It's expensive to follow complex disposal protocols for construction waste that can often contain toxins. It's a lot less expensive to find someone willing or desperate enough to simply allow waste to be dumped directly onto their land, with no regard for the health and environmental impacts.

An Indigenous community in Kanasatake has dealt with this problem for years. Until some community members banded together, at personal risk, to get the story out there and force the government to take action. This week, the government finally did.

GUEST: Chris Curtis, investigative journalist, co-founder of The Rover

(NOTE: Nexus, a company named by reporters covering this story, has denied their role in a comment to La Presse: The company says it is only responsible for the soil transportation component and assures that it "has not at any time dumped soil into the Ottawa River." It assures that it "maintains a buffer strip between the natural environments and the deposit site" and reiterates that its "commitment to environmental protection remains unwavering”)

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When you hear of an outbreak of a virus, you think of a sudden explosion of sickness, or a cluster of people infected. What you don't think of is a process that lasts almost a full year, featuring infections spread across the country, month by month, that are ultimately traced to different contaminated products from different brands.

But when public health finally figured out in June what was causing a listeria outbreak that has killed three and sickened more than a dozen others, it did so by finally cracking what every one of those cases had in common, and tracing the infections back to an unlikely source...

GUEST: Hannah Alberga, health reporter, the Canadian Press

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Safe supply programs across the country that aim to provide alternatives to street drugs are under scrutiny right now. But today's story isn't an official safe supply program... it's an activist-led attempt to purchase untainted heroin, cocaine and meth and deliver it straight to users.

The creators of the program argue that it has saved lives. The federal government says that what they've been doing is simply drug trafficking. And it's charged them accordingly. But is it possible both sides are correct? And what does this truly renegade approach to the overdose crisis tell us about the state of Canadian drug policy?

GUEST: Omar Mouallem, filmmaker; contributing editor and reporter at Maclean's

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