Marketplace, CBC – “Dirty Hospitals”
Canada has the highest rate of hospital acquired infections in the developed world, and Canada’s consumer watchdog wants to know why. Dirty Hospitals, airing Friday, March 23 at 8 p.m. (8:30 NT) on CBC-TV, is a follow-up to MARKETPLACE’s groundbreaking Dirty Doctors. Erica Johnson puts hospital cleanliness to the test, and finds a mess that is making you sick. With hidden cameras, including Canada’s first hidden camera glo gel test, insider interviews and expert opinions, MARKETPLACE uncovers why people in Canadian hospitals are too often getting sicker instead of better.

The Fifth Estate, CBC – “Boy on the Ice”
A 14-year-old boy on his snowmobile gets lost in a blinding blizzard on his way home to an isolated Labrador village. The local townspeople search into the night, and discover snowmobile tracks heading the wrong way—out toward the coastal ice and the open sea beyond. Searchers call on the military, asking for a rescue helicopter to be dispatched at first light. Their request is denied, and for two more days the people of Makkovik mount their own rescue operation and try to find the lost boy in some of the most inhospitable conditions imaginable. By the time Canada’s Search and Rescue service does send a military helicopter to help find the boy, he’s been missing for nearly 52 hours. Aerial spotters soon locate footprints not far from an abandoned snowmobile and follow the boy’s tracks hoping to find him still alive. But it wasn’t to be. Just over three days after he lost his way home, they found Burton Winters’ body near an open patch of water. His footprints show he’d walked 19 kilometers, through the storm, in a desperate bid to get home before he finally succumbed to hypothermia. His parents want to know why Canada’s esteemed Search and Rescue service refused to help find the boy on the ice in time to save his life. “I just think about him walking and trying to get home and just not wanting to give up, and every night when I try to go to sleep that’s all I can think about:  my little boy, walking on the ice…” CBC News’s the fifth estate investigates Friday, March 23 at 9 p.m. (9:30 NT), on CBC-TV.  Lost on the Ice reveals a web of excuses and a so-called “protocol” used to justify the decision not to send the helicopter which could have saved Burton Winters—a defence which a veteran Search and Rescue official calls “a concoction.”

The Nature of Things, CBC – “Smarty Plants”
Plants: nice, pretty to look at. But they don’t DO anything, do they? They just kind of….sit there, right? Wrong! Exploding the myth of a passive plant world, SMARTY PLANTS, a new one-hour TV documentary premiering Thursday, March 22 at 8 pm (8:30 NT) on CBC Television The Nature of Things with David Suzuki, uncovers the real “secret world” of plants, revealing a fantastic and dynamic landscape pulsing with sex, movement, communication, and social interaction. This is a world where plants talk, forage, wage war and nurture their kin; a world where plants behave a lot like…us!

Doc Zone, CBC – “Scandal: Inside the Murdoch Empire”
DOC ZONE examines the scandal that has rocked the empire of media baron Rupert Murdoch.

Battle Castle, History Television – “Malbork Castle”
Stretched along the bank of the River Nogat in modern-day Poland, Malbork Castle was built by an elite group of knights during the Baltic Crusades. Its distinct brick architecture, soaring walls, and deadly battlements were built to intimidate the local population. In 1410, a pagan-turned-king marches on the castle, determined to put an end to the Teutonic Order’s reign.