Season 39

We’ve heard for years about the dangers of eating too much fat or salt. But there have never been recommended limits for sugar on Canadian food labels, despite emerging research that suggests the sweet stuff may be making more of us fat and sick. Has the sugar industry been hiding an unsavoury truth from consumers?

A lot of our clothes bear the label ‘Made in Bangladesh’. But before the deadly collapse of a garment factory there last April, most of us never thought about the people who make them. After clothes bound for Canada were found in the rubble of Rana Plaza, Canadian companies reacted with surprise - how could such a tragedy happen?

When a body was found in a roadside ditch outside Mexico City, it seemed like just another murder – one of tens of thousands of violent killings in that country each year. But the victim was in fact the hard-working mother of two and the branch manager for Canadian-owned Scotiabank. The death of Maru Oropesa revealed the risks that Canadian banks and their employees face in one of the most corrupt countries in the world. From one murder in Mexico, Bob McKeown follows the money trail to secret accounts in Switzerland, and into the underworld of Mexican money laundering.

How do you move three enormous elephants 4000 kilometres? Very very carefully and bring lots of hay.... When the fifth estate joined the convoy taking 3 Canadian elephants overland to the PAWS sanctuary in California it was bound to be an incredible journey filled with tension, drama and unpredictability. The good news for Toka, Thika and Iringa is that the long battle over their welfare appears to have a very happy ending.

The controversial WikiLeaks founder gets the Hollywood treatment in the new movie 'The Fifth Estate' but the real fifth estate on CBC-TV tracks the inside story of the man in his own words, his secrets and his scandals. How did he get started, what was the global impact of his whistle-blowing website and what cost have whistle-blowers paid for leaking secrets? The rise and fall of Julian Assange - not the Hollywood fiction, the real fifth estate story.

Crack cocaine. Alcohol. Friends who have criminal backgrounds. Just over a year ago, Toronto Mayor Rob Ford stood next to Police Chief Bill Blair promising to fight gang crime. Now the two most powerful men in Canada's largest city are locked in a struggle only one is likely to survive. Gillian Findlay has more on the man who has become the world's most controversial mayor - and the real story behind that first notorious video.

A year after her death, most people remember Amanda Todd from her YouTube video, holding up hand-written pages describing how one mistake in front of a webcam led to her torment by bullies at school and online. But beyond that viral video, the fifth estate reveals a more complex and disturbing story about what happened to the B.C. teenager driven to suicide in October 2012 – not just bullying, but the deliberate sexual extortion of a 15-year-old girl by online predators.

Whether it's the assassination of JFK or the events of 9/11, when national tragedies occur they trigger painful soul-searching. In both cases a national consensus emerged over time about the single gunman who shot JFK… and the reasons the towers collapsed on 9/11. But some still question the so-called ‘official version’ of history. They passionately believe in other – often radical – explanations. And they think there might be conspiracies to hide the real truth.

North Korea is among the world's most mysterious and secretive countries. The little we know comes from desperate souls who risk everything escaping overland in search of a new life. Many are captured in China and sent back home to an uncertain future. But a few somehow manage to make it all the way to Canada.

Scientists across the country are expressing growing alarm that federal cutbacks to research programs monitoring areas that range from climate change and ocean habitats to public health will deprive Canadians of crucial information. In the past five years the federal government has dismissed more than 2,000 scientists, and hundreds of programs and world-renowned research facilities have lost their funding.

An unprecedented view into the life of Jeffrey Arenburg. He was found not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder for the death of Ottawa TV sportscaster Brian Smith in 1995 and is now fuelling debate around the issue of what happens to these offenders once they are released.

The night of September 14th, 2013 north of Montreal, police set off on a manhunt for notorious Hells Angels hitman Rene “Balloune” Charlebois who had escaped from his minimum security prison earlier that evening. When police tracked him to a remote chalet just under two weeks later, they found Charlebois’ body after an apparent suicide. A third party provided Quebec’s provincial police with Charlebois’ final words: a series of audiotapes that he asked be made public if anything were to happen to him. The tapes feature conversations, which, if proven authentic, will bring down one of Quebec’s most respected biker cops and rock the Montreal Police force.

It was a desperate gamble – more than 130 Chinese migrants spent months in squalid conditions below the deck of an old fishing boat, risking their lives for a chance for a better life in America. But those dreams were defeated when the crew of the ‘Black Dragon’ left them stranded on a remote island off the coast of British Columbia in 1999.

Life in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community of Lev Tahor is supposed to be simple: the rules for dress, diet, schooling, marriage and worship are clearly defined and closely followed. But last November, in the middle of the night, about 200 members of the sect fled their homes in Quebec to start a new community in Chatham, Ontario, amid allegations of child neglect. Now the sect is fighting to keep more than a dozen children that a Quebec court ordered removed from their families. Their ongoing legal battles are raising an old dilemma: when does a group’s right to religious freedom get trumped by society’s obligation to protect children?

Even as a youngster growing up in Prince Edward Island, he had ambitions to make it big on Parliament Hill. Eventually, Mike Duffy’s knack for talking politics on radio and TV brought him close to the seat of power in Ottawa, until as a newsman he seemed as famous as the people he covered. Now the disgraced Conservative Senator has become the embodiment of what many Canadians see as a wasteful institution, and a lightning rod for those who want the Senate abolished.

As many young Canadians head off for spring break holidays, do they face unexpected and potentially lethal dangers – in their hotel rooms? When two Canadian sisters turned up dead in a Thailand hotel in 2012, authorities suggested everything from drugs to food poisoning. But an updated investigation by the fifth estate points to new evidence that a highly toxic pesticide used in holiday hotels in Asia to control bedbugs may have caused their deaths. And host Linden MacIntyre digs into the mystery of two other young tourists who died suddenly while travelling in Vietnam.

It’s a question you might think medical science would have answered long ago – when are you dead? But in “Dead Enough” the fifth estate explores how the standards for when and how people are declared dead can vary from province to province and even from hospital to hospital. Host Bob McKeown looks at how, in the rush to meet the need for life-saving organ transplants, some doctors are worried that we may be pushing the ethical boundaries.

This season, the fifth estate was flooded with tips from viewers, asking our team to investigate stories important to you. We listened, we did our research, and now we have three stories built on your suggestions. Bob McKeown uncovers the disturbing past of a man who promised love to at least ten women across Canada, but delivered only deception. Mark Kelley follows up on a viewer’s request to investigate the mysterious death of a young blind woman in Halifax, and learns that a key witness in the police investigation has changed his story. And we went looking for the worst case of small town corruption, and found one - south of the border, in Dixon, Illinois.

Even after a story airs on television, the fifth estate does not stop investigating. Mark Kelley checks in with a survivor of the collapse of a garment factory in Bangladesh and Bob McKeown finds out how the Toronto Zoo elephants are adapting to sunny California.