It's hard to believe the year is almost over and what a year it's been.

Feels like we've had enough news to fill a decade and live through so many elections and so many challenges from south of the border.

So what stands out? What events from 2025 ended up having the most impact?

We take a look at the year that was and the political developments that shaped it nationally and right here in Ontario.

Then many think the life of a foreign correspondent is pretty glamorous.

And sure, it can be full of adventure, but it can also take a major toll.

What is it like reporting on conflicts and bearing witness to human suffering?

This is The Rundown.

A lot has happened this year politically in Ontario and across the country.

Listing the major events just here in this province could take us a whole other year.

So let's cut through the noise and focus on some highlights and lowlights.

I sat down with Tonda Morales, bureau chief and senior reporter in the Toronto Star's Ottawa bureau, and John Michael McGrath, TVO Today columnist and co-host of the OnPoli podcast, to talk about the biggest moments of 2025.

Tonda, John Michael McGrath, welcome to the program.

Great. You guys can be here.

I'm going to start with you. What event had a bigger impact on the course of this year's political landscape? Is it Justin Trudeau's resignation or Trump's announcement on tariffs?

>> Well, I think Trump's announcement on tariffs.

But in a way that was the backdrop for Justin Trudeau's resignation, because it was also the backdrop for when Chrystia Freeland resigned.

But Trump's tariffs have affected globally.

Everybody upended global trade economics, security, security discussions, everything.

It's it's it is a seismic change in the way the the world is working together.

So I mean as one single event that's it.

But as a big political event in the Canadian calendar, Justin Trudeau's resignation was huge.

>> JMM, same question to you. It's hard to look back. It's been 12 months. But yeah.

>> I mean, if I had a time machine and I could rerun this past year, this is the question I most want to see answered, which is, you know, if Justin Trudeau had stayed on as prime minister and could run for re-election in the context of the Trump tariffs, which obviously played so heavily into Mark Carney's federal campaign about, you know, elbows up and all of the messaging around protecting Canadian jobs and protecting the Canadian economy.

You know, could Justin Trudeau still be prime minister today? I I'm sceptical, but it's just such a fascinating historical question that I would love to know.

Like Tonda, I think you have to say that just globally speaking, Donald Trump's presidency has been the bigger, bigger issue.

And in the even in the context of Canadian politics.

And obviously, I could talk a bit more about the effect it's had in Ontario.

The tariffs really have just been so huge.

>> I want to pick up on what you said, Justin Trudeau's resignation. Why was it so big for us here?

>> Because right up until a couple of days before he made the decision, he resigned on January 6th.

Maybe people will recall.

But right up until the very end, he tried to tough it out.

After Freeland's resignation, the resignation of his finance minister on a budget day or a fiscal economic update day.

Big deal.

And spent the whole of Christmas holidays huddling with advisors and talking to caucus.

And so really, when he took the decision to get out, it put everything in play.

It brought in Mark Carney into Canadian politics.

It suddenly challenged the conservatives to deal with a new Liberal leader who was putting attempting to put a new brand and face on the Liberal Party, which had had a decade in power.

And, you know, it really challenged the conservatives in the last campaign to confront that reality.

Mr. Poilievre continued to campaign against Justin Trudeau, and arguably some days he still does.

Throughout that campaign, and many felt that he never did make the pivot to deal with the American threat the way the liberals did via the selection of Mark Carney as their leader.

>> John Mikal, let's talk provincial politics, captain Canada I know that's what we were talking provincial politics here.

I don't have any props or any hats that say Canada's for sale here.

>> But foam glove with the finger.

>> Exactly. But what effect did that nickname have on Doug Ford during his campaign?

>> Well, you know, Tonda mentioned the inability or unwillingness by Pierre Poilievre to pivot to reflect the changing political circumstances.

And, you know, as a columnist, sometimes you get things wrong.

Sometimes you make predictions that don't pan out.

And if I can be allowed a very small victory lap, I was pretty early on in calling that the moment Donald Trump won the election, that Doug Ford would have grounds to call an early Ontario election.

Of course, there had been speculation that there would be an early election for months before that.

And the big question was, you know, what would the what would the excuse for an early election be?

And the moment Trump's election was was final. And, you know, we knew that tariffs were coming.

It was clear to me that we would be that was going to be the grounds for a new election.

And and sure enough, that's what it was.

You know, it really cannot overstate what a seismic shift the tariffs are to Canadian policymakers.

We really have spent a generation just assuming that the American market would always be open to us under the most favourable terms.

And the change since January 20th, perhaps it should not have taken policymakers by surprise the way it did.

I think there was a lot of sort of wishful thinking that somehow Trump didn't really mean us when he talked about tariffs on everybody, but he did.

He meant us as well as everybody else.

He meant us as well as everybody else. And everything since then has just been a form of adjusting, and that has been part of what worked so well for Doug Ford in that election campaign was really, you know, pivoting away from, frankly, almost anything except talking about protecting the Ontario economy and protecting Ontario jobs.

>> All right, Tom.

>> So I would just say he also did so by seizing the moment in a visceral, emotional way.

He appealed to Ontario voters as a defender on an emotional level in a way that neither, frankly, Mark Carney nor Pierre Poilievre did or still are able to capture, sort of the, the, the, the reactions of Canadians in the face of the Trump threats of 51st state and the defensive posture that Canadians adopted to, you know, stop travelling to the US for pleasure and stop buying American made products and go for Buy Canadian.

I mean, that was Doug Ford, I think gave voice to that even with the ad that later so angered Donald Trump into ceasing trade negotiations with this country.

Doug Ford's government, Doug Ford himself, captured both on an emotional level and in a way, on an intellectual level, the anti-tariff argument and put it back in the face of Americans.

Remember how mad they got when he threatened to cut off electricity? Ontario electric electrical exports?

So I think that was the secret of some of his success.

And let's face it, ever since he's been Prime Minister, Mark Carney is quite happy to have Doug Ford play that role.

>> Well, let's stick with that, Tom. Let's throw these two in a room together. We've got Premier Doug Ford, Prime Minister Mark Carney. What do you make of their relationship?

>> I mean, they've got a good relationship. There's no question there is.

There was a source of tension around the ad because the Canadians on the federal side were acutely aware that it was angering Trump and angering the US ambassador here and angering some of the Republicans in the US.

But I think that aside from that tension, by and large, these two get along.

There's barely a federal policy that comes out that Doug Ford doesn't come out in public and defend.

You know, he has backed Mark Carney on major projects.

He has backed Mark Carney largely on his approach to tariffs.

When Mark Carney rolled back Canada's counter-tariffs on the US and rolled back the digital services tax in an effort to, you know, woo Trump, Ford was with him every step of the way praising his efforts.

And look, they do have a good relationship. They talk frequently.

And I think that's, you know, a bit of a success for both of them.

You know, the good cop/bad cop playbook is working for them.

>> Well, I want to pick up on that as well. I should mention that Premier Ford said that Carney knew about the ad, allegedly, that Tonya had mentioned how much of this is a good cop/bad cop strategy here.

>> I'm not sure how much of it is premeditated in that sense, of the idea of them playing those those roles consciously, but they seem to have, at the very least, organically. They have arrived at this game where, you know, Ford stakes out a bit more of an antagonistic, aggressive position, and then Carney can be the relatively more conciliatory one.

You know, it's fair to say that this act has not worked perfectly right.

Like we don't have a deal with the Americans right now, and I don't know of anybody who would confidently say that there is a deal within sight.

But obviously I don't place all of the blame for that on Canadian policymakers.

The primary actor here is Donald Trump and his administration's refusal to to make a deal.

You know, the other point I would make is that I think Ford has been very, very active in a way that I think might have surprised people, maybe not not always familiar with this, you know, just how many levers there are at the provincial level to make international political moves.

Right.

You know, Todd to mentioned threatening electricity exports, which Ontario can do because Ontario owns most of its own electricity system and it certainly regulates electricity sales here.

Right.

Things like pulling American liquor out of the LCBO shelves because Ontario has a provincially run liquor monopoly.

You know, there are all of these pressure points that the provincial government can, can, can push on when it wants to make a point to Americans,

you know, and like the fact that both of Kentucky's senators have been very vocal about how American tariffs are hurting Kentucky bourbon exporters, because Ontario is the LCBO is one of the single largest liquor buyers in the world.

And at the moment, you can't sell Kentucky bourbon here in Ontario.

>> I want to stick on energy, but I want to talk nation building projects.

The Darlington Small Modular Reactor is a project that's on the fast track list.

This is just east of Oshawa. Significant. Explain.

>> So this has been a project that has been underway for actually a very long time.

If you want to go back to the earliest incarnation of Ontario's power company, OPG first applied for an environmental assessment at the Darlington site back under the McGuinty government.

And they got that assessment.

And even after that generation of nuclear proposal was scrapped, OPG wisely kept the environmental assessment alive.

And in the last decade, as as the idea of small modular reactors, these are generally smaller, as the name implies, smaller nuclear reactors that the hope is will be faster and cheaper to build, as that has become sort of the the hot topic in nuclear policy.

Ontario was able to go to global companies and say, hey, we've got this site ready to go, ready to build with an existing environmental approval. We can just get going.

Now. The significance of Mark Carney putting the Darlington SMR site on the the major projects list. It's not entirely clear to me because as I sort of already said, it already has all of its federal approvals.

Now, there are other things that the federal government can do to support it, like make money available, which they've promised.

But I think the harmony that we're now seeing between the provincial and the federal government on nuclear power is probably a foreshadowing of things to come, because the Ontario is not stopping with the Darlington site.

They this year began with the provincial government announcing a massive new nuclear station that they want to build in port Hope, just a bit further east of Darlington.

And that is only one of several locations they're talking about.

So one of the sleeper stories this year, so to speak, has been Ontario really going even more enthusiastically into nuclear power.

And they will need federal help to to execute that.

>> I want to pick up on I think.

>> Yeah, I think I was just going to say that the I think the reason we see a project like that, which you're right, had so many approvals already in place, is less about, you know, what the federal government can actually do for that one particular project. But in the early days when this whole list, the first phase of projects that Mark Carney put on the on the table for potential designation as nation building, I think this was part of a greater signal to the country that the emphasis for major projects and fast tracked approvals is going to be on mines, critical minerals, energy, clean energy and other related trade boosting infrastructure like ports and rail and say the Port of Churchill, the Port of Montreal.

These are, you know, they're in different phases.

Phase one, phase two.

But none of them have actually so far gotten the title of nation in the national interest or been fast tracked.

But there was a very clear signal to markets.

Look, you didn't see on that list a family doctor for every Canadian as a nation building project, you didn't see Pharmacare as a nation building project.

You don't see.

It was also interesting. They put on things like high speed rail for Ontario.

Right.

So that is also a project that the proponents are saying we're already seeing benefits, even if we haven't been put into the process for fast track approvals yet.

They are already seeing the benefit of going out to persuade investors to pour capital into the project.

They're saying, look, this is a real thing.

So I think that was a large part of what Carney is doing.

He's got a very clear vision for what he wants to get priority.

And it's all around trade, economy and potentially clean energy.

Although it might not.

It doesn't sound like that, I suppose, because now we're also talking about pipelines.

>> Well, let's let's follow up on that. Carney most recently signed the memorandum of understanding with Alberta, and he explained his his approach as cooperative federalism.

And I'm curious to know how much of that approach would will bode well for other provinces.

>> I mean, that's a signal that he's trying to honour a constitutional principle around the division of powers, and he wants to engage provinces on their areas of jurisdiction.

It's a bit of a it's a bit of a cliche in a way.

But he's he's preaching to the converted.

I mean, Alberta wants to operate in its own areas of jurisdiction.

What it does, though, signal, is that Carney is willing to cut deals with provinces as long as everybody's aligned on the same goal.

So, for example, he part of the agreement with Alberta, if they were to ever approve a pipeline, would be tougher industrial carbon pricing on Alberta's part on their own emitters.

And the feds would agree to lift, for example, the Clean Electricity Regulations, which are sort of aimed at making natural gas powered plants sort of less and less the the norm and or requiring them to pay for emissions.

The feds are prepared to lift that.

Doug Ford wants that. Ontario wants that.

You know, it's I think what you saw is Carney signalling to provinces.

Then show me not the money, but show me the way. You're going to decarbonise.

Show me the way you're going to get to net zero.

Show me how you're going to cut your emissions, and we'll cut these kinds of deals.

>> All right. I've got 10 seconds each for our last question here. It's been a long year. Given all that's happened, what can we expect next year?

>> In terms of Ontario politics? I think the big fight that is coming is over the fate of school boards and elected trustees.

We don't know yet which way the government is going to go, but that will be a big, loud fight.

>> Tom, do you get the last word?

>> 10 seconds: Energy, politics and a potential election.

Again, I hate to break the news to you, but we may be in another federal election campaign next year.

>> Here we go. All right, Tonda, really appreciate John Michael McGrath. Always a pleasure. Thank you so much.

More than 40 years ago, Brian Stewart became a foreign correspondent.

He reported on the Gulf War.

He brought global awareness to the Ethiopian famine in 1984.

He interviewed heads of state and everyday people affected by historic crises.

Here's part of our conversation about his new book, On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent, and how world changing events changed him to.

Brian, thank you so much for having us in your lovely home. How are you doing?

>> Oh, great. Thank you and my pleasure to have you here.

>> All right. You have covered a lot. Ethiopian famine. You were in El Salvador. You were in Kuwait, Lebanon, covering pretty much the entire Cold War.

I imagine as a journalist, you are pushing through, seeing some of the worst things possible. What kept you going?

>> Well, I think it was the obligation of the craft, being a journalist, being a foreign correspondent, which is what I dreamt of, and knowing there was a risk reward involved in that work, that it was sometimes risky.

I didn't realise just how much the emotional suffering could be.

And I think certainly covering the Ethiopian famine in 1984 and 85 and for often weeks and months on end, it did really cause major strain on all of us who were involved in that coverage.

And we saw things we couldn't really have even prepared for.

I thought I could prepare for everything.

When I arrived in Ethiopia in 1984 and northern part of the country hit by famine, it was just beyond imagining.

It was like apocalypse, a world after a nuclear holocaust.

The dust clouds across the horizon, the bodies along the streets, as I think I reported.

>> Famine is along each road and at the gates of every town by the hundreds of thousands.

Peasants are fleeing the worst drought in memory.

>> What kept you going was the feeling that, you know, this was hidden from the world.

We were there because we fought our way in with the BBC to get visas.

We were the only two crews in the whole famine area, and we needed to alert the world.

And that's what kept us going.

And afterwards other things kept us going, like a desire to see the famine ended and the desire to see that society recover from famine.

>> Tell me about one particular person that is still someone that you keep in touch with, that you met in Ethiopia, that people really connect with in terms of your story and your coverage?

>> Yeah. Her name is Birhan Woldu, and I saw her first when she was three and a half years old.

I was at a feeding centre right outside, one of the worst famine camps, trying to feed these mothers and fathers with young children who were dying or already dead, or save them in some way or another.

I was going down a line of them, and I saw this girl slumped over and collapse on the pavement.

I don't know, something about her face, or just something about the nearness of that appeared to me dying sequence that I called out to a nurse and said, nurse, can we possibly save this girl? Is there anything we can do?

The nurse runs forward, picks her up, runs inside the one room medical centre we follow with the crew rolling and capture on her face what we thought might be the last gasps of life.

The face, looking outward seemed to me a symbol, really, of Ethiopia itself looking on a unhealthful world, begging for help kind of stuff, calling for help.

And the nurse says to us, I'm afraid there's nothing we can do. She's going to die within 15 minutes.

So it just devastated all of us.

And we walked, went outside the room to let her die in peace.

We later were arranged to come back to see her burial.

That afternoon we went out and did other famine stories.

Come back that afternoon to cover the burial of Birhan Woldu and do a story maybe about that.

And we see this group of people holding the girl.

She's there in her arms and she's alive.

And I say to a nurse, nurse, we seem to have seen a bit of a miracle today, did we?

And she said, yes. We stuck a needle in her, and she she will love now. She will survive.

And I still remember that.

So we later did a story on her face and the symbolic of Ethiopia and the story, seeing if she can survive.

Maybe Ethiopia itself can survive later.

Live aid, months later uses an image of her face and the pictures CBC pictures of other desperately ill children in the famine and that caused such a pouring of grief and tears around the world.

Before an audience of 1.1 billion people.

I'm imaginable that it was the greatest, according to Bob Geldof, who arranged Live Aid was the biggest moment of giving that the whole show had, and they ran it for four times.

I went back to documentaries around her years later because she'd been lost.

We found her, did documentaries on her, and she appeared in the second Live Aid and Dancing with Madonna on stage.

She's very, very Christian girl.

And when we first said she was going to appear with Madonna, she said she was really weird.

I thought that was a bit weird.

Anyways, we were on Oprah together.

Long story short, had her over here for a holiday.

I arranged for her and her family, their living and her education and now we zoom back and forth our families.

now we zoom back and forth our families.

She has set up a a small charity in northern Ethiopia itself for disabled children in the very poorest of all areas.

She wants to stay there and help her people.

These are some old pictures I kept through the years.

Going back, you know, childhood ones.

But these are that's me along the line in Ethiopia of the famine line where I met Birhan.

>> Okay. Is she in this?

>> She is in this. This is her. This is the scene.

That's her slumping against the cement, this pavement.

That's her father grieving over her.

That's the nurse would just rushing in to pick her up this way.

Went back to find her four years later.

>> Four years later, right.

>> There outside there.

>> I have to imagine that that story and that relationship is unique in comparison to all of the other places and stories that you've been.

You don't get a chance to be able to tell that full circle story.

And I imagine that that must weigh on you heavily.

I know that in your book you talk about the moral injury.

What what what can you tell us about that?

>> Well, it was a long time for journalism to really realise the psychological and emotional damage of being this professional witness over and over again and also facing dangers, which is so much a part of that life.

It wasn't really until the '90s that journalism discovered that PTSD was ravaging the ranks.

It turned out later there was another thing called moral injury, which is not a psychological mental illness.

It's an emotional one.

Leading psychiatrist in Toronto, Anthony Feinstein, as termed that, wound to the soul, a wound of the spirit that when you watch things like that happen over and over again, even though you may be doing wonderful work in terms of a report that does useful stuff and you can tell yourself a hundred times over, look, it did well. It was good that we were there. We helped the aid arrive.

You still feel that as a human being, you didn't quite live up to your highest expectations of yourself because there were refugee families.

You didn't stop and load into your van and drive off with for to a medical centre.

There was something in your pocket you didn't hand out at a given time.

There were other people, even though you weren't qualified to do anything, as I was not qualified to even give first aid.

What was I doing in a famine?

You kind of feel I could have done more, I could have done more.

And that begins over the years to build to the point where you have symptoms very like PTSD.

And I had, in fact, a nervous breakdown caused by this and was treated for moral injury successfully.

So I'm glad to say so.

I've lived a very good life since that.

>> It is no secret, and it's something that you talk about through your time at CBC, NBC and then back.

Newsrooms don't have the resources that they once did, and I am curious what happens to democracy when we lose the privilege of someone like you in the field of foreign correspondent reporting for the world to see?

>> I think it's a serious loss for particularly the media.

But also, you know, Canada is a country that doesn't have the same kind of diplomatic corps it used to have.

It's a country that chose not to even have an overseas intelligence service of its own.

Like most industrial powers of our size, cabinet often seems out to lunch on the rest of the world and journalism.

We've just decimated the ranks of our overseas coverage.

So we we get stories from other people.

We don't have Canadian eyes and ears out there looking for angles that we as a country need to be informed about.

And I think the main networks, the private networks have done, I'll be quite frank and horrible job at virtually eliminating foreign news coverage by their own bureaus and reporters.

And the CBC has held a held a sort of bridge.

So it's still functioning, but with a much lower impact.

And what happens is we have fewer reporters out there doing the job at a time when there's more stories breaking all the time, the vortex of news that goes on 24 over seven, over and over, crisis upon crisis, upon crisis, and the fragmentation of news makes it very much harder to do the job out there.

So I'm hoping that this country gets to a part where it realises we have got to start rebuilding our foreign media sources overseas, the same way we have to rebuild our our diplomatic sources as well, and our economic sources overseas.

>> Brian, thank you so much. Really appreciate that.

>> Thank you very. Much, honour. My pleasure indeed.

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Until then, see you tomorrow.