Front Burner

The Canadian defence industry can’t grow the way Prime Minister Mark Carney is proposing by just selling domestically. That’s why another aim of the Defence Industrial Strategy is to grow Canadian defence exports by 50%. So what could happen when the world comes knocking on our defence industry’s door?

This is part two of a two part documentary. Part one aired on July 2nd.

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

Mark Carney ran for office promising to spend a whole lot more on the Canadian military. Since being elected, he’s poured billions of dollars into defence, and plans to roughly triple Canada’s defence expenditures in the next ten years. He’s also proposing to grow Canada’s defence industry revenues by 240%.

Today, in part one of our two part documentary, senior producer Imogen Birchard heads to Canada’s biggest defence and security trade show in Ottawa to hear what those in the defence industry – and those protesting outside – think about the plan.

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

This week, temperatures across much of Europe reached above 40 C. In parts of Spain and Portugal, it was hotter than the Sahara Desert.

Governments are telling citizens to stay indoors. Schools have closed. Wildfires have spread. Nuclear reactors have reduced their output because rivers have become too warm to cool them efficiently. The World Health Organization says Europe’s heat is responsible for 1,300 deaths since June 21st.

For generations Europe built its cities, homes, public spaces and tourism industry around the assumption that summers would be hot, but bearable. That assumption is beginning to change.

The Guardian’s Europe environment correspondent Ajit Niranjan joins us to talk about what happens when a whole continent discovers it was built for a climate that no longer exists.

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

Investment company Wealthsimple is partnering with Kalshi to launch Wealthsimple Predict. It’s an app that’ll allow Canadians to place bets on things like Bank of Canada interest rates, job numbers and long term weather patterns.

This comes at a time where there’s growing scrutiny on prediction markets in the U.S. for misleading advertising and susceptibility to insider trading. So why are young investors, especially Gen Z, fuelling the demand for prediction markets and other high risk and speculative ways to make money? And what are the risks of companies like Wealthsimple leaning into the gamification of the economy?

Charles Martineau, Associate Director of Research at the Rotman Financial Innovation Hub at the University of Toronto, joins us to talk about the phenomenon and what the data tells us about who actually wins on prediction markets.

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

A warning: this episode discusses the trauma and harms surrounding Canada's residential school history. Please listen with care.

So much of what we know about Canada's residential schools has been established as fact. More than 150 thousand Indigenous children and youth were taken from their families and required to attend these schools. Several thousand students died.

Although all of this is well-documented and verified, there has been a growing discourse calling those facts into question. Researchers, commentators and some politicians have really zeroed in on the 2021 discovery of suspected graves near a former residential school in Kamloops.

Academics and Indigenous leaders call this residential school denialism — similar to Holocaust denialism. Many of them have called for adding the denial of residential school history to the Criminal Code as a form of hate speech.

Earlier this month, a Nunavut senator brought forward a motion to amend Bill C-9, the Liberals’ anti hate bill, to do just that – but it was voted down.

Sean Carleton and Niigaan Sinclair have been tracking the rise of residential school denialism in Canada. Their book, “Truth Before Reconciliation: Confronting Residential School Denialism”, comes out this September.

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