SCOOP: Canada is setting the global standard of podcasting for social good.

From the way we package stories to the way we find community, Canadian podcasters are modelling a new standard of podcasts for social good.

Mar 30, 2025

March 30, 2025.

One of the latest projects to hit the scene in Canadian podcasting is Queerial, the new podcast from comedian and podcaster, Trevor Campbell. The “neo-noir” detective story has one mission: to find the root source of queerness.

Queerial is a satire and clever critique of queer conspiracy rhetoric and the “gay agenda”. It’s also part of an exciting swell of Canadian podcasts coming out that are innovating the way we talk about hard and complex things; things that have become divisive, taboo, or forgotten. And there’s never been a better time for that.

A lot of things are worrisome these days. Everything’s a big bummer right now, and so I’ve been trying to find community and a homegrown movement of resistance. Unsurprisingly, I’ve found that in Canadian podcasting; in the hundreds of platforms that have been built here and the hundreds of thousands of listeners they serve both nationally and globally.

Over the last year, it’s become strikingly obvious that Canada is leading the pack in using our platforms for social good, but we’re also innovating how we do that. From the way we package stories to the way we find community, Canadians are modelling a new standard.

Canadian podcasters are innovating the way we consume social good content.

In 2023, Pippa Johnstones critically acclaimed podcast, Expectant, was an early sign of things to come in Canadian podcasting, as the genre-bending podcast addressed the decision to have kids during the climate crisis. Like Queerial, it gave the general public a creative new way to understand a complex issue.

Amongst a plethora of choices, interview shows about social change aren’t aren’t always cutting it anymore. “We've always loved a chat show as a species,” says Trevor Campbell “but I think there are so many now. Now that celebrities have gotten onto podcasting [and] they have almost no premise, it's hard to sign up for that [now].”

Trevor says that, from his own experience, there is also a high level of skepticism in podcast audiences that needs to be addressed. “[Telling] them something head-on almost provokes a defensive response these days,” says Trevor, “I've certainly noticed that in myself. If you claim something is a fact, I'm like, ‘citation please.’” This defensive response is actually a very human phenomenon, and something that Jonah Berger calls “reactance and anti-persuasion radar” in his 2020 book, The Catalyst. “When pushed, people push back. Radar kicks in when they sense someone is trying to convince them.” (The Catalyst, 2020). Podcasters who want audiences to take action through their show need to lower a barrier for audiences to “persuade themselves”. For the future of impactful social good podcasting, they must be “Catalysts”.

Trevor is tactfully and charismatically doing that through humour. “As a queer person, I'm interested in giving [queer origin stories] a platform. I think these stories are what demystify myths around queerness, but I also like to poke the bear. I think it's the funniest way to expose falsehood. That's what Queerial slowly became; this idea of ‘what if we exhaustively leaned into [queer conspiracy] and turned it up to 120%? I am playing a part-time detective who wears short-shorts. And then, oops, you get to the end and the way you think has changed.”

For Rachel Cairns, being a Catalyst for social awareness around abortion access in Canada means playing in two mediums: podcasts and theatre. Her podcast Aborsh recently released its second season and functions as a companion show to her one-woman play, Hypothetical Baby. “It took me 10 days to get an abortion,” Rachel told me, “which, listen, in Canadian healthcare right now, that's not a big deal. But I had a medication abortion, which is just taking a pill – it's super easy and straightforward. I was astounded that I had to wait more than a week to get this pill. And that's somebody who doesn't have to drive to a different city, doesn't have to book child care, all of these other barriers that can very quickly compound and really impede people's access.”

Noticing the discrepancies in abortion access in Canada, Rachel found solace in the arts. “Once I found out I was pregnant, I actually didn't know how to get an abortion. My doctor asked me a string of very inappropriate questions and part of me was enraged and scared because I was like, ‘wait, are you not gonna help me get this thing?!’ My writer's brain was like, ‘conflict, this is a scene!’ Moments like that throughout the abortion experience kept on happening [so] I strung them all together and made this narrative. The play is undeniably my story, [and] while I think I do a relatively good job of trying to bring in the awareness of intersectionality as much as I can on stage, there's limitations. The podcast really gave me another medium where I could take some of the pressure off of the play and all of those other conversations that I wanted to expand upon.”

Like Hypothetical Baby and Aborsh, Trevor has also expanded Queerial into book form.“I started to write this script to connect [interviews], and [decided] I should invest in these characters and really create this world. I suddenly realized what I was signing myself up for. The script is this behemoth now and something I'm going to release separately, because I think it works really interestingly as a piece of writing. It's creating new points of access as we're figuring out how people want to be entertained now.”

Every day, people are constantly faced with the very real stress of information fatigue. That exhaustion is dangerously understandable, but Canadian podcasters are facilitating social movements by taking big swings with how they package their shows. “I think that people are really open to learning, but the art and the trick of it is doing it in a way that feels like you're not,” says Rachel.

Canadian Podcasts are facilitating meaningful connection – and resistance.

Queerial and Aborsh aren’t the only podcasts using the anarchist nature of the medium as a catalyst to build informed and socially aware collectives in Canada. I’ve seen this too in Resurrection, the podcast and gay cabaret unraveling the history of the early response to AIDS, and it's something I’m intentional about in my own projects including Canardian, where gossiping about Canadian hometowns brings up conversations about colonization, capitalism, and police brutality, and Curious Tourism’s recaps of HBO’s White Lotus focused through the lens of responsible travel.

But Canadian podcasters themselves are also coming together as a collective to address human rights and progressive social change in a way that I haven’t quite seen anywhere else in the word. Namely, the nearly one hundred podcasters that are a part of the Harbinger Media Network, including Rachel Cairns.

The Harbinger Media Network is Canada’s impressive progressive podcast community of over 80 podcasts. It’s directed by André Goulet in Montreal, who also serves as the Community Director at Unrigged, what he calls the “journalism equivalent of Harbinger”, and includes 27 publishers from around the country focused on progressive journalism.

André says that right now progressive podcasts (and progressive media in general) have found themselves in a precarious position. “The right wing is very well funded in terms of independent media, very powerful, very influential. That sucks because their values are awful. We're trying to model what it would look like to have an alternative to that.” He says that Canadian progressive spaces are balkanized, that “the oars are not rowing in the same direction in the Canadian Left”. That’s why part of the broader mission for Harbinger “with no sense of urgency” he explained, is to figure out what would happen to progressive spaces if we focused on building friendships and community, “and see where it gets us in 2028?”

“One must make meaning with others, cooperatively, for it to be meaning-ful,” says Expect Resistance, a field manual on anarchy from Crimethinc. “We need a culture that is a dialogue, and interplay between us and the languages we think and speak and live in – not a monologue arriving out of a loudspeaker.”

Honing in on the value of friendships and community is why André started getting more intentional about fostering in-person connection through public events and live-shows featuring the superstars of Harbinger and Unrigged, first in Montreal, and again in Edmonton. “They had a great conversation with several Palestinian activists who had been violently decamped from the University of Alberta campus,” he said, describing the Edmonton event. “Because of the political climate in Alberta, leftists and progressives don’t really get those opportunities to hear conversations like that, and to vibe with 50 other people in a small room.” The success of these symposiums sparked an idea from Dr. Shama Rangwala of the pop culture podcast Replay, to combine the podcast community, the independent journalism community, and the scholarship community, for a symposium series called Progressive Publics, focused on connecting academia and independent journalism. “This experience of having 50-60 people in a room, drinking a beer in the evening, and being like, ’so my fun tonight was going out and basically watching a live podcast but also [attending] a community gathering of people who do this work in journalism and in podcasting’. Harbinger wants to model spaces that are fun, cool, warm, smart, funny – like letting the sun in. When community radio stations do that really well, they become places where people can come and participate in the medium of radio. Harbinger can't be a space where there's room for like 8,000 people, but I think it should be a space that helps to energize other communities.”

Unrigged live show at Reggi'e’s worker co-op bar in Montreal.

What does “podcasting for social good” mean?

The phrase “podcasting for social good” does feel somewhere vague and utopian, but to me it means a community of podcasts that feel a responsibility to push for the kind of change that improves the livelihood of all of humanity. In some form or another, a podcast is threading humanity back together.

Jess Schmidt is a seasoned freelance podcast producer, and lately she’s been having these kinds of conversations with the teams she works with. “A lot of us are feeling pretty distraught and downtrodden at some of the things that are happening globally,” she told me. “We're seeing a lot of political leanings going very hard to the right. We're seeing extreme weather events happening and that's really frightening for people. The sustainability of the economy is starting to disappear and people are really scared of inflation and job security. People are trying to look for something familiar to lean on, which unfortunately is not a sustainable path forward.”

Jess and the teams at University of Toronto Press and C40 Cities recently launched the new season of Cities 1.5, a podcast which focuses on sustainability research as it relates to urban centers – what cities can do to help fight climate change. “In the next 10 years we could see as much as two thirds of the global population residing in cities”, Jess says, “so having cities be sustainable places is crucial to the planet being able to sustain human life as we know it.” That’s why this season, the theme is Resistance. “We want to showcase places that are resisting these impulses to go back to something that feels safe. That the narratives that were being sold around what's gonna make things better are not true, that there is a different way forward, and even though it's something we haven't done before, it doesn't have to be scary.”

In the production meetings for Cities 1.5, the team is having intentional conversations about how to use the podcast to combat “us versus them” messaging. “We don't want it to be fear mongering. We want it to be like ‘these things are happening to all of us collectively. How can we make this better for everyone?’. Getting to have those kinds of conversations in the rooms where we're writing these scripts, it really lights a fire under you.”

Cities 1.5 also plays a fascinating role in connecting Mayors from across the globe. “One of the best benefits of C40 being contributors for Cities 1.5 is that [C40] is a coalition of [over] 40 mayors from around the world on the leading edge of sustainability. There are some cities that have very big aspirational goals that align with C40s values and we've been able to feature amazing climate initiatives that they do. Cities outside of the C40 network are listening and the next generation of leaders can be inspired by the things that they're hearing on the show, and try to implement them in their own cities.”

Jess Schmidt (left) at the U20 Summit in Rio de Janeiro with Cities 1.5 host David Miller and Vesna Micic, Director of Marketing at UTP

Who can make a good podcast for social good?

You don’t need to be an academic or a seasoned professional to make a podcast that has a good, lasting impact on the world. Over and over, Canadian podcasters say that social good podcasts are first-and-foremost, curious.

“To me, being progressive means trying to get as much knowledge as you can, and being curious about what's happening,” Jess told me. “Almost every show I've gotten to work on, I work with people who are really curious and passionate and read a lot, and talk to other people who are trying to figure this out. That to me is the thing that matters the most.”

“One of the biggest themes in Queerial is curiosity,” Trevor Campbell also told me. “So much of the show leans into my curiosity as a work of metafiction. I think that's the best thing we can do as producers or hosts or broadcasters, is whet that appetite for people to know more. I'm only with you for 10 hours of a limited series, then you're on your own.”

Trevor says that Western culture is currently in a notable time as we come to terms with the fact that many of the things we’ve been told about the world are not true, and that we’ve been “handed down a lot of assumptions or lies.” He’s tapped into the perfect time to give podcast audiences the chance to “put on the detective hat and figure these things out for ourselves, which can be very traumatizing but can also be extremely fun and one of the true joys of life.”

André Goulet says a podcast host focused on social good usually isn’t an expert, but is someone who seeks out answers from people who know more. “I figured out pretty quickly that I didn't need to be the smart guy when I hosted podcasts. I needed to be the guy who was really curious and who was deliberate about trying to bring in other people. If podcasts are essentially the most human thing of having a conversation or listening into someone's conversation, then what is a conversation but asking questions and learning things that you don't know.”

Aborsh is in constant conversation with experts and organizations with boots-on-the-ground stories to share, and Rachel says it’s important for the podcast to not only share real, intersectional abortion stories, but to amplify the people who are really trying to push for progress. “The more we can be an informed citizenship, I think the better chances we have of being a healthy democracy.”

What the new (Canadian) standard of social good podcasts represents:

Every podcast episode, every series launch, is a chapter marker of a moment in time. “It's funny, because 5 years ago, this show might [have] seemed a bit like, ‘we get it, what's the concern?’”, Trevor Campbell says. “But just seeing the way everything can immediately go into reverse – I enjoy humor that's a bit bleak to think about.”

“I keep working on this show, even though it's really depressing, [because] we get to speak to Mayors and people who hold power and are changing the world,” says Jess Schmidt. “It really skewers the local. You can make change from your own backyard as a resident of a city, especially if you have a Mayor who listens to the people who live there.”

Notably, the Canada Council for the Arts continues to show interest in investing in thoughtful podcasts that are more than just podcasts – they’re “Catalyst Projects” like Resurrection and Aborsh. “I had my abortion at the end of 2019. March of 2020 the world shut down, theater was not happening,” Rachael Cairns told me. “The Canada Council had one program to help live performance artists pivot in the pandemic. The podcast wouldn't exist predominantly if the Canada Council hadn't helped a girl out.”

“It's hard to make these types of shows. A lot of the time people don't wanna pay for them”, says Jess. “I think that people are realizing that genuinely being invested in social good makes a difference and gives you a lot of hope for the future. It's crazy to say this, but I make this silly little podcast, but it does make the world better, and it makes me feel better about the state of the world.”

While the Canada Council has yet to announce intentional funding for capital P Podcasting, I’m holding out hope due in part to the ways that they’ve supported the ecosystem already. “If I want to continue making Aborsh, the Canada Council has to keep on being funded, so vote accordingly in our upcoming federal elections”, says Rachel.

Trevor Campbell compares social good podcasting to zines and mixtapes. “There's a bit of a ‘rough and ready’, ‘cut and taped together’ kind of vibe, even though they're very polished. That's what I like about podcasting; you just kind of craft it. I hope that people see [Queerial] as a very, time stamped, weird thing, not this final statement in any way. I think I'm always hungry for more art like that – that doesn't try and put a period on the sentence. I hope people look at it as a comma.”

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