The Big Story

In case you've been under a rock, or are rich enough not to care, ordinary Canadians (and people around the world) are paying a lot more for basic stuff like groceries and gas. Why? Is this an effect of a two-year pandemic? A glimpse into the new reality of the climate era? Or a blip that will soon correct itself?

We don't know yet, and until we do it's going to impact our daily lives in several ways. It will hit our wallets, of course, but perhaps also our wages, and that might not be a bad thing. With everyone being forced to pay more for things, it's fair to ask what our government plans to do, or not do, about it. Can they be blamed for whatever comes next?

GUEST: Max Fawcett, National Observer columnist

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The package at the Calgary airport was ... moving. Inside were 11 baby turtles who never should have crossed the border. Who never should have left their New Jersey marsh. But they were victims of a global smuggling ring which deals in a very specific kind of turtle. This is the story of how those turtles got to the airport, and who sent them there.

GUEST: Dr. Clare Fieseler, journalist and Fellow at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. (Read Clare's investigation in The Walrus.)

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They've been around in one form or another for almost two decades. And the impact these apps have had on the restaurant business has been immense, and costly. But even as they take over every aspect of food delivery, these apps aren't turning a profit — so whatever their final form, they haven't found it yet.

The real value of these apps is in the data they collect from their users—and that leads to the next logical question: If tech companies know everything about what kind of food we like, when we like it and how much we're prepared to pay...what do they need local, independent restaurants for, anyway?

GUEST: Corey Mintz, food reporter, author of The Next Supper: The End of Restaurants as We Knew Them and What Comes After

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It's only been a few days since the world learned of a new variant of Covid-19. There is a ton of data we don't have yet. But when the world's leading epidemiologists look at what we do know, they see some worrying signs. How worried should we be? That still depends. What can we do to stop it? We already know that, and there is one thing we still haven't really done in Canada that could make a huge difference...

Have our public health officials tell Canadians clearly that Covid-19 is airborne, and adapt our public health guidelines right now to reflect that, even if it means admitting we've been wrong. Scientists have known this for 18 months. Our federal government reluctantly admitted it, just barely, a month ago. Why?

GUEST: David Fisman, epidemiologist, Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto

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Since the initial storm that caused severe flooding, mudslides, evacuations and forced the province to call in the armed forces, things haven't improved much in British Columbia. Yesterday, the third major storm in the past two weeks dumped a new round of heavy rain onto much of the province, raising fears that rivers already above their banks could overwhelm dikes. Meanwhile, gas is being rationed and highways are open for essential use only.

A state of emergency will last at least two more weeks, and nobody knows when life could hope to return to normal. Is the rest of Canada paying enough attention to what's happening on the West Coast right now?

GUEST: Monika Gul, morning reporter, CityNews1130 Vancouver

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For centuries Quebec saw few, if any, immigrants from France. Over the past several decades that trend began to change, and in the past few years, it's been accelerating rapidly. So why are French ex-pats settling in the province en masse? What do they find when they get there? And from housing, to the workforce, to the currently booming economy: how might this influx change Quebec?

GUEST: Eric Andrew Gee, Quebec correspondent, The Globe and Mail

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In 70 days, the Winter Olympics will open in China. Probably, everything will proceed as though it's a normal games. But maybe not. For the first time, many athletes have been speaking out against China for silencing—or even disappearing—tennis player Peng Shuai after she made an allegation of sexual assault against a prominent Chinese politician.

Meanwhile, the NHL is grappling with the fallout of a sex abuse scandal of its own. The NFL is confronting what appears to be years of racism and sexism from one of its most prominent coaches, and anti-vax rhetoric from its reigning MVP. Fans might still enjoy the spectacle, but it's clear the ugly underbelly of the games are increasingly on full display. The question is, will anyone do anything about it? Or does money still talk too loudly?

GUEST: Donnovan Bennett, Sportsnet

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A few years ago, the world was dotted with proposals for utopian Smart Cities, like Toronto's Sidewalk Labs. One by one, those ambitious dreams were scaled down or, in the case of Toronto, canceled altogether. But the technology behind them hasn't gone away—it's still being adopted in cities around the world. Only instead of being a part of a complex urban renewal project aimed at sustainability, it's mostly used for surveillance, by police and other organizations.

What happened to the dream of the smart city—and what are we willing to trade for a little more convenience?

GUEST: Anna Artyushina, research fellow in data governance; Ph.D. Candidate, Science and Technology Studies, York University

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In January of 2020 one of Canada's senior military men warned that domestic deployments in response to weather events were stretching the military too thin to properly prepare for exercises or deployments. Since then we've had a pandemic, a deadly heat wave, massive forest fires and a devastating flood. The  military has been called upon repeatedly and they've done all they can.

But it's becoming clear that these crises aren't slowing down. And we're running out of personnel and equipment to properly respond to them. Why is Canada's military so poorly funded and equipped? How did we end up in this situation? And are the compounding catastrophes of the climate era waking us up to the need for more resources?

GUEST: Matt Gurney, reporter and columnist (Read Matt's piece in The Line right here.)

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