Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

The spring fiscal update is being celebrated. Canada's deficit is down $11 billion. Oil prices are up. The host is not celebrating. Growing up in Fort McMurray and working in the oil upgraders gives a specific lens on coverage that credits an oil-driven windfall while avoiding the word oil. The same media landscape that spent a decade framing Canadian energy as a liability is now quietly folding o...

Canada's spring fiscal update shows a lower deficit. The revenue driving that improvement comes largely from higher energy prices. Jamie Ellerton and Lindsay Broadhead track the contradiction: a decade of policy aimed at limiting energy investment, followed by a fiscal win nobody wants to attribute to energy. The sovereign wealth fund announcement lands in that context. Norway's version was built...

Three stories. None of them necessary. All of them real. First: condom prices are up 30 percent. The Iran conflict has disrupted supply chains for Karex, the company behind Durex and Trojan, which sources materials across Asia and Europe from factories in Malaysia and Thailand. Second: a woman in the Australian outback fell into a pit latrine and spent four hours trapped waist deep before rescuers...

Twenty percent of Canadians hold nearly 70 percent of the wealth. Tony Chapman calls it the K economy and says Air Canada's new seating layout is a direct response to it: personalization and comfort for the top, stripped pricing with fees for everything else on the bottom. Dynamic pricing runs the same logic. Airlines track browser cookies. If you check a fare and come back, the price has moved. C...

Conspiracy theories about the White House Correspondents' Dinner shooting spread faster than any verified facts. Nathan Radke of the Uncover Up podcast applies the same framework he uses on every case: look at the evidence before drawing the conclusion. Radke tracks the specific claims. Vice President Vance was evacuated before the president. A press secretary used a phrase that looked different i...

The bot takeover of the web is not one thing. Greg Fish of Cyberpunk Survival Guide breaks it into parts. Scrapers steal content, fill it with ads, and send bots to click the ads. That is click fraud and it funds a significant slice of what looks like web traffic. North Korea runs distributed crypto mining scripts that install through browsers and run silently while users are on a page. The countr...

Tax filing in Canada looks straightforward until CRA audits you in retrospect. Evelyn Jacks, President of the Knowledge Bureau, tracks where self-employed Canadians and small business owners get it wrong. Mixed use expenses are the most common miss: car, home office, client entertainment. Entertainment is capped at 50 percent. Conferences are limited to two per year for the self-employed. A tuitio...

CRA scams are not seasonal, and the information scammers need to make them convincing is sitting publicly on your social media profiles right now. Julie Matthews says most people do not realise how much they have already given away. Online obituaries have become a targeting tool. Julie Matthews explains how a surviving spouse can receive a call claiming the deceased filed incorrectly, or how a ful...

Good News Tuesday opens with Doug Bush, 62 years old, walking 70,000 steps at a gym in Edmonton. Ten thousand for every year of his life. Google says that's 11 hours and 40 minutes of continuous walking.   Then there is Ben. Ben lost his younger brother Sam and built Reason to Stay Calm, a website that connects people who are struggling with handwritten letters from strangers. He got word tha...

Instagram Plus is being tested now in Mexico, Japan, and the Philippines. Three dollars a month buys you longer stories, priority placement, anonymous story viewing, and the ability to see who rewatched your content. Features that either didn't exist or didn't cost anything before.   Tech analyst Carmi Levy calls it the annoyance ratchet. The free experience gets noisier, more ad-heavy, and m...

Good News Tuesday opens with a homeowner in a former church rectory circling the house waiting for a barbecue that may have been delivered next door. The address confusion dates back to a rezoning in 1904 that nobody has fully corrected since.   Ryan O'Donnell brings a legitimate win: the Griswold Family Christmas has been approved through the LEGO Ideas program and is becoming a real set. Hi...

Calgary rental prices have dropped. Two months free rent, six months free parking, all utilities included. And it still is not enough because the average two-bedroom in Calgary runs between 700 and 830 square feet. A study by lighting brand SoFairy found couples need a minimum of 1,800 square feet to avoid chronic stress. The math is not close.   The hosts track what that gap looks like for t...

F1 engineer Bernie Collins spent years on the Aston Martin pit wall making the calls that shape race outcomes. Her book, How to Win a Grand Prix, covers what actually happens before a driver ever gets credit for it. Also, why do fans and drivers love the Montreal Grand Prix in Canada. Collins tracks how AI shifted race simulation from hundreds of thousands of runs on Friday night to live models up...

Humanoid robots have arrived at Toyota Canada's Woodstock, Ontario factory, one of the largest automotive facilities in North America. Toyota assessed every model available and chose Digit, a short purple robot with oversized lamp eyes made by Agility Robotics. The reason: Digit's AI adapts on the spot to whatever container or configuration it encounters on the floor.   In Stockholm, research...

Canada's sovereign investment fund is the latest answer to a question the country keeps getting wrong. While federal officials announced a port expansion in Montreal, a bridge sustaining the Port of Vancouver collapsed because no one had maintained it. Matt Gurney tracks the gap: hundreds of billions owed on infrastructure Canada already owns, before a single new project is funded. Private capital...

John Garrett was the broadcaster who answered a desperate call with 20 minutes to airtime and asked no questions. He passed away suddenly this week. Bob Addison tells it straight. It was 8:45, the show started at 9:06, and Addison had no guest. He called Garrett at home, admitted he was desperate, and Garrett picked up the slack. Then there was the 2004 NHL lockout, a four-day mini camp, and a med...

Spring yard tips and a cybercrime bounty program make for an unlikely pairing, but both come down to the same idea: things you already have access to are more useful than you think.   Your Orange Peel Is Working Harder Than You Are Dried and ground into powder, orange peel repels ants through a compound insects cannot stand. Whole, it works as a seed starter. Mixed with soapy water, it target...

What makes you feel at home is the question that opened a conversation this week, and it started with a priest named Father Paul from Tanzania standing in a park with the sun on his face saying, today I can feel Africa.   He has lived in Canada since 2018. He is about 70 years old. And on a warm spring afternoon, a single sensation closed seven years and an ocean. The conversation it sparked...

The NASA Artemis Lego set keeps selling out, and the conversation it opened is about something bigger than a model on a shelf. The hosts ask what happened to science as something you bring home and do yourself.   The specific model is the Lego Technic NASA Artemis Space Launch System, $80 Canadian, with a hand-cranked mechanism that separates the boosters and ejects the Orion capsule. It was...

Online shopping fraud in Canada hit approximately $640 million in 2024, and Bruce Winder says the vector is not always an obvious scam. Sometimes it is a website that looks exactly like the one you meant to visit. A convincing Canada Goose lookalike site, a clothing return routed to a random address, a product that ships from overseas and cannot be returned: Bruce Winder walks through how fraud op...

Diesel fuel prices are already painful for Canadian truck operators, and Dan McTeague says the number people are watching at the pump is not the number that tells the real story. The supply that kept prices stable is gone and the replacement is not coming quickly.   Emergency reserves globally are nearly exhausted. The floating oil inventory that markets treated as a buffer has been consumed....

Car dealerships have survived a hundred years of disruption, but Lorraine Sommerfeld says their reputations have taken a serious hit since the pandemic and consumers are increasingly choosing to just stay away. The frustration is not really about the car. It is about the small office after you have already decided to buy it. Lorraine Sommerfeld points to Genesis as the model built specifically aro...

Alpine divorce is the term circulating online for something that is not a divorce at all. Tony Tedesco and Jen Kirsch say it is abandonment with a trendy name, and the conversation it opens is about what a partner does when things get genuinely hard. The term comes from a climber in Austria who left his exhausted girlfriend at a summit. She died. He was convicted. But the conversation Tony Tedesco...

Canada's new $25 billion sovereign wealth fund was announced today, and the panel's first question is the one nobody in Ottawa is rushing to answer: who gets to the front of the line?   The Investment Canada Needs and the History It Cannot Escape Andrew Caddell points to the infrastructure bank and the business bank as cautionary tales: government investment vehicles that did not deliver. Les...

Trail camera surveillance has become a break-and-enter tool, and the reason it works is the same reason it is hard to detect. Mark Mendelson says criminals are not parking on your street anymore. They are already in your tree. Camouflaged trail cameras mounted at eye level give burglars everything the old stakeout provided with almost none of the risk. Mark Mendelson points to recent discoveries i...