Front Burner

This week, temperatures across much of Europe reached above 40 C. In parts of Spain and Portugal, it was hotter than the Sahara Desert.

Governments are telling citizens to stay indoors. Schools have closed. Wildfires have spread. Nuclear reactors have reduced their output because rivers have become too warm to cool them efficiently. The World Health Organization says Europe’s heat is responsible for 1,300 deaths since June 21st.

For generations Europe built its cities, homes, public spaces and tourism industry around the assumption that summers would be hot, but bearable. That assumption is beginning to change. 

The Guardian’s Europe environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan joins us to talk about what happens when a whole continent discovers it was built for a climate that no longer exists.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Investment company Wealthsimple is partnering with Kalshi to launch Wealthsimple Predict. It’s an app that’ll allow Canadians to place bets on things like Bank of Canada interest rates, job numbers and long term weather patterns.

This comes at a time where there’s growing scrutiny on prediction markets in the U.S. for misleading advertising and susceptibility to insider trading. So why are young investors, especially Gen Z, fuelling the demand for prediction markets and other high risk and speculative ways to make money? And what are the risks of companies like Wealthsimple leaning into the gamification of the economy?

Charles Martineau, Associate Director of Research at the Rotman Financial Innovation Hub at the University of Toronto, joins us to talk about the phenomenon and what the data tells us about who actually wins on prediction markets.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

A warning: this episode discusses the trauma and harms surrounding Canada's residential school history. Please listen with care. 

So much of what we know about Canada's residential schools has been established as fact. More than 150 thousand Indigenous children and youth were taken from their families and required to attend these schools. Several thousand students died.

Although all of this is well-documented and verified, there has been a growing discourse calling those facts into question. Researchers, commentators and some politicians have really zeroed in on the 2021 discovery of suspected graves near a former residential school in Kamloops.

Academics and Indigenous leaders call this residential school denialism — similar to Holocaust denialism. Many of them have called for adding the denial of residential school history to the Criminal Code as a form of hate speech.

Earlier this month, a Nunavut senator brought forward a motion to amend Bill C-9, the Liberals’ anti hate bill, to do just that – but it was voted down.

Sean Carleton and Niigaan Sinclair have been tracking the rise of residential school denialism in Canada. Their book, “Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism”, comes out this September.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the fall of 2022, Danish authorities scrambled fighter jets to investigate a strange disturbance in the Baltic Sea. What they found was extraordinary.

An enormous geyser had opened up on the water’s surface. It was evidence that something deep below had ruptured with enormous force.

Just days earlier, a team of divers had planted explosives along Nord Stream, a multi-billion dollar network of pipelines carrying Russian natural gas into Germany.

In the days and months that followed, all kinds of theories emerged about who might have staged the attack, and why. Now, after years of investigations, intelligence leaks, arrests, and reporting across Europe, a much clearer picture of what happened that night has emerged.

Bojan Pancevski is the Chief European Political Correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, and the author of the new book ‘The Nord Stream Conspiracy: The Inside Story of the Explosions That Shook the World’

He joins us today to discuss one of the most consequential acts of infrastructure sabotage in recent history and the small group of Ukrainian civilian divers who, according to his reporting, pulled it off.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

On Monday morning, a 25-year-old man opened fire in Montreal, leading to a shootout that left three people dead.

A few hours later, police found a manifesto written by the shooter. It contained a laundry list of grievances but, more than anything, it bore the telltale signs of someone who had spent a lot of time immersed in the world of incels.

The incel, or involuntary celibate, movement was born online but has occasionally inspired real world violence. Elle Reeve is a correspondent for CNN and the author of Black Pill: How I Witnessed the Darkest Corners of the Internet Come to Life, Poison Society, and Capture American Politics. 

She joins the show to explain why young men are drawn to this movement – and why it keeps leading to violence. 

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Margaret Evans is CBC’s Senior International Correspondent. She just returned from a week-long reporting trip in Tehran, speaking to Iranians on the ground about the impact of the war and the preliminary peace agreement.

In a Canadian exclusive, CBC News reported from Iran with permission of the country’s government, who put restrictions on journalists but have no say over what we decide to publish or broadcast.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

After a weekend of speculation, U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer appeared on the steps of 10 Downing Street on Monday and announced that he would be stepping down. 

He’s now the sixth British Prime Minister to resign in the last 10 years, continuing a pattern many thought would end after he won a majority government with the Labour Party in a landslide just two years ago. 

Zoë Grünewald is a freelance journalist based in London, England. She’s also a regular panelist on the politics podcast ‘Oh God, What Now?’. She’s here to talk about the conditions that have made it so hard for the country to hold onto a Prime Minister, and what that means for people in the U.K.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts 

It was a busy end to the season in the House of Commons. CBC Chief Political Correspondent Rosemary Barton is here to talk about what happened, what it tells us about Carney’s majority government, and what we can expect in the months to come. 

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Toronto police announced this week that nearly 30 recent shootings across the Greater Toronto Area are linked by a multi-layered gun-for-hire network. They say teens have been recruited through encrypted messaging apps to carry out attacks, from targets linked to local tow truck and waste management disputes, to synagogues, Jewish schools and even the US consulate. 

In almost all the cases, they filmed the acts for proof of payment. Now police say they want to know who’s hiring them and how far this network spans.

Abby O’Brien is a reporter at the Toronto Star who has been following Toronto organized crime networks and the recent news. She walked us through what we know so far.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit:  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Andrew Tate – the controversial British-American influencer, and self-described misogynist – has millions of followers around the world.

He often tells young men that they’re victims of a feminized society and that they need to reclaim their “natural masculine imperative for power”.

Tate became even more famous after he and his brother were subject to a police raid on their Romanian property in 2022, due to suspected human trafficking. In the years after, they’ve also been investigated for rape and sexual assault. The brothers deny all wrongdoing.

Heidi Blake is an investigative reporter who recently wrote a piece for The New Yorker that meticulously peels back the industry that Andrew Tate built up: from an online porn empire, to a so-called educational network for men to learn how to recruit women into “sexual slavery”. She walks us through her findings.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts