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Weekend streaming picks from Steve Stebbing start with a question he can’t shake: why remake Moana shot for shot with the same lead singing the same songs, only a decade later and with worse reviews. He counters with two picks worth the watch, the gory consistency of Evil Dead Burn and a spoof comedy called…

A Meta data center Alberta project worth thirteen billion dollars sounds like a win for Canadian business, but Emily Osborne makes the case for why the price tag is the least important number in the story. Osborne breaks down the gap between investment and actual digital sovereignty, explaining why a data center built to serve…

AI search summaries are quietly replacing the second, third, and fourth sources you used to check before trusting an answer. Mohit Rajhans lays out how a single Gemini query can bury the truth of a story under one linked opinion video, and what that means the next time you search for anything you actually need…

Signs your partner is cheating rarely show up as one dramatic clue, and Dr. Laurie Betito spends this conversation drawing the line between suspicion and proof. A guarded phone or a sudden change in routine can mean betrayal, or it can mean stress, depression, or a need for space that has nothing to do with…

Drive-thru culture is getting a real-time reaction this summer, as Europeans in town for the World Cup post themselves discovering it for the first time. One video shows a woman getting out of her car at the window, certain a drive-thru could not possibly be that simple. The numbers back up the culture shock. The…

Some people still insist a CRT television shows colour that no flat screen can replicate, and tech expert Carmi Levy says it is the same instinct that keeps vinyl records and cassette mixtapes alive. He walks through exactly what made those old sets both beloved and genuinely dangerous, radiation warnings included. Carmi also remembers being…

Bonnie Tyler has died at seventy five, and music commentator Eric Alper traces the accident that built her voice: a doctor’s order for six weeks of silence, and one scream of frustration that changed everything. What follows is the real story behind the surgery and the raspy sound producers built songs around. The songwriting era…

Before his last episode aired, Ernie Coombs recorded a farewell message to the crew behind thirty two years of Mr. Dress Up, a moment that anchors this look back at 1996. The same year, Donovan Bailey won gold in the men’s hundred metres in Atlanta, and Prime Minister Jean Chretien became known for the Shawinigan…

A cocktail everyone associates with Hawaii was actually invented in Oakland, and Richard Crouse has the recipe along with his verdict on the Moana live action remake. Before that, he digs into a Madonna song fans are convinced is about Sean Penn, and a horror movie built on a wish nobody can undo. Madonna, Sean…

Mr. Dress Up ran for thirty two years, and historian Ed Conroy says Ernie Coombs and puppeteer Judith Lawrence built entire episodes with no script at all. Ed contributed vintage television equipment and previously unseen behind-the-scenes footage to a new exhibit in Pickering, where Ernie lived for decades. Ed traces that instinctive, script-free chemistry back…

Fast food value meals only look like a deal. Food professor Sylvain Charlebois lays out the seventeen minute rule behind them: the average person sits comfortably for seventeen minutes, so McDonald’s built its old plastic chairs to move you out the door before that clock ran out, and priced the Happy Meal to lose money…

An eight piece bucket at KFC runs thirty four dollars in Canada right now, and the family size version tops seventy five. Shane Hewitt & the Nightshift went hunting for where fast food still counts as a deal, using a Canadian YouTuber’s breakdown that ranked every major chain’s value meal and landed on a surprise…

Three major announcements landed in Alberta within days of each other, and broadcaster Rob Breakenridge breaks down what is actually behind them. A new pipeline to BC, talk of one from Alberta to Ontario, and a thirteen billion dollar Meta data center all dropped during Calgary Stampede, timed to the political spotlight the event brings…

Most affordable mortgage city in Canada is not a Toronto or Vancouver question, and it is not even close to one. A fresh Royal LePage ranking puts the country’s most affordable spots somewhere entirely different, working through mortgage aggregate prices city by city until landing on a windy Alberta answer nobody saw coming. The numbers…

The agency that insures Canadian mortgages just paid out thirty two million dollars in staff bonuses. The people footing that bill are the same ones struggling to qualify for a mortgage in the first place. Jamie Ellerton, founding partner at Conaptus, and former Toronto City Councillor and TTC Chair Karen Stintz do not let that…

Career myths convince people they get one shot at everything: wrong major, wrong first job, and that’s the whole story decided. Candy Ho, a CERIC board member, makes the case that a summer job is closer to free training than a paycheque, and stacking the right experience early can change what happens next. Retail floors…

World Cup fan celebrations are the actual show this tournament, the games are just the excuse. If the sport itself has never made sense, this is the entry point that finally clicks: not the offside rule, but the noise a hundred years of rivalry makes when it finally boils over. There’s a lost voice, a…

Marketing scarcity gets tested against a real example: a wedding with no leaked photos, no outside editor, and twenty six million dollars already routed to charity before the criticism could show up. Tony Chapman, host of Chatter That Matters, treats Taylor Swift’s approach as a working blueprint for owning a narrative completely, from the venue…

Canada World Cup travel plans do not usually involve selling tickets to one game so you can afford tickets to another, but that is exactly the math Bob Addison worked out when Canada advanced to Houston. Three seats to an American match turned into just over eight thousand dollars, enough to cover a father-son trip…

Something happens to a manager who spends all day getting agreed with. Greg Fish, a computer scientist behind Cyberpunk Survival Guide, lays out why the people running the meeting are more likely than anyone underneath them to fall into what he calls AI psychosis, and why it has nothing to do with curiosity and everything…

The Great Lakes Triangle has claimed roughly six thousand ships and hundreds of planes, and Nathan Radke explains why the losses feel supernatural even when they are not. His book Uncover Up spent a decade tracing how ordinary people get talked into extraordinary beliefs. This episode follows his own trip into the vortex, out to…

Good News Tuesday runs on stories sent in by listeners and a text line that keeps the good ones coming, and this week the good news starts with a 139-year-old former church rectory brought back to life one room at a time. Eight months of sanding, painting, and running between renovation work and studio duties…

Good News Tuesday runs on stories sent in by listeners through a dedicated text line, and this week starts with Kyle Lowry set to sign a one-day contract so he can officially retire as a Toronto Raptor, with his number 7 headed for the rafters. From there, a young soccer fan in Saskatchewan set out…

Canada’s submarine procurement finally has a plan, and Matt Gurney explains why getting there will still take most of a decade. He connects the announcement to a defense minister’s own words about shared crews and interoperability, and what that reveals about the deal underneath the headline. The conversation tracks Canada’s credibility problem after years of…

A Portland teenager pulled Wilt Chamberlain’s 1972 NBA Finals warm-up jacket out of a Goodwill bin for four dollars, and it is now headed to Sotheby’s with an estimate as high as $250,000. Someone else had already picked it up and put it back before he grabbed it. That story kicks off a real conversation…

Sobriety gets treated like a confession, and Jim Richards is tired of feeling like he owes anyone an explanation for ordering a non-alcoholic beer. Coming up on three years without a drink, he lays out what actually changed and why the hardest part was never the willpower people assume it takes. He traces the moment…

Wanting what you cannot have applies to more than diets and dream cars. Tony Tedesco and Jen Kirsch dig into why the person just out of reach so often becomes the one we cannot stop thinking about, and why that pull rarely has much to do with who they actually are. They trace it back…

A six-year-old sample from asteroid Ryugu just confirmed all five major DNA building blocks, and Dr. Samantha Yammine breaks down why that finding matters more than the headlines suggest. It separates what the data actually shows from the more dramatic claim that life itself started elsewhere. The conversation traces the Hayabusa2 mission’s pristine sample collection,…

PlayStation discs are going away entirely by 2028, and Kris Abel makes the case that the industry is repeating a mistake music already made, minus the concerts and festivals that kept that transition from feeling like a total loss. Something as basic as playing your own game at a friend’s house is about to require…

Rocco Rossi has walked the Camino de Santiago 23 times since 2002, and what started as a way out of a corporate career he no longer believed in has become something he returns to every year. His new novel, Finding Grace, pulls two decades of that walking into fiction. A mentor’s sudden death during a…

A good party isn’t about the location, it’s about a short list of ingredients that keep showing up at the ones people actually remember. A backyard fire on a mild summer night takes the top spot over any big event, cottage weekend, or festival lineup. One rule carries the most weight: there always needs to…

Washing machine mold prevention starts with one habit almost nobody follows, leaving the door open after every load. Tech and DIY expert Andy Baryer breaks down the manual gasket cleaning most people skip, plus the yard work that keeps hedges and trees healthy without overdoing it. Trim It, Clean It, Keep It Growing Andy walks…

Festival day drinking follows the same script no matter where in the country it happens, water and sunglasses in the morning, a Caesar by noon, full chaos by mid-afternoon. Living beside one of Calgary Stampede’s biggest party tents makes that pattern impossible to miss for ten straight days. The noise complaints from last year haven’t…

Canada submarine defence spending just became real, with a deal that won’t deliver a single vessel for eight to ten years. The Monday study panel breaks down why the government went with a German partner over South Korea or Japan, and what that says about the pace of Canada’s NATO commitments. Pipelines, Pancakes, and Who…

Some jobs stick with you long enough to become writing a book of essays about. Alex Boyd worked a bookshop in the 1990s, the same kind of job George Orwell once described in the 1930s, and found that almost nothing about the customers had changed. His collection, eighteen essays deep, moves through a warehouse job…

Canadian car buying tariffs are reshaping which vehicles are actually worth the money this year, and the answer isn’t always the one buyers expect. Automotive journalist Lorraine Sommerfeld lays out which cars are genuinely built here, how to check a VIN in under a minute, and what that means before you sign anything. Days-on-lot numbers…

Canada submarine deal analysis from a military expert lands on an uncomfortable question: why did Canada pass on the faster, cheaper option? Richard Shimooka breaks down how South Korea offered quicker delivery, more production capacity, and a stronger partnership pitch, and still lost out to a German and Norwegian bid that may not deliver a…

Canada Day landed on a Wednesday and somehow half the country took the whole week off. Shane and Ryan are both at their desks, mildly annoyed, and very much in the mood to talk about summer grievances. The conversation starts with how far in advance you actually need to plan a long weekend, moves into…

Human movement bias is more consistent than almost anyone expects, and Samantha Yammine is here to explain why the research is harder to dismiss than it looks. Studies in Spain and Japan, with children, adults, individuals, and crowds, all point to the same result: people veer left, and they can’t explain why. Handedness doesn’t account…

It’s Canada Day weekend, give or take, and Shane and Ryan have three stories that will improve nothing about your life and yet somehow feel essential. First: the banana car. Twenty-three feet long, Ford F-150 engine, open top, eighty-five miles an hour, and a dedicated app so you always know where it’s headed next. Second:…

AI evaluation in business sounds straightforward until you try to do it. Mohit Rajhans says most companies are realizing the math doesn’t work the way they thought it would. Mohit runs http://ThinkStart.ca and tracks where technology meets business reality. This conversation starts with a simple problem: there’s no gas pump ticker on AI. No visible…

Steve Stebbing, film and entertainment critic, splits this week into two rounds. First, Canadian titles built for a long weekend at home. Then, what’s actually worth the theatre seat right now. Three Canadian Films Worth Your Canada DayUndertone is the one Steve keeps coming back to: a Canadian horror film built on sound, picked up…

Vacation budgeting is something Jessica Moorhouse thinks about professionally. She still went to Italy for three weeks, blew past her carefully built spreadsheet, and came home with zero regrets and a slightly rejigged budget. Jessica is a personal finance expert and the author of Everything But Money, and this conversation is as honest as it…

Dungeons and Dragons started in 1974 with no budget and a simple idea, and Ryan O’Donnell makes the case that it has been saving lives ever since. If you’ve never rolled a die, this is the episode that explains why people who have can’t stop talking about it. For neurodivergent kids especially, the game builds…

Wealth Simple is expanding fast and Vincent Gregoire, Canada Research Chair in Finance and Technology at HEC Montreal, is paying close attention. Lower fees and less friction are good for investors. The new ability to borrow against your portfolio, including potentially your registered retirement savings, is where the conversation gets harder. The mechanics are straightforward:…

Canada Day 1974 means a federal election, a sitting prime minister fighting for his majority, and a American president about to become the first to resign the office. The past has a way of arriving right on time. This Throwback Thursday lands on the Canada Day long weekend and goes back fifty years to a…

Holistic nutritionist Alyssa B of nourished.ca makes the case that protein isn’t a fitness trend — it’s the foundation everything else depends on. Muscle protects bone. Bone protects you from the fall that changes everything. Getting enough protein is how you stay independent at seventy. Alyssa breaks down exactly how much protein you actually need,…

Canadian politics commentator Rob Breakenridge joins the Canada Day long weekend to make a distinction most people skip: the country is not the same thing as the people running it, and one can be worth celebrating while the other deserves serious scrutiny. A piece Rob wrote a year ago on Alberta’s secrecy creep turns out…

Food professor Sylvain Charlebois has real-time grocery data for Canada Day weekend, and the news is mixed depending on what’s on your grill. Ground beef, pork chops, and chicken breasts are all up this year. Strawberries and blueberries are more expensive, soft drinks are pricier thanks to aluminum costs, and potatoes are a little higher…

Entertainment journalist Richard Crouse of http://richardcrouse.ca joins for two conversations that together cover everything worth knowing about pop culture right now — from Canada’s biggest honour going to one of its most beloved exports, to a new comedy that Richard says will land on his best-of list by year’s end. Michael J. Fox, Larry David,…

Flipping the script, going against the grain and breaking away from the norm. Dungeons and Dragons was crucial in setting up the counter culture of the 80s and 90s. And it started in 1974! Guest: Ed Conroy Originally aired on2026-07-02

Dungeons and Dragons for beginners sounds like a rulebook problem. Dean McKinnon says it’s actually a playing pretend problem, and once you solve that one, everything else opens up. Dean is a professional Dungeon Master who runs eleven campaigns a week for kids on every continent, hosts a D&D summer camp, and takes bachelor parties…

Cycling around the world qualifies for a Guinness World Record, and until recently the oldest person to hold it was 56. Mark Herbst looked at that number at age 69, decided it was beatable, and spent the next chapter of his life proving it across 35,000 kilometers and 25 countries, raising funds for Princess Margaret…

Rod Black has been the voice in the room for Canadian sports fans for decades. Cut to Black is the book that explains how he got there, and it turns out it’s not really about him. Rod is a TSN broadcaster and the author of Cut to Black: A Legendary Life in Sports, and this…

The show lands on Canada Day Eve with good news from three cities and a question worth sitting with: what if the most useful thing you can share today is something small? A first Colombian recipe attempt that smelled great. A bathroom renovation closing in on the finish line. A two-day work week that nobody…

The good news tonight comes in three flavors. A Phoenix school resource officer who rented a movie theater for kids who’d never been, then turned to the adults in the room and asked why they weren’t doing the same. A dog named Daisy who walked out of a crash in BC’s Okanagan, spent three days…

Thirty percent of people don’t like cats. Only five percent feel that way about dogs. Rod Phillips has spent years figuring out why, and the answer goes back further than most people expect. Phillips, a historian at Carleton University and author of Cats: A History, makes the case that cats haven’t changed in thousands of…

In Newfoundland, Canada Day doesn’t begin with fireworks. It begins with Memorial Day and the memory of a generation of young men sent over the top at Beaumont-Hamel, France, one hundred and ten years ago tomorrow. The Royal Newfoundland Regiment numbered eight hundred going in. The field between the trenches was maybe three hundred meters…

When Canada advanced further than anyone expected, one family decided the only response was to follow the team to Houston, no matter what it took to get there. The plan: resell tickets to a USA match in Seattle, lean on Mom’s credit card for the upfront cost, and hope it all balances out before Saturday’s…

This conversation starts with Mark Carney admitting his own emissions targets will be missed and uses it as a way into a bigger pattern: decisions on 24 Sussex Drive and a submarine fleet contract that sat untouched since 2017 are finally getting made after years of avoidance. The question driving the discussion is what changed,…

Grand Theft Auto 6 pre-orders are live and the box is real, but open it and there’s only a download code. No disc. No trade-in value. No physical copy. Ever. A tech columnist who argued against this exact model with a Microsoft Xbox executive twenty years ago breaks down why it’s finally happening, what the…

A psychologist makes the case that the highs and lows of being a sports fan are not just entertainment, they are doing real work for your mental health. The conversation traces what happens physiologically when a game gets tense, why grief and joy need each other to feel like anything at all, and why losing…

Film critic Richard Crouse builds a Canada Day weekend watch list from the ground up: three Canadian films, each with a drink to match. Goon pairs with a Bloody Caesar, invented in Calgary in 1969 and consumed by Canadians over 400 million times a year. Richard walks through the recipe and the history, including why…

What makes a good party is a question most people think they already know the answer to. This conversation suggests they don’t. From flood warnings in Calgary to a Cuban pig roast in a small Ontario village, the night shift checks in coast to coast on a summer that is swinging between sticky and soaked.…

Home maintenance tips that actually save money this summer start with knowing where your house is leaking money without you realising it. Andy Barrar of Handy Andy Media walks through the gaps that are quietly wrecking your cooling bill and the gaps you should never fill if you want your deck to survive the seasons.…

Moving in together has a moment nobody warns you about. It’s not the argument or the negotiation. It’s a glance at a bookshelf. Ryan O’Donnell spotted that moment on Laura’s face during unpacking, and everything that followed is a more honest account of cohabitation than most people will admit to out loud. Ryan had filled…

Federal housing policy rarely produces a clean answer, and the BC condo buyback program is no exception. The Monday study panel works through what the numbers actually mean: ten percent federal funding, ninety percent BC, and units that still price out the people the program claims to help. The Bailout Question Jimmy Zoubris flags the…

Vacation budgeting tips are easy to find and hard to follow, especially when the flights are already paid and the costs keep creeping up anyway. Anita Bruinsma of Clarity on Your Money works through what actually happens when the excitement of booking a trip collides with the reality of what it costs to be there,…

Simon Fraser University just received a $40 million donation from the Stevens family to support its new medical school, opening this August. Erin Morantz, SFU’s Vice-President of Advancement and Alumni Engagement, joins to explain what a gift that size actually does — and why the name on the building is the smallest part of the…

Tony Tedesco and Jen Kirsch join Date Night to untangle why so many people are surrounded by love and still feel lonely. The problem isn’t that love isn’t there. It’s that most people are busy performing it instead of building it. Jen has been watching a specific kind of video go viral — women showing…

Canada missile defence has officially moved from background concern to stated priority. The Chief of Defence Staff named Russian missile technology as the country’s biggest threat, and Richard Shimooka, military expert and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, breaks down what that actually means for a country with more Arctic territory to defend than budget…

Canada is the ninth largest economy in the world and a senior member of the G7. Andrew Caddell thinks it’s time the country started acting like it, on trade and on the question of where its prime minister actually lives. Andrew brings a diplomat’s eye to two stories that look unrelated but aren’t. On trade,…

Nobody needed any of this information. That’s exactly why it’s here. A cookie chain put a Nanaimo bar on their menu and filmed Americans trying to say the word. The mayor of Nanaimo has opinions about this. Europeans attending the FIFA World Cup are discovering ranch dressing for the first time and cannot stop talking…

This week’s picks come with a warning: if you bought any of them digitally, you might not have them as long as you think. Steve Stebbing has 4,100 movies on physical media and has been laughing off the “just go digital” advice for years. PlayStation just deleted 500 purchased films from users’ libraries, Terminator 2…

There’s a six-year gap between when relationship problems start and when most couples finally ask for help. Dr. Laurie Betito has spent a career on the other side of that gap, and she wants to close it. Dr. Laurie is a Montreal-based clinical psychologist and relationship expert, and this conversation goes after the reasons people…

AI and kids in Canada is no longer a future problem. Mohit Rajhans says the rules are already changing, most parents don’t know it yet, and the confusion isn’t a sign something’s gone wrong. It’s the whole situation. The vomit of change: a volume and velocity of shifts in policy, platform, and capability that arrives…

Digital ownership in Canada is mostly a polite fiction. You buy the movie, the game, the scale, the heated seat, and what you actually get is permission to use it until the company changes its mind. This conversation pulls the thread on a trend that keeps expanding into new territory. GTA 6, the most anticipated…

It’s Throwback Thursday and Shane, Ryan, and Noah dig into one of 1995’s defining fast food moments: the arrival of stuffed crust pizza and the competitive war that produced it. The story starts in 1958, when two college students borrowed six hundred dollars from their mom, found a small brick building with room for exactly…

Food inflation in Canada is running hotter than every other G7 country, and food professor Sylvain Charlebois says the reasons are closer to home than most Canadians want to admit. Charlebois breaks down what’s actually driving prices higher right now: salmon up 80% in a single month, a weakening Canadian dollar hitting food importers hard,…

It’s Throwback Thursday and the inflation conversation gets personal fast: in 1995, a large pepperoni pizza and a two-litre Coke ran twelve to fifteen dollars as a combo deal. Ground beef was $1.99 a pound. A big box of cereal was three dollars. Gas was fifty-eight cents a litre in Vancouver. Shane and Ryan run…

Columnist and commentator Rob Breakenridge joins for two stories: what King Charles’s voluntary tax disclosure actually reveals about royal finances, and what’s happening to the Corb Lund coal petition in Alberta. King Charles paid eleven million pounds in income tax last year, voluntarily, continuing a practice the Queen began in 1993. Rob unpacks why the…

Retail analyst Bruce Winder joins on Amazon Prime Day to break down what the numbers actually say about where Canadian consumers are right now and whether the deals are what they appear to be. Adobe is forecasting twenty-six billion dollars across four days of Prime Day sales, with day one already up five percent. But…

Technology analyst Carmi Levy joins to talk about where restaurant automation is actually heading, and what gets lost when the entry-level job disappears from the equation. Robots are already in restaurants, following servers from kitchen to table, handling the physical load so staff can focus on service. Carmi is fine with that version. What concerns…

Film critic Richard Crouse joins for two conversations covering the week’s biggest entertainment stories and a pair of cocktails built for a superhero movie night. A Single Line of Code Nearly Killed PixarToy Story 5 just posted the second biggest animation opening of all time, but Richard Crouse traces the franchise back to a near-catastrophe:…

Historian and Retro Ontario founder Ed Conroy joins to trace the stuffed crust pizza back to 1995, the celebrity fast food wars that produced it, and why the nostalgia for that era says more about being a kid than it does about the pizza. Pizza Hut brought back its dine-in restaurants after years of people…

You miss Pizza Hut. You’d go back. You just wouldn’t go back next week. Ryan O’Donnell thinks that’s the whole problem, and that he’s seen it before. The parallel he draws is not about food. It’s about what convenience does to the things people love, and whether nostalgia can survive the moment it gets what…

That device Ishmael Kone was holding on the stretcher after breaking his leg at the FIFA tournament wasn’t a vape pen. It’s called the green whistle, and it’s a medical pain tool that more people probably wish they’d had when things went sideways on a trampoline, a sea-doo, or a toenail that wasn’t quite frozen.…

Green whistle pain relief became the most searched phrase the moment Ishmael Kone waved from a stretcher mid-exit at the FIFA tournament, and Dr. Mitch Schulman, emergency room physician and chief medical correspondent for CTV, is here to explain exactly what that device is and why a healthy athlete on a soccer pitch is precisely…

Conflict of interest in Canadian politics is back in the conversation, and Jamie Ellerton and John Tory Jr. are here to sort out what it means when the Prime Minister has been recused from 17 deliberations and nobody’s saying exactly why. The Recusal Nobody’s Explaining Mark Carney’s conflict screen is public record, and Brookfield’s ownership…

FIFA World Cup 2026 is putting Canada on the world stage, and the cost is real: BC alone is on the hook for up to $114 million after revenue offsets, and a two-hot-dog-two-pop combo just got discounted to $51.75. The numbers are what they are. What the numbers don’t capture is a Japanese fan in…

Soviet espionage during the Cold War was not paranoia. It was infrastructure, and Lee Kuhnle lays out exactly what that looked like from the inside. Kim Philby was recruited as a journalist in the 1930s, embedded himself in British intelligence from the ground floor, and then personally proposed and was handed control of the department…

Software engineer burnout is the reason your app looked different this morning and nobody on the team can explain why it changed. Greg Fish of Cyberpunk Survival Guide has spent years inside the industry watching companies ship work not because it solves a problem but because it lets someone say they’re AI first at the…

Sports dating Toronto is having a moment, and Tony Tedesco and Jen Kirsch are here to explain why major sporting events are doing something dating apps have never figured out. Sociologists call it collective effervescence: strangers sharing the same emotion at the same moment, high-fiving, hugging, talking to people they never would have approached on…

FIFA World Cup Canada is handing brands a masterclass in constraint-as-opportunity, and Tony Chapman says most of them are missing it. The organizations spending millions on stadium naming rights are watching those names disappear for the duration of the tournament. The ones responding with imagination, covering their logos with shapes so recognizable they don’t need…

Good News Tuesday runs on the idea that good news makes more good news. Tonight it also runs on swearing. Dr. Robin Hanley DeFoe’s research says dropping a casual expletive, not at anyone, just into the void, can block pain receptors and reset the nervous system. A French tennis player proved it in a post-match…

Good News Tuesday goes coast to coast this week, and the stories range from eleven hundred pounds to a cup of tea at a library table. The throughline is the same: simple things done with intention tend to matter more than anyone expects. A Chilliwack-based fishing crew pulled an eleven-and-a-half-foot white sturgeon from the Fraser…

Myles Dininio is running nearly eight thousand kilometers across Canada to raise funds for CAMH, and when this conversation happened he was somewhere near Agawa Bay in northern Ontario, just past the halfway mark. He stopped running long enough to talk. Then he started again. The idea has lived in Myles’s head for twenty-two years,…

Less than twenty-four hours before Canada faced Switzerland, Kyle Horner called in from Windsor, Ontario, right on the American border, to talk about what this World Cup run is doing to a country that isn’t used to winning at football. Kyle Horner, radio host at AM800 CKLW, makes the case that what’s happening right now…

Sixty thousand people in red at a Canada World Cup soccer match will do something to you, even if you’re normally a late arriver who avoids crowds. Bob Addison, co-host of the Uncle Bob’s Bits segment, was there, and he’s still processing what national pride actually feels like when it’s coming at you like a…

A shooting in a Montreal Jewish grocery store. A high-speed pursuit ending in gunfire in Calgary. An MP targeted in Saskatchewan. What links them isn’t ideology, it’s the moment after, when the internet fills the silence with certainty. Matt Gurney, writer and analyst at The Line, has spent a career covering political violence and says…

Kris Abel, tech and entertainment commentator at krisabel.com, covers three things this week that actually earned the attention. The Sennheiser Accentum Clip launches July 23rd in Canada, before the US gets it, at $270. It clips around the ear instead of hoping your ear canal cooperates, combines broadcast-grade Sennheiser audio quality with situational awareness, and…

Entrepreneur and investor Arlene Dickinson makes the case that what Canadians need most right now isn’t a new plan — it’s the belief that they already have what it takes to execute one. Dickinson traces how curiosity became her operating system, why she chose to go more public — not less — as the noise…

Calgary mayor Jeremy Farkas put out a video during Stampede and dropped some language that got attention. The swearing was the hook. The issue underneath it is real and a lot more specific than noise complaints. Ryan O’Donnell lives three minutes from the Cowboys tent and has something to say about what ten straight days…

Most people have no idea what they’re spending until the statement arrives. Cash fixes that — which is exactly why almost nobody uses it anymore. Shane and the team open the week with a conversation about what happens when you can’t find your debit card, can’t make change, and can’t explain why your balance is…

AI-generated content has gotten good enough that most people scrolling past it have no idea — and tech and DIY expert Andy Baryer argues the brands using it secretly are taking a risk that transparent ones aren’t. Andy traces how influencer marketing gave way to AI content creation, why the NDAs brands are requiring are…

Bank fees, ATM limits, and a marketplace transaction that required three separate e-transfers to produce four hundred dollars in cash. The cashless future has a cost, and it’s not always obvious until you need actual bills in your hand. Shane and Ryan dig into what cash access actually looks like for Canadians who don’t live…

Three police officers down across three provinces on the same Monday. Lesley Kelly and Jimmy Zoubris open the week by acknowledging what that costs before the panel moves into the policy questions that follow. Bill C-14 gives police more tools to deal with car theft, gang violence, and repeat offenders — but Kelly’s question is…

Automotive columnist Lorraine Sommerfeld breaks down what your car already knows about you and why the politicians now panicking about Chinese vehicles are decades late to a problem that’s been sitting in every driveway for years. The harder question isn’t whether Chinese-made cars belong at the US border. It’s whether anyone is holding any carmaker…

Robinhood just closed its Canadian entry through the acquisition of two major crypto exchanges — and personal finance educator Dr. Preet Banerjee has some thoughts on what follows a platform with dozens of millions in SEC fines and a business model that profits from your trading activity, not your returns. Dr. Preet Banerjee connects the…

Music industry commentator Eric Alper on the death of Clive Davis at 94 — the man whose roster reads like the history of recorded music and whose ear for a hit never stopped working, no matter the decade. Davis didn’t just sign artists. He picked the songs, the co-writers, the photographers, the look. He spotted…

What do you say to a father you can’t sit beside this Father’s Day? This segment is one answer: a letter read live on air, tracing one lesson, just be one step better, through a rebuilt house, years of growing up, and the staples still being pulled out of old stairs. It’s also a pointer…

Canada just slapped a ten percent tariff on canned vegetables and left the US off the list, and the reasoning behind that exclusion says more about how trade rules actually work than most headlines let on. The conversation runs from a Father’s Day bike theft to the brutal on-field injury that ended Guatemala’s World Cup…

A pub in Vancouver burns through two hundred extra kegs in one night because Australian fans showed up to celebrate a World Cup win, and somehow the bar staff still call them well behaved. That’s the kind of story sitting in this Friday roundup, the ones that don’t matter and still won’t leave your head…

Going into a fifth Toy Story movie with low expectations turns out to be a losing bet, and movie critic Steve Stebbing explains why this one earns its place in the franchise on emotional weight alone. The story leans into screens replacing physical toys in kids’ imaginations, and a surprising side plot involving a lost…

Kids notice more than parents think, and new research from McGill University shows that when children see parental honesty and behaviour fall out of alignment, their moral reasoning shifts in measurable ways. Emilie Bélanger, PhD student at the School of Applied Child Psychology, brings findings that hit close to home for anyone who has ever…

Show me your friends and a clinical psychologist can read the state of a relationship before either partner says a word. Dr. Laurie Betito breaks down why emotions and attitudes spread through a friend group the same way they do anywhere else, meaning constant exposure to friends who treat cheating or divorce as normal can…

Showing up every day feels like it should count for something, but master certified coach Rachel Levy explains why a manager hears that as nothing more than doing the job. The real lever in any raise conversation is impact, and most people have never learned how to talk about their own. Rachel breaks down why…

Everybody who built an MP3 library remembers the tools. Winamp, Napster, the slow crawl of dial-up giving way to broadband fast enough to actually steal music in bulk. This one walks through 1999, the year Napster broke open, and 2001, the year it got shut down for it, with torrents picking up right where it…

Food professor Sylvain Charlebois on why Canadian grocery prices are so high, what a Lidl store in Cork, Ireland reveals about what we’re actually paying for, and why Ottawa’s new Competition Bureau food study is long overdue but unlikely to deliver easy answers. Charlebois was calling in from inside a Lidl in Ireland when the…

Music industry commentator Eric Alper on the two years that permanently rewired how the world hears music, and why the streaming subscription you pay today traces directly back to a college kid’s side project in 1999. Before Napster, hearing a specific song meant buying an entire album or catching it on the radio. Within months…

Instead of cutting the gas tax, Alberta sent residents a flat hundred dollar cheque, and the math broke almost immediately. Journalist Rob Breakenridge explains why electric vehicle owners, who pay nothing at the pumps, are getting the exact same payout as everyone filling up every week, and why that detail is fuelling most of the…

Twenty million users in year one. Eighty million at the peak. Then a lawsuit took Napster down in about six months. This one walks through how a platform built by Sean Fanning in June 1999 grew that fast and fell that hard. Metallica chose to be the band everyone resented, betting that looking greedy in…

Twenty-five years after Napster got shut down, the company that replaced it built its own empire on a strikingly similar shortcut. Tech expert Carmi Levy breaks down how Napster’s 80 million users forced the music industry’s hand, and how Spotify quietly repeated the same playbook before settling into the legal giant it is today. It’s…

Film critic Richard Crouse on the auction that is about to put Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber, Rocky’s boots, the Wicked Witch’s hat, and John Lennon’s handwritten lyrics up for sale, and why the stories behind these objects are worth more than the objects themselves. The Stuff That Actually Existed Heritage Auctions’ Entertainment Signature Auction runs July…

Writer and historian Ed Conroy on what Napster actually opened up for music fans beyond the free, and why the resentment and entitlement it created have never left the way we think about paying for music. For Ed, the real revolution wasn’t the price. It was Aladdin’s cave: live recordings, unreleased albums, European EP editions,…

Falls aren’t accidents. Aging and balance science now shows exactly why older adults are more vulnerable — and the answer is inside the brain. Dr. Samantha Yammine breaks down new research that mapped which brain regions control balance and what changes as we age. Younger brains handle most balance automatically, without a second thought. Older…

The satanic panic of the 1980s turned rock music, Dungeons and Dragons, and Ouija boards into instruments of the devil. Tonight the target is He-Man, and the claim that a cartoon prince with a magic sword was secretly recruiting children into devil worship through action figures. It sounds absurd. It was also believed by a…

Strategic communications veterans Jamie Ellerton and Lindsay Broadhead join to sort through the agreement to sign an agreement that may eventually become a peace deal in the Strait of Hormuz, and what any of it actually means for global energy markets, Canadian foreign policy, and the geopolitical leverage Iran just quietly secured for itself. The…

Gas rewards expert Patrick Sojka of http://RewardsCanada.ca joins to map out which loyalty program and credit card combinations are actually worth the effort this summer, and why the system has gotten a lot more complicated than it used to be. Stacking Scene Plus with Shell, linking CAA to Scotiabank, converting Petro Points to car washes…

The phrase old wives tale goes back to a play written in 1595. By 1611 the King James Bible was using it to dismiss the knowledge of older women. The irony is hard to miss, because the women being dismissed were often the ones carrying the most practical knowledge about health, childbirth, and community care.…

Medication safety gets a closer look as emergency physician Dr. Mitch Shulman breaks down why the liquid you use to take your pills can change how much of the medication actually reaches your bloodstream, and what most people have never been told about it. Grapefruit juice blocks an enzyme in your intestines that breaks down…

Relationship columnist Jen Kirsch and commentator Tony Tedesco join date night to unpack why the people closest to us have the most power to hurt us, and what that actually reveals about the patterns we carry into every relationship. The disappointment you feel in love rarely has much to do with what just happened. Jen…

Cyberpunk Survival Guide author Greg Fish breaks down the economics behind AI token pricing and why the free ride is ending faster than most businesses realise. Every AI request costs money, measured in tokens: the subdivisions of language a large language model processes on the way in and the way out. The more complex the…

Nathan Radke of the Uncover Up Podcast is here to explain why a new He-Man movie is the perfect entry point into one of the most useful ideas you can carry into the news cycle right now. In the 1980s, He-Man was accused of recruiting children into the occult. Experts testified. Documentaries were made. Cassette…

Good News Tuesday opens with small wins: a 15-year-old BMW diesel that needed nothing more than a new air filter, and a Calgary venue tour that put a real wedding date one step closer to real. Then the show pivots to a question worth sitting with. The indie horror film Obsession has made near Star…

Good News Tuesday takes a turn toward the hypothetical this week, and the question is harder than it sounds: if you had one wish and no consequences, what would you actually wish for? The prompt comes from Obsession, an indie horror film made for under a hundred thousand dollars that is outpacing recent Star Wars…

Something changed in your Claude window this week and technology analyst Carmi Levy is here to tell you it was not an accident. It was a decision, made by a government that is not yours, about a tool you depend on. The AI you were using had already been dialed back before it reached you.…

If the idea of riding a motorcycle has been sitting in the back of your head, Lisa Best of CFAX 1070 is the person who will either push you toward it or give you a much more honest picture of what it actually takes. Best has been riding for thirty-five years and teaching for nearly…

Canadian citizenship certificates are being recalled, and immigration lawyer Joel Sandaluk has a message for everyone panicking: surrendering the document does not surrender the status. The harder question is how thousands of people became Canadian citizens without knowing it, why the government is asking for proof back instead of simply auditing the files, and what…

Bob Addison is back, and he’s made some decisions that his wife knows about and his son does not yet. From firing a golf ball bazooka at a fundraising tournament to watching Hockey Night in Canada die after ninety-plus years on the air, Bob’s week has been eventful. The Tommy Hunter deep cut is free…

Tech expert Kris Abel shows up every week with the stories that make you stop and say wait, that’s real? This week he brought three of them, and not one of them requires any imagination to top the last. There is a reason people who follow technology closely never seem surprised by anything anymore. They…

Aaron Hagey-MacKay, investigative content creator behind The Goose Media, did something simple: he searched Alberta separatism on Twitter and checked where the accounts were from. Kenya. India. The United States. Fifteen minutes of looking. What he found is less about separatism than about who profits when Canadians fight with each other, and how little it…

Summer gets easier when you know two things: how to take back your backyard and how to stop your phone from running your night. Andy Baryer, home and technology expert at Handy Andy Media, brings both in the same conversation, and neither fix costs much. The Five-Dollar Mosquito Trap Nobody Told You About A five-gallon…

PBR bull riding is unlike anything else you will sit in an arena and watch, and the reason has nothing to do with the spectacle. Shane Hewitt spent the weekend at the Professional Bull Riders event and came back with an observation that is harder to shake than the backflips and fireworks. In every other…

Every move has a moment where something goes wrong that nobody planned for. The difference between a move you survive and one you are still recovering from three weeks later usually comes down to four things, and none of them are the ones that show up on a moving checklist. If a move is coming,…

Gas prices Canada-wide are dropping this week, and Dan McTeague, President of Canadians for Affordable Energy, is here with the regional breakdown and the reason not to get too comfortable. The ceasefire sent markets into relief mode, but sentiment and supply are two different things, and the global oil shortage that built up over the…

Two political stories landed this week that are worth sitting with, and neither one of them is as simple as it first looks. The Poll That Feels Like Good News Until You Do the Math Fifty-five percent approval sounds strong until you remember it was sixty-three percent two months ago. That sixteen-point swing between Carney’s…

Teaching kids about money starts earlier than most parents think, and Jessica Moorhouse, personal finance author and educator, makes the case that silence is already a lesson. Kids are watching what parents do with money whether the conversation happens or not, and the habits they absorb early tend to follow them into adulthood. The question…

The Tim Hortons Canada ownership debate has been running hot since the Duncan tariff announcement, and Duncan Fulton, Chief Corporate Officer at Tim Hortons, sits down to put real numbers behind the noise. Fifteen hundred Canadian franchise owners operate the restaurants, $1.6 billion flows annually to Canadian suppliers, and the headquarters and leadership team are…

Good News Tuesday is built on a simple idea: when you can’t find the good, sometimes hearing it from someone else is enough to turn you around. This one brings the next NASA moon crew, a child in Nanaimo doing something remarkable at three in the morning, a stolen car with a very large dog…

Good News Tuesday opens with a genuine relationship milestone: assembling four pieces of IKEA furniture in a single afternoon and coming out the other side still engaged. The research backs up why that counts. Psychologists have found that picture-only instructions force constant compromise, trigger questions of trust and competence, and surface exactly how differently two…

Vancouver police Sergeant Craig Reynolds was forty-eight when he died. Bob Addison was at the funeral, and one moment at the very end, a single line from the MC, stopped him cold. This is a Good News Tuesday that earns the name the hard way: through loss, through eight hundred people in a church, and…

Couples and food decisions have a numbers problem: research cited by relationship writer Jen Kirsch puts decision paralysis over dinner at about half of all Canadian couples, and Tony Tedesco says the question underneath the question is almost always about who is carrying the load. Date night gets into the mechanics of why this keeps…

Tech journalist Kris Abel joins Good News Tuesday with three stories that land differently depending on how optimistic you are about the future. Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference revealed a new Siri built on Google’s Gemini technology, with longer conversations, better task planning, and customisable voice and pacing. Apple Intelligence is also reaching back to support…

Aaron Rand, host at CJAD Montreal, joins to break down the political moment Quebec finds itself in heading toward an October election. The Parti Québécois, whose signature issue is separation, is pushing a referendum that almost nobody in Quebec wants, and their latest move is asking Ottawa for forty billion dollars to opt out of…

Cognitive bias researcher and author Davis Carbo joins to unpack one of the most unsettling findings in psychology: changing a single word in how an event is described can make people remember things that never happened. The Loftus and Palmer car crash study from the seventies proved it, and the implications reach into every conversation,…

AI in Canadian prisons is no longer hypothetical. Correctional Service Canada has handed $123,000 to Accenture to pilot the use of artificial intelligence in writing criminal profile reports, the foundational documents that shape how inmates are managed, what programs they access, and how parole decisions get made. Technology analyst Carmi Levy breaks down what that…

Alberta separatists have a long memory for grievances and a short one for results. Matt Gurney, editor at Read the Line, brings a new piece arguing that Alberta conservatives have been one of the most effective political forces in Canadian history, and that the case for separatism ignores twenty years of real, documented wins. Then…

Canadian consumer choices rarely get challenged from the inside, and that is exactly the problem. This conversation starts with recycling bags in Merrickville and ends up somewhere much bigger: why do Canadians keep accepting the options they are handed instead of asking for better ones? From the cars that keep getting larger while European streets…

First time travel to a tropical destination has a way of dismantling opinions held for years, and Ryan O’Donnell arrived in Cabo San Lucas with a full set of them. He wanted experiences, not a beach chair. He wanted castles and roller coasters and history, not chips and a pool. He was wrong, and he…

Home maintenance tips don’t get more overlooked than this one: draining your hot water tank once or twice a year could add years to its life, and almost nobody does it. Andy Baryer from HandyAndyMedia.com learned this the hard way when his tank failed a year past its six-year warranty, and his plumber confirmed the…

Canadian car market selection has never really been a choice, and automotive journalist Lorraine Sommerfeld from http://driving.ca lays out exactly why: Canada represents roughly ten percent of the US market, which means whatever America wants, Canada gets. The conversation starts with Monaco yacht videos and ends somewhere much closer to home. Sommerfeld traces how the…

Canadian content streaming funding has been a fight Canadian broadcasters have been losing for years, and the Monday panel digs into exactly what just happened: the CRTC ordered foreign streaming services to contribute to the Canada Media Fund, the government backed off citing trade irritants, and Spotify sent out a price increase notice for 15%.…

Divorce and child expenses are supposed to be settled in the separation agreement, but financial planner Anita Bruinsma says that document only takes you so far. What it cannot anticipate is the horseback riding hobby, the $300 hockey stick, or the braces one parent books before the other has signed off. http://ClarityOnYourMoney.com contributor Bruinsma maps…

If you’ve ever wondered what you’d actually find if you stopped running from yourself, a darkness retreat is the most direct answer available. No light. No sound. No scroll. No signal that you’re doing it right. Just you, and whatever you’ve been carrying without knowing it. Scott Berman has guided over seven hundred people through…

The middleman is gone. The manager who mentored the new hire, the salesperson with the Rolodex, the person who connected the question to the right answer. That role has been cut from business, from retail, and now from the conversation about AI. The problem is not that AI gives wrong answers. The problem is that…

Trump has faced legal setbacks on tariffs. Forced labour as a justification for new trade measures has never appeared before in Canada-US negotiations. Andrew Caddell says it is a backdoor: a way to keep pressure on Canada and limit trade with China while bypassing the courts that have blocked previous moves. The CUSMA review is…

Six things are competing for your weekend. Three in theatres. Three on streaming. Steve Stebbing has seen all of them and has a clear order of priority. The Wayans Brothers, He-Man, and a Paul Rudd Music Drama Walk Into a Theatre Scary Movie 6 marks the first time the Wayans brothers have touched the franchise…

AI can draft a resume. It can help translate one career into the language of another. What it cannot do, according to career development leader Candy Ho, is connect the dots of a life and help someone talk about themselves effectively in a room with another human being. The more overlooked problem is on the…

Social media does not show relationship conflicts, insecurity, ordinary bodies, or real intimacy. It shows curated vacations, idealized bodies, and romantic gestures. Dr. Laurie Betito calls it the comparison trap: measuring your actual relationship against someone else’s highly edited reality, then wondering why yours falls short. The Highlight Reel Affecting Your Expectations Social media shapes…

Canada’s national AI strategy is optimistic, overdue, and built on a premise Vass Bednar says is materially incorrect: that low public trust in AI is a literacy problem that more access will fix. Bednar argues trust is low because the product came to market too early, makes promises it cannot keep, and operates without the…

The clip economy is not just about shorter videos. It is about a generation forming opinions, making arguments, and consuming news from content that has been stripped of everything that makes it accurate. Mohit Rajhans calls it the clip economy: a media environment where a four-minute subway hot take and a 45-minute expert interview compete…

The Price is Right changed hosts in 2007 for the first time in over thirty years, and a man from Grand Prairie, Alberta made it memorable for Canadians before the year was out. Patrice Massa missed his showcase bid by one dollar. The Throwback Thursday conversation digs into what that means, what he walked away…

Canadian baby formula prices are up 70% in five years. There are still shortages. And the only plant producing baby formula in Canada ships most of what it makes to China and the United States. That plant cost $380 million to build. Canadian taxpayers confirmed at least $48 million of that. The company that owns…

Protein added to chips. Protein added to milk that already has protein. A Costco chocolate milk that flies off the shelves. The marketing is working, but the nutrition math is messier than the labels suggest. Alyssa B from http://Nourished.ca cuts through the noise with a number: one gram of protein per pound of bodyweight is…

Alberta’s Premier put a number on separation this week: $170 billion in federal debt as Alberta’s opening share, before accounting for everything the federal government currently handles. Rob Breakenridge says a new poll shows more Canadians now view Alberta leaving as more damaging to the economy than Quebec leaving. The math is starting to land.…

In 2007, Stephen Harper was leading a conservative minority government, George W. Bush was in his second term, and Afghanistan was dominating the news. Politicians were speaking about Arctic sovereignty without calling each other names. Nothing was done about it then either. The average Canadian home cost $300,000. Weekly groceries ran $140 to $170. Gas…

The Price is Right is the definition of game show in most people’s heads, and according to BuzzerBlog’s Cory Anotado, that didn’t happen by accident. Hidden inside Cliffhangers, one of the show’s most dramatic pricing games, is a trick Bob Barker built in specifically for loyal viewers. The first item runs around $25, the second…

Canadian films are landing at the box office, and the question nobody expected to be asking is whether this country is ready to actually celebrate the people who made them. The Knight Who Should Be LutherKing Charles tapped Idris Elba on the shoulders with a ceremonial sword this week, making him Sir Idris — recognized…

Internet memes turned 2007 into year zero — and the evidence starts with a cat, a cheeseburger, and intentionally terrible spelling. Ed Conroy connects the cultural nostalgia of Bob Barker’s final Price Is Right era to the moment the internet stopped being a place you explored and became a place four corporations manage. Something Awful,…

Bob Dylan is 85 and just announced more tour dates. The Beach Boys are out with Mike Love at 85. Paul Simon is 84, Randy Bachman is 82, Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton are both 80. They are all on the road this summer, and concert ticket prices for all of them keep climbing. Music…

The optimization industry needs one thing before it can sell you anything: your belief that you are not enough. Tony Tedesco has decided not to provide it. Tony talks through what actually earns his attention in a feed built to amplify inadequacy, and it is not the cabbage diet or the step counter. It is…

Canada economy recession talk is landing at the same moment a beloved discount chain is rising from the ashes of Hudson’s Bay. The hosts are not sure that is a coincidence. Zellers, Loyalty Points, and the Nostalgia Economy A Quebec retail group has acquired the Zellers name, logo, and Zeddy the bear, and plans to…

Oil inventories are at historic lows. Demand is strong. The price keeps dropping. Dan McTeague says the futures market is being driven by headlines, not reality, and the pain at the pump is far from over. Dan breaks down why a litre of diesel costs forty cents more in Ontario than Alberta, why the weak…

Zellers relaunch Canada has two new Ontario locations and a plan to go national slowly. Bruce Winder has questions about whether slowly is fast enough. Bruce traces the structural challenges facing the new Zellers: limited buying power at three locations, a retail landscape where every major competitor has already absorbed the categories Zellers is re-entering,…

Skinwalker Ranch is one of the most surveilled properties on earth. Dr. Lee Kuhnle wants to know why the footage never quite delivers. Lee walks through decades of ownership, research, and television production, including the defence-funded program that quietly paid for cryptid hunting while telling Congress it was doing something else. He also names the…

Optimization culture sold itself as a tool. Tony Chapman says it became a weapon, and the target is your sense of worth. Tony draws a direct line from fear-based marketing to the anxiety that now runs through everyday decisions about steps, macros, posting schedules, and productivity. The promise is always the same: follow the playbook…

Black hole TON 618 looks beautiful in the viral image. Greg Fish wants to talk about what it would actually do to the clouds, the oceans, and everything in between. Greg breaks down why a black hole produces more light than the sun, how an accretion disc accelerates matter to near light speed before obliterating…

Six-year-olds who could not tell time. A baseline test confirming it. Then two sessions with performance visual artists teaching through play and joy. Every child could tell the time. Every child moved up an attainment bracket. Dr. Jacqueline Harding ran that experiment, and the result is not a curiosity. It is a blueprint. When children…

Children laughter and play turn out to be building something permanent. The Saturday morning forts, the trunk full of random props that turned into a pirate ship, the Roadrunner that never got caught. None of it was wasted time. Tony has an Oscar the Grouch tattoo and a theory about reply-all emails. He still calls…

Good news Tuesday Canada brings Krista Richard out of Moncton, New Brunswick, where her Bikes and Trikes for Everyone program has put wheels under thousands of kids over 14 years. She collects them, fixes them, and sends them out the door. That is the whole program. The phones and texts fill in the rest. Arthur…

Ottawa nostalgia and urban development collide when the place that held your childhood firsts starts coming down by machine. Stefan Keyes grew up in Ottawa’s West End, close enough to walk to Westgate Shopping Centre. He watched his first movie there. He got his first passport photo there. He has not been inside in years…

Three robots walked into the show tonight – all of them fun. One is in a university cafeteria doing something 2.5 million times that humans have never quite managed to do consistently. One is in a litter box, quietly learning things. And one was built in someone’s garage from plans posted online, for a reason…

A Canadian peacekeeper deploys to Croatia in 1993 to separate armies that want nothing to do with peace. He comes home carrying wounds nobody can see. Decades later, a daughter he never knew existed makes her way across the country to find him. The Peace Thieves is Brent Van Staalduinen’s sixth novel, built around a…

Canada is technically in a recession and the prime minister won’t say the word. Matt Gurney thinks the more important conversation is the one hiding underneath it. For years, the answer to flat economic productivity was simple: put more people in the country. More people at Tim Hortons, more people at Canadian Tire, more dollars…

Bob Addison went back to read the label on a six-foot Canada Day flag at Costco. Made in Canada, imported fabric, pole and bracket from China. Fifty dollars. The irony runs deeper when you consider Canada probably sold them the coal that fired the furnace that made the pole. That observation opens into something the…

Counterfeit sports jerseys are everywhere, and the reasons people buy them are more complicated than the law makes room for. The conversation draws a hard line between two kinds of fakes. A counterfeit Rolex or a fake designer bag is about passing yourself off as something you’re not. A fake jersey is about wanting to…

From wildflower yards to self-cleaning robot vacuums, this week’s DIY conversation goes places you won’t expect. The neighbours want a perfect lawn. The bees want you to stop. Chaos gardening is the TikTok trend where you scatter wildflower seeds and let mother nature take over — no mowing, no maintenance, full pollinator habitat. Andy Baryer…

A new study on stress and memory just landed — and it reframes what’s actually happening in your brain when you blank at the worst possible time. The research shows that acute stress doesn’t just make recall harder. It limits how the brain forms associations between new memories as they’re being built. Dr. Samantha Yammine…

A technical recession, a denied emergency debate, and a prime minister who promised less red tape. The Monday panel takes stock of where things actually stand. Showing up is not the same as delivering. Mark Carney visited a Toronto synagogue to speak directly to the Jewish community after protests in Montreal included nooses and effigies…

Before the price increase, young Canadians were already skipping condoms. Now the math gets harder. Let’s Stop AIDS surveys young people across Canada every year. The numbers from the most recent Sex Lives Report are not what most people expect: roughly half of sexually active youth did not use a condom the last time they…

Swiping past someone because their profile opens with a political slogan is now a dating strategy — and it might be the rational one. Tony Tedesco does it. Not because he disagrees, but because leading with that energy is a preview of every conversation to come. He’s seen what happens when political differences stop being…

Toronto Police just pulled three and a half million dollars worth of counterfeit jerseys out of a west-end warehouse, and the story of how it happened says more about who runs this city right now than the bust itself. It was not a tip from a concerned citizen. A lawyer retained by a legitimate sports…

Thrift store summer is not a trend. It is a rational response to the cost of everything right now. Eighty-three percent of Albertans say thrifting makes economic sense given current conditions, and Habitat for Humanity Restore locations in Calgary are seeing ten percent more foot traffic than last year. The secondhand orbit has expanded well…

Friday night news that earns its place at the table: a truck driver hauled a trailer from Embrun to Ottawa missing ten of its twelve wheels, with no brakes and an unsecured fastener on the two that remained. He was headed to a scrapyard. Police found him first. Elsewhere, a man launched a speedboat off…

Claude Lemieux death hit Quebec like a loss in the family. Because for francophones across the province, that is exactly what it was. Andrew Caddell was in Kamaraska when the news landed. He describes watching Lemieux carry the torch into the rink during game three, the cheer that followed, and what it meant to see…

Love as a verb is not a metaphor. According to Dr. Laurie Betito, it is the only definition that actually sustains a relationship. Saying I love you is easy. The actions behind it, reliability, consistency, listening, showing up during the hard moments, are what create emotional safety and trust over time. When Feeling In Love…

What to watch this weekend starts with a nineteen-year-old YouTuber who turned an internet horror phenomenon into a feature film for A24. Backrooms, directed by Kane Parsons, drops a furniture store owner into an infinite maze of yellow rooms and builds from there. Then Tuner makes the case for one of the year’s best performances,…

Canada AI policy has a tell. The country boasts about what it is going to do. It does not yet have victories to boast about. Mohit Rajhans lays out what is actually missing: no unified national framework, no track record of nurturing technology at pace with even smaller European nations, and a governance model still…

Critical thinking is not a soft skill. It is the skill. And right now, something is eroding it in a generation that never learned to live without AI. Dr. Perry Adler has spent decades working with teenagers. What he is seeing now is different. Kids arriving despondent about their futures, convinced AI will take their…

Canadian comedy shows anchor Throwback Thursday 2001, and the hosts want to know which ones belong on the list. Trailer Park Boys, Shoresy, Kids in the Hall, Red Green, and This Hour Has 22 Minutes are all in the conversation. Trailer Park Boys started as a gritty pilot with hard drugs and handguns before becoming…

Food safety is the subject and it starts with pizza pops. Two outbreaks in three years: one E. coli, one salmonella. Dr. Keith Warriner explains how something most people assume is safe to cook at home went wrong twice. The microwave is the common thread in the E. coli case. Microwaves heat unevenly, leaving cold…

Alberta separatism is the subject and the Premiers’ Conference in Manitoba just gave it a flashpoint. Danielle Smith and Wab Kinew had an exchange that nobody in the room expected. The court ruling that killed the separatist petition hinges on the constitutional duty to consult First Nations. Alberta is challenging that ruling in court. Kinew’s…

Throwback Thursday 2001 and the best Canadian comedy shows debate is louder than it sounds. Corner Gas has a case. So does SCTV. So does something from Calgary that only rock radio people from that era fully understand. There is a speech from 2001 about a small Canadian town and a lot of strangers that…

Chicken prices in Canada are about to get worse. Sylvain Charlebois visited a processing plant today and had lunch with the CEO. They ate chicken. Two hundred and fifty chickens are harvested per minute at this facility. Canada’s supply management system missed its production quota twelve times out of the last fourteen cycles. Whole chicken…

Trailer Park Boys reaches 182 countries on Netflix. Randy’s Cheeseburger Picnic Comedy Tour reaches 14 cities across Ontario and Quebec this summer. Pat Roach is driving between them in an RV. The show includes TPB trivia, cheeseburger picnic contests, songs, and audience participation. Hecklers are welcomed. A woman who had never seen Trailer Park Boys…

Montreal Canadiens playoffs took an unexpected turn before anyone predicted them happening at all. Victor Findlay has called every game of this run in English on TSN Radio Montreal and still finds it hard to believe. In December 2024 the Habs were at the bottom of the conference. By spring 2026 they are in the…

Entertainment news covers a boffo return to movie theatres, the first James Bond video game in over a decade, and a new Dustin Hoffman film about a piano tuner who becomes a safe cracker. Bond Has a New Video Game. The Concern Is What Amazon Does With Him Next.Richard Crouse makes the case that 2026…

Canadian comedy history runs deeper than most people realise. Ed Conroy has a working theory about two parallel traditions running since 1970, and Trailer Park Boys sits at the end of one of them. The first tradition is hoser comedy, which started not with the McKenzie Brothers but with a 1970 film called Goin Down…

Online shopping returns take a strange turn in tonight’s opener. A woman ordered five-hundred-dollar jeans from Holt Renfrew. The store sent the wrong pair. She sued for three hundred and thirty dollars in compensation for the inconvenience of completing the return. The conversation moves to return habits generally and how cheap online platforms changed the…

AI subscription costs are changing and not in the direction anyone hoped. The pay-by-workload model is replacing the all-you-can-eat subscription, and it looks a lot like the early internet. Carmi Levy maps the problem precisely. You replace a fifty-thousand-dollar human assistant with AI at fifteen thousand. The AI company doubles the price. Features move behind…

Punk rock and its community are the subject, and the perspective comes from someone who has been in it for forty-six years. Paul Gott started the Montreal band the Ripcordz in 1980 thinking he was already too old for it. Seventeen albums, three thousand shows, and a view of punk that starts with the crowd.…

Online shopping returns open the conversation and land somewhere unexpected. The Holt Renfrew jeans story, five hundred dollars, wrong pair sent, three hundred and thirty dollars in compensation sought in court, is the starting point. The real argument underneath it is about being heard. Jamie Ellerton has not eaten a Domino’s pizza since the day…

UFO orbs are the subject and the newly released US government files go back further than most people realize. The phenomenon predates flying saucers by years. WWII Allied pilots called them Foo Fighters: strange lights and orbs following aircraft over Europe and the Pacific. The Air Force took the reports seriously and launched investigations that…

Artificial general intelligence is what AI companies say they are building. Engineered super children are Silicon Valley’s plan for when that AI takes over. Greg Fish explains why both ideas have the same problem. CRISPR can edit one gene at a time. Human eyes are controlled by around six hundred genes. The immune system blocks…

Canada military procurement made a move this week. Canada is looking to buy a surveillance plane built on a Bombardier airframe with Saab technology. Richard Shimooka says the purchase could be scrapped. The US asked Canada to stop borrowing American assets for northern defence. But the integrated North American aerospace defence network runs at a…

Heavy metal community is the subject and the argument is simple. The music sounds aggressive. The culture is not. Ryan O’Donnell has been to hundreds of shows and never seen a mosh pit that did not stop when someone fell. At all-ages shows, fifteen-year-olds already know to do it. It is not something you learn…

Good News Tuesday lands on one story that earns the name more than most. A six-year-old named Levi has leukemia and could not be surrounded by people for his birthday. His family posted about it on TikTok. A thousand people showed up for a birthday parade: the National Guard, neighboring police, the local fire department,…

Kids recess in Canada has no legal protection. No legislation. Some schools have it. Some do not. A researcher who has been in this field for twenty-five years says that matters more right now than it ever has. The mental health case is direct: anxiety, isolation, lack of movement, and screen time are already pulling…

Parenting adult kids is the subject and it starts with a phone call. Your daughter says she might come visit. The answer to might is just tell me when. Jerry Agar’s daughter is an athletic therapist touring North America with theater productions, fixing circus performers and dancers between show runs and dropping in when the…

Kids metal music has a home and it is called Howdytoons. Mike Whitla started writing heavy songs about dinosaurs for his young children in 2010, realised the words brachiosaurus were basically already a song, and kept going until there were seasons of animated content on YouTube and a growing international fanbase of kids who arrived…

Kids learning music rarely goes the way anyone plans. Bob Addison’s son had never touched an instrument until September. It was mandatory. None of that matters now. The bass clarinet was not the cheapest option. He picked it, practiced until it filled the house, chose it as next year’s elective, and turned a Kendrick-to-Pink-Floyd musical…

Canada right track is the question one year out from the election. Matt Gurney’s assessment is that we are more or less where he worried we would be. A poll showing almost half of Canadians think things are going well is being presented as an optimism surge. Matt Gurney’s read is that the case for…

Tech news this week includes a digital Ozzy Osbourne available for commercial licensing, a Ferrari that looks like an Apple product, and a Canadian breakthrough in early skin cancer detection. HyperReal, the company behind the Tupac hologram, partnered with the Osbourne family to build an AI Ozzy that replicates his voice, mannerisms, and speech patterns.…

Canadian innovation has a cost problem almost nobody talks about. Not the cost of building things, but the cost of giving them away after they work. Jim Balsillie’s argument is pointed: Canadian policy is captured by foreign corporate interests and still built on a 1970s production economy model. The result is that Canada funds the…

The Sears catalog is having a moment online and it opened up something bigger. The difference between what shopping used to feel like and what it has become. Physical department stores had escalators and sandwich bars and crowds and something to discover. The catalog let you circle what you wanted, dog-ear the page, and hand…

DIY and tech tips cover a lot of ground this week, from what to do with grass clippings to what is quietly running inside the AI toy your kid wants. The Spring Yard Tips Worth Knowing Before the Season Gets AwayPressure washing nozzle selection, grass clippings repurposed as mulch and DIY fertilizer tea, and a…

Sears nostalgia hit the internet this week and the hosts are not entirely buying the story being told. A viral post. A real set of numbers. And a question worth asking more carefully. The post says Sears paid enough to live with dignity and then corporations took it all. The problem: Sears went bankrupt. Twelve…

Divorce starts this conversation and doesn’t let go. A viral post about resting on a Saturday for the first time in eight years opens something much more uncomfortable: the question of when we actually decide to change. Jen Kirsch has been covering relationships for years and is navigating her own split. Her honest take on…

Canadian farming costs don’t come with press releases or ribbon cuttings. Saskatchewan alone puts eleven billion dollars into the ground each spring on one chance to get it right. The Quiet Billion-Dollar Bet Saskatchewan Farmers Make Every SpringFamily farms across Saskatchewan are investing well over a million dollars per operation before a single crop comes…

Canada’s automotive industry has been in decline for twenty-five years, and the first argument in this conversation is that the name itself is part of the problem. Canada does not own a car company. It holds about ten percent of North American auto sales, gets told what to build and when, and sits in what…

Mental health in Canada carries a price tag most people have never heard. $180 billion every year, and the lead author of the report that produced that number says it is an underestimate because the data gaps make the full picture impossible to capture. $110 billion of that cost lands directly on employers through lost…

Divorce finances start with a separation agreement and end somewhere much more expensive. The legal framework splits assets fairly. Fair and affordable turn out to be two different things. The family home is where this lands hardest. One parent keeps the house for the kids’ stability, the other takes the savings. Both walk away with…

Canadian expressions are invisible until someone from outside names them. With F1 weekend pulling visitors into Montreal from around the world, the hosts asked the question: what do we say that sounds completely normal to us and completely baffling to everyone else? “Yeah, no” came up first. It sounds like disagreement. It is agreement. One…

Alberta’s separation talk is getting louder, and a man who organized Quebec’s 1980 referendum is watching closely. Andrew Caddell has seen this before. The phrases are familiar. The math is not. He organized on the ground and found the people running the movement were nothing like the people in the legislature. That gap mattered in…

Three weird news stories make up this episode, and each one gets worse the more you think about it. A Texas man drove a Cybertruck into a lake. His citation was for not having a boat licence. A Michigan couple’s interior security camera caught their landlord in their home doing something several prosecutors and defense…

What to watch this weekend covers six picks and a real argument: whether audiences have been permanently conditioned out of blockbuster excitement, with a new Star Wars in theatres as the test case. Horror on the Highway and a Heist That Starts With Demi MoorePassenger follows a van life couple who stop at a gruesome…

Humans in the loop only works as a safeguard if the humans know they are in one. Right now, across industries, most of them do not. Mohit Rajhans points to a coffee chain that pulled its AI automation entirely after customers got wrong information because no one was checking the inventory. That is not a…

Canada has an airport drug smuggling problem, and it starts with the people loading your bags. Avery Haines found that corrupt employees have been switching bag tags, routing narcotics through the luggage of ordinary travelers who have no idea. Sixteen of 17 bag tag switching cases traced back to Pearson. Hells Angels, Mexican cartels, and…

iCloud phishing scams are targeting Canadians with messages so convincing they fooled a cybersecurity analyst’s own mother. The pitch is simple: your storage is full, pay four dollars or lose your photos. One click hands scammers your account, your contacts, your messages, and your credit card. There is no storage. There is no Apple on…

1983 brought Mario, the chicken nugget, and the Swatch Watch. A trivia game on air reveals all of them and gets one answer spectacularly wrong. The clues come one at a time: shoulder pads as the worst fashion trend, Ford Escort as the best-selling car, the chicken nugget as the food debut of the year.…

Swatch watch saved the Swiss watch industry in 1983. Forty-plus years later, a Swatch collaboration just made an Audemars Piguet accessible to mere mortals. A Royal Oak from Audemars Piguet starts at $35,000 Canadian and you cannot just walk into a store and buy one. The Swatch collaboration changes that. Colin Potts, Executive Director of…

Food inflation in Canada has a hidden driver nobody is talking about. Ontario just charged food manufacturers a billion dollars through it. You are paying that bill. The Extended Producer Responsibility fee was designed to push the food industry toward greener packaging. Instead, Dr. Sylvain Charlebois says it created a patchwork of uncoordinated provincial systems…

Polymarket lets you bet on wars, missile strikes, and how many soldiers will die. A finance professor says it is gambling, not a market, and the difference matters. Vincent Grégoire, Canada Research Chair in Finance and Technology at HEC Montréal, says Polymarket is structured like a market but functions like gambling. You buy yes or…

Alberta separation is no longer just a whisper. A court-blocked petition, a rushed committee meeting, and a premier’s televised address are all arriving at once. Rob Breakenridge says the court stepped in last week and killed the separatist petition, leaving the premier with a decision: walk away or escalate. The Forever Canadian anti-separatist petition had…

Swatch watch was born in 1983. In 2026, people are lining up at 5am at malls across Canada to buy one they could just wait for. The Swatch collaboration with Audemars Piguet produced a $560 Canadian pocket watch. It is not limited. More are coming. On eBay, someone listed one for 3,000 British pounds. At…

Star Wars is back on the big screen, and so is a fight over who gets to tell your story when you’re famous. Nobody Told Billy Joel the Movie Was HappeningStephen Colbert is leaving with class, according to Richard Crouse, but the format itself isn’t going anywhere. Billy Joel has been warning filmmakers since 2021…

Swatch watches turned a timekeeping device into a fashion statement. Ed Conroy had three or four lined up on his desk in grade three and felt like a high roller. Post-COVID, every kid at a high school exit looks the same: gray sweatpants, black hoodie. Ed Conroy calls it invasion of the body snatchers. The…

A million dollars used to change everything. One Survivor winner turned theirs into $50,000 of debt. A CTV News piece tracking what Survivor winners did with their prize money put the question on air. Audience texts came fast: pay off the mortgage, clear the family debt, buy a house. On air, the answers split. One…

Airport security workers were arrested by the RCMP for swapping bag tags with drug shipments. The W5 investigation is only the beginning of the conversation. What a Million Dollars Actually Buys You The million-dollar question gets specific answers on air. Lindsay Broadhead would save, travel, and buy killer shoes. Jamie Ellerton would pay off the…

Spy gifts aren’t a conspiracy theory. A coin, a carved eagle, or a lanyard can all carry tracking devices. The White House delegation to China reportedly kept all received gifts separate rather than bringing them home. Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former CSIS senior intelligence officer, calls it a good counterintelligence reflex. His preference: examine the gifts…

COINTELPRO is one of the largest government surveillance programs in American history. A group of ordinary people found the proof by picking the locks. The Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI spent months preparing a break-in at a Pennsylvania field office in 1971. One member learned lock picking through a mail-order course. Another spent weeks…

A million dollars won on Survivor, and Danny Boatwright spent $10,000 of it on a new hip for his dog. He calls it the best money he ever spent. Season 3 winner Ethan Zohn co-founded Grassroot Soccer after two former teammates from a Zimbabwean football club approached him post-win. The charity has spent two decades…

AI resume screening is not the reason your application disappeared. But what’s actually blocking you is almost worse. Shelley Billinghurst surveyed Canadian employers and found over 80% are not using AI to filter candidates at the front end. Kim Wilkinson asked nearly 2,000 job seekers the same question from the other direction. Almost 100% believe…

Nihilism says nothing is special. Greg Fish says that is the most freeing idea in philosophy, and the most misunderstood. Greg Fish argues that the real source of depression and anxiety is not nihilism but the opposite: the belief that you have a special purpose and the crushing weight of never finding it. If there…

Ozempic side effects are starting to tell a story that the billions of dollars in prescriptions written haven’t caught up to yet. Tony Chapman has been paying attention. The drug eats into bone mass and muscle mass, Chapman says, and when you stop, the weight returns without the skeleton to support it. His view is…

Good News Tuesday delivers rare validation that the suspicious-looking settlement email was actually legitimate, and $50 in bread money just landed in a co-host’s account. The Canadian bread price-fixing class action against major grocery chains has started paying out, and a co-host reports his $50 arrived via direct deposit. The team recalls the signup process…

Smart contact lenses are in prototype, gardening pros have a trick nobody ever taught you, and the term glass holes is back. A tech and DIY expert connects all of it. **He Started Playing Guitar Because of Ritchie Valens. His Favourite Cars Are From That Same Era.** Andy says his love of 1950s cars and…

Good News Tuesday reaches into the remarkable with a dog missing for two years, a wild bird that found its human, and a host who cannot wait for the visit months in the making. Joel bought a bulldog at 19 after saving up for years and it became part of the family. Two and a…

Canada military spending has been inadequate for so long that a defence analyst says the country won’t have meaningful new capability until 2035. Richard Shimooka says the US pause on the Permanent Joint Board of Defense is less alarming than it looks, and points out the board has been declining in relevance for decades while…

ChatGPT bank account access is rolling out to select US users, and a tech journalist says Canada is next. His breaking news on next-gen Google Glass is the other story to watch this week. Kris Abel covers OpenAI’s move to let ChatGPT connect to your bank account for conversational financial advice. He frames the question…

Classic cars are about more than chrome and horsepower, and an automotive journalist says the ones that make people pull over are the ones attached to a memory. Lorraine Sommerfeld says a Gremlin club and a Nova club both exist, not because those were great cars by any standard, but because someone’s mom drove one.…

Snowbirds Tutor jets have one season of flying left after this one, and a pilot says the years between the last Tutor flight and the replacement arriving could stretch well into the next decade. John Tory Jr. says the world’s top air show teams are all jets, and the Snowbirds’ Tutors were iconic for what…

Birth family connections don’t always start with a meeting, and a radio contributor says the phone call that changed his life happened almost twenty years ago. Bob Addison says he is adopted and found out about his birth family only when his birth mother was already dying. He never met her, but they spoke by…

Canada defence spending has been a broken promise for decades, and a political journalist says the US pausing a joint defence board is just the beginning of what’s coming. Matt Gurney says the Permanent Joint Board of Defense, a Canada-US committee dating back to 1940, has been paused explicitly because of Canada’s failure to meet…

Tipping culture has a word problem. The receipt says gratuity. The machine says 18. Somewhere between those two things, the meaning changed. The hosts dig into what it means when muscle memory sends you to 18% because that’s where 15% used to be. Canadians are pushing back, and the team says the reason isn’t stinginess.…

Tipping culture is being redesigned, and a hospitality professor says the first real test is already happening at restaurants near you. Wayne Smith says tipping and non-tipping sections are being beta tested now, giving customers a choice that changes the nature of the transaction entirely. Pick the tipping section and you get full table service.…

Tipping in Quebec had a problem, so the government passed a law. The first tip option is now higher than it was before the law existed. The old system calculated tips on top of Quebec’s 15% sales tax, pushing a stated 15% tip to roughly 17.5% in practice. The law banned that and required the…

What to watch this weekend just got a lot more specific, and a film critic from Penticton has already done the scrolling for you. The Movie That Could Make Awards History for Horror Obsession is a Blumhouse debut that Stebbing calls wildly unpredictable, built around a man whose wish for his coworker’s love comes true…

Secrets in relationships aren’t always what they look like, and a clinical psychologist says the distinction between privacy and secrecy could be the most important conversation a couple never has. Deleting Messages Is Not Privacy. A Psychologist Draws the Line Dr. Laurie Betito says privacy protects individuality and is necessary even in close relationships, while…

Peptide supplements are flooding the internet with promises about weight loss and joint repair. A physician says the science behind almost all of them stops at a Petri dish. Dr. Mitch Shulman says the gold standard for knowing whether anything works is a double-blind placebo-controlled randomized trial, and none of the substances being touted online…

Boys falling behind in school often starts before anyone thinks to look, and a mental health professor says the gap begins in kindergarten. Calissa Ngozi says girls’ brains develop faster, giving them social and emotional reasoning that boys need significantly more time to build. She confirms that full brain development doesn’t complete until around 25.…

Shadow AI is a one-click liability, and a tech consultant says most employers have no idea how deep it already goes inside their own organizations. Mohit Rajhans says employees are uploading pricing structures, proprietary documents, and competitive bid information to unvetted AI tools without understanding the security implications. Some of those tools have already shut…

Barbecue season is officially open, and the question on the table is whether convenience has taken the soul out of lighting one up. The team is at a crossroads on this. One host has switched from natural gas to a wood pellet grill and discovered that a Wi-Fi attachment can control temperature from the couch…

Mount St. Helens erupted 46 years ago this weekend, and the mountain did not blow its top. It blew its side, and people as far away as Lethbridge, Alberta felt what that meant. Harry R. Truman was 83 years old and refused to leave Spirit Lake Lodge. He believed the volcano would blow straight up,…

Dunkin’ Donuts expanding into Canada is not just a brand story. It is a bet that Tim Hortons is more vulnerable than it looks. Tim Hortons has been slowing financially and leaning on celebrity marketing at exactly the moment consumers are walking away from the $20 fast food burger in favour of fast casual dining…

Pellet smoker season is here, and whether you’re new to the grill or years in, there are fundamentals most people skip. Ted Reader has been cooking over live fire his whole life. He’s got the tips that change everything. The smoke mistake almost everyone makes: too much wood, too long. Reader says all your flavour…

Volcanoes in Canada last erupted 150 years ago. That fact should not be as reassuring as it sounds. George Kourounis makes his living inside craters and has thoughts on the difference between dormant and quiet. He has been on ropes 400 meters down inside active craters, dodging lava in the air, working with scientists in…

Alberta pipeline talks are coming to a head, with a major announcement expected that will test whether what has been promised has anything behind it. The Prime Minister is arriving in Alberta to stand alongside Premier Danielle Smith and announce the next phase of their energy agreement, including a pipeline proposal the federal government has…

Montreal Grand Prix weekend is coming, and one particular group of workers is planning not to show up for it. According to the Montreal Gazette, exotic dancers in the city are planning to walk off the job on one of their busiest weekends of the year, demanding to be recognized as employees with the same…

Stephen Colbert is leaving CBS on May 21st, comedy is under a microscope, and there is a horror movie in theaters right now that arrives from a completely unexpected direction. Comedy’s Hardest SecretThe Kevin Hart roast is the entry point, but the real question is whether audiences now need to be shocked to laugh. The…

Mount St. Helens erupted on May 18, 1980, and it did not blow its top. It blew its side, and the wall of water and debris that followed changed everything for everyone below it. In Canada, ash fell on cars in Kamloops and the cloud reached Lethbridge. Victoria and Vancouver felt a shockwave through their…

Canadian community does not always look the way you expect it to. Sometimes it is 21 men eating eggs at seven in the morning on garbage day, no agenda, no minutes, just life. The group has been running for 17 years in a village where strangers stop to introduce themselves on the street. The newest…

Gambling advertising in Canada is targeting the demographic least equipped to resist it. Steve Joordens explains exactly why, and what two bills in Parliament are trying to do about it. The brain science matters here. The limbic system, which chases rewards and makes gambling feel exciting, develops early. The frontal lobes, which apply judgment and…

Canadian life satisfaction is measuring something real and its provincial variation tells a more complicated story than any single headline can carry. The Astronauts Came Back. The Panel Asks Who Should Be Doing the Listening.The Artemis astronauts met Canada’s Prime Minister this week and the panel pushes on the moment. Broadhead says real leadership cascades…

Declassified UFO files released by the Pentagon on May 8th look explosive on the surface. Nathan Radke spent the better part of his weekend reading through them and came back with something more complicated. The 162 files from the FBI, Air Force, and CIA include official memos and genuinely strange material, but also newspaper clippings,…

Sports betting did not arrive to replace gambling. It arrived to replace the word. One listener’s text put a fine point on it: kids watching sports with their parents should be picking up lessons about teamwork, not learning what a parlay means. That text is the door into something much bigger: how gambling got rebranded,…

Contagious yawning remains one of the most studied and least understood reflexes in human biology. A new finding about yawning in the womb just made the mystery harder to explain. Thirty-eight pregnant women at 28 to 32 weeks watched videos and images designed to trigger a yawn. Within 90 seconds of the mother yawning, the…

Quantum computers could break the encryption protecting every cryptocurrency on the planet. That is not a distant theory. It is an active scramble. Blockchains link transactions through cryptographic algorithms built on large prime numbers. A quantum computer does not brute force those numbers the way a classical machine does. It runs every probability at once…

Dunkin’ Donuts Canada is happening: a master franchise has been secured with plans to open one location per week up to 200. Tony Chapman has questions. The operator already owns Second Cup and Milestones. Chapman’s read: look at how Second Cup has performed against Starbucks and Tim Hortons and ask whether the same team is…

Alberta voter data leak is the story Matt Gurney says everyone is trying to minimize. The fake names baked into the voter list have already identified who did it. What happened next is the problem. The “it’s just a phone book” argument is the one Gurney refuses to let stand. Phone books had an opt-out…

Dunkin’ Donuts is coming back to Canada, a Canadian chain is bringing it in, and the team has thoughts on what this does to the Starbucks and Tim Hortons of the world. The opening question is what actually makes a great concert. The answer has less to do with the headliner than most people assume.…

Good news Tuesday comes from a simple observation: the bad is loud and the good needs to be found. Two stories this week prove the finding is worth the effort. The first: a pair of adult kids, 19 and 21, drove to Edmonton out of the blue to see their grandfather, who has not been…

Blue dot fever is the new term for half-empty arenas and cancelled concerts. The data behind it is specific and the team has the numbers. Concert ticket prices for the top 100 global tours went up 37.2 percent between 2019 and 2025. Inflation over the same period was 21 percent. The prices never came back…

What makes a good concert is a question Kelly Alexander answers with a specific recent example. The show felt, she says, like being taken to church. Nothing about that had to do with the lighting cues. The artist was genuinely present, talked to the crowd, chose an intimate venue over a larger arena, and made…

Star Wars trading cards were fun in 1977. One of them just sold at auction for $687,500. The seller did not have the Canadian bilingual version with nicks. Kris Abel has the Luke Skywalker card, the first in the 1977 Topps series. His is the Canadian edition, printed with both English and French text, and…

Butterfly population decline is measurable, documented, and connected to something most people eat every day. Federico Riva of Carleton University helped lead a global analysis to figure out how bad it actually is. The UK has been counting butterflies since 1976. North America and Europe show clear declining trends. The tropical world is largely unmapped.…

FIFA World Cup 2026 is landing in Canada at a moment when ticket prices are disconnected from what fans are actually willing to pay. Bob Addison has been to Euro 2024. He knows the difference. Vancouver’s cheapest group stage ticket opened at $777. Knockout games are $800 a seat in Seattle. Prices have gone up…

Stress and burnout start with a word. Dr. Sohan Mansingh says should is the word. It carries shame, it carries guilt, and it keeps people exactly where they don’t want to be. The deeper issue is the nervous system. Mansingh points to hormesis, the kind of stress that produces positive health outcomes, things like exercise,…

Generational trend names are everywhere, and the argument on the table is whether they reflect real experiences or just make it easier to stop trying. Life stretching. Quiet quitting. Bare minimum Mondays. At some point, the label becomes the permission slip. The team digs into which ones hold up and which ones are just participation…

AI home projects are changing how people tackle everything from clogged sinks to room redesigns. The question of who controls the technology making that possible is a lot more complicated. Your Wrench Now Has a Co-Pilot Gen Z and millennials are leading a shift away from YouTube tutorials and toward ChatGPT for home fixes. Baryer…

Relationship expectations are being shaped by a TikTok trend that tells you your partner should anticipate everything, no asking required. Tony Tedesco calls it emotional mind reading dressed up as romance. Jen Kirsch says the problem is simpler: people just want to feel seen. Tedesco’s argument is that the expectation almost always falls on one…

Buying a home Canada feels impossible until someone sits down and actually runs the numbers with you. Jessica Moorhouse starts with the wishlist, then the mortgage broker, then the reality check. The first trap she names is the forever home. The belief that the first place has to be permanent and perfect, Moorhouse says, puts…

Housing affordability has a policy blind spot, and second time home buyers are falling right through it. The assumption is that every young buyer is a first-time buyer. But that’s not who’s stuck. Mike Moffat points to people who bought a condo near the top of the market and can’t make the jump to a…

Canadians living with parents in their 30s and 40s is now at generational highs, according to new Stats Canada data. The conversation digs into the numbers and whether giving it a name like life stretching is part of the problem. Three reasons surface: student loan debt averaging $30,000 per millennial, entry-level salaries that make saving…

Foreign interference in Canada is more complicated than the legal definition suggests. The gap between what’s traceable and what’s actually happening may explain more than anyone wants to say out loud. The Habs, the PWHL, and Why Rome Is Worth the Chaos Jimmy Zoubris returned from Rome calling it beautifully chaotic. The Montreal Canadiens, built…

Driverless cars are coming to Canada, and the safety numbers are making even longtime skeptics rethink their position. Lorraine Sommerfeld wrote the piece. She also used to tell autonomous cars to stay off her roads. Sommerfeld talked to a tech analyst who put it plainly: you eventually have to leave the lab. Waymo is already…

Toxic ex stories on a fourth date sound like a warning sign. Ryan O’Donnell says his became the most honest moment he had ever had with someone that early. He had one genuinely toxic relationship. When he and Laura were a few dates in and the subject came up, what emerged was not just shared…

What to watch this weekend spans a video game brawler that earns its cheese, a sheep murder mystery with a cast nobody predicted, and a 2008 film making its case as the greatest sports movie ever made. Two conversations. One list. When the Sheep Start Asking Questions Carl Urban steps into Mortal Kombat 2 as…