Full Comment
156 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 days ago - ★★★★★ - 2 ratingsFull Comment is Canada’s podcast for compelling interviews, controversial opinions and fascinating discussions. Hosted by Brian Lilley. Published by Postmedia, new episodes are released each Monday.
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Episodes
Ottawa just guaranteed we’ll all be paying higher taxes soon
April 22, 2024 13:00 - 42 minutesThe recent budget’s tax hikes won’t be enough to get us out of the fiscal mess the Trudeau Liberals have made with unrestrained spending and endless deficits, as Robert Asselin tells Brian. Asselin once advised Liberal finance minister Bill Morneau and is now with the Business Council of Canada. He says that with deficits becoming structural and interest on the debt now eating up massive amounts of revenue, the imbalance between spending and revenues is so out of whack that economic growth al...
Gen. Rick Hillier says Canada faces ‘death by a thousand cuts’
April 15, 2024 13:00 - 51 minutesThe Canadian Victoria Cross has never been awarded in its 31 years of existence. Gen. Rick Hillier aims to change that, and he joins Brian to discuss the new “Heroes Among Us” project launching with Postmedia — and his worries about the general state of our military, and our nation, today. Hillier lays out in stark detail how Canada’s world stature has sunk from its former greatness, why we’re a “parasite on defence,” why the army is “essentially broken,” and why Ottawa’s new defence policy d...
Canada has become a hub of Islamist terror financing
April 08, 2024 13:00 - 46 minutesIslamist extremism is on the march, as Hamas, ISIS, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the Houthis and al Shabab unleash attacks against the West. Highly organized support for radicalized violence parades openly on our city streets. What connects them all is money, as Haras Rafiq tells Brian this week. And he says Canada has become a critical nexus of funding from Qatar, Iran and other sponsors connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. Rafiq is at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemit...
‘Target on my back’: Selina Robinson on the NDP’s surrender to antisemites
April 01, 2024 13:00 - 40 minutesAll she did was tell the truth. Before she knew it, Selina Robinson was being hounded out of B.C.’s cabinet for saying the UN had allotted Jews a “crappy piece of land” in 1948, with anti-Israel activists accusing her of insulting Muslims. Robinson joins Brian this week to recount how she was first targeted weeks prior by a “vicious” mob who wanted revenge after the then post-secondary education minister criticized an overtly pro-terrorist college instructor. Robinson recounts how B.C. Premie...
Trudeau’s big party tent is coming apart at the seams
March 25, 2024 13:00 - 48 minutesNew Democrats and even other Liberals are now fighting Justin Trudeau’s carbon-tax scheme. This, as the prime minister’s abandonment of Israel has lost him a significant segment of long-time supporters. Postmedia’s Lorne Gunter joins Brian Lilley this week to unpack the chaos that appears to be consuming the Liberal party right now. They get into how the NDP threw the government into disarray with its Palestinian statehood motion, while the Conservatives seemingly have Liberals cornered on en...
Liberals cry 'racism' to cover up another Chinese interference scandal
March 18, 2024 13:00 - 56 minutesThe Trudeau government didn’t just fight for years to hide the embarrassing truth about two scientists caught leaking secrets from Canada’s highest-risk pathology laboratory to China — including for bioweapons research. As former CSIS analyst Phil Gurski and Conservative MP Michael Chong discuss with Brian this week, the Liberals tried painting concerns about Beijing’s interference as bigoted, just as they have whenever warnings have been raised about Chinese infiltration. As Chong and Gurski...
The ‘Online Harms’ Act could censor Twitter, Netflix, and us
March 11, 2024 13:00 - 53 minutesBeware of governments making laws to “protect the children,” warns Ian Runkle, this week’s guest. The Liberals’ Bill C-63 rules to stop online child exploitation and revenge porn seem well-intentioned. But the Online Harms Act is so broad it could end up censoring popular streaming entertainment, says Runkle, a lawyer specializing in civil liberties and host of YouTube’s Runkle of the Bailey. More worryingly, as Runkle tells Brian, it’s all wrapped up with stiff new penalties and powers again...
We're getting zapped by Guilbeault's radical, no-fuel, electrified future
March 04, 2024 14:00 - 46 minutesWe won’t need roads where we’re going. At least that’s how Liberal Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault wants it. He wants to end funding for new roads in Canada and ban cars that use gas or diesel, while forcing our heating and energy to become all-electric. Meanwhile, as energy researcher and commentator Parker Gallant tells Brian this week, we’re throwing billions at battery plants that lack materials and even markets, as buyers shun EVs, as we push demand for power infrastructure we don...
Danielle Smith challenges Trudeau to call an election
February 26, 2024 14:00 - 34 minutesThe tension between Ottawa and Alberta is rising. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has most recently attacked Premier Danielle Smith’s plans to restrict children from medically transitioning genders. This, after his environment minister demanded the province curb its oil industry and overhaul its gas-dependent power grid. Smith joins Brian Lilley this week, and says that while she would prefer to collaborate with Trudeau, she’ll fight if necessary. Smith also tells Brian why she thinks Trudeau h...
Israel is invading Rafah regardless of what Trudeau says
February 19, 2024 14:00 - 37 minutesEylon Levy spends his day debunking all the patently ridiculous propaganda against Israel. The latest uproar the government’s official spokesman is facing is the fevered campaign to try keeping Israel from invading Rafah. As Levy tells host Brian Lilley, this plays right into Hamas’s hands. Levy discusses how the international media and naive governments, including Canada’s, are swallowing Hamas’s disinformation, unwittingly doing the terror group’s bidding. And he explains how Israel’s succe...
Not all transgender people think Danielle Smith’s gender policies are unhinged
February 12, 2024 14:00 - 36 minutesIt’s been a frenzy since Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced sweeping new policies limiting gender transitioning for children. She’s been accused of endangering lives and was blasted by the prime minister. What isn’t happening, as guest Julia Malott tells Brian this week, is a respectful discussion that accepts that all sides want what’s best for kids. Malott is a parent, columnist and online commentator. She’s also transgender. She explains why she doesn’t think Smith’s plans are comple...
Jean Chrétien looks better now compared to the alternative
February 05, 2024 14:00 - 48 minutesLiberals were praising Jean Chrétien on his 90th birthday recently. Then, almost immediately afterward, they were distancing themselves from Canada’s 20th prime minister after news he had once tried watering down an Indigenous rights declaration. That’s the peculiar, contradictory legacy of “the little guy from Shawnigan” that former Liberal party president Stephen LeDrew and National Post columnist Chris Selley appraise this week with host Brian Lilley. They discuss the reverence for Chrétie...
‘Islamofascism-phobia’ and the Iranians standing with Israel
January 29, 2024 14:00 - 42 minutesAfter Hamas’s Oct. 7 mass slaughter of Jews in Israel, a surprising thing happened: Iranians inside the Islamic Republic and Persians around the world declared their support for … Israel. Ontario MPP Goldie Ghamari was one of them. She joins Brian this week to explain how Islamofascism promoted by Tehran and Hamas is the common enemy that Jews and the West share with people from Iran. She also discusses Iran’s alarming infiltration into Canada, how it menaces anti-regime Iranian-Canadians, an...
Jordan Peterson on why everyone should be afraid of what happened to him
January 23, 2024 01:00 - 39 minutesThe verdict is final. The courts have now decisively refused to overturn a decision by the College of Psychologists of Ontario that ordered Jordan Peterson into a mandatory rehabilitation program for his politically incorrect tweets, which had nothing to do with his practice and involved no actual patients. As Peterson tells host Brian Lilley, his options are now to either lose his licence, try moving somewhere else, or submit and undergo “re-education” for his controversial opinions. But eve...
The Liberal MP who thinks his party is getting things wrong
January 15, 2024 14:00 - 49 minutesHe’s publicly objected to his own Liberal government and the prime minister turning against Israel’s war on Hamas. He fought for his party to stand firm for Quebec anglophones against the province’s attacks — and lost. Anthony Housefather has been breaking publicly a lot lately with his own Liberal party on major issues. This week, host Brian Lilley talks to Housefather about what it’s been like to lose these key policy battles and how he manages to keep working alongside caucus colleagues wh...
We shouldn’t be making things this hard for Canadian winemakers
January 08, 2024 14:00 - 46 minutesSomehow Donald Ziraldo beat the odds: He and his business partner made an international success out of their Inniskillin Winery in Ontario. Starting back in the days when Canadian wine was dismissed as inferior plonk, they went on to produce and sell highly regarded, award-winning vintages all over the globe. But their story is far too uncommon, as Ziraldo tells Brian in this week’s episode. He believes that Canada is perfectly capable of selling far more excellent wine to the world and makin...
Best of 2023: Canada’s great addictive hard-drug giveaway experiment somehow goes awry
January 01, 2024 14:00 - 49 minutesOver the holidays, we’re looking back at some of the best episodes of 2023, a year where serious questions were raised about whether Canada’s “safe supply” approach to drug addiction was making things worse. A long-time proponent of harm reduction, Dr. Sharon Koivu, an urban doctor in London, Ont., discusses with host Brian Lilley how she has watched with alarm as Canada’s drug policy has shifted from safe, supervised consumption, to pumping quantities of extremely addictive opioids onto the ...
Best of 2023: England’s ‘strictest headmistress’ on how old-school education saves kids
December 25, 2023 14:00 - 48 minutesOver the holidays, we’re looking back at some of the best episodes of 2023, a year that saw massive controversy over the state of Canada’s schools. At Katharine Birbalsingh’s inner-city free school in London, students are not to speak in the hallways. Discipline is strict. The kids, heavily drawn from minority groups, memorize knowledge and learn duty. It’s what used to be considered a typical education. But as Birbalsingh tells Brian Lilley this week, she’s now considered a “radical.” The re...
Special: Rex Murphy’s year-end interview with Pierre Poilievre
December 18, 2023 14:00 - 30 minutesAn extended video version of this interview will be available starting Tuesday, December 19, 2023, online at National Post (nationalpost.com). Special guest host Rex Murphy sits down in person with federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre for a year-end interview. They discuss what’s behind the Tories’ remarkable rise in the polls this year. Poilievre explains why he thinks Trudeau’s increasingly stringent climate policies aren’t what they seem. He and Rex also discuss the identity politi...
Trudeau botched 2023. The Liberals won’t allow a repeat in 2024
December 11, 2023 14:00 - 50 minutesPrime Minister Justin Trudeau started the year in fine form. Twelve months later his party is melting down in the polls and Pierre Poilievre is heading what looks like an election-winning juggernaut. But the Conservative leader shouldn’t get too comfortable, as the Full Comment year-end politics panel discusses. Host Brian Lilley is joined this week by Conservative guru Kory Teneycke and former Liberal adviser Warren Kinsella to talk about the federal Liberals’ rebound possibilities in 2024, ...
Canada is a criminal hotbed and the Mounties can’t handle it
December 04, 2023 14:00 - 39 minutesIt’s no secret the RCMP is broken. But as Garry Clement discusses with Brian this week, the force’s inability to investigate serious national crimes — money laundering, narcotics, organized crime, Chinese interference, terrorism and more — is turning Canada into a haven for lawlessness. And innocent people are paying for it with their lives. Clement served in the force for 30 years, from undercover to senior roles. In his new book, Under Cover: Inside the Shady World of Organized Crime and th...
Canada’s worst fiscal crisis in generations is brewing
November 27, 2023 14:00 - 50 minutesThe financial trouble the Trudeau Liberals have put Canada in looks disturbingly unlike previous debt and deficit hangovers, as William Robson tells Brian Lilley this week. The losses Ottawa has pushed onto the Bank of Canada are choking off desperately needed income, explains Robson, president and CEO of the C.D. Howe Institute. Wages are losing ground. Business investment indicators are the worst since the 1940s. Unfunded pensions are soaring. Federal spending keeps rising. And the governme...
As CBC defunding looms, the network doesn’t know what to do
November 20, 2023 14:00 - 44 minutesA lot of the criticisms against Canada’s public broadcaster are fair, acknowledges Richard Stursberg, who was the CBC's executive vice president from 2004 to 2010: The programming doesn’t always reflect the country outside of downtown Toronto; the CBC competes with private broadcasters for advertising, even though it’s government-funded. The problem, which Stursberg says was the case then and remains the case now, is that no one knows what the CBC is supposed to be. And that goes as much for ...
Hamas controls the narrative now
November 13, 2023 14:00 - 51 minutesJournalists for major news organizations joining the terror attack against Israel. Newscasters that refuse to call Hamas terrorists. Campus lefties insisting the torturers, rapists and murderers are the real victims. All of this and more are how the story westerners hear about the Israel-Hamas war is being distorted to vilify the Jewish state and benefit Hamas, as Israeli-based journalist Caroline Glick discusses with Brian this week. She explains how the number of civilian war casualties pub...
Driven into the ditch by Trudeau, Liberals have no clear way out
November 06, 2023 14:00 - 53 minutesAlmost exactly eight years after rebuilding the Liberals and winning government, Justin Trudeau looks like he could be done as party leader. His once powerful personal brand seems irreparably ruined, especially after his recent surrender on his signature carbon-tax policy. As National Post columnist Chris Selley and host Brian Lilley discuss this week, a Liberal party that became Trudeau’s cult of personality is being dragged back down into potential electoral disaster with him, with no clear...
Ben Shapiro on why every Jew he knows is getting a gun
October 30, 2023 13:00 - 36 minutesHost Brian Lilley is joined this week by American podcaster, journalist and author Ben Shapiro to discuss the antisemitic pro-Hamas marches in Canada and the U.S. after the terrorist attacks in Israel — and the sense of danger that has American Jews buying guns in case they need to defend their families. How did our society become so degraded? Shapiro tells Brian it’s because we’ve permitted hate to fester in certain communities while surrendering our western values — falling for the sadistic...
The difficult history behind the Nazi soldier in Parliament
October 23, 2023 13:00 - 51 minutesHistorical ignorance is the generous explanation for the House of Commons applauding a veteran of the Nazis’ Waffen SS Galicia division during a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But the embarrassment and outrage that followed shed little light on exactly how Ukrainians like Yaroslav Hunka found themselves first wearing the infamous Nazi SS uniform, then immigrating to live peaceful postwar lives in Canada. Myroslav Shkandrij, author of a new book, In the Maelstrom: The Waffen...
Obliterating Hamas in Gaza is Israel’s only option now
October 16, 2023 13:00 - 43 minutesGaza not long ago had one of the fastest-growing economies in the world — until Hamas took over, turned it into a terror base and began using Gazans as cannon fodder for anti-Israel public relations, just as its doing now. As Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, discusses with Brian this week, Hamas’s Islamist theocracy has few fans among the Palestinians of Gaza, or indeed elsewhere in the Muslim world. The Israeli government must abandon its failed strategy of trying to contain...
The housing crisis is a sign of worse things to come
October 09, 2023 13:00 - 38 minutesThe shocking political realities behind Canada’s badly broken housing market are sinking in — and the damage spreads much deeper and wider than the generations being unfairly priced out of starter homes. Ben Rabidoux, founder of Edge Realty Analytics, is the guy both federal Conservatives and Liberals turn to for deep housing insights. He joins Brian this week to discuss how waving in millions of temporary residents, many of them students, is causing far more harm — to us and them — than just...
England’s ‘strictest headmistress’ on how old-school education saves kids
October 02, 2023 15:34 - 48 minutesAt Katharine Birbalsingh’s inner-city free school in London, students are not to speak in the hallways. Discipline is strict. Students wear uniforms, sit in rows and listen to instruction. It’s teacher-led learning, not child-centred. The kids, heavily drawn from minority groups, memorize knowledge and learn duty. It’s what used to be considered a typical education. But as Birbalsingh tells Brian this week, she’s now considered a “radical.” The results? The students at Michaela Community Scho...
Trudeau isn’t being taken seriously about India
September 25, 2023 13:00 - 44 minutesAfter the prime minister dropped his bombshell assassination accusation against India, the world has waited for him to back it up. But Ujjal Dosanjh says that when it comes to credibility on this file, Justin Trudeau — and Canada — don’t have much. And the unserious way Trudeau has handled allegations around the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar hasn’t helped. Dosanjh, a former Liberal cabinet minister and B.C. NDP premier, joins Brian this week to explain what’s really going on with the allegat...
Welcome to the tolerance witch trials
September 18, 2023 13:00 - 49 minutesDon’t call it cancel culture: that masks the grimness of the authoritarian era we’re living in, says author Brendan O’Neill. It’s an anti-enlightenment, he says, that is rapidly and fervently obliterating centuries of western civilizational progress. O’Neill, author of the new book A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, joins Brian this week to expose the shibboleths we’re all being forced to accept, even though we know they’re not true. And he shows how those of us living in once-li...
The working class inevitably becomes conservative
September 11, 2023 13:00 - 42 minutesIt’s not just that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are leading in national polls: it’s that the party is bringing in new groups, including “the people who get stuff done,” as guest Lord Daniel Hannan calls the working class. The prominent British journalist and Tory politician joins Brian from the Conservative policy convention in Quebec City, where he delivered the keynote address, coming from the U.K. where Conservatives have held government more than 13 years. Hannan discusses why the rig...
Pierre Poilievre is picking the right fights
September 04, 2023 13:00 - 50 minutesAs federal Conservative party members prepare to gather for their policy convention in Quebec City, they’ll be pushing for a platform that takes on the culture wars, head on. Meanwhile, polls currently show party leader Pierre Poilievre on his way to a majority government as voters rally to his message about the rising costs of housing and living. Long-time Conservative power player Kory Teneycke, manager of Doug Ford’s landslide-winning 2022 Ontario campaign, joins Brian this week to discuss...
The amazing story of Terry Fox you haven’t heard
August 28, 2023 13:00 - 50 minutesBill Vigars was starting a new gig at the Canadian Cancer Society when he flew to the East Coast to check out an unknown kid with one leg planning to run a personal marathon a day across Canada for cancer research. Before he knew it, Vigars was helping Terry Fox make the Marathon of Hope a national phenomenon that’s kept Terry’s legacy alive for decades, with nearly a billion dollars since raised in his name. Vigars joins host Brian Lilley this week to talk about his new book, Terry and Me, a...
How COVID’s ‘pandexicon’ changed the way we speak—and think
August 21, 2023 13:00 - 45 minutesThings were different in the “before times.” Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we weren’t all experts in viral variants or polymerase chain reaction tests. We’d never heard of “vaccine apartheid” or “social distancing.” No one drank “quarantinis” after enduring a “covidivorce.” And “self-isolating” and “lockdowns” were things to be avoided. In his new book Pandexicon, author Wayne Grady has chronicled the words that emerged from the COVID-19 catastrophe to decode the message and meaning behind ...
Inside Canadian school boards, ‘if you disagree…you’re punished’
August 14, 2023 13:00 - 46 minutesMike Ramsay was friends with former Toronto principal Richard Bilkszto, whose suicide after allegedly enduring false bigotry accusations in an anti-racism session has shocked Canadians. And Ramsay says he’s experienced similar vilification. He’s been called a “white supremacist.” He’s been suspended as a school trustee in Waterloo, Ont. He says it’s because he fights to keep schools focused on learning and achievement, not identity politics and radical race theory. He also happens to be Black...
Crime reporting today is making things worse
August 07, 2023 13:00 - 49 minutesFormerly one of Canada’s top crime reporters, Tamara Cherry witnessed gruesome violence and terrible trauma. What she says she didn’t realize was how the way she and others covered the crime beat was worsening pain for survivors, responders and reporters themselves. Cherry, author of the new book The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News, joins host Brian Lilley, himself no stranger to crime reporting. Cherry explains how she came to discover the damaging psychological ...
The real reasons Taylor Swift isn't coming to Canada (for now)
July 31, 2023 13:00 - 48 minutesThe economics of the music business have been turned upside down in recent years. For artists and fans alike, concerts now are king. Legendary publicist, writer and music maven Eric Alper joins Brian this week to discuss why this summer’s concert season in particular is making history, why some concert tickets now cost more than plane tickets, and the most obvious reasons why Taylor Swift left Canada off of her latest tour. (And when she’s likely to finally come.) (Recorded July 19, 2023) Lea...
Canada could be an Arctic superpower, but Ottawa walked away
July 24, 2023 13:00 - 38 minutesIt’s where we should be building up capabilities against Russia’s hypersonic missiles and Chinese spy aircraft coming over the North Pole. But news the Liberal government is closing the Canadian International Arctic Centre is the latest indication Ottawa doesn’t get the importance of the North. After the Harper government made the Arctic a bigger priority, the last eight years have revealed Ottawa’s lack of ambition and enthusiasm for the region, says Heather Exner-Pirot, one of Canada’s most...
Price-fixing at Canada’s grocery stores is bigger than just bread
July 17, 2023 13:00 - 38 minutesFood inflation is showing no signs of letting up soon, as guest Sylvain Charlebois tells Brian Lilley this week. But grandstanding politicians yelling about “greedflation” by allegedly avaricious grocers are looking in the wrong place, says Charlebois, professor of food distribution and policy at Dalhousie University. The recent guilty plea by Canada Bread, admitting to years of bakery price-fixing; allegations that Maple Leaf Foods may have done the same with meat; and revelations of “blacko...
Everyone’s wrong about what’s behind the forest fires
July 10, 2023 13:00 - 35 minutesClimate crusaders are convinced this year’s fire season is global warming. Conspiracy theorists think it’s eco-terrorism from arsonists to scare us about climate change. The reality, as Kenneth Green tells Brian this week, is much more complicated, with everything from poor forest management practices, natural burn cycles, and yes, also some climate and some human causes, playing roles — in addition to countless other factors (including psychological ones). In fact, as Green, an environmental...
Spies, sabotage, secret police and the time the Irish invaded Canada
July 03, 2023 13:00 - 45 minutesIt’s one of the most dramatic episodes in Canada’s early years, although it’s often neglected by our history lessons: Irish republicans attacked Canada from the south as part of a wild plan to win independence for Ireland. As we celebrate the Canada Day weekend, host Brian Lilley is joined by David Wilson, author of Canadian Spy Story: Irish Revolutionaries and the Secret Police. They discuss the stranger-than-fiction chapter in our history, which saw Canadian troops killed battling invading ...
Blaine Higgs on why he won’t relent on New Brunswick’s school-gender controversy
June 26, 2023 13:00 - 43 minutesCabinet ministers have quit. Some party leaders are calling for him to resign. But New Brunswick Premier Blaine Higgs tells Brian Lilley he’ll stake his political career to take a stand for parents in his province to be involved when their kids ask at school to be identified by a different gender or name. Higgs discusses what he thinks of attempts by Justin Trudeau, activists, and progressive media to portray him as “far right,” and why he’s confident the public is on his side. The premier al...
Identity politics puts its progressive spin on old-school anti-Semitism
June 19, 2023 13:00 - 37 minutesHatred toward Jews is the oldest and most pernicious form of prejudice. Although anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and the persecution of Jews have always been around, the rise of social media, populism and identity politics have made it seem increasingly pervasive. Author Philip Slayton joins Brian Lilley to discuss his new book, Antisemitism: An Ancient Hatred in the Age of Identity Politics, and why he believes the fight against anti-Semitism needs to adapt to its modern expressions. Inevit...
Canada’s great addictive hard-drug giveaway experiment somehow goes awry
June 12, 2023 13:00 - 49 minutesDr. Sharon Koivu says it’s like the reverse of the ethical “trolley problem”: in the effort to help an opioid user, Canada’s “safe supply” drug policy puts many more people in danger. A long-time proponent of harm reduction, Koivu, an urban doctor in London, Ont., tells host Brian Lilley how she has watched with alarm as policy has shifted from safe, supervised consumption, to pumping quantities of extremely addictive opioids onto the streets, where they’re often sold cheaply for cash, or har...
Danielle Smith could govern Alberta for a ‘very, very long time’
June 05, 2023 13:00 - 40 minutesIt was late in the game, and the United Conservative Party was set to lose the Alberta election, when it finally discovered a way to win over voters and eke out a victory. The secret? Being just moderate enough to comfort city people and just conservative enough for everyone else, as former federal Conservative MP and Alberta public affairs consultant Monte Solberg tells Brian Lilley this week. If Danielle Smith can manage to keep that up, Solberg explains, the NDP might never have as good a ...
Cracking the $20-million Pearson Airport gold heist
May 29, 2023 13:00 - 43 minutesA cargo container filled with millions in gold and valuables landed at Toronto’s international airport one day this past April. Then it vanished. Weeks later, police haven’t found it. Scott Andrew Selby, co-author of Flawless: Inside the Largest Diamond Heist in History, has studied sophisticated high-stakes robberies. He joins Brian Lilley this week to discuss what we know about how the recent Pearson heist went down, what the thieves might be doing to stay one step ahead of the cops — and o...
Canadians don’t deserve a passport of shame
May 22, 2023 13:00 - 42 minutesHow did we end up with a new passport design that replaces stirring images of Canadian identity — Nellie McClung, Terry Fox, the Mounties, and Vimy — with vapid graphics of squirrels, autumn leaves and snowmen? The problem lies in our classrooms, prominent Canadian historian David Bercuson tells Brian Lilley this week. Canada has a great deal to be proud of in our history, says Bercuson, but generations of students are being taught instead to focus on a few stains. Fortunately, we have the po...
When the baby boomers die, where will we put all the bodies?
May 15, 2023 13:00 - 44 minutesThe traditional ways of dealing with our dead are running into problems. Cities are running out of space for cemeteries. Cremation and burial are being shunned for their environmental damage. And there’s a huge wave of boomers running out of time. Ian Sutton, author of The Big Exit, joins host Brian Lilley to discuss the trouble of dealing with so many humans dying off, and the creative alternatives being explored — including feeding us to mushrooms, blowing us into space, crushing us up, and...