This Matters

Guest: Lauren Haw, CEO and Broker of Record at Zoocasa Spring is usually the busiest time of the year for the real estate market, but many are wondering what this year might look like two years into the COVID-19 pandemic. There are many trends that seem to be turning, and changes like workers returning to the office are starting to take effect. One issue that remains is the lack of inventory of ho...

Guest: Laura Armstrong, sports reporter It almost seems like a fantasy to long-time followers of the sport but the Canadian's Men's National Team has qualified for the World Cup and are heading to Qatar in November. The team has been on a remarkable run, climbing the rankings over the past year and making it so punching their ticket became almost inevitable as opposed to something that has eluded...

Guest: Robert Benzie and Tonda MacCharles, Star reporters With Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Premier Doug Ford signing on the dotted line confirming the province of Ontario is in, Canada will have a national child-care program for the first time in history. With the province having one of the highest child-care rates in Canada, the federal government has earmarked 13.2 billion for Ontario over...

Guest: Rosa Saba and Sara Mojtehedzadeh, Star reporters Jerry Dias was one the most high-profile and well known union leaders in Canada, but now Dias is under investigation for breaching union rules and allegedly accepting money from a supplier and then trying to share it with another employee. The consequences for the former head of Unifor, Canada's largest private sector union, have been swift b...

Guest: Arthur Brooks, author of the bestselling book, "From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life" What if everything that brought you to success, happiness and satisfaction in the first part of your life does a terrible job to prepare you to find those things in the latter half of it? That's something that Arthur Brooks decided to tackle in h...

Guest: Dr. Samantha Nutt, War Child Canada and War Child USA It's been exactly a month since Russia invaded Ukraine. According to the United Nations, more than three million people have been forced to flee. Half of those are children. In addition, Ukrainian officials say more than 100 children have been killed. Children have nothing to do with war and yet it impacts them more than anyone. One in e...

Guest: Susan Delacourt, national columnist With a deal in hand with the federal NDP, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government will be staying in power until at least 2025. Effective immediately, Trudeau has promised to roll out an NDP plan for dental care, pharmacare, climate change and other policies – all items that have long been on NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh's wish list. Both leaders say they'...

Guest: Richard Warnica, business feature writer Ontario's Blue Box paper and plastic recycling program is in the midst of the overhaul, catching up with jurisdictions all over the world by putting more of the responsibility for getting rid of waste packaging on to producers. The made-in-Ontario solution has left no one happy, including industry stakeholders and environmental experts. Both are aski...

Guest: Alyshah Hasham, courts reporter A recent court ruling in Brampton, where a Superior Court judge ordered a man to pay his ex-wife $150,000 in damages for a 16-year pattern of abuse, might change how courts look at domestic violence. In considering such cases "often go beyond assault and battery to include complicated and prolonged psychological and financial abuse," experts say there is a ne...

Guest: Katie Daubs, feature writer Many of us have gotten that call from someone saying they are returning your call even though you never dialed their number. Then there are calls about owing money to the Canada Revenue Agency or border security. It's something the scam operators do that's called spoofing, which along with robocalling technology and humans armed with scam scripts are all part of...

Guest: Noor Javed, reporter for The Star who focuses on municipal politics and affairs in the 905 region. As Premier Doug Ford pushes ahead with two major highway projects, how those roadways actually get built is a not-often considered process. Unless, of course, you happen to live next to one of the open-pit mines needed for the gravel to build them. Those residents and environmental activists s...

Guest: Karon Liu, food reporter Two years of a pandemic have changed the hospitality industry, including the way we look at labour, essential workers, the way we eat and our relationship with food. The Star's food reporter Karon Liu and food writer Suresh Doss have kept us updated by sharing the best of what the city has to offer our taste buds from a hidden food court at the back of a flea market...

Guest: Grant LaFleche, investigative reporter Ontario is the wild west when it comes to regulations for ownership of exotic animals and the running of zoos and other animal exhibitions. This has led to some people opening roadside zoos in rural communities, leaving local governments dealing with all kind of problems including attacks and bites. There is also consideration for the animals, as there...

Guest: Rob Ferguson, Queen's Park reporter Ontario will be dropping mask mandates in most settings including schools on March 21, right after March break. Ontario's top doctor Kieran Moore cites the province's vaccination rates, decreasing case numbers and a decline in hospitalizations as reasons to ease some of the rules, and has indicated all other COVID public health measures may be lifted at t...

Guest: Patricia Lakin-Thomas, York University professor It is time to spring forward! Daylight Saving Time begins this weekend. Clocks shifting ahead an hour on Sunday not only may make you feel a little tired, it's a much bigger deal than you may think.  To some scientists, changing the time twice a year — which is not done in large parts of the world — is one of the world's biggest experiments,...

Today, we will be taking you to Ukraine, speaking with those who are trying to escape war, which for some includes leaving their homes, their families and their lives. Journalist Johanna Chisholm reports. This episode was produced by Johanna Chisholm, Julia De Laurentiis Johnston, Matthew Hearn and Sean Pattendon.

Guest: Jim Williams, president and energy economist at WTRG Economics As the world watches the horrors of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the ripple effects are being felt around the globe. With ever harsher sanctions effectively banning Russian imports, including oil, gas prices keep jumping higher as this conflict continues on. But that isn't the only reason why prices have jumped at the pumps....

Guest: Lauren Markham, journalist and author As Europe opens its doors to more than two million Ukrainians fleeing the horrific Russian invasion of their country, there are others for whom the doors are not left quite as open. The United Nations refugee convention states that a refugee should not be returned to a country that endangers life or freedom. It is international law, but not all laws are...

Today, we are taking you to Novoiavorivsk, a small town outside Lviv, Ukraine near the Polish border. Reporter Johanna Chisholm spent time there over the weekend, speaking with the townspeople on the different ways this war is both tearing them apart and banding them together; the ways in which they attempt to help each other and search inward for personal resolve. People who would ordinarily find...

Guest: Tonda MacCharles, Ottawa-based reporter covering federal politics When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tweeted about speaking to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Thursday, there was an urgent plea between the lines of the diplomacy: help stop Russia's relentless attack on Ukraine. Canada has rolled out new measures since the assault began, including trade restrictions on Ru...

Guest: Dr. Dawn Bowdish, professor of medicine at McMaster University and Canada Research Chair in aging and immunity As many of look ahead to learning to live with COVID-19 and embrace the lifting of restrictions and mask mandates, there are still a lot of people who will have to remain vigilant and live the same type of isolated lives that others have had for the past two years. The immunocompro...

Guest: James Lewis, senior vice president and director, Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Russia has been using cyber attacks on Ukraine for years, and now both sides are escalating their use of technology and information warfare amid the ground conflict. Experts are watching this conflict as there will be new and innovative uses of strategies lik...

Guest: Alex Boyd, reporter for the Toronto Star Canada currently has enough COVID-19 vaccines to double vaccinate the country six times over. That is a bigger stockpile per person than any other country in the world. Granted, not all of those vaccines have been authorized yet, but it's a strategy that has helped ensure a steady supply and helped Canadians get vaccines sooner than others. But a sto...

Guest: Alex Boyd, reporter for the Toronto Star The excitement in getting a COVID-19 vaccine is something almost 85 per cent of Canadians can relate to and for most of us, the opportunity came and went months ago. But in Angola, a country in southwestern Africa, that moment is only just coming for many people. Like most low-income countries, Angola has struggled to get the vaccine. When the first...

In today's episode, we bring you urgent voices from inside the war in Ukraine including a Ukrainian-Canadian father desperate to get his family out, and Sara Firth, a British foreign correspondent in Kyiv. The first conversation in the podcast was edited for clarity and to eliminate any people or place names that could identify our speaker or his family, as we are not revealing his identity for hi...