Front Burner

Nearly a year after the federal NDP’s most devastating election result in history, the party declared Avi Lewis – who ran on a campaign of democratic socialism – its new leader. It was a decisive win – Lewis won over half of the 70,930 eligible votes cast. The turnout was high – at about 70 percent of membership. Avi Lewis talks to host Jayme Poisson about his vision for the federal NDP’s fut...

Experts, market watchers and the authorities in Iran have accused the U.S. President of engaging in market manipulation surrounding the Iran war by timing military announcements around market opens and closes. On top of that, there have been questions of possible insider trading in connection to Trump’s moves. Last Monday, a spike of highly suspicious and extremely lucrative oil futures trades and...

The U.S.-Israeli war with Iran, Operation Epic Fury, is nearly one-month old and the shadow of another war looms over this one: Operation Iraqi Freedom, George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Today on Front Burner, a documentary about the Iraq war and its parallels and differences with what is happening now. Featuring interviews with three veteran reporters: Jane Arraf, Jonathan Landay, and Jerem...

Newly declassified documents reveal the extraordinary depth and reach the Canadian government took to spy on Indigenous leaders in the ‘60s and ‘70s.  This new reporting is the result of a years-long effort by CBC Indigenous and CBC Investigates. Today we hear how the RCMP infiltrated and sought to disrupt legitimate political Indigenous organizations, in an extensive program of covert survei...

“I do believe I will be having the honor of taking Cuba.” Those are the words of U.S. President Donald Trump spoken to a group of reporters assembled at the White House. For more than a century Cuba has remained a fixation of American foreign policy. The U.S. has tried everything from buying the island to taking it by force. Today the country faces the worst economic crisis in its modern history,...

This spring, just outside Regina, construction is set to begin on Canada's largest data centre. Many of these massive server farms, that train and power AI, are being built or proposed across the country. They’re all part of a global infrastructure supercycle. In the U.S. alone, data centres have nearly quadrupled since 2010. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta plan to spend more than $600 billion...

As the world watches for updates in the war on Iran, cutting through the fog of war and getting a real sense of the extent of damage and military activity in the region isn’t easy. For some, the answer is open source intelligence: pouring over satellite images, flight radars, news updates, social media posts, and just about any kind of data someone can get their hands on. And while OSINT investiga...

As Ottawa prepares to tighten bail laws across the country, we take a documentary look at how the issue has become a focal point of Canadian anxiety around crime and ask what might change with Bill C-14, legislation the Prime Minister has called “arguably the most aggressive tightening of the criminal code seen in decades.” For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit:  https://www.cbc.ca/ra...

On Tuesday U.S. president Donald Trump took back his appeal for help to unblock the Strait of Hormuz, and called out his NATO allies for largely ignoring his request. Iran’s blockade of the chokepoint between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman has effectively cut off commercial shipping. This has halted the flow of nearly 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply, caused fuel prices to surge, and s...

“If we lose the midterms, we’re going to jail.” That’s Steve Bannon’s warning to Republicans: a call to act urgently, to “seize the institutions,” and prevent what he calls another stolen election.  It’s a sentiment shared by Donald Trump, who has said the midterms must be won in order to avoid impeachment. He’s also suggested that if elections are run “properly,” his supporters will not have...

One of the most brutal fronts in the escalating war in the Middle East right now is in Lebanon. Israel’s ground troops have crossed the border into the south of the country, and the bombing campaign continues in cities like Beirut. Israel says its mission is to root out and defang Hezbollah and to carve out a security buffer zone in the south.  According to Lebanon’s Health Ministry, at least...

U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is one of the figures central to the ongoing war in Iran. Critics say that the former Fox News host is both dangerous and completely out of his depth. He has made headlines recently for promising “death and destruction," picking fights with the media, and using Christian rhetoric to justify war. The Guardian's Washington bureau chief David Smith joins us to talk...

U.S. intelligence reports this week show that, despite U.S and Israeli strikes, very little has changed about the Iranian regime’s grip since the start of the war. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or the IRGC for short, along with interim leaders that stepped in after Supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s death, still retain control of the country. The IRGC has been described as a parallel state, an...

Nunavut MP Lori Idlout crossed the floor this week, becoming the first New Democrat to defect to Prime Minister Carney’s Liberals. With three byelections coming up next month, this puts the Carney Government on a likely path to a majority. It also adds to the troubles facing the NDP, who are in the middle of a leadership race following their worst election result ever. CBC senior writer Aaron Wher...

Amidst communications blackouts and rising casualties, Jayme Poisson reaches a resident in Tehran to discuss the war, Trump, the Iranian regime, and his pessimistic view about where this goes next.  For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit:  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

The world could face one of the most severe shocks to energy markets since the 1970s as we enter week two of the war in the Middle East. The strait of Hormuz, the artery for 20 per cent of the world’s oil and gas, has been effectively shut down. Qatar, which makes up one fifth of the world’s liquefied natural gas exports, has stopped production of LNG after Iran struck two of its sites. In the aft...

Images coming out of Tehran over the weekend were apocalyptic, with oil refinery fires burning and massive clouds of black smoke turning day into night. Meanwhile, Iran continues to attack other countries in the region and has chosen its new supreme leader Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the slain former supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The Economist’s Middle East correspondent Gregg Carlstrom join...

For decades we have been hearing about the possibility of AI-driven warfare, and now it’s here. Anthropic's AI platform Claude has been reportedly central to the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. It was used during the attack that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, which involved strikes on nearly 900 targets dropped within the first 12 hours, including on a girls’ elementary school tha...

Today on the show, we wanted to bring on Robert Pape. He is a political scientist with the University of Chicago. And we’ve been following his work on his substack “The Escalation Trap” with a lot of interest since the U.S.-Israeli strikes on Iran.   Pape is going to argue that the U.S. has walked into an enormous, military escalation trap. He takes a hard look at things like missile supplies...

On Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney reaffirmed his support for the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. Carney spoke about the need to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and threatening international peace and security. But Carney also said his government supports the goals of the attack with “regret” and that Israel and the United States acted without engaging the United Nations. Is Canada tryin...

In 1953, the United States helped stage a coup to overthrow Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, largely a response to the Iranian leader’s nationalization of the oil industry. Twenty-six years later, revolutionaries stormed the U.S. embassy in Tehran just months after having deposed the U.S. installed King.  Since then, the relationship between these two nations has been defined by...

This weekend after weeks of threats and tense negotiations, the U.S. and Israel began a war with Iran. The developments have been incredibly consequential, from the assasination of Iran’s Supreme Leader to Iran’s retaliatory attacks on neighbouring Gulf states.  To unpack this moment, what led to it, and go through what the future of the Middle East could look like in the aftermath, we are jo...

As Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand travels with Prime Minister Mark Carney to India, a feature conversation with Anand on the reset of the Canada-India relationship, the U.S. military build-up near Iran, CUSMA negotiations, and Canada’s foreign policy doctrine in a tense geopolitical moment.

This week OpenAI’s head of U.S. and Canada policy and partnerships Chan Park was hauled in front of a meeting with Canada’s AI minister Evan Solomon after it was revealed that Jesse Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account was suspended back in June for describing scenarios involving gun violence, and that a group of people at the company debated telling the RCMP, but didn’t. Van Rootselaar went on to kil...

Over the last week or so the debate over Canada’s immigration policy has come to the forefront. In Alberta, Premier Danielle Smith has promised to put a series of restrictive new immigration policies to a provincial referendum. In Ottawa, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has brought forward a motion that would compel the federal government to review and restrict the services available to asylu...