- Is in-person worship an essential service?
Thursday, April 15th 2021
Last weekend, protesters clashed with police over the closing of GraceLife Church in Alberta. It's not the first time that houses of worship have been a flashpoint for anti-lockdown action. Why has religion, and in particular evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity been so opposed to restrictions on in-person gatherings, even in provinces run by conservatives? How have churches of all denominations handled a year of virtual worship? How do you keep faith in a time of plague, when some of your fellow Christians seemed determined to spread it?
GUEST: Michael Coren, Anglican cleric, author, broadcaster
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- Canada had a blueprint for an amazing health data system. We never built it.
Wednesday, April 14th 2021
In the late 1990s, it became clear that Canada's health data systems would need to go digital. A thorough report was presented, the first of many to come, laying out what needed to happen for Canada to lead the world in digital health data. A national data system would track everything from outbreaks and symptoms to vaccinations and side effects. But...we never built it. Over the next 20-plus years, little was done—and nothing at all from a truly national level.
Now, when we desperately need to be able to have access to real-time data on what's happening where, every province relies on a different system, and many of them are duct-taped together from the bones of what was supposed to be a world-leading piece of infrastructure. What happened?
GUEST: Justin Ling (Read Justin's reporting here.)
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- What did the pandemic do to our social media use?
Tuesday, April 13th 2021
It increased it, obviously. But how? And what is that doing to us. A dive into the data that shows us where we spent our extra time, how it made us feel and which platforms have become indispensable and which ones we actually enjoy can reveal a lot about how the apps that live on our phones can change our behaviour. And how they can change to be more useful to us ... if that's their goal.
GUEST: Rani Molla, Senior Data Reporter, Recode
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- Canada’s housing bubble is hitting smaller and smaller communities
Monday, April 12th 2021
And also... bubbles are supposed to burst, aren't they? At some point? It's been more than half a decade since house prices in Canada began to truly climb, and that climb has accelerated even through a pandemic. It's no longer just the big cities that are driving prices, either. It's the smaller towns outside them—and the towns even further down the road when those smaller towns get too expensive.
What has the unending surge done to the Canadian economy? What could stop it? What happens in small Ontario towns when people from Toronto start flooding in and pushing home prices way over asking? And can we still call this a bubble, if some of the underlying factors driving it appear to be here to stay?
GUEST: Economist Mike Moffatt, Smart Prosperity Institute
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- They were switched as babies, and found out decades later. And they aren’t alone.
Friday, April 9th 2021
Have you ever been mistaken for somebody else by a stranger? They call you by another name and you say "Sorry, that's not me." And they say something like, "Oh, I’m sorry, you look just like them." Sometimes, they might add with a smile, "Are you sure you’re not related?" And you say nope, and off you go.
Today’s story is what happens when you discover that, actually, you are related. That other person is your sibling, and you should have come home from the hospital with their mother, and grown up as a member of that family. But you didn't.
GUEST: Lindsay Jones, writing for The Atavist
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