Front Burner

Danielle Smith has been premier of Alberta for about six weeks. Her anti-Ottawa rhetoric and proposed sovereignty act ignited the leadership race. Then, on the day Smith took office, she commented that unvaccinated people were the "most discriminated against group.” A First Nations leader in Alberta has even called into question her claims of Indigenous heritage. Smith took to television Tuesday evening to address the province and lay out her agenda. Now, we’re starting to get a clearer picture of who she is as a leader and where she plans to take the province. Today, CBC’s Jason Markusoff is here to explain what has happened during Smith’s first weeks as premier.

On the sidelines of the G20 summit in Indonesia last Wednesday, a tense face-to-face confrontation between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Chinese President Xi Jinping drew international headlines. Xi accused Trudeau of leaking the contents of their previous discussions to the media. The encounter was a decidedly public reflection of the countries' fraught relations when mounting allegations of Chinese meddling in Canada are causing further strain. Earlier this month, a Global News report alleged China funded Canadian candidates to influence the 2019 federal election. Last week, a Hydro-Québec worker was charged with spying for China. And the RCMP say they're investigating what have been called Chinese "police" stations set up inside Canada. Today, CBC senior writer J.P. Tasker returns to explain the allegations, how Parliament is responding, and how Canada could change its path forward with China during this historic low point in relations.

Last week, Ticketmaster pre-sales for Taylor Swift's Eras tour quickly devolved into chaos, with site crashes, many people waiting eight hours or more in online queues, and tickets going for upward of $40,000 US on secondary sales sites like Stubhub. This is far from the first incident to prompt widespread outrage against Ticketmaster. Sky-high prices for Blink-182 and Bruce Springsteen concerts have been among the sore spots. But the Swift fiasco is shining a new light on the company's virtual monopoly over wide swathes of the live music industry, prompting many — including several U.S. lawmakers — to call for the company to be investigated and broken up. Today, Jason Koebler — editor-in-chief of Motherboard, VICE's technology site — joins Front Burner to break this all down.

There's a lot of bad news in Canadian health care. We're still in the midst of a pandemic, RSV and flu season are hitting families hard, and headlines across the country have been dominated by reports of staffing shortages, severe burnout, overrun emergency rooms, and long wait times for surgeries. Front-line health-care workers and patients are raising alarms about a system breaking under the pressure. Dr. Brian Goldman is the host of CBC Radio's White Coat, Black Art and CBC podcast The Dose. He's also an emergency physician in Toronto and has spent a lot of time thinking about the issues that plague the system. Monday on Front Burner, Dr. Goldman joins us to talk about possible solutions and why some in the field are worried about a health-collapse, rather than a crisis.

After nearly three decades of trying, Canada qualified for the 1986 World Cup in Mexico and proceeded to not score a goal. But Canada could write a new chapter in its soccer history, starting Sunday, when the Qatar World Cup kicks off. We've covered the controversy surrounding soccer's biggest tournament — from human rights abuses to allegations of bribery, and corruption at FIFA. Today, we're focusing on the tournament itself. Roger Bennett is back to give us a primer on the favourites, the underdogs and some of the big storylines expected to unfold on the pitch in Qatar. He's the founder of the Men in Blazers Media network, co-host of the Men in Blazers podcast and co-author of the newly published book Gods of Soccer.

This spring brings a significant update to medical assistance in dying, known as MAID, in Canada. On March 17, 2023, Canadians with a mental illness as their sole condition will be eligible. This evolution is controversial. The change also has some doctors who have been at the forefront of helping people die medically, called MAID providers, feeling increasingly uncomfortable. Dr. Madeline Li is one of them. She is a psychiatrist and a MAID provider who developed the MAID framework for the University Health Network in Toronto. She joins Front Burner today to share her concerns.

On Tuesday, the human population reached eight billion people, according to an estimate by the United Nations. While population growth has slowed in recent years, it still took about a decade to add the last billion people. Meanwhile, humankind is continuing to do irreparable harm to the planet, including climate change, accelerated species extinction and ecosystem collapse. We’re also straining the planet’s ability to sustain this many people, as revealed by water scarcity for billions of people — all while people in more affluent countries are responsible for far more than their fair share of the harm. Today we’re joined by Céline Delacroix, adjunct professor at the University of Ottawa’s School of Health Sciences and the Director of the FP/Earth project with the Population Institute, to discuss how it got to this point, what it means for people and the planet, and where we go from here.

In the last two years, cryptocurrency exchange FTX spent millions of dollars on advertisements with the likes of NFL quarterback Tom Brady and Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Larry David. FTX also sponsored Major League Baseball, the Mercedes Formula One racing team and Canadian businessman Kevin O’Leary. Earlier this month, Bloomberg ranked the platform’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, as one of the world’s 100 richest people. He was sometimes referred to as the “King of Crypto.” But now, after financial leaks triggered mass withdrawals and a halt in trading, Bankman-Fried is worth effectively nothing. FTX has gone from a recent $32-billion US evaluation to bankruptcy. Today, CBC News senior business writer Pete Evans returns to explain how one of the world’s three biggest crypto exchanges was brought down so quickly.

In 2010, during the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, hundreds of thousands of classified military and diplomatic records were released, revealing civilian death and disaster on the ground for both conflicts. It was one of the largest and most explosive leaks in U.S. history and included every incident report the United States Army had ever filed about Iraq or Afghanistan. The mass leak pulled back the curtain on both wars, igniting an intense debate over the role of the U.S. military and about what information the public deserves to know. And at the centre of it all was Chelsea Manning. Manning was a young American military intelligence analyst on her first tour in Iraq who was secretly struggling with her gender identity. She became so disillusioned by the horrors of war that she decided to risk everything to publicize highly-sensitive military information. Now, more than a decade later, Manning is speaking out about her experience as a whistleblower in a new memoir called README.Txt. She joins Front Burner from New York.

Going into the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, things didn’t look good for the Democrats. Inflation is high, approval ratings for U.S. President Joe Biden are low, and traditionally, the sitting president’s party loses seats in the midterms. So, it seemed like Republicans would clean up, and pundits and politicians predicted the electoral map would reflect a red wave. But the Democrats performed better than expected, and the wave didn’t materialize. The dismal performance by the GOP has sparked introspection within the party and amplified questions about whether Donald Trump is its secret weapon, or the kiss of death. Today, CBC’s Alex Panetta takes us through what the midterm results might mean for the future of the Republican party and its devotion to Donald Trump.