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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, Prime Minister Mark Carney, Pierre Poilievre, the Donald Trump administration, 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, the Conservatives and Pierre Poilievre as well as the future of 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 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, 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, the India-Pakistan conflict, 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.

Front Burner

Former FBI James Comey. Former national security advisor John Bolton. New York attorney general Letitia James. What do they have in common? All are now facing legal action from the U.S. government.

Benjamin Wittes, editor-in-chief of the U.S. nonprofit publication Lawfare, breaks down the Trump White House's campaign of legal revenge against the president's rivals and critics, and where it could be headed next.

We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.

Trump's campaign of legal revenge

Over the last 10 days Israel and Hamas have observed a ceasefire that saw the return of hostages and prisoners to Israel, Gaza and the West Bank as well as deliveries of much needed aid to famine-struck Gaza since the deal was reached. 

However, the ceasefire has remained shaky and the possibility of a permanent end to the war is still uncertain. Israel carried out airstrikes throughout southern Gaza after it said Hamas militants fired at IDF troops in Rafah. Hamas has denied this. 

To parse through the events that led to those developments, we talked to William Christou, freelance journalist based in Jerusalem for The Guardian. 

We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

The precarity of Gaza’s ceasefire

This year, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader, María Corina Machado.

In the announcement last week, the chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee said Machado had earned the prize for her “struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy". The award comes at a time when the U.S. has taken an increasingly belligerent stance against Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro.

So today we’re talking about Machado, the legacy of the Nobel Peace Prize, its controversial winners, who wins it and who doesn’t.

Jay Nordlinger, the author of Peace They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, and a writer with the Next Move, a publication of the Renew Democracy Initiative, joins the show.

We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Who gets to win the Nobel Peace Prize?

Marie-Philippe Bouchard has been in her role as President and CEO of CBC/Radio-Canada for a little under a year.

Since her appointment, we’ve had a federal election that has spared the public broadcaster from defunding threats for now, but certainly not from a broad sentiment that the CBC needs change and evolution. 

This week, Bouchard unveiled her own five-year vision. Today, she joins the show to discuss the relationship Canadians have with the CBC, and what changes she thinks the public broadcaster needs to make.

We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.

CBC President Marie-Philippe Bouchard

At its peak, Marineland was the second most popular tourist destination in Ontario’s Niagara region after the falls. Visitors could get up close and personal with beluga whales, dolphins and orcas, and watch them perform in elaborate shows. Throw in a side of rollercoasters and other exhibits and you had a family friendly attraction built to last.

But for years, the park has been mired in controversy and allegations of animal abuse. Business has declined to the point that the park is now closed to the public. However, several animals including 30 beluga whales remain trapped there. Marineland says it needs money or a new home for the whales, or else they might have to kill them.

Liam Casey of the Canadian Press has been covering this story for years. He lays out what could happen to the whales, and what it all means for other parks like Marineland.

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Marineland’s scandalous decline

Canada's first ever minister of artificial intelligence, Evan Solomon, is spearheading what he's calling a "30-day sprint" to nail down Canada's AI strategy. The plan? To figure out a government approach to the technology in order to boost the Canadian economy.

Today, we wanted to take stock of the state of the industry in Canada, and a closer look at the Liberal government’s strategy. What could it all mean for our jobs, our economy, society, and environment?

Murad Hemmadi, a reporter with The Logic, joins the show.

We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.

Canada’s bet on an AI boom

Where did Elon Musk’s epic ambitions begin? In search of clues we return to his sheltered youth in apartheid South Africa, a world engineered for white supremacy. Along the way, we connect the dots between a bizarre White House ambush of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa to teenage Elon’s ego-powered quests in video games. Finally, was his “draft dodge” from military service a moral act or an opportunist’s exit? Know more, now. Understood is an anthology podcast from the CBC that takes you out of the daily news cycle and inside the events, people, and cultural moments you want to know more about. You can find Understood wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/FBxMoM

Front Burner Presents: The Making of Musk, Episode 1

Today, if all goes well, a ceasefire will begin in Gaza.

In phase one, Hamas has pledged to return all of the hostages, living and dead. For its part Israel will release hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, while withdrawing troops to an agreed-upon line in Gaza and maintaining majority control of the territory.

Beyond that, the details of Trump’s promise of a “strong, durable, and everlasting peace” are fuzzy, but for hostage families and people in Gaza, it’s a reason to hope. 

Producer Allie Jaynes brings us a documentary that gives an on-the-ground perspective of what these past two years have been like for Gazans — especially for children. We hear from a 12-year-old with a popular Instagram “cooking show,” a girl living in a crowded displacement camp, and a music teacher giving lessons to kids all over Gaza to help them “escape the weight of war through the freedom of music.”

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Portraits of childhood in Gaza

Beyond the frontlines of the war in Ukraine, a shadow war between the Kremlin and Kyiv is escalating -- with covert assassinations, car bombs, civilian recruitment, and even the involvement of a terrorist group with a history in Canada.

 

Today, national security reporter Ben Makuch examines how it’s transforming the character of the biggest land war since the Second World War -- and who might be winning.

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For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Inside the shadow war in Ukraine

The term ‘Antifa’ derives from the German word for Antifascist — and the constellation of resistance movements largely created as a response to Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. Today, Antifa describes a decentralized anti-fascist movement with local groups and unaffiliated activists all over the world. 

Many became aware of Antifascist organizing following Antifa’s intervention at the white supremacist ‘Unite The Right’ rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. For the last decade, Antifa has come to symbolize progressive protest and movement building – engaging in doxxing,, property destruction, and street-level physical confrontations. 

In late September of this year, U.S. President Donald Trump officially designated Antifa a domestic terror organization. 

Mark Bray is an academic, scholar of European history and radicalism, and the author of several books including ‘ANTIFA — the anti fascist handbook.’ He joins the show to discuss the rise of antifascist movements from the 1930s to today, and why Trump’s terror designation recalls authoritarian crackdowns through history, both in the U.S., Canada and abroad. 

We'd love to hear from you! Complete our listener survey here.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

What exactly is Antifa?

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 of contracts and investigations into regulatory breaches?

Washington Post technology reporter Trisha Thadani explains why Musk is all in on Trump, and what he stands to gain from a second Trump presidency.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Why did Elon Musk go all in on Trump?

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