As it comes down to the final five, Andrew Al-Khouri and Andy Hay are still competing in CTV's Masterchef Canada Season 7 - Back to Win. They discuss Sunday night's episode and the friendship and rivalry they've cooked up as the two Nova Scotia contestants attempt to win the title and 100-thousand dollar prize. (NOTE: Some potential Episode 9 spoilers ahead)

Dalhousie University is receiving more than 1-million dollars to fund a three-year project led by Professor Afua Cooper. She describes her 30 year effort to bring Black studies to Canadian Universities an upward battle. We discuss that and the Nova Scotia Government's bill to recognize August 1st as Emancipation Day.

How likely are you to get your vaccine when it's offered? If you are like most Maritimers, you're probably anxiously waiting for it. We discuss the survey results from Narrative Research on how likely people are to take any and all vaccines including AstraZeneca.

This week, the Red Cross in Atlantic Canada announced they had distributed or committed all 6.2 million dollars collected through the Stronger Together Nova Scotia Fund. That was the campaign launched after the horrific murders across the province in April of 2020. Bill Lawler is the Atlantic Director for the Red Cross and he describes the compassion and contributions that came through the fund.

A student from the Annapolis Valley was recently suspended for sharing a picture of a t-shirt promoting rape culture. Even though that has since been reversed, it raises the issues around the way women and girls are treated when they bring issues like this forward. Martha Paynter recently wrote about this, and she discusses what lessons we should take from it in this conversation.

Free mental health services are being offered to people who have been affected by the events in Portapique one year ago. Alec Stratford Executive Director of the Nova Scotia College of Social Workers and Serena Lewis, a social worker are both advocating for grief literacy. They join Sheldon for a conversation about the topic.

The Emergency Management and Health Protection Acts are the laws that gives government power to declare a state of emergency in a pandemic. And while we've been under that declaration for more than a year, Ontario has only enacted three States of Emergency during the pandemic. Lawyer, democracy advisor and former MLA Kevin Deveaux explains the differences, good and bad.

An independent report on the integrated policing model in Halifax Regional Municipality is now in the works after a motion from Councillor Tony Mancini. The District 6 representative says it's been 25 years since the model was implemented because of amalgamation. He also discusses the issues of police checks, the Portapique Massacre, Black Lives Matter and the "defund" movement.

Our lives have changed over the last year because of the pandemic with more of us working from home. And that has led to an increase in reports of people seeing coyotes in the Hammonds Plains area, the Walsh Court neighbourhood near St. Margaret's Bay Road and Chocolate Lake, and the Old Sambro Road. What does the national media director with the Nature Conservancy of Canada say about the balance between preserving nature and staying safe?

Anna Shoub makes world-famous handmade, bespoke hats in a room of her home in the seaside town of Lunenburg. She's concerned with the campaign encouraging entrepreneurs to move their home-based businesses to Nova Scotia. The challenge is what she describes as our 'whimsical property tax rules'. As she points out, they aren't applied equitably and that's created a culture of ask for forgiveness, and keep hidden from the people who enforce the rules.