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Front Burner is a daily news podcast that takes you deep into the stories shaping Canada and the world. Each morning, from Monday to Friday, host Jayme Poisson talks with the smartest people covering the biggest stories to help you understand what’s going on.

Front Burner

On Thursday, former Prince Andrew was arrested by U.K. police.

After years of controversy, scandal and allegations of sexual assault, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was taken into custody on suspicion of misconduct in public office.

The arrest is related to his decades-long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, and the former prince is alleged to have sent confidential government documents to the convicted sex offender.

Today, Andrew Lownie, a historian and the author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, joins the show. We get into the details of the arrest, the long-standing ties between the former prince and Epstein and what recently released documents reveal.

Epstein fallout: ex-Prince Andrew arrested

Prime Minister Mark Carney and the Liberals welcomed a third Conservative floor crosser on Wednesday – Edmonton MP Matt Jeneroux. 

And with three by-elections coming up, two from Liberal strongholds, a Liberal majority is looking like a possibility. So a pretty seismic day on Parliament Hill. 

CBC’s senior writer Aaron Wherry is here to talk through how this could all play out for the Liberals and for Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party. 

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

Floor-crosser defects to surging Liberals

Looksmaxxers are a community of young men dedicated to the pursuit of maximizing their physical appearance, often at great personal cost. Many are spending thousands of dollars on cosmetic procedures, or even taking blunt objects to their faces, in the hopes of masculinizing their features to become more handsome. Or, as they refer to it: “ascending.” 

In a world where so many young people — particularly young men — feel as though it’s impossible to get ahead, we’ve got a conversation about this viral community augmenting their bodies in the hopes of doing exactly that.

 

Aidan Walker is a writer and content creator whose work explores all kinds of online subcultures. He joins the show to talk about looksmaxxing, its central characters, connections to the far right, and what the movement reveals about young men right now.

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

The Rise of ‘Looksmaxxing’

Last week, a 5000 word post on X with the headline “Something big is happening” went viral. It was written by Matt Shumer, the CEO of HyperWrite, an AI writing tool and in it he says he’s recently watched AI go from a helpful tool to something that “does my job better than I do”. And he’s not the only one. The CEO of Anthropic, one of the biggest AI companies today, wrote an essay saying it could replace half of all entry-level white collar jobs in the next one to five years. 

What’s behind the sudden vibe shift? A good part of it has to do with the abilities of AI agents, which are basically AI models you give a task to perform for you, with the promise of little supervision.

Are we on the precipice of something big? Or is it another way to build hype amid fears of a bubble? Will Douglas Heaven, senior AI editor for the MIT Technology Review, joins us to separate reality from hype. 

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

Will AI agents take over the workplace?

Get lost in someone else’s life. From a mysterious childhood spent on the run, to a courageous escape from domestic violence, each season of Personally invites you to explore the human experience in all its complexity, one story — or season — at a time.

In the latest season of Personally: Creation Myth, Helena does not want kids. Her husband believes she’ll change her mind—she has so much love to give, she would be a perfect mother. That will never happen, she tells him. Again. And again. Until one day, he leaves.

In the silence, doubt starts rushing in. So she asks her close friends, her mother, her sister, even a perfect stranger—did she make the right decision? What is the purpose of life? Center your pleasure, says one friend. Go for adventure, says another, and isn’t parenthood the biggest adventure of all? Be true to yourself, says a father who regrets his decision. But the voice she needs to hear is her own. More episodes of Creation Myth are available wherever you get your podcasts and here: https://link.mgln.ai/CMxFB

The mother of all questions: do you want kids?

Cuba has been facing rolling blackouts, food shortages, and rationed hospital resources after a month with no oil imports. The energy crisis has also been a major blow to the country’s tourism industry, as major airlines suspended service to the country.

The cutoff came after the United States severed the island’s access to Venezuelan oil in January, and then warned any country supplying Cuba it could face retaliation. 

The New Yorker’s Jon Lee Anderson has been reporting on the region for decades. He joins us to talk about how the Trump administration hopes this could end communist rule in the country.

Cuba is pushed to the brink

A horrific mass shooting took place in the small community of Tumbler Ridge, B.C. on Tuesday – one of the deadliest in Canadian history.

Nine people are dead, including the suspect, and 27 more were injured. Many of the victims were as young as 12 or 13 years old.

CBC senior reporter Caroline Barghout is in Tumbler Ridge covering the ongoing investigation. She joins host Jayme Poisson with the latest on the tragedy, and how a community – and country – is in mourning.

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

Tragedy in Tumbler Ridge

Jonathan Haidt, best-selling author of “The Anxious Generation”, is our guest today. He’s been on a global mission to educate parents, the media, and government officials about the harms that social media companies inflict on children.

He believes that the world ran a huge uncontrolled experiment on kids in the 2010s by giving them smartphones and social media accounts. And now, there is clear evidence – often through court case disclosure – that the experiment has harmed children, and that it’s time to call it off.

Haidt has been calling on governments to ban social media for those under 16. And they’re listening. Canada is reportedly considering one for kids under 14 right now.

Today, we’re going to get into some of Jonathan Haidt’s research, what he thinks a ban can achieve, and more broadly about his core goal: reclaiming childhood.

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

The case to ban kids from social media, with Jonathan Haidt

The final remaining agreement constraining U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons expired last week.

The New START treaty was established by President Barack Obama and his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in 2010. And since then the treaty has governed much of the global landscape concerning nuclear weapons and non-proliferation. Reporting suggests both sides remain in talks.

Yet as the U.S. threatens annexation, attacks nations abroad, and threatens to re-emerge as a colonial power in the Western Hemisphere, some are asking whether nuclear weapons have become a necessity for countries hoping to guarantee their sovereignty. Canada’s former defence chief Wayne Eyre has said we should “keep our options open” on acquiring nuclear weapons.

For more on the future of this landmark treaty, and the possibility of a nuclear arms race, we’re joined by George Perkovich. He is the author of a number of books on nuclear weapons and non-proliferation and Senior Fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

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

Should Canada have nuclear weapons?

Last week, Donald Trump’s border Czar Tom Homan announced a drawdown of ICE personnel in Minnesota, following weeks of chaos and two deadly incidents in the state. Homan insisted that ICE was not surrendering, and this departure was instead evidence of ICE’s success in Minnesota. 

Beginning in December 2025, ICE announced ‘Operation Metro Surge’ — an aggressive immigration enforcement operation in Minnesota described as “the largest immigration enforcement operation ever carried out.” The operation incited weeks of protest, direct action and civil disobedience across the Twin Cities.

Today, we take a step back to assess how this operation unfolded, why Minneapolis became the stage for it, and what the unified response across so much of Minnesota says about the state of immigration enforcement in the U.S. today. We’re joined by Robert Worth, a contributing writer with The Atlantic who spent time in Minneapolis last month to report on the protests.

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

ICE, and lessons from Minnesota

With the holidays approaching and the Omicron variant spreading rapidly in Canada, people are reconsidering their response.

In a busy week of Omicron warnings, Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam said cases are expected to “rapidly escalate”; in her fiscal and economic update, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland committed a $4.5 billion “variant response” contingency; and Canada advised against all non-essential international travel. Provinces are expanding testing and booster access.

Today on Front Burner, a discussion with Globe and Mail health columnist André Picard about our pandemic cycle of delay and panic, and the lessons and tools that still might make us better prepared for Omicron.

As Omicron spreads, governments scramble

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