Front Burner

Mark Carney met with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia this week, aiming to strengthen ties and build up our economic relationship in areas like AI and critical minerals. It’s been 26 years since a Canadian Prime Minister visited the country, despite the fact that they’re a major trading partner. The relationship had come with friction over things like Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, h...

The U.S. midterms are coming up this fall. They could flip control of the House and possibly the Senate. But both parties are dealing with difficult messes.  Progressive Democratic candidate Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine imploded after allegations of sexual assault, which has laid bare a war in his party. Republican infighting ground Congress to a halt. And Senator Mitch McConnell...

This week, Prime Minister Carney is in Turkey to attend the NATO summit. Ahead of leaving for Ankara, he announced the procurement of 12 submarines from the German company TKMS, in what’s expected to be the largest military procurement deal in Canada’s history. Carney says that these submarines, along with a slew of other military investments, will allow Canada to assert our full sovereignty in th...

In the aftermath of an act of public violence, attention often turns to a document. Sometimes it’s a letter, a blog post, or a video, that gets referred to as a manifesto. Very quickly the public coalesces around these documents. Journalists struggle to consider what to print, authorities debate whether they should be released, and researchers scour them for clues. Following the recent incel attac...

Aaron Wherry, senior writer at CBC's parliamentary bureau and good friend of the show, is here to parse through last week’s big pipeline announcement with Alberta and the deal that Prime Minister Carney made with B.C. to get it all done. Plus: The 24 Sussex national home reno nightmare turned crowdfunding campaign. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner...

The Canadian defence industry can’t grow the way Prime Minister Mark Carney is proposing by just selling domestically. That’s why another aim of the Defence Industrial Strategy is to grow Canadian defence exports by 50%. So what could happen when the world comes knocking on our defence industry’s door? This is part two of a two part documentary. Part one aired on July 2nd.   For transcripts o...

Mark Carney ran for office promising to spend a whole lot more on the Canadian military. Since being elected, he’s poured billions of dollars into defence, and plans to roughly triple Canada’s defence expenditures in the next ten years. He’s also proposing to grow Canada’s defence industry revenues by 240%.  Today, in part one of our two part documentary, senior producer Imogen Birchard heads...

This week, temperatures across much of Europe reached above 40 C. In parts of Spain and Portugal, it was hotter than the Sahara Desert. Governments are telling citizens to stay indoors. Schools have closed. Wildfires have spread. Nuclear reactors have reduced their output because rivers have become too warm to cool them efficiently. The World Health Organization says Europe’s heat is responsible f...

Investment company Wealthsimple is partnering with Kalshi to launch Wealthsimple Predict. It’s an app that’ll allow Canadians to place bets on things like Bank of Canada interest rates, job numbers and long term weather patterns. This comes at a time where there’s growing scrutiny on prediction markets in the U.S. for misleading advertising and susceptibility to insider trading. So why are young i...

A warning: this episode discusses the trauma and harms surrounding Canada's residential school history. Please listen with care.  So much of what we know about Canada's residential schools has been established as fact. More than 150 thousand Indigenous children and youth were taken from their families and required to attend these schools. Several thousand students died. Although all of this i...

In the fall of 2022, Danish authorities scrambled fighter jets to investigate a strange disturbance in the Baltic Sea. What they found was extraordinary. An enormous geyser had opened up on the water’s surface. It was evidence that something deep below had ruptured with enormous force. Just days earlier, a team of divers had planted explosives along Nord Stream, a multi-billion dollar network of p...

On Monday morning, a 25-year-old man opened fire in Montreal, leading to a shootout that left three people dead. A few hours later, police found a manifesto written by the shooter. It contained a laundry list of grievances but, more than anything, it bore the telltale signs of someone who had spent a lot of time immersed in the world of incels. The incel, or involuntary celibate, movement was born...

Margaret Evans is CBC’s Senior International Correspondent. She just returned from a week-long reporting trip in Tehran, speaking to Iranians on the ground about the impact of the war and the preliminary peace agreement. In a Canadian exclusive, CBC News reported from Iran with permission of the country’s government, who put restrictions on journalists but have no say over what we decide to publis...

After a weekend of speculation, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer appeared on the steps of 10 Downing Street on Monday and announced that he would be stepping down.  He’s now the sixth British Prime Minister to resign in the last 10 years, continuing a pattern many thought would end after he won a majority government with the Labour Party in a landslide just two years ago.  Zoë Grünewald...

It was a busy end to the season in the House of Commons. CBC Chief Political Correspondent Rosemary Barton is here to talk about what happened, what it tells us about Carney’s majority government, and what we can expect in the months to come.  For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit:  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Toronto police announced this week that nearly 30 recent shootings across the Greater Toronto Area are linked by a multi-layered gun-for-hire network. They say teens have been recruited through encrypted messaging apps to carry out attacks, from targets linked to local tow truck and waste management disputes, to synagogues, Jewish schools and even the US consulate.  In almost all the cases, t...

Andrew Tate – the controversial British-American influencer, and self-described misogynist – has millions of followers around the world. He often tells young men that they’re victims of a feminized society and that they need to reclaim their “natural masculine imperative for power”. Tate became even more famous after he and his brother were subject to a police raid on their Romanian property in 20...

Reporter Francis Farrell of the Kyiv Independent recently took a harrowing journey alongside a group of Ukrainian soldiers into what they describe as the kill zone. They travelled by foot down a long road swarmed by drones, littered with shell casings and bombed out vehicles. He captured the trip in a documentary that paints a stark and dystopian picture of a war that is at once both futuristic an...

This week, after more than a hundred days of fighting, the United States and Iran have reached a preliminary agreement to end the war, set to be signed in Geneva this Friday. This deal is meant to end the fighting, open the Strait of Hormuz and as U.S. President Donald Trump put it, “let the oil flow”. Iran’s top military command has framed the deal as a defeat for the US and Israel. To talk about...

A common refrain among those who support Albertan separatism is that they would like a deal similar to what Quebec earned through its decades-long fight for greater autonomy. So as Alberta heads towards its own referendum on a separation, we wanted to try and answer the question: What did Quebec actually get? Chantal Hébert is a longtime political reporter, commentator and panellist on CBC’s At Is...

For decades Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates built a public persona as an unrelenting, tech visionary – and later as a global health and climate philanthropist. But that reputation has started to fracture, largely because of one man: Jeffrey Epstein. The partial release of the Epstein files revealed extensive communication between Epstein and Gates, his foundation, and people who worked for him. On...

Canada has introduced new legislation that puts big tech social platforms on notice: change your platforms to make them safer for kids, or children under the age of 16 will be banned from using them.   Taylor Owen is back on the show to walk us through the proposed Safe Social Media Act and how it’d be enforced. He’s the Beaverbrook Chair in Media, Ethics and Communications at McGill Universi...

Even before a game has been played, this year’s World Cup has been the source of controversy. Officials and staff from countries like Iraq, Iran and Somalia have been refused entry or face lengthy interrogation by immigration officials at American airports.   FIFA President Gianni Infantino has been widely criticized for his proximity to U.S. President Donald Trump after presenting Trump...

As Alberta hurtles towards a referendum on whether or not to hold a separation referendum, we wanted to take a look at how the campaigns on both sides are shaping up. Who are the players? Are they cohesive? Organized? Charismatic? Jason Markusoff, who covers Alberta politics for CBC, is here to walk us through it. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/...

For decades, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, better known as AIPAC, has been one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in Washington. It has helped shape U.S. policy toward Israel, cultivated relationships with lawmakers from both parties, and more recently spent millions of dollars helping elect candidates it supports and defeat those it doesn't. But after the war in Gaza, Isr...