30 years ago, the Stanley Cup playoffs ignited a rumour that has been messing with Jane Macdougall’s life ever since.

It was June 14, 1994, and the Vancouver Canucks had made it all the way to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Finals against the New York Rangers. The Canucks were magic on ice, so when they lost by just one goal, fans expected the team to come back blazing the next year.

Instead,1995 was a total letdown. The team seemed to have lost its chemistry and when a popular defenceman was abruptly traded, stories started swirling. The rumour became that the defenceman was having an affair with the goalie’s wife, destroying team morale and leaving the franchise flailing.

For nearly 30 years, Jane Macdougall (the goalie’s now ex-wife) has been dealing with the fallout of that rumour. She says she’s harangued about it constantly from all directions—strangers at parties, kids at her son’s school, even her accountant—they all have something to say about her “affair”.

But not only is the rumour false, it’s not even possible.

On this week’s Storylines, Acey Rowe tracks the Canucks rumour from locker rooms to chat rooms to NHL legends to figure out how a story like this snowballs, how it survived for 30 years, what really happened to the Canucks way back when, and what it is about sports fandom that makes rumours like this so common—because Jane Macdougall is far from alone.

Reported and produced by Acey Rowe. Story Editing by Willa Paskin and Evan Chung from the podcast Decoder Ring by Slate Magazine. Storylines is part of the CBC Audio Doc Unit.

At a union hall in Detroit’s industrial River Rouge neighborhood, workers have come together to vote for a new leader. The event feels festive, with a fire pit, a tent, and even 'walking tacos,' which are taco meat mixed into a bag of Doritos. But there are dark clouds on the horizon for the future of their industry.

Many of these workers are employed by the Great Lakes Steel Works, a massive steel mill that provides raw materials for the U.S. automotive industry.

These workers have a lot on their minds. The company that runs their plant, U.S. Steel, might merge with the Japanese steel company Nippon Steel. Then there’s the rise of EVs, which will potentially disrupt the U.S. automotive sector. Layoffs have already been happening. Four years ago, the steel mill shut its blast furnace, and more than a 1000 workers lost their jobs.

People are worried about their futures, and how they see that future might impact the U.S. election.. Michigan’s 15 electoral college votes are critical for Biden's path if he hopes to get re-elected. Michigan is a swing state, which Biden won in the last election, but Trump took the first time he ran.

To understand what’s on these Michigan workers' minds, Pete Mitton traveled to Detroit to better understand the dynamics of the upcoming election and the economic realities of the blue-collar workers there for this documentary 'Detroit Takes the Wheel'.

Reported by Pete Mitton. Story Editing by John Chipman. This documentary originally aired on The Sunday Magazine.

Storylines is part of the CBC Audio Doc Unit

In January, some New Hampshire voters thought they had gotten a robo call from Joe Biden, telling them to skip voting in the state primary.

The robocall voice at the other end of the phone wasn’t Biden at all. In fact it was a deepfake, created by a political consultant working for a longshot democratic challenger to Biden. The audio itself was made by a magician in Texas, using a simple website that created the deepfake using text-to- speech audio using AI.

The fake Biden robocall shows how easy it could become to use AI to disrupt an election but that isn't the whole story.

In this episode of Storylines, producer Craig Desson takes us around the world to see how election officials, politicians and academics are grappling with how AI might impact our elections as hundreds of millions go to the polls this year.

The situation is troubling, but there are also ways AI brings new possibilities to democracies around the world.

Reported and Produced by Craig Desson. Story Editing by Joan Webber. Originally aired on Sunday Magazine.

Storylines is part of the CBC Audio Doc Unit