Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Swatch watch saved the Swiss watch industry in 1983. Forty-plus years later, a Swatch collaboration just made an Audemars Piguet accessible to mere mortals. A Royal Oak from Audemars Piguet starts at $35,000 Canadian and you cannot just walk into a store and buy one. The Swatch collaboration changes that. Colin Potts, Executive Director of the Horological Society of Canada, says this only works be...

Food inflation in Canada has a hidden driver nobody is talking about. Ontario just charged food manufacturers a billion dollars through it. You are paying that bill. The Extended Producer Responsibility fee was designed to push the food industry toward greener packaging. Instead, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois says it created a patchwork of uncoordinated provincial systems with no oversight and no results...

Swatch watch was born in 1983. In 2026, people are lining up at 5am at malls across Canada to buy one they could just wait for. The Swatch collaboration with Audemars Piguet produced a $560 Canadian pocket watch. It is not limited. More are coming. On eBay, someone listed one for 3,000 British pounds. At Chinook Mall in Calgary, people showed up at 5am. The Swatch store was one of only 22 worldwid...

Alberta separation is no longer just a whisper. A court-blocked petition, a rushed committee meeting, and a premier's televised address are all arriving at once. Rob Breakenridge says the court stepped in last week and killed the separatist petition, leaving the premier with a decision: walk away or escalate. The Forever Canadian anti-separatist petition had been languishing in committee for month...

Polymarket lets you bet on wars, missile strikes, and how many soldiers will die. A finance professor says it is gambling, not a market, and the difference matters. Vincent Grégoire, Canada Research Chair in Finance and Technology at HEC Montréal, says Polymarket is structured like a market but functions like gambling. You buy yes or no tokens on events. Suspicious bets on the US str...

Swatch watches turned a timekeeping device into a fashion statement. Ed Conroy had three or four lined up on his desk in grade three and felt like a high roller. Post-COVID, every kid at a high school exit looks the same: gray sweatpants, black hoodie. Ed Conroy calls it invasion of the body snatchers. The Swatch answered the opposite impulse: no two versions looked alike, and owning three or four...

Star Wars is back on the big screen, and so is a fight over who gets to tell your story when you're famous. Nobody Told Billy Joel the Movie Was Happening Stephen Colbert is leaving with class, according to Richard Crouse, but the format itself isn't going anywhere. Billy Joel has been warning filmmakers since 2021 that they have no right to his life or his music. Paranormal Activity cost $15,000...

A million dollars used to change everything. One Survivor winner turned theirs into $50,000 of debt. A CTV News piece tracking what Survivor winners did with their prize money put the question on air. Audience texts came fast: pay off the mortgage, clear the family debt, buy a house. On air, the answers split. One went with a house, a wedding, and a $50,000 pair of 1989 Jordan 1s. Another: pay off...

Airport security workers were arrested by the RCMP for swapping bag tags with drug shipments. The W5 investigation is only the beginning of the conversation. What a Million Dollars Actually Buys You The million-dollar question gets specific answers on air. Lindsay Broadhead would save, travel, and buy killer shoes. Jamie Ellerton would pay off the mortgage, take a two-month trip, and invest the re...

Spy gifts aren't a conspiracy theory. A coin, a carved eagle, or a lanyard can all carry tracking devices. The White House delegation to China reportedly kept all received gifts separate rather than bringing them home. Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former CSIS senior intelligence officer, calls it a good counterintelligence reflex. His preference: examine the gifts rather than discard them, because a c...

A million dollars won on Survivor, and Danny Boatwright spent $10,000 of it on a new hip for his dog. He calls it the best money he ever spent. Season 3 winner Ethan Zohn co-founded Grassroot Soccer after two former teammates from a Zimbabwean football club approached him post-win. The charity has spent two decades educating teens worldwide on HIV, mental health, and protection through soccer. He...

COINTELPRO is one of the largest government surveillance programs in American history. A group of ordinary people found the proof by picking the locks. The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI spent months preparing a break-in at a Pennsylvania field office in 1971. One member learned lock picking through a mail-order course. Another spent weeks inside the building posing as a journalism stu...

Nihilism says nothing is special. Greg Fish says that is the most freeing idea in philosophy, and the most misunderstood. Greg Fish argues that the real source of depression and anxiety is not nihilism but the opposite: the belief that you have a special purpose and the crushing weight of never finding it. If there is no place in the universe designated for you, you are free to find the things you...

AI resume screening is not the reason your application disappeared. But what's actually blocking you is almost worse. Shelley Billinghurst surveyed Canadian employers and found over 80% are not using AI to filter candidates at the front end. Kim Wilkinson asked nearly 2,000 job seekers the same question from the other direction. Almost 100% believe AI is actively working against them. The real cul...

Ozempic side effects are starting to tell a story that the billions of dollars in prescriptions written haven't caught up to yet. Tony Chapman has been paying attention. The drug eats into bone mass and muscle mass, Chapman says, and when you stop, the weight returns without the skeleton to support it. His view is nuanced: if you cannot move and need to lose significant weight to start, that is a...

Good News Tuesday delivers rare validation that the suspicious-looking settlement email was actually legitimate, and $50 in bread money just landed in a co-host's account. The Canadian bread price-fixing class action against major grocery chains has started paying out, and a co-host reports his $50 arrived via direct deposit. The team recalls the signup process looked so much like a scam that many...

Smart contact lenses are in prototype, gardening pros have a trick nobody ever taught you, and the term glass holes is back. A tech and DIY expert connects all of it.   **He Started Playing Guitar Because of Ritchie Valens. His Favourite Cars Are From That Same Era.** Andy says his love of 1950s cars and his reason for picking up a guitar trace back to the same source: Ritchie Valens. He also...

Good News Tuesday reaches into the remarkable with a dog missing for two years, a wild bird that found its human, and a host who cannot wait for the visit months in the making. Joel bought a bulldog at 19 after saving up for years and it became part of the family. Two and a half years ago it disappeared. Two years later it came home with no explanation, and the team takes a few minutes to imagine...

Canada military spending has been inadequate for so long that a defence analyst says the country won't have meaningful new capability until 2035. Richard Shimooka says the US pause on the Permanent Joint Board of Defense is less alarming than it looks, and points out the board has been declining in relevance for decades while NORAD provides real daily Canada-US defence coordination. The concern wo...

ChatGPT bank account access is rolling out to select US users, and a tech journalist says Canada is next. His breaking news on next-gen Google Glass is the other story to watch this week.   Kris Abel covers OpenAI's move to let ChatGPT connect to your bank account for conversational financial advice. He frames the question plainly: should you actually let an AI near your money?   Bell Me...

Classic cars are about more than chrome and horsepower, and an automotive journalist says the ones that make people pull over are the ones attached to a memory. Lorraine Sommerfeld says a Gremlin club and a Nova club both exist, not because those were great cars by any standard, but because someone's mom drove one. What turns a car into a classic isn't the specs, she says. It's the story. Sommerfe...

Snowbirds Tutor jets have one season of flying left after this one, and a pilot says the years between the last Tutor flight and the replacement arriving could stretch well into the next decade. John Tory Jr. says the world's top air show teams are all jets, and the Snowbirds' Tutors were iconic for what their pilots could do with them. The replacement turboprop emulates jet handling at a fraction...

Birth family connections don't always start with a meeting, and a radio contributor says the phone call that changed his life happened almost twenty years ago. Bob Addison says he is adopted and found out about his birth family only when his birth mother was already dying. He never met her, but they spoke by phone. He says the people on that side turned out to be wonderful, and this summer he is d...

Canada defence spending has been a broken promise for decades, and a political journalist says the US pausing a joint defence board is just the beginning of what's coming. Matt Gurney says the Permanent Joint Board of Defense, a Canada-US committee dating back to 1940, has been paused explicitly because of Canada's failure to meet defence commitments. The trade agreement renegotiates in six weeks,...

Tipping culture has a word problem. The receipt says gratuity. The machine says 18. Somewhere between those two things, the meaning changed. The hosts dig into what it means when muscle memory sends you to 18% because that's where 15% used to be. Canadians are pushing back, and the team says the reason isn't stinginess. It's that an expectation is not the same thing as a thank-you. A long weekend...