This Matters

Guest : Toronto Star basketball writer Doug Smith Hosts : Bruce Arthur and Dave Feschuk   Five years ago, Masai Ujiri was among the most coveted executives in all of pro sports, his masterstroke trade for Kawhi Leonard landing the Raptors their first NBA title. In the five years since, the franchise has won one playoff series while languishing through less-than-inspiring moments that Ujiri himself...

Guest: Former Toronto Star baseball columnist and Blue Jays PR director Richard Griffin Hosts: Bruce Arthur and Dave Feschuk   Mark Shapiro could have been the perfect president of the Toronto Blue Jays. In the eight years since he took over for Paul Beeston, Shapiro has successfully convinced Blue Jays ownership to spend big money on the team, not to mention hundreds of millions in renovations to...

Guest:  Deborah Dundas, opinion section editor at the Toronto Star  A chilling revelation  has surfaced almost a month after the death of Canada's literary giant, Alice Munro. Andrea Skinner  —  who is Munro's daughter  —  has revealed in the Toronto Star that her stepfather Gerald Fremlin sexually abused her when she was nine years old. She was only able to tell her mother in a letter when she wa...

Guest:  Olivia Chow, mayor of Toronto One year ago, Olivia Chow was elected mayor of Toronto in a victory that signalled optimism in a city where that seemed in short supply. As we approach the annual Pride parade and the Canada Day long weekend (and after a marathon city council meeting), Chow reflects on what she's proudest of and what has been most challenging so far. She also talks about the d...

Guest:  Cait Alexander, artist and social activist In 2022, 184 women were killed violently in Canada. That's one woman killed every 48 hours. More than four million women, 30 per cent of all women aged 15 and older, report that they have experienced sexual assault. It's costing Canada almost $8 billion to deal with the aftermath of spousal violence alone. Is a country that in the past was conside...

Guest:  Andrea Gunraj, vice president public engagement, Canadian Women's Foundation In 2022, 184 women were killed violently in Canada. That's one woman killed every 48 hours. More than four million women, 30 per cent of all women aged 15 and older, report that they have experienced sexual assault. It's costing Canada almost $8 billion to deal with the aftermath of spousal violence alone. Is a co...

Guest:  Mary Simon, governor general of Canada  Gov. Gen. Mary Simon was appointed to her role in 2021, and made history as the first Indigenous person to hold that office. She used her social media to share updates about her work until last year, when the online hate came for her. Her   team was forced to close her social media account's comment section because the incoming hate became vile, raci...

Guests:  John Degen, novelist, and Peter Gorman, Deputy People's Warden at St. Anne's On June 9, a catastrophic four-alarm fire destroyed St. Anne's Anglican Church in Toronto's Little Portugal neighbourhood. The flames turned valuable paintings that were embedded into the very structure to ashes, including the only know religious artwork made by Canada's famed Group of Seven. With the loss of St....

Guest:  Satirical conspiracy theory leader Peter McIndoe It all started when Peter McIndoe, a self-described "obnoxious teenager," went to a women's march and scrawled the most random phrase he could think of on a sign: "Birds Aren't Real." When asked by people around him what he meant, he improvised a whole back story, someone posted a video of him online, and a fake movement was born. He spent a...

Guest:   Ben Spurr , city hall bureau chief  Can you imagine Toronto without its public transit lifeline? A TTC strike might be looming for the first time in almost 16 years as thousands of transit workers might soon walk off the job and on to the picket line  this Friday . Despite months of negotiations on job security, wages and benefits, the TTC management and the union representing about 12,00...

Guest:  David Miller, former mayor of Toronto Former Toronto Mayor David Miller was always an advocate for the environment. But in the nearly 14 years since he left office he's become one of the world's great networkers for climate solutions, bringing together mayors from 96 cities to share policy ideas, programs and practices. In this episode of " This Matters ," Miller discusses why municipal go...

Guest:   Shawn Micallef , contributing columnist and author of "Stroll: Pyschogeographic Walking Tours of Toronto" In 2010, journalist Shawn Micallef first published his book of observations, suggestions and civic history gleaned from years of wandering around the city and paying close attention to what he saw. In the 14-years since, as Micallef became a freelance columnist for The Star, the book...

Guests:  Journalists   Samira Mohyeddin and Christopher Curtis Student protests that first erupted across the United States have now spread northward, igniting across Canada, including campuses at University of Toronto, McGill University, University of British Columbia and University of Alberta among others. The students say they want to end a war that's claimed more than 34,000 Palestinian lives,...

Guest:  Toronto PWHL season ticket holder and superfan Connie Hamers At the inaugural game of Toronto's professional women's hockey team, Connie Hamers had front-row seats, and immediately took a liking to the play of rookie Emma Maltais. By game two, she'd labelled her section "Emma Nation" and began bringing team swag she made (or had made) herself — signs, team roster reference lists, mini-stic...

Guests:  Jasmine Eastmond, Tristan Kim and Kristin Rushowy  The Ontario government has announced a crackdown on cellphones and vaping in schools, new regulations that are being seen as some of the toughest in Canada. According to Education Minister Stephen Lecce, the new government policy for cellphones, with some exceptions, is out of sight, out of mind. With this new move to ban cellphone use in...

Guest:   Betsy Powell , courts reporter After the death of police Const. Jeffrey Northrup, the trial of Umar Zameer for first degree murder galvanized attention (and political rage) in the Toronto area. Now that he's been found not guilty, people are left with questions about a prosecution that always seemed to be based on flimsy grounds. Reporter Betsy Powell covered the case for the Star from it...

Guest: Sophie Grégoire Trudeau Even before Sophie Grégoire Trudeau married Prime Minister Justin Trudeau she was an advocate for mental health, openly sharing her personal struggles with eating disorders. She discusses her new book. She shares those struggles afresh, along with tales of her parents, her schooling, her relationships, in her new book, "Closer Together: Knowing Ourselves, Loving Each...

  We asked three published, award-winning Toronto poets to weigh in on Swift's literary merit at a listening party on the album's release day. The assignment: dissect three new songs as though Swift were a writer workshopping new pieces. Guests:   Sanna Wani , a poet and poetry editor whose latest book, "My Grief The Sun," was released in 2022;  Jody Chan's  most recent volume of poems, "impact st...

Guests:  Leena Usman, Pino Buffone and Kris Rushowy In what could be a landmark lawsuit in Canada, at least five major Ontario school boards are  taking some of the largest social media companies to court  over their platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok, alleging they have been designed in a way that's almost "rewiring" the way children behave. The allegations have yet to be proven in cou...

Guest:  Salman Rushdie, author It has been almost two years since celebrated author Salman Rushdie was attacked on a stage in Erie, New York as he was about to deliver a lecture. In an assault that lasted 27 seconds, a knife went through his right eye and optical nerve, while wounds to his tongue, neck and hand left him a changed man. Salman shares details of the attack — and his recovery — in his...

Guest : Anuradha Dugal, Vice President Community Initiatives at the Canadian Women's Foundation Equal Pay Day is recognized internationally as a day of action, calling on stakeholders to advance women's economic activity. It symbolizes how much longer women have had to work to catch up to what their male colleagues have earned in the previous year. Showing that women in Canada have worked nearly 1...

Guest:  Olivia Chow, mayor News over the last couple of weeks around city hall has been heavy on tax worries and mix-ups — thousands of bills sent out for vacant home taxes for occupied properties and concerns about a proposed stormwater fee. Mayor Olivia Chow explains what she thinks went wrong and how she plans to fix it (and "start from scratch" on the vacant home system). She also discusses he...

Thousands of property owners across the city got bills this week for vacant home taxes applying to homes they live in. Today, hosts Ed Keenan and Emma Teitel try to understand the comprehensive fiasco in the implementation of the policy. They also talk about the much-feared "rain tax" that will now go back for further study, about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's attempts to announce his way out of...

Guest:  Nicholas Keung , immigration reporter  The federal government is scaling back on the number of temporary residents and foreign workers in Canada while trying to boost access to permanent residence for those already here. Earlier, similar curbing measures were introduced for international students as well. While the government is framing these new, more restrictive immigration measures as a...

Guests:   Sheila Wang  and  Morgan Sevareid-Bocknek , investigative reporters They're called "lunch hour facelifts," cosmetic touch-ups without the surgery. But if you are rethinking your lunch plans, you might want to think again. A recent  Star investigation  found a lot of these procedures are not as advertised. Across Canada, spas and medical clinics are offering the popular medical procedure...