This Matters

Guest: Deborah Dundas , books editor The 2023 Scotiabank Giller Prize, Canada's prestigious literary award, will be handed out on Nov. 13 . Five books were shortlisted last week from a longlist of twelve, picked out of more than a hundred books that were submitted across the country. Star books editor Deborah Dundas walks us through the most buzzworthy books and gives great recommendations to add...

Guest: Amy Laski, founder of the Tween Girls Hockey League The city's policy for allocating recreational permits for sports facilities favours tradition. Long-term permit holders get renewed year after year. That's great for building up those leagues, but leaves any newcomers, including those trying to serve girls and others who feel left out of the existing sports culture, scrambling to try to fi...

Guest: Dr. Sasha High, internal medicine and obesity physician Ozempic has been all over the news and social media as it has been hailed as the miracle drug for weight loss. As it is a trend among A-list celebrities, it's also found itself surrounded by controversy. Experts say Ozempic is a medicine, not a TikTok trend and needs to be taken with the advice of your doctor. Last year, Ozempic hype a...

Guest: Lydia Greene, student nurse For a long while, Lydia Greene would forgo many vaccines for her and her children, believing them akin to poison. A mother of three and a former quality-control chemist for a pharmaceutical plant, Greene called herself an anti-vaxxer. But when COVID-19 put vaccine safety into the spotlight, she decided to dig deeper into the research and concluded she might actua...

Guest: Amy Dempsey , feature writer Less than a century ago, a single raccoon raiding a garbage bin was front-page news in Toronto, while today the trash pandas are everywhere. Feature writer Amy Dempsey, who documented how the creatures outsmarted the city's waste-bin engineers , takes a closer look at our love-hate relationships with these animals, the city's frustrated attempts to control them...

Guest: Michael Lewis, journalist and author In 2019, Sam Bankman-Fried set up a crypto exchange called FTX. Over the course of two years, as the price of crypto skyrocketed, so did his fortune, until it was estimated at as much as $26.5 billion U.S. SBF, as he became known, was feted by celebrities from football star Tom Brady to comedian Larry David. Then, in November 2022, it all came crashing d...

More than a week ago Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made an unprecedented move. He accused Indian government agents of involvement in the death of exiled Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar on Canadian soil; an accusation that New Delhi has denied strongly and dismissed as "absurd." Since then, both countries have been in a diplomatic showdown, including tit-for-tat expulsions of each other...

The Blue Jays clinched a playoff spot on Sunday and will start the Wild Card series agains the Minnesota Twins on Tuesday. The Star's baseball podcast Deep Left Field has gone daily for the playoff run, so This Matters guest host Mike Wilner brings you this clinch episode. You'll hear from Blue Jays (and Deep Left Field regulars) Kevin Kiermaier and Jordan Romano, along with Vladimir Guerrero Jr.,...

Hosts: Toronto Star columnists Edward Keenan and Emma Teitel In this episode: The week that was in Toronto and beyond: Including questions about whether the Eglinton Crosstown will be built in any of our lifetimes (and whether they'll let us know if it is), the fallout from the celebration of a Nazi soldier that ruined what should have been a good and meaningful day for the federal government, Oli...

On this episode: Guest host Althia Raj talks with Bernie Farber, the founding chair of the anti-hate network, the former CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress Last week, the Speaker of the House of Commons, Anthony Rota, invited Yaroslav Hunka, a 98-year-old constituent, to come to Ottawa and hear Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy's address. Rota introduced him in the House as a Ukranian who'd...

Guest: Toronto Star Queen's Park Bureau Chief Robert Benzie In this episode: Doug Ford's foray into a mayoral election he promised to stay out of was just the start of a summer where nothing seemed to go right for his government and where the Greenbelt swap scandal exploded — costing his government cabinet ministers, senior staff members, and oodles of popular support. The Star's Robert Benzie det...

Guest: Brandi Morin, French/Cree/Iroquois journalist from Treaty 6 in Alberta Indigenous people have been on the frontlines of fighting to protect and sustain the land and environment for years. They warn that the west's supposedly eco-friendly climate strategy is also a repeat of history. Resources needed for sustainable alternate energy such as mineral mining continues the practise of extracting...

Guests: Martin Regg Cohn , Queen's Park columnist In this episode, columnist Martin Regg Cohn joins to tackle the avalanche of news coming from Queen's Park including Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow's visit (and common ground with the premier), the debate for Liberal party leadership hopefuls and Premier Doug Ford reversing his earlier reversal on Greenbelt protections. All of that, plus what you can le...

Guest: Mark Maloney, author Mark Maloney is the author of the book "Toronto Mayors," which profiles all 65 people who've held the city's top job. He joins " This Matters " to talk about the rogues gallery of scandalous scoundrels in our past, share who he considers the Mount Rushmore of best (and most beloved) mayors and give his thoughts on the city's recurring state of explosive growth and under...

Guest: Ed Jackson, community historian Hanlan's Point is known as Toronto's clothing-optional beach , but it has deeper significance as a historically queer space and has recently been recognized for its place in city history. The beach in the Toronto Islands was the site of Canada's first Pride celebration in 1971 and a place, just outside of the spotlight, that was quietly known for decades as a...

Guest: Wendy Gillis , crime and policing reporter Chilling testimony has been delivered in the ongoing trial of the man accused of killing four members of a Muslim family in 2021. For Canadian Muslims, it's a reopening of old wounds and a litmus test of Canada's anti-terrorism laws. Four members of the Afzaal family were killed just over two years ago in London, Ont., when the accused allegedly st...

Guest: Bill Vigars, author of "Terry & Me" It was 43 years ago when Terry Fox dipped his leg in the Atlantic Ocean and embarked on a run across the country to raise money for cancer research. He ran 5,373 kilometres in 143 days before his cancer would return and end his run in Thunder Bay, Ont. Fox's dream of raising $1 for every Canadian would be realized, though. Canadians and others around the...

Guests: Edward Keenan and Emma Teitel , columnists Mayor Olivia Chow spoke with John Baird, the former federal minister of foreign affairs, and they agreed Toronto needs a new deal. So far the federal government hasn't played along, but maybe a scandal plagued Premier Doug Ford could be convinced to play along? Keenan and Teitel also discuss the Conservative party's indulgence of anti-woke panderi...

Guest: Katie Daubs , senior writer At a time when reports of dog bites and complaints about dog behaviour are on the rise, a motion at city council will review rules for dog off-leash areas. Senior writer Katie Daubs has looked at the bitter fights and challenges of enforcing rules about beloved city pets, and she joins " This Matters " to talk about the lack of resources (and the culture of disob...

Guest: Peter Howell , movie critic This year's Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) kicked off last Thursday with relatively less buzz. As the red carpets rolled out for the annual festival, organizers, film directors and movie buffs are all grappling with the absence of the usual number of big movie stars due to Hollywood's ongoing strike by writers and actors, its largest in decades. TIFF...

Guests: Edward Keenan and Emma Teitel , columnists In this episode, hosts Edward Keenan and Emma Teitel discuss the fiasco "inside a clown show wrapped in a dumpster fire" that is the Premier Doug Ford Greenbelt scandal, Toronto city council talks on new taxes and new public housing, how the education minister's lose talk could lead to kids becoming homeless and other assorted news that caught Ed'...

Guest: Alex Boyd, staff reporter If you're a parent, you might believe your child can teach you a thing or two about the internet. You wouldn't be wrong but did you know teens are more susceptible to online conspiracy theories and disinformation than you? Research shows that young people are increasingly exposed to disinformation and misinformation, and struggling to separate facts from fake news....

Picture this: A swarm of bees, millions of them, unleashed and spilling out onto a highway. Sound like the plot of a horror movie? This happened recently in Burlington, Ont. when a truck carrying five million bees spilled its cargo. The incident caused quite a buzz, but experts are saying we're buzzing about the wrong disaster . The real one is the rapidly declining populations of these bees and h...

Guest: Clarrie Feinstein , real estate reporter Real estate is becoming mission impossible in Canada. With interest rates holding high, there is less demand for properties on the market and an increasing number of mortgages are going into default. Property investors aren't making money and struggling to sell as homebuilders are cancelling projects. Something has to give. As the Star's real estate...

Guest: Jeremy Nuttall, reporter at the Toronto Star In May 2014 the New York Times published an opinion piece that generated much buzz, claiming that Canada might have stolen the famous "American Dream" when it came to median, after-tax income, quality of education and economic equality. Less than ten years and a pandemic later, the "Canadian Dream" might be turning into a nightmare with a spirali...