Front Burner

Israel and Hamas signed a deal for a ceasefire set to begin Sunday January 19th that will see the exchange of Israeli hostages for Palestinian prisoners in Israel and the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza. The news was met with celebrations in Gaza where Palestinians have been suffering under a brutal Israel offensive since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023. Tens of thousands are dead, more tha...

Fires continue to burn in Los Angeles as millions of people remain under an extreme fire weather alert. The Palisades Fire and the Eaton Fire have already flattened entire neighbourhoods in Los Angeles, leaving nothing but outlines and ash where homes once stood. It is expected that this will all amount to the worst natural disaster in American history in terms of cost and scale. These fires raise...

Donald Trump is building the wealthiest cabinet in American history with 13 billionaires set to be part of his administration. That of course includes his vocal backer and X CEO, Elon Musk. But it’s not just the ones joining him in office. A parade of CEOs and business giants have met with him over the past month in Mar-A-Lago including Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and Canada’s Kevin O’Le...

A week after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation, a much clearer picture of the Liberal leadership race has emerged. Whoever the candidate ends up being will have the challenge of running both a leadership and a general election campaign at essentially the same time. According to some recent polling by Abacus Data, that won’t be the only challenge. David Coletto is the founder and CEO of t...

Joe Biden will end his reign as President as not only the oldest holder of the executive office, but one of the longest tenured lawmakers in American history. As he enters his twilight in public life, we look at the President’s final few weeks in office and ask: how is Joe Biden likely to be remembered?  President Biden’s final weeks in office include the controversial decision to pardon his...

With just under two weeks until he re-takes the Oval Office, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has outlined a mind-map of sorts to, as he says, “make Canada the 51st American state.” He has referred to the border separating Canada and the U.S. as an “artificial line,” called Justin Trudeau Canada’s “Governor” and said Canada would “dissolve” without U.S. assistance. At the same time, he’s not ruli...

Nearly a decade ago Justin Trudeau rode a wave of hope and optimism — his so-called "sunny ways" — to the prime minister's office, leading a once-flailing Liberal party out of the wilderness. A lot has changed since that time. Not only for Trudeau and his party's fortunes, but for the world — and how many people feel about the kind of hopeful vision that once helped propel people like Trudeau into...

After months of non-confidence votes and growing pressure, Justin Trudeau has stepped down as the leader of the Liberal Party. He’s still the Prime Minister, for now, after proroguing Parliament until March 24th so that the Liberals can hold a leadership race and find his successor.  Wayne Long, a backbencher from New Brunswick, was among the first voices from within Trudeau’s own party to ca...

For the last couple weeks, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has apparently been thinking about his future. At the same time, he faced new calls to resign: from his colleagues, the country and political rivals. Will he make it through the day, the week or the election? Tim Powers shares his thoughts on Trudeau’s political future. He’s the chair of Summa Strategies, managing director of Abacus Data, a...

What is the point of Hollywood? There are two obvious answers, right? To make good stuff that entertains people. And to make money for the big studios and the people who work for them. Those two things don’t have to be mutually exclusive. But writer Daniel Bessner believes increasingly they have been. Bessner spent a year working on a deep dive into how Hollywood has evolved for Harper’s Maga...

For some time now, there’s been a growing trend on TikTok and Instagram of young women sharing about their daily lives as “trad wives.” “Traditional wives” forego the workplace, extol the virtues of homemaking, and often talk about the ways they “submit” to their husbands.  So why do these women say they’ve chosen a life at home? How does their messaging cross into religion and politics? And...

Céline Dion is having a moment. It’s not her first. And millions of fans are hoping it won’t be her last. While Céline’s international stardom seems obvious now, it was all so unlikely. This is the final episode of the four-part series from Understood, the anthology podcast that takes you out of the daily news cycle and inside the events, people, and cultural moments you want to know more about. H...

Murray Sinclair — an Anishinaabe lawyer, judge, senator, and, most consequentially, the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation commission — died in November at the age of 73.  Sinclair helped bring to light the stories of thousands of Indigenous residential school survivors and advocated for justice for them. He's been recognized by many as someone who fundamentally changed the country and wha...

In the next two years, Canadian millennials will stand to inherit as much as one trillion dollars from their boomer parents. Today, we take a look at what this consolidation of family wealth could mean for Canada’s economy, and Canadian society writ large with Katrina Onsted, freelance reporter and producer for the Globe and Mail’s tech business podcast, Lately.

The Apprentice is a Donald Trump biopic that premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this year and got an extended standing ovation. But it quickly came under fire from its subject. Today, we bring you an encore of host Jayme Poisson’s interview with Dan Beckerman, one of the producers behind the film. He’ll walk us through the film’s complicated journey to theatres, and the challenges of making art...

Céline Dion is having a moment. It’s not her first. And millions of fans are hoping it won’t be her last. While Céline’s international stardom seems obvious now, it was all so unlikely. This is the third episode of the four-part series from Understood, the anthology podcast that takes you out of the daily news cycle and inside the events, people, and cultural moments you want to know more about. H...

Céline Dion is having a moment. It’s not her first. And millions of fans are hoping it won’t be her last. While Céline’s international stardom seems obvious now, it was all so unlikely. This is the second episode of the four-part series from Understood, the anthology podcast that takes you out of the daily news cycle and inside the events, people, and cultural moments you want to know more about....

Got some money burning a hole in your pocket? You could go online and place a bet about whether or not Canada will become the U.S.’s 51st state before July, whether or not there will be an election before the New Year, or whether the U.S. will ban TikTok before May 2025. And you could do it all on a website called Polymarket. Polymarket is a “prediction market”  that allows users to spend cry...

People talk about Donald Trump as a singular figure. A one-of-a-kind politician who's made conservative history in the U.S. But where exactly does Trump fit in conservative history? In what eras does he stand on common ground? What are the big differences? Is he a revolutionary figure or a natural evolution of the movement? To work though that, we've got Sam Adler-Bell and Matt Sitman. They are th...

After Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, historian and professor Timothy Snyder wrote a long post on Facebook. Here's how it started:  "Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience." Snyder went on to share twenty lessons about authoritarianism from the 20th century....

The fallout from Chrystia Freeland’s resignation is far from over. As more people demand Justin Trudeau’s resignation he appears to be in no hurry to heed the calls. Meanwhile, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump pokes fun at Canada’s ongoing chaos, reprising his jokes about the country becoming the 51st state. What does the drama in Ottawa mean for Canada’s position as it prepares for a potential t...

The charge of ethnic cleansing is not, on its own, considered a crime under international law. Experts consider it to be part of the overall charge of genocide.  In this episode we take listeners to northern Gaza and examine the words and actions of politicians, academics and settlements organizations in order to better understand whether Israel is perpetrating a campaign of ethnic cleansing...

Chrystia Freeland's bombshell resignation as finance minister has thrown Justin Trudeau's fragile government into chaos. The decisions that led to this are raising questions about the Prime Minister's judgment, loyalties, leadership and ability to stay in power. Paul Wells and Stephen Maher are our guests.  Paul has a substack under his own name and has written about Canadian politics for dec...

Late last week, federal labour minister Steven MacKinnon recommended that Canada Post workers, who have been on strike for more than four weeks, be ordered back to work until May 22, 2025. In the meantime, an inquiry would look into the roadblocks preventing the two parties from getting to an agreement. This labour dispute has led to a lot of debate and discussion about the future o...

The Bank of Canada cut interest rates again this week. Economists say wages are up, inflation is on target and the stock market is in the green. But most everyday Canadians are living a very different story. One of insanely high grocery prices, impossible housing costs and a suffocating economic squeeze. Recently, Canadian finance minister Chrystia Freeland announced a temporary GST holiday on a b...