Museum visits, art classes and fishing trips could ease Canada's health care crisis
During the pandemic, we got really good at being alone. We subscribed to streaming services, took up crafting, set up home gyms and figured out remote work. Now, several years after lockdowns, many people are still pretty reluctant to get out of the house. Perhaps we got too good at being alone? Last year the U.S. surgeon general warned about an epidemic of loneliness. Kate Mulligan, an assistant professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, has a plan to fight the tidal wave of depression and illness that often accompanies isolation. She’s an evangelist for something called social prescription. Instead of writing prescriptions for pills, health-care workers prescribe their patients social activities: a trip to a museum or park, or a fishing trip with a buddy. There’s overwhelming research proving that community interactions lead to better health outcomes. Mulligan, who founded the Canadian Institute for Social Prescribing, makes her case in Maclean’s this week. “Social prescribing is not yet widely known enough to be a universal part of Canada’s health system,” she argues, “but it should be.” Visit macleans.ca for more coverage of everything that matters in Canada, and subscribe to the magazine here. —Sarah Fulford, editor-in-chief, Maclean’s |
Last July, one of the world’s largest cybersecurity firms, CrowdStrike, released a buggy software update that crashed 8.5 million computers worldwide and caused over US$5 billion in losses. Such massive outages are rare, but a rise in smaller outages and data breaches are expected in 2025. In this essay for Maclean’s, University of Waterloo associate professor of computer engineering Kami Vaniea writes, “The logic is simple: more complex systems contain more vulnerabilities.” Here’s why those vulnerabilities matter. |
In Kingston, Ontario, food insecurity is so severe that the city council declared it an emergency last week. Things are similarly dire at the Ottawa Food Bank: CEO Rachael Wilson says that her organization, which has a 51,000-square-foot warehouse, has been forced to turn people away and sometimes even close their doors. For Maclean’s, Wilson describes what needs to change to prevent millions of Canadians from going hungry. |
AI detection will hit the wildfire frontlines in Alberta and B.C., while Jasper rebuilds. Ottawa’s Green Building Strategy will help answer Canada’s infrastructure pollution problem. And Ontario will supersize its power grid. Here are 10 big climate stories to watch in 2025. |
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