- Is Russia really about to invade Ukraine?
Wednesday, February 9th 2022
Or is Vladimir Putin bluffing to gain the world's attention? The history of Russia-Ukraine conflict dates back decades and can only be properly understood by looking at what has come before.
But right now, Canadian citizens are being warned it's time to come home, there are massive amounts of troops on the border and the world is worried diplomacy might not work. So ... what happens next?
GUEST: Seva Gunitsky, associate professor of political science, the University of Toronto.
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- A strange correlation between alternative schools and vaccine hesitancy
Tuesday, February 8th 2022
If you want to know which kids are least likely to get vaccinated, there’s a decent way to tell — they're the ones attending an alternative school. Even before covid, with traditional vaccines that were proven safe over decades, the opt-out rate among alternative school kids was many times higher than kids in traditional classrooms.
Why is that? Where does the hesitancy come from? And what can we learn about the factors parents weigh when they make these decisions by studying the philosophies of the schools they choose?
GUEST: Inori Roy, investigative journalist, writing in The Local
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- Inside a peaceful protest that stopped a pipeline
Monday, February 7th 2022
Amid the current rhetoric around protests across Canada, it's worth examining what successful, peaceful protest looks like, and what we can learn from it. It took more than half a decade, work by Indigenous women and leaders and non-Indigenous allies. It took a deep understanding of treaties and laws and relentless positive commitment. And in the end, an oil and gas company simply gave up, and left a beautiful river system alone. This is the story of how it happened.
GUEST: Cheryl Maloney, protest leader, Mi'kmaq woman, former national environment coordinator for the Native Women’s Association of Canada
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- The fight for the soul of the Conservative party
Friday, February 4th 2022
Since Stephen Harper left, the federal Conservatives are on their fifth leader in six years. Later this year they'll likely choose a sixth—and the party's eventual choice will go a long way to determining its future. What does O'Toole's exit and the choice of Candice Bergen as interim leader reveal about the state of the party currently? Is this really good news for the federal Liberals as some pundits claim?
The next few months will be critical to determining what Canadians are choosing the next time they go to the polls. Will it be a united CPC, led by the right wing of the party? A fractured party still trying to hold its various factions together? Or could the unification that led to Harper's success end with O'Toole, producing a split between the party's two ideologies?
GUEST: David Moscrop, political writer and commentator, author, host of the Open To Debate podcast
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- Why are some grocery store shelves empty? How high will food prices go?
Thursday, February 3rd 2022
Depending on where you stand, you may have blamed anything from Covid-19 to vaccine mandates, protesters to climate change, or even the federal government for the empty shelves you’ve seen. And all those answers are valid. But the reasoning you'll hear from politicians depends on who you ask. And of course, so does the assessment of how much of a crisis this actually is.
So how big a problem are the scattered empty shelves? How precarious is Canada's food supply chain? When will the pressure ease? And when it does, how much more will it cost to put food on your table?
GUEST: Sylvain Charlebois, Senior Director, Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, co-host of The Food Professor podcast
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