The World This Hour - The World This Hour for 2025/12/21 at 17:00 EST

Episode Date: December 21, 2025

The World This Hour for 2025/12/21 at 17:00 EST

Hey, I'm Gavin Crawford. Each week I quiz a panel of comedians. All About the News. This week, Steph Tolliv makes her debut. Her Netflix special is just named by The L.A. Times is one of the best comedy specials of the year. She's joined by Miguel Revis and Andrew Fung. The news is pelting us with coal, so we're looking for the candy canes. How are Canadians altering their holiday plans? Does the Prime Minister have a secret plan to turn us all British? And what AI slop do we have to look forward to from Person of the Year?

Follow us on Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts to find out. From CBC News, the world this hour. I'm Kate McGilfrey. In a year-end interview, the Prime Minister is pulling away from Trudeau-era climate policy. Mark Carney says those plans had too many regulations and not enough investment in clean energy and technology. Olivia Stefanovic has more. The fact is we're not going to meet our targets. It's the Prime Minister's strongest rejection yet of his predecessor's climate plan. Mark Carney told CBC chief political correspondent, Rosemary Barton, Canada won't achieve its climate goals under former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's

plan. So he's trying to steer the country in a new direction. We are going to grow clean energy in this country at a scale never seen before. But Carney's plan may also include a new bitumen pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific Coast, a potential project that spurred the cabinet resignation of environmentalist Stephen Gilbo, who Carney says knew the details of a memorandum of understanding signed with Alberta before departing. And elements of the MOU were changed consistent with his views. Kearney didn't specify which elements of the agreement were changed for Gilbo. The former minister declined CBC's request for an interview.

Olivia Estevanovich, CBC News, Ottawa. Israel's cabinet approved proposals for 19 new settlements in the occupied West Bank today. The country's far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, says the move is meant to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state. In the past two years, Israel's approved 69 settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. They're considered illegal under international law. This decision comes as the U.S. pushes Israel and Hamas to move to the second phase of the Gaza ceasefire agreement. The politicians who spearheaded legislation forcing the release of the Epstein files

are now working on a new plan to make the Department of Justice release those documents in full. This comes after some of the files that were released on Friday were scrubbed off the DOJ website. Mitch McCann has the latest. The failure of the Department of Justice to release all of its files on Jeffrey Epstein has congressional lawmakers looking for ways to hold Attorney General Pambondi to account. Republican Thomas Massey and Democrat Ro Khana lead efforts to force their release and Kana says they are now building bipartisan support to hold the Attorney General in contempt. We only need the House for inherent contempt and we're building. a bipartisan coalition, and it would fine Pam Bondi for every day that she's not releasing these documents. The Deputy Attorney General says they need more time to review documents to protect

victims' privacy, and Todd Blanche is defending the removal of images, including one featuring Donald Trump, saying they are checking privacy concerns raised by victims or advocates. We're going to address it. If we need to redact faces or other information, we will, and then we'll put it back up. The Justice Department says more files will be released in the coming weeks. Mitch McCann for CBC News, New York. Conversations are being held this weekend on the U.S. proposed plan for peace in Ukraine, which has been batted back and forth for weeks now. It's not clear if progress is being made. A Kremlin envoy says talks have been constructive, but at the same time, a top Russian foreign policy aid says that changes to the original plan by Europe and Ukraine

have not improved the prospects for peace. And across the country, the number of Canadians visiting food banks has been going up for years now. Toronto's Daily Bread Food Bank says they had more than 4 million visits this year. That's up 340% since 2019. Valerie Tarasuk is an attrition professor and food insecurity investigator at the University of Toronto. We would be wrong to see that as just a food story. It's really about the struggle and the struggle is rooted in financial problems. The truth is most of the people who are food insecure already have jobs. They actually and they have multiple jobs, but those jobs are insufficient to cover current living costs. Daily Bread Food Bank is asking for support from all levels of government.

It's also urging people to contact policymakers to demand better social assistance benefits. And that is the world this hour. For CBC News, I'm Kate McGilfrey. Thank you.