Front Burner

Late last week, the Globe and Mail broke an explosive story with allegations that China tried to influence the 2021 election here in Canada. Then, on Tuesday, a parliamentary committee that was already studying allegations of foreign meddling in the 2019 federal election decided to widen its scope. Elections Canada, the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and Liberal cabinet ministers were all summoned to testify to answer questions about these new allegations to determine what the government and national security agencies are doing to protect democracy in Canada.

Today on Front Burner guest host Jodie Martinson is joined by Catherine Cullen, the host of CBC's political podcast, The House, and a senior reporter in our parliamentary bureau.

Russia has put at least 6,000 Ukrainian children in camps, according to a U.S.-funded report from Yale University.

The report says the children are enduring pro-Russian re-education. Some are being adopted out to Russian families with fanfare from Russian officials, while others are allegedly receiving military training. Meanwhile, Ukrainian mothers have been making long and treacherous journeys in an attempt to retrieve their children.

Today, Yale Humanitarian Research Lab executive director Nathaniel Raymond explains the findings of the report, why Russia's actions could amount to war crimes, and why he says the report should be read as a "gigantic Amber Alert."

Weeks after a train derailed and crews released and burned toxic chemicals, officials are reassuring residents of East Palestine, Ohio that the air and water are safe.

Many residents, however, remain wary of the long-term effects of materials like vinyl chloride, with some reporting symptoms like skin and eye irritation and hoarseness. Simultaneously, a political conversation is unfolding about who or what to blame for the crash, with critics pointing to a lack of regulation and cost-cutting from rail giants as they post record profits.

Today, a look at what's happening on the ground as residents return to East Palestine, and a look at why rail disasters like this continue to happen more than a decade after the fatal catastrophe in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec.

News of the mysterious deaths of billionaire Canadian pharma giant Barry Sherman and his philanthropist wife Honey in December 2017 reverberated around the world. Five years later, with no arrests and little news from the police, their deaths remain shrouded in mystery and conspiracy theories, with too many lingering questions. Not just who killed them, but what kind of life do you have to live that when you’re found dead, there are multiple theories, including some involving your own family? That’s the question journalist Kathleen Goldhar set out to discover, in The No Good, Terribly Kind, Wonderful Lives and Tragic Deaths of Barry and Honey Sherman, as she explores who the Shermans really were and why too much money might have been what killed them in the end. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/DTlP12wc

Within the first several months of the COVID-19 pandemic, doctors around the world noticed something strange. Suddenly, they were seeing a surge of young patients presenting with sudden, explosive tics.

But in many cases, these tics didn’t fit the profile of a tic disorder like Tourette Syndrome. Doctors started searching for a shared source that was causing the outbreak, and that search led them to TikTok.

Experts at the University of Calgary have been leading the research.

Azeen Ghorayshi is a reporter with the New York Times. Today, she takes us through what researchers have found about why so many teens were affected, what the pandemic had to do with it and the role social media played in the spread.

Last week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres called out oil companies for raking in “monster profits” and expanding production instead of focusing on renewable energy.

2022 was a record-breaking year for oil producers. According to the International Energy Agency, global gas and oil profits went from a recent average of $1.5 trillion to four trillion dollars last year alone. And in the wake of those profits many oil companies are walking back on climate-friendly pledges.

Today on Front Burner, we’ll be talking about why Big Oil is raking in so much cash, how long a fossil fuel resurgence could really last.

Geoff Dembicki is an investigative climate reporter who has been following this closely for DeSmog and the author of The Petroleum Papers.

It all started two weeks ago with a suspected Chinese spy balloon, which carried a payload about the size of three buses. A U.S. fighter jet shot it down after it floated across the continent.

Then, the U.S shot down a second object: something airborne over Alaska that the U.S. said was likely not a balloon at all. And now, there’s been a third and a fourth object taken down above North America this month, in these cases over Yukon and Lake Huron.

Today, Dan Lamothe explains the knowns and unknowns about these objects and what could be driving the decisions to shoot them down. Lamothe covers the Pentagon and U.S. Military for The Washington Post.

A few days ago, Canopy Growth Corporation, one of weed's biggest players, announced significant cuts and the closure of its headquarters in Smith Falls, Ontario, resulting in 800 layoffs for the town's biggest employer.

Canopy reported a net loss of $267 million this quarter, bringing the struggling company's losses in the first three quarters of the year to $2.6 billion.

Today on Front Burner, Solomon Israel, a reporter with MJBizDaily, joins us to discuss the closure and what this means for a slowing cannabis industry.

An hour after the Toronto Star published an article about his affair on Friday, mayor John Tory was standing before reporters at Toronto City Hall. He offered his resignation.

During his over eight years in office, some praised Tory as a boring mayor, a return to normalcy after the explosive Rob Ford years. But his critics have also accused him of presiding over a historic decline in Toronto, pointing to decaying services and failures for the most vulnerable.

Today, a conversation with Canadaland editor Jonathan Goldsbie about why Tory resigned this quickly, and what will become of his increasingly complicated legacy.

In 1985, at the height of the Black Power era, police dropped a bomb in a Philadelphia neighborhood. Their target? A family of Black radicals known as ‘MOVE,’ who found themselves ensnared in a city — and nation’s — domestic war on Black Liberation. Over seven episodes, host Matthew Amha investigates the events that culminated in the MOVE bombing, and the long afterlife of a forgotten American tragedy. More episodes are available at: https://link.chtbl.com/X9pEruGw