Front Burner

For those using drugs in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, Thomus Donaghy was a lifeline, committed to saving those on the brink of overdose. On the night of July 27, 2020, Donaghy, a volunteer at the Overdose Prevention Society, had just saved another life. Moments later, he lost his own. Today, the stories of two men whose lives were shaped by a city in the grips of an overdose epidemic, the tragic...

Omicron is spreading rapidly in Canada. Barely two weeks after the first cases of the coronavirus variant were identified in Ontario, it became the dominant strain in the province, and experts say that will soon be the case across the country. Even as Canada is reporting some of the highest daily case counts seen throughout the whole pandemic, some doctors say the real numbers could be several tim...

The Matrix was a blockbuster hit when it came out in 1999. Now, more than 20 years later, the film still feels relevant — whether it’s people talking about “taking the red pill” or theorizing that we’re all really living in a computer simulation — the movie starring Keanu Reeves as Neo and Laurence Fishburne as Morpheus permeated the culture. With the Matrix Resurrections opening in Canada on Wedn...

Longtime Jeffrey Epstein companion Ghislaine Maxwell is on trial in New York City this month, facing decades in prison over allegations of sex trafficking and conspiracy, all related to her relationship with the convicted sex offender and financier. Maxwell maintains that she is innocent. Victoria Bekiempis is reporting on the trial for the Guardian. As the trial approaches its conclusion, she exp...

Extracting bitumen from Alberta’s oilsands requires water — lots of it. And for decades, oilsands companies in Canada were banned from releasing the used water back into the environment. So as the industry skyrocketed, the reservoirs of water grew. There are now more than 1.4 trillion litres of toxic wastewater stored in these tailings ponds. Experts say that could be a disaster waiting to happen....

With the holidays approaching and the Omicron variant spreading rapidly in Canada, people are reconsidering their response. In a busy week of Omicron warnings, Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam said cases are expected to “rapidly escalate”; in her fiscal and economic update, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland committed a $4.5 billion “variant response” contingency; and Canada advised aga...

HBO’s Succession came out of the gate quietly back in 2018. And even as critics raved over its stylish production, intricate plotting and viciously sharp humour, it took a while to catch on. Now, it’s easily one of the most influential and discussed TV shows in a long time. Structured like a chamber drama set in the corridors of elite power and influence, it revolves around the highly successful b...

The debate over Quebec’s controversial secularism law, known as Bill 21, has been reignited after a teacher was told she can no longer teach her Grade 3 class, because she wears a hijab. Fatemeh Anvari was hired this fall at Chelsea Elementary School, during a period of confusion over whether English school boards had to enforce the religious symbols ban. Now, in the wake of a recent court decisio...

For a year, a 49-year-old woman in B.C. posed as a nurse at a Vancouver hospital, even assisting in gynecological surgeries, despite not actually being a nurse. Brigitte Cleroux has since been criminally charged, but it turns out she has a long history of impersonations dating back decades and spanning multiple provinces. Now, former patients are left with serious questions about the care they rec...

On Monday, as the Recording Academy began its final round of voting for the 2022 Grammy winners, people learned Drake was off the ballot. Drake and his management had asked the Academy to pull his two nominations. He still hasn’t offered an explanation, but this is the latest in a series of tensions between Drake and the Grammys: he’s questioned their relevance in his lyrics, defended The Weeknd a...

Russia has sent almost 100,000 troops near the Ukraine border in recent weeks. Observers believe the state is trying to extract certain concessions from Europe, particularly assurances from NATO that Ukraine will never be able to join the security group. Janice Gross Stein was a founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto. She argues that NATO’s "strategic ambiguity" toward U...

Just when Europe thought it had beat COVID-19, it’s once again an epicentre of the pandemic. As countries struggle to fight off yet another wave of the virus many governments in the E.U. are bringing in strict new lockdowns, and in some cases contemplating vaccine mandates. But these efforts are meeting fierce — and sometimes violent — resistance. Today, the host of the Berlin podcast Common Groun...

You’ve probably noticed that prices of practically everything — food, gas, haircuts, housing — have been going up lately. Canada’s inflation rate is now the highest it’s been in 18 years. In Parliament, the Conservative party has been pointing fingers at Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, and calling on them to quit racking up deficits. They’ve even come up with a nickname for the problem: #Just...

For months, a B.C.-based QAnon conspiracy influencer named Romana Didulo has been amassing followers online, declaring herself the “Queen of Canada.” In the summer, her audience began distributing cease-and-desist letters across North America on her behalf, demanding a stop to COVID-19 restrictions. Recently, her rhetoric escalated when she urged her followers to “shoot to kill” anyone who adminis...

$210-million dollars went out the door and into the pockets of businesses who shouldn’t have received it. That was the assessment of Ontario’s auditor general in an annual report this week that looked, in part, at the pandemic support of Doug Ford’s Conservative government. And it definitely got the opposition parties in Queen’s Park talking. The audit comes as each party stakes out their pre-elec...

Canada and a growing list of more than 20 countries have confirmed cases of omicron, the latest version of the COVID-19 virus to be labelled a "variant of concern" by the World Health Organization. Despite omicron's global reach, dozens of nations are enforcing travel bans on mainly southern Africa, where the variant was originally detected. Some countries have celebrated South Africa's identifica...

In the spring of 2020, the Cargill meat-packing plant in southern Alberta became the site of the largest COVID-19 outbreak tied to a single facility in all of North America. Approximately 950 workers were infected, and three died. A year and a half later, COVID-19 appears to be under control at the slaughterhouse. But workers say the underlying working conditions that were laid bare by the pandemi...

British Columbia is still struggling with the fallout from record-breaking rains that caused floods and mudslides that killed six people and displaced thousands more. This, after the fatal heat dome of the summer, and the third worst fire season on record. While experts say it’s impossible to determine whether this year’s extreme weather resulted directly from climate change, they will say climate...

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in one of the most important cases on reproductive rights in decades. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, has challenged a state law that would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The Supreme Court case could determine not just the fate of the clinic, but of the monumental 1973 ruling R...

Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today those objects are housed in genteel institutions across the U.K. and the world. They usually come with polite plaques. This is a series about the not-so-polite history behind those objects. Hosted by Marc Fennell. More episodes are available at: smarturl.it/stuffthebritishstole

Since the first pediatric Pfizer vaccines landed in Canada last weekend, provinces have been moving fast to get them into arms. Children got their first jabs in Ontario on Tuesday; more kids started being vaccinated in Quebec, Manitoba and Saskatchewan on Wednesday; and the rollout continues to expand. Today we’re joined by Dr. Fatima Kakkar, an infectious diseases pediatrician at the research cen...

After Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai posted a sexual assault allegation against a former top Communist Party official on social media, the post — and Peng — disappeared. In the weeks that followed, the Women's Tennis Association and the sport's top athletes joined the hashtag #WhereIsPengShuai, including Naomi Osaka, Roger Federer and Serena Williams. Even the UN called for proof of her safety. No...

Marc and Craig Kielburger's WE Charity routinely misled school-aged children and wealthy philanthropists across North America for years as it solicited millions for schoolhouses in Kenya in its Adopt-A-Village program, an investigation by CBC's The Fifth Estate has found. WE denies it has misled donors. Today, Mark Kelley explains what the team found over the course of the investigation, and the o...

Yesterday, demonstrators and journalists appeared in a northern B.C. court after spending the weekend in jail for their presence at a resistance camp in Wet’suwet’en territory. The RCMP arrested dozens of people and cleared the camp last week. It had been blockading a key work site for the Coastal GasLink pipeline project. Hundreds of workers had been stranded after the blockade was erected. The p...

The Conservative Party is objecting to Parliament’s new mandatory vaccination policy. Its leader, Erin O’Toole, is fending off attacks on his leadership. And the Liberals are being accused of benefiting from unfair advantages in the House. This is just some of what’s playing out as Parliament returns for the first time since June and the federal election. CBC chief political correspondent Rosemary...