This Matters

Guest: Jacques Gallant , courts and justice reporter The Ford government is facing accusations of patronage for bringing back the King's Counsel (K.C. for short) special designation for lawyers and awarding it to numerous Tory politicians, staffers and loyalists. Meant to be "given to lawyers who have demonstrated a commitment to the pursuit of legal excellence in service to the Crown, the public...

Guest: Paris Marx, author and host of "Tech Won't Save Us" podcast Threads, Meta's new social media app that is being called the "Twitter killer" by some experts, has now become the fastest growing app in history with 100 million new users since it was officially launched on July 5. Many see it as a sign of social media user's disenchantment with Twitter after the platform went through a series of...

This episode originally aired January 9, 2023. Guest: Jim Rankin, staff reporter Twenty years ago, the Star published a landmark and controversial investigation examining data that showed police interaction with racialized people occurred at a higher rate, kicking of years of stories that reinforced this initial conclusion. This past year, after looking at their own data, acting Toronto police chi...

This episode originally aired June 2, 2023.   Guest: David Suzuki, world-renowned geneticist and environmentalist Before the Paris Agreement, before the Kyoto Protocol, before even the UN Climate Convention was signed in Rio, world-renowned geneticist and environmentalist David Suzuki was ringing the alarm bell and saying that climate change is a "matter of survival." In this episode, Suzuki joins...

This episode originally aired April 21, 2023.  Two years ago, Cowessess First Nation announced the discovery of 715 unmarked graves near the site of a former residential school. The news shocked the world and ignited a national conversation on Canada's colonial history. At the centre was  Chief Cadmus Delorme , a young and vibrant leader, who came to office wanting to show that an Indigenous world...

This episode was originally broadcast April 18, 2023. Guest: Jeremy Hansen, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Col. Jeremy Hansen, a CAF fighter pilot and Canadian Space Agency astronaut, has been named to NASA's Artemis II mission , the first scheduled crewed mission of the Space Launch System with the Orion spacecraft. It will leave Earth's orbit and perform a lunar flyby, the first time people hav...

Guest: Raisa Patel , Ottawa Bureau Google has announced plans to block all Canadian news content from its platforms and the ramifications are huge. The move is in response to the just-passed Online News Act, which would force platforms to strike deals with Canadian media publishers for sharing, previewing and directing users to online content. Some news organizations, including Torstar, lobbied Ot...

Guests: The Toronto Star All-Star Opinionator Panel, featuring columnists Emma Teitel , Shawn Micallef , Matt Elliott and guest host Edward Keenan Now that the election is done, our panel of columnists gathers one last time to assess what the heck happened and discuss Olivia Chow's mandate, what her winning Scarborough means, what Ontario Premier Doug Ford (and others) lost by going against her an...

Guest: Michael Oscars, talent agent and theatre producer Drag is increasingly a target of hate and criticism across the world, looped into far-right hysteria, "freedom" convoy protesting and narratives about child safety. It is an unusual turn of perspective when drag has always been part of our popular culture, including our local popular culture and arts scene in Toronto. Drag performers have al...

Guests: Toronto Star columnists and guest hosts Emma Teitel and Edward Keenan When Olivia Chow won the mayoral election Monday night, she ended 12 years of Conservative rule at city hall, bringing a message of hope, harnessing hunger for change and riding a bicycle festooned with flowers. Ed and Emma recap how she won the election, discuss Ana Bailão's last-minute surge, discuss the performance an...

Guest: Tracy Morley, executive director at Camp Awakening, and Joshua Chong , staff reporter The Toronto Star's Fresh Air Fund has provided thousands of children and teens with a memorable summer holiday since 1901. Begun by former publisher Joseph Atkinson, the fund provides grants to camp organizations to subsidize fees for financially or medically vulnerable youth who otherwise couldn't have th...

Guests: Toronto Star City Hall Bureau Chief David Rider , and reporters Alyshah Hasham and Ben Spurr , join guest host Edward Keenan Just before the final weekend of the Toronto mayoral campaign, Premier Doug Ford and former Mayor John Tory told us who they're voting for. The fact that they did it at all was a bigger surprise than the names they came up with. How much difference can it make at thi...

Guest: Katharine Lake Berz , freelance journalist Are criminals using laced drugs to target and murder people? With overdose deaths more than quadrupling from 2016 to 2021 in the Niagara region and investigations ongoing, some say that some of the once-believed accidental deaths may have actually been caused by ingestion of "hot shots" (a recreational drug intentionally laced with a lethal substan...

Guest: Matthew Van Dongen , transportation reporter at The Hamilton Spectator Light rail transit has long been considered a cheaper public transit option, especially when compared to building subways, but many projects are skyrocketing in costs. In Toronto, the Eglinton Crosstown LRT has been bogged down in all kinds of problems and, as we have learned, its problems are not isolated. Other transit...

Guest: Nicholas Keung , immigration reporter While Canada is in the process of welcoming nearly 1.5 million permanent residents by the end of 2025, Statistics Canada data raises the question whether the country is doing an equally good job of keeping them here. A conservative estimate of 15 to 20 per cent of immigrants leave the country within 10 years. As many new Canadians struggle with systemic...

Guests: Toronto Star City Hall Bureau Chief David Rider , and reporters Alyshah Hasham and Ben Spurr , join guest host Edward Keenan One week before election day, undecided Toronto voters are wrestling with the choice of who to vote for as the city's next mayor. To help, we've assembled the reporters of the Toronto Star's city hall bureau, who have been covering the campaign. Together they go over...

Guests: Denise Balkissoon, Ontario Bureau Chief for The Narwhal, speaks with guest host Edward Keenan In the final weeks of the mayoral election campaign , journalist Denise Balkissoon wrote a piece for The Local looking at the environmental platforms of the major mayoral candidates and mostly found them wanting. She joins Edward Keenan to walk through the promises and approaches of front-runners...

Guest: Edith Lemay and Sébastien Pelletier When Edith Lemay and Sebastien Pelletier learned three of their four children have a genetic disorder and will lose their sight, they turned their devastation into an opportunity and found joy in travel around the world. They have travelled everywhere from Zambia and Tanzania to Mongolia and Nepal, exploring and finding new experiences to help their kids...

Guests: The Toronto Star All-Star Opinionator Panel, featuring columnists Emma Teitel , Shawn Micallef , Matt Elliott and guest host Edward Keenan With less than two weeks to go before the election, candidates are making their closing pitches to voters and in this campaign, a surprising number of those involve claims to be the only candidate to beat Olivia Chow. Our Toronto Star All-Star Opinionat...

Guest: Sherwin Modeste, executive director of Pride Toronto Toronto's Pride festival is up against some financial challenges this year. Organizers say rising costs of necessary security and policing, paired with quadrupled insurance premiums, have resulted in desperate calls to three levels of government for help and the possibility of cutting back on programming. While Trudeau's government delive...

Guest: Tony Doob, professor emeritus, University of Toronto Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies News that Paul Bernardo, one of Canada's most notorious killers, has been moved from a maximum security penitentiary to a medium-security institution touched a raw nerve that hasn't healed three decades after his crimes. How could one believed to be so evil have his experience in incarceration...

Guests: The Toronto Star All-Star Opinionator Panel, featuring columnists Emma Teitel , Shawn Micallef , Matt Elliott and guest host Edward Keenan Signs are blooming on lawns across the city. The advanced polls are open, which can only mean that the election is nearing. With just over two and a half weeks left before the city goes to the polls, it's time to reconvene our Toronto Star All Star Opin...

Guest: Patrick O'Rourke, editor-in-chief of MobileSyrup.com Apple has launched what it hopes is it's next game changing computing device. The Vision Pro is a headset the company calls an augmented reality platform, that it says may change change the way people interact with the digital world. The device has long been rumoured to be coming from the company, and while it very expensive, Apple believ...

Guests: Jennifer Keesmaat, former Chief Planner of Toronto, 2018 candidate for mayor and partner with Markee Developments speaks with guest host Edward Keenan We all know that fundraising is a key part of running a mayoral campaign, and that the rich and well connected have a leg up. But how? Former candidate and former top city planner Jennifer Keesmaat talks about her first-hand experience of tr...

Guests: Jennifer Pagliaro , crime reporter, and Alyshah Hasham , City Hall reporter With so many high profile and violent crimes in Toronto in the past year, public safety has become an important issue in the mayoral byelection. Many feel like the city is less safe , but how does that align with the actual numbers and data? Crime isn't equal across the city but to discuss how best to deal with it,...