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At Katharine Birbalsingh’s inner-city free school in London, students are not to speak in the hallways. Discipline is strict. Students wear uniforms, sit in rows and listen to instruction. It’s teacher-led learning, not child-centred. The kids, heavily drawn from minority groups, memorize knowledge and learn duty. It’s what used to be considered a typical education. But as Birbalsingh tells Brian this week, she’s now considered a “radical.” The results? The students at Michaela Community School are excelling and parents are delighted. Birbalsingh discusses what she thinks educators in Canada are getting very wrong — and why the ones paying most dearly for it are disadvantaged children. (Recorded September 28, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After the prime minister dropped his bombshell assassination accusation against India, the world has waited for him to back it up. But Ujjal Dosanjh says that when it comes to credibility on this file, Justin Trudeau — and Canada — don’t have much. And the unserious way Trudeau has handled allegations around the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar hasn’t helped. Dosanjh, a former Liberal cabinet minister and B.C. NDP premier, joins Brian this week to explain what’s really going on with the allegations, Indian diaspora politics, and how Ottawa has undermined Canada’s global reputation with its shallow approach to the significance of India and the issue of Khalistan separatists in Canada. (Recorded September 21, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Don’t call it cancel culture: that masks the grimness of the authoritarian era we’re living in, says author Brendan O’Neill. It’s an anti-enlightenment, he says, that is rapidly and fervently obliterating centuries of western civilizational progress. O’Neill, author of the new book A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, joins Brian this week to expose the shibboleths we’re all being forced to accept, even though we know they’re not true. And he shows how those of us living in once-liberal societies are being cowed into self-censorship, rightly fearing that the wrong opinions will get us denounced, ostracized and possibly even arrested. (Recorded August 15, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s not just that Pierre Poilievre’s Conservatives are leading in national polls: it’s that the party is bringing in new groups, including “the people who get stuff done,” as guest Lord Daniel Hannan calls the working class. The prominent British journalist and Tory politician joins Brian from the Conservative policy convention in Quebec City, where he delivered the keynote address, coming from the U.K. where Conservatives have held government more than 13 years. Hannan discusses why the right is the new political home for the proletariat in Canada, the U.S. and U.K., as workers feel abandoned and betrayed on economics and culture by liberals and the left. (Recorded September 8, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pierre Poilievre, Federal Conservative party leader and guest Kory Teneycke discuss Poilievre's rising popularity, gender identity and parental rights, government overspending, conservative image, political alternation theory, challenges of homeownership, and navigating media relations.

Bill Vigars was starting a new gig at the Canadian Cancer Society when he flew to the East Coast to check out an unknown kid with one leg planning to run a personal marathon a day across Canada for cancer research. Before he knew it, Vigars was helping Terry Fox make the Marathon of Hope a national phenomenon that’s kept Terry’s legacy alive for decades, with nearly a billion dollars since raised in his name. Vigars joins host Brian Lilley this week to talk about his new book, Terry and Me, and to share some never-before-told stories behind the incredible saga that carries on today in Canada and around the world. (Recorded August 10, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Things were different in the “before times.” Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, we weren’t all experts in viral variants or polymerase chain reaction tests. We’d never heard of “vaccine apartheid” or “social distancing.” No one drank “quarantinis” after enduring a “covidivorce.” And “self-isolating” and “lockdowns” were things to be avoided. In his new book Pandexicon, author Wayne Grady has chronicled the words that emerged from the COVID-19 catastrophe to decode the message and meaning behind them. He joins host Brian Lilley this week to discuss what our viral vocabulary says about who we are. And how the pandemic has indelibly changed us all in the “after times.” (Recorded July 25, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mike Ramsay was friends with former Toronto principal Richard Bilkszto, whose suicide after allegedly enduring false bigotry accusations in an anti-racism session has shocked Canadians. And Ramsay says he’s experienced similar vilification. He’s been called a “white supremacist.” He’s been suspended as a school trustee in Waterloo, Ont. He says it’s because he fights to keep schools focused on learning and achievement, not identity politics and radical race theory. He also happens to be Black. Ramsay joins Brian this week to discuss how Canadians can take school boards back from the extremists who want to teach political indoctrination over skills, and won’t stop until they’ve silenced all dissent. (Recorded August 8, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Formerly one of Canada’s top crime reporters, Tamara Cherry witnessed gruesome violence and terrible trauma. What she says she didn’t realize was how the way she and others covered the crime beat was worsening pain for survivors, responders and reporters themselves. Cherry, author of the new book The Trauma Beat: A Case for Re-Thinking the Business of Bad News, joins host Brian Lilley, himself no stranger to crime reporting. Cherry explains how she came to discover the damaging psychological toll crime reporting was taking on her, the victims and even the public, and the new approach she wants the media to take when it comes to covering everyone’s worst nightmares. (Recorded July 21, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The economics of the music business have been turned upside down in recent years. For artists and fans alike, concerts now are king. Legendary publicist, writer and music maven Eric Alper joins Brian this week to discuss why this summer’s concert season in particular is making history, why some concert tickets now cost more than plane tickets, and the most obvious reasons why Taylor Swift left Canada off of her latest tour. (And when she’s likely to finally come.) (Recorded July 19, 2023) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices