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Canada’s men’s soccer team is closer to going to the World Cup tournament than it has been in decades, after a historic win against heavyweight team Mexico. The last time they qualified was in 1986. They didn’t score a single goal. But now with coaching from John Herdman and star players like Alphonso Davies, the team has started to believe in itself — and this week, won an important qualifying event against Mexico. After scoring their second goal, team members leaped into a snowbank in the –10 C Edmonton weather to celebrate. This iconic moment comes only a few months after Canada’s women won their first Olympic gold for soccer in Tokyo. Shireen Ahmed is a regular contributor to TSN, and a co-host of the Burn It All Down podcast. Today, she takes us through the game, what it means for Canada, and what comes next for soccer in this country.
British Columbia declared a state of emergency Wednesday after days of extreme flooding and mudslides destroyed major highways and cut off entire communities in parts of the Lower Mainland. Mass evacuations were ordered in places like Merritt, Princeton and parts of Abbotsford, a city of nearly 100,000 people, but the full scale of the devastation still isn't known. These kinds of climate events are becoming all too familiar in B.C. It was just four and a half months ago that a crushing heat dome killed nearly 600 people in the province, and a wildfire burned the town of Lytton to the ground. Today on Front Burner, how this week's weather event, known as an atmospheric river, unfolded, and how other recent extreme climate events may have made it worse. If this is the new normal for B.C., what does the future look like for the people in the province? Finally, a conversation with CBC Vancouver reporter Justin McElroy about how the B.C. government responded and what needs to change moving forward.
Since the end of October, a cyberattack on the health-care system in Newfoundland and Labrador has caused thousands of delays and cancellations for services. Patients have missed appointments and procedures, including chemotherapy. With their IT networks knocked out, facilities resorted to pen and paper. The CEO of a cybersecurity firm in Fredericton, David Shipley, called it “the worst cyberattack in Canadian history.” Disruptions to health services are easing. But while the province has now confirmed that both patient and employee data was stolen, it is still offering little information on the attack. Today on Front Burner, St. John’s-based CBC reporter Peter Cowan joins us to explain what this attack was, why the province isn’t saying more, and why health breaches like this are happening so often.
A crisis is unfolding at the border of Poland and Belarus, where thousands of migrants are stranded in freezing temperatures, hoping to reach Europe. Belarus, under authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko, is accused of deliberately creating this crisis by shepherding migrants from the Middle East to the Polish border as revenge for sanctions imposed on his regime. Poland, with the support of the European Union, has responded by fortifying its border in a massive show of force. Almost 20,000 police and soldiers have been deployed to the area, and there are claims that they have illegally pushed people back across the border into Belarus. Today, Guardian correspondent Lorenzo Tondo on the geopolitical standoff and the people trapped in the middle of what is increasingly looking like a humanitarian disaster.
COP26, the UN’s annual climate summit in Glasgow, was touted by many as the “last best chance” for the world to come together and make a plan to stave off the worst of climate change. Today, Time magazine senior correspondent Justin Worland delves into what the summit did and didn’t achieve.
From David Ridgen, the creator of Someone Knows Something, comes the new investigative podcast The Next Call. Tackling unsolved cases through strategic phone calls. In the case of Terrie Dauphinais, a 24-year-old Metis woman is found dead in her Calgary home in the spring of 2002. New investigative efforts have held out promise, but the case still remains cold almost two decades later. More episodes are available at: smarturl.it/thenextcall
In Ontario, COVID-19 cases are rising again — but unlike before, the Greater Toronto Area isn’t bearing the brunt of this wave. Dr. Sumon Chakrabarti explains why.
As lawsuits, a criminal investigation and social media try to assign blame for the fatal crowd surge at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival, a look at the warning signs before the concert, and the long history of festival disasters.
Ethiopia’s deadly war in Tigray province is now threatening to engulf the entire country as rebels move toward the capital and a humanitarian crisis intensifies. Reporter Zecharias Zelalem explains how the conflict got to this point and where it could go from here.
Less than 10 months into his presidency, Joe Biden’s popularity is plummeting, Democratic in-fighting has put some of the most ambitious parts of his agenda on life support, and recent elections in several states are spelling even more bad news for his party. Susan Ormiston joins us to take the pulse of the Democratic party.
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