Podcasts about Quebec, Canada

Most of what plays on this page is somebody arguing about the Montreal Canadiens' goaltending. Jakub Dobes turns up in clip after clip: going 8-3 with a 2.25 goals-against average over his last eleven starts on Habs Unfiltered, passing Carey Price and Patrick Roy for the Canadiens rookie-wins record on Canadiens Connection. Hockey is the largest beat here by a wide margin, and it is a Montreal beat, as are the politics, the housing fights and the pizza arguments: the bulk of Quebec's playable listening is really Montreal's, and a reader who wants that city should look for Montreal directly. What remains is smaller and stranger: a cold-case investigation into murders from the 1970s, old books read aloud a chapter at a time, and a teachers' association talking with its own members.

What Quebec is

Quebec is Canada's largest province by area and its only majority French-speaking one, running from the St. Lawrence valley, where Montreal and Quebec City sit, north to Hudson Bay and the tundra beyond the tree line. Its politics have long turned on language and on the province's place within Canada.

The Canadiens, argued in different rooms

The Canadiens shows separate by how they argue rather than by what they argue about. Locked On Canadiens is two fan-hosts in a brisk, affectionate back-and-forth, hedging and correcting mid-thought; its clips have them weighing whether Slafkovsky has to move back beside Demidov if Montreal falls behind Tampa Bay, and replaying Nick Suzuki calling his own line 'pretty brutal all night' after a game the Canadiens had already won in a shootout. Habs Unfiltered is rougher: people interrupt, finish each other's thoughts and use blunt language when they want a point to land. Its clip from the hangover episode after the Anaheim loss walks one broken play corner by corner, a defenceman drifting into the wrong corner out of habit, no forward covering, the pass going to a man alone in front, then moves from the mistake to the system that allowed it. Canadiens Connection treats the club as an organization, with attention to Laval, and its clips are front office and record book: whether Kent Hughes has to move Patrick Laine's salary before the deadline, Cole Caufield's fiftieth goal making him the seventh Canadiens player to reach that mark in a season. Eyes On The Prize: A Montreal Canadiens podcast runs a numbered game-by-game series called Bottom Six Minutes; its feel-good clip is Alexandre Texier's first career hat trick, a player his old team did not want making good in a city that speaks his native language.

Politics, permits, pizza

Away from the rink, provincial politics comes up most on The Big Five Podcast, hosted by Elias Makos, whose titles keep returning to the CAQ leadership, the PQ, Bill 96 and the Quebec Liberals. The clips are more municipal. Dan Delmar argues that blocking an 18-storey tower in the Old Port makes Montreal's housing shortage worse, and the talk around it is about permits: a developer waiting months for the local municipality to let him demolish a derelict house so he could put up three triplexes, only to be sent on to the central city for the next approval. Justine McIntyre says Quebec should fix its roads before asking drivers to pay tolls. A Quebec lab finds at least half cane sugar in cans labelled as maple syrup.

Standing By: The Terry and Ted Podcast is the other Montreal talk show. Terry DiMonte and Ted Bird, reunited from Montreal morning radio, sound like two people already mid-conversation, leisurely and plain, by turns irritated and affectionate, working through buses, old venues and radio memories. In one clip they size up Montreal against Monaco as an F1 host city; in another, from a Remembrance episode, a wartime chaplain's line is quoted: "It is sheer tragedy to be losing these lads." The title run includes The uncomfortable truth: Greeks make the best Montreal pizza.

Unsolved, 1975

Who Killed Theresa began with the unsolved murder of the host's sister, Theresa Allore, who died in November 1978, and widened into the unsolved murders of women in Quebec in the 1970s. The clip that plays is the discovery of Diane Thibeault: a sixteen-year-old named Jean Bresson, out on his bike at 4:30 on a Saturday morning in August 1975, sees a fire in a vacant lot at Saint-Dominique Street and Dorchester Boulevard and finds a body in it, the narration pausing to place the corner on the edge of Chinatown between Complexe Desjardins and Old Montreal. The remaining clips come from an interview with Michael Arntfield and range well beyond the province, to Sherlock Holmes and the first forensic-science curriculum in France.

Older books, read aloud

The audiobooks are the oldest texts on the page. Seats of The Mighty, The by Gilbert Parker (1862 - 1932) is an eighteenth-century Quebec novel; the clip from Chapter 02 is François Bigot facing a crowd of two thousand angry people, asking whether they mean to punish him by burning their own food with the English at the door, then declaring that he will be their leader. Lure of the Labrador Wild, The by Dillon Wallace (1863 - 1939) follows Leonidas Hubbard's canoe expedition through Labrador and the George River in Quebec, and every clip is about food: a caribou splashing into the river and becoming a venison feast, and Hubbard by the fire in 14 - Back Through The Ranges telling George there are worse places than Labrador to starve in.

Teachers

QPAT-APEQ Podcast is the show here about the province's working life: a teachers' association in bilingual English-French conversation with teachers, students and its own members about projects already happening in schools. The clips mostly follow teachers out of the province. In Teaching Together with Arla Connell (PTU) / Enseigner ensemble avec Arla Connell (SEP), the guest recalls a Gambian co-facilitator changing the plan half an hour before a session and discovering two teachers inside: the Canadian one who would have panicked, and the other one, who said fine, I'll follow your lead.

Where to start

• For the hockey argument, Habs Unfiltered gives the rough version and Locked On Canadiens the warmer one.
• For Quebec politics and Montreal's civic fights, The Big Five Podcast.
• For the province's past, the Diane Thibeault clip on Who Killed Theresa, or François Bigot facing the crowd in Seats of The Mighty.
• For something with no scoreboard in it, Lure of the Labrador Wild.

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