Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Tipping in Quebec had a problem, so the government passed a law. The first tip option is now higher than it was before the law existed. The old system calculated tips on top of Quebec's 15% sales tax, pushing a stated 15% tip to roughly 17.5% in practice. The law banned that and required the "other" option on payment machines to be as visible as the presets. Restaurants responded by setting the ne...

Tipping culture is being redesigned, and a hospitality professor says the first real test is already happening at restaurants near you. Wayne Smith says tipping and non-tipping sections are being beta tested now, giving customers a choice that changes the nature of the transaction entirely. Pick the tipping section and you get full table service. Pick the other and you order at a kiosk, pick up yo...

What to watch this weekend just got a lot more specific, and a film critic from Penticton has already done the scrolling for you. The Movie That Could Make Awards History for Horror Obsession is a Blumhouse debut that Stebbing calls wildly unpredictable, built around a man whose wish for his coworker's love comes true in all the wrong ways. A viral YouTube short got the director his first feature....

Secrets in relationships aren't always what they look like, and a clinical psychologist says the distinction between privacy and secrecy could be the most important conversation a couple never has. Deleting Messages Is Not Privacy. A Psychologist Draws the Line Dr. Laurie Betito says privacy protects individuality and is necessary even in close relationships, while secrecy is concealment that prot...

Shadow AI is a one-click liability, and a tech consultant says most employers have no idea how deep it already goes inside their own organizations. Mohit Rajhans says employees are uploading pricing structures, proprietary documents, and competitive bid information to unvetted AI tools without understanding the security implications. Some of those tools have already shut down. In some cases, the c...

Boys falling behind in school often starts before anyone thinks to look, and a mental health professor says the gap begins in kindergarten. Calissa Ngozi says girls' brains develop faster, giving them social and emotional reasoning that boys need significantly more time to build. She confirms that full brain development doesn't complete until around 25. The education system isn't accounting for wh...

Peptide supplements are flooding the internet with promises about weight loss and joint repair. A physician says the science behind almost all of them stops at a Petri dish. Dr. Mitch Shulman says the gold standard for knowing whether anything works is a double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trial, and none of the substances being touted online have been through that process. What gets sold i...

Barbecue season is officially open, and the question on the table is whether convenience has taken the soul out of lighting one up. The team is at a crossroads on this. One host has switched from natural gas to a wood pellet grill and discovered that a Wi-Fi attachment can control temperature from the couch without stepping outside. The food comes out basically perfect every time. That, it turns o...

Pellet smoker season is here, and whether you're new to the grill or years in, there are fundamentals most people skip. Ted Reader has been cooking over live fire his whole life. He's got the tips that change everything. The smoke mistake almost everyone makes: too much wood, too long. Reader says all your flavour penetration happens in the first 45 minutes. After that, you're just making it bitte...

Dunkin' Donuts expanding into Canada is not just a brand story. It is a bet that Tim Hortons is more vulnerable than it looks. Tim Hortons has been slowing financially and leaning on celebrity marketing at exactly the moment consumers are walking away from the $20 fast food burger in favour of fast casual dining and proper sit-down meals. That is the opening Dunkin' is walking through, and the ana...

Mount St. Helens erupted 46 years ago this weekend, and the mountain did not blow its top. It blew its side, and people as far away as Lethbridge, Alberta felt what that meant. Harry R. Truman was 83 years old and refused to leave Spirit Lake Lodge. He believed the volcano would blow straight up, not sideways. He had said they couldn't pull him out with a mule team. He and his 16 cats were buried...

Alberta pipeline talks are coming to a head, with a major announcement expected that will test whether what has been promised has anything behind it. The Prime Minister is arriving in Alberta to stand alongside Premier Danielle Smith and announce the next phase of their energy agreement, including a pipeline proposal the federal government has committed to fast tracking as a project in the nationa...

Volcanoes in Canada last erupted 150 years ago. That fact should not be as reassuring as it sounds. George Kourounis makes his living inside craters and has thoughts on the difference between dormant and quiet. He has been on ropes 400 meters down inside active craters, dodging lava in the air, working with scientists in Congo, Vanuatu, Ethiopia, Hawaii. The question he keeps being asked about Can...

Montreal Grand Prix weekend is coming, and one particular group of workers is planning not to show up for it. According to the Montreal Gazette, exotic dancers in the city are planning to walk off the job on one of their busiest weekends of the year, demanding to be recognized as employees with the same protections as other workers. Most dancers are not paid a salary. One dancer, Celeste Ivy, said...

Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, and it did not blow its top. It blew its side, and the wall of water and debris that followed changed everything for everyone below it. In Canada, ash fell on cars in Kamloops and the cloud reached Lethbridge. Victoria and Vancouver felt a shockwave through their homes. Harry R. Truman, 83 years old, had refused to leave his lodge on Spirit Lake. In March,...

Stephen Colbert is leaving CBS on May 21st, comedy is under a microscope, and there is a horror movie in theaters right now that arrives from a completely unexpected direction. Comedy's Hardest Secret The Kevin Hart roast is the entry point, but the real question is whether audiences now need to be shocked to laugh. The case made here is that the hardest thing a performer can do is make it look li...

Canadian community does not always look the way you expect it to. Sometimes it is 21 men eating eggs at seven in the morning on garbage day, no agenda, no minutes, just life. The group has been running for 17 years in a village where strangers stop to introduce themselves on the street. The newest member sat down this week for the first time and walked away wondering if he should have found a tabl...

Canadian life satisfaction is measuring something real and its provincial variation tells a more complicated story than any single headline can carry. The Astronauts Came Back. The Panel Asks Who Should Be Doing the Listening. The Artemis astronauts met Canada's Prime Minister this week and the panel pushes on the moment. Broadhead says real leadership cascades from the top when it is aspirational...

Gambling advertising in Canada is targeting the demographic least equipped to resist it. Steve Joordens explains exactly why, and what two bills in Parliament are trying to do about it. The brain science matters here. The limbic system, which chases rewards and makes gambling feel exciting, develops early. The frontal lobes, which apply judgment and inhibition, are not fully developed until age 25...

Sports betting did not arrive to replace gambling. It arrived to replace the word. One listener's text put a fine point on it: kids watching sports with their parents should be picking up lessons about teamwork, not learning what a parlay means. That text is the door into something much bigger: how gambling got rebranded, embedded, and normalised across everyday life without most people noticing....

Declassified UFO files released by the Pentagon on May 8th look explosive on the surface. Nathan Radke spent the better part of his weekend reading through them and came back with something more complicated. The 162 files from the FBI, Air Force, and CIA include official memos and genuinely strange material, but also newspaper clippings, letters from cranks, and a flying saucer frisbee advertiseme...

Quantum computers could break the encryption protecting every cryptocurrency on the planet. That is not a distant theory. It is an active scramble. Blockchains link transactions through cryptographic algorithms built on large prime numbers. A quantum computer does not brute force those numbers the way a classical machine does. It runs every probability at once and collapses toward an answer. A rec...

Contagious yawning remains one of the most studied and least understood reflexes in human biology. A new finding about yawning in the womb just made the mystery harder to explain. Thirty-eight pregnant women at 28 to 32 weeks watched videos and images designed to trigger a yawn. Within 90 seconds of the mother yawning, the baby yawned on ultrasound a significant amount of the time. The researchers...

Dunkin' Donuts Canada is happening: a master franchise has been secured with plans to open one location per week up to 200. Tony Chapman has questions. The operator already owns Second Cup and Milestones. Chapman's read: look at how Second Cup has performed against Starbucks and Tim Hortons and ask whether the same team is the right bet for a Dunkin' rollout. The franchise math is steep, the suppl...

Alberta voter data leak is the story Matt Gurney says everyone is trying to minimize. The fake names baked into the voter list have already identified who did it. What happened next is the problem. The "it's just a phone book" argument is the one Gurney refuses to let stand. Phone books had an opt-out clause. Three million Albertans never got that choice. Reports are already coming in of people, i...