Podcasts about Ontario, Canada

The Maple Leafs set the temperature. More voices on this page are arguing about Toronto's hockey team than about anything else, and the argument in the clips is bleak: Sticks in the 6ix goes into the second-to-last game of the year hoping the team finishes in the bottom five while news breaks about Keith Pelley's involvement in the club, and on Locked On Leafs David Alter, working through the locker-room cleanout, decides Toronto needs a high-status player like Brad Marchand or Tom Wilson to disrupt a corporate culture. The titles say the rest: "Treliving Fired, Pelley's Presser & the Future of the Maple Leafs (Ep. 231)", "Leafs season ends with a whimper, The Athletic details MLSE disfunction".

Everything else is what the Leafs crowd out: the Raptors and Blue Jays, Ottawa sports talk, Windsor council, and a smaller group of shows that treat Ontario as a province rather than a city, with Queen's Park, municipal finance, cold cases going back to the 1950s, road running and Haliburton County history in them. Most of the listening here is Toronto listening carried up to the provincial page, with Ottawa and Windsor adding a show apiece; those three cities are where to go for more.

What Ontario is

Ontario is Canada's most populous province. Toronto, its capital and the country's largest city, sits on Lake Ontario; Ottawa, the national capital, is on its eastern edge. The province runs from the Great Lakes and the US border north to Hudson Bay, with most of its people in the southern strip between Windsor and Ottawa.

Leafs postmortems

The Leafs shows differ mainly in how much argument they fit into a minute. MLHS Podcast is the fastest, Nick Ashbourne and Anthony Petrielli building a case at speed and revising it mid-sentence: after a 1-2-2 stretch they call it "rubber meets the road time", Petrielli says the team went 1-for-10 at home and last looked this bad in 1984, and the titles keep circling management, as in "Pelley denounces Leafs' culture, underlines retooling mandate - MLHS Podcast Ep. 117". Sticks in the 6ix covers the same wreckage with a wider lens, bringing in Brock Otten on Gavin McKenna's draft stock and Emma Maltais on women's hockey, where every game since the Olympics has sold out.

Talkin' Buds Leafs Show takes the long view: its clips from "Toronto Maple Leafs: 11 Years of the Shanaplan" treat the 2021 Montreal series as the era's clearest indictment and argue the club needs a president of hockey operations, not six assistant general managers. Offside Hockey Talk is a fan thinking out loud rather than an analyst, Steve Peters on whether Matias Maccelli can replace Mitch Marner's playmaking; Don't Stop Beleafing! has Nolan and Jack, who call their Leafs fandom a sickness, on a 227-game run without being shut out ending against Montreal and what that says about Canadian goaltending. Hebsy on Sports is louder and grumpier, Mark Hebsher and Toronto Mike counting ten straight elimination games without a win; its retirement announcement has Hebsher explaining why he can no longer produce an opinion on demand. Take 6ix, from 2019, wants the argument to survive statistical scrutiny.

Raptors and Blue Jays

The basketball is in a better mood. On Locked On Raptors, Sean Woodley and Vivek Jacob call a 46-36 season, a fifth seed and a top-ten half-court offence a success whatever happens against Cleveland, noting that ESPN had projected 33 wins. Jurassic Pod, with Eric Koreen and Holly MacKenzie, is from the summer of 2022 and the Kevin Durant trade talk. Locked On Blue Jays runs hot: Braden Iwasco and Carter First stack examples rather than theses, and the examples here are a sweep by the White Sox, a loss to the Rockies, Max Scherzer's injury and John Schneider's ejection over a disputed Kevin Gausman balk call.

Queen's Park, city budgets and a Windsor council

On The Ledge is the provincial politics roundtable, measured and comfortable taking its time, piling up caveats before landing a blunt conclusion. Its title run is budgets, housing, freedom of information and cost of living under the Ford government; its clips range wider, a panel weighing Avi Lewis's first-ballot NDP leadership win and calling his direction "pretty radical", one voice saying that playbook has been tried and fell apart. AMO ON Topic is the Association of Municipalities of Ontario talking about money: the central clip argues municipalities subsidize what should be provincial programs by about $4 billion a year, money not going into police budgets, transit or the infrastructure housing growth needs, while planning up to $290 billion in infrastructure spending.

Rose City Politics is Windsor's version, two voices who prefer explanation to performance. In "Curler Murals" one of them, Fraser, says public art can look like the first step in gentrification, and a library debate turns on 560 hours a week year-round and a report that never showed Sunday usage for branches already open on Sundays. "Goose Snipers" and "Doug, Cut the Tape!" give the tone.

Cold cases

Two shows work unsolved Ontario crime from different decades. True Crime Real Time stays in Southern Ontario. Its Edward Barbarian clip has a 28-year-old shot with a .32 revolver and found with an empty wallet, a permit for a 1946 blue Cadillac and $1.05 in his pocket, and the same weapon pattern turning up three years later; another has Anton Kudernoga, a week before he was found in July 1956, warning that something might happen to him. Ontario Cold Cases - The Podcast is more forensic. Its Christine Jessop clips walk through Guy Paul Morin's DNA exoneration in 1995, a 1998 report whose 119 recommendations brought mandatory interrogation recordings and stricter forensic standards, and Calvin Hoover's identification in 2020 through genetic genealogy at odds of three trillion to one; the title run keeps returning to the Sherman murders.

Off the sports page

Athletics Ontario Running Podcast starts from race facts and widens fast. Neil McKay's clip goes from the Around the Bay 30k, and telling his wife to punch him if he ever mentioned a marathon, to the Toronto waterfront marathon in 2014 and an ultrasound at which a specialist delivered a lethal diagnosis for their first child. Lanni Marchant says her eating disorder was about control, not sport; Kofi Ayinde says he was addicted not to substances but to the effect they produced.

Time Warp is Haliburton County history, each title pairing a local item with a wider Canadian one: "Early Churches in Haliburton County plus Japan Bombs Canada", "Pioneer Bridges plus Pemmican War". In the bridges clip a 19th-century builder turns out to have made coffins too and put up a building still standing in Haliburton, before the show moves on to the Hudson's Bay Company. Tune In YRDSB is York Region schools from the inside; the title run is practical ("Course Selection", "Ontario Secondary School Literacy Test (OSSLT)"), but the clips are about who the schools are for: a school in 2007 that could not put the word Muslim in a club's name, and a Tamil Heritage Month guest who lived with a guru in India at 13 practising mridangam ten hours a day.

TORONTO RESTAURANTS | THE PODCAST is Stephanie Dickison with chefs Ashley McKay and Aldo Camarena of XOLO and Antyllia, a couple in the kitchen and in life. The Steve Warne Project is the Ottawa entry, two longtime radio partners on the Senators and Redblacks; in "Closing Time: Good Night, Everyone" Steve explains that after 19 years on a morning show and a layoff from Bell Media the podcast was a life raft, and that it may now go dark.

Where to start

• For the Leafs argument at full speed, MLHS Podcast; for the same wreckage over eleven years, Talkin' Buds Leafs Show.
• For provincial politics, On The Ledge; for where municipal money goes, AMO ON Topic.
• For unsolved crime, Ontario Cold Cases - The Podcast on Christine Jessop, or True Crime Real Time for the older cases.
• For something without a scoreboard, Athletics Ontario Running Podcast or Time Warp.

The Ontario feed on this page plays clips from these shows.