Veteran reporter and current Metro Morning radio host David Common will replace Heather Hiscox as host of CBC Morning Live, the Crown corporation announced Thursday.
The announcement comes on the same day as Hiscox’s final broadcast as host — the last stop on her Morning Live across Canada tour — and 20 years after she first took over the position.
In an interview shortly ahead of the announcement, Common spoke of his plans for the show: to address both the quickly diversifying TV landscape and the increasing sense of apathy and discouragement about news.
“We’re not going to shy away from the serious stuff with journalistic rigour — it is our job. But we don’t want you to feel crushed by it either; I don’t want to be crushed by it,” he said. “I want to have some fun, so we’ll have a mixed bag — come for the buffet, I say.”
A Winnipeg native who moved to Toronto at an early age, Common had plans to become a nurse before a chance meeting with Peter Mansbridge as a teenager. He began his career at CBC’s London bureau in 1999, where he established his itinerant journalistic streak early on. He would move between Toronto, Fredericton, Winnipeg and Regina before landing in Paris as the corporation’s European correspondent, and then New York City as bureau chief and correspondent.
Reporting gigs in more than 90 countries would follow, and then a series of hosting positions: he was host of CBC Radio’s World Report in 2013, held the dual roles of Marketplace co-host and news correspondent in 2015 and most recently became the host of Metro Morning in 2023.
After 20 years of waking up early with Canadians from coast to coast, Hiscox will host her final CBC Morning Live show on Nov. 6. Before unplugging her alarm clock, she talked to The National’s Ian Hanomansing about her career and why she thinks now is the right time to retire.
Echoing his outlook ahead of taking that job, Common said he anticipates the challenges the new role — and a return to video journalism — present.
“There’s butterflies galore on something like that. That frankly just excites me,” he said, while speaking of the unique situation journalism faces.
“We’re in the midst of a very significant change within CBC and an even more significant change within the media ecosystem,” he said, also speaking of early plans to broaden the show’s reach. “We have to reach audiences where they are, and that will not only be on television.”
Evolution of Morning Live
In an interview, CBC News Network’s managing editor Mark Ross said that while the dedication to live and breaking news will remain, Morning Live will evolve. As the show was largely written around Hiscox’s strengths of telling live stories through ad-libbing, Ross said the next months of preparation will aim to incorporate Common’s skills in “how to engage an audience in a more intimate way, how to be maybe a little more casual in how we write the show.”
“We’ll look at those strengths that David brings to it and build programming around that so that it has a real kind of personal and authentic feel to it,” he said.
As the host of CBC News Network’s flagship morning program, Hiscox and her team won numerous awards, including Canadian Screen Awards for best national news anchor in 2018 and best morning show in 2023.
Last year, they were awarded by the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA) for their breaking news coverage of earthquake rescue efforts in Turkey. This year, Hiscox received a National Lifetime Achievement Award from the RTDNA.
Common’s final day hosting Metro Morning will be Jan. 16, 2026, before he begins his full-time hosting role at Morning Live on Feb. 2. Various anchors will fill the Morning Live hosting role until then, while a search for the new host of Metro Morning is ongoing.
