The 2020 Network

“Progressives build things that last.” In the next of our series of highlight sessions from the 2023 Global Progress Action Summit, Mark Carney (United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, Former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, and Advisory Board Chair for Canada 2020) speaks about the closing the gap between what people value and what markets value, and ho...

Foreign policy might not win elections, but it shapes domestic politics – and the world. Recent months have seen external affairs intersect with internal affairs, hitting the headlines and shaping the country’s agenda. Foreign electoral interference has been top of mind for quite some time. India’s alleged assassination of a Canadian on Canadian soil grabbed even more attention. Then, during an ad...

In a decade that has already faced unprecedented economic, health, and environmental crises, there’s never been a more important time for progressives leaders to be coming together to share bold new ideas for building a better future. In this featured session of the 2023 Global Progress Action Summit, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Jonas Gahr Støre (Prime Minister of Norway), Jacinda Ardern (forme...

In June, Olivia Chow was elected mayor of Toronto. She faces an all-too-often complacent city with a hefty budget shortfall and a series of longstanding policy challenges, and failures. Affordable housing, transit, public safety, taxes, and parks spring to mind, but there’s plenty more.  Chow’s performance may be evaluated on its own merits or demerits and against her predecessor’s; but her time a...

Canada’s housing crisis is persistent and brutal. In August, the average rent was nearly $2,100 a month – and much higher in cities including Vancouver and Toronto. The average cost to buy a home was about $670,000 – and, again, much higher in Vancouver, at $1.2 million, and Toronto at $1.1 million. The Canada Mortgage Housing Corporation says the country must build 5.8 million units by 2030 to hi...

In June, this year became the worst wildfire season in Canadian history. Fires burned throughout the country. And there’s almost surely more to come. So far, over 10 million hectares have burned, sending toxic smoke from province to province and into the United States, where tens of millions of people were put under air quality advisories. The smoke caused some of the worst – on some days the wors...

On April 19 in Ottawa, Canada 2020 hosted our first Net-zero Leadership Summit, a gathering of leading experts and innovators from across Canada and beyond to explore the challenges and opportunities of achieving a net-zero economy. In the final of our series of highlight conversations from this summit, we hear from Heather Chalmers (CEO of GE Canada), as well as Heather, Ben Greenhouse (CEO of Po...

On April 19 in Ottawa, Canada 2020 hosted our first Net-zero Leadership Summit, a gathering of leading experts and innovators from across Canada and beyond to explore the challenges and opportunities of achieving a net-zero economy. As we undergo shared global health and environmental challenges, along with major geopolitical and economic shifts, we must look to how markets, governments, and peopl...

On April 19 in Ottawa, Canada 2020 hosted our first Net-zero Leadership Summit, a gathering of leading experts and innovators from across Canada and beyond to explore the challenges and opportunities of achieving a net-zero economy. As we undergo shared global health and environmental challenges, along with major geopolitical and economic shifts, we must look to how markets, governments, and peopl...

On April 19 in Ottawa, Canada 2020 hosted our first Net-zero Leadership Summit, a gathering of leading experts and innovators from across Canada and beyond to explore the challenges and opportunities of achieving a net-zero economy. As we undergo shared global health and environmental challenges, along with major geopolitical and economic shifts, we must look to how markets, governments, and peopl...

The United States of America is a polarized country marked by toxic partisan politics. The state of American politics comes from somewhere. And it might have been otherwise. It has been shaped by powerful interests, technologies, and contingent forces. One of those – one of the most important – is cable television.   A new book traces the history of cable television and the changing political and...

There are all kinds of euphemisms for fat bodies. They capture and obscure a persistent social discomfort and prejudice that appears across fields and settings, from pop culture, to airlines, to medicine and beyond. Weight is also a marker for constant abuse, online and offline. When it comes to weight, we have normalized prejudice, moral panic, and shaming, even as we have made such treatment soc...

For years, private interests have encroached upon public spaces. As time goes on, there are fewer and fewer places that belong to each of us regardless of our socioeconomic status–places where we can congregate or simply exist without needing to bend to the will of the market or worry about being surveilled.  But what if our cities themselves were to fall to privatization? Imagine a city run, for...

On May 16 in Ottawa, Canada 2020 hosted this year's edition of The Indigenous-led Economy, a summit on economic reconciliation. In this final episode of our three-part series highlighting important conversations from this gathering, Marc Miller (Minister of Crown–Indigenous Relations), Khelsilem (Chair, Squamish Nation Council), and Karen Restoule (Co-Founder, BOLD Realities; VP, Crestview Strateg...

Infrastructure, connectivity, and access to energy remain a significant barrier to quality of life in many Indigenous communities, with the net-zero transition presenting both urgent challenges and unprecedented opportunities. In a conversation featuring Hillary Thatcher (Managing Director, Indigenous and Northern Investments at Canadian Infrastructure Bank), Angel Ransom (Senior VP, Environmental...

On May 16 in Ottawa, Canada 2020 hosted another edition of The Indigenous-led Economy, a summit on economic reconciliation. When it comes to foundations for community and economic development, access to health care, crucial social supports, and education are no less relevant than infrastructure and investment. In a conversation featuring Patty Hajdu, Minister of Indigenous Services, Dr. Alika Lafo...

Last week in Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith and the United Conservative Party held on to government in a race that was much closer than the 49-38 seat count suggests. Indeed, a small shift in votes in a handful of ridings in Calgary would have tipped the contest in favour of the New Democratic Party. But that didn’t happen. NDP leader Rachel Notley says she will stay on as leader after losing to...

This is the first episode in our three-piece series on the past, present, and future of public spaces in Canada. In these episodes we’ll cover nature, cities, and big national undertakings – things we do, have done, or might do together in spaces meant for all of us. We’ll also discuss threats to public spaces, of which there are many, and what is being done to address them.  Now, nature is the ul...

We spend an awful lot of time talking about housing and development—and we should. But often lost in the conversation is how we manage rural land and housing. The vast majority of Canada is urbanized, but in case you were thinking what happens “out there” has nothing to do with you, think again. Rural areas are home to plenty of houses and residential developments of their own, but they are also t...

At Carleton University, a union local is fighting for a fair deal for its workers–and getting ready for a strike. Across Ontario and Canada, unionized workplaces are fighting similar battles, even while the balance of power continues to favour employers by default. Democratized workplaces produce better results for employees, and everyone down the line, too. Recent gains in Canada and the United S...

Like it or not, we are stuck online. Digital life is a reflection and extension of life offline–if we can even talk about life offline anymore. It’s not like the old days of logging on and logging off. We are constantly connected. Our social, political, and economic lives are bound up with the digital world. So is our public sphere. And much of that world is controlled by a handful of very wealthy...

On February 10 in Vancouver, BC, Canada 2020 and the Urban Land Institute of BC co-hosted a special event to discuss how we can face the economic challenges faced by all Canadians.  In a conversation featuring Mark Carney (former Governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance, and Canada 2020 Advisory Board Chair), Ken Sim (Mayor of Vancouve...

In Ontario, Premier Doug Ford is trying to address the province’s healthcare crisis. With over 200,000 people waiting for surgeries, long emergency room wait times, too few family physicians, and nurses burning out and leaving the profession, something must be done. But Ford’s plan is to introduce more for-profit care into the system. He calls it “innovation.” It’s been done in other provinces. It...

Canadians can be forgiven for making a national pastime out of expressing anger at the state of competition in the country. Telecom, grocery, transportation, entertainment, and several other industries are an utter, anti-consumer disaster. As I like to put it, Canada is made up of three telecom companies in a trenchcoat.  There may be some hope for change, however, as the country undertakes a revi...

Reconciliation with Indigenous peoples in Canada requires structural transformation. One essential site of institutional reform is the country’s legal systems.  In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada released 94 calls to action. In call to action #42, the TRC called upon “the federal, provincial, and territorial governments to commit to the recognition and implementation of Abo...