In this 1999 piece we look at the public battle raging over genetically modified food. We explore the dispute between Canadian grain farmers and the multinational company Monsanto, the world's leading manufacturer of genetically modified seeds.

It was December 6, 1989 - the last day of classes before midterm exams at Montreal’s Ecole Polytechnique. Around 4 p.m., a man entered a classroom with an assault rifle. “He ordered the men - the students and the professors - to go on the right side of the class, and the girls on the left side,” said Adrien Cernea, one of the teachers in class at the time. Fourteen women were shot dead in all. The gunman, Marc Lepine, then took his own life. In 1999 the fifth estate conducted an investigation into Lepine’s life, and just what it was that led him to pick up a gun and attack complete strangers. But the gunman’s plans extended beyond women he had never met. Lepine also left behind a list of other women he’d planned to kill - many of them well-known in Quebec. Francine Pelletier, host of the CBC’s fifth estate, was on that list. Pelletier delves into Lepine’s past, speaking with his aunt, friends and roommates, and discovers factors that may have led him to act as he did. Pelletier also also sits down with relatives of Lepine's victims. Jean-Francois Larivée lost his wife, Maryse Laganière. They’d been married only three months. “I didn’t spend time hating him, trying to kill him in my dreams or making him pay for what he did,” Larivée told Pelletier. “I believe that the external influence - maybe friends, his father - things happened in his life to make him very aggressive towards people, and especially women.” More than ten years after the painful tragedy, the fifth estate takes you, along with the victims’ families, to Place du 6-Décembre-1989 - the Montreal park commemorating the 14 women killed that day.

It was a hot, muggy evening in 1959 when 14-year-old Steven Truscott gave his schoolmate Lynn Harper a ride on his bicycle near an air force base outside Clinton, Ontario. Two days later, the girl’s body was found in a wooded grove near the town. She had been raped and strangled. After a trial that lasted only 15 days, Truscott was convicted of murder and sentenced to be hanged, becoming Canada’s youngest death-row inmate. His death sentence was commuted, but the schoolboy spent a decade in prison before being paroled in 1969. The case of Steven Truscott was the most famous chid criminal case in Canadian judicial history, but Truscott himself disappeared into an anonymous existence, living under an assumed name and shunning all publicity for three decades. Then, in a 2000 episode of the fifth estate, Steven Truscott broke his 40-year silence for the first time, coming forward to maintain his innocence. The fifth estate’s investigation highlighted serious problems with the forensic evidence and showed that police were too hasty in laying charges, ignoring vital testimony of certain key witnesses and not allowing for the possibility of other potential suspects. Following the documentary and a book on the case, Truscott, his family and supporters launched a campaign, with help from lawyers from the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted, to get the federal justice minister to re-open the case. On Aug 28, 2007 – 48 years later his original trial – the Ontario Court of Appeal unanimously overturned Truscott’s conviction, declaring the case “a miscarriage of justice” that “must be quashed”. The Ontario Government awarded him $6.5 million in compensation for his ordeal. Truscott now lives in Guelph with his wife of more than four decades, Marlene, who was instrumental in the legal effort to bring about his acquittal.