental and physical function." To assess the long-term impact of a daily cuppa (or two) on aging, Mahdavi and her colleagues made a careful study of data collected as part of the Nurses' Health Study, a series of epidemiological studies that examine the long-term impacts of various factors on the health of nurses in the US. They examined health and dietary intake data collected since 1984, all the way up to 2016. Healthy aging was defined as living to 70 years or older, maintaining good physical function, staying free from 11 major chronic diseases, and with no cognitive, mental health, or memory impairment. The researchers also adjusted for other factors that might influence health, such as smoking, alcohol consumption, level of physical activity, and body-mass index. By 2016, the researchers identified 3,706 women who qualified as healthy agers. For this group, around 80 percent of their average daily caffeine intake came in the form of three small cups' worth of coffee. By contrast, tea and decaffeinated coffee were not associated with any of the markers of healthy aging; and cola intake was associated with a negative impact for the markers of healthy aging. In other words, coffee had a positive effect; tea and decaf were neutral; and cola had a negative effect. For the healthy agers, each additional cup of coffee, up to five small cups a day, boosted the odds of healthy aging by between 2 and 5 percent. For the cola drinkers, each cup per day reduced the odds of healthy aging by 20 to 26 percent. Of course, coffee isn't a magic bullet for your health; you should still look after yourself in other ways, Mahdavi says. "These results, while preliminary, suggest that small, consistent habits can shape long-term health. Moderate coffee intake may offer some protective benefits when combined with other healthy behaviors such as regular exercise, a healthy diet, and avoiding smoking," she explains. "While this study adds to prior evidence suggesting coffee intake may be linked with healthy aging, the benefits from coffee are relatively modest compared to the impact of overall healthy lifestyle habits and warrant further investigation." The research has been presented at the NUTRITION 2025 conference in Orlando, Florida. Texas Woman Dies From Brain-Eating Amoeba After Flushing Sinuses Menopause Drug Reduces Breast Cancer Growth In Clinical Trial Bowel Cancer in Young People Is Rising – Here's How to Reduce Your Risk
CBC
2 days ago
- Politics
- CBC
What is a duty to consult — and how will it affect Bill 5?
The Ontario government's controversial Bill 5 was passed with no consultation with First Nations, whose treaty lands are likely to be affected. Metro Morning spoke with an Anishinaabe scholar at the University of Toronto about the difference between a duty to consult and the "free, prior and informed consent" of First Nations leaders.
Yahoo
01-06-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
The American mass exodus to Canada amid Trump 2.0 has yet to materialize
In February 2025, the New Republic, reported there were a growing number of Americans who wanted to leave the country following the election of Donald Trump. Canadian reports backed up the assertion, particularly the news that three high-profile Yale professors would be joining the faculty of the University of Toronto in the fall of 2025. Read more: For some Canadian observers, it may feel like a case of déjà vu. After Trump's first election in 2016, some media predicted a sharp increase in Americans seeking to escape their country's harsh social and political climate for Canada's 'sunny ways.' According to Google Analytics, web searches originating in the United States involving 'how to move to Canada' increased by 350 per cent on election night in 2016. A few months earlier, they'd increased by 1,500 per cent over normal search rates for the same phrase in March 2016, when Trump clinched the Republican nomination for president. Despite such post-election musings nine years ago, the pending American mass exit didn't materialize. According to migration data (a download is required) from Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada (IRCC), the number of Americans applying for permanent residency from January through March 2017 rose only slightly. There were 1,882 applications, just 66 more than from the same period in 2016. As for visas and authorizations issued to people from the U.S. during the same time period, they barely increased — from 2,497 in 2016 to just 2,523 in 2017. Americans taking up permanent residency in Canada jumped from about 8,400 in 2016 to 10,800 in 2019. However, that increase in the modest number of moves from the U.S. to Canada can hardly be construed as an exodus. Over those same two years, the number of Canadians becoming permanent residents of the U.S. continued to exceed the number of Americans who headed north. There has been, however, a decline in the number of Canadians moving to the U.S. In 2016, the year Trump was first elected, just over 19,300 Canadians moved to the U.S. In 2019, the year before Trump lost to Joe Biden, 14,700 Canadians took up residence in the U.S. That trend didn't last as the gap in cross-border permanent residency widened once more during the Biden era. In 2023, while 10,600 Americans moved to Canada, 18,600 Canadians moved to the U.S. Looking at the data from 2016 to 2023 suggests politics isn't the primary reason why Americans head to Canada. It's more likely driven by economic considerations, better job offers or family ties. In terms of the apparent uptick in migrants from the U.S. heading to Canada during Trumps's second term, it's too early to draw definitive conclusions. But numbers for the first quarter of 2025, according to the same IRCC datasets, show no signs of any significant uptake, with a drop from 2,485 Americans headed Canada's way between January to March 2024 to 955 over the same period in 2025. Despite the surge in American internet searches on moving to Canada in 2016, when Trump won the Republican nomination and then the presidency, acting on impulse in a moment of political turmoil is complicated. Moving to Canada is not as simple as it may seem; it can be long and arduous. There's a process and a waiting line with requirements that include an offer of employment in Canada, liquid assets and language proficiency in English, or French if Québec is the ultimate destination. It's easier to immigrate to Canada if there's a close family member already living there, but still not guaranteed. Canada's tax rate is a migration deterrent for some, even though these higher tax rates come with more services. Although Canada's health-care system is more inclusive and affordable, the wait times for procedures, along with the perception that Canadian services are not as robust as American health services, could also be a deterrent to migration. In short, even for Americans, it's not easy to migrate to Canada. There is, however, one group of people living in the U.S. who may consider relocating to Canada: asylum-seekers. The second Trump administration has ended Temporary Protection Status for Afghan, Venezuelan, Nicaraguan, Cuban and Haitian residents. This means that people from these strife-torn countries must apply for permanent residency or 'self-deport' — otherwise, they will become undocumented. Haiti is currently unsafe. Gangs control the country's cities and neighbourhoods and have staged a successful coup. The country is also still rebuilding after the devastating 2010 earthquake. Read more: Afghanistan remains in the throes of a decades-long war where women have have no rights. Venezuela is in a state of civil unrest; about 19 million citizens do not have enough food or sanitation. Nearly 7.7 million people have fled the country. The crackdown on other undocumented residents and the recent issuing of large 'civil penalties' in the form of fines for failing to self-deport may force others to leave the U.S. Where might they go? Many will return to their country of residence, but others may be unable to do so and could consider Canada a convenient and safe destination. In 2016, 23,919 people made asylum claims in Canada. That number slowly rose throughout the first Trump administration to 64,020 in 2019, the last full year of the president's first term. Those seeking asylum in Canada declined to 23,680 in 2020 — the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic — but had increased to 171,850 by the end of 2024. The geographic distribution of these asylum-seekers was uneven. In 2017, 50 per cent of all asylum-seekers to Canada made their claim in Québec; in 2022, 64 per cent of asylum claims were made there. So rather than seeing a large influx of American citizens migrating to Canada during Trump's second administration, there will likely be a larger number of asylum-seekers, many of whom have legitimate fears of persecution. How Canada chooses to handle these claims remains to be seen — but it's urgently important for Canadian elected officials to figure it out immediately. Jack Jedwab, CEO of the Association for Canadian Studies and the Metropolis Institute, co-authored this article This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organisation bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Lori Wilkinson, University of Manitoba Read more: Trump v Harvard: why this battle will damage the US's reputation globally The Trump administration's move to ban international students at Harvard escalates attacks on universities Who are immigrants to the US, where do they come from and where do they live? Lori Wilkinson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Globe and Mail
23-05-2025
- Politics
- Globe and Mail
What is happening to higher education in the U.S. right now is not reform. It is destruction
Debra Thompson is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail. She is an associate professor of political science and Canada Research Chair in Racial Inequality in Democratic Societies at McGill University. I first set foot on a university campus in 1999. I knew absolutely nothing about the purpose of higher education, other than that my parents, neither of whom obtained a university degree following high school, insisted that I needed to go. I didn't do any campus tours in advance because I didn't know that was what prospective students were supposed to do. I couldn't afford to participate in frosh week once I got there. I had a full scholarship that covered tuition but not the cost of my dorm room, so I worked 35 hours a week at three part-time jobs, and never quite had enough time to do the course readings, study for exams, or attend the public lectures of renowned thinkers. But I loved it. I loved getting lost in libraries, the lectures and the labs, the all-nighters, the seminar discussions that continued for hours at the campus bar, new beginnings each September and years that were divided into semesters rather than weeks or months. I loved it so much that I never left. I have worked at or attended some of the best universities in the world – my current employer, McGill University, but also the University of Toronto, Northwestern University, and Harvard University. I spent a decade mired in the system of higher education in the United States, at both public and private universities. I've taught students who came from more wealth than I'll ever see, and those who shared my table at Christmas because they had no home to go to. I've heard lectures by Nobel Prize winners and former presidents. I have seen the future of scientific research, innovation, expertise, entrepreneurship, law, politics, and the global citizenry co-exist – sometimes tenuously – on the social microcosm of the college campus. Universities have faced varying and somewhat perpetual crises over the decades, but the recent showdown initiated by the Trump administration is an unprecedented inflection point. In a matter of months, the system of higher education in the United States has been completely upended. There are valid critiques to be made of universities, especially in terms of cost, access and value, but what is happening right now is not a careful process of thoughtful, nuanced reform. It is vindictive, ideologically driven destruction. It began with Columbia University, which had US$400-million in federal grants and funding cancelled in early March. The Trump administration then cut millions of dollars from seven other elite universities, including Northwestern, Brown University and Cornell University. Dozens of others have received notice from the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights that they are under investigation for 'antisemitic harassment and discrimination.' The guise of combatting antisemitism on college campuses is a complicated cover for a far-reaching ideological assault. In March, US$175-million in funding to the University of Pennsylvania was suspended because the university allowed a transgender athlete to compete on the women's swim team. A few weeks later, the Trump administration issued a letter with a list of demands for reforms at Harvard, including merit-based hiring and admissions, allowing admission data to be audited by the federal government, and initiating an audit of 'viewpoint diversity' and of programs, including the Center for Middle Eastern Studies and the Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic. After Harvard refused to capitulate, federal officials froze more than US$2-billion in funding and later threatened to revoke Harvard's tax-exempt status, even though federal law prohibits the President from directing the IRS to conduct investigations. Finally, on Thursday, the Trump administration revoked Harvard's Student and Exchange Visitor Program certification – meaning international students, which make up 27 per cent of the school's population, can no longer enroll at the university. Meanwhile, more than 1,800 international students had their visas suddenly revoked or lost their legal status to remain in the United States – a decision that was later reversed. Before that happened, some fled, fearing deportation. Others were abducted off the street by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). The Canadian Association of University Teachers advised professors against non-essential travel to the United States. Some of my colleagues have cancelled speaking engagements, because it's not worth the risk. My discipline's largest and most significant conference, the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, will be in Vancouver this September, and organizers are scrambling to attend to the concerns of visa- and green-card holders who fear they will not be allowed to return home should they leave America. Most recently, President Donald Trump's proposed budget cuts TRIO programs, which assist low-income and first-generation students and students with disabilities access and succeed in postsecondary education, slashes the budgets of the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health (both of which already had thousands of grants worth billions of dollars in research funding cancelled), and eliminates the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Conservative commentators have long held the view that universities have been ideologically captured by the left and are now indoctrination factories of 'radical-left' ideologies. Some disciplines are considered intractably left-wing (women and gender studies, African American studies), while others either happen to allegedly be the exclusive domain of leftists (music, the arts and humanities) or are the subject of profound skepticism and hostility from certain segments of conservatism (science, climatology and medicine). A less generous interpretation of the Trump administration's attack on higher education would note that one of the most important voting trends in the United States (and other Western societies, including Canada) is educational polarization. Analyzing the available interview and survey data from the 2024 election, data scientist David Schor told The New York Times: 'The lower your political engagement, education level or socio-economic status, the less engaged you are in politics, the more Trumpy you are.' To put it bluntly, a reduction in college graduates would electorally benefit Republicans. And, of course, there's also a touch of Trumpian retributive-style politics at play here; the President is both resentful and reverent of the elite club of the Ivy League, which has never truly accepted him as one of their own. Regardless of the contrived or sincere rationale, as Vice-President JD Vance stated, echoing Richard Nixon before him, universities are now the enemy, and these attacks are popular among the conservative base. A Gallup Poll from 2024 showed that Americans are evenly divided among those who have a great deal of confidence in higher education (36 per cent), some confidence (32 per cent) and little or no confidence (32 per cent). This is a rapid decline in confidence from 2015, when 57 per cent had a great deal or quite a lot of confidence and only 10 per cent had little or none. Look, universities are a lot of things. Universities are employers, corporations, gatekeepers, landlords and governing boards. They are social spaces and innovation incubators. They are a public good, gentrifiers of poor neighbourhoods, a brand, a symbol, a lightning rod, a neoliberal façade, bureaucratic hierarchies, mysterious tuition fees and the citizenry in the making. Universities are research hubs, student pubs, generational legacies, and a kind of liminal space where students become the people they will henceforth continue to be, leaving the college campus, hopefully, with more knowledge, a critical eye, skills (both hard and soft) that make them employable, an understanding that the world is vast and complicated, and a love of learning. Moreover, the benefits of higher education are rarely immediately apparent. Only 14 per cent of Americans have professional or graduate degrees, and so those who attend a university (approximately 38 per cent of the American population over 25) are only on college campuses for a short time, making it difficult to see patterns over time or the importance of long-term investment for society-improving outcomes. High-quality research, I find myself constantly reminding my students, is supposed to take a long time because you search, hypothesize, test and analyze, and then you do it all again, just to make sure. The current siege on higher education is an attempt to radically alter what universities can and should be in a democratic polity. Their reliance on indirect and direct government funding and their role in producing the country's intellectual and political elites make them an easy target, but universities are important to democratic life precisely because of that which makes them both myopic and unique: They are centrally concerned with the pursuit of knowledge. This is why the attack on universities is a page out of the autocrat's handbook. We have seen this happen over the past decade or so in Hungary, Turkey, Russia and Brazil: regimes where liberal democracy is either a façade or deeply in crisis. The core mission of the university is to enable open and free inquiry, where denizens can exchange ideas and opinions, debate and contest those of others, engaging with the full, rich tapestry of viewpoints – even controversial ones – without fear of retribution, exclusion, or threats to lives or livelihoods. The climate of fear that the Trump administration has created, certainly for international students and faculty who are terrified of abruptly devastating visa revocations, but also for any whose research has been identified as maligned with the administration's views on diversity, gender, expertise, inequality, or science, is also a time-honoured intimidation tactic of dictators and demagogues. The American system of higher education is far from perfect. There are thousands of books and articles that detail deeply entrenched (but not insurmountable) challenges of higher education, including: issues of accessibility; astronomical tuition fees and lifelong student debt; declining state funding and increasing state interference; the heavy reliance on poorly paid and precariously positioned adjunct professors to teach core undergraduate courses; the exploitative mess of college sports; opaque admissions processes; asking would-be students to chart their life course at 18; for-profit colleges that prey on low-income families; the unspoken affirmative action of legacy admits; labour and workplace concerns; falling and racially disparate graduation rates; the replacement of universities' roles in social mobility with one of wealth consolidation; and much more. The explosive campus protests and pro-Palestinian encampments last year put a harsh spotlight on the contentious collision of academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, prompting blistering moral and intellectual scrutiny of universities' ethically indefensible investments in weapons manufacturing. Universities nevertheless serve a vital role in democratic life. In his book What Universities Owe Democracy, Ronald Daniels, the former dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto and the current president of Johns Hopkins University, argues that universities in fact have a duty to promote and protect democratic values. The nearly 4,000 postsecondary institutions in the United States, which will educate an estimated 19.5 million undergraduate students this year, are also stalwarts of democracy in at least four critical ways: (1) social mobility, or launching talented individuals up the socio-economic ladder; (2) civic education, or educating citizens to be active participants in democratic processes; (3) stewardship of facts, and the creation and dissemination of knowledge; and (4) pluralism, the cultivation of meaningful exchanges of beliefs, ideas and opinions across our human differences. In authoritarian regimes, it is the educated classes that push for democratization, and which help new democracies to stabilize and endure. Both the targeted degradation of democratic norms in the United States and Republicans' attack on higher education – especially tenure protections, curricular content, and academic freedom – have been years in the making. State legislators have introduced dozens of 'gag orders' that prevent professors from teaching about structural racism or gender identity, weakened or attempted to eliminate tenure protections, stripped power from faculty in shared governance models, and sometimes have even meddled in hiring processes. In Ohio, where I taught for several years, the state legislature recently passed Senate Bill 1, which requires course syllabi be publicly available, mandates student evaluations of professors' biases, eliminates DEI trainings, scholarship, and programs, and creates post-tenure evaluations, prohibits faculty strikes, and sets rules around teaching 'controversial beliefs' such as climate change, electoral politics, marriage, or abortion. The institutions hit the hardest in these battles will not be the Ivy League or selective liberal-arts colleges with their billion-dollar endowments; rather, it will be the state schools, already facing enrolment contractions and in perpetual financial crisis as states slash funding. It already is the state schools, in Indiana, Ohio, Texas, Florida and elsewhere, that Republican-controlled legislatures have fashioned the conservative blueprint that President Trump is now nationalizing. These are the institutions, with their dedication to serving a wide array of students from less privileged backgrounds and from less accessible communities, for which the promise of higher education as a key pathway to social mobility has been actualized more than any others. What is now required is the one thing that universities are not exactly known for: bravery. As Mr. Daniels puts it, 'Our institutions of higher education can be neither indifferent nor passive in the face of democratic backsliding.' This is an opportunity – fair enough, one forged from constant political chaos and pending societal doom – for universities to be courageous, bolstered by the fact that for once, there is an unprecedented interest convergence across public and private universities, minority-serving institutions and selective liberal arts colleges, as well as the millions of students, staff, faculty and administrators who believe that the pursuit of knowledge is worth defending. We Are Higher Ed, a coalition of faculty across the United States, was organized in the aftermath of the American election out of an acute sense of vulnerability on the part of racialized and queer faculty. It has since grown into a community of resource sharing, of strategizing, and resistance. When I spoke with some of the organizers, they emphasized that the Trump administration's cuts, lists, orders, cancellations and overreach are an unbridled attempt to dismantle academic freedom and decimate the entire endeavour of higher education across disciplinary, institutional and state boundaries. And it can get worse, still; should the Trump administration choose to cull or eliminate the US$120-billion in grants, work-study funds or low-interest loans that currently assist approximately 13 million students who attend university, small and medium-sized colleges and universities that are heavily tuition-dependent will simply cease to exist. The silver lining is that, urged by individual faculty members and coalitions like We Are Higher Ed, universities are beginning to fight back. There are several formal declarations of a united front in higher education, including the Big Ten Mutual Defense Compact initiated by professors at Rutgers University, and a similar proposal from 250 land-grant and public universities spearheaded by faculty at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. There are dozens of lawsuits pending and there will likely be many more. In April, hundreds of university and college presidents and other educational leaders signed a statement condemning the Trump administration's 'unprecedented government overreach,' 'political interference,' 'undue government intrusion' and 'coercive use of public research funding.' With over 650 signatories, it is an astounding act of unity and resistance, especially considering the way that this administration targets and punishes those who President Trump perceives to have challenged him. 'Scholarship cannot flourish in an atmosphere of suspicion and distrust,' United States Supreme Court chief justice Earl Warren wrote in 1957. 'Teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise, our civilization will stagnate and die.' Academic freedom is not a luxury or liberal trickery – it is the cornerstone of democracy. The university is a lot of things, but it is fundamentally a public good. Universities exist for the benefit not just of those who, like me, cherish the moral responsibilities of conducting ethical and empirical research and teaching generations of lifelong learners, but for the entirety of society. However, the current political climate of ideological interference, restricted scientific research and punitive and retaliatory measures threatens elite universities and could devastate non-elite institutions that serve middle- and lower-income families. President Trump's siege on higher education undermines American democracy itself.
