The Big Story

In mid-September, commercial fishers began to protest and threaten First Nation lobster fishermen who were exercising their treaty rights to make a moderate living out of season. Traps were cut, boats burned and flares were fired. But it's not a new story. This is a decades-old problem that's never been solved. Why is a supreme court ruling from more than 20 years ago still largely ignored? Why do...

The federal government may not be working towards decriminalization of banned substances, but if you follow the proper procedures, as some churches have, you can receive permission to import and use them. Recently a church in Winnipeg became the latest organization to receive permission to use daime tea, a psychedelic substance also known as ayahuasca. How did they receive permission? What is the...

If all goes well, sometime in the next six months, one of the many Covid-19 vaccine candidates will receive approval for human use. It will be a day to celebrate. The end of the pandemic will at long last be in sight. But what happens next? Who gets the first doses? The second batch? How do you actually vaccinate billions and billions of people, quickly and safely? A vaccine isn't the end of the r...

You're a good citizen, so you probably toss your plastic into the recycling bin. Especially if it has those little recycling arrows on it. Why wouldn't you? Public service campaigns have been telling you to do this forever. But what if those campaigns were a lie, designed to make you feel better about the plastic you use? What if plastic recycling was never going to be effective, except at selling...

September was a month for rising COVID-19 case counts in British Columbia. October will be a month for an election. Why now? That depends on who you ask. The NDP claim they need a mandate to govern more responsively during a pandemic. Their opponents say it's a power grab because the NDP's poll numbers are high. What will British Columbians think? Will they punish the NDP for forcing them to the p...

Cases are increasing exponentially. Hospital admissions are beginning to follow them. The doctors who oversee ICUs are nervous. And the public is looking for clear rules they can follow—only those seem to vary by public health unit. Dr. Michael Warner runs an ICU in Toronto. He can see the line from his hospital's COVID-19 assessment centre stretching down the road from his office. Along with othe...

They played zero games in Toronto. They spent the first three weeks on the road. They lost their best hitter for half the year. Their ace welcomed a baby during a pandemic. They were written off as young but not ready. They ended up in the playoffs, by clinching a spot that had never existed until this season. The Blue Jays are a bunch of talented kids of former big leaguers, a South Korean ace an...

If you think that parents are nervous about Back To School, imagine how the kids are feeling. You’re going back to school, or maybe trying to learn from home. You’re not allowed to hang out with your friends except with masks and at a distance, yet you’re still supposed to share rooms with them. Your teachers are masked. They’re measuring space between your desks. You're worried about a virus you...

Last week, an unlikely research project made a startling discovery: Phosphine gas in the atmosphere of Venus. That's something that, as far as we know, is created by living organisms. Our efforts to find signs of life on other worlds, and a lot of our space dreaming in general, tend to focus on Mars. But all of a sudden we need to take a closer look at our other planetary neighbour. So how can we...

Because the coffee bean is in danger. A rapidly spreading fungus is threatening both the plants themselves and the farmers who make a living from them. The fungicides that used to stop it no longer work in many cases and climate change is making life easier for the fungus every day in areas where coffee grows. How long until there's a coffee shortage? Or until we start losing some of the more uniq...

Since the beginning of the pandemic, Quebec police estimate threats made against public officials are up about 400 percent. Most of the people arrested for making those threats show evidence of believing in conspiracy theories. In fact, belief in these theories, as well as distrust in the mainstream media, is rising quickly in the province. And not all of these theories are coming from the United...

It’s not Donald Trump’s fault. He’s just an accelerant. America has been churning towards a crisis of democracy for decades. Our guest today created a model that predicted the 2020s would be the ultimate test for the future of America. The crisis point is here, so how will America respond? And what does it mean to Canada if our neighbours fail the democratic test? GUEST: Jack Goldstone, George Mas...

On this show, we usually talk to experts—and that means during Covid-19 we've been speaking with doctors and infectious disease specialists, researchers and scientists, pundits and journalists, but not very often with average Canadians. Fortunately, someone has been. A new documentary that airs tonight follows several Canadians through the past six months, and takes us into their homes and virtual...

In 1988, Toronto lawyer Clayton Ruby represented the family of a young man named Michael Wade Lawson. Though neither Ruby, the family or anyone else involved at the time knew it, it’s a case that's had a profound impact on how police forces in Canada’s largest province do—and don’t—hold themselves accountable. Michael Wade Lawson, you see, was 17—a young Black man who was shot and killed by the po...

This November, accused killer Alek Minassian will face trial for the 2018 Toronto van attack that killed 10 people and injured 16. In the aftermath of that attack, we learned that Minassian subscribed to the incel ideology—which has been linked to mass killings around the world. Incels entered the public consciousness as lonely people obsessed with other people's sex lives. But in recent years the...

There are a lot of things that provincial back-to-school guidelines don't cover—because they can't. Every school is different, and so are the neighbourhoods they serve. And as students return, teachers and administrators often need answers, quickly, to problems they couldn't have foreseen. This is where a new program led by hospitals and doctors in Toronto's east end comes in. Each school is match...

It's been 25 years since the Ipperwash crisis and the killing of Dudley George. Long enough that there's a generation that doesn't remember it—but they have plenty of examples of modern-day land defenders standing up against the government. But the original protesters, who took back land the government had promised to return to them 50 years ago and won? They're still there. Still living at Stony...

Are you addicted to the news? Don't lie! It's understandable. This year has been hard, and everything feels like a crisis sometimes, and some of us can't look away. Not knowing what's happening in the world at all is not an option, but what if we don't have to know everything absolutely immediately? Is it possible to regulate the way you consume the news without missing out on the things that matt...

It's been a chaotic and eventful—and still not yet close to done—return to schools across Canada. A majority of parents have chosen to return their kids to the classroom. Other have opted for remote learning either by necessity or preference. And then there are the private pods—small bubbles of a few families, taught by a teacher hired to work privately. Of course, having the means to afford priva...

In a large house, in a very nice area of Toronto, in the 1970s and 80s, there lived a normal family: Mom, dad, kids. Roughly thirty kids, actually, most of them adopted from all over the worlds. Thirty kids with different languages, needs, dreams and personalities. Why did they do it? What happened when they did? What kind of legacy does the Simpson family leave behind today in a city and country...

When SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy took off from a NASA launchpad this year, it marked a new era of manned spaceflight, one in which private businesses have as much of a stake in success as government space agencies. But have we stopped along the way to think about the ramifications of that? What rules do companies like SpaceX have to follow once they are out on the final frontier? If they break them, who...

A lot of Canadians are obese. That's a fact. But a lot of the things you think you know about that fact—why they're obese, how they could lose weight, what they need to hear from their doctors—just aren't true. Last month Canada unveiled a new set of guidelines for treating obesity, and the biggest headline among the recommendations was: "No dieting." But the guidelines don't stop there....

It was a program created at unimaginable speed under incredible circumstances. And it has helped millions of Canadians. But six months later—two months longer than initially planned—the federal government is ending the Canada Emergency Response Benefit. So what’s next? Expanded EI qualifications, new programs for those who don't qualify for EI and other efforts aimed at supporting workers still im...

One of the goals of the movement to defund the police is to limit a police force's ability to acquire expensive, military-style equipment. Even if that movement is successful, however, the police have other ways of funding their purchases. It doesn't get much attention, but police foundations across Canada have in recent years used money given to them by corporate donors to help police purchase ev...

It's already something some people try to avoid—and the thought of spending hours in a courtroom with others, masked or not, doesn't make jury duty any more appealing. But jury trials are returning this month, and so jury questionnaires are already on the way to mailboxes. But what's being done to keep jurors safe? To make it worthwhile for them to serve? And to mitigate that added burden on any d...