This Matters

Guests: May Warren and Lex Harvey, reporters at The Star Hark! The Omicron variant threatens to put a damper on holiday plans as many people are trying to balance seeing their loved ones with a now what seems to be a more transmissible variant of COVID-19 spreading rapidly. With that in mind, The Star reached out to dozens of health care professionals to ask how they feel about the holidays and ho...

Guest: Sara Mojtehedzadeh, work and wealth reporter for the Star A recent Star investigation has revealed a tangled thread of wage theft, threats and intimidation, all a systemic pattern of abuse within Canada's long-haul trucking industry. Now, truck drivers from Brampton, Ont. are mobilizing and fighting back through a public campaign, as the trucking companies facing allegations have denied any...

Guest: Josh Rubin, business reporter at The Star Is it time to say a final "cheers" to The Beer Store? The provincial government wants to change alcohol sales in Ontario are and has already loosened some things during the pandemic. The Beer Store is losing money with a continually dropping market share as beer retails in more outlets outside their stores. The contract between the province and The...

Guest: Kerry Gillespie, sports reporter for the Star Are Olympians born or are they created? While Canada has a big athletic talent pool to choose from, there are athletes flying under the radar who have world-class abilities but perhaps not the sport to match them. The RBC Training Centre is aiming to find "diamonds in the rough" of Canadian athletes, putting them through tests and trials of thei...

Guest: Jake Roach, senior writer, computing at Digitaltrends.com If you've tried to buy a hot ticket item online like a new video game console, PC graphics cards or high end sneakers, you know that it is a race against the bots to purchase it. Now, as the holiday season approaches, these programs are spreading to other highly sought after items like toys, prompting members of U.S. Congress to tabl...

Guests: Natasha Shakespeare, mother of a 13-year-old girl facing bullying and harassment at school, and Shree Paradkar, The Star's race and gender columnist Warning: Graphic content outlining anti-Black racism and antisemitic abuse. There has been an explosion of anti-Black racism in schools across Ontario, often intersecting with other forms of hate, including antisemitism. Black parents are now...

Guest: Danica Samuel, reporter for the Toronto Star With hundreds of ethnicities, cultures and unique neighbourhoods, one of the great points of pride for Toronto is its diversity. The City of Toronto wants to define what exactly this is through a "cultural districts" program that would identify different cultural enclaves as being worthy of being preserved. Who gets to decide what should be prese...

Guest: Kevin Donovan, The Star's chief investigative reporter With films like "Gone in 60 Seconds" to "The Fast and The Furious," the world of car theft has been portrayed as a glamorous life full of high stakes and rollicking action. In fact, the modern car thief has high tech tools and they usually work in groups. Cars stolen in the middle of the night and are often on their way to being shipped...

Guest: Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti, infectious diseases physician at Trillium Health Partners in Mississauga News and serious worry over the Omicron variant of COVID-19 spread almost as quickly as the virus itself. The World Health Organization says the newest, potentially more contagious variant poses a "very high" global risk. The UK's Health and Security Agency calls it "the most worrying we've ever...

Guest: Alex Boyd, Calgary-based reporter for the Toronto Star The latest Omicron variant has starkly reminded the world about what global health advocates have been shouting about for more than a year – if vaccines aren't shared, the virus and its variants will spread. Canada has followed dozens of other countries in announcing more travel bans on African countries, and many in South Africa are fe...

Guest: Kenyon Wallace, investigative reporter for the Star The start of the school year in Canada was in effect a real-time experiment of how COVID-19 could spread among a mostly unvaccinated population. Despite vaccine mandates among school staff, mask use, physical distancing and ventilation, the vast majority of elementary school-age children are unvaccinated with their vaccine rollout only now...

Guest: Andrew Young, founder and director of Vaccine Hunters Canada For more than a million Canadians, volunteers for Vaccine Hunters Canada have been heroes and messengers of hope in the difficulties of the pandemic. After the initial rollout of vaccines in spring 2021 were plagued by shipment delays, miscommunication, massive lines that stretched for hours that were no guarantee you'd get a shot...

Guest: Brandi Morin, French/Cree/Iroquois human rights journalist who lives in Treaty 6 territory Last Friday, RCMP arrested award-winning journalist Amber Bracken and documentary maker Michael Toledano, as well as 15 others, as part of a raid on one of the camps set up to keep TransCanada Energy's Coastal GasLink gas pipeline out of Indigenous territory. Many say the multibillion-dollar gas proje...

Guest: Emma Westecott, associate professor of game design at OCAD University and co-director of the Game: Play Lab The Metaverse is coming. Long thought to be one of the next great leaps in shared digital spaces, the idea of the Metaverse recently got a boost from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg when he announced the company is investing $10 billion and rebranding its own platform with the name M...

Guests: Canadian astronaut Dr. Dave Williams and Alex Boyd, Toronto Star reporter What if the answers and solutions of the pandemic are found in the stars? The two industries of space and medicine are more closely aligned than we may think, as many of the technologies we use today were first tested in the rigours of space. Can space exploration and research help us find our way through this pandem...

Guest: May Warren, reporter for the Toronto Star With winter months bringing in an uptick in COVID-19 cases and a relatively static vaccination rate, Canada's top health officers are urging people to double down on masking because masks are the last line of defence against the virus. With a major shift (again!) in the conversation and culture around masking and new data available, reporter May War...

Guest: Megan Ogilvie is a health reporter at the Star Parents of children aged 5 to 11 can now book their children for their first dose of vaccines across Canada. It's been a long wait for this cohort, which is the largest unvaccinated group in Canada. Most parents — who have had to live through plenty of invasive COVID tests at the first sign of symptom — now have an option to get their kids more...

Guest: Adrienne Appell, toy trends expert and senior vice-president of marketing communications of The Toy Association While many industries were devastated by the pandemic, the toy industry enjoyed record breaking sales. One of the most interesting trends to come out of the past two years is that growth shows adults are buying toys for themselves, which the industry has dubbed the "kidult" catego...

Guest: Edward Keenan, Washington Bureau Chief for the Star It's been five years since the last trilateral summit between Canada, Mexico and the U.S. on trade, co-operation and diplomatic relations. Now this week, U.S. President Joe Biden hosted the first North American leader summit since 2016. It was nicknamed the 'Three Amigos' summit. It's being seen as a potential new phase in Canada-U.S. rela...

Guest : Kieran Leavitt, Toronto Star politics reporter For decades, adding fluoride to the water supply of many Canadians towns and cities has been standard public health protocol. Fluoridation has proven to slow tooth decay, and the practice has widespread support among doctors and dentists, including the World Health Organization, Health Canada and the Canadian Association of Public Health Denti...

Guest: Dr. Naheed Dosani, Toronto-based palliative care physician and health justice activist Even as health care workers were being hailed by many as heroes for facing the deadly COVID-19 pandemic on the front line, many were also targets of online hate, racism and xenophobia. The digital harassment has seeped into real-life with anti-vaccination protests outside hospitals where there have been r...

Guest: Ruke Okome, program manager of the after-school program Free Play for Kids Alphonso Davies, Canadian soccer superstar, has become a world-renowned name with highlight reel goals, pride in his country and awards-laden recognition of his sporting excellence. He will soon return home to Edmonton as Canada faces a crucial match in its qualification for the World Cup where Free Play for Kids, th...

Guest: Liam Casey, Canadian Press reporter Ontario is the only province that has legislation that bans pit bulls. Since it's enactment over 15 years ago, dog lovers have had issues with the ban, from the determination of dogs, the enforcement and seizure of animals, the lack of personal responsibility of owners and little to no recourse for owners of dogs who haven't done anything wrong, but fit t...

Guest: Jeremy Nuttall, investigative reporter for the Toronto Star In the middle of societal and racial reckonings, many Canadians are asking questions about their shared histories, education and how reliable the stories of our past are. Are they written by the people and communities they're reflecting or is it colonial history? Some of Canada's biggest museums are now are taking a hard look at th...

Guest: Corey Mintz, freelance food reporter and the author of the upcoming book "The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants as We Knew Them, and What Comes After" The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that in a lot of cases what was once normal couldn't sustain a lot of people. Among many things, the pandemic highlighted longstanding issues within the restaurant industry, such as low pay, worker protection...