The Decibel

Electronic monitoring of employees has been going on for years, but it’s seen a serious boost during the pandemic. It can consist of tracking anything from location, online activity status, keyboard and mouse movements, URLs – some even take photos of employees from their computer cameras and take screenshots to ensure they are working. Ontario has legislation that now makes it mandatory for compa...

New census data from Statistics Canada shows that immigrants now represent 23 per cent of the Canadian population , a new high. But these numbers only tell half the story. The challenges that immigrants face in getting into the country are numerous and complex. Dakshana Bascaramurty digs into the new numbers and explains why some people will risk their lives to move to North America. Questions? Co...

The Bank of Canada announced a 0.5 percentage point rate hike on Wednesday. It’s the sixth consecutive increase in the past year alone. These increases have made borrowing more expensive and saving more difficult for Canadians. With all this economic uncertainty, The Decibel hosted a conversation live on Twitter with three personal finance experts to talk about how young people should prepare to w...

Indigenous people are over-represented in Canada’s federal prisons. One in three men in federal prisons identify as Indigenous, and the number is 50 per cent for women prisoners. Officials have long said that healing lodges – minimum-security rehabilitation centres for Indigenous people – work, but there are only 10 in Canada. And while politicians pledge to build more, they haven’t in recent year...

Rishi Sunak is set to become the UK’s next Prime Minister. This comes after Liz Truss resigned from the job afte r a tumultuous six weeks. Truss is the shortest-serving Prime Minister in British history. Now, Sunak must try to repair the very shaky economic situation that the country currently finds itself in. Tom Rachman is a novelist and contributing columnist for The Globe based in London. He t...

It’s been a month since post-tropical storm Fiona slammed into Atlantic Canada, causing huge amounts of devastation . In Prince Edward Island, thousands of trees came down, houses were destroyed, and people remained without power for weeks. Amidst a labour shortage, recovery efforts in the province are moving slowly. The Globe’s Greg Mercer visited PEI recently and spoke to people picking up the p...

An anti-loitering noise device under a bridge in the small city of Oshawa, Ontario was put there by municipal officials to dissuade unhoused people from setting up camp. It’s raised questions about how cities should be dealing with homelessness at a time when housing is more out of reach than ever. With municipal voting day coming on Monday across Ontario, Marcus Gee discusses the politics of addr...

The public inquiry into whether the use of the Emergencies Act to stop protests in Ottawa this past winter was justified is under way. On Wednesday, we learned that the city of Ottawa and police were warned in advance that the trucker convoy protest was well-resourced and determined to remain on site until COVID-19 restrictions were lifted. But Ottawa police reportedly didn’t receive these warning...

In the span of two weeks, Russia has launched two major drone attacks on Ukraine. Scores of so-called “kamikaze drones,” purchased from Iran, have been attacking Ukrainian civilians and devastating power and water infrastructure . Dr. Stacie Pettyjohn is a senior fellow and director of the defence program at the Center for a New American Security . She’s back on the show to tell us how these drone...

Finding a suspect based on their DNA alone used to be almost impossible: police could only search DNA databases of people who’d already committed crimes and been convicted. But the increase in popularity of online genealogy and DNA databases are changing what’s possible. The Globe’s Colin Freeze has spoken to Canadian detectives who are using the same technique that caught the Golden State Killer...

If you’ve bought something online recently, you’ve probably seen a payment option to spread out the purchase in installments. This is known as Buy Now, Pay Later and it’s popping up all over Canada with companies like Amazon, Adidas, Samsung and Sleep Country. But why is it all over the place all of a sudden? Finance reporter and columnist Tim Kiladze looked into it, and he explains where it came...

Next week, China’s ruling Communist Party is expected to announce an unprecedented third term for its leader, Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi has consolidated his power over the last decade, cracking down on billionaires, movie stars and businesses seen as going against party ideology. Asia correspondent James Griffiths tells us about Mr. Xi’s vision for China and what his grip on the country means for the fut...

There’s an experiment under way on the roadways around the Greater Toronto Area. Loblaw Companies Ltd. has partnered with autonomous vehicle company Gatik and is using five driverless delivery trucks to ship products around . And since August, they haven’t had a human ‘safety driver’ on board. The Globe and Mail’s retail reporter Susan Krashinsky Robertson discusses how the technology for these dr...

On Tuesday, the CEO of Hockey Canada, Scott Smith, left the organization and the entire board of directors resigned . The organization has been embroiled in controversy for months over its handling of sexual assaults , specifically the fact that Hockey Canada used funds – paid in part by registration fees – to settle sexual assault claims. Globe and Mail columnist Gary Mason has been writing on th...

The company that owns Facebook might be in trouble. Meta’s stock has plunged nearly 60 per cent this year, Facebook has been losing active users, existing users are consistently complaining about the company’s other social media platform Instagram, and fresh upstarts with their own apps are gobbling up the public’s attention. As Meta executives pour billions of dollars into the virtual reality wor...

Adaptable, smart and invasive. No we’re not talking about humans. We’re talking about wild boars . With their populations growing and sightings – even around big metropolitan areas – increasing, governments are rushing to find ways to contain them before they wreak ecological and agricultural damage. Jana G. Pruden , a feature writer for The Globe and Mail, discusses what kind of damage these crea...

In the second quarter of 2022 housing affordability in Canada saw its “worst deterioration” in more than 40 years. At the same time, rents across the country are skyrocketing . For young adults between the ages of 25-29, that means living on your own is more out of reach than ever – even if you’ve graduated from university and have a full-time job. Personal finance reporter, Erica Alini crunched t...

The Ukrainian military has made substantial advancements in two regions of the country in the past few days. Those gains come as Russian President Vladimir Putin formalizes his annexation of four regions of Ukraine, where young male residents live in fear that they might be conscripted into the Russian army. The Globe’s Janice Dickson is in Kyiv and has been travelling to different regions of the...

Liz Truss’s ‘mini budget’ didn’t get a mini reaction . The plan, which initially included a cut in personal income tax for the top earners, sent markets into a panic and sent the pound plummeting to near parity with the U.S. dollar — something that hasn’t happened since the mid-1980s. But why did the markets react that way to a budget? And what was Truss trying to do in the first place? Lucille Pe...

After a meteoric rise, the value of NFTs plummeted . But here’s the weird thing: that’s when people started stealing them. In the span of a year, one report pegs the total theft at US $100 million. The Globe’s Rita Trichur is on the show to tell us how people are being scammed out of the NFTs they paid so much for. And don’t worry, we’ll explain what an NFT is, too. Questions? Comments? Ideas? Ema...

We wanted to find out from you, our listeners, what you’re thinking about COVID-19 – especially as restrictions are disappearing and new vaccines are available. Infectious disease specialist, Dr. Lisa Barrett is on the show to answer the COVID-19 questions you have right now, like: When you get sick, is there any way to tell if it’s COVID-19 or the flu or a cold? How long should you isolate if you...

It’s become something of a rallying cry to move reconciliation forward, repeated from British Columbia to Ontario to New Brunswick . But what exactly does “land back” mean?  Bruce McIvor has written extensively on the struggles people face when trying to make a legal case for the return of their traditional lands — not least because he’s represented  some of them. He’s a partner at First Peoples L...

Quebec is the one province where immigration is a ballot-box issue in provincial elections. In 2018, it was one of the deciding factors that gave François Legault of the Coalition Avenir Québec his win. Now, the major parties are vowing to set different limits on how many permanent residents the province can let in without compromising its French identity. Meanwhile, its labour force is in decline...

Russia has one of the largest nuclear arsenals in the world, and Russian President Vladimir Putin and those in his inner circle have threatened to use nuclear weapons if Russian territory is threatened. Similar comments have been made before, but many experts are looking at these threats differently in light of the so-called referendums taking place across four regions of Ukraine. Cheryl Rofer wor...

Protests are spreading across Iran – and the world – after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody. Mahsa was picked up by Iran’s morality police on Sept. 13 for allegedly not wearing the proper hijab. Three days later, she was dead. People have taken to the streets demanding justice for Mahsa, and, more broadly, justice for women living under Iran’s strict hijab laws. Jasmin Ramsey...