This Matters

This week, This Matters is publishing episodes of the Toronto Star's new podcast Small Things Big Climate.

Plastic is a miracle substance that's revolutionized healthcare, keeping things sterile, and has replaced glass and metal packaging, reducing carbon emissions from shipping goods. It even keeps produce fresh for longer, reducing waste and the carbon emissions that come from rotting food.

But those positives have for too long overshadowed the negatives. Some plastic is toxic. It's building up in the ecosystem and in our bodies. Today, plastic can be found in virtually every aspect of our lives. Not only in shopping bags, pop bottles and straws, but in places you'd never expect, like furniture and construction materials, and clothes. Yes clothes. Join us for a shopping trip to learn how your pants are contributing to climate change.

Guests: Kelly Drennan, founder of Fashion Takes Action and Max Liboiron, a professor of geography at Memorial University of Newfoundland and director of the Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR).

This week, This Matters is publishing episodes of the Toronto Star's new podcast Small Things Big Climate.

The way we talk about climate change needs to, well, change. Everything is either invisible, like emissions, or incomprehensible, like megatonnes, or inconceivable, like reductions of national emissions 25 years in the future. The cause of climate change is simple: it's fire. To end global warming, we need to stop burning things. Guests: Tim Stezik of Toronto Fire Services, Lytton fire survivor and author Meghan Fandrich and Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of Fire Weather, John Valliant.

This week, This Matters is publishing episodes of the Toronto Star's new podcast Small Things Big Climate. The Star is often inundated with emails from readers asking what they can do to fight climate change. While there are lots of things people can do to lower their personal carbon emissions – and it's important to feel like you're part of the solution – individual action cannot end global warming on its own. So in this episode we take a look at community groups working on scaling up individual action to the neighbourhood level, and ask a former environmental activist turned Member of Provincial Parliament whether writing politicians actually makes a difference.

• Host: Marco Chown Oved, Climate Change Reporter, Toronto Star
• Guests: David Langille and Julia Morgan, co-chairs of the Pocket Change Project. Peter Tabuns, former head of Greenpeace Canada and the Ontario NDP's environment critic.

To hear more episodes, go to Small Things Big Climate or find it in your podcast feed.

Guest: Toronto Star reporter Mark Colley and contributor Aisling Murphy

In this episode, This Matters looks at the Tay-Tay-takeover of Toronto, in which the pop star's six concerts over 10 days have been estimated to bring in as many as a half a million tourists and pump hundreds of millions of dollars into the economy. Reporter Mark Colley provides some perspective on the phenomenon and all it has entailed, from massive security, transit and traffic planning, to the scene around the city. Aisling Murphy, the Star's resident Swiftie, was at the show on Thursday night, and provides a look at the vibes inside, and a perspective on what the performance was like. PLUS: How Taylor's Toronto "secret songs" in her first performance tied into the season.

Guest: The Toronto Star's Richard Warnica, reporting from Washington, DC

In this episode, This Matters returns from hiatus with a special episode on the U.S. Election. Knowing all that they know about Donald Trump — after the court convictions and the insurrection and the threats and open bigotry, and after a campaign in which he sometimes seemed increasingly undisciplined — Americans sent him back to the Oval Office. And they voted for him by higher margins than in 2016. The day after the election, the Star's Richard Warnica, who has been reporting on Trump since the 2016 campaign and who travelled the U.S. during this campaign, joins Edward Keenan who covered part of Trump's first term as the Star's Washington Bureau Chief. The two discuss the mood at Kamala Harris' election night party, what Warnica observed about Trump voters, and why Americans might expect a more effective form of authoritarianism from a second Trump term. PLUS: How the Democratic party may have been right about public opinion on abortion access and wrong about how it would affect the presidential results.

Guest: The Toronto Star's Richard Warnica, reporting from the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

Less than a week after a would-be assassin wounded former U.S. President Donald Trump, he accepted his party's nomination to run for president again on a stage in Wisconsin. In between, he selected a vice-presidential candidate, created a new political fashion trend for ear bandages, and watched as Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt off and invoked Trumpamania. The Republican Party, the Star's Richard Warnica reports from the convention floor, was absolutely giddy in their confidence going into the election as their Democratic opponents muddled through an attempt to get President Joe Biden to step down. If there was hope for Democrats, it might be they now expect a new candidate, and that the speech Trump ended the week with took most of the air out of the room, dragging on and on as a new message of unity quickly gave wave to the same old scaremongering, clothed in new shades of boredom.

Audio sources: Forbes Breaking News

Produced by Julia De Laurentiis Johnston and Paulo Marques

Guest: Alex Boyd, Toronto Star reporter

The investigations continue into what drove 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks to open fire last weekend, at former president Trump's campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, before being shot dead by a Secret Service sniper. But moments after the shooting, social media platforms were flooded with conspiracy theories with both right and left-wing voices amplifying mis and disinformation. From claims that the blood on Trump's ear was fake and from a theatrical prop to allegations of a staged operation by the Secret Service, the internet was rife with speculation. We unpack how this incident reveals the growing reach of conspiracy theories beyond traditional political lines, how they spread so quickly and social media's role in amplifying them.

Audio sources: TikTok/The Daily Show

This episode was produced by Saba Eitizaz and Matthew Hearn

What would you like to hear on Toronto Star podcasts? Let us know in this survey and you can enter to win a $100 gift card.

Guest: Allan Woods, Toronto Star global and national affairs reporter

On the weekend, a 20-year-old gunman opened fire at a Donald Trump campaign rally, apparently injuring the former president, killing a bystander, and injuring two others. Toronto Star reporter Allan Woods wrote this week about the history of political violence and assassinations in the U.S., and about what that history might teach about how to step back from the brink of civil war. He also discusses the political fallout and implications of the shooting, the ongoing Republican National Convention, and whether those in attendance are tempering or ratcheting up their rhetoric.

This episode was produced by Julia De Laurentiis Johnston and Paulo Marques

Bruce Arthur and Dave Feschuk take a final tour through Toronto's recent sports history. They touch on the bean-counting days of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan and Rogers to the more ambitious days of Bell and Rogers, with Larry Tanenbaum in between. They muse on the bad old days of the Leafs, Raptors and Jays to the current era of Brendan Shanahan, Masai Ujiri, and Mark Shapiro in Toronto sports. They consider the end of Alex Anthopoulos, the Raptors title (and the subsequent idea that Kawhi Leonard and Paul George could have come to Toronto), and the many failures, big and small, of the Toronto Maple Leafs. How could it have been different? How do you fix it now? Are the Jays doomed to corporate mediocrity, are the Raptors too far from their championship peak, and have the Leafs accumulated too much baggage to actually have a championship contending window? Arthur and Feschuk take you through the whole big ball of failure, and more.

Guest: Legendary sports broadcaster Dave Hodge, formerly of TSN and Hockey Night in Canada

Hosts: Bruce Arthur and Dave Feschuk

When Brendan Shanahan took over the helm of the Maple Leafs in 2014, he vowed not to repeat the sins of various predecessors accused of rushing the team-building process. Shanahan insisted he would exercise patience. But after eight post-season runs in which the Maple Leafs have only once advanced beyond the opening round, Shanahan's refusal to give up on the team's core stars is accompanied by the reek of stubborn incompetence. Here Arthur, Feschuk and Hodge try to make sense of Shanahan's approach while pointing out the glaring blind spots that have left the Maple Leafs a long way away from interrupting the longest Stanley Cup drought in the history of the NHL, 57 years and counting.

PLUS: Arthur, Feschuk and Hodge discuss the highs and lows of the Shanaplan era.

This episode was produced by Julia De Laurentiis Johnston and Sean Pattendon