Canadians are battling rats for dominion over our urban centres. It’s time to take them back.
Last summer, rats were everywhere. At least, that’s how it felt where I live in downtown Toronto. After weeks of texts chronicling our rat encounters, my roommates and I started keeping a daily tally on a small chalkboard. The record? Six, all caught racing through a residential neighbourhood within half an hour. It wasn’t just us. Rats have been running wild all over the country—scampering across busy sidewalks, swimming in toilets, sometimes spilling right out of restaurant ceilings. At Maclean’s, we wanted to find out what was behind this rodent boom. The experts I interviewed for this feature pointed to a host of factors, including an uptick in construction, ongoing transit digs and rising urban densification, as well as escalating climate disasters, which can leave wreckage—a free-for-all rat buffet—scattered through residential areas. How do we take our cities back? Several companies are floating shiny new tech: rat birth control, smart rat traps, even solar-powered trash compactors. But rats are a notoriously complicated problem for any city to solve. No single fix will do the trick. Sometimes, in the evenings, I walk past piles of black plastic trash bags, leaking murky fluids next to overflowing plastic bins. As rat researcher Kaylee Byers told me, “We need to look in the mirror and realize that we largely provide the things rats need to survive: food, water, and a place for them to live.” Visit macleans.ca for more coverage of everything that matters in Canada, and subscribe to the magazine here. —Jadine Ngan, digital editor, Maclean’s |
Canada needs to build approximately 22 million new housing units by 2030—and materials from old construction sites could go toward that project. “Canada is a country of vast natural resources, and many of them are just sitting idle—or being blown to dust,” Meredith Moore writes in this essay for Maclean’s. Here’s why Moore thinks we need to do away with quick, destructive home demolition and make the most of salvaged materials instead. |
Back in January, with the U.S. president threatening massive tariffs, Canada’s provinces decided to defend themselves. For B.C. Premier David Eby, nothing was off the table—not export bans, not travel boycotts and certainly not retaliatory import tariffs, right down to Florida orange juice. Days before Trump’s inauguration, Maclean’s managing editor Katie Underwood spoke to Eby about this eye-for-an-eye economic approach. Read their conversation here. |
Generational change, culture shifts and labour activism will reshape workplaces, while slowing inflation, rising wages and a surge in side hustles will finally put a little more money in Canadians’ pockets. Here are the business stories that will dominate Canadian headlines in the upcoming year. |
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