From two heartbreaking hockey losses to the fiery debate over whether the men’s gold medal curling team was cheating, Milano Cortina 2026 was a dramatic one for Team Canada. The games also brought some headscratching moments like a Norwegian biathlete confessing to infidelity minutes after a race and an investigation into Olympic ski-jumping dubbed ‘penis-gate’. We break down the storylines from the Winter Olympics that dominated our timelines and got us talking with senior contributor at CBC Sp...
Feb 23, 2026•25 min
On Thursday, former Prince Andrew was arrested by U.K. police. After years of controversy, scandal and allegations of sexual assault, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was taken into custody on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The arrest is related to his decades-long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, and the former prince is alleged to have sent confidential government documents to the convicted sex offender. Today, Andrew Lownie, a historian and the author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of th...
Feb 20, 2026•23 min
Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberals welcomed a third Conservative floor crosser on Wednesday – Edmonton MP Matt Jeneroux. And with three by-elections coming up, two from Liberal strongholds, a Liberal majority is looking like a possibility. So a pretty seismic day on Parliament Hill. CBC’s senior writer Aaron Wherry is here to talk through how this could all play out for the Liberals and for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www...
Feb 19, 2026•28 min
Looksmaxxers are a community of young men dedicated to the pursuit of maximizing their physical appearance, often at great personal cost. Many are spending thousands of dollars on cosmetic procedures, or even taking blunt objects to their faces, in the hopes of masculinizing their features to become more handsome. Or, as they refer to it: “ascending.” In a world where so many young people — particularly young men — feel as though it’s impossible to get ahead, we’ve got a conversation about this ...
Feb 18, 2026•37 min
Last week, a 5000 word post on X with the headline “Something big is happening” went viral. It was written by Matt Shumer, the CEO of HyperWrite, an AI writing tool and in it he says he’s recently watched AI go from a helpful tool to something that “does my job better than I do”. And he’s not the only one. The CEO of Anthropic, one of the biggest AI companies today, wrote an essay saying it could replace half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next one to five years. What’s behind the s...
Feb 17, 2026•22 min
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 to explore the human experience in all its complexity, one story — or season — at a time. In the latest season of Personally: Creation Myth, Helena does not want kids. Her husband believes she’ll change her mind—she has so much love to give, she would be a perfect mother. That will never happen, she tells him. Again. And again. Until ...
Feb 16, 2026•41 min
Cuba has been facing rolling blackouts, food shortages, and rationed hospital resources after a month with no oil imports. The energy crisis has also been a major blow to the country’s tourism industry, as major airlines suspended service to the country. The cutoff came after the United States severed the island’s access to Venezuelan oil in January, and then warned any country supplying Cuba it could face retaliation. The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson has been reporting on the region for decade...
Feb 13, 2026•27 min
A horrific mass shooting took place in the small community of Tumbler Ridge, B.C. on Tuesday – one of the deadliest in Canadian history. Nine people are dead, including the suspect, and 27 more were injured. Many of the victims were as young as 12 or 13 years old. CBC senior reporter Caroline Barghout is in Tumbler Ridge covering the ongoing investigation. She joins host Jayme Poisson with the latest on the tragedy, and how a community – and country – is in mourning. For transcripts of Front Bur...
Feb 12, 2026•22 min
Jonathan Haidt, best-selling author of “The Anxious Generation”, is our guest today. He’s been on a global mission to educate parents, the media, and government officials about the harms that social media companies inflict on children. He believes that the world ran a huge uncontrolled experiment on kids in the 2010s by giving them smartphones and social media accounts. And now, there is clear evidence – often through court case disclosure – that the experiment has harmed children, and that it’s...
Feb 11, 2026•34 min
The final remaining agreement constraining U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons expired last week. The New START treaty was established by President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in 2010. And since then the treaty has governed much of the global landscape concerning nuclear weapons and non-proliferation. Reporting suggests both sides remain in talks. Yet as the U.S. threatens annexation, attacks nations abroad, and threatens to re-emerge as a colonial power in the Western ...
Feb 10, 2026•30 min
Last week, Donald Trump’s border Czar Tom Homan announced a drawdown of ICE personnel in Minnesota, following weeks of chaos and two deadly incidents in the state. Homan insisted that ICE was not surrendering, and this departure was instead evidence of ICE’s success in Minnesota. Beginning in December 2025, ICE announced ‘Operation Metro Surge’ — an aggressive immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota described as “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.” The operati...
Feb 09, 2026•30 min
Today on the show we are going to discuss the complete gutting of the Washington Post, an American institution. The paper that broke Watergate. The paper that just nine years ago told the world “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. And we’re going to place this latest news in the context of a much broader political assault on journalism, and the further consolidation of information in the hands of the billionaire class of Trump allies. Our guest today is Max Tani. He is the media editor and co-host of t...
Feb 06, 2026•32 min
Last week the U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent issued a very public warning to Prime Minister Mark Carney. At the centre of that warning is the USMCA trade deal, which kept Trump’s tariffs from unleashing even deeper damage to the Canadian economy. A mandatory review of the US-Mexico-Canada pact is kicking-off now. It has turned into a high stakes negotiation, with the U.S. poised to squeeze Canada and Mexico and to use the negotiation itself as leverage to advance the administration’s inte...
Feb 05, 2026•31 min
Jeffrey Epstein’s vast connections with the rich and powerful, the world over, are on full display in the over 3 million files and documents released by the U.S. Justice department late last week. There’s mounting evidence of Epstein’s relationships with people like President Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and tech titan Peter Thiel, as well as behind the scenes dealmaking with global power brokers. Today, we go over the biggest revelations...
Feb 04, 2026•31 min
Around 73 thousand people have been detained in ICE facilities across the United States over the past year. That’s a 75 per cent increase from right before Donald Trump took office. At least 38 people have died in ICE custody since then. It’s all part of the Trump administration’s rapidly expanding immigration crackdown, which has included the addition of over one hundred new facilities. One of those facilities, in south Florida, has been dubbed Alligator Alcatraz. In December Amnesty Internatio...
Feb 03, 2026•29 min
Pierre Poilievre easily won his leadership review in Calgary on the weekend with 87.4% of the vote. Today, senior Parliamentary bureau writer Aaron Wherry talks about the convention, whether it guarantees Poilievre’s future and what challenges still lie ahead for the Conservative leader. Plus, why a press conference at a grocery store prompted election speculation. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts...
Feb 02, 2026•30 min
In just over a decade, the Conservative Party of Canada has lost four elections, picked three new leaders, and turned on two of them when they failed to become Prime Minister. As the party votes on Pierre Poilievre’s future as leader of the Conservative Party, Front Burner speaks to Conservative insiders, Abacus Data CEO David Coletto and senior parliamentary writer Aaron Wherry to consider the path the Conservatives took to this point and whether Poilievre can keep the party united behind him....
Jan 30, 2026•37 min
Over the last few weeks, the Trump administration has explicitly or implicitly borrowed from the Nazi tradition on social media. Specific passages or iconography from the Third Reich have been repurposed in the context of the government’s own legislative program today. The adoption of these extreme symbols, dog whistles and phrases is part of a re-mainstreaming of fascist and Nazi ideas more broadly. Ali Breland, a staff writer at The Atlantic, explains why he sees it as part of an attempt to re...
Jan 29, 2026•26 min
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has weighed in on the separatism movement in Alberta. Bessent has said that the province is a “natural partner” to the U.S., and that it has “great resources”. While Bessent is certainly the most high profile U.S. official to muse about Alberta separatism, he hasn’t been the only MAGA supporter to chime in. Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon and Republican congressman Andy Ogles have also waded into the debate. Today we’re asking why MAGA is...
Jan 28, 2026•30 min
Last week, U.S. President Donald Trump set off a firestorm with comments dismissing the military contributions of fellow NATO members during the war in Afghanistan. This follows the president’s aggressive bid for Greenland, a self-governing territory of NATO-ally Denmark, which brought into question whether NATO, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, could survive without America, its strongest and richest member. And while some kind of agreement on Greenland now seems to be on the table, and ...
Jan 27, 2026•30 min
Massive anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis intensified over the weekend, in the wake of the second fatal shooting of an American citizen involving federal law enforcement agents in the city this month. On Saturday, border patrol agents shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive care nurse. Today, we’ll be talking about Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, and how the deadly ICE surge in Minnesota is only the latest example of domestic policy that he ha...
Jan 26, 2026•37 min
Donald Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ says it has a plan for the future of Gaza. Critics say that strategy is full of holes, and that the true intention of the board extends far beyond the war ravaged territory. Today we look at how a U.S. 20-point plan for a post-war Gaza evolved into a body that some fear could undermine the United Nations and further erode international order. Jayme Poisson speaks with Hugh Lovatt, a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations based in London....
Jan 23, 2026•32 min
It was an eventful World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, with striking speeches by both the U.S. President and Canadian Prime Minister. For his part Donald Trump talked for more than an hour on an array of topics, including his desire to acquire Greenland. His speech came a day after Mark Carney made international headlines announcing the end of the old world order as he sees it, and the need for a new path forward for “middle powers.” In today’s episode Jayme Poisson sits down w...
Jan 22, 2026•32 min
In a provocative speech to the World Economic Forum on Tuesday, Prime Minister Mark Carney made the case that the rules of international economics and politics are “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition”. Carney went on to say that middle powers like Canada need to work together to find their own coalitions to survive and stand up to countries using economic coercion – a clear reference to the Trump administration. This comes after Trump’s stunning threats earlier this week to slap tariffs...
Jan 21, 2026•30 min
Prime Minister Mark Carney is at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland this week, as the situation with Greenland continues to escalate. Carney’s Davos trip is coming on the heels of a visit to China and Qatar where the Prime Minister made deals with both countries. Last year, he called China the biggest threat to Canada’s security, but now he talks about a “new world order” and says “we take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” Aaron Wherry, senior political correspondent, joi...
Jan 20, 2026•26 min
Anti-ICE protests continued throughout Minnesota over the weekend, as they have for nearly two weeks now. Since the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis, ICE agents have been getting in confrontations with the people they are targeting, and the citizens attempting to observe and document ICE’s actions. The city and state are on a razor’s edge — trying to observe and protest while not giving U.S. President Donald Trump an opportunity to escalate. Trump has threatened to use the Insurrection Act ...
Jan 19, 2026•29 min
A mass protest movement has gripped Iran and is shaking the foundations of that country’s ruling regime. Thousands of protesters have been detained and rights groups say more than 2,500 people are dead, including one Canadian citizen. With Iranian officials signalling plans for “quick” executions, U.S. President Donald Trump issued threats of his own, hinting at military intervention. Will the U.S. throw its military weight behind Iranian protests? Will Iran’s regime fall, or will it manage to w...
Jan 16, 2026•29 min
Potential American military intervention in Iran amid ongoing protests and violence. The shooting death of a 37-year-old mother in Minneapolis at the hands of an ICE agent. A criminal investigation into the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve. Astead Herndon is a podcast host and editorial coordinator with Vox. He breaks down another seismic week in American politics. Our colleagues in CBC's Washington bureau — Katie Simpson, Paul Hunter and Willy Lowry — have launched a brand new podcast, Two Blo...
Jan 15, 2026•31 min
Mark Carney arrives in Beijing today to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping. It’s the first time in nearly a decade for a Canadian Prime Minister to do so, and the stakes are high. Carney has to balance his handling of two problematic superpowers during these talks. On the one hand, he wants to double non-U.S. exports abroad in the next decade and China is the second largest market in the world. On the other, a closer relationship with China could set Canada on a collision course with a U.S. ...
Jan 14, 2026•27 min
The seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro by military force. Promises to "take back" the Panama Canal. Massive tariffs on Brazil. Threats to take action against cartels in Mexico. Donald Trump's foreign policy in Latin America in recent months has been chaotic, even contradictory at times. But it all seems to be part of what Trump has referred to as the "Donroe Doctrine": a reinvention of the Monroe Doctrine that saw America looking to exert hegemonic dominance across the entire western...
Jan 13, 2026•33 min
