This Matters

Guest: Dr. Katharine Smart, president of the Canadian Medical Association Despite spending much of the pandemic trying to ensure that hospitals were not overwhelmed, incredibly long waits at emergency departments at hospitals across the country are becoming the norm. In Ontario, the average wait time for an ER visit is 20 hours and anecdotal stories of patients waiting hours and even days for trea...

Guest: May Warren, Toronto Star reporter Fourth COVID-19 vaccine doses are now open to all Ontarians older than 18 years of age. Ontario's chief medical officer of health Dr. Kieran Moore made the much awaited announcement to expand eligibility on Wednesday, but the tone of the announcement left many confused. Dr. Moore said that healthy, currently vaccinated people continue to have significant pr...

Guest: Stephanie Levitz, politics reporter for the Star With just under two months left in the Conservative party leadership race, it's been a wild week that still hasn't been settled. Disqualified leadership candidate Patrick Brown is using legal means to see if he can remain in the race, but also throwing his support behind leadership candidate Jean Charest. He and Pierre Poilievre are the front...

Guest: Christine Dobby, business reporter at the Star, joins us to talk Rogers fallout and the new requirement for telecom companies to help each other during outages. The Rogers network outage affected Canadians, businesses and services across the country, and now the federal government wants to make sure it never happens again, mandating that the country's telecommunications companies come up wi...

Guest: Edward Keenan, Washington Bureau Chief for the Toronto Star Last month, as Ketanji Brown Jackson made history as the first Black woman to be sworn in as a U.S. Supreme Court Justice, the moment was almost overshadowed by a series of decisions by America's top court that will change the very shape of the future. One after the other, the Supreme Court struck down abortion rights, rolled back...

Guest: Jacques Gallant, politics reporter As Bill C-5 moves through the legislative process, Canadians who have been convicted of simple possession of drugs could see their records disappear in the next few years. Although it won't be an amnesty, the government is using a system called sequestration that would effectively hide the records. It's another sign of the changing way authorities are deal...

Guest: Armine Yalnizyan, Economist & Atkinson Fellow Throughout the pandemic, nurses worked long hours with fewer resources and made major sacrifices to keep us safe. For some, perks that made the job appealing like stable income and a pension are wearing off as other issues remain unaddressed. This includes Ontario's Bill 124, wage cap legislation as the cost of living and inflation continues to...

Guests: Dr. Grace Parraga, Tier 1 Canada research chair in lung imaging at Western University's Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry, and Dr. Michael Nicholson, a respirologist with the post-acute COVID-19 program at St. Joseph's Hospital in London, Ont. An estimated one in ten COVID survivors suffer from long COVID. The cause of the condition has puzzled doctors and long COVID sufferers are fr...

Guest: Rosa Saba, business reporter at the Star The Bay is spending millions on reinventing itself to appeal to Canadians. With a history that predates Canada, the company has a long tradition that in some ways hampers it, as young people think of it as their grandparents' store. The company is updating its product offerings in-store and its automation for its online operations, which has plans to...

Guest: Dr. Andrew Boozary, physician and executive director of UHN's Gattuso Centre for Social Medicine A pilot project called Food Rx, run in collaboration with the University Health Network (UHN) and the non-profit FoodShare, is aiming to tackle growing food insecurity in Toronto with a "doctor's prescription" for regular home delivery of fresh fruit and vegetables. Nearly one in five Toronto ho...

Guest: Alex Ballingall, politics reporter for The Star As Ottawa prepares for a larger and less COVID dampened Canada Day, protesters are making their way to the city to protest vaccine mandates, health restrictions and other freedoms they feel have been curtailed. Thinking back to some organizers who were involved with this past winter's "Freedom Convoy," which occupied the city for weeks, some o...

Guests: Trevor Manson, co-chair ODSP Action Coalition, and Anne Jensen, mental health and disability advocate Ontario's Disability Support Program (ODSP), which provides income and employment support to people with disabilities, has been criticized by advocates for being out of touch with economic realities. The most a single person can receive through ODSP is $1,169 per month, or $14,028 annually...

Guest: Jacob Lorinc, Business Reporter at The Star. The message early in the pandemic was simple from many employers: Get vaccinated. Now, as vaccine mandates are being lifted, some employees who were suspended or laid off for choosing not to get vaccinated are fighting back, often through their unions or civil lawsuits. The other issue is the vast majority of employees are vaccinated, many of who...

Guest: Rosemary Westwood, reproductive health reporter The U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade — a nearly 50-year-old constitutional right for a woman to end a pregnancy — will lead to bans on abortion in more than half of U.S states. That means abortion clinics will be forced to close in large swathes of the country. According to Planned Parenthood, more than 36 million people cou...

Guest : Allan Woods, global and national affairs reporter for the Toronto Star As the Russian invasion of Ukraine enters its fourth long month, you may wonder, what's it like in Russia? In a country slipping into further isolation and sanctions, where information is tightly guarded, do Russians support this war or are they living in fear of government surveillance and censorship at home? According...

Guest: Jon Wells, feature writer for the Hamilton Spectator Hamilton has a long history of organized crime. One of the biggest events in its history was the killing of Johnny "The Enforcer" Papalia in broad daylight on May 31, 1997. Ken Murdock was the man who pulled the trigger. Jon Wells, a feature writer at the Hamilton Spectator, tracked down one of Canada's most notorious hit men and joins "T...

Guest: Erica Pimentel, assistant professor at the Smith School of Business at Queen's University Cryptocurrencies have been spiralling downward for the past two months after bitcoin's value fell below $20,000 U.S., several exchanges halted trading and one company announced layoffs of their workforce. It's a fast turnaround for a sector that is otherwise known for making people incredibly rich. Man...

Guest: Victoria Gibson, affordable housing reporter Hundreds of tenants of Swansea Mews, a beleaguered west Toronto community housing complex, have been thrown into turmoil after a ceiling collapsed and the complex was later deemed structurally unsafe. Residents have now been told they would need to relocate to motel rooms and dorms. There is no timeline for how long they will be displaced. What w...

Guest: Raisa Patel, Toronto Star reporter As of June 20, Ottawa scrapped "proof of vaccination" requirements for air passengers on domestic or outbound international flights, as well as for rail travellers, and federal bureaucrats and federally-regulated workers like airline employees or those who process passports. The move comes as passengers have been expressing frustration over long delays, ca...

Guests: Angelyn Francis and Annette Ejiofor, Toronto Star journalists After decades of systemic racism and discrimination have punished Black Americans at school and at work because of their natural hair, at least eight U.S. states have made race-based hair discrimination illegal and now CROWN (Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair) Act is awaiting Senate approval. Canada also has a...

Guest: Wendy Gillis, crime and policing reporter On Wednesday, the Toronto Police Service unveiled a landmark report that made clear there is systemic discrimination in their policing. Including use of force statistics from 2020, the results show that many racialized people face over policing, in particular, Black and Indigenous people. This comes as no surprise to many of Black and Indigenous com...

Guest: David O'Brien, youth worker and director of mental health for ETA It is evident that violent attacks committed by angry young men, regardless of the ideology behind them, are increasing. Whether motivated by white supremacy, incel subculture or other extremist belief, the path toward radicalization usually starts online and can end in violence. ETA is a GTA-based service that tackles hate a...

Guest: David Rider, City Hall Bureau Chief The fate of ActiveTO is up for discussion at City Council this week. Established in April 2020 at the start of the pandemic lockdown, the program shut down major roads to let people ride their bikes and exercise while remaining physically distanced. As with anything that affects traffic in this city, it had its detractors, but for a long while, was held u...

Guest: Steve McKinley, Halifax bureau There is an interesting project off the East Coast involving tidal energy that has accomplished something that no previous one has. Sustainable Marine's floating tidal turbine platform PLAT-I 6.40 has connected to the Nova Scotia grid, converting the power of the world's largest tides into electricity. With looming deadlines requiring more green energy from re...

Guest: Alex McKeen, reporter Last June, a wildfire decimated the small town of Lytton, B.C. after three days of record-breaking heat. Months later, floodwaters drowned the farming region of Abbotsford, B.C. and left four people dead and the B.C. interior cut off for months. Canada is warming twice as fast as the world average and will no doubt experience a greater number of climate disasters in th...