The Big Story

Employees returning to work is a positive sign in our battle against COVID-19, but it's also scary, and raises a lot of questions. Is my workplace safe? What is my employer required to do to make it safe? What do I do if I don’t think it is? What if my daycare is still closed and I don’t have childcare? What if I’ve been temporarily laid off—do I get my job back now? What if my office is safe, but...

Every bottom-trawling fishing boat off the coast of British Columbia has an independent observer on board. The observers monitor the catch and protect against overfishing and environmental harm. But when they do that, they're the only person on the boat with the power to report the captain and crew and cost them fines or perhaps their jobs. And many of them say they've been pressured to ignore vio...

Schools in parts of Quebec reopened this week—though they look different. And other parts of the country will likely be considering this move soon. And as this happens we still don't know exactly how children contribute to the spread of COVID-19. Nor do we know how they're impacted by it. There are a couple of efforts underway to change that in Canada, if we can gather enough data quickly enough t...

You know the timeline we've been quoted every time a COVID-19 vaccine is discussed: 12-18 months. But how accurate is that? What if we get lucky? What if we really, really don't? When you see news of a new vaccine entering a trial, how should you react? What percentage of vaccines that enter trials actually end up working? And if we do find a vaccine, how can we possibly make enough for more than...

You've seen the stories and images from around the world. Hospitals built in China in 10 days. Convention centres turned into temporary Covid-19 care centres. A medical train moving patients around France. When healthcare systems become overwhelmed, solutions are needed quickly—and they need to be executed in a span of days or weeks, not months. Canada has avoided that drastic situation thus far,...

If there was one thing almost all governments—liberal, conservative, whatever—agreed upon when disaster struck, it was the need to get money into people's hands quickly. And in Canada right now, millions of people are receiving $2,000 per month from their government. This isn't universal, but it's a huge step towards a policy that has been fought for and fought against for decades, and not always...

Well, you probably shouldn't call them that. They may kill—but they don't intend to murder, which is what passes for good news in 2020. Since a New York Times headline vaulted the asian giant hornet onto the list of everyone's nightmares last weekend, it may seem like a new plague is almost upon us. But these hornets—at least a few of them—have been in Canada since last year. So what have we learn...

Over the past two months, several programs worth billions upon billions of dollars were rolled out to Canadian people and businesses faster than we could have imagined. So...do they work? How many people have needed them? How are they being tweaked on the fly? And why do opposition parties say they either don't do enough or need to be scaled back? After the initial burst of "We're All In This...

OK, maybe it's not necessarily flour, but surely there's been something missing from your shopping list since COVID-19 struck. You might be surprised to know that there haven't actually been any shortages. There's still more than enough flour, toilet paper, bread and milk to go around...it's just a matter of adjusting massive supply chains to get it to you where you need it. Today we'll walk you t...

All of the psychoactive recreational drugs you can name are illegal in Canada. But if you're smart enough to make a new drug yourself? Well, it's not on the banned list yet. This is the story of a strange but fascinating ingredient called MEAI, the substance its inventor created, called Pace, and the inventor himself, who is also strange but fascinating. It's also a story about recreational drugs,...

In order for us to go back to day-to-day lives that are even close to normal, we’re going to have to be able to track contacts of people who test positive for COVID-19—and we’re going to have to be able to do that unbelievably quickly. Right now, we don't have the capacity to do that on a large scale. And if we don't promptly hire an army of health workers to do it manually, we will have to look t...

In the days after Canada’s worst mass shooting, there were dozens of questions we couldn’t answer. The list started with things as basic as "How many victims?" and "Who were they?" It ended with the biggest one of all: Why? Police were clear that there would be no quick, neatly reported answers to anything. Now two weeks later, we know more, but not enough. We know Who and What...

This is a report from the front lines, and it's about both tragedy and triumph. When the COVID-19 crisis began, Canadian ICU doctors looked at their colleagues in Italy and Spain and feared that would happen here—that they would have to make horrible choices about who to treat and who to let die. That hasn't happened, in part because all of Canada came together to stay home and flatten the curve,...

It sounds like a first-world problem: "What if people can't visit their second homes?" But behind the stereotype there are hundreds of thousands of people facing tough choices. People who flee cities for rural areas in the summer are not exclusively rich folks off to a lakefront mansion, and the communities people visit on hot summer weekends depend on that influx of cash to get business...

Ontario and British Columbia discovered their first cases of COVID-19 just one day apart. B.C. was the first province to report community transmission. But since early March, while the virus numbers skyrocketed in Ontario and Quebec, B.C. kept the pandemic largely under control. How? What did B.C. do that other large provinces didn't? Who is Dr. Bonnie Henry, the provincial health officer who has...

All the reports say that, so far, Canada's strategy is working. The curves from province to province are beginning to flatten. That's thanks to Canadians isolating themselves for almost two months now. But how long can this high level of cooperation keep up? The weather in many parts of the country is getting warmer, we're already seeing some tiny protests, and if some people start bending and bre...

We figured you might have exhausted your first choices and the obvious options by now—and with at least a few more weeks to go of self-isolation and sheltering in place, we wanted to make sure that you had something to take your mind off things. So we gathered up viewing types from across the spectrum, and put them to our media expert, who keeps tabs on what's available everywhere as part of his j...

It's been six weeks since every major sports league hit pause on their seasons. We still don't have a timetable for their return. But the world of sports is as busy as ever, just in a very different way. There's no question COVID-19 will dramatically change the games we love to watch. But how? And for how long? And what have we realized about our relationship with sports in the time that they've b...

Dr. David Fisman has been at the forefront of the battle against infectious diseases, from SARS to COVID-19. We asked him about this new virus in January, and he got it wrong. He was far from alone in that. The nature of discovering new diseases is making hypothesis based on what's known, and then adjusting as new data becomes available. But in a world where we are held to our predictions or told...

It’s been almost 48 hours, and police still aren’t sure how many people are dead. But it’s at least 19. It’s the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history. We don’t yet have a motive. The surest piece of information we have about the tragedy in Nova Scotia this weekend, is that it’s going to be weeks and months, not hours or days, before we learn the full story. That, and that a province in the...

Open-concept floor plans. Roads designed for peak traffic at peak times on week days. Apartments built for sleeping and eating but not extended isolation. Sidewalks built for...closeness. This pandemic has cast a spotlight on the nature of how we design our homes, offices and cities. It's left huge swaths of space empty, and crammed some people into tiny boxes. There are design and planning lesson...

In the early days of self-isolation, for some people food was an adventure. For others, an obstacle. But now that we've been at this for a while, perhaps you've realized that your standards are slipping. How can we possibly feed ourselves well through this when there are so many barriers? Some of us have lost access to ingredients, or the income to buy them. Some of us are alone—and cooking for on...

Shelters and advocates and even governments have sounded the alarm about what our efforts to stay in our homes and battle COVID-19 means for people who have an abusive partner. Many of the usual paths out of an awful situation have become much more complicated, if not impossible. As we face potentially several more weeks of sheltering in place, how can we help people who are living with abuse and...

Health stories are basically the only stories now. There are reams of sometimes-conflicting data, no shortage of sources (though some are much better than others) and someone has to sift out the themes that will have lasting impacts from the one-day scares and triumphs. This is where those who have made the health beat their career are essential. It might be the toughest job in journalism right no...

It's been used in desperate times of disease for a century—but there's never been a large-scale study of its effectiveness. It's relatively simple to administer, but requires a lot of resources to get right. Will it work? We don't know, but if it does it could be the armour the front-line workers need to battle COVID-19. Today we look at a Canada-wide experimental treatment that could provide some...