Front Burner

Mark Carney’s Saudi Arabia reboot

Mark Carney met with Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia this week, aiming to strengthen ties and build up our economic relationship in areas like AI and critical minerals.It’s been 26 years since a Canadian Prime Minister visited the country, despite the fact that they’re a major trading partner. The relationship had come with friction over things like Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, human rights abuses, and political repression. Canadian-Saudi relations hit an all-time low during Justin Trudeau's tenure, and Dennis Horak was expelled from his post as Canada’s ambassador to Saudi Arabia in 2018. Now, almost eight years later, he’s applauding this move by the current government to renew the relationship. Horak joins us to talk about how relations soured, and why he thinks we’re headed back in the right direction.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

U.S. politics! Platner implosion, where’s McConnell?

The U.S. midterms are coming up this fall. They could flip control of the House and possibly the Senate. But both parties are dealing with difficult messes. Progressive Democratic candidate Graham Platner’s Senate campaign in Maine imploded after allegations of sexual assault, which has laid bare a war in his party. Republican infighting ground Congress to a halt. And Senator Mitch McConnell has not been seen or heard by the public for weeks, following a hospitalization. Alex Shephard, senior editor of the New Republic, joins us to break down the state of each party heading into these consequential elections. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

What does it take to defend Canada’s Arctic?

This week, Prime Minister Carney is in Turkey to attend the NATO summit. Ahead of leaving for Ankara, he announced the procurement of 12 submarines from the German company TKMS, in what’s expected to be the largest military procurement deal in Canada’s history.Carney says that these submarines, along with a slew of other military investments, will allow Canada to assert our full sovereignty in the Arctic.Today, we are focusing on the Arctic. Earlier this year – the Liberal government announced a plan to modernize and expand the military’s footprint in the North. This is all in a bid to assert sovereignty in a region where Russia and China’s influence is growing.Anne Shibata Casselman is a science journalist based in B.C. She makes the argument that the path to asserting that sovereignty must put the people who live on the land and have claim to it at the centre. She just wrote a deeply reported piece in Maclean’s about this, called “The Arctic Needs Defending. Canada Isn’t Ready.”For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

How to read a manifesto

In the aftermath of an act of public violence, attention often turns to a document. Sometimes it’s a letter, a blog post, or a video, that gets referred to as a manifesto.Very quickly the public coalesces around these documents. Journalists struggle to consider what to print, authorities debate whether they should be released, and researchers scour them for clues.Following the recent incel attack in Montreal, we engage in these questions, and more. What ingredients make up a manifesto? What are they designed to accomplish? And what responsibility do the rest of us have when confronted with one?Today, we’re joined by J.M. Berger, author of several books including “Extremism.’ He’s also a senior research fellow for the Center on Terrorism, Extremism, and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

Politics! Pipeline power move, renovating 24 Sussex

Aaron Wherry, senior writer at CBC's parliamentary bureau and good friend of the show, is here to parse through last week’s big pipeline announcement with Alberta and the deal that Prime Minister Carney made with B.C. to get it all done.Plus: The 24 Sussex national home reno nightmare turned crowdfunding campaign.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts