Show Segments

8:30 – Today marks the one-year anniversary of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig’s arrests by the Chinese.  Jonathan Manthorpe, author of “Claws of the Panda: Beijing’s Campaign of Influence and Intimidation in Canada” joins Gormley on the one year anniversary and sheds some light on how Canada might navigate its way through this.

LIVE: Jonathan Manthorpe, international affairs columnist and commentator.

9:00 – The Hour of the Big Stories… Open Session

10:00 – The lockout at Regina’s Co-op Refinery Complex is into its second week, and tensions remain high as the Unifor members picket for a deal that safeguards their pensions. On Monday, Unifor claimed the refinery was unsafe, releasing a photo purportedly showing a tanker car leaving the refinery with a spill on top, and another video of a tanker car with its top left open. On the other side of the dispute, the refinery accused workers on the picket lines of harassing, accosting, and verbally abusing picket line crossers and truck drivers. Vic Huard with Federated Co-operatives Ltd. joins Gormley now to discuss the dispute and the latest allegations by Unifor.

LIVE: Vic Huard, executive VP of customer experience and stakeholder management w. Federated Co-operatives Ltd.

11:00  – The Royal Saskatchewan Museum team has published a paper on the first record of amber attached to a dinosaur bone. Curator of paleontology for the RSM, Ryan McKellar, says it’s the “coolest to second coolest thing I’ve found in North America.” According to the Regina Leader Post, the specimen was first discovered in Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park in 2010.  The team there didn’t realize there was amber stuck to the bone until they got it back to the lab and started processing it.  McKellar said when the Alberta team noticed they had amber they contacted McKellar because the Saskatchewan lab was the biggest in Canada able to do that sort of work. McKellar joins Gormley now to talk about the rare, 75-million-year-old find.

LIVE: Ryan McKellar, Curator for paleontology for the Royal Saskatchewan Museum.

12:00 – After a Regina family’s big Christmas light display was vandalized by a driver in a black truck, they’re back in business and hoping to have the full display up and running by the weekend. The “Allen Family Lights” consist of about 36,000 bulbs, drawing comparisons between Trevor Allen and Clark Griswald of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and are synchronized to music broadcast on an FM channel. Since the display was damaged last Tuesday, Trevor and his family have been rebuilding, and he says they’ve even been offered help from a Nebraska-based Christmas light group. Allen joins Gormley now to discuss their rebuilding efforts.

LIVE: Trevor Allen