Front Burner

Quebec has introduced a new bill that would ban prayer in public spaces. It’s the latest in a series of recent moves by the province to reinforce Quebec’s secularist values. It comes as Premier François Legault is embroiled in a spending scandal and polls that show he’s the least popular provincial leader in the country.  Will falling back on Quebec values and stoking anti-immigrant...

On Wednesday, 16 people — including Romana Didulo, the cult leader known as the “Queen of Canada” — were arrested in the tiny Saskatchewan village of Richmound. RCMP released them the following day, but then re-arrested two unidentified individuals. Didulo and her followers have been holed up in a decommissioned school there for two years. Their presence has been a source of ire for many locals, a...

Late last week - a list of over 200 books, set to be removed from Edmonton school libraries by October made the rounds online. It was in response to an order set out by Alberta’s education ministry in July to take books with sexually explicit content from the shelves. This applied from kindergarten to Grade 12. On that list? Award-winning works like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Maya Ange...

Today on the show, James Elder is here. James is UNICEF’s global spokesperson, and he has made five trips to Gaza since the October attacks documenting what UNICEF has called a “war on children.”   He joins us less than two weeks after a UN backed body officially designated the hunger crisis in Gaza a famine, one that the UN’s relief chief Tom Fletcher says is man-made, and the result of...

In a trial entering its final phase, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro stands accused of attempting to stage a coup, leading an armed criminal organisation, and plotting to have the country’s current president and a Supreme Court justice killed.  In response Bolsonaro ally U.S. President Donald Trump slapped Brazil with steep 50% tariffs and sanctioned the Supreme Court justice presid...

NATO’s secretary general has warned Russia could launch an attack on the alliance within the next five years. Talk to NATO’s two newest members, Finland and Sweden, and they’ll tell you preparation involves a lot more than just boosting military spending. As Canada seeks to strengthen ties with both countries, what can we learn from our newest NATO allies about preparing for the worst? Supported b...

Last week, the U.S. released another round of sanctions against officials at the International Criminal Court, including a Canadian judge. They’re the latest in a string of attacks from the Trump administration this year, after the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant for alleged war crimes and crimes against huma...

American history has always been contested, but recent decisions by U.S. President Donald Trump to reshape the way it’s taught and remembered have put museums, schools, and memorials squarely in the crosshairs.  Earlier this year, Trump passed an executive order that called for the removal of what he referred to as “divisive, race-centered ideology” from the nation’s museums. He’s targeted th...

Prime Minister Mark Carney campaigned on big promises and bold action to save a country in crisis. It's now been more than 100 days since his cabinet was sworn in, but details and tangible results are still thin on the ground. How much of a runway does he have to start delivering on his promises on things like national infrastructure, housing, and a trade deal with the United States? Meanwhile, Pi...

The unemployment rate for Canadians between 15 and 24 is at 15 percent, the highest it's been since 2010, not including the pandemic. Why can't young people find a job? And how do these numbers fit into the wider health of our economy at the moment? Economist and Atkinson Fellow on the Future of Workers Armine Yalnizyan is on the show to talk about these numbers, why they stand out...

Airstrikes and tanks continued pounding the outskirts of Gaza City over the weekend, as Israel’s plans to seize the strip’s largest urban centre continued. A much bigger operation, widely condemned by the international community, could begin within days or weeks. This is all happening as the world’s leading authority on food crises is saying that Gaza City and surrounding areas — currently home to...

Elon Musk wants a million people living on Mars within 20 years. Jeff Bezos imagines a trillion humans in space, living in a constellation of space stations the size of major cities within a few generations. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, is preparing for a future where rogue AI could destroy civilization, and is stockpiling land, gas masks, and gold in the event it leads to disaster.  These plan...

Christian Zionism — the belief that the modern state of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy — has existed as a theological concept for well over a century. But in the past couple decades its political power and influence in the United States has surged, with many of Donald Trump's closest political allies among its adherents. Today we're taking a look at the theological roots of Christian Zionism, h...

This summer is on track to being the second-worst wildfire season in Canadian history. It started earlier than usual with emergencies declared in the spring in Manitoba and Saskatchewan and is hitting locales that aren't typically fire-prone like Vancouver Island and Atlantic Canada. Meanwhile, fires from neighbouring provinces gave parts of southern Ontario some of the worst air quality in the wo...

Over the last few days, US President Donald Trump has hosted a series of high-stakes talks to further the effort to end the war in Ukraine. First, on Friday, there was the summit in Alaska — Russian president Vladimir Putin’s first time in the US in nearly 20 years. Then on Monday, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky arrived at the White House for his first time since his brutal confrontation w...

It was a chaotic weekend for anyone flying with Air Canada. The airline canceled hundreds of flights after 10,000 flight attendants walked off the job. Less than 12 hours later, federal jobs minister Patty Hajdu had ordered them back to work — but the union took the unusual step of defying that order and continuing the strike. The main sticking points for the union had been wages and "ground work"...

This week, Canada's housing department released a document with more details on the Liberal government's plans to scale up affordable housing in the country. It's now seeking feedback from the public about it. Back in March, Prime Minister Carney vowed that his government would double the number of homes built annually in Canada to nearly half a million. This would be done through an entity called...

Israel’s military campaign in Gaza has become the deadliest conflict for journalists in recent history. Among those killed was Anas Al-Sharif — one of the last remaining reporters in Northern Gaza, and one of the most recognizable media voices in the strip. In July, the Committee to Protect Journalists said that the public smear campaign against him, led by the Israeli military, was part of an eff...

National Guard troops descended on Washington D.C. after U.S. President Donald Trump vowed on Monday to take back the nation's capital and clear the streets of what he calls "crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor". It comes after the President spent the better part of the last week taking aim at D.C.'s leadership, homeless population and how crime there is "out of control" – a statement that stands...

35 years ago, the Kanien'kehá:ka of Kanehsatà:ke squared off with the Canadian army to defend their territory, culminating an armed standoff now known as the Oka Crisis, or the Siege of Kanehsatà:ke. Now, some community members worry that same territory is being threatened by an out-of-control boom of unregulated cannabis megastores with alleged connections to organized crime. And a governance cri...

Last month, RCMP charged four people for their alleged involvement in a plot to forcibly take land north of Quebec city in what Mounties called an incident of "ideologically motivated violent extremism". Three of the men were denied bail last week. The accused, they charged, had planned to create an anti-government militia, but even more startling: two of the four people charged by RCMP are active...

Bad Bunny, one of the most-streamed artists on the planet, is in the middle of his 30-concert residency in San Juan, Puerto Rico titled No me Querio Ir de Aqui, or "I don't want to leave here". Much like his latest album Debí Tirar Más Fotos, it is both a celebration of Puerto Rican culture and heritage but also a statement against the political and economic forces that have worked against the wel...

Alberta's Battle River-Crowfoot is about as safe a riding as Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre could hope for as a place to regain a seat in the House of Commons in a byelection later this month. But he's facing pushback from some locals who feel they're being used as a means to an end by someone who won't represent their interests in Ottawa. The riding is also the latest target of the Longest...

Later this month, OpenAI is expected to release the latest version of ChatGPT – the groundbreaking AI chatbot that became the fastest growing app in history when it was launched in 2022. When Sam Altman first pitched an ambitious plan to develop artificial intelligence, he likened it to another world changing, potentially world destroying endeavor: the Manhattan Project, in which the U.S. raced to...

Since Oct. 7, according to Gaza’s health ministry, over 60,000 Palestinians have been killed in Israel’s military campaign against Hamas. Recently, the ministry also began reporting a new kind of toll: deaths by starvation. 180 people, including 93 children, are now reported to have died from hunger. This comes after months of Israeli restrictions on humanitarian aid. Israeli Prime Minister Benjam...