Welcome to The Advance, the newsletter of the CCA. If you haven’t subscribed yet, you can sign up here.

IN THIS EDITION:

• Mark your calendars: Three important reports coming this fall
• Increased disasters and resilient futures
• Readings on threats to scientific integrity; the future of food production, in Canada and on the moon; new plans for digitizing history; Indigenous guidance for ending extractive research; concerns over Canada’s health data security; and more
• Top concerns for ocean research

Mark your calendars: Three important reports coming this fall

The policy discussions that will shape Canada’s future are already underway. During the past month, the Globe and Mail detailed the “storm surge of digital activity” that surrounds extreme weather events as Canadians seek meteorological insights. At University Affairs, an op-ed called for “rethinking academia’s role in innovation” by supporting entrepreneurship among professors. Meanwhile, other voices called for Canada’s increased defence spending to catalyze innovation and support national security, and celebrated the opening of the country’s first quantum computing hub.

The most important policy decisions deserve the best available evidence. The CCA is hard at work on a collection of expert-led assessments that will contribute valuable insights to these national conversations and others in the months ahead. They include:

• The Future of Meteorological and Hydrological Services in Canada. How will climate change, new technologies, and an evolving information landscape affect the functions of Canada’s public weather forecaster? (Coming in mid-September)
  
• Balancing Research Security and Open Science for Dual-Use Research of Concern. How might Canada’s research community identify and safeguard sensitive research while honouring its commitment to open science? (Coming in mid-October)
  
• The State of Science, Technology, and Innovation in Canada. It’s been seven eventful years since the last edition of the CCA’s flagship report. What new developments in Canada’s innovation ecosystem hold the greatest potential for the future? (Coming in mid-November)
  

We want to equip you to help chart Canada’s course and keep evidence at the centre of these conversations. How can you help? Join our mailing list if you haven’t yet, or follow us on Bluesky and LinkedIn, where you can also receive this newsletter. Have a friend who might be interested in one of the reports above? Be sure to forward this newsletter to them so they don’t miss out.

Readings and Events

• On Tuesday, October 7, The Walrus hosts “Growing Canadian Productivity,” a free conversation focused on leveraging the impacts of “higher education and the cutting edge research it enables.” The event features Tima Bansal, chair of the CCA’s Expert Panel on the Circular Economy in Canada.
  
• Evidence for Democracy released Accretion and Erosion: A Comparative Analysis of Scientific Integrity in Canada and the US. “The United States is experiencing significant erosion of its existing infrastructure, driven by political interference that compromises both transparency and accountability,” note the authors. Meanwhile, “Canada struggles with training and public trust.” Read the full report.
  
• Food production in Canada “requires a systems-level approach that aligns agricultural practices with planetary boundaries,” according to a new report from CIFAR’s Future of Food Discovery Panel, chaired by Deborah Buszard, chair of the CCA’s Expert Panel on Plant Health Risks in Canada. Learn more about the CCA’s upcoming assessment on Indigenous Science and Food Sovereignty and full report on food tech.
  
• Prompted in part by a 2015 CCA report on Canada’s memory institutions, Libraries and Archives Canada released its Canadian National Heritage Digitization Strategy, in which it outlines potential digitization projects for the next decade—among them, scientific journals published by Canadian universities.
  
• Researchers at Canadensys Aerospace and the University of Guelph successfully grew oats and barley in lunar conditions, a step towards greenhouses on the moon’s surface. Here’s how they did it.
  
• At Nature, eight Indigenous scientists working in four different settler-colonial countries offer guidance for research institutions to enable Indigenous self-determination and counteract extractive research practices.
  
• At the Canadian Medical Association Journal, a trio of University of Ottawa law professors flag concerns over Canadian electronic medical records stored on servers owned by companies based in the United States. “Given the rapidly changing political climate in the United States, preserving the sovereignty of Canada’s health data—notably, ensuring that the data are subject to Canadian laws and legal systems—requires renewed focus,” they write.