The Decibel

Sri Lanka is in crisis right now . After months of fuel, medicine and food shortages, protestors have taken to the streets – and the homes of the country’s leaders. The now-former Prime Minister’s house was set ablaze . President Gotabaya Rajapaksa fled to Singapore, then resigned. Normally a good friend and funder of projects under his government, China’s government has gone silent as the former...

Today we're bringing you an episode of City Space, a Globe and Mail podcast about how to make our cities better, hosted by Adrian Lee. Climate change isn’t just coming, it’s here. And cities are uniquely susceptible to its effects because of their population density and infrastructure. So how can they better prepare for the increasingly devastating impacts of the climate crisis? In this episode, w...

The Bank of Canada raised the benchmark interest rate by one percentage point on Wednesday. The surprise move is the biggest hike since 1998. The aggressive increase is larger than economists were expecting. The goal is to cool inflation, which hit 7.7 per cent in May – the highest it’s been in almost four decades . The Globe’s Mark Rendell covers the Bank of Canada. He’s on the show to explain wh...

Things are not going well at airports around the world and Canada has taken a particularly bad turn. On Monday, 70 per cent of flights from Canada’s largest carrier Air Canada were delayed – the highest percentage in the world. Duncan Dee is a former Chief Operating Officer for Air Canada. He also worked on a panel that reviewed the Air Transportation Act in 2016, looking closely at what could be...

On Friday, Rogers’ cellphone and Internet surfaced suddenly stopped working, leaving almost 12 million Canadians disconnected . And it wasn’t just Rogers’ direct customers who were affected — Interac’s debit system for e-transfers and retail payments were out of commission for most of the day, and some emergency services lost their connection too. The Globe’s telecom reporter, Alexandra Posadzki ,...

Two and a half years into the COVID-19 pandemic, we may be sick of talking about it – but COVID-19 is not through with us yet. Case counts are higher than the first two pandemic summers, and as staffing shortages become more and more common in hospitals, emergency departments are becoming overwhelmed. And yet; with mask mandates gone almost everywhere, few public health restrictions remain. Wency...

Today we're bringing you an episode of City Space, a Globe and Mail podcast about how to make our cities better, hosted by Adrian Lee. If you’re a white-collar worker, chances are your office setup looks different than it did before the pandemic. After our two-year-long global experiment with remote work, many employees say there’s lots to like about it, with a number of companies now offering hyb...

On Tuesday, First Nations chiefs in the Assembly of First Nations voted against continuing the suspension of National Chief RoseAnne Archibald . Archibald was suspended on June 17, after being accused of bullying and harassment by staff, who she then accused of corruption. Niigaan Sinclair , professor and acting head of Indigenous studies at the University of Manitoba, explains the work of the AFN...

Just 10 days after the 2020 Nova Scotia mass shooting where 22 people were killed, RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki allegedly pressed senior officers to publicly release information about the kinds of firearms that were used in the shooting. The reason? To help bolster Liberal gun legislation. The commissioner, the former public safety minister, and the Prime Minister all deny there was political in...

It’s often thought of as a disease from a bygone era, but in some parts of Canada, tuberculosis is still very much with us. When the hamlet of Pangnirtung experienced an outbreak last year, local health officials were left begging for help to bring in resources to the remote community. Kelly Grant , the Globe’s health reporter, is on the show to talk about the explosion of tuberculosis cases in Nu...

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...

Westview Centennial Secondary School in the northwest of Toronto is celebrating the graduating class of 2022. On Thursday, about 180 students are crossing the stage to get their diplomas. While this is a common rite of passage for teens across the country, these students had anything but a normal high school experience. The pandemic meant online learning, no sports, taking care of younger siblings...

Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade on Friday, abortions were immediately outlawed in several states. But this week, the procedures were allowed to resume in Texas , Louisiana and Utah . While this is seen as a win for pro-choice advocates, these measures are only temporary. And, it’s only a matter of time before abortion will likely be illegal in more than half of...

A woman alleges she was sexually assaulted by eight Canadian Hockey League players in 2018. The public did not hear about this until 2022, after TSN broke the news that Hockey Canada settled a civil lawsuit with the woman. Now the government has cut off funding for the national organization until more details of their investigation are provided to a parliamentary committee. So, how is it that an a...

The superstar K-pop group BTS announced recently that they are taking a temporary break as a group and pursuing individual projects. This moment was a big deal for their millions of fans worldwide, the company that brings in billions of dollars managing them and for South Korea, which considers its members cultural ambassadors for the country. Hannah Sung, co-founder of Media Girlfriends , host of...

Today, Pride celebrations in big cities include parades and parties which attract millions of participants around the world. But for many smaller cities and towns across Canada, public Pride events are relatively newer, smaller and sometimes hard-won.  Chelle Turingan is the co-director of the documentary Small Town Pride . They join us to talk about the joys and challenges queer folks face in sma...

Feb. 14, 2022, marked the first time the government has had to invoke the Emergencies Act. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau did so in response to the continuing trucker convoy protests. And in doing so, he also automatically launched a review into that decision. The committee looking into the government’s justification for using the Act is about to take a summer break, but in the last few months it h...

Monkeypox, an endemic disease for a number of Central and West African countries, is having its largest outbreak outside of that region. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are over 2,500 cases of the disease in 37 countries .  Canada’s share of that is 168, as of June 17th when numbers were last released by PHAC. Yap Boum from Doctors Without Borders tells us abo...

British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian Indigenous expert Bruno Pereira went missing in the Amazon on June 5. They are now confirmed dead and multiple people have been arrested . They both spent decades working in the area, reporting on and working with local Indigenous communities – work that many people in the country say has become more and more dangerous. Lucy Jordan , Brazil corresponde...

For many months now, people have been calling on the federal government to do something about skyrocketing prices. Last week, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland unveiled the Liberals’ plan to tackle inflation , which is now creeping up to nearly 7 per cent . But is it enough? And what tools does the federal government actually have to help correct prices in grocery stores and at the pump? Bill Cur...

Mykola Kuleba is the former children’s ombudsman of Ukraine and he’s now the head of an organization called Save Ukraine . He’s been co-ordinating evacuation missions all over the country – and right now, those are focused in the eastern region. He’ll tell us what that work looks like, and what kind of toll, being in the middle of a war zone, is taking on the country’s most vulnerable. Hosted by S...

Cryptocurrencies have taken another dive this week. And this crash follows seven months of declines, even for the big names in the game. Bitcoin, for example, is down more than 60 per cent from its peak in November. And on Monday, a crypto trading platform froze all activity , further rupturing the price of a lot of digital currencies. Globe and Mail columnist Tim Kiladze explains why even with su...

They’re the front line in defending British Columbia from flooding – but no one can agree who’s responsible for them. Dikes, levees, whatever you want to call them, we need them. But there are over 100 in B.C. that are “orphaned” – and when the next flood comes, the people behind them could be in trouble. The Globe’s Justine Hunter toured one of these “orphan dikes” with flood-management engineer...

Ontario’s proposed Highway 413 would cut through the habitat of several species at risk in the province. Critics are concerned it would harm local waterways as well, far beyond the actual highway itself, highlighting the ongoing push-and-pull between the federal and provincial governments across Canada, and between species protection and development. Science reporter Ivan Semeniuk is back to walk...

When it comes to the issue of salary gaps, some experts say one solution is to make salaries more transparent. In 2021, the federal government introduced new legislation that would do just that: the Employment Equity Act requires federally regulated companies to disclose salary data. June 1st was the deadline for employers to submit their first rounds of data. Erica Alini , the Globe’s personal fi...