The World This Hour - The World This Hour for 2025/01/23 at 19:00 EST

Episode Date: January 24, 2025

The World This Hour for 2025/01/23 at 19:00 EST

Every language is a note in the symphony of our heritage. Together, they create a harmony that cannot be silenced. Discover your voice on the new APTN Languages TV channel. From CBC News, the world is ours. I'm Tom Harrington. We begin with breaking news. Multiple media outlets are reporting Ontario voters will soon be going to the polls,

more than a year ahead of the fixed date. Two government sources confirmed to CBC News the call could come as early as next week. Philip LeShannock reports. Just stay tuned. We need a mandate from the people. Ontario Premier Doug Ford says he needs a new mandate, a strong one to face the challenges ahead. Donald Trump wants to destroy our economy. We're going to be investing billions and billions of dollars to protect the people. While he made no official announcement, Ford's Progressive Conservative candidates will be meeting in Toronto for a super caucus to discuss election strategy.

John Malloy teaches political science at Wilfrid Laurier University. That to me is a clear signal. It seems full steam ahead for Ontario to go to the polls probably end of February, early March. Ford has been ahead in the polls recently, so Malloy says it may be an ideal time to take advantage of his popularity. I think waiting till June of 2026 contains a lot of unknowns. But opposition leaders say with uncertainty in Ottawa, it's exactly the wrong time and that Ford already has a mandate.

Philip P. Shannock, CBC News, Toronto. Donald Trump is once again taking shots at Canada. The president today repeated his complaints about what he describes as unfair trade between Canada and the US. As Tom Parry reports it came as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met with his liberal caucus to discuss how this country will respond. Rather than restrict the goods coming from Canada, the US should be working even more with Canada. Justin Trudeau says his government will keep trying to persuade the new US administration not to impose tariffs on Canada, but if it does, he says, Canada will retaliate. Whether that's getting through to Donald Trump is unclear. Canada has been very tough to deal with over the years.

The US president appeared via video at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Trump rehashed his usual complaints and once again claimed the US doesn't need Canadian goods while musing menacingly about Canada becoming a state. Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Jolie says she's spoken by phone to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and will be in Washington next week to meet him to try once again to

make Canada's case. Tom Perry, CBC News, Ottawa. A U.S. federal court judge has temporarily blocked President Trump's executive order ending birthright citizenship. Barrett guarantees citizenship to anyone born on American soil. Four states challenge the order as unconstitutional because it violates the 14th Amendment and Supreme Court case law. The temporary legal block applies nationally.

Trump signed the order on his first day in office in a slate of orders related to immigration. We are here welcoming the news that the Supreme Court of Canada, the highest court in the country, has decided to grant leave to our constitutional challenge of Bill 21. Stephen Brown of the National Council of Muslims is part of a charter challenge to Quebec's secularism law. Bill 21 bans some civil servants, such as teachers and police officers, from wearing religious symbols at work. Those items include the Muslim hijab, the Jewish kippah, and the Sikh turban.

You can't go after the rights of some Canadians without going after the rights of all Canadians. Quebec Premier Francois Lagault vowed to fight to the end to defend Quebec's values and who Quebecers are. The province pre-emptively used the notwithstanding clause when the law was enacted back in 2019. A British man who stabbed three girls to death at a Taylor Swift themed dance class has been sentenced to more than 52 years in prison. Justice Julian Goose says Axel Ruda Cabana wanted to carry out the mass murder of innocent, happy young girls. His culpability for this extreme level of violence is equivalent in its seriousness

to terrorist murders, whatever his purpose. What he did on the 29th of July last year has caused such shock and revulsion to the whole nation that it must be viewed as being at the very extreme level of crime. The 18-year-old was also charged with producing the deadly poison ricin and possessing an al-Qaeda training manual. And that is your World This Hour. For CBC News, I'm Tom Harrington. Thanks for listening.