Medicine Hat, one conversation at a time.
Bring Back The Porch keeps its feet in Medicine Hat, Alberta, moving from Stampede planning and YMCA campaigns to archives, politics, adoption, and family history. It feels like a local table where public issues and private experience are allowed to sit side by side.
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Bring Back The Porch is a community conversation show with Medicine Hat at its center. It has the feel of people sitting down before the tape is perfectly polished and talking until the local meaning comes into focus. One episode may work as a guide to the Medicine Hat Stampede, naming Summer Jam bands, Pioneer Village activities, kids’ programming, volunteers, artisans, and the rhythm of a busy July. Another can shift inward, following the emotional pressure of IVF, adoption, birth-family meetings, medical uncertainty, and the effort to handle one problem at a time. The show is personal. It is also civic. Conversations with Linda Tooth and Katie Richard make the YMCA of Southeastern Alberta’s Y Connect campaign feel less like a fundraiser and more like a map of children’s camps, youth programs, trauma support, and family participation. Episodes from the Esplanade Archives bring a different pleasure, lingering over local rumors, missing evidence, old court cases, family-history searches, and the strange routes by which a city remembers itself. Politics also has a seat at the table. With Jim Broom, the show talks through Alberta referendum questions, budgets, recall petitions, right-wing movements, democratic strain, and city-level decision-making in direct, sometimes sharp language. The format is flexible rather than slick. Guests often carry the energy, and the conversations allow side roads, repeated thoughts, jokes, and concrete local detail to remain intact. That looseness is part of the appeal. Bring Back The Porch is less interested in a perfect broadcast shape than in preserving the way community talk actually sounds: practical, curious, personal, occasionally tense, and full of names that matter to the people in the room.
Made for: Best suited to listeners interested in Medicine Hat, local history, community events, civic issues, family stories, and Alberta public life. It also fits anyone drawn to conversational, place-based shows that value lived experience over polished narration.
What sets it apart: The show stands apart by treating local institutions, family memory, politics, archives, and event planning as parts of the same community record. Its strength is the lived-in specificity: named places, real programs, local guests, and conversations that take their time.
Bring Back The Porch, a podcast about simpler times when folks sat on their porch, and felt a sense of community. Everything was discussed on the porch from life, family, politics, and religion. Hosted by Bernie Leahy, this podcast aims to reignite those conversations, while giving people a chance to share their perspectives.
Based on 4 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Local history, public affairs and family experience meet in conversations that show how civic life reaches the kitchen table.
Bring Back The Porch moves easily between interviews about public life and first-person accounts of private experience. Brian's conversations stay rooted in concrete questions, from Alberta politics and Medicine Hat civic decisions to the work behind the Medicine Hat Exhibition…
Like borrowing a Medicine Hat neighbor's porch, only the conversation can reach IVF and referendum mechanics.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A candid, uneven, deeply personal look at adoption, infertility, and staying steady.
Brian keeps the focus close to home, making this chapter of Manual Not Included a plainspoken account of IVF, a recent hysterectomy, and an adoption that is still taking shape.
A loose archive visit where local rumor meets careful detail.
Echoes From the Archives moves Bring Back the Porch off the porch and into the Esplanade Archives reading room, where Brian and assistant archivist Jenny trade stories about rumors, records, and the people who keep both in play.
A plainspoken Alberta politics talk that keeps its feet on local ground.
Bring Back The Porch settles into a familiar kitchen-table rhythm while Brian and Jim Broom take stock of Alberta's political mood. The episode moves through the nine referendum questions due in October, the budget announced at the end of February, the Alberta Next panel, and…
Career power without apology.
Career confidence with a leadership edge.
Career clarity with backbone.
This episode features an interview with Dr.
Brian recounts how his wife's hysterectomy led to an embarrassing trip through a maternity ward, where a frosted temporary entrance hid him from a nurse.
Brian records this special “Echoes from the Archives” edition from the Esplanade Archives reading room with assistant archivist Jenny Berrientos, who answers local-history questions from Medicine Hat.
Brian and Jim Broom frame Alberta’s nine referendum questions, the late-February budget, and the October vote as a political setup rather than a public mandate.
In this episode of Bring Back the Porch, Mayor Lindsay Clark interviews host Brian Conrad about his background, including growing up in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and his family's history in the area.