This Year at CIGI

CIGI released its annual report on Wednesday, documenting its twentieth-anniversary year of innovative research and constructive dialogues with governments and partners around the world. We invite you to explore the interactive report here.

Artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be used to promote equality and non-discrimination, but if not properly governed, they can have the opposite effect. Harmful biases in AI systems often disproportionately affect racialized, low-income and minority groups and can perpetuate systemic discrimination. In this paper, Maroussia Lévesque describes how policy makers can address these concerns through interventions that promote AI fairness.

Although successes have been smaller in East Asia than in North America, the #MeToo movement has had a considerable impact in Japan, South Korea and China. Marie Lamensch asks what the government’s crackdown on activism, online and off, means for China’s growing feminist movement, and discusses how engagement with #MeToo takes on characteristics specific to individual countries’ political, socio-economic, cultural and digital milieux.

Canada’s last formal review of its Competition Act occurred well over a decade ago, in 2008. This lack of urgency is cause for concern when assessing the performance of merger enforcement, a cornerstone of Canada’s competition law. As Keldon Bester writes, whether Canadian law can address challenges to competition is an increasingly open question, particularly in light of the rise of digital markets.

President Biden, although he may not be the free trader Canadians had hoped for, has brought a badly needed stability to international relations and bilateral affairs, which Canada needs. A larger truth, as Aaron Shull and Michael Den Tandt discuss in this op-ed, is that the conventional lens through which Canadians have viewed the Canada-US relationship, and geopolitics generally, is obsolete.