Front Burner

The Liberals released a new, long-awaited climate change plan last week that they say will meet Canada's commitments under the Paris Agreement and cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 30 per cent by 2030. The plan includes $15 billion in federal investment and a gradual tripling of the carbon tax. Today on Front Burner, host Jayme Poisson asks Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson about the...

Canadian fashion mogul Peter Nygard was arrested Monday night in Winnipeg under the Extradition Act. He faces nine charges related to sex trafficking and racketeering in a New York court. You may remember that Nygard has already been accused by dozens of women across the globe of sexual assault, rape and human trafficking. While he has denied all allegations, these charges out of New York are the...

Pornhub, the Montreal-based streaming giant, is in trouble. They’ve dumped millions of videos from their platform, Visa and Mastercard have cut ties with the company, and they’re facing questions from Canadian MPs. This all happened after a recent New York Times article which exposed the platform’s insidious problem of hosting videos of rape, child abuse and sex trafficking — sometimes even after...

The Chinese government says the Lop County Hair Product Industrial Park in the country's northwest is a place where people make wigs and other hair products that get shipped across the globe. Others say what’s happening at the park is forced labour, and that it’s just the latest in a pattern of grave human rights abuses committed in recent years against the country’s Uighur Muslim population — inc...

On Monday evening, Newsmax TV beat Fox News Channel in ratings for the very first time. Since Fox News accurately called the U.S. election for Joe Biden, Donald Trump has soured on the network in favour of smaller, more controversial outlets. And the outgoing president is urging his political base to join him. Today, CBC senior Washington correspondent Susan Ormiston reports how this fissure is sh...

Health Canada has approved the Pfizer-BioNTech after scientists wrapped up a two-month review of the company's clinical trial data. The approval is a crucial step in what will be the largest vaccination campaign in Canadian history. Today, host Jayme Poisson goes through what we know about the vaccine with Dr. Maria Sundaram, an infectious disease epidemiologist based in Toronto.

New restrictions have been announced in Alberta as the province struggles with the highest rate of new coronavirus infections in the country. As hospitalizations rise, we check in with two Edmonton doctors on the front lines of the pandemic, to hear about the impact they're seeing the virus have up close: Dr. Darren Markand is an intensive care unit physician, and Dr. Shazma Mithani is an emergenc...

The wildfire spread of misinformation about COVID-19 on social media is giving critics of Big Tech ammunition in their fight. It comes at a time when Facebook and Google face major antitrust lawsuits in the U.S., and some are calling on Canada to do more to regulate tech giants. Our guest is Taylor Owen, director of the Centre for Media, Technology and Democracy at McGill University, and host of t...

It’s been more than a year since Cameron Ortis, the former director-general of the RCMP’s National Intelligence Coordination Centre, was arrested and charged under Canada’s Security of Information Act. The Fifth Estate’s Bob McKeown discusses the bizarre chain of events that led to Ortis’s arrest, including the vandalism of the graves of a high-stakes gambler’s parents.

It's been a month since Joe Biden was voted in as the next president of the United States. But a lot has happened since then. There are the final weeks of Donald Trump's chaotic tenure, the importance of Georgia's runoff Senate race and the tensions that are dividing the Democrats even as they prepare to take power. Today, former CBC Washington correspondent Keith Boag joins us to get us up to spe...

Many world-renowned ballet productions, from Swan Lake to Romeo and Juliet, have graced the stage of the legendary Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow since the 1800s. No matter what wars and revolutions the Russians confronted, the Bolshoi would find a way to stay open. That is, until COVID-19. The theatre closed down for six months this year because of the pandemic. It relaunched in the fall, and it's get...

Last weekend NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh and U.S. congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez raised over $200,000 US for charity by livestreaming a game called Among Us on the streaming platform Twitch for nearly six hours. Among Us is a popular space-murder-mystery multiplayer online game. About 100,000 people watched the livestream. Today, CBC senior writer and gaming columnist Jonathan Ore is here to...

On Monday, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the Liberal government will spend up to $100 billion to support the post-pandemic economy. The priority is, as Freeland says, to do “whatever it takes” to help Canadians, despite the record-high $381 billion deficit. CBC senior parliamentary reporter David Cochrane breaks down the details of the economic update, and tells us what critics had...

As Pfizer and Moderna's vaccine candidates get closer to being approved in countries around the world, many Canadians are wondering when they might be able to get a shot here. Prime Minister Trudeau has said most Canadians could be vaccinated by next September, but the details on when those vaccines may arrive in the country — and how they'll be distributed — remain hazy. The government is also fa...

Last week, after a video of one of his speeches went viral, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had to address a growing controversy over “The Great Reset”. The term means different things to different people. To the World Economic Forum it’s a vague goal to make the world more equal and address climate change in the wake of the pandemic. To Conservative finance critic Pierre Poilievre it’s evidence of...

Last January, Wuhan became the epicentre of the coronavirus. The Chinese city went under a strict lockdown for almost two months. The conditions were so severe that buildings were sealed off, and barricades erected. Today, the economy is booming again, but many people are still reeling from the trauma brought by the virus and the way it was managed. CBC Asia correspondent Saša Petricic travelled t...

New details revealed by The Fifth Estate question the RCMP's timeline about the worst mass shooting in modern Canadian history. It's been seven months since a gunman disguised as a Mountie went on a rampage, killing 22 people over 13 hours in Nova Scotia, travelling a distance of nearly 200 kilometres. Gillian Findlay joins Jayme to describe the fuller picture of what happened in that time, how th...

In the first wave of the pandemic, Alberta was one of the provinces that seemed to have things relatively under control. Now, the province has daily case rates three times as high as Quebec or Ontario, and ICUs in Calgary and Edmonton have been hitting 90 per cent capacity. But Premier Jason Kenney hasn't addressed the province at a COVID-19 briefing for almost two weeks, and has resisted repeated...

Canada is spending a tremendous amount of money to get the country through the COVID-19 pandemic, but a growing movement says we can shed our old worries about the federal deficit. Modern monetary theory argues that since we control our own currency, the country can create more money and never go broke. Today, Front Burner examines this controversial idea and how it relates to Canada.

Vancouver mayor Kennedy Stewart wants to decriminalize small amounts of illegal drugs. If he gets his way, Vancouver will be the first Canadian city to do so. The move comes as overdose deaths continue to surge in Vancouver and across the country. CBC Vancouver producer Jodie Martinson has been speaking to drug users in the city. She’ll explain the significance and limitations of the possible chan...

In recent public and media appearances, Conservative Leader Erin O'Toole has talked up the need to fight inequality through labour rights, and lamented the decline of unionization in the private sector. He's also blamed the Liberals for favouring elites over workers, and trade deals over jobs in Canada. These issues have become recurring themes as he introduces himself to Canadians after being ele...

Today on Front Burner, we’re bringing you updates on three stories we’ve been following: the latest vaccine news, a new twist in the Mi’kmaq lobster dispute, and a Canadian company embroiled in a major U.S. voter fraud conspiracy.

The second wave of the coronavirus is battering much of the country right now. Over the weekend, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec all had record-breaking new case numbers. As some familiar issues re-emerge, like deadly outbreaks at long-term care homes, we're talking to Globe and Mail health columnist Andre Picard about what Canadians learned from the first wave, and what lesson...

It was one of the most harrowing attacks in recent Canadian history. Alek Minassian plowed into pedestrians on a busy section of Yonge Street in Toronto with a rented van, killing 10 and wounding 16. Just before his attack on Facebook, he wrote of an 'incel rebellion,' aligning himself with the ideology of involuntarily celibate men who blame women for the fact they are alone. Minassian has admitt...

This week, Britney Spears lost a legal battle to remove her father as her conservator — a court-ordered agreement that has put him and a lawyer in charge of her finances and daily life since 2008. Her conservatorship has spawned #FreeBritney, a sometimes-conspiratorial movement whose adherents believe Spears is essentially a prisoner in her own life. But it has also attracted the attention of the...