Shane Hewitt and The Nightshift

Alberta's Premier put a number on separation this week: $170 billion in federal debt as Alberta's opening share, before accounting for everything the federal government currently handles. Rob Breakenridge says a new poll shows more Canadians now view Alberta leaving as more damaging to the economy than Quebec leaving. The math is starting to land. On AI, Canada's ambitions are running ahead of its...

The Price is Right is the definition of game show in most people's heads, and according to BuzzerBlog's Cory Anotado, that didn't happen by accident. Hidden inside Cliffhangers, one of the show's most dramatic pricing games, is a trick Bob Barker built in specifically for loyal viewers. The first item runs around $25, the second around $35, the third around $45. Know those numbers and that mountai...

Bob Dylan is 85 and just announced more tour dates. The Beach Boys are out with Mike Love at 85. Paul Simon is 84, Randy Bachman is 82, Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton are both 80. They are all on the road this summer, and concert ticket prices for all of them keep climbing. Music journalist Eric Alper says the cynical read is that they need the money. The more interesting answer is psychological. Fo...

Internet memes turned 2007 into year zero — and the evidence starts with a cat, a cheeseburger, and intentionally terrible spelling. Ed Conroy connects the cultural nostalgia of Bob Barker's final Price Is Right era to the moment the internet stopped being a place you explored and became a place four corporations manage. Something Awful, Catterday, Grumpy Cat — the lineage is weirder a...

Canadian films are landing at the box office, and the question nobody expected to be asking is whether this country is ready to actually celebrate the people who made them. The Knight Who Should Be Luther King Charles tapped Idris Elba on the shoulders with a ceremonial sword this week, making him Sir Idris — recognized for his work as an actor, activist, and musician. Richard Crouse argues...

The optimization industry needs one thing before it can sell you anything: your belief that you are not enough. Tony Tedesco has decided not to provide it. Tony talks through what actually earns his attention in a feed built to amplify inadequacy, and it is not the cabbage diet or the step counter. It is people telling the truth about what they are going through. The scroll-past is instant for any...

Canada economy recession talk is landing at the same moment a beloved discount chain is rising from the ashes of Hudson's Bay. The hosts are not sure that is a coincidence. Zellers, Loyalty Points, and the Nostalgia Economy A Quebec retail group has acquired the Zellers name, logo, and Zeddy the bear, and plans to go national. The hosts dig into what the revival actually signals about where Canadi...

Zellers relaunch Canada has two new Ontario locations and a plan to go national slowly. Bruce Winder has questions about whether slowly is fast enough. Bruce traces the structural challenges facing the new Zellers: limited buying power at three locations, a retail landscape where every major competitor has already absorbed the categories Zellers is re-entering, and mall landlords so eager to fill...

Oil inventories are at historic lows. Demand is strong. The price keeps dropping. Dan McTeague says the futures market is being driven by headlines, not reality, and the pain at the pump is far from over. Dan breaks down why a litre of diesel costs forty cents more in Ontario than Alberta, why the weak loonie adds roughly forty cents a litre regardless of where crude is trading, and why provincial...

Skinwalker Ranch is one of the most surveilled properties on earth. Dr. Lee Kuhnle wants to know why the footage never quite delivers. Lee walks through decades of ownership, research, and television production, including the defence-funded program that quietly paid for cryptid hunting while telling Congress it was doing something else. He also names the independent analysts who went to the ranch,...

Black hole TON 618 looks beautiful in the viral image. Greg Fish wants to talk about what it would actually do to the clouds, the oceans, and everything in between. Greg breaks down why a black hole produces more light than the sun, how an accretion disc accelerates matter to near light speed before obliterating it, and why the idyllic image circulating online has no relationship to the physics in...

Optimization culture sold itself as a tool. Tony Chapman says it became a weapon, and the target is your sense of worth. Tony draws a direct line from fear-based marketing to the anxiety that now runs through everyday decisions about steps, macros, posting schedules, and productivity. The promise is always the same: follow the playbook and you'll get there. The problem is the playbook was never wr...

Six-year-olds who could not tell time. A baseline test confirming it. Then two sessions with performance visual artists teaching through play and joy. Every child could tell the time. Every child moved up an attainment bracket. Dr. Jacqueline Harding ran that experiment, and the result is not a curiosity. It is a blueprint. When children laugh, cortisol drops. Defences lower. The brain enters the...

Children laughter and play turn out to be building something permanent. The Saturday morning forts, the trunk full of random props that turned into a pirate ship, the Roadrunner that never got caught. None of it was wasted time.   Tony has an Oscar the Grouch tattoo and a theory about reply-all emails. He still calls it the tickle trunk. Shane shares he once moved the actual tickle trunk on a...

Good news Tuesday Canada brings Krista Richard out of Moncton, New Brunswick, where her Bikes and Trikes for Everyone program has put wheels under thousands of kids over 14 years. She collects them, fixes them, and sends them out the door. That is the whole program.   The phones and texts fill in the rest. Arthur was fancy. Teletubbies was a hard no. Someone watched Mr. Dressup through their...

Ottawa nostalgia and urban development collide when the place that held your childhood firsts starts coming down by machine. Stefan Keyes grew up in Ottawa's West End, close enough to walk to Westgate Shopping Centre. He watched his first movie there. He got his first passport photo there. He has not been inside in years and he is going to miss it anyway.   There is a difference between a pla...

Three robots walked into the show tonight - all of them fun.   One is in a university cafeteria doing something 2.5 million times that humans have never quite managed to do consistently. One is in a litter box, quietly learning things. And one was built in someone's garage from plans posted online, for a reason that sounds absurd until Kris Abel explains exactly who it was built for.   T...

A Canadian peacekeeper deploys to Croatia in 1993 to separate armies that want nothing to do with peace. He comes home carrying wounds nobody can see. Decades later, a daughter he never knew existed makes her way across the country to find him. The Peace Thieves is Brent Van Staalduinen's sixth novel, built around a question the title refuses to let go of: who is stealing the peace, and can it eve...

Canada is technically in a recession and the prime minister won't say the word. Matt Gurney thinks the more important conversation is the one hiding underneath it. For years, the answer to flat economic productivity was simple: put more people in the country. More people at Tim Hortons, more people at Canadian Tire, more dollars tallied in GDP. It worked as a number. It did not work as an economy....

Bob Addison went back to read the label on a six-foot Canada Day flag at Costco. Made in Canada, imported fabric, pole and bracket from China. Fifty dollars. The irony runs deeper when you consider Canada probably sold them the coal that fired the furnace that made the pole. That observation opens into something the algorithm has been quietly building for a while. Nostalgia for the sixties, sevent...

Counterfeit sports jerseys are everywhere, and the reasons people buy them are more complicated than the law makes room for.   The conversation draws a hard line between two kinds of fakes. A counterfeit Rolex or a fake designer bag is about passing yourself off as something you're not. A fake jersey is about wanting to wear your team's colours without taking out a mortgage. One is vanity. Th...

From wildflower yards to self-cleaning robot vacuums, this week's DIY conversation goes places you won't expect.   The neighbours want a perfect lawn. The bees want you to stop. Chaos gardening is the TikTok trend where you scatter wildflower seeds and let mother nature take over — no mowing, no maintenance, full pollinator habitat. Andy Baryer makes the case that lawns are vanity proje...

A new study on stress and memory just landed — and it reframes what's actually happening in your brain when you blank at the worst possible time. The research shows that acute stress doesn't just make recall harder. It limits how the brain forms associations between new memories as they're being built. Dr. Samantha Yammine uses a sharp example: if a friend tells you they'll be wearing a brig...

A technical recession, a denied emergency debate, and a prime minister who promised less red tape. The Monday panel takes stock of where things actually stand.   Showing up is not the same as delivering. Mark Carney visited a Toronto synagogue to speak directly to the Jewish community after protests in Montreal included nooses and effigies on public streets. Jimmy Zoubris says the visit matte...

Before the price increase, young Canadians were already skipping condoms. Now the math gets harder. Let's Stop AIDS surveys young people across Canada every year. The numbers from the most recent Sex Lives Report are not what most people expect: roughly half of sexually active youth did not use a condom the last time they had sex, and more than half have never been tested for HIV or an STI. HIV ra...