The Big Story

By Frequency Podcast Network

What's The Big Story about?

Focusing a magnifying glass on the headlines everyone is talking about, with the help of journalists from the best outlets in Canada. Intelligence, wit, curiosity. 15 minutes a day, Monday to Friday. First thing in the morning.

Download our free app to listen on your phone

LAST EPISODE

Schools and students in lim...

05.26.2020

Imagine being a high-school graduate right now, deciding whether to pay your tuition for post-secondary education in the fall. How do you know what you'll be getting for your money? Do the lessons in your program even translate to virtual ...

The Big Story episodes:

05.26.2020 Schools and students in limbo as virtual fall term looms Imagine being a high-school graduate right now, deciding whether to pay your tuition for post-secondary education in the fall. How do you know what you'll be getting for your money? Do the lessons in your program even translate to virtual ...
05.25.2020 How workers are fighting for their rights in a dangerous gig economy A few months ago, a group of couriers won a huge victory for gig economy workers in Canada. And you won't believe what happened next... We're relying on this sort of work more than ever as we attempt to stay ...
05.22.2020 Will COVID-19 bring down Airbnb? Nearly every story on a housing crisis casts Airbnb as one the chief villains driving up rents and home prices. So it should not come as a shock that the crisis facing the company as worldwide travel grinds to a ...
05.21.2020 A groundbreaking terrorism charge against an alleged ‘incel’ The crime itself did not generate many headlines at the time it happened. Partly because the COVID-19 pandemic was ramping up, and partly because women are killed with shocking regularity in Canada. But three months later, two words were added ...
05.20.2020 How isolation is changing our use of substances Have you found yourself joking about drinking your way through quarantine? You are, anecdotally and statistically, not alone. We know more people are reporting increased use of substances—but we still imagine there's a world of differences between people living with ...
05.19.2020 An employment lawyer explains what we need to know as workplaces open Employees returning to work is a positive sign in our battle against COVID-19, but it's also scary, and raises a lot of questions. Is my workplace safe? What is my employer required to do to make it safe? What do ...
05.15.2020 Alone and threatened on a boat far out to sea… Every bottom-trawling fishing boat off the coast of British Columbia has an independent observer on board. The observers monitor the catch and protect against overfishing and environmental harm. But when they do that, they're the only person on the boat ...
05.14.2020 What we do (and don’t) know about COVID-19 and kids Schools in parts of Quebec reopened this week—though they look different. And other parts of the country will likely be considering this move soon. And as this happens we still don't know exactly how children contribute to the spread of ...
05.13.2020 “Is this year really possible?” A COVID-19 vaccine explained You know the timeline we've been quoted every time a COVID-19 vaccine is discussed: 12-18 months. But how accurate is that? What if we get lucky? What if we really, really don't? When you see news of a new vaccine ...
05.12.2020 A very Canadian solution to a problem we’ll hopefully never face You've seen the stories and images from around the world. Hospitals built in China in 10 days. Convention centres turned into temporary Covid-19 care centres. A medical train moving patients around France. When healthcare systems become overwhelmed, solutions are needed ...
05.11.2020 Will a Universal Basic Income finally get a real shot? If there was one thing almost all governments—liberal, conservative, whatever—agreed upon when disaster struck, it was the need to get money into people's hands quickly. And in Canada right now, millions of people are receiving $2,000 per month from their ...
05.08.2020 Oh great…now Murder Hornets? Well, you probably shouldn't call them that. They may kill—but they don't intend to murder, which is what passes for good news in 2020. Since a New York Times headline vaulted the asian giant hornet onto the list of everyone's ...
05.07.2020 Aid programs, partisan politics and the path forward: A dispatch from Ottawa Over the past two months, several programs worth billions upon billions of dollars were rolled out to Canadian people and businesses faster than we could have imagined. So...do they work? How many people have needed them? How are they being ...
05.06.2020 A supply chain explainer, or why you can or can’t find flour OK, maybe it's not necessarily flour, but surely there's been something missing from your shopping list since COVID-19 struck. You might be surprised to know that there haven't actually been any shortages. There's still more than enough flour, toilet paper, ...
05.05.2020 Inside the strange world of designing psychoactive drugs All of the psychoactive recreational drugs you can name are illegal in Canada. But if you're smart enough to make a new drug yourself? Well, it's not on the banned list yet. This is the story of a strange but ...
05.04.2020 Will we have to trade privacy for freedom to get ‘back to normal’? In order for us to go back to day-to-day lives that are even close to normal, we’re going to have to be able to track contacts of people who test positive for COVID-19—and we’re going to have to be able ...
05.01.2020 Everything but ‘Why?’: What we know now about the Nova Scotia shooting In the days after Canada’s worst mass shooting, there were dozens of questions we couldn’t answer. The list started with things as basic as "How many victims?" and "Who were they?" It ended with the biggest one of all: Why? ...
04.30.2020 Learning, innovating and grieving: Inside a Canadian ICU This is a report from the front lines, and it's about both tragedy and triumph. When the COVID-19 crisis began, Canadian ICU doctors looked at their colleagues in Italy and Spain and feared that would happen here—that they would have ...
04.29.2020 What does COVID-19 mean for cottage season and rural communities? It sounds like a first-world problem: "What if people can't visit their second homes?" But behind the stereotype there are hundreds of thousands of people facing tough choices. People who flee cities for rural areas in the summer are not ...
04.28.2020 How did BC successfully flatten the curve? And will it stay that way? Ontario and British Columbia discovered their first cases of COVID-19 just one day apart. B.C. was the first province to report community transmission. But since early March, while the virus numbers skyrocketed in Ontario and Quebec, B.C. kept the pandemic ...
04.27.2020 How long can we all follow strict social distancing orders? All the reports say that, so far, Canada's strategy is working. The curves from province to province are beginning to flatten. That's thanks to Canadians isolating themselves for almost two months now. But how long can this high level of ...
04.24.2020 A distraction for every type: What to watch during lockdown We figured you might have exhausted your first choices and the obvious options by now—and with at least a few more weeks to go of self-isolation and sheltering in place, we wanted to make sure that you had something to ...
04.23.2020 What does the future of sports look like? It's been six weeks since every major sports league hit pause on their seasons. We still don't have a timetable for their return. But the world of sports is as busy as ever, just in a very different way. There's ...
04.22.2020 What COVID-19 can teach us about being wrong Dr. David Fisman has been at the forefront of the battle against infectious diseases, from SARS to COVID-19. We asked him about this new virus in January, and he got it wrong. He was far from alone in that. The ...
04.21.2020 What we know and don’t know about the Nova Scotia shooting It’s been almost 48 hours, and police still aren’t sure how many people are dead. But it’s at least 19. It’s the deadliest mass shooting in Canadian history. We don’t yet have a motive. The surest piece of information we ...
04.20.2020 How COVID-19 could change our cities forever. Or not. Open-concept floor plans. Roads designed for peak traffic at peak times on week days. Apartments built for sleeping and eating but not extended isolation. Sidewalks built for...closeness. This pandemic has cast a spotlight on the nature of how we design ...
04.17.2020 How to eat well (enough) during quarantine In the early days of self-isolation, for some people food was an adventure. For others, an obstacle. But now that we've been at this for a while, perhaps you've realized that your standards are slipping. How can we possibly feed ...
04.16.2020 COVID-19 and domestic violence: A meeting of two pandemics Shelters and advocates and even governments have sounded the alarm about what our efforts to stay in our homes and battle COVID-19 means for people who have an abusive partner. Many of the usual paths out of an awful situation ...
04.15.2020 How a health reporter does her job when every story is urgent Health stories are basically the only stories now. There are reams of sometimes-conflicting data, no shortage of sources (though some are much better than others) and someone has to sift out the themes that will have lasting impacts from the ...
04.14.2020 A Canadian experiment looks for a ‘Hail Mary’ COVID-19 treatment It's been used in desperate times of disease for a century—but there's never been a large-scale study of its effectiveness. It's relatively simple to administer, but requires a lot of resources to get right. Will it work? We don't know, ...
04.13.2020 A guide to COVID-19 scams and how to protect yourself A global pandemic has trapped most of us inside our homes. We're cut off from friends and family. We're scared and lonely and worried about our jobs and the rent or the mortgage. Which means, sadly, that we've never been ...
04.09.2020 How many restaurants will survive this Spring? An early estimate says perhaps one in 10 non-chain restaurants have already closed for good. This month could add 15-20% more. The hospitality industry depends so closely on incoming cash flow, that they simply aren't built to survive a shutdown ...
04.08.2020 How a Nfld. funeral home became the centre of Canada’s biggest COVID-19 outbreak When Shannon Fleming's loved ones gathered to mourn her passing, there hadn't yet been any official bans on gatherings of this size in Newfoundland. Attendees remember it as a normal funeral, though the funeral home says it took precautions. A ...
04.07.2020 COVID-19’s great mask debate Everyone you know probably has an opinion on whether or not we should be wearing masks outside. So does Canada's chief public health officer—and her opinion has evolved over the past month. Canadians are now being encouraged to wear non-medical ...
04.06.2020 How COVID-19 is changing B.C.’s approach to the opioid crisis Pandemics force us into a lot of changes that otherwise might never have been made. Some of those changes are horrible choices between 'bad' and 'worse'. But not every one of them. In an effort to help both drug users ...
04.03.2020 What it’s like to have COVID-19 (but not get tested) The novel coronavirus presents in different ways for different people, and that means that experts think we're likely missing lots of cases due to mild symptoms, test shortages or both. This, perhaps, includes our host. But it definitely includes today's ...
04.02.2020 A stealth virus, the missing infected and playing the long game: Inside the COVID-19 numbers POP QUIZ! If a province's report says it has 426 new cases of COVID-19 in one day, which brings the provincial total to 2392 and represents a 22% increase day-over-day—but the number of test results on that day tops 6,200, ...
04.01.2020 Montreal faces a rental crisis in a pandemic For decades, the image of Montreal apartments has been a lure to the rest of Canada: Huge, spacious units in beautiful old walkups, for prices that wouldn't get you a basement in most other cities. Those days are gone. Montreal ...
03.31.2020 How to stay positive in self-isolation These are stressful times, to put it lightly. And the message from Canada's health officials is that there's no clear end in sight for physical distancing measures. As we go longer and longer without the sort of everyday things that ...
03.30.2020 Hospitals plan for the worst, as a community steps up The last time we talked to Dr. Michael Warner, he was headed in a week leading his time in the critical care unit at a Toronto hospital. He joins us to update what teams at hospitals across the province are ...
03.27.2020 Canada’s COVID-19 aid package and you Do you qualify? How much will you get? For how long? What if you still have a tiny bit of income, but it's not enough to live on? What if you're already on EI? What if you haven't been fired, ...
03.26.2020 Going back to school on a virtual campus When Canadian campuses shut down, there wasn't a lot of time to make plans. Students needed to get home safely, if they could. Professors needed to set up virtual classes in a week or two—and nobody really had any idea ...
03.25.2020 Is a climate wakeup the silver lining on a horrible situation? You’ve probably seen the pictures of clear canals and blue skylines as the world shuts down. They look like scenes from a better future. But most of them are real, and there’s not a lot of good news at the ...
03.24.2020 How to talk to people who won't self-isolate... Yeah, this means your parents. It's a problem a lot of Gen-X and Millennials are facing right now—their moms and dads are at the most risk from COVID-19. They're also pushing back on following extreme isolation orders, or at least ...
03.23.2020 Some Canadians have made it home. Others haven’t. There are still plenty of Canadians abroad, all scrambling to get home. Depending on where they are, and when they left, some will have an easier time than others. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said almost a week ago that "it's ...
03.20.2020 A report from the front lines of Canadian hospitals The phrase "overwhelm the health care system" has become a kind of catch all for the COVID-19 Worst Case Scenario, but what does that look like? How would it happen? And more importantly, how can we still act to prevent ...
03.19.2020 We want to hear from you! Here's a taste of what it sounds like when The Big Story team works from home. What are YOU doing to pass the time? Record a 30-second clip of yourself using the voice recorder on your phone or computer–or take ...
03.19.2020 Who’s most at risk from CoVid-19? What do they need? We all have people in our lives who are vulnerable to the coronavirus. And yes, it’s easy to say, OK I’m going to stay away from my elderly parents, or other seniors. But there are people at risk from this ...
03.18.2020 Debunking CoVid-19 myths and hoaxes You’ve probably heard at least one of these. It might’ve sounded too good to be true. You might not have cared, so eager were you for something concrete in a world of chaos. The Coronavirus isn’t the only thing spreading ...
03.17.2020 From a cruise ship to quarantine and then to ... ? Most of Canada is now adapting to a new life spent almost entirely in their homes. Some Canadians, however, have been locked down, in one way or another, for weeks now. You might remember the Grand Princess cruise ship, which ...

Older episodes

The Big Story

What's The Big Story about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

The Big Story episodes:

Schools and students in limbo as virtual fall term looms

How workers are fighting for their rights in a dangerous gig economy

Will COVID-19 bring down Airbnb?

A groundbreaking terrorism charge against an alleged ‘incel’

How isolation is changing our use of substances

An employment lawyer explains what we need to know as workplaces open

Alone and threatened on a boat far out to sea…

What we do (and don’t) know about COVID-19 and kids

“Is this year really possible?” A COVID-19 vaccine explained

A very Canadian solution to a problem we’ll hopefully never face

Will a Universal Basic Income finally get a real shot?

Oh great…now Murder Hornets?

Aid programs, partisan politics and the path forward: A dispatch from Ottawa

A supply chain explainer, or why you can or can’t find flour

Inside the strange world of designing psychoactive drugs

Will we have to trade privacy for freedom to get ‘back to normal’?

Everything but ‘Why?’: What we know now about the Nova Scotia shooting

Learning, innovating and grieving: Inside a Canadian ICU

What does COVID-19 mean for cottage season and rural communities?

How did BC successfully flatten the curve? And will it stay that way?

How long can we all follow strict social distancing orders?

A distraction for every type: What to watch during lockdown

What does the future of sports look like?

What COVID-19 can teach us about being wrong

What we know and don’t know about the Nova Scotia shooting

How COVID-19 could change our cities forever. Or not.

How to eat well (enough) during quarantine

COVID-19 and domestic violence: A meeting of two pandemics

How a health reporter does her job when every story is urgent

A Canadian experiment looks for a ‘Hail Mary’ COVID-19 treatment

A guide to COVID-19 scams and how to protect yourself

How many restaurants will survive this Spring?

How a Nfld. funeral home became the centre of Canada’s biggest COVID-19 outbreak

COVID-19’s great mask debate

How COVID-19 is changing B.C.’s approach to the opioid crisis

What it’s like to have COVID-19 (but not get tested)

A stealth virus, the missing infected and playing the long game: Inside the COVID-19 numbers

Montreal faces a rental crisis in a pandemic

How to stay positive in self-isolation

Hospitals plan for the worst, as a community steps up

Canada’s COVID-19 aid package and you

Going back to school on a virtual campus

Is a climate wakeup the silver lining on a horrible situation?

How to talk to people who won't self-isolate...

Some Canadians have made it home. Others haven’t.

A report from the front lines of Canadian hospitals

We want to hear from you!

Who’s most at risk from CoVid-19? What do they need?

Debunking CoVid-19 myths and hoaxes

From a cruise ship to quarantine and then to ... ?

Other shows like The Big Story: