BIG Exclusives

In 2000, the United Nations set eight millennium development goals (MDGs). They were not poetry. They were a short list of mostly efficient, targeted aims: cut extreme poverty in half, get children into school, slash child and maternal deaths, fight the big killer diseases, and give people clean water. Fifteen years later, the world retired them. In their place came sustainable development goals (SDGs) – 17 of them, with 169 targets and enough indicators to...

Artificial intelligence has no shortage of ethical principles. Fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy, human oversight and explainability now appear in corporate policies, government frameworks, and international standards around the world. The broad direction is remarkably consistent. Organizations deploying AI should understand the risks, protect people from discriminatory outcomes, maintain appropriate human control, and remain accountable for the consequences. The difficulty begins when those principles encounter an actual decision. A facial-recognition system identifies someone entering a store as...

On “eclipse day”, I found myself compelled to write about a confounding question; how many existential crises does it take? It might sound like the start of a joke involving a light bulb, but my (hopefully) bright idea is to examine how we humans are facing a few more, shall we say, critical challenges than we are used to. For many, it seems to have become overwhelming. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, in his latest...

Many published articles and other media content have come to the forefront on mainstream and social media related to so-called anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the last year. Core to “the climate narrative” is that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, one of multiple variables that may be affecting our atmosphere and climate, is the dominant, if not the sole variable causing warming. In my last article, “Controlling perception – how images and colours are used to...

In a publicly funded healthcare system already strained by wait times, staffing shortages, and an aging population, the emergent normalization of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was never going to remain constrained. Once a procedure enters the bureaucratic and budgetary machinery, incentives emerge – quiet, structural, unspoken. And denied. What began as a compassionate response to irremediable suffering becomes entangled with the cold, objective logic of resource allocation. This is the financial reckoning Canadians have...

The preceding essays in this series have mapped the new terrain of conflict: mineral chokeholds that determine what can be built, energy shell games that determine what can be moved, machine-speed systems that compress decision cycles, narrative filters that shape what the public accepts as true, and quiet resource captures that shift the balance of endurance.  The Iranian flashpoint serves as both catalyst and stress test for an emerging order. Principled war strategy begins with the...

Since the war in Iran started in late February, everyone has been anxiously following crude oil prices because energy prices affect every household and business every day. The impact of the war has been significant, as illustrated in the crude oil price chart below. Suddenly, evening news reports provide a daily update on consumer gasoline prices. Figure 1 – Source: Petroleum markets responded to disruptions in the Middle East in the second quarter, EIA The impact of...

The Iranian sky lit up with missiles and drone swarms, but the slower, quieter war continued beneath the surface – in offices, boardrooms, and diplomatic backchannels. The capture of strategic resource regions around the globe is happening in plain sight, yet rarely is it framed as part of the same contest that produced the Twelve-Day War or ongoing proxy activations. This is where narrative filters do their most effective work: encouraging the public to believe...

Are United States stock markets experiencing an “AI bubble” that is about to burst? Or is that theory nothing more than wishful thinking from those who missed the boat?  From late 2022 through 2026, investment in artificial intelligence by U.S. companies has increased substantially. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Oracle, and Microsoft have been rapidly increasing their spending, with a combined cumulative investment of $140 billion attributed to AI.Productivity benchmarks continue to rise modestly – 1.9% year...

Artificial intelligence governance is often described in terms of principles. Fairness, accountability, transparency, and safety have become the dominant language through which organizations signal responsible deployment. These principles appear in policy frameworks, regulatory proposals, and corporate commitments across jurisdictions. Yet the operational reality of AI deployment reveals a persistent and widening gap between declared ethics and executed decisions. The central issue is not the absence of ethical frameworks, but the conditions under which those frameworks...