The 519 Podcast

If you wanted one way to gauge the excitement people have for our lockdowns and stay-at-home orders coming to an end, there’s really only one stop you need to make: your local restaurant’s patio.

It's where you can find people doing what they have waited so long to do. That is, gather with others with a semblance of normalcy. 

This is what we’ve been waiting for., and it’s a good time to take a look back to the restaurant struggles we’ve had and have a look forward to where outdoor and indoor dining is headed in the future.

This is Patio Mania, a Blackburn News podcast looking into one of this summer’s most anticipated social gathering places, and where we’re at with the bar and restaurant industry. It's hosted by Craig Needles

You can ask just about anyone and they'll tell you that we've come a long way in this country when it comes to the rights of the LGBTQ2S+ community. 

But many of those same people that you ask will also say we have a long way to go. 

June is Pride Month in Canada. 

And where things stand is the focus of this edition of the Blackburn News Podcast. 

This episode is hosted by Hayley Cheng. 

In this 5th and final episode of our series, Ghost Town, hosts Hayley Cheng and Craig Needles look at the reports of hauntings at the Huron County jail in Goderich. 

It was a crime that has left many people in our region reeling, and one that is making us take a closer look at the kind of society in which we live. 

On a quiet Sunday night in northwest London, Salman Afzaal, his wife Madiha, their daughter Yunma, son Fayez, and Talat, the grandmother and pillar of the family, went for an evening walk. 

But instead of coming home from that walk, Salman, Madiha, Yunma, and Talat were murdered, while Fayez was left in hospital with serious injuries.

In this episode of the Blackburn News Podcast, hosted by Craig Needles, we learn more about the family. We also hear from some prominent Muslim voices in the London community who say we should not be surprised or shocked that something like this would happen in Canada, .a country that many would argue has long deluded itself into believing that racism and Islamaphobia are problems that exist elsewhere, but not here. 

In this episode of the Blackburn News Podcast, host Craig Needles speaks with Professor Lori Campbell about the discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C.

Professor Campbell talks about the reaction to the discovery, the shameful history of residential schools, and how many Canadians turned a blind eye to their existence over the years. 

On this episode of the Blackburn News Podcast, host Craig Needles speaks with Indigenous scholar Sara Mai Chitty about the discovery of the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops, B.C. They talk about the legacy of residential schools and what Canadians need to learn about this country's treatment of Indigenous people. 

More resources can be found here:

http://trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf

https://oncanadaproject.ca/settlerstakeaction

https://indigenouspeoplesatlasofcanada.ca/article/history-of-residential-schools/

In part four of our series Ghost Town, the Blackburn News Podcast looks at a scary story from the Wallaceburg area near the end of the 19th century, where the accounts of the haunting are in dispute to this day.

It's hosted by Craig Needles and Hayley Cheng. 

This week on the Blackburn News Podcast, we continue the Ghost Town series with Part Three. We’re looking at the Lawrence House in Sarnia - once the home of a lumber baron and his family at the end of the 19th century. Today, it’s a centre for the arts, but lots of people who work there or have visited will tell you, it’s a lot more than that.

This episode is hosted by Hayley Cheng and Craig Needles.

It's been nearly 70 years since construction finished on what we now know as the Enbridge Line 5 pipeline. For decades, the pipeline has been sending oil from western Canada to Sarnia for refining. 

And it did so largely outside the attention of most Canadians. 

But that changed when Michigan Governer Gretchen Whitmer gave Enbridge a deadline to shut the pipeline down. 

That deadline came and went this week, with Enbridge saying that it will not shut the line down without a court order. 

So why is the battle over this pipeline so important?

That's what the Blackburn News Podcast set out to learn in this episode, hosted by Craig Needles. 

If you live in the London area, you have almost certainly heard that  there are more than a few places in the city that are haunted. 

Some people believe the stories, while others are a little more skeptical. 

Whether you believe or not, there are few things that can get the hair on your arms standing up better than a good ghost story. 

In part two of Ghost Town, our five part series series on some of the haunted houses and areas of our region, host Julie Bullivant takes us through London's haunted Grand Theatre.