Storylines

In this episode, we step inside a Toronto classroom where some 30 students from diverse backgrounds lift their voices and sing as part of the University of Toronto’s first-ever Black gospel choir class. Led by Professor Darren Hamiliton, the students, many with no background in gospel music, learn that there is more to this musical tradition than they imagined.  In this documentary, Let it Sh...

Dylan Bullock, a former firefighter with the BC Wildfire Service, has heard about close calls. Like the time a colleague lost sight of the vehicle ahead and ended up in the path of a forest fire. They had to abandon their truck after it got stuck on a tree stump and escape on foot. Another time Dylan was hospitalised after his clothes caught fire during a controlled burn, caused by improperly mixe...

Early in the morning in Winnipeg, outside a grocery store, Dmytro is about to start his shift. Dmytro, who is in their mid-20s and identifies as non-binary, has only been in Canada for 18 months. They fled Ukraine when the Russian invasion was looming and could only leave the country because of a medical condition.  However, Ukraine amended its medical military exemptions, and Dmytro now fear...

30 years ago, the Stanley Cup playoffs ignited a rumour that has been messing with Jane Macdougall’s life ever since.  It was June 14, 1994, and the Vancouver Canucks had made it all the way to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals against the New York Rangers. The Canucks were magic on ice, so when they lost by just one goal, fans expected the team to come back blazing the next year.  Instea...

At a union hall in Detroit’s industrial River Rouge neighborhood, workers have come together to vote for a new leader. The event feels festive, with a fire pit, a tent, and even 'walking tacos,' which are taco meat mixed into a bag of Doritos. But there are dark clouds on the horizon for the future of their industry. Many of these workers are employed by the Great Lakes Steel Works, a massive stee...

In January, some New Hampshire voters thought they had gotten a robo call from Joe Biden, telling them to skip voting in the state primary.  The robocall voice at the other end of the phone wasn’t Biden at all. In fact it was a deepfake, created by a political consultant working for a longshot democratic challenger to Biden. The audio itself was made by a magician in Texas, using a simple web...

Claire Hafner at 47, is among the top women boxers in the world. She’s just about ready for retirement but wants to win the Canadian title before hanging up her gloves.  However, a question hangs over the timing of when retirement will come.  Claire is also among a small group of women athletes who are participating in a landmark study on the effects of trauma in mostly combat sports.&nb...

CBC producer Naheed Mustafa, then a freelance writer and broadcaster, landed at the Kabul airport on a blistering hot summer day back in 2008. She’d come to report on how the country had been transformed by the U.S. led war.  By that point a lot had changed. In Kabul Afghans felt free to come and go as they pleased, women wore burkas but they also wore jeans, tunics and pretty headscarves. Th...

When Julia Pagel was seven months pregnant, she and her husband faced all the usual new parent decisions: making a birth plan, deciding which stroller to buy and whether to use reusable or disposable diapers.  However, there was one choice that was extra tricky for the two of them. What would their child's last name be? Should they just go along with standard practice of giving the baby the f...

On May 1st the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion will begin commercial operations.  It marks the end of a 12 year saga that included protests, legal challenges and the purchase of the pipeline itself by the federal government.  When Ottawa stepped in to buy TMX six years ago, it had an estimated price tag of $7.4 billion dollars. Today the cost has grown to $34 billion dollars.  As...

Mary Kajumba needed money to make a better life for her daughter. So, with the help of a placement agency she left her home in Uganda, and went to Iraq where she got a job as a restaurant cleaner. It wasn’t long after she realised she was in trouble. Mary says she found herself working 18 hour days, sharing cramped accommodation with 30 other workers and never getting paid.  But then, help ca...

Over the past near-century, Academy Award categories have come and gone. In the silent film era there was an award for Best Title Writing. You know, the written cards that summarized the “dialogue”? Oscar worthy.  This year’s 96th Academy Awards broadcast saw Oscars handed out in a whopping 23 different categories, from the big wins like Best Picture, to awards for behind-the-scenes expertise...

On October 23rd, 2023 Bob Hallaert, a man with a history of intimate partner violence, shot and killed Angie Sweeney days after she broke up with him. They’d been together for about three years.  What happened that day didn’t just shatter the Sweeney family, it shattered Sault Ste Marie. And many believe what happened to Angie could have been stopped.  Intimate Partner Violence is at a r...

Public washrooms are few and far between in Canada. When nature calls, it’s often a scramble to find a coffee shop or mall restroom that's accessible. In Montreal this is certainly the case, but it wasn’t always so. The city used to boast a decent network of public washrooms, constructed before the Second World War. Where did they go? And why, to this day, do we have so few public washrooms in Can...

In 2014, Shams Erfan was pulled off a bus by members of the Taliban who accused him of being a traitor. A bystander intervened, saving his life, but Shams knew he was no longer safe in Afghanistan.  This threat set Shams on a treacherous 8-year journey. He hoped to find a safe haven in Indonesia. Instead, he spent years stuck in a refugee prison camp. When he finally reached Canada, Shams vow...

When Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy put out a call to foreigners with combat experience to come and help. Paul Hughes, a former marksman and paratrooper with Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, went.  Paul has been in Ukraine ever since, where he founded HUGS: Helping Ukraine, Grass Roots Support. Run out of a garage through donations and volunteers, HUGS mostl...

24 Sussex Drive. That Ottawa address has been the official residence for the prime minister since the 1950s, but Canada’s current one doesn’t live there because the house is in disrepair.  Workers have already removed  asbestos, mould and rodents, but it’s estimated it will cost millions more to make the building habitable—and secure. Critics call the languishing home an “embarrassment”...

It’s been 12 years since Widlene has seen her son. She had to leave the little boy in Haiti with family after she was targeted by gang members. The plan was to get out, find somewhere safe, make a home there, and have her son join her. So when she was granted asylum in Canada, Widlene believed her fight would be over.  Instead, it was only just beginning. Asylum seekers are supposed to be abl...

You might associate sommeliers (wine experts) with fancy restaurants and snooty attitudes, but Canada’s Best Sommelier is as likely to be found traipsing the backwoods in steel toed boots and a cowboy hat, as in a MICHELIN starred restaurant in a three piece suit.  It all depends on what he’s up to: is he harvesting maple syrup at the sugar shack he runs with his family? Or is he representing...

The Great Bear Rainforest on BC’s coast is a spectacular place. Rugged mountains and old growth forests stretch all the way to Alaska. It was here that nearly a decade ago a group of coastal First Nations decided to halt most of the logging in their territories. And in the areas where they did log, they would do it differently. But ten years on the plan hasn’t gone quite as expected… And it’s left...

Not long after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Sasha Skochilenko walked into a grocery store in St. Petersburg, Russia. She reached into the pocket of her puffy winter coat, and pulled out a sheet of sticker price tags where she’d printed information she was learning about the war. Information she wasn’t getting from Russian state media. She placed the tags on a few shelves, and left. But these sm...

For years, thousands of kids with roots in Canada, the U.K., the U.S. and beyond lived under the Islamic State’s so-called caliphate. Some were taken there by their parents. Others were born there. But after the war against the Islamic State was won, many of these children still remain in limbo. They wait in detention camps, run by the group which helped defeat ISIS – the Kurdish-led Syrian Democr...

The federal government estimates that on average 27 people a day in this country are diagnosed with brain tumours. Among the most aggressive is Glioblastoma (GBM). According to Brain Cancer Canada, people with GBM have a life expectancy of 15-18 months. So when David Cormican was told that his father’s tumor was the “size of a baseball” the family started looking for something—anything—that would...

Is Newfoundland and Labrador English dying? No b’y, but it is changing! From dropping an 'h' to adding an 's', Newfoundland and Labrador accents are among the most recognizable regional accents in Canada. But while some features of those accents may be in decline, linguist Paul De Decker says younger generations are finding creative ways to keep them alive. On this week's Storylines, Caroline Hill...

The Marefat School in Kabul, Afghanistan earned an international reputation for being a place where democracy, freedom, and education could flourish. But when the Taliban took over the country in August 2021, many of the female teachers and students had to flee for their lives. On this week's Storylines, Leisha Grebinski follows the harrowing story of Maryam Masoomi a music teacher who—with the as...