Now or Never

Today we're celebrating all the cool stuff people are good at, in our own version of “Canada’s Got Talent.” When Rick Ammazzini sees a locked safe without a key, he doesn’t see an impenetrable door, he sees an opportunity to test his skills as an amateur safe cracker. For Rick, it's not about discovering potential riches inside, it's about unlocking a portal to a specific time in history.The newest member of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra is also their youngest. 17-year-old Julin Cheung shares his thoughts on being labelled a prodigy, and what it really takes to be talented. Tanya Ryan is a talented singer-songwriter from Alberta who's won country music ‘Rising Star’ awards and performed at Calgary Stampede. But after 12 years of trying to make it in the music industry, Tanya is hanging up her guitar for good. She tells us about coming to terms with the fact that talent isn’t always enough.Don Vickers of Sydney Mines, NS says he has a horrible memory, but he still managed to break a world record in the competitive world of memory sports.And Paul Anthony’s "Talent Time!" is a long-running live show in Vancouver with a very broad definition of what it means to be talented. A seniors' vaudeville troupe, a kids' Kung Fu class, a rabbit agility club – all have a stage here. Paul tells Ify why he doesn’t want to put the notion of ‘talent,’ or his show, in a box. 

There are lots of reasons to volunteer - and many excuses not to. So as Canada faces a critical volunteer shortage, what is motivating those who do?Ify takes to the streets of Toronto to find out where and why people are volunteering (or not).Seven days a week, Ashley Van Aggelen is coaching kids in hockey, basketball, soccer, and badminton. She gives up all her evenings, barely sees her friends, and bounces between multiple practices and games in a week. So what keeps this super-volunteer going?After getting fed up with the lack of emergency services in his community, Ian Hicks decided to buy a fire truck from the set of Rambo: First Blood. And just like that, a small town B.C. fire department was born. How a rag-tag collection of volunteers transformed into critical first-responders.Michele Botel grew up afraid of felines. So why did she volunteer to feed a colony of feral cats?Lyall Davis has one mission: to keep the community radio station in Killaloe, Ontario from going off the air. But without volunteers, the station will have to sign off for good - something he's worked too hard to let happen.Ever since the discovery of unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, Vanessa Genier (Missanabie Cree First Nation) has been volunteering her time making quilts for residential school survivors.Angela McBride volunteers to sit with people at the end of their lives - listening to music, playing games, and talking about whatever people want to talk about. What these end-of-life conversations have taught Angela about living.

Hear the stories behind the one-of-a-kind anniversaries people mark on their calendars.Every December before Christmas, Now or Never producer Ariel Fournier goes with her mom to visit the cemetery where her dad was interred. It’s a tradition they mark on December 15 – her parents’ anniversary. But it’s not the day they got married, or the day they met...it’s the first time her parents (ahem) became intimate. Ariel and her mom, Adrienne Drobnies, address the awkwardness and discuss the deeper meaning of sharing this day together. For the last 102 years and counting, descendants and friends of what was once the largest Black settlement in Canada travel from all over to come to a homecoming celebration like no other. Michelle Robbins' family has been there for it all, and shares what this celebration means to her.3…2…1…MENOPAUSE! How do you enter menopause? Well, if you’re Coral Short, you ask guests to wear red, prepare an array of red foods, and throw a party.We asked Now or Never listeners to share a personal date they commemorate, and how they do it.And World AIDS Day on December 1 is a personal one for Anita Ikwue. Not only is it a chance to remember her father who died of AIDS when she was four years old, it’s a time to celebrate and fight stigma for the 27-year-old who was born with HIV. 

What happens when you're known for one thing - good or bad - and now you're trying to be something else? Stories of people trying to change the way the world sees them.Recovering addict Shane Sturby-Highfield shares the challenges of trying to make amends and regain the trust of people he's hurt.Writer Rhea Rollman has many articles she's published, but all under a different name. Now that she's come out publicly as a trans woman, she's changing that one email at a time.Yassine Nouah is currently on the adventure of a lifetime, travelling from the Arctic to the Antarctic — and his parents don’t even know about it. He now has aspirations to reinvent himself and morph from Yassine the cubicle-dwelling accountant, into the Yassine he really is today.For the last two months, Stacey Chicoine has been carefully writing her own obituary. But she’s not anywhere close to death. This 41-year-old mom-of-two tells us how writing her own life story, in her own words, has been such a powerful experience - and why she’s sharing parts of herself in her obituary she’s never shared with anyone. 

All over the country, the prices we’re paying for food are giving people sticker shock, and changing behaviours.Statistics Canada tells us food prices have gone up 22 per cent in the past four years. Food Banks Canada says 40 per cent of us are feeling financially worse off than we were last year. So as we enter into a season of celebration and food we want to know: how are you putting food on the table right now?When Julianna Romanyk realized some of her friends were struggling with high grocery costs, she got an idea: invite them into her kitchen for monthly ‘meal prep parties.’ Now everyone shows up to her Toronto home with one ingredient and a stack of Tupperware, and makes a week’s worth of food together - creating community along the way.At a free dinner in Winnipeg’s north end, we sit down with people who reveal their food security is based on dumpster diving, stealing to survive, and a calendar that keeps track of where free food can be found in the neighbourhood.In Nunavut, grocery store prices are sky high and Kyra Kilabuk is sharing the details on TikTok so everyone can know about it. On Now or Never Kyra shares what it takes for her family of five to make ends meet in Iqaluit.At Helen Detwiler Elementary School in Hamilton, 400 students are waiting for breakfast, but the school’s food program can only offer half of what they once did. Find out why milk is now off the table at this school in need.If you lift the lid in Robert Gagnon’s basement, you’ll find hundreds of pounds of elk meat, some salmon fillets, and even a little bit of elk tongue and moose nose. Robert is bagging game on his Lheidli T’enneh First Nation territory, to help feed his family and put meat on elders’ tables.

40 000 Afghan refugees have settled in Canada since the Taliban's swift and dramatic return to power in Afghanistan in 2021.Today on Now or Never, five newcomers share the realities of starting over in a new country, and what they're dreaming about next.Afghan teenager Razia Arifi grew up in a family that always encouraged education, and to get out of Afghanistan the first chance she got. So when the Taliban returned in 2021, 16-year-old Razia found herself on a plane to Canada, without her parents and siblings. Today this university student shares how she’s dealing with the weight of expectations, and why her goal is to eventually get back to Afghanistan to open a school for girls. In Afghanistan, she was an award-winning journalist fearlessly fighting for women’s rights and press freedom. But here, Farida Nekzad says she’s starting from zero, worried about her finances, and wondering how she will pay back the transportation loan most refugees arrive with.Canadian military veteran Dave Lavery was on the ground helping evacuate people from Afghanistan when the Taliban took Kabul. But a few months after fleeing, he returned to take back his house from the Taliban and rebuild his business in a country he still calls his 'home away from home.'For many Afghani kids in Edmonton, soccer games were their first taste of life in Canada. We take you to a game with head coach Hamid Atimadi, who is sharing his love of the game with the next generation.And transgender woman Ozlam Mahshar was severely punished by her family for wearing make-up in Afghanistan. After escaping the Taliban’s rule and arriving in Canada in 2022, she now has dreams of being a make-up artist, and flexes her skills on Ify for an intimate sit-down. 

Three months after a wildfire burned 32,500 hectares of Jasper National Park, locals in the municipality are finding a way to rebuild their lives next to the charred remains of what they've lost. As this fire season comes to an end and the tourist town prepares for winter, Now or Never meets Jasperites as they navigate grief and new beginnings together. Joe Urie, a Métis tour guide and longtime local, brings Ify Chiwetelu and Trevor Dineen up to Old Fort Point, for a mountain top view of  what Jasper looks like today. Lorraine Stanko searches through the debris of her friends' and neighbours' homes, trying to find valuables that weren't destroyed by the wildfire. She hopes to bring them, and herself, closure, after her own home in town burned down. Blocks away from where the Stanko's house once stood, Sviatoslav Rud and Nina Egorova's rented home is still standing, but it is still uninhabitable due to smoke damage. They're sleeping in a borrowed RV in front of their house even as the temperatures dip. As volunteer firefighter Kim Stark battled the blaze in town, her own house burned to the ground. Now, as she tries to talk to her three young children about the devastation she's learning as much from them as they are from her.Grab a plate at the town's community dinner, a 20-year-old tradition in Jasper, that has new meaning and urgency right now.And we meet Stephen Nelson in a Hinton Hotel after his seniors lodge burned down. After 16 years in Jasper with no stable home - he moved into the lodge 11 days before the evacuation order. He is preparing to leave Jasper for good -- "the love of his life" that won't seem to let him stay.

Have you ever seen someone do something so bold, with so much confidence, and think to yourself….where did they get the nerve? On this episode, we find out.You’ve probably seen the viral video of the guy in BC who came face-to-face with a black bear in his garage. Alex Gold tells us how he managed to keep his cool with one angry mama bear.When we last talked to Ben Pobjoy, he was in the middle of trying to break a Guinness World Record for most marathons run in a year. And to make it even harder, he was doing it in 90 different countries. He tells us how he transformed from a self-described ‘hot dumpster fire party animal” into a guy who can run 242 marathons in 365 days.Would you ever sit down with your parents to show them a box of sex toys? Entrepreneur Mathusha Senthil is doing that and more with her company Thaen Pot — a project aimed at starting healthy discussions about sex among the South Asian diaspora. Oh, and she's running the whole thing from her bedroom closet. Lyle Odjick was a parking lot security guard when he decided to enter a blues harmonica contest on a whim. And that’s how he found himself under the glare of the stage lights, playing the harmonica his grandmother gifted him, fronting a legendary Ottawa blues band…the very first time he ever played in public.Meet a Winnipeg renovation company with a bold mission: to get around only by bicycle. Trevor joins the crew from Velo Renovations to find out how you lug around 30-foot ladders and table saws to construction sites, using only two wheels. In winter. In Winnipeg. Lynn Burton has been trying to work up the courage to wear leggings in public for more than a month. Enter body-confident powerhouse Michelle Osbourne for an intervention.

When something's been lost or taken from you, how far would you go to get it back?Mohammed Aljadba’s seven year old daughter lost a year of her childhood in Gaza when the war began last October. They managed to escape to Canada after a grueling journey, and he’s now trying to give her and her cousins — who escaped with them — the childhood they deserve. After a lifetime of focusing on others and believing she wasn’t quite smart enough, 56-year-old Colleen Sharpe is finally chasing the university degree she dreamed of.Meet a group of women in Opaskwayak Cree Nation in northern Manitoba who are training to become midwives - so babies can be born at home once again, and include the ceremonial birth practices that have been absent for so long.And when Lynn Lau found herself struggling to pay the rent as a newly single parent, she opened her home to guests to help pay the bills. How hosting strangers has helped Lynn glue the pieces of her life back together. 

Breakups can look a lot of different ways: slow dissolves, out-of-nowhere blow-outs, mutual partings-of-ways. The truth is, they all hurt. Today you'll meet people in the thick of it, and the surprising ways they're getting through.When Litia Fleming broke up with Richard Kemick after 10 years together, it came as a shock to Richard. But two weeks later, they got an even bigger jolt: Litia was pregnant. Find out how these exes are juggling new parenthood, dating, and the joys and challenges of living together after breaking up.After a painful divorce, Saba Ahmad vowed to go to law school and become the lawyer she never had. She graduated last spring, and is providing support to other South Asian women facing the end of a marriage, as she pursues her last steps to becoming a lawyer.   Three years ago, exhausted from all the arguing, nagging and fighting, Jessyka and Jordan Hagen called it quits - only to realize their breakup would eventually save their marriage.Ify heads to Next Generation Arts, a youth arts organization in Scarborough, to learn lessons on wading through heartbreak.And we crash a support group helping men talk about their emotions after a breakup - but if you’re late, expect to do push-ups. 

We know that people love their pets - the pet industry is worth billions of dollars in this country. But on this week's show, Ify and Trevor join Canadians who are truly going beyond for the animals in their lives and asking, "How far is too far?"When she was growing up, Ify's parents disliked pets, but today they've fallen for Kiki the cat. Ify asks her mom Vicky Chiwetelu how this unexpected love story came to be.After Kendal Crawford and Shaun Stephens-Whale, of Squamish BC, adopted two rats, friends refused to come over to their house. But the couple is out to prove that Kuzko and Kronk are not only adorable, they're smart pets who have learned to drive a homemade "rat rod".Ottawa's Duane Taylor puts his money where his mouth is when it comes to stray dogs. For the last two years, he has spent $80K and travelled to conflict zones in Ukraine, bringing food and medicine to four legged friends in need. When will he stop and how will he measure success?When Sahar Bayat broke up with her boyfriend, he took their dog, Stella. But Sahar couldn't live without her golden retriever, so she took him to court to fight for custody, despite the $60K price tag. The emotional story behind this first case in Canada, where a dog was seen as a child instead of a piece of property. Edmonton's Marla Smith says that it wasn't for her own good that she learned to drive an adapted van as a bipedal amputee. It was so she could take her service dogs to the vet and obedience competitions around the prairies. Find out what makes them best in show and how they've expanded Marla's world.

As many as 12 per cent of all workers in Canada are on the clock after midnight. And that can have an impact on your health, your relationships, and your home life. Today we hear from some of the people who work while the rest of the country sleeps, including long-haul truckers, health-care aids and DJs.Trucker Leah Gorham regularly goes on long-haul treks with her boyfriend Roland Bereczki, where they trade off shifts so they can be on the move 24 hours a day. They tell us how they maintain a relationship when your bodies are on opposite clocks - while doing one of the most dangerous jobs out there.For the last four years, health-care aid Tes has been working the night shift at a personal care home in Aldergrove, BC. And not all those nights are peaceful.Sam Stratigeas has always loved the night, and pumping up nightclub crowds as his alter ego DJ Sammm. But it wasn’t until his divorce and coming out that he took it more seriously, and now at 62 he can be found spinning at venues across Toronto’s gay village. Some people say nothing good ever happens at 2 am, but don’t tell that to the overnight staff at the WE24 Safe Space For Youth in Winnipeg. Every night, they open up their doors to provide food, laundry and a safe sleeping area for vulnerable youth in the neighborhood. And more importantly, they offer hope.When Binita Lamsal needed a second job to make ends meet, she asked Deepak Kumar for work at his overnight cleaning business. They tell us how their friendship bloomed into a romance on the night shift, and what they're dreaming of next.

We all feel stuck sometimes - in habits, relationships, or just general middle-age malaise. So how do you get "unstuck?" On this episode, hear from people in the thick of it - and what they're doing to get their lives back on track.Emily Baadsvik is stuck between an idealism of what she thinks she should have accomplished by age 41, and the realities of her life today. She tells Ify why she feels like she's slowly unravelling, 10 years after she was on the Canadian Olympic bobsled team, dreaming big.Musician Boy Golden is currently stuck in a van while on tour, so we decided to call him up for his best stories from the road.Chet Breau was stuck in behaviours that were going to kill him, until a moment that turned everything around. How he overcame addictions to food and alcohol and helped save his own life.Dominique Robichaud swears being stuck on an island together with her partner is the best thing for their relationship. And after fleeing Gaza on foot, Marilyn Kasken’s brothers Talal and Fahed have been stuck for months in Egypt, waiting to join their sisters in Newfoundland.

At 15, Bee Bertrand's life was changed when he went to a Bif Naked concert. Finally, he was able to see "weirdos" just like him: queer people living loudly and proudly. And for decades, her music got him through the highs and lows of life. But after a late-night DM, Bee went from Bif's fan to one of her best friends.

It's always bugged Toronto journalist Adrian Ma that there is *another* Adrian Ma out there, a journalist and podcast host who is more famous, more accomplished, and “approximately 20% better looking" than him. So this summer, Adrian reached out to his doppelganger, and flew down to Washington, D.C. to meet him in person. The surreal moment when Adrian Ma meets Adrian Ma.Plus, Trevor talks to an old-school matchmaker with some unusual methods of scouting for singles.And what happens when 60 strangers dressed up in mumus and curly orange wigs get together to channel their inner Mrs Roper? We crash a "Mrs. Roper Romp" to find out how the wise-cracking landlady from 70s sitcom Three's Company is bringing people together in unexpected ways. At 15, Bee Bertrand’s world changed when he saw a Bif Naked concert: it was the first place he felt a sense of belonging as a queer person. And for decades, Bif’s music was the soundtrack to the highs and lows of Bee’s life. But now, thanks to a late-night DM, Bee and Bif have connected IRL - and are building a life-changing friendship. 

All summer long, we're sharing some of our favourite Now or Never stories. When Carl Clarke struggled to find love after his divorce, a friend suggested he try an app for an AI companion. Now Clarke says he is in a committed relationship with Saia and says she’s helping him improve his life and expand his world.

All summer long, we're sharing some of our favourite Now or Never stories!Richard Kemick is looking to dip his toe into the dating world again. There’s just one problem. His living situation is a little…..complicated. And tough to sum up in the six minutes he has to make a good first impression during speed-dating.

All summer long, we're sharing some of our favourite Now or Never stories. A year and a half ago, Trevor’s dad, Dave Dineen, underwent a laryngectomy to battle throat cancer. The surgery took away his vocal cords and forced him to find a new way to speak. He’s never spoken about how hard the recovery has been...until now.

All summer long we're sharing some of our favourite Now or Never stories, and this one is fun! What happens when you put CBC Radio hosts Paul Haavardsrud, Angeline Tetteh-Wayoe and Piya Chattopadhyay on the hot seat? Ify and Trevor ask nosy questions to find out how much personal information they're willing to reveal...on air.

All summer long, we're sharing some of our favourite Now or Never stories. This is one that was part of our "Lost and Found" episode.When Chuck the parrot escaped, the Porte family didn't know if they would ever see their pet again. But days later and six kilometers away, Trevor Van Huit noticed a yellow bird land in his backyard. And then it started talking...