White Coat, Black Art

IDEAS, hosted by Nahlah Ayed is a daily podcast that explores how ideas over place and time shape our world.

In the days before her medically-assisted death, journalist Elaine Dewar made it her mission to finish writing her book revealing ignored Canadian history. For more than three years, the author investigated how Canada's health care system cruelly mistreated Indigenous people — including forcing them to use segregated hospitals. Dewar's extensive research uncovers not only a shameful past. It also reveals that our collective obliviousness to it was deliberately manufactured.

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Dr. Tara Kiran knows primary care in Canada can be better. That's why the Toronto-based family physician and researcher went to the Netherlands, a world leader in health, to see what we can take away. What she found is a system that provides around-the-clock care and primary care teams who can see patients when they need it most. In this encore episode, Dr. Kiran and Brian chat about what the Netherlands is getting right.

When sportscaster Scott Oake isn't rinkside at NHL games, he's often hanging out at a substance use treatment centre in Winnipeg. He's there to be close to his late son. An urn with Bruce's ashes greets everyone who walks through the doors of the Bruce Oake Recovery Centre. We’re re-airing this 2025 Mindset Award-winning episode for reporting on addiction, taking you inside the centre to learn about its effective recovery approach.

Miles Randell says years of working as a Vancouver paramedic led to post-traumatic stress that left him “unemployable.” When the help he needed wasn’t there, he created TEAAM (Technical Evacuation Advanced Aero Medical), a non-profit that deploys helicopters to provide advanced life support in some of the most rugged locations in B.C.’s wilderness. But TEAAM is also a workplace where health-care workers are encouraged to care for their mental health - a story that we’re proud to re-air as the 2025 Mindset Award winner for workplace mental health reporting.

What if birth care put women and babies first? Dr. Michael Klein’s guiding question came from the Ethiopian midwives who let him “catch” his first babies during a gap year in med school. It would go on to shape his lauded career in pediatrics and family medicine—and challenge medical dogmas like routine episiotomies. His research helped show the once-common procedure often did more harm than good, helping drive a major shift in maternity care. On the occasion of his death on June 10, 2026, we're revisiting our remarkable 2018 conversation with the self-described “Dissident Doctor.”