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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

Some of our favourite guests of the year return to talk about books that helped meaningfully explain 2025. 

We talk about the evergreen appeal of Plato as well as Jewish identity with former Yale fascism scholar Jason Stanley. 

The déjà vu of trade wars and Canadian nationalism are tackled by journalist and author Stephen Maher. His pick is a book that details the last election of Sir John A. Macdonald and first election of Wilfrid Laurier.

Then the career works of Herman Melville as a blueprint for modern America with historian Rick Perlstein.

This is part one, in a series that will continue on tomorrow’s show! 

The books:

The Republic Book 8 by Plato 

Being Jewish After Gaza: A Reckoning by Peter Beinart

The History of Canada Series: The Destiny of Canada by Christopher Pennington

The Lightning-Rod Man by Herman Melville

The books that explained 2025

In the 1980s and 90s, Satan and his followers were accused of brainwashing children, sacrificing babies, and infiltrating North American society on a massive scale — yet these thousands of alleged Satanists were nowhere to be found. Even so, the narrative became embedded in our cultural memory, warping everything it touched — including the lives of innocent people… And it never quite died out.

In the new 8-part series, The Devil You Know, Sarah Marshall (You’re Wrong About) explores the tangled web of the Satanic Panic, in a journey that will take you everywhere from Victoria, B.C. to rural Kentucky to San Antonio, Texas. This is a show about the people who experienced the Satanic Panic in real-time — the believers, the skeptics, the bystanders, and the wrongfully-convicted. What was it like to be a psychologist told to look for Satanists in every case; a mother slowly recovering memories of supposed Satanic abuse; a teenager accused of conspiracy to murder? The stories of these eyewitnesses point us toward the real underlying problems — individual and societal — that the Panic was a response to. The fault, as ever, was not with Satanists, but in ourselves.

You can find more episodes of The Devil You Know wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/TDYKxFB

Go inside the tangled web of the Satanic Panic from Jaws to Patrick Swayze

Forged is a six-part series from CBC in Canada and ABC Australia. Host Adrian Stimson, an artist from the Siksika Nation, travels from Thunder Bay to the Northern Territory of Australia, to reveal what's believed to be the largest art crime fraud in the world.

In this first episode, rock star Kevin Hearn of the Barenaked Ladies is doing rock star things — like buying paintings. And what better painting for an iconic Canadian rocker to buy than one by Norval Morrisseau, one of the most iconic Indigenous artists in Canada? But when Kevin’s Morrisseau painting is featured in an exhibit, it gets taken down because the head curator says it’s “questionable.” Kevin tries to get some answers but every answer leads to more questions. Host Adrian Stimson traces Kevin’s dogged quest to find out the truth about his painting — and learns how this one painting is the key to cracking a whole underworld open. More episodes of Forged are available here: https://link.mgln.ai/ForgedxFB

The true story behind the Norval Morrisseau art fraud

Today we're bringing you a 2025 Front Burner wrap up, answering audience questions and bringing you behind the scenes of the making of some of our most popular episodes of 2025.

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

The stories that shaped our year

In 2025 news of the biggest, most sensational sports scandals was broken not by ESPN or Sports Illustrated, but by a podcaster named Pablo Torre on his show Pablo Torre Finds Out.

It was Pablo who investigated Kawhi Leonard’s alleged multi-million dollar under the table no show deal. And it was Pablo who uncovered potential collusion involving NFL player salaries.

Pablo Torre is with us today to talk about the year in sports scandal, the state of sports journalism, and gambling grip’s grip on the whole industry.

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

The year in sports scandal with Pablo Torre

Corruption is a word that’s come up throughout this year in relation to U.S. President Donald Trump’s second term. There have been allegations of personal enrichment, to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars, through his family’s crypto and real estate ventures. There are also accusations of quid pro quo deals with foreign leaders and convicted criminals seeking pardons.

Is this a bug in Trump’s administration, or a feature?

To put it all into focus, Tommy Vietor is here. He’s been following this issue of corruption on his very popular podcast, Pod Save America. He also co-hosts Pod Save the World.

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

Trump & corruption with Pod Save America

The Australian prime minister and police have said that the suspected gunmen in the Bondi Beach mass shooting at a Hanukkah event were motivated by Islamic State ideology. Australian counterterrorism officials allege the father and son received military training in southern Philippines. 

While it's been more than six years since the fall of the caliphate, experts like Lucas Webber say there’s been a troubling rise in Islamic State motivated activity and violence worldwide. 

Webber is a Senior Research Fellow at The Soufan Center and a Senior Threat Intelligence Analyst at Tech Against Terrorism. He joins us to talk about what’s known about the Bondi Beach attack, and what the evolving presence of ISIS as a decentralized terrorist network looks like.

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

Bondi Beach and the ISIS connection

On the first day of his second term as U.S. president, Donald Trump signed an executive order effectively gutting USAID — the United States Agency for International Development. It's an arm of the government that, in 2024, was operating in more than 130 countries worldwide, providing food, medicine and other life-saving support.

At the time, advocates said the cuts would result in preventable deaths from starvation, malnutrition, and easily treatable diseases. Now, nearly a year later, reporting from ProPublica suggests that’s what happened, particularly in several African countries.

Anna Maria Barry-Jester, a reporter with ProPublica, breaks down her investigation into the fallout of the collapse of USAID.

The human toll of Trump's war on aid

It’s been almost a year since Alberta Premier Danielle Smith met with U.S. president-elect Donald Trump. He was on the brink of a trade war. Since then, a lot has happened, from a renewed push for a separatist referendum, to election recall campaigns, to a shift in the relationship between the province and Ottawa.

We are joined by two CBC colleagues. Kathleen Petty is the host of the West of Centre podcast and Jason Markusoff is a writer and producer in Calgary.

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

Alberta’s very interesting year

Today, an in-depth look at puberty blockers and their use on minors with gender dysphoria. These drugs have come under an enormous amount of scrutiny in recent years, with some questioning their benefits, safety and long-term impact.

After banning the use of puberty blockers for gender treatment of people under 18, a new clinical trial in the U.K. aims to get to the bottom of those concerns.

Azeen Ghorayshi is a science and gender reporter for the New York Times.

She’ll parse through what we know and don’t know about the effects of blockers in minors, how this became a hugely divisive and politicized debate around the world, and whether this new trial could change our understanding.

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

Why is the U.K. rethinking puberty blockers?

Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre says his party supports a bill from an independent senator that would require websites to verify users' ages before allowing them to see sexually explicit content — similar to laws recently passed in the U.K., several E.U. countries and numerous American states. But critics say the law would be disastrous for privacy and civil liberties — and industry titan Pornhub says it might force them to block Canadians from the site altogether, as they've already done in some of those other jurisdictions.

Sam Cole — a journalist with 404 Media and the host of Front Burner's upcoming spinoff podcast, The Pornhub Empire: Understood — explains the controversy around a seemingly simple push to protect children online, and what it could mean for the future of the online porn industry.

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

Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Could an ID law trigger a Pornhub blackout?

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