Front Burner

Prime Minister Mark Carney is in Alberta this week, making a final pitch for unity in the lead-up to the province's referendum on potential separation. Meanwhile, the government is threatening legal action against steel company Stelco over layoffs related to the trade war. And the U.S. Ambassador to Canada has raised concerns about potential election interference by Canadian government officials in the U.S. midterms.

Aaron Wherry, senior writer for CBC's parliamentary bureau, joins us to break it all down.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Today we are going to spend some time trying to understand the expanding front lines of two ongoing wars, where the battlefield isn't just marked by trenches, snipers and fortifications, but also by energy infrastructure, supplies and distribution.

Think of them as energy wars, currently being fought in Ukraine, and in countries around the Persian Gulf.

We're joined by Ravi Agrawal, Editor in Chief at Foreign Policy and host of their podcast, FP Live. Together, we’re looking at energy and how it can be used as a tool or weapon of war and why after decades without them, energy wars are back.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Alberta's referendum is next week and advance voting is already underway. Much of the attention has centred around the separation question. But there are actually ten questions being put to a vote next week.

Today on Front Burner, Jayme Poisson speaks with CBC Calgary's Jason Markusoff about the other nine questions: what they mean, why they're being asked, and how the polling shows they could go either way.

For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts.

In late September, amid mounting warnings about the risks of AI, the CEOs of six of the world’s most powerful technology companies signed an agreement on artificial intelligence. U.S. President Donald Trump called the accord “morally binding”. But it isn’t legally binding – it’s essentially a pledge from the world’s biggest tech companies to police themselves.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jill Lepore has a name for this: the “artificial state”. A world run not by democratically elected governments, but by the billionaires who control technology companies.

Lepore’s new book, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, explains how we got here, why she thinks it can’t last, and how the public can push back.

Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

How did sports betting go from being illegal to being EVERYWHERE? The answer lies in the convergence of daily fantasy sports apps, a bombshell New York Times op-ed, and the potential of a multi-billion dollar payout. This episode of Understood: The Big Bet tells the story of how a pivotal Supreme Court ruling set the stage for one of the biggest scandals in sports history — one involving a Toronto Raptors bench player named Jontay Porter.

Understood takes you deep inside the seismic shifts reshaping our world right now. From online porn and crypto chaos to the rise of tech oligarchs, deepfake AI, and the broken promises of the internet — we explore the stories that define our digital age with hosts and characters embedded in the heart of the action.

More episodes of The Big Bet are available wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/TBBxFB