Explore: A Canadian Geographic Podcast

It’s hard to think of a person who has written with more passion about Canada, and in as many different mediums, as Dave Bidini. You might know him as the songwriter and frontman of the Rheostatics – that most Canadian of Canadian bands — or for his best-selling books On a Cold Road, The Tropic of Hockey, Keon and Me or Midnight Light, or from his award-winning journalism and documentaries, or for his latest endeavour, the West End Phoenix, a community newspaper he founded in Toronto. The Phoenix is a bold effort to fill the void caused when big newspaper chains started closing down community newspapers. With a focus on great reporting and storytelling, it features guest writers like Margaret Atwood and Rush guitarist Alex Lifeson. The interview also gets into why the Yellowknifer newspaper in the N.W.T. was the inspiration for the Phoenix, and touches on Dave’s deep love of the Toronto Maple Leafs, a special moment with Wendel Clark, and a possible cause of the Leafs’ decades-long Stanley Cup curse.

Today we’re lucky to be talking to Dr. Daniel Pauly, professor of marine biology at the University of British Columbia, the leading expert on the declining state of the world's fisheries and something of a philosopher. Fish is the last wild catch: the last animal food source we hunt and eat en masse from the wild. But Daniel Pauly warns that we are rapidly approaching the end of fish due to industrial fishing methods, government subsidization of corporate fishing operations, and climate change. The French-born marine biologist has dedicated his long and award-winning career to improving the data that’s used to understand global marine stocks, especially in the developing world, where illegal fishing is rampant. This is the principal aim of the Sea Around Us initiative that he helped found at UBC. More accurate data helps better pinpoint where fisheries are collapsing and how best to protect them with ocean reserves, government regulation and a shift from industrial fishing operations back to smaller, tr

With this December marking the 100th anniversary of Agnes Macphail becoming the first woman elected to the Canadian Parliament, Explore welcomes one of the most prominent female political figures of our present day to the podcast. Before stepping back from public life in the fall of 2021, Catherine McKenna was a federal Minister of Industry and Minister of the Environment in the government of Justin Trudeau. She was lead Canadian negotiator and signatory of the Paris Climate Accord, and got federal carbon pricing legislation passed by Parliament. In this engaging and thoughtful conversation, she discusses the joys and challenges of being a woman in politics today, how to make politics more inclusive, what needs to be done to shut down the threats and hate of internet trolls, where things stand with the environment after the Glasgow Climate Conference, and why she is passionate about open- and cold-water swimming.

We're thrilled to welcome Emily Choy, the newest RCGS Explorer-in-Residence, to the Explore Podcast. Based out of McGill University, Emily is an award-winning expert on the impacts of climate change on the Arctic, with a focus on a sea-bird called murres. Emily describes her summers on Coats Island in Hudson's Bay, studying a colony of 30,000 murres that nest high on the island's barren cliffs. Looking like a cross between a penguin and a puffin, these remarkable sea birds can dive up to 100 metres deep while hunting for fish. Emily explains how summer heatwaves are seeing murres die in their nests from heat exhaustion, and how they are being forced to change their diet as their staple food source, Arctic cod, shifts north searching for colder waters. She also describes how her passion for nature was nurtured at her grandparents’ cottage near Lake Simcoe, her time spent studying beluga whales, and why she sees her role as a Black female scientist as an important one, especially in her work in the North.

Viola Desmond was arrested 75 years ago this month for refusing to leave her seat in the “whites only” section of a movie theatre in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia. This brave stand by a Black Nova Scotian against the segregation rules of the day in Nova Scotia would inspire future generations to break down the racist structures that had been suppressing Black people in Canada for centuries. George Elliott Clarke, Canada’s former Poet Laureate, is intimately familiar with that world. His family roots stretch back centuries to the earliest days of Black Nova Scotia, which is the subject of his latest book, Where Beauty Survived: An Africadian Memoir. “One of the great things about being Africadian,” Clarke says, “is no matter the oppression, and the racism and the apartheid, what made our communities special is that we had communities, we had land, we had homes, we had neighbours who had the same struggles you had, who could share their resources with you, who shared your faith, and all of a sudden you've got

The UN Climate Change Summit in Glasgow is being described as a critical moment in human history, as our ability to reverse global warming reaches a point of no return. Harvey Locke is in Glasgow, leading the charge against biodiversity loss, and linking it firmly to climate change. As a leader of the "Nature Needs Half" movement, Locke and a growing number of experts believe that the way to reverse both climate change and biodiversity loss is to set aside half of the world's natural places, and let nature be nature. Locke explains why this is both possible and necessary, and discusses his own grassroots experiences as the co-founder of the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative. Based in Banff, Alta., Locke has dedicated his life to conserving the world’s wild spaces. He is also the Chair of the Beyond Aichi Targets Task Force and a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

It's bird migration season. Geese are flying south, loons making their last mournful cries on northern lakes and bird feeders are getting set up in backyards and on balconies. To celebrate our avian friends, we’re thrilled to have Patrick Nadeau joining us. He is the new President of Birds Canada, which is the largest organization for citizen science in Canada. This episode is about birds and you, and how by simply observing and noting those birds in your backyard, on your balcony feeder, or in the wild, you can do a lot to advance the understanding of not just birds, but also the state of our planet. You can join in at https://www.birdscanada.org/ Patrick Nadeau is a New Brunswick native, with a long career in preserving our wild and natural places. He is the former executive director of CPAWS Quebec, where he played a leading role working with the Inuit in Nunavik to create Tursujuq National Park, the largest protected area in eastern North America. And as we discuss in the podcast, he was als

October ... The nights grow longer and darker. It's time for Hallowe'en, time to gather around fires and tell ghost stories. And that is exactly what RCGS Explorer-in-Residence Adam Shoalts has in store for us in this episode. He joins us to talk about his new book, The Whisper on the Night Wind. It's a wilderness tale of the supernatural, an investigation into a century-old legend of a strange, demon-like creature that haunted the remote fur trading posts of Labrador. This creature, known as the Traverspine Beast or Traverspine Gorilla, was described in detail by multiple eye-witnesses over several years. Armed with those accounts, and a travel companion trained in mixed martial arts, Adam set off in his canoe, up roaring Labrador rivers and into the ancient, mist-shrouded Mealy Mountains, in search of this legend. The resulting story is a fantastic, fun and chilling tale, a look, as he puts it, into “the strange and scary things that lurk in the darkness, beyond the flicker of the firelight.” Our s

September 30, 2021 marks the first ever National Day for Truth and Reconciliation in Canada. It's a federal statutory holiday, a time to reflect about the brutal impact of the Indian Residential School System. Hundreds of thousands of First Nations, Inuit and Métis children were forced to attend those institutions from the 1830s to the 1990s, and the impact of that has resonated through families, communities and generations. This holiday was the direct result of the 94 Calls to Action from the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report. Our guest today, Marie Wilson, was one of the three Commissioners of that Commission, which worked from 2009 to 2015. In that role, Wilson criss-crossed the country hearing heartbreaking testimony from residential school survivors. Stories of the mental, physical and sexual abuse children suffered as part of a system, run by the churches and government, aimed at forcing Indigenous children to assimilate into white society — or as one official bluntly put it, “to kil

Commander Chris Hadfield is arguably Canada’s most famous astronaut. There was even a time, during his 2013 mission aboard the International Space Station, when he was quite possibly our most famous Canadian, appearing as a guest on talk shows and capturing the imaginations of millions with his viral dispatches from life in orbit. A veteran of multiple missions to space with the Canadian Space Agency, NASA and the Russian Space Program, he was the first Canadian to do a space walk, was commander of the ISS, and spent five years as the NASA representative to the Russian Space Program based in Moscow, becoming a fluent Russian speaker in the process. It’s fair to say that Hadfield knows a thing or two about space, so when it came time for him to write his first ever novel, he turned for inspiration to the cosmos and the heyday of the Space Race, particularly the Apollo Missions to the moon in the 1960s and ’70s. Out next month, The Apollo Murders is a classic Cold War-era spy thriller. In this fascinating conv

“Colombia is a place where magic seems to happen every moment and I would argue that only a people like the Colombians, with their enduring spirit of place, their indescribable capacity for joy, could have endured the agonies of the last 50 years.” Wade Davis says his latest book Magdalena: River of Dreams is a love letter of sorts. Colombia, he says, is “a nation that allowed me to dream, that gave me my wings to fly.” His love affair with Colombia began as a 14-year-old in the late 60s, when he went on an exchange from suburban Montreal. He has been returning ever since, as a writer, botanist, traveller, and scholar of Indigenous religions, captivated by the unbelievable range of history, cultures, environments, climates, and people that exist in this diverse South American nation. In this interview, Davis discusses the five years of travels he undertook along the Magdalena River, “a corridor of commerce and a fountain of culture, the wellspring of Colombian music, literature, poetry and prayer,” as the

One last trip into the HBC vaults at the Manitoba Museum with curator Amelia Fay.

On this episode of Explore, we take another fascinating dive into the Hudson’s Bay Company Collection at the Manitoba Museum.It contains over 27,000 items, far too many for us to pour through on our podcast, so we asked curator Amelia Fay to take us down into the vaults and talk about some of her favourite items, as well as items that speak to the long 350-year history of the HBC and its impact on Canada.Amelia discusses the design of the iconic Hudson’s Bay Company point blanket, and what’s behind that colour scheme. She explains why moccasins have a strong case for being as important a First Nations tool in the fur trade as the birch bark canoe. We also look at some items that point to the HBC’s shift in the late 19th century from fur trading company to Canadian retail giant (HBC coffee anyone?).

Amelia Fay, Curator of the HBC Collection at the Manitoba Museum and Archives

RCGS founding president Charles Camsell on his 19th century childhood at an Arctic HBC post

How The Métis Nation was born from the Fur Trade and the HBC

The impact of legendary HBC Governor Sir George Simpson

Adam Shoalts on early HBC Explorers and their impact on mapping Canada

A look at the impact of the Hudson's Bay Company as it turns 350 years old, by visiting the first ever HBC Trading Post, in the Cree community of Waskaganish.

Astronaut David Saint-Jacques knows a thing or tw…