Johansen.se

It’s still not clear how Juste Pour Rire / Just for Laughs (JPR/JFL) went from one of the biggest comedy festivals in the world to bankruptcy.

On April 12, La Presse reported the festival lost $800,000 in an email phishing scheme in 2023. This is just the latest detail emerging after Groupe Juste pour rire inc. announced the cancellation of the 2024 edition of JPR/JFL as well as the layoffs of 70 per cent of its workforce.

The company also applied for protection from creditors under the Bankruptcy and Insolvency Act. A week before the company announced this, a bailiff seized more than $800,000 in assets because of a Québec Court of Appeal decision on a bizarre contract disagreement with an archivist/former employee who was promised a job for life.

Documents filed in Montréal reveal the company was $22.5 million in debt, with an additional $3.4 million owing to a long list of creditors that included television stations, production companies, marketing firms and even a dépanneur (local convenience store).

With large-scale government funding that has previously gone to JPR/JFL potentially now up for grabs, there is an opportunity to reconsider and restructure our national comedy industry.

From burst to bust

JPR was founded by businessman Gilbert Rozon in 1983 as a two-day French-language comedy event in Montréal. In 1985, Rozon was joined by promoter Andrew Nulman who brought the event to anglophone audiences and co-founded the company’s bilingual iteration.

JPR/JFL is a behemoth in Canadian comedy and tourism. The flagship festival still took place in Montréal but expanded nationally and globally.

A news crew in front of the Just for Laughs theatre in Montréal, March 5, 2024.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Ryan Remiorz

Conflicts around sexual assault, harassment

In recent years, JFL has contended with a series of high-profile conflicts. At the height of #MeToo in 2017, Rozon stepped down as president after being named in numerous sexual assault allegations.

This also brought back to light Rozon’s previous 1998 sexual assault charge that he plead guilty to. In 2020, Rozon was found not guilty of rape and indecent assault. In 2022, more allegations emerged.

Just for Laughs founder Gilbert Rozon walks past demonstrators as he arrives at the courthouse to hear the closing arguments in his sexual assault trial in Montréal in November 2020.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Paul Chiasson

The festival was also accused by journalist and comedian Megan Koester of shutting down an attempt to investigate the accusations of sexually inappropriate behaviour from comedian Louis C.K., which C.K. later admitted to.

As I have written elsewhere, sexualized violence is rampant in the comedy industry. In 2018, after tying for first at the Montréal festival’s Homegrown Comics competition, comedian and writer D.J. Mausner publicly rejected their prize — the taping of a stand up special — and called for a boycott of JPR/JFL.

Read more:
Louis C.K.: Sexual misconduct and the pursuit of justice

Mausner said Rozon’s stepping down was a “a surface-level solution for a systemic problem” and called the festival an “accessory to sexual assaults.”

Following the earlier assault allegations, the organization implemented an
anti-harassment policy and brought in new investment partners.

Royalties issues, pandemic challenges

Then, in 2019, SiriusXM Canada and JPR/JFL announced a partnership to take over the Canada Laughs radio channel. The channel, which once played exclusively Canadian content, would now primarily feature classic JPR/JFL recordings, meaning a substantial reduction in royalties for Canadian comedians.

Intense public pushback from comedians led JPR/JFL to walk back their proposal and commit to playing 100 per cent Canadian content.

In their official statement on the 2024 festival cancellation, Groupe Juste pour rire inc. cited COVID-19, inflation, a changing media landscape and difficult times for festivals as reasons for the 2024 cancellation.

It is clear that the rise of social media and streaming services have drastically changed the comedy landscape. The pandemic hit live festivals hard, but JPR/JFL did receive significant monetary assistance from government sources. Despite the real disruptions the company faced, there is confusion about how a well-funded comedy festival managed to dig itself so deep in debt.

The Montréal-born Just For Laughs festival grew international offshoots including in Chicago and Sydney, Australia. Comedian Martin Short at a press conference at the Opera House in Sydney, Australia, in 2011.
(AP Photo/Rob Griffith)

Blockbuster festivals, broke comedians

Canadian comedians often think of performing at JPR/JFL as a massive career goal. This makes its cancellation a brutal loss. As comedian Cassie Cao told CBC host Elamin Abdelmahmoud, JPR/JFL is a huge deal for Canadian comics who have “so little else in the industry.” A 2019 study from SponsorPulse found that 49 per cent of Canadians engaged with JPR/JFL over a year (meaning, they either watched on live television or online, or followed news events or social media), which suggests that platforming Canadian comedians could have a huge impact on their careers. But for years, JPR/JFL has been taken to task for their prioritization of American comedians.

Even if JPR/JFL survives restructuring, comic Sam Sferrazza says this likely will mean “bringing in more bankable American talent paid for by Canadian taxpayers and artistic institutions.”

Canadian funding agencies tend to favour blockbuster events like JPR/JFL but in the world of art grants, stand-up comedians are at a disadvantage. Lumped in with other groups like theatre performers, comedians are, Sferrazza says, forced to “compete with completely different art forms.”

JPR/JFL’s monopoly of the industry is evidently not working, so what do we need to build a real and sustainable foundation for Canadian comedy?

Boosting international exposure

In my doctoral research and book chapter on work in the Canadian comedy industry, I found that most comedians felt that to make a real living off comedy, they’d have to leave Canada. But what if we created an environment where they not only wanted to stay but could stay.

One option is boosting Canada’s comedic digital content internationally. CBC Gem, for example, is accumulating an impressive catalogue of stand-up, but they are restricted to Canadian viewers. While there is nothing wrong with Canadian content for Canadian audiences, it ultimately puts a ceiling on comedians’ visibility. Expanding the circulation of our comedic content and continuing to invest in producing stand-up specials — which is relatively low cost — could be a huge boon to the careers of Canadian comedians.

Funding for local comedians and festivals

Another option is putting more funding directly into the pockets of individual Canadian comedians, producers, and (smaller) festivals, strengthening the comedy industry nationwide. While my study focused on Toronto, there are flourishing independent comedy scenes all over the country. These scenes are often where cutting-edge comedy is being created by diverse performers who might never have made it to, or felt welcomed on, a JPR/JFL stage.

In reimagining the industry, we shouldn’t be taking a top-down approach. We need to be asking comedians what they need to succeed and recognizing their work as both artists and contributors to Canadian culture.

While the potential end of JPR/JFL is a loss, it is also a wake-up call to rethink how we support and structure our comedy industry. Läs mer…

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have reportedly been conducting operations in the Beit Hanoun area of the northern Gaza Strip conducting raids on Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets. The IDF says it has been working on information gleaned from questioning Palestinian fighters captured in the fighting.

According to a report in the Jerusalem Post on April 17, the Palestinian fighters were hiding out in schools in the area. A warning was issued to civilians to evacuate the buildings before the Israeli military moved in, the IDF said.

Meanwhile, ceasefire talks have been suspended as Israel reportedly prepares to move on Rafah, where more than a million Palestinians remain trapped. The Guardian reported this week that the IDF had confirmed buying 40,000 tents for evacuees.

Gaza Update is available as a fortnightly email newsletter. Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox.

When it comes to how the IDF identifies its targets, investigative journalists in Jerusalem have published reports recently delving into the use of artificial intelligence (AI) by Israel’s military and intelligence agencies in its conduct of the war. The investigation, by online Israeli magazines +927 and Local Call examined the use of an AI programme called “Lavender”. This examines a range of data to identify possible Hamas fighters. As Elke Schwarz, a reader in political theory at Queen Mary University of London, explains, this could include social network connections and family relationships.

Military activity on the Gaza Strip, April 17.
Institute for the Study of War

Schwarz writes here: “The category of what constitutes relevant features of a target can be set as stringently or as loosely as is desired. In the case of Lavender, it seems one of the key equations was ‘male equals militant’.” Shades, she says, of the US doctrine during the drone wars of Barack Obama’s administration that apparently held that “all military-aged males are potential targets”.

Needless to say, the potential for misidentification is enormous. It’s important to note that the IDF is not the only military to be working with AI in this way. The US Department of Defense is known to be working on what it calls “Project Maven”, which – we’re told – allows the user to sign off on up to 80 targets an hour, apparently barking out the prompt to “accept, accept, accept”. As the 1970s Milgram experiments into obedience to authority suggested, controversially, humans – particularly men – will perform actions that are tantamount to torture if directed to with sufficient authority.

Read more:
Gaza war: Israel using AI to identify human targets raising fears that innocents are being caught in the net

These are also not the first reports to emerge about Israel’s alleged use of AI to identify targets. Natasha Karner, a researcher into emerging technologies and global security at RMIT University in Australia, writes that the IDF was boasting of winning the first “AI war” in its’ intensive 11-day Operation Guardian of the Walls campaign in 2021.

But one function of the way the IDF is harnessing Lavender in this current conflict is its use alongside other systems. One called “Habsora” (or Gospel) tells the system that a building potentially houses a suspected fighter and another, apparently called “Where’s Daddy?”, reports on when the target returns to the building, which may or may not also contain the fighter’s family.

Read more:
Israel accused of using AI to target thousands in Gaza, as killer algorithms outpace international law

The Iranian dimension

Away from the charnel house that is the Gaza Strip, the focus has been on the aftermath of Israel’s strike on the Iranian embassy in Baghdad on April 1. The strike killed seven members of Iran’s Islamic Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, including General Mohammad Reza Zahedi, the Quds Force commander overseeing Syria and Lebanon.

According to Scott Lucas, an expert in Middle East conflicts at University
College Dublin, Israel has been assassinating Iran’s top military and intelligence brass for years. But what set the April 1 attack apart from the rest was that this was an attack on a diplomatic premises, ruled by international law to be “inviolable”. As is his wont, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, vowed revenge, declaring: “The Zionist regime will be punished by the hands of our brave men. We will make it regret this crime and others it has committed.”

Writing on April 11, Lucas kindly agreed to answer our questions on whether this would be likely to escalate into an all-out regional conflict. He felt that Khamenei’s rhetoric was very much performative. It was meant for both internal consumption, to rally a restless population suffering from a parlous economy crippled by sanctions and angry at the regime’s oppression, and to project strength in the region.

Iranian mourners march at the funeral of the seven members of the IRGC killed in Israel’s April 1 airstrike on Iran’s embassy in Syria.
EPA-EFE/Abedin Taherkenareh

He speculated that Iran could launch an air assault, but this could undo Tehran’s diplomatic efforts over months to portray Iran as much of a victim as Gaza and to try to sow division between Israel and the US. And this was very much how it was to turn out when Iran’s drones and missiles flew last weekend.

Read more:
Could Israel’s strike against the Iranian embassy in Damascus escalate into a wider regional war? Expert Q&A

Far from driving a wedge between Israel and the US, Paul Rogers, a Middle East specialist at the University of Bradford, believes it has actually brought them together again. We’ve reported here before the chill that was settling over the relationship between US president Joe Biden and Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. This had even reached the point where many thought the White House was reconsidering the extent of its military support for Israel. Iran’s drone and missile bombardment on April 13 changed all that, writes Rogers:

Israel … moved from being drawing condemnation by the US and many western governments for its conduct of the campaign in Gaza to an ally that needs strong support.

Read more:
Gaza war: Iran’s attack on Israel has brought Washington back on side – for now

Meanwhile Gavin Hall, a teaching fellow in political science and international security at the University of Strathclyde, thinks that despite being widely viewed as a tactical blunder on Iran’s part, the April 13 missile and drone attack could well play in its favour over the longer term.

Hall believes the attack will put considerable pressure on Israel as it calibrates its response. At present, Netanyahu is presiding over a fractured political coalition and is deeply disliked by a majority of Israel’s population. Too heavy-handed and he risks Gaza spiralling into an all-out escalation. But he can’t afford to be seen as weak either. The attack has also put pressure on Israel’s relationship with Jordan, which was the first Arab state to recognise Israel back in 1994 and now faces pressure from its own people for helping defend Israel.

Read more:
Why Iran’s failed attack on Israel may well turn out to be a strategic success

The nuclear option?

One of the possibilities being widely canvassed is that Israel could mount some kind of attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons programme. This has been revitalised in the years since Donald Trump pulled the US out of the deal negotiated by his predecessor Barack Obama.

Iran’s nuclear weapons programme as at June 2012.
Sémhur/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-NC-SA

Christoph Bluth, an international security expert at the University of Bradford, believes this is unlikely. He walks us through the history of Iran’s nuclear programme, a story littered with the bodies of Iranian nuclear scientists and the wreckage of its nuclear facilities thanks to fiendish cyberattacks such as the Stuxnet virus developed by Israel and the US that was launched against Iran in 2010.

Since Trump quit the nuclear deal, Iran has gone full-steam ahead in ramping up its nuclear weapons programme, while reportedly hiding its key installations in deep underground bunkers that are thought impossible to destroy from the air. Any sort of ground assault appears out of the question too, concludes Bluth.

Read more:
An Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons programme is unlikely – here’s why

Gaza Update is available as a fortnightly email newsletter. Click here to get our updates directly in your inbox. Läs mer…

Over the past two decades in the news industry, we’ve witnessed shrinking newsrooms, mass redundancies and the steady decline of regional news on a global scale. With fewer opportunities for steady employment in this undeniably bleak landscape, freelancing is becoming the new normal for prospective journalists.

Squarely in the remit of the digital gig economy, freelancers can expect to “rise and grind” in this new reality. Some may publish their own content using new monetisation platforms like Patreon and Substack, while also hustling for more traditional commissions from the established national and trade press.

This is a massive social, cultural and economic change to the production and distribution of journalistic content. Journalists are left wondering: how sustainable is a profession that relies on hustle culture?

This was the main question driving our recent survey into the earnings, contracts and copyright of UK-based freelance journalists. Funded by the UK Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society in collaboration with the the National Union of Journalists, our survey gathered data on the earnings of almost 500 UK-based freelance journalists.

Funding and income

Our findings show that the vast majority of “primary occupation” freelancers (those who spend more than 50% of their time on freelancing) earn less than the minimum wage in the UK – typically £17,500 per year. This is hardly a lucrative career that can incentivise people to stay, or encourage newcomers to join. Our respondents confirmed that they would hesitate to encourage a young person to become a freelancer nowadays given the limited prospects offered in the profession.

Low levels of income for freelancers have been attributed to a range of complex factors surrounding new technologies and business models – particularly the move from physical print to digital media distribution. For this reason, regulators around the world are currently considering the extent to which online platforms that host news content, like Google or Facebook, should pay for the use of that content as a potential route to improving newsroom revenues (in theory, trickling down to journalists).

From the perspective of policymakers, making big tech take responsibility for subsidising the profession of journalism is an attractive prospect, given tech companies’ deep pockets. But our research suggests that big tech’s use of news content is just one (relatively small) factor among many affecting freelancers’ income.

Many freelance journalists earn less than the minimum wage.
ESB / Shutterstock

Instead, we found that day-to-day earning potential is more adversely impacted by the inconsistent, and often predatory, business practices of press publishers. These are often the very same entities that outsource journalism to freelancers to begin with.

For example, we found that freelancers consider contracts – one of the most important legal safeguards – to be increasingly rare. Sixty-five per cent of freelancers have worked with informal contracts, ranging from WhatsApp messages and emails to “back of the envelope” agreements. More worryingly, we found that 40% have worked without any contract at all if none were offered at the outset of the commission.

Even where journalists did sign a contract, it’s hard to sell this as a positive development. As commissioners continue to view freelancing as a buyer’s market, a freelancer’s lack of bargaining power usually results in (unfavourable) terms being offered on an agree or walk away basis.

One respondent described these as “almost zero-hour contracts that provide no stability for the future or families”. Problematic clauses range from payment only upon publication, to ongoing stagnation of rates, late payment and the decline of “kill fees” (payment for stories that are not, in the end, published).

Long-term earning potential is also seriously curtailed in the race to rights grab, with almost half (47%) of freelancers signing away their copyright to press publishers upon publication. As a result, freelancers lose the capacity for future earnings through royalties or licensing fees for republications or adaptations of their work.

Who can be a journalist today?

Inevitably, the result of an unlivable baseline income and tenuous working conditions is that there are limitations on who actually gets to be a freelance journalist. Our findings indicate that freelancers need to rely on other sources of income, either from another job or from a partner to support their career.

This has created an expectation in the industry that everyone has an additional income, resulting in the “crowding out” of marginalised demographic groups. For example, we found that almost two thirds (63%) of respondents come from a background associated with the highest levels of social and economic privilege – compared to 23.5% in the general UK population.

This suggests that the income trajectory and diversity of the profession are closely intertwined: freelancers need to be able to “pay to play”.

Our research unequivocally calls for the support of sustainable, quality journalism with a view to supporting the future of democratic societies. We suggest that the high value of journalism should translate to – at the very least – a liveable wage.

But right now, the lack of regulatory oversight in the profession and disproportionate levels of bargaining power place the sustainability of freelancing at serious risk. Läs mer…

Lawyers often tell their clients that “principles cost money”. As actor Hugh Grant’s decision to settle his privacy claim against News Group Newspapers (NGN) shows, sometimes principles just cost too much.

Grant announced he had reluctantly accepted an “enormous sum of money” to settle his claim against the Murdoch-owned NGN, the publisher of The Sun. He has accused the publisher of “phone hacking, unlawful information gathering” and “landline tapping” among other allegations, which they have denied.

The actor made clear that he would have preferred to go to trial, but felt that he had to accept the settlement because of civil litigation rules. If he took the case to trial, he risked being ordered to pay NGN’s legal costs, which his lawyers advised could exceed £10 million.

This is because of one part of the civil procedure rules, which govern the conduct of civil disputes in England and Wales.

Part 36 of the civil procedure rules is designed to create a financial incentive for either party in litigation to accept reasonable settlement offers made in civil disputes, rather than proceeding to trial. The rules require the courts, in almost all circumstances, to financially penalise a party that does not accept what retrospectively proves to be a reasonable offer.

In Grant’s case, this meant that, if he had won at trial and the court had awarded damages that were even a penny less than the settlement offer, he would have been ordered to pay the majority of the legal costs of both sides.

It does not matter by how much the settlement offer exceeds the court’s order at trial. The claimant can be ordered to pay the defendant’s legal costs from shortly after the offer was made, plus interest.

If no Part 36 settlement offer is made, the usual outcome in a civil trial would be for the loser to pay the winner’s legal costs. In most cases, a claimant would be happy to receive a huge sum of money in settlement, and would prefer that than risk going to trial.

Part 36 of the litigation rules – which, again, is designed to incentivise a claimant to accept a settlement – puts the claimant in jeopardy if they decide to continue with the case after being offered a settlement. Even if they are successful, they could be ordered to pay a very large amount of costs, potentially exceeding any damages they receive.

What is a trial worth?

If a claimant’s primary motivation for pursuing a case is to recover a financial loss caused by the defendant, then both parties will benefit from a settlement.

They avoid the costs, stress and delay of a trial, and the court service is better able to cope with the high volume of other cases in the system.

However, in cases where a claimant is seeking a court order as vindication or to expose misconduct through a trial, then it starts to look like the civil litigation rules are hampering access to justice.

Grant is a wealthy actor, he doesn’t need the money he would have received in damages. It is clear from Grant’s statements that his motivation was to hold NGN to account for unlawful information gathering.

The suggestion from Grant, as well as other former claimants against NGN, is that the company is using its deep pockets to avoid its senior executives being required to give witness evidence, and to protect against adverse court orders that would be publicly available.

Holding companies to account

There is arguably a balance to be struck between the individualistic view of this case as just an issue between one person and a media company, and the wider public interest angle: that it should be possible to use the court system to hold big companies to account.

There has always been an element of bigger companies using their deep pockets in litigation, but this rule adds another layer of protection for those that can afford to make a generous offer.

The Me Too movement has led to more public understanding in recent years that confidential settlements can be used inappropriately to stifle the investigation of poor conduct or criminality.

Read more:
Non-disclosure agreements are commonplace in sexual harassment cases, but they’re being misused to silence people

There is clearly a public interest in exposure of wrongdoing, as well as a need to protect vulnerable people. Perhaps it is time to consider whether different settlement rules are necessary for a category of cases such as this, in which the value of the case is not defined solely by its monetary value.

This would not be straightforward, but worth considering if our court system is to truly offer access to justice against all defendants, no matter their wealth or fame. Läs mer…

The English language left its borders of origin in Britain long ago. It has been exported throughout the world through colonisation, travel and media.

This process has created not one English, spoken around the globe, but many Englishes. There are native speaker varieties, such as British, American or Australian English, but also multiple versions spoken by non-native speakers, such as Indian, Ghanaian and Singaporean English. In fact, the majority of people who speak English are non-native speakers.

In India, English is spoken by around 125 million people, according to the last available data from the 2011 census. Indian English has its own grammatical constructions, such as “I am having a house”, and its own words, such as “prepone”, meaning to bring a meeting forward.

We can’t expect any language to remain the same in terms of grammar and vocabulary across a single country, let alone when it spreads internationally. And we can’t declare international varieties “wrong” on the mere basis that they differ from native speaker English, the standard variety in particular.

This has implications for universities that teach in English, and may have many non-native English speakers as students. Our view is that an increased sensitivity to linguistic difference and awareness of the patterns of world Englishes will help to dissolve the notion that non-standard usage is of necessity mistaken. Universities and lecturers should consider what their approach should be to marking work written in non-native or non-standard varieties of English.

Hierarchies of English

Standard native speaker Englishes, whether British, American or other native speaker varieties, tend to receive the most support and respect. They have associations with government, education and other official contexts.

For some, native speaker English is still seen as the “correct” variety, with native speakers seen as holding sole authority on how the language should be spoken. Even within England, regional dialects may be seen as inferior to “standard” English.

This does not, of course, mean that a student cannot demonstrate understanding and engagement with a topic if they use a non-standard or non-native variety of English.

International students may use a World English in their written work.
fizkes/Shutterstock

In our current research, we focus on a specific world English – China English. We’re trying to find out whether what might seem like errors in student work are actually the use of this world English.

While based on standard English, China English has its own specific and identifiable use of grammar and vocabulary, which is predictable and systematic. One example is the tendency to omit pronouns: “miss you a lot” rather than “I miss you a lot”. China English has its own expressions, such as “paper tiger”, meaning something that appears powerful but is in fact weak.

This predictability distinguishes China English from “Chinglish”, which refers to translation errors from a Chinese language (usually Mandarin) into English. The errors can reflect ungrammatical constructions such as “please do not climbing”, or they can be grammatical but semantically unclear, such as “slip carefully”. These errors can be random and unpredictable, unlike the systematic nature of China English.

We’ve found that grammatical forms such as “researches” appear with great frequency in students’ writing: in China English, you can have one piece of research and two researches, unlike standard English in which research is a non-count word. Our students use China English expressions such as “mute English”, referring to the phenomenon of students whose study of English has focused on grammar and written elements, to the detriment of their ability to speak and hold conversations comfortably in the language.

Often, international students take courses in English at their universities in the UK. Lecturers may well teach them some aspects of the dialect local to the university’s region. It would be valuable to also recognise that the students may already have learnt an English which varies from what is perceived as standard.

The assessment practices of universities tend to be underpinned by this standardised notion of language. But ignoring the global reality – and plurality – of the English language is impractical, when thousands of overseas students will bring their Englishes with them to university.

One way forward here is through thinking about how patterns of language are perceived, encouraged, and assessed. Lecturers can focus on the content of students’ writing, not the expression, so that if the expression is understood, this is the bottom line. This is not about standards slipping, but accepting the reality of what might be a perfectly grammatical sentence in another variety of English.

We don’t suggest allowing for a linguistic free for all, or that educators need to become familiar with all varieties of English. But we do argue that it’s high time we addressed linguistic equality and diversity when using a language that has many “correct” forms. Läs mer…

Across the country, Canadians are worried as they look ahead to summer. Forest fires in British Columbia are expected to begin earlier and last longer this year and severe multi-year droughts are forecast for the Prairies.

Other Canadians are also bracing themselves for — or are already experiencing — extreme flood conditions.

In the lead-up to the federal government’s 2024 budget, there was hope for investments in water management and water-related infrastructure to help address some of these issues. However, as we examine the 2024 budget — with a particular focus on the key issues of drought, floods and water supply — we found that, unfortunately, most of these hopes have been misplaced.

Fires and droughts

The budget is light on details — and critical infrastructure investments — regarding the management of fires and droughts.

Some provinces are attempting to address the issues. But there’s a lack of consensus on the validity of their approaches.

Alberta, for example, wants to consider the transfer of water from one basin to another, though there is uncertainty about the implications, especially the impact on aquatic ecosystem health.

There are also discussions in Alberta about building new large-scale water storage systems that would build storage capacity and could help address water access during low-flow conditions. But they are often politically contentious and have many social and environmental impacts that need to be weighed during the decision-making process.

While such infrastructure is vitally important in western Canada, there is no commitment to evaluating or building any of these types of systems found within the 2024 budget. Given the recurring jurisdictional spats between Ottawa and the provinces over water management issues, this lack of commitment to large-scale infrastructure is perhaps unsurprising. That doesn’t make it any less disappointing.

Fire crews watch a water plane spray a wildfire near Biggar, Sask., in April 2019.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Kayle Neis

Focus on emergency management

In contrast to Ottawa’s actions, Alberta recently dedicated funds in its provincial budget to address the urgent threat of a looming drought. This included $125 million over five years to help communities handle drought and flooding impacts, though how such a small pot of funds will be equitably distributed remains to be seen.

On the topic of fires, while the federal government acknowledged in early April the looming destructive wildfire season, the budget is focused exclusively on emergency management and firefighter training. While it’s important to prepare, such a focus ignores an arguably more pressing problem — the lack of infrastructure required to provide the water for firefighting.

Read more:
Why Canada needs to dramatically update how it prepares for and manages emergencies

Significant potable water is needed for domestic firefighting purposes, but untreated water sources are even more critical to battling forest fires. Without sufficient water levels, firefighting becomes even more challenging.

Regardless, the 2024 budget looks unlikely to drastically improve the situation, and droughts and fires are probably going to keep getting worse in the years to come.

Floods

Unfortunately, the 2024 budget also failed to invest in critical flood control and resiliency infrastructure for communities that are frequently exposed to seasonal flooding.

It did, however, propose almost $7 million over five years for the Meteorological Service of Canada’s early warning system for extreme weather events, with a focus on floods and storm surges.

These are important investments since the costs of weather and climate-related damage are increasing significantly. It’s estimated that insured losses in Canada exceeded $3.1 billion in 2023.

Additionally, the initiation of a national flood insurance program to the tune of $15 million is a welcome investment. However, this type of policy approach doesn’t address the root causes that result in the occurrence of floods; rather, it focuses on paying out for damages after the floods have happened.

Ultimately, what is perhaps most striking about the issue of floods in the 2024 budget is how little attention they received and how much of it may be buried under housing-related budget measures.

An abandoned car in a mall parking lot is seen in floodwater following a major rain event in Halifax in July 2023.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darren Calabrese

Housing and wastewater

The third major water-related aspect we examined in the 2024 budget concerned housing and water management in the built environment.

There were many welcome references in the budget about the need to invest in urban storm water and wastewater infrastructure.

This is definitely an important component in dealing with rapid growth and housing affordability issues in Canadian cities, but it will be critical for infrastructure investments to go beyond the status quo and incorporate novel storm-water systems and green infrastructure. Hopefully this funding can be used to improve aging storm water infrastructure across the country as cities increase in density.

There have been investments in water in recent budgets.

A year ago, during a visit by U.S. President Joe Biden and tied to the 2023 budget, Canada committed $650 million over 10 years to protect the Fraser River, the Mackenzie River, Lake Winnipeg, the Lake of the Woods, Lake Simcoe, the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes. Previous budgets have invested in water management through green infrastructure investments that have included the rehabilitation of storm-water systems and the restoration of wetlands.

But sustained investments are needed to both protect and preserve water systems and adequately prepare cities and communities for extreme weather events through improved resiliency.

A rainbow over where the Fraser and Thompson Rivers meet in Lytton, B.C., in October 2023.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Marissa Tiel

What still needs to be done

In the end, this budget did little to address the concerns many Canadians have about climate-related impacts and water security.

To keep communities across the country safe, more investments into water-related infrastructure and — more importantly — ambitious policy development are critical to ensure the health and well-being of all Canadians.

There must be investments in sustainable water-use programs and timely water measurements. Canada also urgently requires a registry of water rights and standards for water accounting that inform transparent decision-making — similar to the National Water Initiative in Australia.

Read more:
Australia, it’s time to talk about our water emergency

These investments are an essential step in allowing us to begin triaging the most important climate-related impacts to infrastructure before it’s too late the most important climate-related impacts to infrastructure over the coming decades.

The above being said, infrastructure alone won’t solve the complex issues of climate-related water management. Long-term water sustainability requires innovative policy approaches aimed at addressing inequity.

This includes a shift in how we approach water governance from a system of individual water ownership and licensing, as is the case in some provinces, to a more collective approach.

Substantial investments, alongside innovative policy discussions — perhaps guided by the new Canada Water Agency — are extremely important but noticeably absent from the federal budget. This must change if we are to get serious about Canada’s long-term water security. Läs mer…

More than 960 million Indians will head to the polls in the world’s biggest election between April 19 and early June. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which is led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, is seeking a third term in office. And the polls suggest it will achieve this objective.

If one was to go by economic growth figures alone, the Modi government’s performance has been impressive. When Modi came to power in 2014, economic growth was sluggish. A series of high-profile corruption cases led to a loss of investor confidence in the Indian economy.

But between 2014 and 2022, India’s gross domestic product (GDP) per capita (a measure of income per head) rose from US$5,000 (£4,000) to over US$7,000 – an increase of roughly 40% in eight years. These calculations use purchasing power parity, a way of comparing general purchasing power over time and between countries.

This growth occurred in spite of an ill-advised attempt early on in Modi’s first term to take ₹500 (£4.80) and ₹1000 (£9.60) notes out of circulation. Scrapping the notes led to an acute cash shortage, slowing the growth in per capita GDP from 6.98% in 2016 to 5.56% in 2017.

According to the International Monetary Fund, India’s economy is projected to grow at a rate of 6.5% in 2024. That is higher than China’s projected growth of 4.6%, and exceeds that of any other large economy. The UK’s economy, for example, is expected to grow by 0.6% in 2024.

However, recent estimates also suggest that inequality in India is at an all-time high. Growth, when it has occurred, has seemingly been unequal. A key challenge facing the Modi government in its next term will be to convert higher growth into productive jobs while also curbing the excess wealth of India’s economic and political elites.

All smoke and mirrors?

India’s economic performance is hard to assess as the government has not published official data on poverty and employment since 2011. This has led analysts to use alternate data sources that are not as reliable as the large and nationally representative consumption and employment surveys of the Indian government’s statistical agency.

As a consequence, one gets wildly varying estimates of poverty. Less than two months before the elections, the Indian government released a factsheet that suggests poverty in India had fallen to a historic low in 2022.

The results were based on a large consumption survey carried out by the Indian government. But the actual data behind the government’s estimates was not released for independent analysis.

The lack of transparency with data has led to a situation where no one really knows what the true estimates of poverty and inequality are. This is a sorry state for a country known for its pioneering household surveys that in the past were far ahead of their time.

Government data now says that India has eliminated extreme poverty.
Sheldon Maxwell / Shutterstock

The new welfarism

In its second term, the Modi government placed greater emphasis on delivering public goods and social welfare programmes in a less corrupt manner. This saw the launch of a massive rural road construction programme and the enrolment of roughly 99% of Indian adults in Aadhaar, a digital ID system linked to fingerprints and iris scans.

The Aadhaar rollout, in particular, has allowed national and state governments to distribute benefits to the poor directly through their Aadhaar-linked bank accounts. It has also helped to curb leakage in the delivery of subsidies to poor households, which has long been the bane of India’s welfare delivery.

Essential goods such as toilets and cooking cylinders, which are normally privately provisioned, were supplied in large numbers by the government. This led to what Indian economist and the former Chief Economic Advisor to the government, Arvind Subramanian, called “New Welfarism” in India.

The delivery of welfare programmes occurred most rapidly during the pandemic. For example, the government’s food subsidy bill increased by nearly five times between 2019–2020 and 2021–2022, ensuring people were able to access affordable food grains.

There have been other areas of success too. The proportion of Indian villages with access to electricity climbed from 88% in 2014 to 99.6% in 2020. And 71.1% of people in India now own an account at a financial institution, up from 48.3% in 2014.

These massive transfers of cash, along with the greater provision of goods and services to India’s poor, have led to the BJP enjoying increased popularity among marginalised groups. Historically, these groups have tended to vote for the opposition Congress Party.

The lack of good jobs

The Modi government has grown India’s economy. But it has not been as successful in creating productive jobs for the large proportion of India’s labour force who are unskilled and poor.

Around 40% of workers remain in agriculture, and only about 20% work in manufacturing jobs or business services such as IT. Pre-poll surveys suggest that increasing unemployment and inflation are sources of concern for many voters.

The weak record of the Modi government in creating jobs is surprising given that it has floated many initiatives to kickstart manufacturing. The Make in India programme, which was launched as soon as Modi came to power in 2014, aimed to reduce the costs of doing business in India.

This was followed by the more recent production-linked incentive scheme in November 2023. The scheme offered US$24 billion in industrial incentives to boost domestic production in key manufacturing sectors from electronic products to drones. However, manufacturing’s share of output remained the same in 2022 as it was when Modi first took office.

The number of Indians working on farms has swelled by around 60 million over the past four years.
Majority World CIC / Alamy Stock Photo

For India to emulate the labour-intensive industrialisation success of China, deeper structural reforms are needed in the country’s product, labour and credit markets. But this will be politically difficult to do as it involves taking on India’s powerful conglomerates and trade unions.

As the Modi government seeks a third term in office, a key challenge that lies ahead is creating productive jobs outside of agriculture for the country’s increasingly educated and aspirational youth. Läs mer…

The National Health Service (NHS) in England has long enjoyed high levels of popular support and trust. This was heightened during the COVID-19 pandemic, as people across the nation stood in the streets at the same time every week to clap for the NHS.

The culmination was when a 99-year-old retired army officer, Captain (later Sir) Thomas Moore, began fundraising for the NHS by walking around his garden. He eventually raised an estimated £38 million in public donations.

Yet, since the peak of the pandemic, the difficulties facing the NHS have been laid bare. Waiting times in accident and emergency and referral times for specialist treatment remain staggeringly high.

As researchers on trust, this led us to a question: do high waiting times mean people trust the NHS less? Trust is hugely important to society, as it tells us so much about people’s faith in the integrity of institutions.

We put this to the test. In monthly samples of approximately 500 respondents from July 2022 to July 2023, we looked at trust in major British political and public institutions such as parliament, the police, and the NHS. The NHS had the highest levels of support by far. On a seven-point scale, trust in the NHS was a full two points higher than trust in parliament.

One might say that trust in parliament is low because the public views the institution as having major performance problems. Polls show more than half of those surveyed believe parliament does not reflect the “full range of people and views of the British electorate”, and a majority of respondents also state that the Westminster parliament does either a “fairly bad” or a “very bad” job in holding the government of the day to account.

But the same does not appear to be true for the NHS. Higher waiting times, a strong indicator that the system is not functioning at its best, do not make people in England trust the NHS less, even though they may at some point be required to trust the NHS with their life.

Identifying with the NHS

Public administration specialists find that a person’s familiarity with an organisation such as the NHS, and whether they “identify” with its mission, can be as important as performance in determining whether they trust it.

Virtually every voter has had an experience with the NHS, and our research elsewhere finds deep sympathy with its employees, who are judged to be underpaid. Further polling during the service’s 75th anniversary found “the health service makes more people proud to be British than our history, our culture, our system of democracy or the royal family”.

Conservative politician Nigel Lawson once said “the NHS is the closest thing the English people have now to a religion”. So it’s clear that people do identify with the NHS. Voters also do not seem at all willing to abandon the faith of “free at the point of use” nationalised healthcare. Rather, citizens largely want a government that will fix their trusted institution.

Work by polling company Survation shows that for the NHS, voters do prioritise “reducing waiting times for NHS operations and procedures” and “making it easier to get GP appointments” – but they also don’t seem to think NHS staff are responsible. The same poll showed fewer than 10% of respondents believe that a priority for the NHS should be “reducing waste and creating efficiencies in NHS services”.

There is little sign, therefore, of the public being responsive to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s contentious claims that the NHS waiting times and other woes are at least partially related to industrial action.

Feelings run high.
Shutterstock/John Gomez

It is likely that voters will punish the Conservatives for their poor performance on managing the NHS in the upcoming election. But that doesn’t mean Labour will get a free pass. Voters want the next government to sort things out – but the solutions to NHS problems are increasingly complex. Läs mer…

If you’ve ever gone through a friendship breakup you aren’t alone – one study from the US found 86% of teenagers had experienced one.

Though we tend to think of bad breakups as the end of romantic relationships, losing a friend – especially one who has been close to you – can be just as hard.

In a recent session of a personal development group I run, several participants in their 20s and 30s got talking about being dumped by a friend. They were struck by how similarly the “breakup” had happened. Most thought things were okay, then received a long text in which the friend explained they were unhappy and wanted no further contract.

Many reacted as you might expect. “How did I not see this coming?” “How could my friend just end it?” They also said things like: “Why do I feel so devastated, when it’s not like they’re my life partner or anything?” “How can I talk about how bad this feels – or get support when people will probably think I’m overreacting?”

Research into attachment can help us make sense of why a friendship breakup can be devastating.

As children, our most important relationships are with our parents or caregivers. But during adolescence this changes.

This is part of our genetic design, readying us to grow up and build adult lives independent of our parents. We shift the person we most trust, rely on, and seek intimate contact with, to someone who is a romantic partner – or a best friend.

A bond with a friend – your companion, confidante and co-traveler through big changes as you enter adulthood – can be stronger than any other bond. Women in particular tend to discuss personal issues with friends more than they do with family.

As a psychotherapist, I often hear clients describe how friends provide ongoing stability even when romantic relationships might come and go. Having a best friend is an important part of healthy development.

This article is part of Quarter Life, a series about issues affecting those of us in our 20s and 30s. From the challenges of beginning a career and taking care of our mental health, to the excitement of starting a family, adopting a pet or just making friends as an adult. The articles in this series explore the questions and bring answers as we navigate this turbulent period of life.

You may be interested in:

Loneliness is a major public health problem – and young people are bearing the brunt of it

Why losing a parent when you’re a young adult is so hard

Dating someone with a different mother tongue? Learning each other’s language will enrich your relationship

So it’s no wonder that it can rock your world if things go wrong with that person. It can be especially disorienting if you didn’t see it coming. Research shows that the most common method of ending a friendship is by avoidance – not addressing the issues involved.

This can be a shock, and the feeling of being rejected can hurt as much as physical pain. It can knock your confidence, especially if you don’t understand what went wrong.

Why friendships break up

The biggest reasons for friendships ending in young adulthood are physical separation, making new friends which replace old ones, growing to dislike the friend and interference due to dating or marriage.

A serious romantic relationship or starting a family means the time and focus given to the friendship will naturally decrease. And, if one of you is still single, that person might feel left out, jealous and threatened.

Friendships don’t have to end over changes like this, if you can try to empathise with what your friend is going through rather than judging them or taking it personally. Talking with your friend about what’s different and how you’re affected can normalise the feelings you might be experiencing.

By talking, you can also reassure each other of your commitment to the friendship – even if you need to adjust how you spend time together. Giving a friendship space to grow, change, go through rough patches, but still come together again, can strengthen your bond and allow it to continue through many years of tumultuous life events. Long friendships will naturally go through fluctuations, so it’s normal if sometimes you feel closer and other times further apart.

Try talking it out with your friend if you can.
wavebreakmedia/ Shutterstock

But what if you’ve tried discussing things with your friend but they don’t want to talk with you? This can cause your feelings of closeness to suffer.

Even worse, the friend could try to make you feel bad about yourself – guilt-tripping you for developing other relationships or interests. Such an absence of mutual respect and support signals that a healthy way of relating is over. This is when it’s best to let that friendship go. In such circumstances it can be a relief to end your involvement with that person.

How to cope

If a friendship does break up, you might experience the kind of distress associated with romantic breakups, such as symptoms of depression, anxiety and rumination (thinking a lot about the situation). Waves of painful feelings are normal. These will decrease over time.

You can help yourself get through such waves by practising diaphragmatic breathing, which is evidenced to reduce stress. This is an easy technique you can do by yourself anywhere and at any time. Place a hand at the base of your ribs, and breathe in towards that hand, feeling it rise against your belly with each in-breath. Breathe in for three counts, and out for seven. Keep repeating until you feel calmer.

Discussing the situation with someone else can help, and might allow you to see what you can learn from it. Or try journalling to freely express your thoughts and feelings, which can stimulate positive emotions and help you gradually come to terms with the situation.

When coping with any type of breakup, traits of resilience (optimism, self-esteem and grit) will help you adapt. You can build these by reminding yourself that there are many wonderful people you can make new friends with, that you are a worthwhile person for someone to have as their friend and by actively putting effort into nourishing other friendships in your life. Läs mer…

In 1999, during the opening verse to Hate Me Now, Nas positioned himself as the “most critically acclaimed, Pulitzer prize” winning “thug narrator” of his generation. At the time, these lines were seen as just another gem in a long line of highly sophisticated, literary Nas lyrics.

But flash forward almost two decades to 2018, and this once seemingly unfathomable accolade for an artist of the rap genre became a reality for fellow rapper and musical pioneer Kendrick Lamar. In many ways a verbal successor to Nas, Lamar controversially won an actual Pulitzer prize for music. Lamar had picked up the mantle of Nas’s approach to using innovative literary devices in his lyrics.

Like Lamar, Nas is as highly esteemed in the street as he is in academic circles. Rappers and hip hop scholars alike often note the educational, social and political impact of Nas’s work as a contemporary urban storyteller, black public intellectual and cultural spokesperson.

But less is said about his use of literature, and literary techniques to open up avenues of discussion on communal and individual forms of trauma and vulnerability. Nas’s use of these techniques have paved the way for generations of his fellow rap peers to express themselves – often with brutal honesty – for cathartic purposes.

As his nihilistic and visionary “reality storybook” album, Illmatic, turns 30, I ask: who has done more to open doors to self-expression in the hyper-masculine world of rap than Nasir Jones?

One Love breaks new ground

Perhaps this is most clearly demonstrated at the inception of Nas’s career. The Illmatic track One Love (1994) introduced the “epistolary narrative”, or written letter technique, to the rap genre. This literary device had been previously employed by African American creative writing giant Alice Walker for her novel The Color Purple, a book Nas has referred to several times throughout his career.

As journalist, educator and author Dax-Devlon Ross explains, One Love contains “a series of prison letters set to song”, which “effectively began the epistolary sub-genre” of rap.

The music video for One Love by Nas.

This rapidly led to a ripple effect on the technique’s use by rap’s upper echelons. Notable advocates of the technique include one-time rival of Nas, Tupac Shakur, releasing Dear Mama a year after One Love. Jay-Z (another one-time rival) also used the form in Do U Wanna Ride (2006), his own tribute to an imprisoned comrade.

But as critics have gone on to highlight, One Love is deeply personal. It articulates the wide spread forms of trauma in black communities in the US, which at the time was undeniably groundbreaking.

Writing in Born to Use Mics: Reading Nas’s Illmatic, professor of African American Studies Sohail Daulatzai notes how One Love tapped directly into the “carceral imagination” of young American black males at time of its release. This concept relates to a communal way of thinking overwhelmed by the looming prospect of imprisonment that is still relevant today.

While chances of incarceration for black people have dropped post millennia, modern statistics still point to a one in five chance of incarceration for African Americans born after 2001.

Illmatic’s legacy

The overwhelmingly personal and vulnerable nature of songs from Illmatic such as One Love enabled many rap artists to foster a new set of literary tools in their own attempts at illustrating often comparable experiences.

Take West Coast MC Xzibit’s The Foundation (1996) for example. Released two years after One Love, Xzibit utilised rap’s newly established epistolary sub-genre to pen an emotive open letter to his young son. The Foundation addresses themes prevalent in the male African American experience, such as lineage, loyalty, masculinity and the paternal bond.

Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst carries Nas’s mantle.

In recent times, artists are still using the song letter, penning songs such as Kendrick Lamar’s Sing About Me, I’m Dying of Thirst (2012) to elucidate important societal issues in black America.

In the track, Lamar incorporates elements of the epistolary technique to channel the personas of several different characters, in order to capture a range of social and psychological issues relating to his nation.

Nas today

In recent years, Nas has reached a purple patch of creativity, and released a flourish of well received albums, including both the King’s Disease (2020) and the Magic series. This new artistic surge towards the latter stages of his career has again benefited his peers, providing hope for artists over 40 that rap is still a legitimate art form they can engage with.

Considering his achievements, I’ve often wondered at Nas’s lack of canonical status as poet of the modern ages. Is this mainly due to a long-term hierarchy that has stigmatised rap as less valuable than literature? Or, is this more related to Nas’s own humility? When brought into the running of “top five dead or alive” rap debates, Nas is often quick to deflect from comparison, stating that there “ain’t no best”.

Rap can be a force for healing, and a balm for both collective and individual trauma. As Nas said himself in 2022: “I probably don’t need a therapist because I have music.” It’s hard to think of another rapper of his generation who has opened up so many doors for the artform.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here. Läs mer…