The Access to Algorithmic Justice project (A2AJ) is an open-source alternative to the Canadian Legal Information Institute (CanLII). At a moment when technology promises to enable new ways of working with law, CanLII is becoming an impediment to the free access of law and access to justice movements because it restricts bulk and programmatic access to Canadian legal data. This means that Canada is staring down a digital divide: well-resourced actors have the best new technological tools and, because CanLII has disclaimed leadership, the public only gets second-rate tools. This article puts CanLII in its larger historical context and shows how long and deep efforts to democratize access to Canadian legal data are, and how often they are thwarted by private industry. We introduce the A2AJ's Canadian Legal Data project, which provides open access to over 116,000 court decisions and 5,000 statutes through multiple channels including APIs, machine learning datasets, and AI integration protocols. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate how open legal data enables courts to conduct evidence-based assessments and allows developers to create tools for practitioners serving low-income comm
The Photometric Observations of Exoplanet Transits (POET) is a proposed micro-satellite mission dedicated to the characterization and discovery of transiting exoplanets. POET has been identified as a top priority small-sat space mission in the Canadian Astronomy Long Range Plan 2020-2030. POET is being proposed as Canada's next astronomy space mission, with launch possible in late 2029. POET is an iteration on the designs of the Canadian MOST and NEOSSat space missions, which had 15 cm-sized telescopes and observed only in the visible band pass. POET will have a larger 20 cm telescope aperture and three band passes: near-ultraviolet (nUV; 300-400 nm), visible near-infrared (VNIR; 400-900 nm), and short-wavelength infrared (SWIR; 900-1700 nm). All mission components either already have significant space heritage or are seeing rapid adoption in commercial space missions. POET's simultaneous tri-band 300-1700 nm photometric monitoring will allow it to separate the impact of star spots on the transmission spectrum of extended atmospheres on super-Earth or larger exoplanets. POET's SWIR band is optimally sensitive to the emission peak of ultracool dwarf stars and would enable a systemat
Canada's research productivity in Library and Information Science (LIS) is significant: studies have found that Canada ranks third globally in terms of output. As the LIS field continues to grow, the pace of output accelerates, and the scope of this work expands. The recently launched Canadian Publications in Library and Information Science Database compiles all Canadian scientific publications, including those authored by faculty members and academic librarians. This database offers the advantage of encompassing articles and librarian publications that may not be typically included in traditional bibliometric surveys, such as those conducted using databases like Web of Science, Scopus, and Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA). Using this data, this study maps the scholarly contributions of Canadian LIS scholars and academic librarians to the field of LIS and examines whether Canadian LIS research is characterized by silos. This paper examines the similarities and differences in research output, impact, topics, and publication venues between academic librarians and scholars in Canada, as well as the extent to which academics and practitioners engage in research collabor
Harmful experiences such as harassment and discrimination continue to push many people out of science. To better understand identities and experiences of harm among physicists, we conducted Canadian Physics Counts, the first comprehensive national survey examining equity, diversity, and inclusion within Canada's physics community. To better understand identities and experiences of harm among physicists, we conducted Canadian Physics Counts, the first comprehensive national survey examining equity, diversity, and inclusion within Canada's physics community. We explored experiences of harm focusing on personal harassment, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. We measured both direct experiences of harm and awareness of harm happening to others. Our analyses revealed that women and gender-diverse physicists reported experiencing personal harassment at twice the rate of men, a pattern consistent across all academic positions, including students and early-career researchers. An intersectional focus revealed even deeper inequities. Black women and men reported the highest rates of personal harassment, while Indigenous women and men faced elevated levels of sexual harassment. Physicists
In this work we evaluate the performance of three classes of methods for detecting financial anomalies: topological data analysis (TDA), principal component analyis (PCA), and Neural Network-based approaches. We apply these methods to the TSX-60 data to identify major financial stress events in the Canadian stock market. We show how neural network-based methods (such as GlocalKD and One-Shot GIN(E)) and TDA methods achieve the strongest performance. The effectiveness of TDA in detecting financial anomalies suggests that global topological properties are meaningful in distinguishing financial stress events.
The search for neutrinoless double beta decay has internationally been recognized as the most promising approach to determine the Majorana nature of neutrinos. This hypothesized decay would, if observed, violate lepton number in weak interactions by two units, hence, prove the existence of physics beyond the Standard Model. Current experiments with sensitivity to neutrinoless double beta decay half lives of $10^{26}$ years did not observe such a decay and worldwide efforts are ongoing to deploy experiments with half-life sensitivities beyond $10^{28}$ years. Canadian groups have been involved in this search for more than four decades. This article summarizes the historical experimental efforts and describes current Canadian contributions to neutrinoless double beta decay searches and their theoretical interpretation.
Canada is internationally recognized for its leadership in science and its commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields. Despite this leadership, limited research has examined gender disparities in scientific publishing within the Canadian context. This study analyzes over 67,000 articles published in 24 Canadian Science Publishing (CSP) journals between 2010 and 2021 to better understand patterns of gender representation. Findings show that women accounted for less than one-third of published authors across CSP journals. Representation varied by discipline, with higher proportions of women in biomedical sciences and lower proportions of women in engineering - trends that mirror broader national and global patterns. Notably, the proportion of women submitting manuscripts closely matched those published, suggesting that broader workforce disparities may play a larger role than publication bias. Women were less likely to be solo authors or to hold prominent authorship positions, such as first or last author - roles typically associated with research leadership and career advancement. These findings point to the need
This paper examines how Canadian firms balance the benefits of technology adoption against the rising risk of cyber security breaches. We merge data from the 2021 Canadian Survey of Digital Technology and Internet Use and the 2021 Canadian Survey of Cyber Security and Cybercrime to investigate the trade-off firms face when pursuing digitalization to enhance productivity and efficiency, balanced against the potential increase in cyber security risk. The analysis explores the extent of digital technology adoption, differences across industries, the subsequent associations with efficiency, and associated cyber security vulnerabilities. We build aggregate variables, such as the Business Digital Usage Score and a cyber security incidence variable to quantify each firm's digital engagement and cyber security risk. A survey-weight-adjusted Lasso estimator is employed, and a debiasing method for high-dimensional logit models is introduced to identify the predictors of technological efficiency and cyber risk. The analysis reveals a digital divide linked to firm size, industry, and workforce composition. While rapid expansion of tools such as cloud services or artificial intelligence can rai
The aim of the Canadian publications in Library and Information Science (LIS) database is to help break down the silos in which the two main target audiences - LIS faculty members and academic librarians - conduct their research. As part of a larger project entitled "Breaking down research silos", we created a database of research contributions by Canadian LIS researchers (academics and practitioners). This was motivated by a desire to make research by Canadian LIS scholars and practitioners more visible and foster collaboration between these two groups. The aim of this paper is to introduce the database, describe the process through which it was created, provide descriptive statistics of the database content, and highlight areas for future development.
In celebration of the 2025 International Year of Quantum Science and Technology, this article highlights the pioneering achievements and ongoing innovations in quantum error correction and quantum error mitigation by Canadian institutions, academia and industry alike. Emphasizing Canada's central role in advancing these two related areas, we summarize landmark theoretical breakthroughs, cutting-edge experiments, and emerging techniques aimed at reducing and/or eliminating errors incurred when using a quantum computer. This community-focused overview underscores Canada's leadership in addressing the critical challenge of noise in quantum information science.
We employ a comprehensive data set and a variety of methods to provide evidence on the magnitude of large banks' funding advantage in Canada in addition to the extent to which market discipline exists across different securities issued by the Canadian banks. The banking sector in Canada provides a unique setting in which to examine market discipline along with the prospects of proposed reforms because Canada has no history of government bailouts, and an implicit government guarantee has been in effect consistently since the 1920s. We find that large banks have a funding advantage over small banks after controlling for bank-specific and market risk factors. Large banks on average pay 80 basis points and 70 basis points less, respectively, on their deposits and subordinated debt. Working with hand-collected market data on debt issues by large banks, we also find that market discipline exists for subordinated debt and not for senior debt.
The COVID-19 pandemic led to a large global effort to sequence SARS-CoV-2 genomes from patient samples to track viral evolution and inform public health response. Millions of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences have been deposited in global public repositories. The Canadian COVID-19 Genomics Network (CanCOGeN - VirusSeq), a consortium tasked with coordinating expanded sequencing of SARS-CoV-2 genomes across Canada early in the pandemic, created the Canadian VirusSeq Data Portal, with associated data pipelines and procedures, to support these efforts. The goal of VirusSeq was to allow open access to Canadian SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences and enhanced, standardized contextual data that were unavailable in other repositories and that meet FAIR standards (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable). The Portal data submission pipeline contains data quality checking procedures and appropriate acknowledgement of data generators that encourages collaboration. Here we also highlight Duotang, a web platform that presents genomic epidemiology and modeling analyses on circulating and emerging SARS-CoV-2 variants in Canada. Duotang presents dynamic changes in variant composition of SARS-CoV-2 in
In the search for political-economic tools for greenhouse gas mitigation, carbon pricing, which includes carbon tax and cap-and-trade, is implemented by many governments. However, the inflating food prices in carbon-pricing countries, such as Canada, have led many to believe such policies harm food affordability. This study aims to identify changes in food prices induced by carbon pricing using the case of Canadian provinces. Using the staggered difference-in-difference (DiD) approach, we find an overall deflationary effect of carbon pricing on food prices (measured by monthly provincial food CPI). The average reductions in food CPI compared to before carbon pricing are $2\%$ and $4\%$ within and beyond two years of implementation. We further find that the deflationary effects are partially driven by lower consumption with no significant change via farm input costs. Evidence in this paper suggests no inflationary effect of carbon pricing in Canadian provinces, thus giving no support to the growing voices against carbon pricing policies.
This paper formalises the Canadian Traveller problem as a positional two-player game on graphs. We consider two variants depending on whether an edge is blocked. In the locally-informed variant, the traveller learns if an edge is blocked upon reaching one of its endpoints, while in the uninformed variant, they discover this only when the edge is supposed to appear. We provide a polynomial algorithm for each shortest path variant in the uninformed case. This algorithm also solves the case of directed acyclic non-temporal graphs. In the locally-informed case, we prove that finding a winning strategy is PSPACE-complete. Moreover, we establish that the problem is polynomial-time solvable when $k=1$ but NP-hard for $k\geq 2$. Additionally, we show that the standard (non-temporal) Canadian Traveller Problem is NP-hard when there are $k\geq 4$ blocked edges, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first hardness result for CTP for a constant number of blocked edges.
Scholarly publishing involves multiple stakeholders having various types of interest. In Canada, the implication of universities, the presence of societies and the availability of governmental support for periodicals seem to have contributed to a rather diverse ecosystem of journals. This study presents in detail the current state of these journals, in addition to past trends and transformations during the 20th century and, in particular, the digital era. To this effect, we created a new dataset, including a total of 1256 journals, 944 of which appeared to be active today, specifically focusing on the supporting organizations behind the journals, the types of (open) access, disciplines, geographic origins, languages of publication and hosting platforms and tools. The main overarching traits across Canadian scholarly journals are an important presence of Diamond open access, which has been adopted by 62% of the journals, a predominance of the Social Sciences and Humanities disciplines and a scarce presence of the major commercial publishers. The digital era allowed for the development of open infrastructures, which contributed to the creation of a new generation of journals that mas
The Canadian Penning Trap mass spectrometer (CPT) has conducted precision mass measurements of neutron-rich nuclides from the CAlifornium Rare Isotope Breeder Upgrade (CARIBU) of the Argonne Tandem Linac Accelerator System (ATLAS) facility at Argonne National Laboratory using the Phase-Imaging Ion-Cyclotron-Resonance (PIICR) technique for over half a decade. Here we discuss the CPT system, and methods to improve accuracy and precision in mass measurement using PI-ICR including some optimization techniques and recently studied systematic effects.
The 2021 Canadian census is notable for using a unique form of privacy, random rounding, which independently and probabilistically rounds discrete numerical attribute values. In this work, we explore how hierarchical summative correlation between discrete variables allows for both probabilistic and exact solutions to attribute values in the 2021 Canadian Census disclosure. We demonstrate that, in some cases, it is possible to "unround" and extract the original private values before rounding, both in the presence and absence of provided population invariants. Using these methods, we expose the exact value of 624 previously private attributes in the 2021 Canadian census disclosure. We also infer the potential values of more than 1000 private attributes with a high probability of correctness. Finally, we propose how a simple solution based on unbounded discrete noise can effectively negate exact unrounding while maintaining high utility in the final product.
Monitoring land cover using remote sensing is vital for studying environmental changes and ensuring global food security through crop yield forecasting. Specifically, multitemporal remote sensing imagery provides relevant information about the dynamics of a scene, which has proven to lead to better land cover classification results. Nevertheless, few studies have benefited from high spatial and temporal resolution data due to the difficulty of accessing reliable, fine-grained and high-quality annotated samples to support their hypotheses. Therefore, we introduce a temporal patch-based dataset of Canadian croplands, enriched with labels retrieved from the Canadian Annual Crop Inventory. The dataset contains 78,536 manually verified high-resolution (10 m/pixel, 640 x 640 m) geo-referenced images from 10 crop classes collected over four crop production years (2017-2020) and five months (June-October). Each instance contains 12 spectral bands, an RGB image, and additional vegetation index bands. Individually, each category contains at least 4,800 images. Moreover, as a benchmark, we provide models and source code that allow a user to predict the crop class using a single image (ResNet,
The lack of diversity in physics remains a persistent worldwide problem. Despite being a quantitative discipline which relies on measurements to construct and validate hypotheses, there remains a paucity of data on both demographics and experiences of marginalized groups. In Canada, there has never been a nationwide assessment of those studying or working in physics. Here, we present findings from Canadian Physics Counts: the first national survey of equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) in the Canadian physics community. Our intersectional approach allowed us to gather a wealth of information on gender identity, sexual orientation, race, disability, and more. Analyses revealed key findings, including the first data on physicists who identify as non-binary or gender diverse, as well as the first data on Black and Indigenous scholars. Black physicists (1.2%) and Indigenous physicists (.3%) were found to be the most underrepresented, while White men were overrepresented across all sectors. Among respondents with a disability, 5% reported receiving full accommodations for their required needs at their place of work or study. One in four respondents from BIPOC gender diverse backgroun
The Canadian subatomic physics community establishes its scientific, and thus funding, priorities through periodic Long-Range Plans (LRP). The community is now putting together a new LRP, which will be in effect from 2027 through 2034, with its scope extending through 2041. As part of this process, the Canadian Institute of Nuclear Physics (CINP) has put together a strategic report, following an extensive consultation process. The report describes the broad and ambitious research program undertaken by the Canadian nuclear physics research community, both onshore and abroad, touching on key questions regarding the origin, evolution, and structure of visible matter in the universe. This document provides a grid of different Canadian nuclear physics projects undertaken now and in the future, and their associated timelines. It concludes with specific recommendations for maximizing Canadian scientific output in nuclear physics.