CanCon

If you're reading this in a big city, congratulations! You have reliable local news options! If you're living somewhere smaller... well, it's a bit of a dice roll, really.
While most communities still have at least one options for reporting on their every day lives — everything from city council to education, local hospitals and sports and events — but news deserts are spreading with every closure of small town newspaper or radio station, and while independent publications and podcasts are working hard to replace them, that business mode is difficult to make work in smaller places.
Today, we sit down with April Lindgren, professor emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University and co-founder and director at the Local News Research Project, to discuss what happening to newsrooms across the country and what comes next.

Feedback from listeners is so, so welcome. If you have something to say, email us: hello.cancon@gmail.com.

Most Albertans don't want to leave Canada. Most Canadians don't want to see them go. The data is clear, the separatist wing is a small percentage of the population, and is likely buoyed by foreign influence campaigns.
To many Canadians, it seems clear there's no need for a referendum at all—that it only raises a question that millions of people already answer every day; that it's a bad faith attempt to steer the political conversation further right. So, why have it?
Because we live in a democracy. A democracy that, like most in the West, is under threat. And you don't solve a democratic credibility problem by holding fewer votes.
Today, Concordia University political science professor Donal Gill explains why this fall's vote in Alberta, as messy as it might get, is a healthy sign for Canadian democracy.

Feedback from listeners is so, so welcome. If you have something to say, email us: hello.cancon@gmail.com.

New tariffs have hit us. Our government will respond in kind next week. A trade war has begun in earnest. And there's no doubt Canadian businesses will suffer and jobs will be lost.

And yet. After more than a year and a half of economic turmoil, the numbers tell a story of resiliency. Of an economy that did not, in fact, enter a technical recession. An economy that, in the last quarter, actually posted a very impressive number.

Is this our economic diversification at work? Is it the calm before the storm? What do good numbers in the middle of uncertainty really mean for the months to come? And how will your wallet experience the new phase of the trade war?

Economist and director of the Centre for Future Work Jim Stanford joins Jordan to explain the recent economic reports, and look ahead to what happens now.

Feedback from listeners is so, so welcome. If you have something to say, email us: hello.cancon@gmail.com.

Canada's going to become one of three "framework nations" taking the lead on Arctic defence. The government is moving to purchase military equipment outside the United States or even (gasp!) build it here at home. Is all that talk about taking national defence seriously starting to show up in action?

Alistair Edgar, Associate Dean at the School of International Policy and Governance at Wilfred Laurier University, joins us to analyze the Carney government's recent defence decisions.

Feedback from listeners is so, so welcome. If you have something to say, email us: hello.cancon@gmail.com.

You may have noticed that we're talking about building another pipeline. And our acknowledgement that we'll probably blow past our emissions targets. You may have also noticed all the trees burning. Again. And the smoke and the flooding and the ... you get it.

But the country faces economic and non-economic threats as extreme as any in recent memory, and in times of trouble we often look to the oil fields. So has Prime Minister Carney's government sacrificed our climate future for dollars and jobs right now? Or can the Liberals have their cake and electrify it, too?

Environmental journalist Arno Kopecky helps us parse through what has changed and what hasn't since Justin Trudeau's government crafted the Liberals' signature climate policies.

 

Feedback from listeners is so, so welcome. If you have something to say, email us: hello.cancon@gmail.com.