Front Burner

Mass violence broke out on Sunday in Mexico after a military raid killed the most wanted, and feared, cartel boss in the country — a man known as El Mencho. We take a closer look at the aftermath of the operation and ask some questions: who was this kingpin, what is the powerful criminal organization he presided over, and what could happen in his absence? With us today is David Mora in Guadalajara...

From two heartbreaking hockey losses to the fiery debate over whether the men’s gold medal curling team was cheating, Milano Cortina 2026 was a dramatic one for Team Canada. The games also brought some headscratching moments like a Norwegian biathlete confessing to infidelity minutes after a race and an investigation into Olympic ski-jumping dubbed ‘penis-gate’.  We break down the storylines...

On Thursday, former Prince Andrew was arrested by U.K. police. After years of controversy, scandal and allegations of sexual assault, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was taken into custody on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The arrest is related to his decades-long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, and the former prince is alleged to have sent confidential government documents to the convicted...

Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberals welcomed a third Conservative floor crosser on Wednesday – Edmonton MP Matt Jeneroux.  And with three by-elections coming up, two from Liberal strongholds, a Liberal majority is looking like a possibility. So a pretty seismic day on Parliament Hill.  CBC’s senior writer Aaron Wherry is here to talk through how this could all play out for the Li...

Looksmaxxers are a community of young men dedicated to the pursuit of maximizing their physical appearance, often at great personal cost. Many are spending thousands of dollars on cosmetic procedures, or even taking blunt objects to their faces, in the hopes of masculinizing their features to become more handsome. Or, as they refer to it: “ascending.”  In a world where so many young people —...

Last week, a 5000 word post on X with the headline “Something big is happening” went viral. It was written by Matt Shumer, the CEO of HyperWrite, an AI writing tool and in it he says he’s recently watched AI go from a helpful tool to something that “does my job better than I do”. And he’s not the only one. The CEO of Anthropic, one of the biggest AI companies today, wrote an essay saying it could...

Get lost in someone else’s life. From a mysterious childhood spent on the run, to a courageous escape from domestic violence, each season of Personally invites you to explore the human experience in all its complexity, one story — or season — at a time. In the latest season of Personally: Creation Myth, Helena does not want kids. Her husband believes she’ll change her mind—she has so much love to...

Cuba has been facing rolling blackouts, food shortages, and rationed hospital resources after a month with no oil imports. The energy crisis has also been a major blow to the country’s tourism industry, as major airlines suspended service to the country. The cutoff came after the United States severed the island’s access to Venezuelan oil in January, and then warned any country supplying Cuba it c...

A horrific mass shooting took place in the small community of Tumbler Ridge, B.C. on Tuesday – one of the deadliest in Canadian history. Nine people are dead, including the suspect, and 27 more were injured. Many of the victims were as young as 12 or 13 years old. CBC senior reporter Caroline Barghout is in Tumbler Ridge covering the ongoing investigation. She joins host Jayme Poisson with the lat...

Jonathan Haidt, best-selling author of “The Anxious Generation”, is our guest today. He’s been on a global mission to educate parents, the media, and government officials about the harms that social media companies inflict on children. He believes that the world ran a huge uncontrolled experiment on kids in the 2010s by giving them smartphones and social media accounts. And now, there is clea...

The final remaining agreement constraining U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons expired last week. The New START treaty was established by President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in 2010. And since then the treaty has governed much of the global landscape concerning nuclear weapons and non-proliferation. Reporting suggests both sides remain in talks. Yet as the U.S. threaten...

Last week, Donald Trump’s border Czar Tom Homan announced a drawdown of ICE personnel in Minnesota, following weeks of chaos and two deadly incidents in the state. Homan insisted that ICE was not surrendering, and this departure was instead evidence of ICE’s success in Minnesota.  Beginning in December 2025, ICE announced ‘Operation Metro Surge’ — an aggressive immigration enforcement operati...

Today on the show we are going to discuss the complete gutting of the Washington Post, an American institution. The paper that broke Watergate. The paper that just nine years ago told the world “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. And we’re going to place this latest news in the context of a much broader political assault on journalism, and the further consolidation of information in the hands of the bil...

Last week the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issued a very public warning to Prime Minister Mark Carney. At the centre of that warning is the USMCA trade deal, which kept Trump’s tariffs from unleashing even deeper damage to the Canadian economy. A mandatory review of the US-Mexico-Canada pact is kicking-off now. It has turned into a high stakes negotiation, with the U.S. poised to squeeze...

Jeffrey Epstein’s vast connections with the rich and powerful, the world over, are on full display in the over 3 million files and documents released by the U.S. Justice department late last week. There’s mounting evidence of Epstein’s relationships with people like President Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and tech titan Peter Thiel, as well...

Around 73 thousand people have been detained in ICE facilities across the United States over the past year. That’s a 75 per cent increase from right before Donald Trump took office. At least 38 people have died in ICE custody since then.  It’s all part of the Trump administration’s rapidly expanding immigration crackdown, which has included the addition of over one hundred new facilities. One...

Pierre Poilievre easily won his leadership review in Calgary on the weekend with 87.4% of the vote. Today, senior Parliamentary bureau writer Aaron Wherry talks about the convention, whether it guarantees Poilievre’s future and what challenges still lie ahead for the Conservative leader. Plus, why a press conference at a grocery store prompted election speculation. For transcripts of Front Burner,...

In just over a decade, the Conservative Party of Canada has lost four elections, picked three new leaders, and turned on two of them when they failed to become Prime Minister. As the party votes on Pierre Poilievre’s future as leader of the Conservative Party, Front Burner speaks to Conservative insiders, Abacus Data CEO David Coletto and senior parliamentary writer Aaron Wherry to consider the pa...

Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration has explicitly or implicitly borrowed from the Nazi tradition on social media. Specific passages or iconography from the Third Reich have been repurposed in the context of the government’s own legislative program today. The adoption of these extreme symbols, dog whistles and phrases is part of a re-mainstreaming of fascist and Nazi ideas more broad...

U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has weighed in on the separatism movement in Alberta. Bessent has said that the province is a “natural partner” to the U.S., and that it has “great resources”. While Bessent is certainly the most high profile U.S. official to muse about Alberta separatism, he hasn’t been the only MAGA supporter to chime in. Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon a...

Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump set off a firestorm with comments dismissing the military contributions of fellow NATO members during the war in Afghanistan.  This follows the president’s aggressive bid for Greenland, a self-governing territory of NATO-ally Denmark, which brought into question whether NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, could survive without America, its stro...

Massive anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis intensified over the weekend, in the wake of the second fatal shooting of an American citizen involving federal law enforcement agents in the city this month. On Saturday, border patrol agents shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse. Today, we’ll be talking about Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy...

Donald Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ says it has a plan for the future of Gaza. Critics say that strategy is full of holes, and that the true intention of the board extends far beyond the war ravaged territory.  Today we look at how a U.S. 20-point plan for a post-war Gaza evolved into a body that some fear could undermine the United Nations and further erode international order. Jayme Poisson spe...

It was an eventful World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, with striking speeches by both the U.S. President and Canadian Prime Minister. For his part Donald Trump talked for more than an hour on an array of topics, including his desire to acquire Greenland. His speech came a day after Mark Carney made international headlines announcing the end of the old world order as he sees it, a...

In a provocative speech to the World Economic Forum on Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney made the case that the rules of international economics and politics are “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition”. Carney went on to say that middle powers like Canada need to work together to find their own coalitions to survive and stand up to countries using economic coercion – a clear reference to t...