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Bill Vigars was starting a new gig at the Canadian Cancer Society when he flew to the East Coast to check out an unknown kid with one leg planning to run a personal marathon a day across Canada for cancer research. Before he knew it, Vigars was helping Terry Fox make the Marathon of Hope a national phenomenon that’s kept Terry’s legacy alive for decades, with nearly a billion dollars since raised...

Things were different in the “before times.” Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we weren’t all experts in viral variants or polymerase chain reaction tests. We’d never heard of “vaccine apartheid” or “social distancing.” No one drank “quarantinis” after enduring a “covidivorce.” And “self-isolating” and “lockdowns” were things to be avoided. In his new book Pandexicon, author Wayne Grady has chronicl...

Mike Ramsay was friends with former Toronto principal Richard Bilkszto, whose suicide after allegedly enduring false bigotry accusations in an anti-racism session has shocked Canadians. And Ramsay says he’s experienced similar vilification. He’s been called a “white supremacist.” He’s been suspended as a school trustee in Waterloo, Ont. He says it’s because he fights to keep schools focused on lea...

Formerly one of Canada’s top crime reporters, Tamara Cherry witnessed gruesome violence and terrible trauma. What she says she didn’t realize was how the way she and others covered the crime beat was worsening pain for survivors, responders and reporters themselves. Cherry, author of the new book The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News, joins host Brian Lilley, himself no...

The economics of the music business have been turned upside down in recent years. For artists and fans alike, concerts now are king. Legendary publicist, writer and music maven Eric Alper joins Brian this week to discuss why this summer’s concert season in particular is making history, why some concert tickets now cost more than plane tickets, and the most obvious reasons why Taylor Swift left Can...

It’s where we should be building up capabilities against Russia’s hypersonic missiles and Chinese spy aircraft coming over the North Pole. But news the Liberal government is closing the Canadian International Arctic Centre is the latest indication Ottawa doesn’t get the importance of the North. After the Harper government made the Arctic a bigger priority, the last eight years have revealed Ottawa...

Food inflation is showing no signs of letting up soon, as guest Sylvain Charlebois tells Brian Lilley this week. But grandstanding politicians yelling about “greedflation” by allegedly avaricious grocers are looking in the wrong place, says Charlebois, professor of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University. The recent guilty plea by Canada Bread, admitting to years of bakery price-fixin...

Climate crusaders are convinced this year’s fire season is global warming. Conspiracy theorists think it’s eco-terrorism from arsonists to scare us about climate change. The reality, as Kenneth Green tells Brian this week, is much more complicated, with everything from poor forest management practices, natural burn cycles, and yes, also some climate and some human causes, playing roles — in additi...

It’s one of the most dramatic episodes in Canada’s early years, although it’s often neglected by our history lessons: Irish republicans attacked Canada from the south as part of a wild plan to win independence for Ireland. As we celebrate the Canada Day weekend, host Brian Lilley is joined by David Wilson, author of Canadian Spy Story: Irish Revolutionaries and the Secret Police. They discuss the...

Cabinet ministers have quit. Some party leaders are calling for him to resign. But New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs tells Brian Lilley he’ll stake his political career to take a stand for parents in his province to be involved when their kids ask at school to be identified by a different gender or name. Higgs discusses what he thinks of attempts by Justin Trudeau, activists, and progressive medi...

Hatred toward Jews is the oldest and most pernicious form of prejudice. Although anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the persecution of Jews have always been around, the rise of social media, populism and identity politics have made it seem increasingly pervasive. Author Philip Slayton joins Brian Lilley to discuss his new book, Antisemitism: An Ancient Hatred in the Age of Identity Politics, and...

Dr. Sharon Koivu says it’s like the reverse of the ethical “trolley problem”: in the effort to help an opioid user, Canada’s “safe supply” drug policy puts many more people in danger. A long-time proponent of harm reduction, Koivu, an urban doctor in London, Ont., tells host Brian Lilley how she has watched with alarm as policy has shifted from safe, supervised consumption, to pumping quantities o...

It was late in the game, and the United Conservative Party was set to lose the Alberta election, when it finally discovered a way to win over voters and eke out a victory. The secret? Being just moderate enough to comfort city people and just conservative enough for everyone else, as former federal Conservative MP and Alberta public affairs consultant Monte Solberg tells Brian Lilley this week. If...

A cargo container filled with millions in gold and valuables landed at Toronto’s international airport one day this past April. Then it vanished. Weeks later, police haven’t found it. Scott Andrew Selby, co-author of Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History, has studied sophisticated high-stakes robberies. He joins Brian Lilley this week to discuss what we know about how the recent Pe...

How did we end up with a new passport design that replaces stirring images of Canadian identity — Nellie McClung, Terry Fox, the Mounties, and Vimy — with vapid graphics of squirrels, autumn leaves and snowmen? The problem lies in our classrooms, prominent Canadian historian David Bercuson tells Brian Lilley this week. Canada has a great deal to be proud of in our history, says Bercuson, but gener...

The traditional ways of dealing with our dead are running into problems. Cities are running out of space for cemeteries. Cremation and burial are being shunned for their environmental damage. And there’s a huge wave of boomers running out of time. Ian Sutton, author of The Big Exit, joins host Brian Lilley to discuss the trouble of dealing with so many humans dying off, and the creative alternativ...

When Natalie MacLean broke out of the Ottawa tech scene to become a globally celebrated wine writer, travelling the world, paid to drink, she thought she had everything she could want. Then, like a glass toppling off a table, her life was shattered: her marriage collapsed, she was pilloried in an journalistic ethics scandal, and she realized wine had gone from career to crutch. MacLean, bestsellin...

Canada isn’t the only place where left-wing activists are blackening the names of colonial-era figures like John A. Macdonald and Henry Dundas for not living up to modern, ultra-progressive ideals. When British ethicist Nigel Biggar found himself defending 19th-century mining magnate Cecil Rhodes against exaggerated claims of racism from Oxford University students, he recognized the need to bring...

For 1,019 days Canadians Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig were China’s hostages, cruelly imprisoned by the communist regime as leverage for the release of Meng Wanzhou, held under house arrest in Canada on a U.S. warrant. Then, suddenly, one day, they were free, thanks to a White House-brokered deal. Mike Blanchfield and Fen Osler Hampson, authors of the new book The Two Michaels, join host Brian...

Billy Gorta saw the rise of violent attacks in New York City back in the ’70s and ’80s, when politicians took a soft-on-crime approach. If that sounds familiar, that may be because Canadians are facing a shocking crime wave — and many point the finger at looser bail and police-defunding policies. As an NYPD captain, Gorta was in the room when leaders finally got serious about cracking down on crim...

The new buzzword among urban planners is the “15-minute city,” but it’s the same old idea they’ve been pushing for decades — their dream of getting us all living in small, densified urban condos, and out of our cars. Urban Policy Analyst Wendell Cox joins host Brian Lilley to explain what the “15-minute city” really is and why it’s doomed. He discusses how planners ignore how we really want to liv...

Wars, terrorism, boycotts, a nuclear Iran: Since the 1948 founding of the modern State of Israel, the Jewish state has faced seemingly endless threats to its security — and, at times, its very existence. As it approaches its 75th birthday, the biggest threat comes from within, says Vivian Bercovici. Canada’s former ambassador to Israel joins host Brian Lilley from Tel Aviv to explain what’s really...

When Chanel Pfahl started teaching at an Ontario public school she didn’t expect the curriculum to include lessons about how everything is racist, including math. When she told her Facebook followers about her disagreement with what she considered the indoctrination of students into critical race theory, she found herself under investigation by the Ontario College of Teachers. Pfahl joins Full Com...

Canadian lawyer Dan Bilak didn’t expect his legal career to end up with him training to fight Russian soldiers invading Ukraine, but here he is. Bilak joins host Brian Lilley this week to explain the unlikely story of how he went from practising corporate law to practising clearing booby-trapped houses. And he discusses why he thinks the stakes of this war are so high for the western world, why he...

Project Sidewinder, a joint CSIS and RCMP report, found evidence of Canadian politicians under Chinese influence, Beijing’s agents funnelling money to Canadian political parties, and communist spies infiltrating Canadian assets and institutions. That was back in 1997. With fresh allegations of China’s electoral interference in Canada, Michel Juneau-Katsuya, the former CSIS intelligence officer beh...