The 1950s & 60s saw a wave of radical movements. Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution. The Black Panthers. Quebec and Canada had the FLQ — a showdown that dissolved into crisis. By October 1970, there were soldiers in the streets, communities on edge, kidnapping and terror in the headlines. But those frightening weeks were just the crescendo of a wave of terror and violence that was nearly a decade in the making. This series will reveal the stories of that time through immersive storytelling and the people who lived it: the bomb disposal expert on defusing live explosives, the survivors of terror, their families, and the radicals themselves.
John and Amanda have lived on the fringes their whole lives. They're on welfare, living with John's grandma, and struggling with addiction to opioids and Dungeons and Dragons. They've followed crooked paths to this point. John played in heavy metal bands and dabbled with Satanism. Amanda left home and discovered heroin before her 18th birthday. The couple converts to Islam in an attempt to turn their lives around. But things take a wild turn when a mysterious figure enters their lives and draws them into a web of conspiracy, deception and terror. More episodes are available at smarturl.it/pressurecookercbc
Kuper Island is an 8-part series that tells the stories of four students: three who survived and one who didn't. They attended one of Canada's most notorious residential schools – where unsolved deaths, abuse, and lies haunt the community and the survivors to this day. Hosted by Duncan McCue. More episodes are available at hyperurl.co/kuperisland
The Secret Life of Canada is a podcast about the country you know and the stories you don't. Join hosts Leah-Simone Bowen and Falen Johnson as they reveal the beautiful, terrible and weird histories of this land. The Secret Life of Canada is back with season 4 and in this episode, you'll hear the story behind a now famous "before and after" photo of a little boy who was taken to residential school in Regina, Saskatchewan. Who is this boy? Where is he from and what happened to him after he was taken away from home? More episodes are available at http://hyperurl.co/secretlifeofcanada
Throughout its reign, the British Empire stole a lot of stuff. Today those objects are housed in genteel institutions across the U.K. and the world. They usually come with polite plaques. This is a series about the not-so-polite history behind those objects. Hosted by Marc Fennell. More episodes are available at: smarturl.it/stuffthebritishstole
The Flamethrowers captures the punch-you-in-the-mouth energy and sound of right-wing talk radio. Host Justin Ling takes us from the fringe preachers and conspiracy peddlers of the 1920s to the political firestorm that rages today. With humour and candour, Ling examines the appeal of broadcasters like Rush Limbaugh, who found a sleeping audience, radicalized it, and became an accidental kingmaker — culminating in the election of Donald Trump. More episodes are available at smarturl.it/theflamethrowers
Discovery. Reserve. Savage. After centuries of colonization, some words have the power to hurt us deeply and twist our collective history. Host Kaniehtiio Horn guides listeners through over 70 conversations with people from 15 Indigenous communities sharing their truths about the impact of words on our perspectives, cultures, and lives. Together we will decolonize our histories – and ourselves – one word at a time. More episodes are available at smarturl.it/twistedhistories
Brainwashed investigates the CIA’s covert mind control experiments – from the Cold War and MKULTRA to the so-called War on Terror. It’s the story of how a renowned psychiatrist used his unwitting patients as human guinea pigs at a Montreal hospital, and the ripple effects on survivors, their families, and thousands of other people around the world. It also examines the cultural impact — how the CIA brought LSD to America and inadvertently created counterculture influencers such as author Ken Kessey and poet Allen Ginsberg. It’s an exploration of what happens in times of fear, when the military and medicine collide. And what happens when the survivors fight back. More episodes are available at: smarturl.it/brainwashedcbc
In response to the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte, the federal government invokes the War Measures Act. And when the body of Pierre Laporte is discovered, popular sentiment turns against the FLQ and leads to the collapse of the group.
With the kidnappings of James Cross and Pierre Laporte, the FLQ earns the headline attention it craves, and creates a national crisis in the process.
Pierre-Paul Geoffroy and Bob Côté were at opposite ends of the busiest period of FLQ bombing activity. It began in May 1968 with a bomb at the 7-Up factory, and ended in February 1969 with the explosion at the Montreal Stock Exchange. Geoffroy was planting the bombs, Côté had to defuse them. For both men, the period took a toll.
The FLQ’s campaign for liberation did not spring from a vacuum: radical Québec separatists were inspired by and in turn inspired decolonization movements around the world, including the Black Panthers.
Pierre Vallieres taps into the anger and alienation felt by Francophone Quebecers by penning a book of essays that earns him comparisons to Malcolm X and Che Guevara. The revolutionary text inflames separatist sentiment, cements Vallieres’s position as the intellectual and philosophical father of the FLQ… and is held up in the courts as evidence of his guilt in earlier FLQ bombing campaigns.
The story of how a Hungarian born, Austro-German raised, ex-French Foreign Legionnaire became a radical Quebec separatist demonstrates the allure of the FLQ message in the political tinderbox that was Montreal in 1964.
The 1960s began as a time of promise for Quebec, with the feeling that the province was throwing off the shackles of its parochial past. But despite plenty of reason for hope, the seeds were being sown for radical revolt, and by 1963, Montreal would be shaken by political violence. We meet the victim of an early FLQ bombing, and dig into how her story was lost to history.
Introducing Recall, a series about history that is still hot to the touch. The first season, How to Start a Revolution, explores the story of a groundbreaking political movement that rocked Canada in the 1960s. Host Geoff Turner will examine how the movement grew from a global spirit of liberation and how the dream of revolution became a nightmare of bombs, kidnapping and murder.