The Fifth Estate
Season 47
Each week the fifth estate brings in-depth investigations that matter to Canadians – delivering a dazzling parade of political leaders, controversial characters and ordinary people whose lives were touched by triumph or tragedy.
Where to Watch Season 47
15 Episodes
- VaccinesE1
VaccinesIn our season premiere of The Fifth Estate, Bob McKeown shows you what happened to the Canadian government's first effort to secure a domestic vaccine, why the agreement crashed behind the scenes and why some say the deal with a company linked to the Chinese military is one Ottawa should never have even considered. Bob's interview with the CEO of that company took a turn that caught us by surprise. You'll want to see what happened. The pandemic has also meant millions of businesses large and small have staggered or shuttered. But not Amazon. Locked in their homes, Canadians pressed “buy now” relentlessly, and Amazon is building more warehouses all over this country as a result. But at what cost to its employees? Next week, Mark Kelley will take you inside Amazon for a look at the human cost of convenience. Hint: When was the last time you logged 45,000 steps in a single shift at work? And, as Afghanistan descends further into the regressive world created for it by the Taliban, some of those who worked with the Canadian military and believed Canada would help them get to safety are living in fear that the Taliban will get to them first. Later this month, Gillian Findlay will show you in real time with extraordinary access how military veterans and private money in Canada are working to get thousands of Afghans to safety, as questions mount about why Ottawa hasn't taken the lead. - Amazon unpackedE2
Amazon unpackedIn the blur of stories this year about COVID-19, one in particular, a story involving e-commerce giant Amazon, caught our eye. An Amazon warehouse in Brampton, Ont. was ordered to close temporarily last spring. Staff were told to stay home and isolate themselves. We learned there had been 600 COVID-19 cases at the plant since the fall of 2020. That's when we decided to look closely at Amazon and its handling of COVID-19. Yes — Amazon is a huge employer with thousands of staff in Canada alone. People were bound to get sick. But, we also knew that because of the pandemic, business skyrocketed as more and more people shopped from home. In fact, Amazon’s own company figures show that net profit worldwide grew by a staggering 84 per cent in 2020. Our big question became: Was there a human cost to that convenience? - Abandoned in AfghanistanE3
Abandoned in Afghanistan“They just came in front of our house, and they open[ed] fire and they [shot] our house but fortunately nobody got hurt. The bullets hit the bars, the steel bars.” That was the reality for former Canadian military interpreter Abdul Jamy Kohistany along with his wife and two kids, back home in Afghanistan. Like tens of thousands of other interpreters, mission staff and their families, living in fear of reprisal for helping Canada during the war, they are now seen as traitors and the enemy by the Taliban. That’s why he and his family, like so many others, flooded the Kabul airport this summer desperate to get out of Afghanistan after the Taliban took control. To hear the Canadian government’s account of it, those horrific scenes of people trampling over each other, the desperation and the death that unfolded there over the summer was simply a tragedy — an unforeseeable event that culminated after a faster than expected takeover of the country by the Taliban. But what we heard from political insiders and veterans was that the Canadian government knew well in advance that these former military workers’ lives were in danger. The Fifth Estate obtained emails sent by a Liberal MP to his cabinet colleagues, including former Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino, as far back as February 2020. Before that, Liberal Immigration Minister Ahmed Hussen was warned in at least September 2019. Yet we’re told the government did nothing until it was too late. While the Canadian government has now gotten about 2,000 Afghans and their families out of the country, veterans groups estimate there are still about 20,000 stuck behind. Sitting, waiting to be hunted by the Taliban. Given the government’s comments during this crisis about how committed they are to the Afghan people, I was surprised to learn how the bulk of the work to protect Afghans has fallen on a group of Canadian veterans and volunteers working around the clock to prov - The Cluster: New Brunswick's Mysterious IllnessE4
The Cluster: New Brunswick's Mysterious IllnessWhile this is a story about a cluster of people living in New Brunswick with a “neurological disease of an unknown cause,” in many ways, it’s really a story about people trying to get answers and help from their health-care system and the provincial government. Back in April, in collaboration with CBC New Brunswick investigative journalists, The Fifth Estate started to delve into a story about a neurological syndrome nobody could explain. A cluster had been identified and 48 New Brunswickers were part of it. As our research progressed, we met many people along the way: families, individuals in the cluster and the neurologists they went to in hopes of understanding their debilitating symptoms: muscle spasms, memory loss, brain fog, anxiety. One of those people was Steve Ellis. After not seeing his father, Roger, for 10 months because of a COVID-19 lockdown, he was going to drive from his home in Nova Scotia to Bathurst, N.B., to visit his dad. It was an important trip: for the past two years, his father was rapidly declining from a neurological condition and time was of the essence. “It's running out,” Steve told us. “And it's running out not only for my dad, but for everyone else who's dealing with this.” Roger had been identified as one of the 48 people in the cluster. When my colleague, Karissa Donkin, and I contacted Steve and asked if we could film his journey to Bathurst, we knew it was a tall request. But we wanted to illustrate the urgency and anxiety families face on a daily basis when faced with the unknown. There are no cures for neurological diseases, and for the individuals in the cluster and their families, they only have to look at the experiences of others to see their own possible future. Tim and Jill Beatty have already lost their loving father, Laurie, who brought people joy. And then there’s Gabrielle Cormier. She’s only 20 and is becoming a prisoner in her own body. For more than two - School of Secrets: The Church, the cult and the consequencesE5
School of Secrets: The Church, the cult and the consequencesReading judge’s decisions becomes a frequent part of a journalist’s job. Not all of them make you sit up astonished at what you’re reading. So, when the wording is as strong as what’s used in the decision regarding the systemic and decades-long abuse of students that took place at Grenville Christian College, it’s hard not to wonder: What more is there to know? In 2020, a judge ruled in favour of the roughly 1,400 students who filed a class-action lawsuit alleging life at the Ontario boarding school, which closed in 2007, was not only tough but also brutal, with seemingly endless examples of physical and emotional abuse meted out as punishment. The school didn’t operate far from public view. The Anglican Church flew a flag there. And the school had ties to another religious group based in the United States called the Community of Jesus. The school had at one time counted prominent Canadians among its board. Six months ago, we set out to answer the question: How could this have gone on so long? We methodically began calling people connected to the school, including lawyers, police officers, journalists, former teachers, administrators and more than 30 former students. We developed confidential sources and people who had never spoken publicly agreed to share their stories with us. Two people in particular took the courageous decision to share their stories on camera. Grace Irving and Michael Phelan had never spoken publicly about what they endured. They told us they did it because they wanted people to know what really happened behind the imposing stone walls of a school that was for many years their home. Our research also revealed allegations of sloppy police work, written warnings ignored by the Anglican Church and strong connections to a mysterious and abusive Christian cult in Cape Cod, Mass. And what of the role of the man who was the school’s final headmaster? He had been a teacher there for years. And what questions were asked of him b - Finding School No 4 - WE Charity Donor Deception in KenyaE6
Finding School No 4 - WE Charity Donor Deception in KenyaMark Kelley and I are sitting in the back of a taxi in Nairobi, Kenya, when we suddenly receive urgent texts, followed quickly by phone calls, from the CBC office in Toronto. The Fifth Estate’s Executive producer Diana Swain tells us she has just received an official document from the Ministry of the Interior of Kenya, dated Sept. 13, 2021, and stamped “Assistant County Commissioner.” The letter contained unfounded allegations that Mark, our camera crew and I had committed crimes while filming our documentary about the Canadian-based WE Charity’s projects in Narok County, Kenya. For some reason, the letter was cc’d to the WE organization. The letter claims we trespassed on government property, a “criminal offence” in Kenya. Fearing for our safety, Diana tells us to immediately head to the airport. CBC’s security team has instructed us to check in every 20 minutes until we are out of the country. How did it come to this? Along with other news organizations, The Fifth Estate began looking into WE Charity in the summer of 2020 after the Trudeau government awarded the organization a controversial contract to manage a $500-million volunteer grant program for students. This spring, our research turned to the charity’s overseas projects. For years, WE Charity had been asking kids across North America to raise money for its schoolhouse projects overseas. We had what we thought was a simple question. Did the number of donations that WE Charity collected in North America from children and wealthy philanthropists to build badly needed schoolhouses in rural Kenya match up with the actual number of schoolhouses that were constructed? Getting the answer proved to be far more difficult than we might have imagined. WE Charity would not provide us that information, citing privacy concerns. So we built our own spreadsheets and combed through publicly available information to find out how many donors were told they had fully funded classrooms. We - Come hell... B.C. under waterE7
Come hell... B.C. under waterWhat you will see tonight on The Fifth Estate is a departure from what we normally do, in that it is not the product of months of meticulous research. It is in fact the culmination of a week’s work — driven by our teams’ collective shock at the images of catastrophic flooding in British Columbia over the past several days. We shared the sadness of seeing thousands of homes lost, people displaced and five people killed in mudslides. Highways, rail lines, and dikes: damaged. Livestock and livelihoods: devastated. Instead of our planned episode for this week, we quickly changed course and focused our attention on the catastrophe. Tonight we examine what happened and, as Mark Kelley says in his script, whether we should’ve all simply seen this coming. That’s because of what we’ve found documented in reports that date back as many as six years, warning that the dike protecting the Sumas Prairie was “too low,” “substandard” and “likely needs to be updated.” And that the provincial and federal governments have invested much less in flood mitigation in the past two decades, leaving municipalities and First Nations unable to pay the millions of dollars required to repair the dikes that protect their communities. We also ask why residents of Washington state, who were exposed to the same vicious rain storm, got a warning to sandbag their property and get livestock to higher ground; a warning that most in B.C. didn’t get. - Why Not in WinnipegE8
Why Not in WinnipegMore than 125 women, including 60 Canadians, have now accused disgraced multimillionaire fashion mogul Peter Nygard of rape and sexual assault, but it wasn't that long ago he was celebrated in his hometown. When I lived in Winnipeg in the 2010s, his face and company were everywhere, whether it was his photo in the newspaper cutting the ribbon for a new store with local leaders, events he held to promote his latest donation to cancer research or countless billboards he rented and plastered with youthful musclebound images of himself. Then, in 2010, The Fifth Estate broadcast its first investigation into Nygard, showing widespread allegations of workplace abuse, sexual harassment and sexual misconduct against him. And still, as recently as 2018, 1,800 of the city’s who’s who came out to celebrate his company’s 50th anniversary at a massive gala. The local paper described it as a party that would “rival any Hollywood bash.” The city’s current mayor, Brian Bowman, and the province’s current premier, Heather Stefanson, both attended. So in 2021, when one by one, the women who recently reported allegations of sexual assault against Nygard in Winnipeg started to hear their cases wouldn’t be prosecuted, they told us they weren’t totally shocked. And then The Fifth Estate broke the story in October about charges Nygard was about to face in Toronto. That raised even more questions about the lack of charges in Winnipeg. We knew we had to dig deeper into his past in his hometown. Our investigation reveals, for the first time, in all eight cases referred to prosecutors in Winnipeg, no charges will be laid. In our story, you will hear from four of the eight women, and we document a pattern of Nygard avoiding prosecution in his hometown going back more than 50 years. Nygard denies all of the allegations against him. But at this point, Nygard has faced sex trafficking charges in New York and sexual assault charges in Toronto. So … why not in Winnipeg? - Abandoned in Afghanistan: Canada's Failed PromiseE9
Abandoned in Afghanistan: Canada's Failed PromiseThousands of former interpreters and military staff (along with their families) who worked with the Canadian Armed Forces have been stuck in Afghanistan since the Taliban takeover this summer. They need help to escape. When we interviewed then-Immigration Minister Marco Mendicino in October, he assured us, and most importantly the veterans and volunteers working around the clock to get former interpreters and their families out of Afghanistan, that money was coming to help fund their operations. But no government money has come since that promise. Two months later, the risk for those who fought alongside Canada against the Taliban is as great as ever. Just last week, the Canadian government, along with 20 other countries and the European Union, issued a joint statement expressing concerns over reported killings and enforced disappearances of former members of Afghan security forces that have been documented by Human Rights Watch and others. - The Reckoning: Secrets Unearthed by Tk'emlúps te SecwépemcE10
The Reckoning: Secrets Unearthed by Tk'emlúps te SecwépemcThe Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation was the first community to identify what are believed to be the graves of children at the site of a former residential school. The Fifth Estate shows how the community is dealing with the traumatic discovery and talks to survivors about the impact on them, as the First Nation tries to lead the way for other communities coping with a similar tragic history. - School of Secrets: New Revelations From Inside the CultE11
School of Secrets: New Revelations From Inside the CultSince a Fifth Estate story last November about abuse endured by students of a now-closed Ontario private religious school and its connection to a U.S.-based cult, there have been several new developments. Prompted by our reporting, another person has come forward to allege abuse by a son of the former headmaster. - The convoy and the questions: How a protest paralyzed a capitalE12
The convoy and the questions: How a protest paralyzed a capitalThe Fifth Estate will show how months of planning, some secretive but much of it in the open, drew convoys to Canada’s capital, leading to an unprecedented weeks-long occupation of part of Ottawa. Host Gillian Findlay talks to the early organizers and asks why police so quickly lost control. - Parents Without Power: When Addicted Kids Can't be Forced into CareE13
Parents Without Power: When Addicted Kids Can't be Forced into CareFrustrated parents say they should be able to force their opioid-addicted kids into care. But, in B.C., the province with the highest rate of opioid deaths, the laws say kids can deny care and insist doctors don’t tell their parents if they are hooked. - Priced Out: Canada's Rental CrisisE14
Priced Out: Canada's Rental CrisisOne in three Canadians rents their home. While much of the focus has been on the rising price of buying a home, rental prices are skyrocketing, too. The Fifth Estate examines what’s driving rental prices up, and some people out, of their homes. - Bait and Switch: Recycling's Dirty SecretE15
Bait and Switch: Recycling's Dirty SecretA joint Fifth Estate/Enquête investigation shows Canada still routinely ships plastic waste to developing countries, often illegally mixed inside containers of paper recycling. We ask Canada’s environmental activist-turned environment minister what he’s prepared to do about it.