Front Burner

On Monday, as the Recording Academy began its final round of voting for the 2022 Grammy winners, people learned Drake was off the ballot.

Drake and his management had asked the Academy to pull his two nominations.

He still hasn’t offered an explanation, but this is the latest in a series of tensions between Drake and the Grammys: he’s questioned their relevance in his lyrics, defended The Weeknd after a snub and even criticized the Academy while accepting a trophy.

Today on Front Burner, music journalist and host of Marvin’s Room A. Harmony joins us to explain why so many Hip Hop artists are expressing frustration with the Grammys, and whether a show with limited recognition of Black talent can remain relevant.

Russia has sent almost 100,000 troops near the Ukraine border in recent weeks. Observers believe the state is trying to extract certain concessions from Europe, particularly assurances from NATO that Ukraine will never be able to join the security group.

Janice Gross Stein was a founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs in Toronto. She argues that NATO’s "strategic ambiguity" toward Ukraine gave the country false hope we had its back — so now, we’re partly seeing the fallout of promises we couldn’t keep.

Just when Europe thought it had beat COVID-19, it’s once again an epicentre of the pandemic. As countries struggle to fight off yet another wave of the virus many governments in the E.U. are bringing in strict new lockdowns, and in some cases contemplating vaccine mandates. But these efforts are meeting fierce — and sometimes violent — resistance.

Today, the host of the Berlin podcast Common Ground Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson walks us through what’s fuelling this latest surge across Western European countries — vaccine hesitancy, a more aggressive variant, general distrust in government, or all of the above?

You’ve probably noticed that prices of practically everything — food, gas, haircuts, housing — have been going up lately. Canada’s inflation rate is now the highest it’s been in 18 years.

In Parliament, the Conservative party has been pointing fingers at Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, and calling on them to quit racking up deficits. They’ve even come up with a nickname for the problem: #Justinflation.

But economists say this isn’t a normal inflation problem and warn normal solutions may not work.

For months, a B.C.-based QAnon conspiracy influencer named Romana Didulo has been amassing followers online, declaring herself the “Queen of Canada.” In the summer, her audience began distributing cease-and-desist letters across North America on her behalf, demanding a stop to COVID-19 restrictions. Recently, her rhetoric escalated when she urged her followers to “shoot to kill” anyone who administers vaccines to children. The RCMP have visited her since, and one of her followers in Laval, Que., was arrested after allegedly posting threats about his daughter’s school. Today on Front Burner, Vice World News reporter Mack Lamoureux discusses this influential QAnon figure, her active base of followers and law enforcement’s response.

$210-million dollars went out the door and into the pockets of businesses who shouldn’t have received it. That was the assessment of Ontario’s auditor general in an annual report this week that looked, in part, at the pandemic support of Doug Ford’s Conservative government.

And it definitely got the opposition parties in Queen’s Park talking. The audit comes as each party stakes out their pre-election ground and try to build a narrative that will lead to a win in June.

To help us take a bite of the pre-election stew bubbling in Ontario politics, we’re joined by CBC News’ Mike Crawley.

Canada and a growing list of more than 20 countries have confirmed cases of omicron, the latest version of the COVID-19 virus to be labelled a "variant of concern" by the World Health Organization.

Despite omicron's global reach, dozens of nations are enforcing travel bans on mainly southern Africa, where the variant was originally detected. Some countries have celebrated South Africa's identification of the variant mere moments before announcing restrictions.

Meanwhile, vaccine stockpiling by outside nations has contributed to spotty supply and high hesitancy on the continent. Africa faces a looming wave of omicron, with a full vaccination rate in the single digits.

Today on Front Burner, infectious diseases physician Dr. Zain Chagla explains how measures by countries like Canada have put Africa into this precarious position with omicron, and why vaccines are more important in regions that are currently seeing far fewer doses.

In the spring of 2020, the Cargill meat-packing plant in southern Alberta became the site of the largest COVID-19 outbreak tied to a single facility in all of North America. Approximately 950 workers were infected, and three died.

A year and a half later, COVID-19 appears to be under control at the slaughterhouse. But workers say the underlying working conditions that were laid bare by the pandemic are still there. And now, they’re demanding changes.

Workers are currently negotiating a new contract with management, and if their demands aren’t met by Dec. 6, they’re prepared to strike. And since this one facility is responsible for 40 per cent of the beef processing in Canada, that’s put a lot of people on edge.

Today, CBC reporter Joel Dryden on what Cargill workers want, and what it could mean beyond this one facility.

British Columbia is still struggling with the fallout from record-breaking rains that caused floods and mudslides that killed six people and displaced thousands more. This, after the fatal heat dome of the summer, and the third worst fire season on record.

While experts say it’s impossible to determine whether this year’s extreme weather resulted directly from climate change, they will say climate change made these events worse.

Last week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and B.C. Premier John Horgan agreed to strike a joint provincial-federal committee to address disaster response and climate resilience.

Today, environmental journalist Arno Kopecky on how B.C. is experiencing so many of the big climate change issues of our time.

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in one of the most important cases on reproductive rights in decades. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the last remaining abortion clinic in Mississippi, has challenged a state law that would ban abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy. The Supreme Court case could determine not just the fate of the clinic, but of the monumental 1973 ruling Roe v. Wade, which legalized abortion nationwide.

Today, legal historian Mary Ziegler breaks down the Mississippi case, and explains what its potential impacts could be for reproductive rights across the United States.