News
Dais Holiday Reading
Dec 19, 2024
Dear friends –
We launched the Dais in May 2023, building on the proud legacies of the Brookfield Institute and the Leadership Lab at Toronto Metropolitan University, because Canada needed a response to the coming era of runaway technology and runaway politics.
That time is here. And if we are going to build a society of shared prosperity and shared citizenship, it’s going to take Canadian leadership.
We have been pleased to do our share of that work, building bold ideas and better leaders for the key economic, education, and democracy policy challenges in this digital era. You can catch up on our work from the year below.
But first, a breather, a chance to enjoy the togetherness, fun and beauty of the season (thank you to Web and Graphic Designer Zaynab Choudhry for our holiday card!). And to enjoy some cozy reading around the fireplace – see below for some of our own choices, which feature some of the most challenging ideas out there.
Happy reading, and happy holidays!
Karim Bardeesy
Executive Director, the Dais at Toronto Metropolitan University
Top reports of 2024
Canada’s Got Tech Talent – Diversity of Canada’s Tech workers
To ensure technology benefits all Canadians, we must address disparities in the tech workforce. Since 2016, the gender pay gap in the field has nearly tripled, and visible minorities, newcomers, and Indigenous workers face higher risks of underpayment.
Canadian Support for a K-12 Cellphone Ban – Survey Brief
As classroom cellphone bans roll out across the country, we asked Canadians what they thought of the policy. We found that a strong majority of Canadians are supportive – but that younger Canadians are an important outlier.
Compared to its G7 peers, Canada holds the lowest amount of publicly-available computing infrastructure and performance to train and develop AI systems. Canada needs to urgently tackle the AI Compute gap to retain and grow our business and talent investments, and improve productivity.
Ontario’s postsecondary sector is in crisis, facing financial constraints as the federal government imposes limits on international student enrolment. We propose a fundamental, radical and future-focused reassessment of higher education in Ontario.
Waiting for Takeoff: The short-term impact of AI adoption on firm productivity
Many private-sector and policy leaders are betting big on AI as the silver bullet for our productivity crisis, but will it pay off? This first look at AI’s impact on productivity revealed no clear evidence that it has made Canadian companies more productive.
Survey of Online Harms in Canada
As generative AI and deepfakes fuel the spread of online hate and misinformation corrosive to our democracy and shared citizenship, our research shows that most Canadians support government intervention to mitigate online harms.
What We’re Reading
- Nuclear War: A Scenario (Mark Hazelden, Senior Director of Partnerships)
- Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization (Nina Rafeek Dow, Communications and Marketing Lead)
- Imagination: A Manifesto (Christelle Tessono, Policy and Research Assistant)
- Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation (Fahmida Kamali, Manager of Strategic Initiatives)
- Earthlings (Viet Vu, Manager of Economic Research)
- The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore (Angus Lockhart, Senior Policy Analyst)
- The Message (Marium Hamid, Manager of Partnerships)
- Talking to Strangers (Feben Bogale, Leadership Development Assistant)
- The Anxious Generation (Ashna Ali, Leadership Development Facilitator) – note that this was the first book our Dais staff book club dove into this fall.
- Deep Work (Rajender Singh, Senior Policy Analyst)
- Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto (Catherine Amburgey, Communications and Marketing Liaison)
- The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians (André Côté, Director of Policy and Research) – we were pleased to host co-authors Vass Bednar and Denise Hearn for a Dais Book Talk in October
- We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland (Karim Bardeesy, Executive Director)
2024 Highlights
P.S. We’re now on Bluesky! Connect with us there, or on LinkedIn.
P.P.S, Do you still wonder what a dais is? How do you pronounce that, anyway? We made it easy for you!