When Ash Abraham was a little girl, something changed with her mother. "Ma" started behaving oddly. She'd drag a suitcase around with her everywhere. She stopped paying her bills. Started sleeping a lot and having volatile emotional reactions. As a teenager, Ash had to move out as Ma lost her job, her car, and her home, and ended up being supported by a relative. Now, Ash wants to find out what's really behind her mother's increasingly troubling behaviour, to see if she can help her... or at least understand her. PLUS, When Graham Isador was 21, his dad suffered a heart attack. But it wasn’t Graham’s dad who needed his help — it was his mom. In a moment of simple, kind clarity, Graham did the only thing he could think of to help her.

Understanding Ma

A weekly documentary show for people who love narrative podcasts. These are stories you can’t stop thinking about. That you’ll tell your friends about. And that will help you understand what’s going on in Canada, and why. Every week a journalist follows one story, meets the people at its centre, and makes it make sense. Sometimes it’s about people living out the headlines in real life. Sometimes it’s about someone you’ve never heard of, living through something you had no idea was happening. Either way, you’ll go somewhere, meet someone, get the context, and learn something new. (Plus it sounds really good. Mixed like a movie.) One story, well told, every week, from the award-winning team at the CBC Audio Doc Unit.

Society & Culture

Personal Journals

History

Philosophy

Places & Travel

At a union hall in Detroit’s industrial River Rouge neighborhood, workers have come together to vote for a new leader. The event feels festive, with a fire pit, a tent, and even 'walking tacos,' which are taco meat mixed into a bag of Doritos. But there are dark clouds on the horizon for the future of their industry. 
 Many of these workers are employed by the Great Lakes Steel Works, a massive steel mill that provides raw materials for the U.S. automotive industry. 
 These workers have a lot on their minds. The company that runs their plant, U.S. Steel, might merge with the Japanese steel company Nippon Steel. Then there’s the rise of EVs, which will potentially disrupt the U.S. automotive sector. Layoffs have already been happening. Four years ago, the steel mill shut its blast furnace, and more than a 1000 workers lost their jobs. 
 People are worried about their futures, and how they see that future might impact the U.S. election.. Michigan’s 15 electoral college votes are critical for Biden's path if he hopes to get re-elected. Michigan is a swing state, which Biden won in the last election, but Trump took the first time he ran. 
 To understand what’s on these Michigan workers' minds, Pete Mitton traveled to Detroit to better understand the dynamics of the upcoming election and the economic realities of the blue-collar workers there. 
 Reported by Pete Mitton. Story Editing by John Chipman. This documentary originally aired on The Sunday Magazine. 
 Storylines is part of the CBC Audio Doc Unit 

Detroit Takes the Wheel: The blue collar workers who may decide this year's election

In January, some New Hampshire voters thought they had gotten a robo call from Joe Biden, telling them to skip voting in the state primary.  
 The robocall voice at the other end of the phone wasn’t Biden at all. In fact it was a deepfake, created by a political consultant working for a longshot democratic challenger to Biden. The audio itself was made by a magician in Texas, using a simple website that created the deepfake using text-to- speech audio using AI.  
 The fake Biden robocall shows how easy it could become to use AI to disrupt an election but that isn't the whole story. 
 In this episode of Storylines, producer Craig Desson takes us around the world to see how election officials, politicians and academics are grappling with how AI might impact our elections as hundreds of millions go to the polls this year.  
 The situation is troubling, but there are also ways AI brings new possibilities to democracies around the world.  
 Reported and Produced by Craig Desson. Story Editing by Joan Webber. Originally aired on Sunday Magazine.  
 Storylines is part of the CBC Audio Doc Unit 

Artificial intelligence at the ballot box

Claire Hafner at 47, is among the top women boxers in the world. She’s just about ready for retirement but wants to win the Canadian title before hanging up her gloves.  
 However, a question hangs over the timing of when retirement will come.  
 Claire is also among a small group of women athletes who are participating in a landmark study on the effects of trauma in mostly combat sports.  
 Every year she gets tested for signs of head trauma to see if all those hits are leading to a long-term degenerative brain condition, known as CTE or chronic traumatic encephalopathy. 
 In this documentary we follow Claire to Las Vegas where she’s undergoing a new round of tests, and if they show a sign of decline, she’s going to retire before attempting to win that last Canadian title.  
 At the end of the show we’ll hear another documentary about boxing, but this one with a surprising twist. We’re going to drop you into a chess boxing match in London,UK. You can win by a KO or by checkmate. That documentary was reported by Laura Lynch back in 2011 for Dispatches. 
 Reported and produced by Katie Nicholson. Story Editing by Acey Rowe with help from Liz Hoath. 
 Storylines is part of the CBC Audio Doc Unit 

The Boxer’s Brain

CBC producer Naheed Mustafa, then a freelance writer and broadcaster, landed at the Kabul airport on a blistering hot summer day back in 2008. She’d come to report on how the country had been transformed by the U.S. led war.  
 By that point a lot had changed. In Kabul Afghans felt free to come and go as they pleased, women wore burkas but they also wore jeans, tunics and pretty headscarves. There had been an election too, but at the same time, a violent Taliban resurgence was underway. 
 Mustafa didn’t know it at the time, but that resurgence would continue until the Taliban recaptured the country.  
 It's been 10 years since Canada officially ended its mission in Afghanistan. Now, Mustafa is looking back at the documentaries she made, and listening to the voices of everyday Afghans living through a key moment in their country's history. 
 Reported by Naheed Mustafa. Produced by Julia Pagel. Original Dispatches doc produced by Donna Cressman.  
 Storylines is part of the CBC Audio Doc Unit  


Return to Afghanistan

When Julia Pagel was seven months pregnant, she and her husband faced all the usual new parent decisions: making a birth plan, deciding which stroller to buy and whether to use reusable or disposable diapers.  
 However, there was one choice that was extra tricky for the two of them. What would their child's last name be? Should they just go along with standard practice of giving the baby the father’s last name?  
 The tradition of giving the dad’s name to the child didn’t sit right with Julia, but her husband had come to Canada from Serbia as a 9-year-old, and his last name meant a lot to him. So Julia set out on a mission, to see how others had managed this last name quandary. 
 The documentary was reported by Julia Pagel and story editing by Karen Levine.

Understanding Ma

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