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

Who are the fighters reigniting Syria’s civil war?

In a sudden offensive, Turkish-backed rebel forces in Syria have managed to take several villages and towns, including the second largest city in the country, Aleppo, all with minimal resistance from government forces.  Now as they continue to push further south, Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad is left with a diminished army and his main allies are embroiled in conflicts of their own.  Kareem Shaheen is the Middle East editor at New Lines Magazine. He spoke to host Jayme Poisson about...

Dec 04, 2024•25 min

The crisis facing Canada's colleges and universities

At the beginning of this year, immigration minister Marc Miller said the government was looking to rein in the number of international study permits it would be granting, in a bid to take pressure off the strained housing market. But that's been bad news for the post-secondary institutions for which a significant part of their operating budgets come from tuition fees from international students. Colleges in southern Ontario have been particularly hard hit, with many announcing cuts and consolida...

Dec 03, 2024•24 min

Canadian encrypted phones, a mass hack, and 10 thousand arrests

More than 10,000 arrests, a mountain of drugs stopped at the border, and more than a hundred assassination attempts thwarted. Those are just some of the results of a massive police data hacking operation in Europe to disrupt organized crime. And at the center of it all – Vancouver tech company Sky Global – that promised communication couldn’t be hacked by their encrypted phones. Frédéric Zalac, and Radio-Canada’s investigative program Enquête teamed up with journalists from a dozen European medi...

Dec 02, 2024•25 min

Weekend Listen: An attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds

People don’t think Graham Isador is losing his sight. They think he’s an asshole. Short Sighted is an attempt to explain what vision loss feels like by exploring how it sounds. Written and hosted by master storyteller Graham Isador, the show’s mini episodes are an intimate and irreverent look at accessibility and its personal impacts. Get lost in someone else’s life. From a mysterious childhood spent on the run, to a courageous escape from domestic violence, each season of Personally invites you...

Nov 30, 2024•17 min

Could the Menendez brothers soon be free?

In 1996, after two hung jury trials, brothers Lyle and Eric Menendez were convicted of killing their parents in one of the most high profile trials in American history. The brothers argued they had killed their parents following years of sexual, psychological and physical abuse at the hands of their father, but it was ultimately decided that they had killed their parents in a premeditated fashion, in pursuit of their parents' million dollar estate. They were sentenced to life in prison without t...

Nov 29, 2024•30 min

Will Trump's tariffs crush Canada?

It's time for Canada to pay "a very big price." That was the message from president-elect Donald Trump this week when he announced a 25 percent tariff on literally everything coming into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico. The tariffs will come into effect January 20th, Trump said, and stay in effect until "Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country! " This isn't the first time Trump has threatened to impose major tariffs or followed through on his threa...

Nov 28, 2024•20 min

The case against Google

The second of two major antitrust cases against Google wrapped up this week. Earlier this year, a judge found the company holds an illegal monopoly over the internet search market. Now the U.S. Department of Justice is arguing the same thing about its grip on online advertising. This is all part of a major push of antitrust litigation against tech companies by the U.S. government — Apple, Amazon and Meta are all facing similar cases. What's behind this push to crack down on these companies now? ...

Nov 27, 2024•25 min

Trump and the strongman feedback loop

Argentina’s chainsaw-wielding, “anarcho-capitalist” president, Javier Milei, and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, who has called himself the “world’s coolest dictator,” have often taken cues from Donald Trump. But now, could he be taking cues from them? Today we speak to Tracy Wilkinson, a longtime writer with the LA Times, and Natalie Alcoba, a journalist based in Argentina, about the “right-wing strongman feedback loop” happening between these three leaders — and what it could mean for the U.S. and...

Nov 26, 2024•25 min

Anti-vax update as Canadian measles surges

Routine childhood vaccinations have been on the decline in recent years, with the anti-vax movement rising during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the conversation has shifted. What was once affiliated with left-leaning counterculture has now become increasingly right-wing, with male health influencers leading much of the conversation.  How did the shift happen, and what implications could it have on public health?  Timothy Caulfield is a professor at the University of Alberta, with the Facu...

Nov 25, 2024•26 min

Weekend Listen: What happened to Christine Harron?

Christine Harron, a book-loving teenager from Hanover, Ontario, leaves for school in the spring of 1993 and is never seen again. A suspect emerges, confessing to her murder, but the case falls apart and Christine's family are left without answers. In Season 9 of the award winning podcast Someone Knows Something, David Ridgen, along with Christine's mother, reopen the investigation and come face to face with the man who said he killed Chrissy. Someone Knows Something is the investigative true cri...

Nov 23, 2024•36 min

Politics, Gaza and money collide at The Giller Prize

For the last year, Canada’s premier literary award The Giller Prize has been embroiled in a controversy that has split the Canadian literary community. Last years gala was interrupted by protestors who rushed the stage carrying placards emblazoned with ‘Scotiabank Funds Genocide.’  What they were referring to was the fact The Giller’s lead sponsor, Scotiabank, was a principal shareholder of one of Israel’s largest weapons manufacturers. They also objected to a pair of Giller sponsors invest...

Nov 22, 2024•29 min

Long-range missiles, nuclear fears in Ukraine

Earlier this week, after months of debate and hesitation, the U.S. decided to allow Ukraine to use American made ATACMS missiles on targets inside Russia. Escalations followed, such as Russia signing a new doctrine that lowered the threshold for nuclear attacks. As the tensions ratchet up, there’s still the question of what will happen once Donald Trump takes office.  To break down the gravity of this moment, we talk to David Sanger, longtime New York Times national security correspondent a...

Nov 21, 2024•25 min

Work sucks. Where are the unions?

Nearly a million Canadian workers have taken job action in recent years, with Canada Post employees being the latest to do so. That included work stoppages at airlines, railways and Canadian ports. You might assume, from the many headlines about strikes, that union power is growing in Canada. But in fact, over the last forty years, the number of workers who are members of a union has decreased by nearly 10 percent. At the same time, jobs across many sectors have gotten worse, from stagnating wag...

Nov 20, 2024•26 min

UN Palestinian rapporteur Francesca Albanese

Francesca Albanese, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories, recently returned from a week-long trip to Canada. She was given standing ovations at sold-out speaking events, yet also faced backlash from groups who called for the Canadian government to condemn her, and advocated for the UN to remove her from her position. Today, a wide-ranging conversation with Francesca Albanese. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/tra...

Nov 19, 2024•43 min

Trump’s day one: mass deportations?

In the past week, U.S. president-elect Donald Trump has announced many members of his upcoming cabinet, giving a window into his second term’s priorities. There’s little known about the wider implications of these appointments, but one area that Trump has emphasized as a “day one” priority is immigration. This was Trump’s single biggest talking point throughout his presidential campaign, and heading into a second term, it’s a clear policy priority. Nicole Narea is a senior reporter covering poli...

Nov 18, 2024•25 min

Weekend Listen: How bad results can upend lives

They needed certainty. They got chaos. For over a decade, countless people from at least five different countries put their trust in a company offering prenatal paternity tests. It promised clients “99.9% accuracy” — but then routinely, for over a decade, identified the wrong biological fathers. In the brand new season of Uncover: Bad Results, investigative journalists Jorge Barrera and Rachel Houlihan track down the people whose lives were torn apart by these bad results, the shattered families...

Nov 16, 2024•36 min

The Billion Dollar Influencer Economy

There are a reported 13 million full time influencers in the U.S. today. According to Goldman Sachs, the influencer economy is worth around $250-billion, a number expected to double by 2027.  Despite its quick rise, the influencer economy remains a nascent industry that, in many ways, has no meaningful oversight or standard and practices.  We're joined by Emily Hund, author of 'The Influencer Industry: the quest for authenticity on social media' to better understand one of ou...

Nov 15, 2024•29 min

Canada’s secret list of alleged Nazi war criminals

In the mid 1980s, the Canadian government tasked a commission to investigate whether a considerable number of alleged Nazi war criminals settled in Canada after the Second World War. The Commission of Inquiry on War Criminals was headed by retired Quebec judge Jules Deschênes. It looked into this issue, but for decades, many of the commission’s findings were not made public.That includes a list of 900 names of alleged Nazi war criminals who lived in Canada, and the files and documents about them...

Nov 14, 2024•26 min

Hasan Piker on how Trump seized online culture

For decades, conservatives worried about losing the fight for cultural relevancy.  During his campaign, Donald Trump aggressively courted Gen Z and young millennial men — appearing on podcasts, streams and alongside influencers, discussing everything from combat sports to cocaine use. A PR campaign which many have credited, in part, for his election victory.  Hasan Piker is a rare political streamer on the American left; on election day, his coverage garnered 7.5 million views overall....

Nov 13, 2024•42 min

Why can't Canada have fast trains?

In Canada, we've spent a lot of time and money studying the prospect of high-speed rail, as enjoyed by many other countries — transit infrastructure that has transformed countries like Japan and France. This week, the federal government is expected to announce plans for a high-speed rail line between Toronto and Quebec City, which could finally make that prospect a reality. But are Canadians — and their politicians — ready to spend the billions of dollars it would take? Does this particular line...

Nov 12, 2024•25 min

How Murray Sinclair changed Canada

Murray Sinclair — an Anishinaabe lawyer, judge, senator, and, most consequentially, the chair of the Truth and Reconciliation commission — died last week at the age of 73.  Sinclair helped bring to light the stories of thousands of Indigenous residential school survivors, and provided Canada with a roadmap towards reconciliation. Today we have a documentary featuring the voices of three people who knew Murray Sinclair well, about the personal lessons he taught them and how he transformed th...

Nov 11, 2024•29 min

What could Trump’s win mean for Canada?

The election of a new U.S. president reverberates around the world, but none of America's partners are as intertwined economically, politically and culturally as Canada.  With respect to trade, the future of NATO, immigration, and the culture wars, both Canada and the United States are inextricably linked.  Today, CBC Washington correspondent Alex Panetta and CBC senior business reporter Peter Armstrong on the longstanding political relationship between Ca...

Nov 08, 2024•30 min

How the Democrats lost to Trump again

As the dust settles and Donald Trump celebrates a remarkable victory, we examine what went wrong for the Democrats this time around. How did they fail to speak to working class voters of all backgrounds? Should President Biden have left the race sooner? And where does the party go from here? After a long night of covering the election, Alex Shephard, senior editor at The New Republic, joins us for a post mortem. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit:  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontb...

Nov 07, 2024•26 min

America embraces a second Trump presidency

For months, Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris rallied voters with a message: "We're not going back." But as the election was finally called in the early hours of Wednesday morning, it's now clear that America does in fact want to go back. Back to Donald Trump. Keith Boag, longtime CBC Washington correspondent, joins us to break down how this happened, and what a second Trump presidency could hold. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit:  https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontbu...

Nov 06, 2024•25 min

A viewer's guide to U.S. election night

It’s been an incredibly tight race between presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump ahead of today's U.S. election.  The winner is expected to be decided by razor-thin margins in seven battleground states: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. From understanding the path to victory, to the value of the blue wall states, to the final stretch of the campaigns, CBC Washington correspondent Paul Hunter guides us through what to consid...

Nov 05, 2024•21 min

What’s up with these political polls?

With the U.S. election just a day away and a Canadian one that could be called very soon, we’re all spending a lot of time talking about polls. But how exactly do they work and what happens when they get it wrong? Last week, Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe won another majority government for the Saskatchewan Party despite some polls beforehand showing the NDP in the lead. And famously, the polls highly underestimated Donald Trump’s voter base in both 2016 and 2020. So to better understand the ins...

Nov 04, 2024•24 min

Front Burner Presents: The Flamethrowers Ep. 6

Donald Trump takes the style, tactics, and issues straight from the right-wing radio playbook. The only question now is: Where does it go from here? This is episode 6 — the final episode — of The Flamethrowers, the story of how radio energized and then radicalized a conservative base. Hosted by Justin Ling. Listen to the full series here .

Nov 02, 2024•50 min

An undecided Palestinian Democrat in Michigan

In the Democratic presidential primaries in Michigan earlier this year, rather than voting for Joe Biden, more than 100,000 people marked “uncommitted” on their ballots. It was an anti-war protest, meant to send a message to Biden to make a permanent ceasefire happen in the war in Gaza — or risk losing those voters in November. That campaign spread nationally. And while Biden is no longer the Democratic candidate, the Uncommitted movement is still going — even though it has garnered significant ...

Nov 01, 2024•27 min

Why did Elon Musk go all in on Trump?

As recently as 2022, billionaire Elon Musk was saying that Donald Trump should "hang up his hat & sail into the sunset." But in recent months, Musk has become one of the most influential supporters of Trump's campaign to regain the presidency, from appearances at rallies to millions of his own dollars in funding. What prompted his change of heart? And how much might it have to do with the relationship his companies like Tesla, SpaceX and StarLink have with the U.S. government — both in terms...

Oct 31, 2024•22 min

The state of the U.S. presidential race

The 2024 U.S. presidential election is happening on Tuesday. With six days left, the New Republic's senior editor, Alex Shephard, is here to take the temperature of the race. What are presidential candidates Donald Trump and Kamala Harris pitching in this last week of the campaign? Where are they focusing their efforts? What issues and revelations could make a difference in these final days of a race most pollsters say is too close to call? For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit:  ht...

Oct 30, 2024•33 min

← Prev Next →