On June 24, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the case that legalized abortion in the country in 1973. The decision shocked many around the world, and has had folks wondering: could this happen here, at home, in Canada? And what led up to this historic moment in the U.S.? What are the real and current issues facing the state of abortion in Canada, and how can we make a difference? This two-part mini series is hosted by Sarah Sahagian, a feminist podcaster, writer, and non-prof...
Mar 09, 2023•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast This year marks the 35th anniversary of the Supreme Court of Canada’s Morgentaler Decision. That landmark decision decriminalized abortion across Canada and turned the courageous Dr. Henry Morgentaler into a household name. As pivotal a part of Canada’s abortion rights story as Dr. Morgentaler was, many of us are unfamiliar with the stories of woman-identified activists who fought alongside him to ensure people who didn’t want to be pregnant wouldn’t have to be. So, who were the women who fought...
Mar 08, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Last month a horrific earthquake in Turkey made it clear that outdated building codes—or non-compliance with updated codes—can turn a normal disaster into an historic one. And while Canada may not have the same earthquake risk or code non-compliance that Turkey has, we have our own problems. Simply, our building own codes are an outdated, confusing mess, and we're finding out regularly just how unequipped the current system is for the extreme weather that's coming. What makes sense about the sys...
Mar 07, 2023•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Some Canadians cannot see Canadian news on Google right now. It's because of what Google calls a 'test' that it only admitted when a reporter noticed it happening to them and asked the company. The government, meanwhile, calls it 'bullying' as it prepares to pass Bill C-18, which would force companies like Google to compensate Canadian media companies for serving up their content. If the bill passes, Google could theoretically block all Canadians from finding their news on Google. Will Google's ...
Mar 06, 2023•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast It costs more these days. But yeah, so does everything. What makes coffee a perfect product to explore the world's rising costs, though, is its ubiquity. You can get it absolutely anywhere in the world—but not only that, dozens upon dozens of countries grow, produce and export it, so no one factor in one nation or on one continent explains why your latte costs more. So how does the coffee industry work? Why and how is it changing? And what can that tell us about ... everything else? GUEST: Gavin...
Mar 03, 2023•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast It used to be a threat almost exclusively to the poultry industry. But the current strain of H5N1 avian flu has spent the past year infecting millions of wild birds, thousands of mammals, and even humans. To experts who track the disease, it's clear something is up. But we're not yet sure what comes from it. The virus could become more contagious in mammals, but less harmful. It could remain difficult to transmit widely outside of bird populations. It could, theoretically, go away gradually. But...
Mar 02, 2023•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast If the questions are "Who knew what, and when?", then Canadian voters aren't the answer. Not only have recent reports shed light on Chinese attempts to influence the 2019 and 2021 elections, but The Globe and Mail Tuesday reported that these attempts stretch back to 2014-2015, after Justin Trudeau became Liberal leader, but before his party rose to power. There are surely more revelations to come ... but why are Canadians finding out this way, through leaked bombshells in the press, instead of l...
Mar 01, 2023•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Thankfully, Canada's process for updating its federal electoral map is nothing like America's partisan nightmare. But that doesn't mean it won't have an impact on the results. Every decade, boundaries are moved, new seats are added, and somebody has to win them. The questions are what's changing, what's moving where, and who stands to benefit? GUEST: Éric Grenier, political and polling expert, founder of The Writ We love feedback at The Big Story, as well as suggestions for future episodes. You ...
Feb 28, 2023•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's such an innocuous term, intended to define a metropolis with neighbourhoods that are walkable and livable for citizens. It's been around for a long time as a theory, and it's one well worth discussing. Except you can't discuss it anymore, at least not rationally. First in the United Kingdom, and now in Edmonton, plans for pilot projects, or even just consideration of the "15-minute" model have been met with cries of a Global World Order seeking to control the people. It's ridiculous, but it...
Feb 27, 2023•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast They are majestic flying in a "v" overhead. A symbol of fall and spring. A true National treasure. And also, Canada geese can be...just total jerks. They flock to cities and universities, nesting and aggressively defending those nests, and leaving metric tons of goose poop just about everywhere. And you don't want to get on their bad side. This is the story of the many and varied efforts Canadian institutions have made to figure out how to live in peace with these creatures. If it's possible. GU...
Feb 24, 2023•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the time in between peak travel windows, the problems at Canada's major airports seem to have mostly vanished. But does that mean airlines and airport authorities have actually fixed the issues that had us ranked among the worst in the world last year? Not really. The massive numbers of cancelled or delayed flights, and the chaotic snapshots of hundreds of bags scattered about are primed for a comeback, because there's an underlying problem we haven't solved. And there are lessons even a year...
Feb 23, 2023•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Exactly what happened on February 3 in East Palestine, Ohio? What do we know about the toxic gasses that were vented from a derailed train? What kind of effect could they have on nearby residents, and could their impact reach as far as Canada? It's been a decade since Canada's Lac-Mégantic train disaster, and somehow the push for tighter regulations for trains carrying hazardous cargo weren't enough to prevent this catastrophe. It may be years until we know everything about the environmental and...
Feb 22, 2023•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Almost three years ago, George Floyd's murder and the ensuing protests, brought the idea of defunding the police into the mainstream, and made the concept palatable to many Canadians. And yet, with police budgets increasing in pretty much every city across Canada, it seems that momentum has yet to translate into tangible social change. So what happened to the defund movement? What are some common misconceptions about its actual aims? And although police unions and politicians seem to have won th...
Feb 21, 2023•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Meeting House was meant to be a new kind of church; one that would appeal to those who felt alienated by mainstream Christianity. The church’s charismatic leader, Bruxy Cavey, with his impassioned sermons, and sometimes controversial interpretations of scripture, drew parishioners to their Oakville, Ontario headquarters from across the Greater Toronto Area. At its peak, Meeting House membership numbered 5000, and the future looked bright for the so-called ‘megachurch’. Then, in 2021, allegat...
Feb 17, 2023•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast The situation in Haiti, especially in and around the capital Port-au-Prince, has deteriorated in recent months. In some areas gang violence and poverty is rampant, while food, water and fuel have become scarce. While many point to the assassination of former-president Jovenel Moïse as the catalyst for the current crisis, our guest today argues that the roots of the current tumult stretch back much further, and that past Canadian foreign policy decisions have contributed heavily. Now, there are c...
Feb 16, 2023•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast It started with a suspected Chinese spy balloon, shot down by the American military off the coast of South Carolina after being tracked floating over the continent for at least 4 days. Since then, three more as-yet-unidentified objects have been blown out of the sky, one near the coast of Alaska, one in the northern Yukon Territory, and one over Lake Huron. At this point we can say with some certainty that the origin of these objects is terrestrial, and that’s essentially it. It may take some ti...
Feb 15, 2023•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast John Tory for a long time seemed like your archetypal career politician; adept at avoiding scandal, and keeping his private life out of the public eye. And so the recent revelation that the thrice-elected mayor engaged in a romantic affair with a former employee — his subordinate at the time — was shocking to say the least. On top of tarnishing his public image, the scandal has thrown the Toronto political sphere into a state of disarray. Tory, with his newly acquired ‘Strong Mayor Powers’, had ...
Feb 14, 2023•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast Every day brings new headlines of entrance exams Chat GPT has passed, or university essays the AI tech has scored solid grades on. And the technology will only get better from here. One of the first places that will have to reckon will the AI revolution are colleges and universities, where essays and exams are traditional forms of evaluation. So what are they doing? Are they attempting to seek out AI essays, as they do for plagiarism? To ban the programs entirely? And are those options just futi...
Feb 13, 2023•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast In October of 1988, 23 year old Tatiana “Tania” Anikejew was found in her Toronto apartment by a friend and her parents days after she had been stabbed to death. Her killer has never been found. Tania's parents died before any arrest was ever made in this case, but three of her friends have never given up on finding out the truth behind her violent death. They share her story in this episode. Listen to more episodes of Tracking a Killer. We love feedback at The Big Story, as well as suggestions ...
Feb 11, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Traditionally, we think of a tip as an acknowledgement of a job well done, usually by someone who performs a service for us. It's become impolite not to tip, of course, but until recently the standards were still mostly understood. Then society began to go cashless... Over the past few years, tipping has crept into far more transactions than it had previously. Now businesses don't need to rely on tradition, they can simply add a tip prompt to their transaction machines, and presto! Tip creep. Th...
Feb 10, 2023•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast Keira Kagan should be an anonymous little girl—going to school, playing in the park, growing up. Instead, after three years of her mother fighting for answers and change and demanding better, she's a tragic example. Keira and her father—who should never have been able to pick her up for the weekend—went over a cliff together, three years ago. Every year, 30 children in Canada are killed by a parent. Many of those deaths are preventable, if the system works, and those charged with that do their j...
Feb 09, 2023•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast In April of 2021, the federal government announced their intention to give all Canadians access to $10-a-day childcare, amounting to roughly $30-billion of federal funds over three years. It's a huge deal, as any parent who has ever paid for daycare can tell you. For the program to actually work though, daycares need to be barrier-free and high quality. Here’s the catch: there’s a staffing shortage, workers are underpaid, and working in poor conditions. How can governments make childcare accessi...
Feb 08, 2023•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast A Canadian tank arrived in Poland on Monday, and will head off to bolster Ukrainian efforts agains a Russian invasion. The single tank, obviously, isn't critical on its own, but what it represents definitely is: It's a German tank, which Canada could not have offered without German agreement, which shouldn't be taken for granted. Nearly a year after the war started, holding NATO's supportive alliance together is paramount, and these tanks are a symbol that it remains. They are also critical beca...
Feb 07, 2023•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast What counts as "work" and what doesn't? If you're sitting there, doing nothing, thinking of how to accomplish your goals ... are you working? Well, if you're using a company laptop, the software watching your every move might not agree. And now there's a chance the courts will agree with them. Welcome to the still-very-new era of "time theft", where employee tracking can result in a case being made against workers who were using their work time for something else, at least in the eyes of their e...
Feb 06, 2023•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Much of humanity's search for extraterrestrial life has focused on, well, our kind of life—the conditions that make possible the biology we see on Earth. But what if the conditions that make life possible are far from what we imagine? What if we don't actually know what "life" is, even? Woah, dude... Seriously, though, in recent years scientists have been working to reframe our parameters in hopes that we'll find unlikely life, in unlikely places. What might that look like? The possibilities are...
Feb 03, 2023•18 min•Transcript available on Metacast Even if you don't live in the city, you've probably heard about the recent spate of violence on Toronto's transit system. There have been some really ugly, seemingly random incidents. And while anecdotes may not be reliable, in this case the numbers back them up: Even with far fewer riders, there has been a sharp spike in the number of serious incidents on the system since the pandemic began. The question is what happens now. When fear spreads, that keeps riders away. With fewer riders comes wor...
Feb 02, 2023•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast Pain and fever meds for children—acetaminophen and ibuprofen, usually—have been in short (or no) supply across the country for several months. Purchases made by the government have begun to hit shelves, but for many parents it's still difficult to find. How did a handful of factors combine to cause this shortage? Why has it lasted so long? And although these medicines have been the ones grabbing headlines, why don't many Canadians know just how many drugs we're running out of? GUEST: Carly Weeks...
Feb 01, 2023•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast When new drinking guidelines for Canadians were released, it was the headline takeaway that got the most attention, and scorn. And viral interview responses. In fact, many of the other recommendations were ignored. There is a lot of science behind limiting alcohol consumption, and there are many ways to do it. But is setting a goal that is daunting for many Canadian drinkers the best way to do it? How important is the messaging to actually achieving results? Are there lessons we can learn, both ...
Jan 31, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's fair to be skeptical of ANY deal announced by a government or resource company that will lead to natural resource extraction on Indigenous land. They don't have a good track record here, to put it mildly. But even with that said—last week was very good week for putting more power over the land back in the hands that once held it. Are these deals, the sign of a new era in recognizing Indigenous rights, or will they prove to be more of the same when push comes to shove? Are they a sign of thi...
Jan 30, 2023•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast It seems Impossible. Plant-based meat products were supposed to take us Beyond our love for beef, save the environment and maybe even make us healthier. For a while, it seemed the hype was real, and the growth was sustainable. Billions of dollars were spent backing that up. Three years later, it's pretty clear something went wrong. Where did the hype come from? What was expected from these products and how did they fail to deliver? What happened to the plant-based meat revolution? GUEST: Deena S...
Jan 27, 2023•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
