Front Burner

CBC•www.cbc.ca

Front Burner is a daily news podcast that takes you deep into the stories shaping Canada and the world. Each morning, from Monday to Friday, host Jayme Poisson talks with the smartest people covering the biggest stories to help you understand what’s going on. We’re Canada’s number one news podcast and a trusted source of Canadian news.

We cover Canadian news and Canadian politics, Pierre Poilievre, Mark Carney, the Donald Trump administration, the upcoming 2025 Canadian election, provincial politics from Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and politicians Danielle Smith, David Eby and Doug Ford. We cover Toronto, Vancouver, and Calgary as well as other municipalities across Canada.

In this Canadian election year, Front Burner will be focusing more on Canadian politics. We will take a close look at Mark Carney’s first few weeks as Prime Minister-Designate, the Conservatives and Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre as well as other leaders like Jagmeet Singh from the NDP and Quebec’s Yves-François Blanchet from the Bloc Québécois during the 2025 Canadian federal election. The podcast goes beyond Ottawa and digs deeper into major election issues like U.S.-Canada relations, jobs, the economy, immigration, cost of living, housing and rental costs, taxes and tariffs, democracy and technology.

The Front Burner daily podcast covers Canadian news from every province and territory: Alberta, British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Quebec, Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Nunavut, Northwest Territories and Yukon. We cover news from major cities like Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary and Edmonton.

When U.S. President Donald Trump declares he wants to make Canada the 51st state, and decides to implement tariffs, Front Burner has an analysis into what is happening. We cover Elon Musk’s DOGE. We cover the latest in technology from the rise of bitcoin and crypto, the future of TikTok, Meta, artificial intelligence, influencers, and more.

Look to our archives to see fact-checked stories about infrastructure, fascism, border security, immigration, Pierre Poilievre, Justin Trudeau, the Republican Party, American politics, Canadian politics, India, China, Trump’s tariffs, Mark Carney, Elon Musk, Toronto, technology, artificial intelligence, international students, healthcare, and inflation. We cover global news like the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, the ceasefire, the Ukraine-Russia war, and the U.S. economy and U.S. politics.

Front Burner is a part of your morning news routine. Whether you’re in Toronto or Vancouver or Washington, this is the news that matters to Canadians. We take a look at the economy and break it down from the budget to interest rate hikes to inflation to recessions to jobs to the cost of living. We look at the policy around housing, Canadian housing supply, and what this means for first-time home buyers, renters, and those with a mortgage. We look at technology, from AI to the manosphere to social media like Meta, Twitter, Facebook, and more. We look at influential newsmakers like Elon Musk and influential technology industries like crypto and AI.

Follow on

Episodes

Has NATO outlived its purpose?

As the NATO summit wraps up in Washington, D.C., this week, Canada has finally committed to spending two per cent of its GDP on defense, as required by the treaty. But NATO is an alliance forged in a post-WWII world at the dawn of the Cold War. Is it still relevant in a modern, post-Soviet world? Or has Russia's increased aggression in recent years given the alliance a renewed purpose? Andrea Charron, director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at the University of Manitoba, explains...

Jul 12, 2024•26 min

Preparing for ‘war’: the Alberta blockade trial so far

In 2022, a convoy of truckers angry with COVID-19 measures staged an 18-day blockade, shutting down a busy border crossing with the U.S. in Coutts, Alberta. It ended with the RCMP arresting 13 protesters and finding a stockpile of guns, ammunition and pipe bombs. Now, two men are standing trial for possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose and conspiracy to commit murder in connection with their involvement with the blockade. The prosecution says the two men believed they were preparing for...

Jul 11, 2024•21 min

Grappling with Alice Munro’s dark family secret

The late Canadian author Alice Munro remains one of the best-known fiction writers in the English language. She won a Nobel prize for her work, and was celebrated for her intimate portrayals of the lives of women and girls.  But for decades, Munro hid a dark secret: her husband had sexually abused her youngest daughter when she was a child, and Munro stuck by him — even after her daughter stopped speaking to her, and even after her husband was convicted of sexual assault. Now, Munro’s daugh...

Jul 10, 2024•26 min

Canada vs. Messi, Argentina

The Canadian men's soccer team is set to take on Lionel Messi and Argentina, the current holders of the World Cup and No.1 ranked team in the world, in the semi finals of the Copa America soccer tournament.  The game is arguably the biggest match in Canadian soccer history. James Sharman is a longtime soccer journalist and host of The Footy Prime Podcast. He'll share how this marks the culmination of a years-long project which has taken the Canadian program from relative obscurity to legiti...

Jul 09, 2024•23 min

Where does Joe Biden go from here?

On Friday, in an exclusive interview with ABC news anchor George Stephanopoulos, U.S. president Joe Biden insisted that only the “Lord Almighty” could get him to quit. But as calls for him to step down grow following a disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump, how long can he hold on — and what might it do to the Democratic party? CBC Washington correspondent Paul Hunter joins us to talk about what’s next for Biden, and if there is any way for his party to stanch the bleeding. For tran...

Jul 08, 2024•27 min

President as ‘king’, and other giant Supreme Court cases

The U.S. Supreme Court’s latest ruling grants presidents the ability to break the law without fear of criminal prosecution as long as it counts as an “official” act. It’s the latest in a string of wide-ranging decisions, from abortion to corporate deregulation, that critics say are reshaping America. We take a look at some of those cases with University of Michigan law professor and co-host of Crooked Media’s Strict Scrutiny, Leah Litman, and break down what motivates this majority conservative ...

Jul 05, 2024•28 min

Why is France’s far right surging toward power?

After his centrist coalition suffered a humiliating loss to the far right in European elections early last month, French President Emanuelle Macron called snap elections for France’s own Parliament in hopes of pushing back. Instead, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally continued their momentum and won the first round of voting last Sunday. So will Macron’s election gamble backfire? Why are the far right surging? And what would it mean for Europe and the world if they took power in the final round of v...

Jul 04, 2024•22 min

A massive collapse and the troubling history of Yukon mining

A landslide caused by a heap leach failure at the Eagle mine site in the Yukon has been called a “disaster” by some local residents. Hundreds of workers are currently laid-off and there’s a chance that it has leaked cyanide and/or other heavy metals into the river, endangering the nearby environment and wildlife. Meanwhile, Victoria Gold, the company that owns and operates the mine, is facing charges and their stock has tanked, raising concerns the mine could close for good. Cali McTavish and Ju...

Jul 03, 2024•25 min

Years after burning down, why hasn’t Lytton rebuilt?

A little over three years ago, a roaring, rapidly spreading wildfire burned through Lytton, a B.C. town of around 200 residents. It essentially burned to the ground. And even though at least $239 million dollars have been promised or poured into the recovery – rebuilding has been slow, and people are frustrated. CBC Vancouver reporter Yvette Brend just returned from Lytton. She tells us about the town’s delayed recovery, and how it might be a cautionary tale of climate disaster recovery. For tra...

Jul 02, 2024•23 min

Front Burner Introduces: The Six Billion Dollar Gold Scam

It was the biggest gold discovery in history...until it wasn’t. In 1995, Canadian mining company Bre-X announced to the world it had found a significant amount of gold deep in the jungles of Indonesia. Stock prices soared as investors worldwide fought to stake their claim. But when Bre-X’s chief geologist mysteriously fell from a helicopter over the jungle, the story of the billion dollar discovery began to unravel. Nearly three decades later, no one has ever been held accountable. In the new po...

Jul 01, 2024•41 min

Stumbles, mumbles, smears: a U.S. presidential debate recap

It was déjà vu all over again in Atlanta, Ga., on Thursday night as Donald Trump and Joe Biden squared off in the first presidential debate of the 2024 campaign. Biden will be looking to secure a second term in November, while Trump will be looking to take the office back for a second term of his own. And indeed, much of the debate focused on rehashing both men's records in office — to varying degrees of veracity and coherence. The CBC's Washington correspondent Katie Simpson breaks down both ca...

Jun 28, 2024•27 min

What Charlottetown’s immigration boom can teach Canada

When Alex Cyr was growing up on Prince Edward Island in the early aughts, the capital Charlottetown was a pretty quaint and homogeneous place. But in 2024, the city looks very different. In the last few years, the provincial government has made it easier for immigrants to flock there – and they have, more than any other city in the country. The city is younger and more diverse, and it’s solved a lot of the problems caused by its aging workforce. But housing prices have gone up, and the healthcar...

Jun 27, 2024•27 min

A Liberal stronghold falls. Is Trudeau next?

The last time a Conservative won a federal vote in the riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s, it was 1988. The Soviet Union was still together. Brian Mulroney was Prime Minister. The territory of Nunavut wouldn’t be created for more than a decade. But on Monday, in a by-election in the riding, the Conservatives took the Liberal stronghold riding back for the first time in over thirty years.  Does this spell electoral doom for the Liberals? Where does the party go from here? And despite his insistenc...

Jun 26, 2024•24 min

Why did Canada list Iran’s Revolutionary Guards as terrorists?

Canada announced last week that it has added Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to its list of terrorist organizations under the criminal code. It now joins the United States as the only Western countries to do so.  Unlike most groups on Canada’s terror list, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is an official arm of the Iranian government. The designation is something some Iranian Canadians and Conservative MPs have been calling for many years. So who are the IRGC? And, why now? Kav...

Jun 25, 2024•25 min

The Oilers’ historic Stanley Cup final comeback

After going down three games to zero against the Florida Panthers in the Stanley Cup final, the Edmonton Oilers won the next three games in a row to tie the series. It’s a feat that’s only been accomplished twice, and both times were in the 1940s. Can the Oilers complete one of the greatest comebacks in pro sports in game seven tonight? After a long cup drought for both Edmonton and Canada, what would the win mean for the city and the country? And what would a ring for Connor McDavid’s status am...

Jun 24, 2024•25 min

Are Canadian cities crumbling?

Calgarians are still rationing water more than two weeks after a catastrophic pipe break — and the city says they’ve got at least two more weeks to go before it’s fixed. There’s still much we don’t know about why this pipe broke down, but what experts do know is that other Canadian cities should be gearing up for similar crises. Huge amounts of their infrastructure — from roads to subway cars to schools and community centres — hasn’t been properly maintained for decades, and it’s nearing the end...

Jun 21, 2024•23 min

The ‘pronatalists’ trying to engineer a baby boom

Simone and Malcolm Collins are pronatalists: they believe many countries are headed toward a catastrophe of shrinking population, and that we need to have more babies to save them. Other supporters of the movement include Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. By choosing embryos with the genetic traits they want, are they practicing eugenics? Is their push to boost babies in rich countries really different from racist conspiracy theories about immigrants? Jenny Kleeman is a journalist and broadca...

Jun 20, 2024•27 min

Why you can’t buy a cheap Chinese electric car

 If price is one of your top reasons for why you haven’t bought an electric car, China is looking to solve that problem. Chinese consumers can buy high quality electric cars for as little as $10 -thousand USD and Chinese carmakers are looking to expand their reach globally. But American and European governments are hoping to put a stop to it with high tariffs to give local manufacturers a fighting chance. But is it too late? Steve LeVine, the author of The Powerhouse: America, China and The...

Jun 19, 2024•22 min

War grinds on in Ukraine. Is peace possible?

On the weekend, more than 90 countries held a conference in Switzerland billed as a “peace summit” for Ukraine. But Russia was not in attendance. The summit failed to reach a consensus on a final statement. And the way forward on a peace process remains totally unclear, with Russia and Ukraine drawing intersecting red lines on territory and security. So after over two years of war, what do Ukrainians feel like the path is to ending it? How are they coping with mounting losses and strains on reso...

Jun 18, 2024•26 min

What's behind massive anti-Netanyahu protests in Israel?

Over the weekend, tens of thousands marched in the streets of Tel Aviv to protest against the Israeli government. This particular protest was calling for early elections and a hostage deal now. Demonstrations similar to the one over the weekend have been a regular occurrence across Israel for months now. Today on Front Burner, Amir Tibon on how representative these protests are of broader Israeli sentiment, and what that says about Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s grip on power. He’s the dipl...

Jun 17, 2024•26 min

The “brain school” that experimented on Indigenous children

In 2014, a U.S. brainwave scientist claimed he could increase people’s creativity and cure their traumas. And he got permission to experiment on Indigenous children in Canada, offering an all-expenses-paid trip to Victoria, B.C. But a decade later, some study participants say the testing they went through — which included staff attaching electrodes to their heads and being asked to talk about the most traumatic moments of their lives — wasn’t what they signed up for and may have left side-effect...

Jun 14, 2024•29 min

Céline Dion’s struggle with stiff-person syndrome

Everyone knows who Céline Dion is. You can’t forget her incredible power ballads, her iconic outfits at the Met Gala or her quirky conversations with journalists and fellow singers alike. But what fans didn’t know for years was Céline was suffering from stiff-person syndrome. It was causing her body to tense up and spasm, making it hard to use her famous vocal chords. She went public with the diagnosis a year and a half ago, and then stepped away from showbiz and the public eye. Now, she’s openi...

Jun 13, 2024•25 min

Two Jewish parents on recent school attacks

Over the past few months attacks that hit Jewish schools, community centres and synagogues have shaken Canada’s Jewish community. For some Jewish-Canadian parents, there is now a question of whether it’s safe to send their children to Jewish schools. “Right now, it's a bit fraught to be very Jewish out in the broader world,” says Kim Werker, a Jewish-Canadian mother with a 13-year-old son.  We speak to Werker and another Jewish-Canadian mother about these concerns, how they’ve been coping a...

Jun 12, 2024•27 min

Grift, Disinfo, Fraud? What happened at The Epoch Times?

We dive into the wild story behind The Epoch Times, a fringe conservative newspaper turned right-wing propaganda machine with ties to a mysterious dissident Chinese meditation movement.  What are its aims? How did it become one of the biggest pro-Trump ad spenders and a destination for the likes of Candace Owens and Conrad Black? And what will happen now that its CFO is charged in a $67-million money laundering scandal. NBC disinfo reporter Brandy Zadrozny explains. Help us make Front Burne...

Jun 11, 2024•26 min

Are there ‘traitors’ in Canada’s parliament?

A new report accuses parliamentarians of aiding foreign governments to interfere in Canadian politics, which some national security experts say would amount to ‘traitors’ at the heart of our democracy.   Will we ever get the names of the MPs in question? How has it already created a chill between parliamentarians and their colleagues? And if the primary goal of interference is to destabilize Canada, is this report just another success for foreign actors? CBC’s chief political correspon...

Jun 10, 2024•26 min

Life's tough. Will the interest rate cut help?

An interest rate cut of a quarter of a percent might not sound like much. But as the first cut in four years following the COVID-19 pandemic and all the economic upheaval that followed, it's a big deal. And it could be the first of several in the months ahead. But what does that mean for you? How does that affect your ability to afford things like a mortgage, a car, groceries, or growing your business? And after a rocky couple of years, do people even have faith in the Bank of Canada's ability t...

Jun 07, 2024•27 min

The battle over Vancouver’s legal tent camp

Tent encampments have been around in Canada for a long time. But since the pandemic, the number of camps have grown drastically as Canadians struggle with soaring housing prices and homeless shelters often operating at full capacity. Meanwhile, cities have gotten more aggressive in removing these camps — claiming they’re lawless, unhealthy environments. So how did the city of Vancouver end up with a fully legal tent community in CRAB Park?  Sarah Berman, an investigative journalist based in...

Jun 06, 2024•24 min

Will the Liberals dump Trudeau?

It’s no secret the Liberal Party is Canada is unpopular. Poll after poll shows the Liberals between 15 to 20 points behind the Conservatives, led by a surging Pierre Poilievre. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau isn’t faring any better, hitting record low approval ratings after nearly ten years in power. Is it time to replace him? And if so, who can take over the sinking ship? David Herle, a partner at Rubicon Strategy and chief campaign strategist for the Liberals under Paul Martin, joins us to answ...

Jun 05, 2024•27 min

George Floyd’s legacy of racial progress — and backlash

Four years ago, George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His death sparked a massive movement in the U.S. and around the world as protestors passionately rallied against police violence and systemic racism. Not only that, but companies and politicians promised to enact change. But since that reckoning, has progress really been made? Or is there now a cultural backlash that’s cutting down progress? Washington Post journalist Tolu Olurunnipa, who wrote a Pulitzer Priz...

Jun 04, 2024•28 min

Is Doug Ford’s $225M booze plan worth it?

Ontario Premier Doug Ford has announced the province will pay at least $225 million to get beer and wine into corner stores over a year ahead of schedule. But why does the province need to pay at all, and why has Ford spent so much time and energy on this issue over his six years in power? Our Ontario provincial affairs reporter Mike Crawley joins us to explain the massive payment, Ford’s political history with alcohol sales and how the new announcement may tie into rumours that an early electio...

Jun 03, 2024•22 min

← Prev Next →