This Matters

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Up until a disatrous fall-off in mid 2024, This Matters was such an excellent podcast that it actually managed to outclass far better known daily podcasts from the New York Times and Washington Post, and often managed to upstage the rather mid tier newspaper, The Toronto Star, to which it was technically attached. Unlike those American papers, The Star itself has no pretense of being a global leader in news. It shares similar flaws as the US and UK mainstream media— an unwillingness to take an independent view in line with the global majority, and challenge the “Washington consensus”— without having access to the same resources for reporting, the same ability to attract well known, talented commentators on the arts and international affairs, that even some highly flawed US and UK media often do. Even in covering its specialty, Canadian news (usually neglected outside Canada) certain biases are present in The Star, which prefers to stay in tune with wherever it perceives the “centre” of Canadian politics to be, usually somewhere toward the right-most edge of the Liberal Party or the left-most edge of the Conservatives. On local affairs, The Star was highly sympathetic to the aptly named John Tory. And yet, because of its stature as Canada’s “paper of record,” The Star did attract a wide enough variety of Canadian reporters and commentators to offer a decent cross section of news and analysis on local affairs. By generally emphasizing GTA news, often at a microscopic level of detail, and applying a generally balanced (if not always deep-digging) approach to its discussion of politics in Canada, This Matters podcast built on the existing success of newspaper in these specific areas. Although the occasional episode covering an international-related issue (e.g. the Canadian media-created frenzy a few years ago over the “two Michaels”) might offer a more superficial, unapologetically jingoistic gloss on that topic compared to the greater nuance of, say, a Guardian podcast, these ball-drops were fairly rare. In most cases the Star smartly concentrated on more local matters with its podcast, getting into the nitty gritty of greenbelts and new builds, homelessness and health care, culture and transport, budgets and elections, rarely biting off more than it could chew. Adrian Cheung, and later Raju Mudhar and Saba Eitizaz, were truly excellent hosts, their patter focused, but spontaneous rather than over-rehearsed and condescending to the listener’s intelligence in the style common in public media in the USA. Toward the middle of 2023, just in time for the mayoral elections, This Matters came into its own as a political voice with the arrival of Edward Keenan and Emma Teitel. Keenan, who began the election season sympathetic to John Tory’s designated centrist successor, and Teitel, an establishment liberal with similar views, were both surprised when the progressive NDP veteran Olivia Chow won a resounding victory on a left wing platform centered on housing, but in a rare example of Canadians living up to their ideal of being polite and conciliatory (rather than the usual tendency toward passive aggression), Keenan and Teitel immediately shoved aside any hard feelings toward the NDP, refusing to use the podcast as a partisan tool for undermining Chow, instead hosting her for hard-hitting, yet friendly interviews where they asked for specifics of her governance. By the start of 2024, it’s true that a few problems were cropping up. The podcast, which had been daily, seemed to suddenly cut back on the number of episodes and the main hosts like Mudhar and Eitizaz seemed to disappear for weeks at a time, as if the Star was trying to save money on paying actual reporters by converting This Matters into an unusually polite version of talk radio wherein Teitel and Keenan would shoot the breeze on random Toronto and Canada topics (and sometimes even non Canada ones) for an unedited hour that was best listened at double speed (unless one loves the sound of Keenan’s voice as much as Keenan himself seems to). Even so, this strange, at times profoundly boring iteration of the podcast had real virtues in its own right, offering a coziness, a sense of the beating heart of Toronto life, from voices that had proved their trustworthiness and pragmatism by refusing, at least on local matters, to indulge in the kneejerk partisanship one may have expected. And when the podcast returned to its reportage format for a strong episode by Saba Eitizaz covering pro-Palestine university students, or even an intriguing round table of Toronto poets debating (and not always celebrating) the merits of Taylor Swift’s then-new album (both third-rail topics in their own way) This Matters reached a real peak, with a breathtaking level of news-gathering ambition, responsibility, creativity, risk taking and nuance that was unmatched by the podcast of any other major city newspaper in the Anglosphere. Five star stuff. And then… possibly not unrelated to that risk taking (did an owner or donor pull the plug?) it all just went silent. There were a few weeks of random sports themed podcasts, followed by reporting on the Republican convention in the US. But, oddly, not a peep about Kamala Harris when she shockingly replaced Biden as the nominee, days later. And not even a mention of the Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef, the biggest culture story of the summer, and one closely linked to Toronto. Keenan and Teitel skulked away, with no further dispatches from Chow’s city hall. The environmental and transit beat has even been quiet, in a summer that saw Toronto make international news with the fight between Chow and Rob Ford, who announced his intention to remove the city’s flagship bike lanes. Eitizaz’s social media shows that she’s still employed by the Star, but she has not been heard from in months on the podcast. And finally, six months after going dark, y’all return with… Trump again… and now a hagiography of Taylor Swift?!? No.

If Canadian accents and digestible news hits turn you on, this is a must-listen.