My ears were buzzing from the latest news: two female protesters had interrupted the annual anti-abortion March for Life on Parliament Hill—topless. The senior producer at CBC News Network’s Power & Politics with Evan Solomon wanted me to get both women, who were part of the feminist group FEMEN, in the studio as soon as possible. I punched in the phone number and felt a brief jolt of surprise when the woman at the other end of the line answered, “Allo?”

November 25, 2008. Light rain drizzled over the city as Marie-Maude Denis walked along Amherst Street from CBC/Radio-Canada’s offices in southeast Montreal. She had a 10 a.m. meeting with a source at Pouding Café, a neighbourhood coffee shop. Her boss, Pierre Tourangeau, had suggested she talk to this contact, someone he relied on during the Gomery Commission’s investigation into the federal sponsorship scandal in 2005.

Denis was an ambitious television crime reporter, a go-getter with a strong work ethic that impressed her superiors at Radio-Canada. A few days before this meeting, the then-27-year-old had received a brown envelope from a confidential law enforcement source. The tip mapped out long-standing collusion linking construction entrepreneurs and union bosses to high-profile municipal and provincial politicians throughout Quebec, prompting her to meet with this new source at the café. The evidence focused primarily on Laval, a city north of Montreal.

At the time, Denis knew little about the Quebec construction industry, or the cast of characters her source was rambling on about at the coffee shop. But she learned a lot as he shared his intimate knowledge of the systemic corruption that had gripped much of Quebec for the previous decade. The people involved included Tony Accurso, one of the city’s most prominent construction entrepreneurs.

Back at her newsroom cubicle, Denis asked her colleague, Christian Latreille, for advice on how to handle the information. Latreille recommended she share it with Radio-Canada’s newly revamped investigative unit. He urged Denis to contact Monique Dumont, a senior researcher known for her interest in the Laval corruption dossier. Denis walked down to Radio-Canada’s current affairs department on the building’s ground level. She knocked on Dumont’s door and introduced herself. They walked over to a glass-enclosed conference room, where Denis watched as Dumont’s eyes widened; then she began running around the office, screaming, “I’ve got my smoking gun! I’ve got my smoking gun!”

 ***

Since Denis took that smoking gun to her colleagues at Enquête in 2008, Montreal reporters have successfully exposed deep-rooted corruption, in what has been hailed as a golden moment for Canadian journalism. By 2009, the investigations began to snowball and over the many years it took to reveal the whole stunning story, several Montreal journalists became involved—including Denis and Alain Gravel at Radio-Canada, André Noël and André Cédilot at La Presse, Kathleen Lévesque at Le Devoir, Linda Gyulai at The Gazette and Fabrice De Pierrebourg at RueFrontenac.com, the news site launched by locked-out Le Journal de Montréal employees in 2009. They were competitive, but they built on each other’s stories. Although many received defamation suits from people they were investigating, they persevered.

“We’ve been part of the solution regarding the fight against corruption and crime,” says Brian Myles, a reporter at Le Devoir and former vice-president of the Quebec Federation of Professional Journalists. He and his colleagues have every right to be proud: their exemplary, old-fashioned reporting and the astonishing results—cemented by the creation of the Charbonneau Commission in 2012—reaffirmed that investigative journalism can lead to change. “The real work, and the part that people don’t realize,” says Les Perreaux, a Quebec correspondent for The Globe and Mail, “is the story that comes the day after the big scoop.”

The journalists had their work cut out for them. Corruption is not new to Quebec politics and public works contracts. Since 1925, there have been eight inquiries, including the 1973 commission on organized crime and the 1974 Cliche Commission that revealed intimidation practices within construction unions.

In 1977, then-Premier René Lévesque enacted a new law prohibiting companies and unions from donating to political parties and limiting individual donations. Thirty years later, though, construction and engineering firms had found ways around the rules. A well-oiled underground system with arm’s-length connections to the Mafia was involved in rigging contracts for public works and providing illegal political financing.

By 2008, the public realized something was not right. The city’s infrastructure was in a dire state, while Quebec remained the highest-taxed province in the country, with Montrealers paying 30 percent more for their public works contracts than anywhere else in Canada. It soon became clear that many of those in power had been abusing the system for years. In their arrogance and complacency, they weren’t expecting a group of astute journalists and an informed public to put them to shame.

At Radio-Canada’s Enquête, Gravel, a middle-aged television journalist with stern features, teamed up with Denis. The two became local celebrities as their show generated unprecedented audience interest. From 2009 to 2011, they produced bombshell investigations into corruption, primarily focusing on the construction industry’s ties to organized crime. Their work paved the way for other journalists to contribute to the sensational story. The picture was coming into focus and the public was outraged, as long-standing suspicions were confirmed by the meticulous reporting.

At La Presse, Noël, a seasoned investigative reporter, revealed the details of the Faubourg Contrecoeur real estate deal between the City of Montreal and Frank Catania Construction & Associates. The housing and development department allegedly sold the land to construction entrepreneur Paolo Catania for well below the estimated $31-million market value. The secret deal had been orchestrated before the call for tendering on the project. Those accused of being involved included Frank Zampino, then-chair of the city’s executive committee; Bernard Trépanier, a Union Montreal party fundraiser; Martial Fillion, the director of housing and development; and Catania.

In 2012, Noël left La Presse to work for the Charbonneau Commission. (He declined to be interviewed for this article because it would be a conflict of interest.) For much of his career, he and Cédilot were the only investigative reporters at La Presse. Small-statured with a trim moustache, Cédilot mastered the organized crime beat. The two collaborated on the tell-all book Mafia Inc., first published in 2010, which explored the intricacies of Montreal’s Sicilian mob.

Meanwhile, at the independent daily Le Devoir, Lévesque, a reporter with piercing eyes and youthful energy, investigated engineering firms. She detailed their close ties to illegal political fundraising operations and alleged that bids for city contracts were rigged. Her diligent reporting over the years helped force the province’s auditor general to become involved, and he eventually proposed the creation of the public inquiry.

At The Gazette, Montreal’s only English-language daily, civic affairs reporter Linda Gyulai also contributed to the unfolding story. She’s the kind of journalist people don’t see coming even though she’s always three steps ahead of them, says her colleague Monique Muise, who covered the Charbonneau Commission for The Gazette. With two decades of municipal reporting experience, Gyulai’s analytical skills and expert knowledge of city hall helped her reveal a correlation between city contract allocations and political party donations.

Big news organizations weren’t the only ones working the story. The now-defunct website RueFrontenac.com also covered it. Rugged-looking French-born Fabrice De Pierrebourg broke a shocking story linking the construction industry to municipal party donations in the lead-up to the Montreal municipal elections in 2009.

Together, the reporting fuelled public discontent, leaving politicians no choice but to create the Charbonneau Commission to examine Quebec’s construction industry and its connections to organized crime. As Gravel says, “Sometimes you need a perfect storm in order for everything to explode.”

 ***

The timing was right for a big story at Radio-Canada. When Alain Saulnier became senior director of information in 2006, he had two goals: increase international coverage and produce more investigative reports. He helped kick-start the return of hard-hitting journalism in Quebec. Meanwhile, the network’s public affairs program Enjeux was going through an existential crisis. That same year, Jean Pelletier, Radio-Canada’s director of television information, came to Saulnier with an idea.

“Are you crazy!? You want us to produce a weekly investigative show?” exclaimed Gravel, then-host of Enjeux. “We are never going to be able to pull that off.” Although he had never been particularly fond of Enjeux’s soft human-interest stories, he remained uncertain about the feasibility of the idea and worried that sources would refuse to speak to them after they heard the premise of the new program.

Saulnier was immediately on board with the idea. His vision was to dismantle the traditional boundaries between the newsroom and current affairs. He wanted the six o’clock news to lead with breaking stories, while the weekly show Enquête would follow up with in-depth coverage. “I felt like we needed to prove that we were indispensible, and that the public could count on us for our professionalism and our thorough work ethic,” says Saulnier, now a journalism professor at the University of Montreal. “I knew it was a risk worth taking.”

Initially, Enquête struggled to produce investigations every week, but everything changed in late 2008. Soon after Denis’s scoop, Radio-Canada executives allocated time and resources that enabled the journalists to see their investigation to fruition. Denis created a makeshift desk in Gravel’s office, where she began pinning central figures and events onto a bulletin board. The duo chipped away at a list of possible sources, conducting numerous off-camera interviews. “This was a Cinderella story for me,” recalls Denis.

In conversations with sources, one name kept surfacing: Ken Pereira, director of the industrial mechanics branch of the Quebec Federation of Labour’s (FTQ) construction wing, the province’s largest union. Pereira noticed irregularities with executive director Jocelyn Dupuis’s expenses. It appeared that he and other union executives were indulging in first-class dinners at restaurants, receiving tickets to hockey games and more. Pereira had also discovered close ties between the FTQ and the Mafia.

In January 2009, Pereira arrived at Radio-Canada looking for Gravel. The whistleblower presented the Enquête team with a duffel bag full of Dupuis’s receipts. He produced hard evidence about the Mafia’s involvement with Quebec construction union officials and how they tampered with the Fonds de Solidarité, a multi-billion dollar pension fund in which half a million Quebeckers keep their life savings. “This is when I realized we had something solid here,” recalls Gravel. “This wasn’t bullshit.”

Enquête’s lawyers suggested the show package the expense scandal story and the report on the ties to the mob. On March 5, 2009, it aired its first episode on corruption. “What happened after that was very much like Watergate,” says Gravel. “We all understood that we would only be able to bring the big picture to light through smaller stories, piece by piece.” La Presse picked up on it the next day but added new details, proving that it had been working on the story as well. “As journalists, we don’t necessarily like being quoted or scooped by others,” says Gravel, “but in this case, it was a good thing.”

***

In the days following that first Enquête episode, Denis and Gravel searched for a new piece of the puzzle. It appeared that several high-profile public servants had taken all-expenses-paid holidays on The Touch, a yacht owned by construction magnate Tony Accurso. Through privileged information, they knew that Michel Arsenault, who was FTQ president and Dupuis’s boss, had vacationed on the boat. As a representative of the labour union, Arsenault shouldn’t have accepted this kind of gift.

“My boss told me we were going to do something we never do,” remembers Gravel. “We were going to sacrifice our scoop.” Pelletier instructed his team to scrum Arsenault, who happened to be in Quebec City at the time, and ask him straight out about the boat. To everyone’s surprise Arsenault confirmed everything. That evening, Céline Galipeau, host of Le Téléjournal, led the newscast with this latest scandal.

At the same time, Noël was investigating Accurso and his alleged ties to Montreal’s former executive-committee president Frank Zampino—the same Zampino involved in the Faubourg Contrecoeur scandal. He’d retired from municipal politics in July 2008 and was now working for the engineering firm Dessau-Soprin, which was part of the consortium that received Montreal’s largest contract for water meters. On March 13, 2009, La Presse’s headline shook things up yet again. La Presse’s judicial affairs columnist Yves Boisvert wrote “Copinage et Pantouflage” (“Cronyism and Revolving Doors”), exposing the friendships between civil servants and members of private enterprises. Boisvert summarized all of the suspicious behaviour that had emerged through other reporting. Buried at the end of the column, he made reference to Zampino vacationing on The Touch while the city was awarding the water meter contract—a contract Accurso’s construction firm won. “I felt like I needed to support the movement and follow up on my colleagues’ investigations,” explains Boisvert. “A column can accelerate a news story.”

Journalists had successfully uncovered ties between construction unions and the mob, as well as connections between municipal politicians and the construction industry. From then on, they continued to reveal information piece by piece. “In the industry,” laughs Gravel, “this is what we call a one-two-three punch.”

In the months that followed, this combination of competition and cooperation continued among the journalists. According to Gravel, Noël leaked information to him after La Presse hesitated to publish one of his stories, then went to his bosses to say that Gravel had scooped them—leverage to convince them to publish. When asked about it, Noël said, “I can’t confirm this.”

Meanwhile, at Radio-Canada, the journalists became a close-knit group as they enjoyed success after success. “I think that was our real strength at Enquête,” says Latreille, who worked with Denis and Gravel. “We lunched together, we had fun together—just like a hockey team.”

 ***

While the Montreal story was unfolding on TV and in the press, the journalists knew the problem was much larger in scope. The provincial transportation ministry was responsible for awarding public works contracts to engineering firms, which in turn put out a call for proposals to construction companies. Then the bidding would begin. At the time, the government was increasingly using private engineering firms instead of the Ministry of Transportation. This was also occurring at the municipal level. It appeared that engineering firms were communicating with the construction firms that were receiving the contract bids. This type of collusion is illegal, and Lévesque uncovered it early on. She also paid close attention to a similar trend: the engineering firms being invited to municipal political financing events were the same firms receiving city contracts. Her dedication and attention to detail resulted in several stories that revealed the larger corruption picture in Quebec.

But before that came part one of the water meter scandal. In 2007, Lévesque received a phone call from a source who had helped her in 1996, when she first wrote about water meter scandals. She remembers the conversation being brief, and her source telling her to look into the water meter contract—the city’s largest. Lévesque struggled to find out what had actually happened, but she was eventually able to put the pieces together. On December 13, 2007, under the headline “Conflict of Interests in Connection with a Contract for $355 million,” Lévesque revealed that BPR, the engineering firm the city had hired, was allegedly collaborating with engineering firm Dessau on several other projects. It was no coincidence that Dessau undertook the water meter contract. “Two years later, the scandal took on a new dimension and greater importance,” says Lévesque. “This was the straw that broke the camel’s back.”

 ***

By 2009, as The Gazette’s civic affairs reporter, Gyulai was investigating another angle to the water meter story. Since her time as a freelancer at the Montreal Mirror, a now-defunct weekly, she’d believed in old-school sleuthing in service of the public interest. “What I love about municipal reporting is that you ride this righteous horse waving your arm in the air.”

While Denis and Gravel reported on the construction industry and Lévesque investigated irregularities within engineering firms, Gyulai sifted through municipal archives. A source hinted that the eventual owners of the water meter system would be a private consortium called GÉNIeau, co-owned by Dessau and one of Accurso’s construction firms, Simard-Beaudry.

Gyulai discovered that the contract usually attached to the service file was missing. This piqued her interest. After all, the $355-million contract was the largest awarded in Montreal’s history. She was dumbfounded that city councillors didn’t have a copy of the contract to review before approving it. Through an access to information request, Gyulai received the documents from a 2007 council meeting. She discovered that the water meter contract passed in a group with other resolutions in 53 seconds without objections or debate.

“For people like Linda, it was really a lasting commitment that they were going to devote themselves, their talent and their energies, to these stories,” says Muise. The Gazette didn’t have the resources other news organizations had for these investigations, which is why it decided to focus its coverage on city hall.

Gyulai looked for patterns within the paperwork and then cross-referenced her data. After she received the tip on the water management contract, the newspaper granted her the summer of 2009 to advance her research. “You are on this track and you just keep following it. It’s about seeing a pattern and following it down whatever path,” she says. “You aren’t really driving the car. It’s kind of driving you.” In August of that year, Gyulai wrote a story with the headline, “City Deal Was Changed at the 11th Hour.”

Her extensive investigation revealed that changes to the contract removed the financial risk to the consortium. Not only would the city not own the water meters, but it would likely have to replace them 15 years down the line. Montreal Auditor General Jacques Bergeron then investigated the matter. “Everything he wrote and all of these findings supported everything I wrote that summer,” says Gyulai. On Bergeron’s recommendation, former mayor Gérald Tremblay announced the cancellation of the contract in September. “She is the reason we didn’t have a bogus $355-million water meter contract,” says Martin Patriquin, Quebec bureau chief for Maclean’s. Gyulai “saved us $355 million, and that alone is astonishing.”

As the only investigative reporter at Le Devoir, Lévesque couldn’t cover everything. After her research into the water meter scandal in 2007, she focused on the engineering firms. In 2009, she filed an access to information request with the City of Montreal after receiving a tip from an anonymous source. She filed another with the provincial ministry of transportation on the same issue of outsourcing contracts. What she discovered was just as astonishing as what she’d previously uncovered. Almost all of the city and province’s construction contracts were being outsourced to a small number of private firms. Whether in the public interest or not, it was certainly benefitting the small coterie of politicians, bureaucrats and construction executives who lined each other’s pockets with money they grabbed from the public purse. With every new revelation from the journalists, public outrage grew. Something had to be done.

Quebec’s Auditor General Renaud Lachance came to the same conclusion as Lévesque. He recommended the creation of an anti-corruption unit (UPAC) headed by Jacques Duchesneau, a former Montreal police chief. In September 2011, Duchesneau leaked his own report to the Enquête team, later recommending to a parliamentary commission that, in light of his findings, the government launch a public inquiry. He was fired a month later for the leak. In 2013, UPAC raids led to the arrests of Zampino, Catania, former Laval mayor Gilles Vaillancourt, interim Montreal mayor Michael Applebaum and many others. Several engineering firms, including Dessau, were also raided.

Lévesque says the engineering firms “are at the centre of it all. They are the professionals making the plans and the decisions at the start of any contract.” She investigated donations to political parties and the bid-rigging system within a core group of nine engineering firms in Montreal—“the fabulous nine,” as they came to be known. “The last thing you should do as a journalist is work alone in your corner,” says Lévesque. Looking back now, she understands that by building on each other’s work, they were able to move forward.

 ***

Denis and Gravel continued their research during the summer of 2009, while other journalists, including Fabrice De Pierrebourg, sought to contribute to the ever-growing story. After the Journal de Montréal locked out its employees, the newsroom staff created the website RueFrontenac.com to host their reporting. These journalists were not paid, and the newsroom was a decrepit ballet studio across the street from the Journal’s office.

In August, De Pierrebourg’s phone rang and he recognized the number. “Are you ready to write this down?” asked a familiar voice. He grabbed his pen and notebook. The source went into great detail about a meeting that took place at a restaurant in Old Montreal in March 2008. Municipal politician Benoît Labonté had asked Accurso for money to help fund his campaign. Louise Harel, the leader of the opposition party Vision Montreal was running for mayor in the November 2009 elections, and Labonté was her right-hand man. Vision Montreal’s entire campaign was based on the idea of cleaning up city hall.

After weeks of research, De Pierrebourg managed to get three other sources to confirm the details. But Normand Tamaro, RueFrontenac.com’s lawyer, thought it would be best to release the story as part of a series over the course of three days. “I didn’t like this idea at all because as a journalist you are always afraid of being scooped,” says De Pierrebourg. But Tamaro’s “bear trap” strategy lured in readers and created shockwaves throughout the city. Labonté resigned from his position at Vision Montreal and Louise Harel subsequently lost the election to the incumbent Gérald Tremblay.

This was the first time an investigation proved direct ties between political financing and construction entrepreneurs. “I remember everyone jumped to write follow-up stories after that,” recalls Vincent Larouche, who contributed to RueFrontenac.com and is now at La Presse with De Pierrebourg. “We all had something to contribute.” After his resignation, Labonté chose to give his first sit-down interview to Denis. He was emotional and admitted to accepting cash from Accurso, stating that “prêtes-noms” (“straw men”) were commonly used to conceal illegal political donations from private companies.

 ***

Cédilot sits at the busy Première Moisson bakery in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, a neighbourhood west of Montreal’s downtown core. His grey moustache and vintage black-rimmed glasses make for a distinguished look. Now retired from La Presse, he spends most of his days commenting on radio or television about organized crime or the latest developments at the Charbonneau Commission.

Like his pal Noël, he has a different perspective on these events. Throughout the 1990s, he and Bruno Bisson published a series of investigations into corruption in Laval—a precursor to what would come in Montreal and other municipalities across Quebec. Yet the timing wasn’t right and the public didn’t take much notice. Having spent 20 years covering organized crime, Cédilot’s interest in Montreal’s mob family the Rizzutos runs deep—as Mafia Inc. showed. “When the book arrived, it was like the cherry on the sundae,” he admitted. “To say that the Mafia was involved in all of this—the pizzo!”

But Cédilot remains skeptical about what the commission report will accomplish, especially since the inquiry didn’t clearly identify the ties to organized crime and failed to look into Hydro-Québec—the government-owned corporation that deals with many of the same crooked players. Though journalists played an instrumental role in revealing the intricacies of the corrupt system, the commission didn’t hear testimony from high-profile provincial players such as Jean Charest and Pauline Marois. Andrew McIntosh, who leads Quebecor’s new investigative unit (which Cédilot sees as a competitive response to Enquête), also questions how far the commission went. “It’s like we’ve been at the buffet and they’ve been plucking at the juiciest cuts of meat, but they never drilled down.”

The commission proposed reforming the province’s Access to Information Act, but reporters also want better protection of whistleblowers and greater access to municipal documents. “The access to information law has become a way to block journalists,” says Pierre Tourangeau, now Radio-Canada’s ombudsman. “It’s time for governments to demonstrate more transparency.”

 ***

As this extraordinary period of investigative journalism comes to an end, no one doubts that more scandals will surface in the years to come. “Where there is money being exchanged, there will always be the potential for corruption,” says Alan Conter, a media consultant and journalism lecturer at Concordia University in Montreal. “And when this does happen,” he hopes “journalists will be there to uncover the facts yet again.”

In the meantime, the climate of journalistic collaboration has shifted back to one of competition, as more news outlets create or expand their investigative units. La Presse recruited Lévesque and De Pierrebourg. And while budget cuts at Radio-Canada may affect shows such as Enquête, in late September—six years after the initial scoop—it’s business as usual.

Gravel leans in toward his computer screen, mouthing the words as he reads his script. A copy of Mafia Inc. is open on his desk, and piles of documents are spread on the floor. Photos of his children are on the wall, and on the other side of the room are awards and newspaper clippings collected over the years. “I don’t have the status of Peter Mansbridge,” says Gravel as he points to the investigative unit. Empty desks and boxes line the pathway to his office.

Dressed in black jeans and a black T-shirt under a blazer, he makes a few final changes to his script before picking up the phone to speak to one of the show’s lawyers. After Accurso unsuccessfully sued Radio-Canada three times, vetting scripts for a television show such as Enquête has become a tedious but necessary process. This is going to be a big “Accurso-Mafia” episode, Gravel says with a sense of vindication.

People used to congratulate him for his work, but now they thank him. “The Charbonneau Commission is the stamp of validation on everything we said,” he says, and while he believes reporters still have work to do, this whole chapter in Quebec’s history helped reaffirm journalism’s core values. His boss Pelletier agrees. “Journalism is by definition investigation. If it is something else, then I don’t want to practise it.”

Photo by Scott Adamson

Power & Politics with Evan Solomon premiered on the day of a much-hyped rebranding that saw CBC Newsworld transformed into CBC News Network. It was also the same day as Health Canada’s troubled launch of the H1N1 vaccination program. Solomon’s debut, on October 26, 2009, began with a decidedly non-traditional approach. Rather than opening with the Health Canada story, he invited on three unknown environmentalists who’d staged a disruptive protest in the House of Commons over the government delaying the Climate Change Accountability Act (Bill C-311), before security forcefully ejected them. “We will actually have some of those environmental activists coming up right after the break. One of them still has blood on his face!” announced Solomon, sounding perhaps a little too enthusiastic about the segment.

After a commercial break, he rose from his desk and strode over to a bright-red plastic bench installed at his behest. “This is our Front Bench,” he said with evident relish. “This is the place that we’ve reserved in our studio to talk to people who are affected directly by policies that are created in Ottawa.” Seating the environmentalists on the bench, Solomon vowed to put their concerns to the environment minister later in the show, declaring, “I think it’s really important we open up the dialogue.”

As he prepared for that debut, Solomon thought carefully about how to distinguish himself and his new show. “I didn’t just want people with suits and ties on. I wanted it to be accessible to everybody,” he says now. “I took a lot of crap for that—‘Oh, that was a stunt’—but I thought that was democracy. Young people concerned about an issue, bloody nose—sounds like television to me.”

After five years on Power & Politics, as well as stints at other CBC programs including his literary show Hot Type and technology show Futureworld, Solomon knows good television; it’s what helped win him this job. Jennifer McGuire, general manager and editor-in-chief of CBC News, chose him because she wanted a “different sensibility” for the flagship political affairs program. He didn’t come from political reporting, “which was sort of a plus and a negative at the beginning,” she says. To Globe and Mail television critic John Doyle, it was more of a negative, especially since Solomon was succeeding Don Newman, the well-regarded host of Politics, the network’s previous political affairs show. “As the whole country knows, Solomon is no Don Newman,” wrote Doyle in a critical review of CBC News Network’s launch.

McGuire knows such shows can alienate viewers. “What Power & Politics has done incredibly successfully is offer enough depth for the insider,” she enthuses, “but it is also entertaining enough that it brings in people who are more casual followers of politics.” Since 2009, the show has expanded its audience by roughly 65 percent—from 51,000 to 84,000 viewers, according to internal figures—while transitioning from inventive, egalitarian fare like the Front Bench to the more conventional: polls, punditry and panels.

The rise in viewership came during severe CBC cutbacks, thinning audiences for similar U.S. shows, and an increasingly toxic national political culture characterized by restricted access to newsmakers, enforced party message control and shameless displays of spin.

Although a 65 percent gain sounds impressive, the increase represents just 33,000 viewers, undermining McGuire’s assertion of incredible success. It’s positively anemic compared to the 800,000 listeners who tuned in to CBC Radio One on Saturday mornings this season for The House, a political affairs show also hosted by Solomon that features lengthier one-on-one interviews.

The assumption behind much of Power & Politics is that the core audience is politically informed, if not politically engaged. But to continue its ratings growth, the show will need to win more viewers outside its traditional constituency of Hill staffers, bureaucrats, lobbyists, politicos and assorted news junkies. As Alison Loat, co-founder and executive director of civic engagement non-profit Samara Canada told me, “Many political journalists are challenged with this question: how do you expand the audience for political news and political content beyond people who are already interested?”

***

Last October, I visited Solomon in his studio at CBC’s Ottawa bureau. A few blocks away on Parliament Hill, the Conservative caucus was debating renewed Canadian participation in the battle against the Islamic State. A morning meeting led by CBC Ottawa bureau chief Rob Russo lets out shortly after I arrive, and the parliamentary bureau team’s goal is clear: find out what was said behind the caucus’s closed doors.

As it happens, military operations, along with procurement, finance and intelligence, rank among Solomon’s topics of interest. He’s cultivated high-level sources in these difficult-to-penetrate circles and communicates with them off the grid. “You could call it an electronic black market,” says Solomon, scrolling through the BlackBerry he carries with him at all times, even on air. Often, watching the show in their Hill offices, his sources message him in real time: “Everybody is communicating with everybody,” he adds, “but nobody’s doing it officially.”

Taking cues from Russo, Solomon works his caucus sources, cajoling one chief of staff on the phone while firing off one-line inquiries over email. Solomon, Russo and the rest of the CBC team soon discover there’s broad agreement in the caucus for an expanded role in Iraq: MPs Rob Nicholson, then minister of defence, and John Baird, then minister of foreign affairs, both spoke in favour of a combat mission.

But neither Nicholson nor Baird will do an interview. In fact, Baird’s office pointedly refused requests for the former foreign affairs minister to appear on Power & Politics after a particularly combative interview with Solomon a few days earlier. “He’d better not do Don,” Solomon grumbles later, referring to rival Don Martin’s Power Play on CTV.

Executive producer Amy Castle’s goal is to open every episode with an exclusive or, failing that, a newsmaker interview that may advance a developing story. At the beginning of this morning’s pitch meeting, the team has neither. North America’s first case of Ebola has just been diagnosed and Solomon wonders aloud if Minister of Health Rona Ambrose could be their newsmaker. Again, the answer is no; the minister would not be made available.

“She’s unreal,” fumes Castle. Marker in hand, she considers the whiteboard where every episode is plotted out: it’s mostly blank, except for the “Power Panel,” a double-length segment featuring a rotating cast of talking heads. “It became quite clear to us that it was a destination panel,” says Castle. “So we’ve made that kind of a centrepiece in the middle of the program.” The whiteboard is divided into blocks. She writes a name into the mid-show block: Stephen Day.

Day, the former commanding officer of Canada’s national counter-terrorism and special operations unit Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2), is due to arrive soon for a pre-taped interview. Solomon is clearly excited. “He’s seen a lot of bang-bang all over the world,” he explains. “Very, very rarely does anyone who was in JTF2 ever speak, ever go public about anything. We’re building a relationship with him.”

It’s similar to the relationship Solomon built with Ray Boisvert, former assistant director of intelligence at CSIS, who has since become CBC’s go-to security analyst, appearing frequently to discuss the spy agency’s opaque decision-making. Solomon hopes Day will become his “special ops” analyst (and in the months since, he has appeared regularly for that purpose). As the government inched toward approving a military engagement, Day—instead of cabinet ministers—would be explaining the combat mission to Canadians.

 ***

Like many of the politicians he interviews, Solomon tends to romanticize his upbringing. He recounts his family’s history in a long narrative that culminates in a celebration of the “Canadian dream.” His father, Carl, was a lawyer, the youngest of eight and the first to attend university; his mother, Virginia, worked as an urban planner. He’s quick to acknowledge his “fortunate upbringing,” but it seems a sensitive point. “I only say that because people say, ‘Your dad’s a lawyer.’” But Solomon’s grandfather never lived to see his son called to the bar, after suffering a heart attack in a downtown Toronto sweatshop near where his grandson would later establish his magazine, Shift. As a child, Solomon play-hosted radio shows. Educated at Toronto’s Crescent School, Solomon earned a bachelor’s degree and then a master’s in English literature and religious studies, both from McGill University in Montreal.

At a party on Saint-Laurent Boulevard in his sophomore year, Solomon met Andrew Heintzman. It was 1992 and the job market was bleak. Both men had written for campus publications; Solomon had dabbled in playwriting. After graduating, they launched their own magazine, a literary quarterly titled Shift. It was, Heintzman admits, a “crazy idea”—but the fledgling publication turned heads before its first issue hit the stands. The two founders appeared on the front page of the Globe’s arts section and on CBC Radio’s Morningside. Their host, a 37-year-old Ralph Benmergui, was by then already too old to write for Shift, which had vowed to publish only work by those under 35. With an initial print run of 800, their magazine, declared its two founders, was here to “kick in the teeth of the literary establishment.”

Today, Solomon and Heintzman laugh about this posture of youthful aggression. “I think, inevitably, there’s a young person who would like to kick in my teeth,” muses Solomon. “I work at CBC, I host a two-hour show called Power & Politics, I traffic in people of great power. That’s my world. This is about as establishment in my field as it gets.”

Still, as promised on Morningside, Solomon penned many righteous screeds against the sins of legacy media during six years as editor of Shift: “Mainstream media is not interested in the story of a black man from an obscure ethnic group in Nigeria who was fighting a multinational company; it’s interested in stories about business mergers and oil prices, in sending people to work listening to dazzling pop songs and tips on how to maintain ‘lifestyle,’” wrote Solomon in January 1998. “Debt-free media don’t cover sensitive stories so much as sensational ones. The curve of a president’s penis gets more ink than the curve of the unemployment rate,” he vented in June of that year.

By the time Solomon left, Shift had become a journal of late-’90s digital culture. In his final issue in June 1998, Solomon’s letter from the editor discusses the debt a journalist owes his audience: it is, he argues, “a different kind of debt, one which dictates that the truth can’t be traded for marketability. This debt has to be repaid not only by bearing witness to events, but by then transforming them into shared experiences.” It was a telling preview of the kind of change he would try to take with him to Ottawa.

 ***

“It’s shit,” says Solomon, looking askance at Day’s thick brown tie. “You look like you’re going on a date later.” Solomon’s own six-foot-four frame is clad in a well-cut suit, complete with a bright tie, which, he advises, looks better on television. The host has adopted a different tone than he had in the morning pitch meeting: jocular and laced with profanity. It’s part of an effort to build rapport with Day, whom other shows also want to book; he’d already appeared once on CTV’s Question Period.

Solomon, Day and Castle return their attention to footage from a rehearsal interview. Solomon explains his job as a journalist to Day: “When you go out on a mission and you say, ‘What’s my goal?’ They say, ‘Go get the bad guy, gag him up or kill him.’ Mine is: ‘What did you bring that no one else knows?’”

The difficulty is that Day’s best lines in the rehearsal—the stuff no one else knows—are laden in dense military jargon. Midway through the interview, he delivers a savvy answer about “talk[ing] the talk with warriors” to get “the ground truth.” Solomon hits pause. “That was fucking aces!”

He encourages Day to drop the jargon and illustrate points by saying more about his tours in Afghanistan. “They see you in a suit. They don’t see you in dusty boots,” says Solomon. “The key is: you’re talking to civilians who are watching TV, and they’re political junkies, and they wanna like you. They wanna love you.

“You’re hitting home runs on the brain side. But now, you gotta hit on the heart side.” Solomon thumps the left side of his chest. “Figure out what you can talk about. I don’t know the line. But you could say, ‘I remember—but I can’t say when. . .’ The more you describe something, and hide the details, the better it is: Dance of the Seven Veils,” he concludes. “All good television.”

 ***

For nearly as long as television has existed, there have been programs about politics. The longest-running show in U.S. history is NBC’s Meet the Press, broadcast since 1947 and the object of much gossip and commentary. It’s the most venerable of several Sunday morning shows, including Face the Nation and This Week. All are deeply influential in elite D.C. circles. Lately, however, ratings have sagged as viewers lose interest in what The Washington Post called “Beltway blabfests.” Over the first quarter of 2014, Face the Nation, Meet the Press and This Week collectively drew 9.6 million viewers, about the same number that watched Meet the Press in a single week in 2005.

Panic is setting in among network executives. The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi reported that NBC president Deborah Turness hired a psychologist to analyze why then-host David Gregory was failing to connect with viewers. (NBC denies this.)

Producers are under pressure to alter the show’s format to recover the lost audience. The late Meet the Press host Tim Russert, to whom Newman might be compared for his patrician manner, spent lengthy segments grilling a single lawmaker. Today the trend is toward faster pacing, shorter segments and a wider range of topics. Many of the Sunday morning shows now rely on elements similar to the “Power Panel” to explain the intricacies of contemporary politics to casual viewers.

“I’m so bored with Canadian political coverage. I can’t connect with it. I can watch a lot of American political coverage,” media critic Jesse Brown declared at a Ryerson University talk, complaining about the jargon on Power & Politics and The House. “It’s this insider stuff. You’ve got to be a wonk. It’s not even about the policy—it’s about, ‘What are the optics of this move?’”

Brown hopes to crowdfund a politics podcast in time for the next federal election. “I want to decode it, demystify it. . . and put it into human language,” he said. He is still searching for a host, perhaps someone like his friend, a coffee shop owner named David Ginsberg, who is upset with the state of political coverage. Ginsberg, who Brown calls “a smart guy and an angry guy,” sounds like he has a lot in common with Solomon circa Shift.

 ***

Following Newman’s retirement in 2009, CBC management’s choice for a successor privately puzzled many. Although Solomon had been co-hosting CBC Radio’s Sunday news show for eight years, he was still identified with Hot Type. “When Evan first arrived in Ottawa, he was the guy at the CBC who had the book show,” remembers Ian Capstick, former press secretary for Jack Layton and now a “Power Panel” regular. “There was a lot of apprehension around Ottawa because Don Newman was a known quantity. And when Evan came in, he shook up the show.”

The consensus among the Ottawa chattering classes was that the new host had at most one year to prove worthy of Newman’s chair. “Nobody thought I would be able to do it—least of all me,” says Solomon. “So I didn’t try. I didn’t try to be Don.” Instead, he set out to create an entirely new show: one that would not only “bear witness to events” but actually transform them into “shared experiences,” to borrow Solomon’s own phrases.

The plan for Power & Politics was ambitious: air live from 5 to 7 p.m. five nights a week. Filling such a lengthy program with quality content is still an enormous challenge, given that producers have fewer than six hours to put the show together every day. Peter Harris, former executive producer at Power & Politics, compares it to “feeding the beast,” standing on the edge of “a black hole” sucking up infinite energy and fighting in “a war zone”; or, as Castle puts it, like “Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the mountain.”

At the start, Peter Mansbridge gave contacts to Solomon, who dutifully made the calls. He also read House of Commons Procedure and Practice, the 1,206-page tome that explains, in exhaustive detail, Parliament’s Byzantine workings. “That gives you an idea of how paranoid I was about making sure I knew what I was talking about,” he says. “I had a gap and so I started with the basics.”

Today, Solomon is the consummate Ottawa insider and an astute political observer, adept at moderating debate on the “Power Panel.” On the afternoon of my visit, producers have convened the regular Wednesday members: Capstick, Rob Silver and Tim Powers—all career politicos—and Canadian Press journalist Jennifer Ditchburn. They spend most of their time in a debate over an apparent disparity between two Conservative comments on the number of “military advisers” already deployed against ISIS. Was it 69 or 26? As usual, the government was not exactly forthcoming, leaving the press gallery to puzzle out such mysteries.

The panel typically follows the same “casting” formula: three insiders whose views and careers align with each of the main federal parties—and one journalist to temper the partisan bickering. Sometimes during commercial breaks, Solomon will discreetly offer up his own take. The panellists know to play on that idea once they’re live again. Unlike Day, the panel needs no coaching in the Dance of the Seven Veils. Some CBC staff hesitate to use the P-word as a catch-all term for commentators, but there are those who have no qualms: “I pundit on things. I’m a talking head, for fuck’s sake! What else do you want from me?” exclaims Capstick. “I make entertainment. I make news analysis entertaining. That’s my job.” (Ditchburn and other journalists tend to offer more factual, less animated commentary.)

“The way the New Democrats or the Liberals or the Tories did something is just as important as what they did,” Capstick continues. “I want to pull back the curtain: Here’s how this message is being pushed forward to you. Here’s why they use the certain words that they do.” Senior producer Leslie Stojsic, who previously produced The National’s “The Insiders” and “At Issue” panel segments, says a good panel is all about “making you feel like you’re a part of the conversation.” That definition is a long way from the citizen engagement Solomon emphasized in his debut, an ersatz version of “open dialogue” and “shared experiences.”

Inevitably, the “Power Panel” attracts critics. “Watching CBC’s Power & Politics can be hard on the synapses,” complains iPolitics writer Andrew Mitrovica in his column. He takes issue with the panellists, “who ooze a haughty, know-it-all attitude that treats anyone outside of the Ottawa bubble with thinly disguised contempt.” Nevertheless, the “Power Panel” is regularly the highest-rated portion of the broadcast. That may be because other segments, such as newsmaker interviews or MP panels, can be unenlightening or uninformative.

Take, for example, an infamous appearance by MP Paul Calandra in September 2014. In the House of Commons, Calandra, the prime minister’s parliamentary secretary, turned a straightforward question about Canada’s military involvement in Iraq into a cheap political point about the opposition’s purported anti-Israel bias. Then he went on Power & Politics. “Do you think it’s your responsibility, when you’re answering questions on behalf of the prime minister, to at least make an attempt to answer on the topic you’re asked, as opposed to completely changing the topic?” asked Solomon, openly incredulous. “Well, I disagree with you that the topic was changed,” replied Calandra, before segueing seamlessly into the same nonsensical talking points he’d delivered in question period. “Be reasonable!” exclaimed Solomon. Seated next to Calandra, NDP MP Paul Dewar buried his face in his hands and shook his head in disbelief, a moment captured in freeze-frame and widely retweeted. The incident crystallized public frustration over message control and spin.

In her bid farewell on The House, outgoing host Kathleen Petty admitted her policy against allowing politicians to “freely throw around talking points unchallenged” meant that MP panels had consequently become “few and far between.” But Power & Politics perseveres. “We know that, as frustrating as MP panels can be, it’s important to get those voices out there,” says Castle. The show’s mandate-—to hold decision-makers or their surrogates to account—sometimes means becoming a platform for PMO spin, despite Solomon’s vociferous attempts to elicit real answers.

***

By mid-afternoon, Castle has blocked out all slots on the whiteboard: the top stories are the mission in Iraq, Ebola preparations and the protests in Hong Kong. Day’s segment is prioritized and there are interviews with the chief public health officer and Canada’s former ambassador to China. The show ends with a moustachioed trapper arguing with an animal rights activist about the muskrat fur hats traditionally worn by RCMP officers. Castle and Solomon decide to use Day’s pre-tape footage instead of the second interview conducted after the review session. Castle prefers his initial explanation of the role of military advisers. “It’s a fantastic window on what could be happening on the ground,” she says to Day and Solomon. As an interviewer, Solomon had more success putting Day at ease in the studio and his critique may have undermined the expert’s confidence.

But making his guests feel comfortable has always been Solomon’s forte. His earliest television success came on Hot Type. Guest Tom Wolfe remembers Solomon as an “adept and provocative young host.” In his book of essays, Hooking Up, Wolfe recounts the time Solomon riled up John Irving: “His sexagenarian jowls shuddered. He began bleeping. It was all the show’s technicians could do to hit the bleep button fast enough,” recalls Wolfe. “Evan Solomon kept covering his face with his hand and smiling at the same time as if to say, ‘How can the old coot make such a spectacle of himself—but wow, it’s wonderful television!’”

Solomon has always known the recipe for good television. “Call it the Oswald Quotient,” he wrote in Shift in June 1996. “Watching Jack Ruby off Kennedy’s killer was television at its best, and everyone knew it.” Hence the bloodied protester on the debut episode—and the record-high ratings on October 22, the day of the Ottawa shootings. The capital was shut down and Solomon was on the air by 10:15 a.m. for a full day of coverage with Mansbridge. Later, he hosted a three-hour special edition of Power & Politics.

“The media are among the few storytellers left in our secular culture,” wrote Solomon in Shift in 1995. “If they chronicled less and imagined more, they might just find that people would become more interested in the world around them.” His challenge on Power & Politics has always been just that: make Canadians more interested in politics. Five years on, he seems to have given up on the high-minded ideals of “shared experiences” and “open dialogue.” Despite a commitment to original journalism, he chronicles less (frustrated by endless spin) and imagines more, shaping our national narrative through punditry with the help of the “Power Panel.” Its members, as Joan Didion says of the panel’s American counterparts, are part of “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.”

Though his show has changed, Solomon insists he hasn’t, despite evidence to the contrary: “My life can be divided into a series of segments,” he tells me. From Shift to Futureworld to Hot Type, and then to Ottawa: a tidy narrative that begins with his grandfather in a sweatshop and leads here. “I’m not that different,” he maintains. “I feel like a 20-year-old version of myself wouldn’t say that the 46-year-old version of myself is unknowable.”

Late in the evening, Russo and Solomon are still working their sources. Solomon kicks his feet up on his desk, revealing brightly coloured striped socks. Grinning widely, Russo pulls up his trouser leg: “Look at this, kid,” he says to me. “Socks are the only form of rebellion we have left.”

Photo by Jessica Deeks

Dressed in a navy blue suit, Cathal Kelly sits on the edge of his seat hunched over his MacBook Air. Other writers in Toronto’s Rogers Centre press box sit back in their chairs, some chatting, others racing to finish their first stories of the day. Many are dressed in T-shirts and shorts to stay cool in the heat. It’s 1:07 p.m. and R.A. Dickey has just thrown the first pitch for the Toronto Blue Jays, but Kelly keeps his head down as a grin forms at the corners of his mouth. After years of covering baseball he relies on the crack of the bat to get his attention—even the screaming fans can’t break his focus when he is writing. Now he’s the only one whose eyes aren’t on the diamond. The sports columnist for The Globe and Mail writes quickly without stopping, mumbling quietly to himself. The only reason he stays in the press box is to avoid missing anything, but his column is unlikely to change unless “someone throws a grenade on the field.” He finishes his 800-word column just after the seventh-inning stretch. “I am not a nuts-and-bolts guy,” he says. “I want people to read it and have a laugh, think that five minutes was worth it.”

A couple of weeks later, Bruce Arthur is in Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, eating ham and scalloped potatoes in the media room before he heads up to the narrow press box in the rafters. The Toronto Star sports columnist slides in his earbuds to drown out the noise of the hockey pre-game show and writes his lede before checking Twitter, which he says helps him think. Beside him, Star beat reporter Kevin McGran has already started to write his story. After Toronto Maple Leafs sniper Phil Kessel scores in overtime, all the other reporters run to the locker room, but Arthur heads for the eerily quiet media room.

Later, McGran rushes in. “I wish I had more time,” he says. Arthur’s column is almost finished and he hurries to the locker room so he doesn’t miss the players. He talks to a few, then joins the rest of the reporters listening to then-head coach Randy Carlyle. Arthur stands off to the side intently focusing on his notebook. But instead of writing notes, he’s doodling a cartoon face with beady eyes—the same face he often draws to help him process information.

As two of Canada’s best sports columnists, Kelly and Arthur rarely have to worry about writing game recap stories. Their ability to blend culture and sport in their writing is a far more valuable offering. In 2014, crosstown papers scooped up both Arthur and Kelly. First, the Globe snatched Kelly from the Star, and then the Star raided the National Post for Arthur.

Sports sections are struggling to bring in new readers and keep existing ones in the face of increasing competition. But they still have their ringers: columnists with distinctive voices who cut through the clutter and keep readers coming back.

***

On Saturday mornings, eight-year-old Kelly wouldn’t get out of bed until he’d read a Hardy Boys book. Later, while studying political science at the University of Toronto, he worked in a bookstore, read prolifically and wrote “one really, really terrible” sports article for The Varsity. He then studied journalism at Ryerson University, eventually landing a job at the Star as a copy editor. Later, he became a beat reporter covering the Jays. He wrote with an “I dare you not to print this, I dare you to change it” attitude. “I never could adapt to being a beat writer,” says Kelly. “I was piss-poor at it.” Even as a beat reporter, he was writing columns and his editors would pull out his outrageous flights of fancy and goofy digressions. Looking back, Kelly says they saved him from himself and he now understands how right they were. He expected his editors to say his stories were idiotic, that they needed to find something else for him to do. And they did find something else—four years after he took over the Jays beat, the Star made him a columnist.

In March 2014, Globe sports editor Shawna Richer emailed him, asking if he’d like to meet up. They were friends and the request was a little more formal than usual, but Kelly didn’t think too much of it. When they met, she asked if he wanted to come work for her. Kelly was interested, but the relationships he’d formed over 14 years at the Star were hard to ignore. “My head was spinning,” he says. “I was going to all my rabbis in the business, guys I trust and saying, ‘How do I do this?’” One of them, Norris McDonald, current editor of the Star’s Wheels section, let Kelly babble on and on, then held his hands up. “Dick Beddoes, Allen Abel, Christie Blatchford, Stephen Brunt,” he said in his pebbly voice. “Those are four people who have done this job before you.”

Kelly’s departure wasn’t the only hit to the Star’s Sports section. Columnist Damien Cox announced that he was leaving for Sportsnet, though he would continue to write a weekly column. The paper moved quickly to fill the gap.

Monday, April 14, 2014 was one of the busiest days Arthur can remember. Before scheduled TV and radio appearances, he attended a press conference for newly appointed Leafs president Brendan Shanahan, who was the main subject in his next column. That evening, his kids threw him a surprise birthday party because he was scheduled to be on the road for the big day. Then, around 10 p.m., he met with Star editor Michael Cooke, managing editor Jane Davenport and former sports editor Jon Filson about making the move.

He thought about his decision carefully: he wanted to be good at his job and take care of his family. Although he didn’t like the idea of change, the offer was enticing. He took it. “I left a great job to go to a great job.” Going from the Post to the Star was “abrupt,” says Arthur. “It happened really, really fast.” He left the Montreal Canadiens playoff series and started covering the Toronto Raptors post-season effort, all within two days.

Exceptional sports writers have always been one of the strengths of newspapers. At the Globe, that tradition includes not just the writers McDonald mentioned, but also Scott Young, Trent Frayne and Roy MacGregor. The Star had Jim Proudfoot, Randy Starkman and, for decades, Milt Dunnell. Even the Post, the relative rookie among the big papers, fielded Abel, and Blatchford, who covered the Olympics before Arthur.

All of these sports writers earned the loyalty of readers with engaging profiles, colourful investigations and well-crafted stories. Like Young, some wanted to be novelists, some wanted to be political journalists and some knew from the beginning that they were destined to write about sports. All shared the ability to go deeper than what happened in a game.

That’s what may just save the sports section from extinction. The game story, also known as a “gamer,” is more difficult to write as deadlines get tighter while journalists get less access to players and must create more content on a variety of platforms. Besides, when fans can watch any game on television, receive game updates on their phones and find almost limitless analysis on the web, a game story in the next day’s paper is largely irrelevant. One of the worst things in sports journalism is the play-by-play, says Arthur. “It’s like Morse code. It’s completely value-free.”

***

Doug Smith was in a bar one night in September 2004 when his phone rang. The voice on the other end claimed to be Toronto Raptor Vince Carter and said he really needed to talk. The Star sports reporter chuckled and said, “Yeah, right. Call me back in 30 minutes.” But Jim LaBumbard, the Raptors director of media relations, confirmed the call really had come from the star shooting guard. When they spoke again, Carter told Smith it was time for him to be traded. The next morning, the story ran on the front page of the Star with the headline: “‘I Want to Be Traded,’ Vince Carter Says It’s Time to Go.”

If he received a call like that today, Smith would tweet, “Vince wants a trade” as soon as he could get his story online. Then, a piece with a different angle would appear in the paper the next day. Other reporters might chase it as soon as they saw the tweet. Reporters would previously have to steal these stories straight off delivery trucks for a scoop—something the internet has now made extinct.

While the internet makes exclusivity harder, so does decreased access to athletes. That wasn’t as big a problem for Wayne Parrish in the 1980s. During his time at the Star and The Toronto Sun, his working relationship with George Bell, for example, meant that the Jays slugger would have called him to share personal details. He would ask Bell questions in private, trying to get to the essence of him not just as an athlete but as a human being, without other reporters within earshot. “Today, that is much more difficult to do,” says Parrish, who is now the chief operating officer at Postmedia.

Meanwhile, economic turmoil in the newspaper industry is also hurting sports sections and increasing reliance on wire service copy. Reading through the Star one Friday in December 2014, the Sports section featured six articles by the paper’s own staff, one from a freelancer and seven from wire services. There was an Arthur column on the NFL; two Dave Feschuk stories, one a game recap and the other about Leafs goalie Jonathan Bernier; two NBA stories from Smith; a Josh Rubin piece on Toronto FC; and a column about hockey analytics from a freelancer. The “scoreboard” filled one page. The rest of the seven-page section was wire service stories, including a piece on NHL superstar Sidney Crosby from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

***

If the game story is dead, or at least desperately ailing, the good news for publishers and editors is that reporting resources may become available for writing other stories. “If you free up journalists from that and get them to do other things, I think you would be surprised at how productive they would be,” says Sean Holman, a journalism professor at Mount Royal University in Calgary. But it also means losing a valuable farm system for future columnists. Writing columns offers journalists the chance to explore stories those on the sports beat can’t, but it takes years of experience—and sometimes embarrassing lessons—to get there.

Kelly rarely has trouble sleeping, but tonight is an exception. Tomorrow is his first day of spring training camp in 2007. He tries to lie still, feeling sick to his stomach all night long. In the morning, he heads to the ballpark in Dunedin, Florida, with two fellow Star reporters, Richard Griffin and Mark Zwolinski. They seem like nice guys to Kelly, who just landed the sports section job. Though he feels out of place with all the rituals of baseball, he still manages to think up a story idea.

He approaches Griffin for advice, and the veteran reporter suggests he talk to pitching coach Brad Arnsberg, a man standing in centre field talking to some of the players warming up. Kelly starts marching toward the coach without knowing the area is generally off-limits to reporters during practice. Arnsberg watches in growing fear as Kelly closes in on him.

“Hi, I’m Cathal Kelly with the Toronto Star and I was hoping I could ask you some questions.”

“Yeah, but you can’t be here,” replies Arnsberg. Realizing everyone is staring at him, Kelly slinks off the field.

“You can’t run, you can’t show fear!” he says now. After he became a columnist, Kelly passed on notes to Brendan Kennedy explaining everything he wished he knew when he started covering the Jays.

Beyond his experience with the Jays, Kelly has run into other uncomfortable situations while chasing a unique story. Three lines of scars mark the left side of his head are a testament to this. During the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, Kelly walked into razor wire outside the tightly guarded stadium where the North Korean team was training. It didn’t hurt, despite all the blood, but he was worried about the rust. He needed to see a doctor, but the only one around was with the North Korean national team.

As other journalists watched the team practice, Kelly found himself alone with one of the players—Ri Jun-Il. He pointed to his head and Jun-Il winced appreciatively. Kelly prodded some more: “You. Brazil,” he said, miming a running motion and giving a thumbs up for the team’s losing effort against the South American powerhouse in its last game, in which they “ran like demons.” Jun-Il responded by shaking his head, and saying, “No, no. No good.” It occurred to Kelly that he was having the first-ever sit-down interview with a North Korean soccer player inside a dressing room.

The doctor arrived and wrapped Kelly like a mummy, pointing to his own head and telling him, “I have great pity.” In his column, Kelly reflected, “He was saying sorry that this had happened to me at all. I liked him more than any doctor I’ve ever met.”

Kelly wrote his column in 50 minutes. He told not just the story of his trip through the forbidden stadium, but also how the experience changed his view of the country and its oppressive dictatorship. “I met them for only a moment yesterday. But those two men changed my mind. The regime is evil. They weren’t.” Kelly shook both their hands before he left and thanked them. They smiled and nodded in return. “They seemed embarrassed by my thank-yous,” he wrote. “So I left.”

Kelly regularly makes readers feel connected to the athletes he writes about. One-by-one, the Raptors walk into the large room on the second floor of Toronto’s Real Sports Bar & Grill, squeeze past the reporters and stand in front of the traditional black backdrop for some pre-season face time. Kelly, dressed in a grey suit and black tie, doesn’t join the sweaty circle of journalists digging elbows into backs and yelling over each other. Instead, he stands about three metres back and watches until a player who’s just signed with the team drifts off near him. Kelly introduces himself with an outstretched hand.

As they talk, Greg Stiemsma laughs and opens up to Kelly about a little cabin he’s stayed in with no electricity on Lake St. Joseph in northwestern Ontario. As other reporters notice, their heads pivot toward the pair and soon they surround the once-private conversation. But Kelly has his column. “First guy out of the gate? Greg Stiemsma, a gentleman so fetchingly midwestern you want to take him home so that he can make everyone pancakes and advise you on livestock purchases,” he wrote, using the new player to show how the Raptors are finally getting attention in a hockey town and telling the story the way he’d share it with a friend in a bar.

Kelly knows he must grab readers and hook them within 100 words. The first thing you want to tell a friend, he says, is what the story should be about. He understands his audience wants the bigger picture and not just a breakdown of statistics. The only two things that matter are what happened and what it means.

To Arthur, sports writing is about stepping back and tackling the story from a different angle. As he watches the Leafs skating circles during their morning practice, he says, “You need to be able to write bigger picture and be able to write small details. Perspective is the word—sports is really easy to not put in perspective.” If he could cover one event for the rest of his life, he says it would be the Olympics. “It means something to people—everyone watches, everyone cares.” Sports is one of the things that ties municipalities together (other than traffic) and is something that can make people feel in ways that few other activities can.

That was the case with a 2008 story about a Vancouver basketball star who’d disappeared more than 20 years earlier after playing his last game at the age of 17. Arthur offered a vivid account of the people who knew him: “And so they live their lives. They experience joys and sorrows, indignities and triumphs. And through all the years, a lost boy named Acron Eger follows them, sits on their shoulders, inhabits their dreams. Acron Eger may never be found. But he will never be completely lost, either.”

Similarly, a Post column about Brian Burke marching in Toronto’s Pride Parade gave a rare glimpse into the pain of a father who’d lost his son, and the pressure that gay athletes face. “One year ago Brian Burke promised his son Brendan he would march in the Pride Parade with him. And in a way, he did…But the reason marching was easier is that every time he tries to talk about Brendan, 156 days later, he gets strangled by his heart. Brian Burke can talk about anything but this,” Arthur wrote in a July 2010 column that earned him his first National Newspaper Award nomination. In 2012, he was named Sportswriter of the Year by Sports Media Canada.

***

Arthur and Kelly are different personalities, have different voices and they take different approaches. Eccentric and witty, Kelly is often the first to say hello to fellow reporters. He makes his readers laugh. Arthur is friendly, but is quieter while working. He entertains by making his readers think.

Their readers form relationships with them, whether they agree with them or not. That’s why sports columnists are so valuable to newspapers when they can find—or steal away—good ones. They represent a level of excellence that editors and publishers wish they could put on every page. “I think many of the newspapers that we’ve got around at the moment will struggle to survive the next ten years because they have cut back so much on the quality,” says Globe publisher and CEO Phillip Crawley.

Those cuts mean losing distinctive content that make sports sections a must-read. “Everyone is vulnerable right now, regardless of their property and regardless of their reputation,” says Holman. To stay competitive, newspapers need to invest in unique voices and insight, which often comes in the form of columnists. “You’ve got to give them something that is special,” Holman adds. And that is why columnists are so invaluable.

Readers don’t buy the Globe for sports, admits Crawley, but they expect high-level journalism in every section—and since Kelly joined the paper, people who wouldn’t normally look at the sports section find themselves laughing out loud at what he writes. Crawley wants to see his star columnist write general columns in the near future, but for Kelly, there isn’t a better part of the newspaper to work for than sports. Arthur agrees: “It can make you feel ways that very few other things can.”

Sports columnists such as these two writers may not be able to save newspapers on their own, but they sure can keep the fans wanting more.

Photo by Laura Arsie

It’s 9 a.m. and senior producer Dayna Gourley and executive producer Alan Habbick gather in a conference room at the CBC headquarters to discuss and assign the stories of the day. Within the hour, they will assign reporter Marivel Taruc to cover the death of former NHL player and coach Pat Quinn, which has shocked local fans. Quinn, a beloved sports figure, played defence for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the late 1960s and came back to coach the team from 1998 to 2006. As Taruc makes her way past her co-workers’ cubicles, she decides the best way to showcase Quinn’s legacy is to first speak to current Leafs players and then to some hockey fans.

At 11:20 a.m., Taruc finishes her research, gathers her things and heads out the door with Chris Mulligan, her videographer for the day. She starts at the Leafs’ practice facility, where she joins other reporters gathering in the locker room for a scrum around defencemen Morgan Rielly and Cody Franson. Standing in the circle, Taruc finds her link between the former coach and the current players: both Rielly and Franson looked up to Quinn. The next stop is Maple Leaf Square at Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, where she and Mulligan will approach pedestrians to share their thoughts on camera.

She hopes to give a voice to the average person—something streeter segments have done for decades. To reporters, it’s either a quick way to gauge public opinion or useful filler on slow news days. For viewers, such segments are either entertaining or pointless. For the industry, devoting reporters to the task is increasingly becoming a luxury, and Mulligan is lucky to have one on this story. Faced with decreasing resources, assignment producers cannot afford to assign streeter segments to reporters. Now, camera operators must often do these shoots alone, learning interviewing techniques and research methods that were once reserved for reporters.

A long-time staple of television news, streeters are a fast and easy way to find out what the public thinks—journalists ask questions, people give answers—but they are also a target for critics because they don’t always provide viewers with any new information or insight. “When used well, they give a voice to the ordinary people in our stories,” says Jeremy Copeland, a lecturer from the information and media studies faculty at Western University in London, Ontario. “It makes for great TV and, at times, fills a hole within our story—but it’s not great journalism.”

Taruc and Mulligan arrive at Maple Leaf Square and set up. “As streeters go, this is an easy one to do,” the reporter says. “Even if you were one of the few who’s never heard of Quinn, you know who the Toronto Maple Leafs are.” But the reporting technique relies on the luck of the draw, which means the quality depends on how informed random people are of the day’s news. In this case, the story is about Quinn, not just the Leafs. A common criticism of streeters is that unprepared people answering questions about topics they simply don’t understand can be of limited value to viewers. “There is a risk that they can be a lazy way to do journalism,” says Copeland. “Sometimes journalists can’t come up with a creative way to find another voice for their stories, so they go out and do a couple of streeters and they think that’s it, they’ve covered it.”

The questions are another problem. When the approach works, it’s thanks to a reporter who knows what to ask and how to ask it. “You can’t generalize what you’re saying—you have to be specific,” says Susan Harada, the associate director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication. “They have to be used carefully. That’s where journalists make the mistake.” Taruc knows that how she asks her questions is crucial to an effective story. To make her subjects feel at ease, she poses questions that are direct and simple.

Of the dozen people she approaches today, half agree to be interviewed. She first asks them if they’re hockey fans, then moves on to questions about Quinn’s legacy. Some know about his history with the Leafs, while others are not sure who he was. From half of those interviews, Taruc generates enough for her story. “I know with talking to all those people, that one person is giving me the content I need.”

One interview does stand out from the others. An older gentleman speaks about an incident that has since become part of NHL lore: the time Quinn, playing for the Leafs, body-checked Bobby Orr and left the legendary Boston Bruin lying on the ice unconscious. “I remembered when he levelled the great Bobby Orr, way back then,” the man tells Taruc. “The Bruins weren’t really happy with him.”

Even with strong answers like that, streeters raise concerns about whose opinion matters most. Reporters have to be careful they don’t make one person’s point of view represent a whole community. That’s especially crucial for more contentious issues. “You are at the mercy of the people you come across on the street,” Taruc says. “If they share the same ideas on a story, then you don’t have a variety of opinion.”

When the technique works, a bond forms between the subject and the reporter. But these days, reporters are making those bonds less frequently. More and more, videographers shoot streeters and give the footage to an editor. Luke Yung was the go-to cameraman and streeter interviewer for Rogers TV for six years. “It is easier when there is a reporter or assistant to help, like when I was covering the Toronto garbage strike and the crowd was getting a little chaotic,” Yung says. Ultimately, though, he understands the budget cuts. “In the end, the reporters aren’t really needed; they are not even seen. It’s the people’s opinion that matters.”

That’s why many news outlets rely more and more on an even cheaper way to show public opinion: social media, especially Twitter. “You can see conversations happening in real time,” says Sylvia Stead, public editor at The Globe and Mail. “Getting public feedback, thoughts and views through Twitter, Facebook or streeters and sharing them—it’s so important for the media to realize that we all take part in discussing and shaping the news.”

But Stead adds that social media streeters make it hard to identify the truth. In her December 2012 column, “A Valuable Lesson in Using Social Media for Journalism,” she cites the example of a woman who identified herself online as a lawyer, but it later became clear that was unlikely. Of course, people can pretend to be someone else on television, too. As Stead wrote, “It’s a reminder that editors and reporters should do all they can to confirm the identities of the people they quote.”

As Taruc’s 5 p.m. deadline approaches, Mulligan heads to CBC’s basement offices. He slides the media card into the computer. A senior editor quickly cuts the footage as the senior producer vets the script. They run the final take in the office control room. Meanwhile, Taruc moves to the Hockey Hall of Fame for a live hit that will precede her piece. She doesn’t get a chance to see it, but that’s normal and she’s satisfied. It’s one of the hundreds of streeters she’s done in her career—and while it may not have been the best way to pay tribute to someone’s legacy, it made the six o’clock news.

Photo courtesy PlainPicture

Hamilton, Ontario’s Barton Street is barely recognizable from its former self. A layer of grey dust sits on the pharmacies, bookstores, tailor shops and billiard halls that thrived in the 1960s. Differentiating between the closed and abandoned brick retail buildings is difficult—“We’re Closed” signs hang indefinitely on storefront doors, and other properties have turned residential with absentee landlords. This 3.4-kilometre stretch is known as a place to score heroin, prostitutes and, for some journalists, sources. Molly Hayes, a Hamilton Spectator reporter, exits one of the new businesses on the street, a coffee shop known by its address (541 Barton) and its pay-it-forward payment system using buttons from clothing. She walks along, pointing to the provincial jail, a steel factory and Hamilton General Hospital. She soon spots one of her sources from a story reported last summer about Pauline, a 24-year-old woman who died from a heroin overdose. At the time she was writing on Pauline’s death, Hayes was about the same age as the woman.

“Hey, do you remember me?” the reporter asks. “I’m from the Spec!”

The man, in his fifties, is weathered and greying in skin and hair. He pauses and looks at her sideways. “No. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah! How you doing?” he replies in a boisterous yet raspy voice.

Standing over six feet tall, he towers above Hayes, a five-foot-six Hamiltonian in the third year of her city reporting career. Accompanied by a man and a woman, both thin and tired-looking, perched on bicycles behind him, the source begins chatting away. First he rants about Pauline’s funeral, then about a local drug dealer who’s allegedly been slinging bad junk leading to overdoses. He’s visibly pissed off—sweating, muscles flexing, eyes widening. When he doesn’t want to talk anymore, Hayes simply continues the dialogue—an invaluable tactic, according to many journalists who’ve written about drugs and the people who use them.

The source, who was a relative of Pauline’s, says he too was a junkie and that he’s done over 20 years in jail for various offences, including violent ones. He tells vivid tales of coming off heroin, comparing it to someone taking a sledgehammer to every joint in his body. “I’m a tough guy, but I was bawling like a baby,” he says. “It was like hell.” His talk turns to God, and Hayes just nods her head. She’s used to enduring tangents. “I took a Bible course,” he says. “Believe me, I’m telling you guys, God is real.”

Using an interview technique to redirect him, Hayes mentions Wesley Urban Ministries, a Christian organization that helps drug addicts. “Do you know Mike at Wesley? He’s a chaplain.” He doesn’t recall the name. It’s time to go meet another source.

Passing a street corner, she stops to point out the spot for Pauline’s memorial. There is nothing there now, but in the summer teddy bears and flowers surrounded the corner near where the young woman hung out. Hayes was told that neighbourhood addicts stole the stuffed animals. As one of her sources said, “Only in Hamilton.”

Hayes confirmed a heroin overdose was the cause of death through Pauline’s mother, who had been told by hospital staff it was one of three overdose deaths in the city that week. Hayes says it’s difficult for reporters to get numbers from authorities. She and her colleagues, such as Nicole O’Reilly—who, along with Hayes, spearheaded a series of investigative pieces on drug-related deaths in Hamilton’s provincial jail—are often stuck between the public and the authorities, fighting for information. Toxicology reports can take many weeks, and police and coroners are rarely forthcoming with numbers. In 2012, there were over 580 overdoses linked to opiates in Ontario—one of the few hard statistics Hayes is able to cite in her articles. But numbers for the city of Hamilton haven’t officially broken out.

Canadian journalists are more careful than ever when reporting on illicit drugs. Until the late 1980s, journalists recklessly used terms such as “epidemic” and “overdose,” and commonly referred to drugs as “dope” when covering sudden increases in recreational drug casualties. Today, this sensational language has decreased. Reporters are more likely to go down to street level to find people affected by drug addiction—and tell their stories with empathy.

 ***

An early example of illicit drug coverage in Canada was news about drug smuggling. A 1940 Globe and Mail article told the story of the “king of smugglers,” Louis (Lepke) Buchalter. The
author commonly referred to the drugs Buchalter was trafficking as “dope” and “narcotics.” Up until the late 1950s, journalists who covered smuggling or drug busts did so from a distance, often unable or unwilling to convey details about the substances themselves.

But in the 1960s, as the baby boomer generation reached adulthood, the stories started to change. Newspapers and magazines began to report on the effects of LSD, often referring to “hippies” and the “flower power” movement that was luring young people into drug use. A Globe feature from 1969, for instance, read, “LSD mixed with strychnine, LSD mixed with speed … LSD mixed with God-knows-what,” followed by nightmarish descriptions from a music festival of “kids on the verge of psychotic breaks, paranoid kids, kids deep into sub-suicidal depression, kids showing signs of regressing to childhood prodded on by the chemicals in their brains.”

In the 1970s, Canadian news outlets had picked up a “War on Drugs” mentality. In the 1980s, a new drug took over headlines: cocaine. Stories of major cocaine trafficking busts ran alongside articles about cannabis and LSD. At the end of the 1980s and throughout the 1990s, heroin, a more dangerous drug than any other at the time, began receiving more coverage.

 ***

In Niagara Falls, about 75 kilometres east of Hamilton, John Robbins has written about both busts at the border and drug use within Canada. The Ontario city is a hub of tourists and activity—it’s adjacent to Buffalo, New York, at the junction of numerous major American and Canadian highways. In 2001, Robbins was working as a weekend reporter on the health beat at the Niagara Falls Review. He checked out a minor overnight fire at a ball hockey court near the skeletons of the city’s decommissioned factories, northwest of the Falls. The guy cleaning up the vandalism complained about “junkies.” “What do you mean?” Robbins asked. “Just take a walk with me,” the man said.

The two strolled along the abandoned industrial-era railroad track leading to former factories such as the Kimberly-Clark paper mill. They walked only about 20 feet before seeing used needles. The environment sparked Robbins’s interest and led to a series of features in which he hung out with addicts in seedy motel rooms. He had to give some sources anonymity, a practice several other journalists say is necessary when covering illicit drugs. “The bottom line was that you had to get down to the street level,” Robbins says. “Short of taking the drug yourself to see what it feels like, you need to talk to somebody.” This work won him his first Ontario Newspaper Award in 2002. His days of hanging out in motel rooms with addicts are long over. Today, as publisher and managing editor of Bullet News Niagara, he still covers drug busts at the border.

***

Niagara Falls has more issues with drug use because it’s a border town and its touristy nature has created a thriving sex trade that often intersects with other criminal activity. Similarly, Vancouver’s port city status makes it a breeding ground for drug use and trafficking. Vancouver became another scene affected by drugs many years before Robbins’s discovery. Addicts, scattered in alleyways alongside dumpsters and fire escapes, smoked crack or shot up heroin and rode out their highs. Opiate fatalities were in the triple digits each year during the 1990s and reached a high of 250 in 1993. Today, some intravenous users on the streets opt to use Insite, the only supervised injection clinic in the city, which opened its doors in 2003 and has never had an overdose death.

Globe reporter Robert Matas began pitching drug stories at daily meetings in the Vancouver bureau in the ’90s, and he wrote many articles related to heroin. But it wasn’t always easy for Matas to convince his editors of the importance of reporting on drug-related topics at a paper focusing primarily on politics and business. Interest spiked when there was a drug death, then waned again. His first sources were social action groups in the Downtown Eastside and through them, he was eventually able to meet addicts. “They had incredible stories to tell,” he says. “It touched on a lot of different parts of the city. They were affected by the health policies, they were affected by police—a lot of them had issues with social support.” Because of the different aspects of life addiction touches, drug reporting is often an intersection of the health, crime and city beats.

In the early 2000s, the story of serial killer Robert Pickton shocked the nation. He was found to have lured drug-addicted sex workers from the Downtown Eastside to his farm, where he murdered them and fed their bodies to his pigs. It also changed how drug addiction was perceived in the city and affected policing policies. Today, officers don’t respond to non-fatal overdose calls in Vancouver unless there is a public safety concern—emergency medical responders do.

Lori Culbert was six-months pregnant when she started hanging out on Downtown Eastside streets to report on about 30 missing women in the area. Despite the neighbourhood’s nefarious reputation, Culbert says she was never scared. She recognized that many addicts were in fact also suffering from mental health issues. “Even though the public was aware these women were going missing,” she says, “it wasn’t a high-profile story.”

Culbert understood the importance of writing about the relationship between drugs and prostitution in non-discriminatory terms. “It shouldn’t belittle their worth as human beings,” she continues, “and they deserve to be written about.” In a November 2001 article, she profiled Dawn Crey, one of the female addicts who had gone missing: “Dawn’s fragile world was turned upside down in November 1999 when [her father] died of cancer.” Culbert made an effort to show the humanity of the women, often trying to figure out why they became addicts in the first place. Crey’s DNA was found on Pickton’s farm.

In the late ’90s, hard news reporters weren’t the only people covering drug addiction in Vancouver. Lincoln Clarkes developed what he now understands to be an “obsession” with photographing female addicts, some of whom ended up becoming Pickton victims. Over four years, more than 400 addicts agreed to pose for Clarkes, and some of those photos appeared in his book Heroines. He sometimes worked alongside print journalists and won a Western Magazine Award and a National Magazine Award for his Vancouver Magazine work.

The project took over his life. Most Sundays, he would go to an area near his neighbourhood in the Downtown Eastside with an assistant, armed with gifts (a bag of apples, a pack of cigarettes, some Band-Aids) and approached women hanging out on the streets. After he offered them cigarettes, some would open up to him, revealing details of their lives and addictions. One of his girlfriends eventually asked, “What do I have to do to get you to pay attention to me, stick a needle in my arm?” Maybe she was onto something—Clarkes experimented with crack and heroin. “I had to do it as my homework for this project,” he says. “I had to really understand what the women were going through—what was going on in their heads.”

Clarkes hates how journalists reduced drugs to a Downtown Eastside problem; drug abuse had been rampant in many parts of the city for a long time. That’s why Frank Luba, The Province’s general assignment reporter in Vancouver, says he inevitably finds himself writing about drugs.

But it’s not without challenges. Some commenters recently gave him flack when “overdose” appeared in a headline over one of his stories: “Potent Heroin Blamed for Vancouver Woman’s Death in Hostel, 31 Overdoses at Insite Injection Facility.” While overdose doesn’t necessarily mean death, and the story makes it clear that the term is not referring to deaths, some people read the headline and assumed that 31 had died.

“Epidemic” is another term avoided by many journalists interviewed for this story. “I’m not qualified to call it an epidemic,” Luba says. “I’m neither a health professional nor someone involved in law enforcement.” While reporters used epidemic in stories up to the late ’80s, the word is disappearing from Canadian journalism about drugs today. Reporters generally agree they should leave terms such as overdose, epidemic and “bad” drugs out of the news unless they are quoting an expert.

Before he retired in 2012, Matas ended one of his last stories about heroin on a hopeful note. An article featuring a recovering addict titled “A Chance to Change Fate” almost reads as a metaphor for the city healing its drug problem. In other stories, Matas cited decreasing crime rate statistics and observed the positive effects of public housing programs. While it’s clear that Vancouver and Hamilton still have visible drug problems, journalism has evolved. The ignorance and prejudice is disappearing.

When Edgar-André Montigny was a part-time history professor at York University in Toronto, he edited The Real Dope: Social, Legal, and Historical Perspectives on The Regulation of Drugs in Canada, a 2011 book that compiled stories about drugs written by authors from interdisciplinary backgrounds. “People who have no working knowledge of drugs, they trust what they hear in the media,” he says. “It’s getting better in the last few years—there’s certainly a lot more balanced reporting. For a long time, statements in the media were usually pretty stereotypical.” Montigny, who’s now a disability lawyer, thinks journalists still have a long way to go, but he’s pleased they’ve been more critical of government drug policy in the past few years.

Still, journalists agree there is more work to be done. “There is this overwhelming stigma,” Hayes says about drugs. “But the people who have been affected by it and seen the damage it can cause—they want the public to know.” It’s a tough position to be in: she’s trying to tell the stories of individuals affected by drug abuse while also fighting against a broader issue of government transparency.

***

In early August, two people at Toronto’s Veld Music Festival died and 13 others went to hospital. That same weekend, during the Boonstock Music Festival in B.C., one died and 80 went to hospital. A week earlier, another festival-goer died at B.C.’s Pemberton Music Festival. The suspect in all these cases? Party drugs.

Brian Platt was a Toronto Star intern when the news broke about Veld. He had just an hour to type up a story about the supposed drug-related deaths of a 22-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman. He wrote a well-informed article, citing the recent rash of festival deaths. But like Hayes, he experienced the frustration of getting hard numbers. Initially, journalists have little to go on except what police state publicly, and in this case, they said the drugs that caused problems at Veld could be considered “poison.” Platt followed up with a feature, “Party Drug Strategy Sought for Festivals,” and interviewed harm reduction experts and a Canadian psychotherapist who holds a licence to import MDMA.

Platt’s story “Deaths at Music Festival Spark Concern Over Drugs” contrasted with past headlines. In 1999, for instance, when 20-year-old Allen Ho died after taking ecstasy at a Toronto rave in an underground parking garage, headlines such as “A Deathwatch on Raves” (the Globe) and “Young Clubbers Ecstatic About Rave ‘Chemicals’” (Toronto Sun) appeared. In September 1999, Toronto Life served up its own take. For “Adventures in Clubland,” Ian Brown hung out in nightclubs for a few weeks and then wrote about the drug culture he encountered: “$25 for a hit of E, $10 for a vial of crystal meth, $30 for half a vial of Special K.” While he maintains the assignment was mainly about the club scene, there was a lot of drug talk in the feature.

Other journalists, such as Leah McLaren at the Globe, criticized him for making a piece more fiction than fact. Brown wrote the feature in first person, combining the views of ravers he interviewed with his own reporting to create a composite character, although he says this unnamed character was based mainly on one guy he hung around with and interviewed a few times at length. He wrote about using drugs in the feature when, in fact, though he’d tried some of the drugs in the past, he was sober the entire time. In his forties when he wrote the article, Brown was older than most at the club. As a feature writer, though, he has no qualms about taking on any subject.

Unlike Brown, the Star’s music critic Ben Rayner is intimate with the party scene as a self-proclaimed long-time raver. He was a strong voice in Toronto’s 1999 iDance movement, which protested banning raves. He responded again after the Veld and Boonstock deaths with the following advice: “Believe it or not, folks, there is such a thing as responsible drug use.” His opinion is not a common one in journalism, but other ravers-turned-journalists, such as NOW Magazine’s former music editor Benjamin Boles and senior editor Joshua Ostroff at The Huffington Post Canada, share Rayner’s viewpoint. All three agree that 15 years later, the press is better behaved. “In 2014, the media was relatively reserved in comparison to what happened in the late ’90s and early 2000s,” Ostroff said. “I feel like they didn’t blow it up.”

While it’s part of Hayes’s job as a general assignment reporter, covering drug-related news is a never-ending process. For her and O’Reilly, it’s a tangle of access issues, sifting through the words of addicts on the streets and waiting on calls from people who are incarcerated (the reporters can’t call them, the inmates can only dial out). In spring 2014, Hayes worked with O’Reilly, who sits across from her and has been with the Spectator for five years, on a story about drug-related deaths at the provincial jail. 

Even when Hayes was finally able to tour the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre, a group of government officials accompanied her. O’Reilly has been frustrated by slow responses to her freedom of information requests, not to mention the thousands of dollars in charges for estimated work times to complete the requests. She filed five requests in May 2014 and is still waiting on three as of this magazine’s publication. “It’s sometimes hard to get information from official sources,” Hayes says, “so I do end up relying on a lot of people who are either keeping me posted from jail or that I run into on the street. It makes it more difficult to get regular updates.”

O’Reilly would come into the office in the morning and there’d be seven missed overnight calls from collect numbers. “There’s nothing you can do,” she says. “They can’t leave a message, they can’t tell you why they’re calling.” Through jail sources, Hayes and O’Reilly found out how drugs were being smuggled in (sometimes sparing the public the vulgar details), what drugs they were and how much they were being sold for.

Hayes is regularly in touch with three inmates; one calls her several times a week. And several others still keep in contact with O’Reilly. While they fill the Spec reporters in on drugs, they also update them about other pertinent information—after all, says Hayes, most crimes in the area can be traced back to one thing: drugs.

***

One of Hayes’s sources is about to get out of jail. He calls her collect in December 2014 to talk about what “free life” will be like.

“There’s going to be a lot of temptations,” he says. “Fentanyl is so easy to get.”

“How exactly do people do fentanyl?” (Fentanyl is a prescription synthetic opiate similar to but more powerful than morphine.)

“You take a patch,” he tells her, “burn it until it peels off and then freebase it.” After a few minutes, she wishes her best jail source good luck with his freedom.

Before hanging up on what he hopes is his last interview from inside, he says, “I promise to keep in touch.” About a month later, Hayes gets a call from her source to let her know he’s out. He tells her that he’s doing drugs, but he’s trying to lie low. Just over a week later, she gets a collect call—he’s back in jail and going through withdrawal.

Photo courtesy The Globe and Mail

Twenty-year-old Keltie Byrne was tidying up the pool area after the 1:30 p.m. show at Sealand of the Pacific in Victoria, B.C., when her rubber workboots skidded on the wet pool deck, sending her into the pool. As a dozen spectators watched, she tried to climb out. But the marine park’s orcas dragged her underwater. Despite being a competitive swimmer, Byrne had no chance against the persistent orcas Haida, Nootka and Tilikum. To the whales, unaccustomed to having trainers in the pool, Byrne was the most interactive toy they had ever played with. She resurfaced and cried for help twice. Ten minutes later, she surfaced again, but was still. She had drowned.

On February 20, 1991, journalists wrote about the first person to be killed by orcas at a marine park. Barbara McClintock, then-Victoria bureau chief for The Province, arrived on the scene around 3:30 p.m. and gathered with other reporters in a parking lot overlooking the marina. From their lofty vantage point, they watched the recovery efforts and tried to piece together the story. At this stage, Sealand employees were dragging a weighted net along the bottom of the pool, trying to recover Byrne’s body from the whales, which kept it away from the crew for two hours. “You could see a ‘something,’” she says now, “which later you realized was a body.”

Unable to get closer to the action, the reporters had little to work with. No one could verify the story—even with witness accounts, the police were reluctant to release any particulars to journalists. The coverage of the accident was sparse at first, with details added as reporters gathered more information. No one knew how or why this had happened, and the shallow news items reflected that. McClintock’s vaguely worded article appeared in The Province the next day with the lede, “A whale trainer was dunked to death by three killer whales yesterday.” Police hadn’t even identified the trainer, and the story relied solely on one witness to provide any details or context of the accident. The result was a jarring 162-word article on the front page with the final line that read, “Then the whales became quiet.”

Over two decades later, Liam Casey recalls the enormous audience for “Inside Marineland,” the Toronto Star investigative series that was published in 2012. Casey’s colleague, Linda Diebel, wrote several stories in which eight whistleblowers claimed that Marineland failed to adequately care for its animals. Diebel, who spearheaded the investigation, made allegations claiming that Marineland’s water filtration system caused the animals serious health problems; dolphin skin fell off in chunks; Smooshi the walrus had an inflamed flipper, a chemical burn apparently caused by the water; six of seven seals were either blind or had serious eye problems; two aggressive belugas attacked and killed a baby beluga named Skoot. Later, Casey joined Diebel to pen an article that alleged Kiska the orca seemed lethargic and lonely in her concrete pen.

In addition to garnering widespread public interest, however, the series drew the ire of Marineland; its owner, John Holer; and Holer’s lawyers. Three months after two articles were published in 2013 about orders given to Marineland by the OSPCA to address problems first identified by the Star‘s investigation, Marineland sued the Star; in its statement of claim, Marineland denied the range of allegations in the Star series, saying its water filtration system is not substandard, nor are its animals neglected in any way. The Star stood by the allegations, and filed a statement of defence in response to Marineland’s lawsuit. The lawsuit was outstanding at time of publication.

Readers devoured the Star’s Marineland stories, which were part of a momentous shift in the way reporters cover animal issues. Today, animal-related journalism is becoming a blockbuster business, drawing a big audience and encouraging news outlets to devote scarce resources to the coverage, including more senior reporters. Thanks to the emergence of enterprising animal stories and high-profile documentaries, there is an acute awareness of animal welfare issues that didn’t exist a couple of decades ago. Interviews with reporters, experts and activists show that there is more serious interest in, and greater knowledge of, the problems animals face. But since the subject matter inevitably has soft and fluffy connotations, the animal beat still risks being perceived as less-than-serious journalism.

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Tilikum, one of the whales involved in Byrne’s death, would help change the way journalists cover animal tragedies. The orca was moved to a new home at SeaWorld Orlando in 1992, almost one year after the incident with Byrne, and Sealand closed its doors forever by the end of that year. On a summer morning in 1999, trainers at SeaWorld Orlando found Tilikum with a nude body of a deceased male draped across his back. Canadian newspapers linked the man’s death to Byrne’s, and coverage included details that had been missing in the initial news reports about her death. In 2010, another trainer named Dawn Brancheau died in the pool with Tilikum.

This time, the coverage wouldn’t be so scattershot. After Brancheau was dragged underwater to her death, Tim Zimmermann, a correspondent at Outside magazine, wrote a 9,000-word feature that appeared in the July 2010 issue. Zimmermann’s “The Killer in the Pool” examined the 45-year history of keeping whales in captivity and the accidents that transpired in that time, focusing mainly on incidents involving Tilikum. Instead of simply recounting events, Zimmermann sought experts to explain how and why these types of incidents occurred. “If you want to try to get an inkling of what captivity means for a killer whale,” he wrote, “you first have to understand what their lives are like in the wild.” He pursued the most qualified sources, including Ken Balcomb, a marine biologist who had been tracking orcas for almost 35 years, and Don Goldsberry, who captured orcas for aquariums and notoriously hated reporters.

Zimmermann’s work had a depth of detail missing from much of the previous reporting. For example, he compared Sealand to McDonald’s and SeaWorld Orlando to a five-star restaurant, with its 220 acres of custom marine habitat. At SeaWorld, “there were seven different killer whale pools, including the enormous Shamu show pool, and seven million gallons of continuously filtered salt water kept at an orca-friendly temperature between 52 and 55 degrees [fahrenheit]. There was regular, world-class veterinary care. Even the food was a custom blend, made up of restaurant-quality herring, capelin and salmon.” Without having to look beyond this one magazine article, readers with no previous understanding of orcas could receive a close-up look at a controversial issue. Zimmermann provided enough depth and detail to allow his readers to draw their own conclusions.

Tilikum’s story would eventually find a wider audience beyond the magazine. After reading “The Killer in the Pool,” documentary filmmaker Gabriela Cowperthwaite started a project of her own—the 2013 film Blackfish, starring Tilikum, with Zimmermann billed as associate producer. After making a scant $2 million during its theatrical release in the summer, the documentary was viewed by nearly 21 million people when CNN aired it on television that October.

Blackfish became a rallying cry against the billion-dollar industry of marine parks. Since the film’s release, SeaWorld has published open letters criticizing the documentary’s claims that marine parks are harmful to orcas and refuting allegations that the park attempted to cover up facts about Brancheau’s death. A section of SeaWorld’s website is dedicated to arguing that Blackfish is propaganda. The documentary opened a Pandora’s box, prompting questions about the morality of keeping cetaceans in captivity.

After Blackfish made the rounds in Vancouver, National Post correspondent Tristin Hopper had an “icky” feeling about SeaWorld aquariums—and a news hook for a feature. Hopper reported that shortly after the documentary appeared on Netflix, supporters of the film converged on the Vancouver Aquarium in Stanley Park, rallying to get rid of the beluga whales kept there. Soon after, the Vancouver park board put an end to the breeding programs of most whales and dolphins at the aquarium.

This Blackfish effect was not the first time animal journalism had gone Hollywood. Grizzly Man (2005) told the grim story of a man who trusted grizzly bears too much; The Cove (2009) exposed the slaughter of thousands of dolphins in Japan; and Project Nim (2011) was about the attempt to break the barrier between human and chimpanzee. These documentaries are commercial productions made for entertainment, but after watching them, millions of people became knowledgeable on topics they might not be otherwise drawn to. Animal rights advocate Lesli Bisgould fought long and hard to convince reporters to cover stories about the issue. “It took a long time to get these ideas into the public consciousness,” she says. “But people have now seen these images that are too ugly to forget.”

 ***

Despite the attention that big stories attract, animal journalism still struggles to be taken seriously. Early in the 1990s, editors at The Vancouver Sun put out a call for new column ideas. Reporter Nicholas Read approached them with a concept close to his heart: a regular missive about animals and their welfare. To his great surprise, the Sun decided to give it a try. Read wanted to do something important, since he believed nobody was writing in a serious way about animal issues at that time.

His column, “The Ark,” ran once a week in the Sun beginning November 1, 1991. When John Cruickshank became editor-in-chief four years later, he reduced the column to biweekly appearances. In an email, he explains his thought process behind the cut. Cruickshank felt he needed to make the Sun look more serious in order to compete with The Globe and Mail. “I thought a pet column was kind of flakey. Readers told us they valued it. Live and learn,” says Cruickshank, who is now the publisher of the Toronto Star. Read now teaches journalism at Langara College in Vancouver, and he notes that many reporters’ mindsets regarding animal stories have changed: “People who run news organizations have recognized that they are popular, but they could and should be better.”

That popularity comes with a price—the internet is saturated with critter content that is neither newsworthy nor beneficial to the cause of animal welfare. Bisgould calls it a “chicken or the egg” situation, asking, “Is it the media’s fault for giving us these stories or is it our fault for eating them up?”

The problem isn’t just the steady stream of inconsequential cat photos. According to Casey, animal stories get covered by journalists because they are quick and easy to do, and there is an appetite for them.

In a news clip aired on CTV Calgary last September, a small black bear cub can be seen on a golf course with its mother and two other cubs lounging in the background. The reporter’s voice chimes in, “This oh-so-cute bear cub was caught on camera over the weekend trying to capture the flag at Mountainside Golf Course in Fairmont, B.C.” The cub grabs the flag pin and runs in circles before taking one of the golfer’s balls into the woods. It was, according to the reporter, “a front-row seat to a once-in-a-lifetime show.”

After the network aired the video, other news organizations followed suit and it went viral. CTV Calgary’s managing editor, Dawn Walton, says, “Every time there’s a bear in a tree, it’s always a top story local media covers.”

Eric Taylor, professor of zoology at the University of British Columbia, believes that “fluff” pieces such as the bear video trivialize wild animals and are not newsworthy. As the chair of the federal government’s Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada, Taylor can’t find humour in the “fluff” until other important issues get the coverage, readership and action they deserve. Frivolous animal pieces serve primarily as entertainment and as a way to increase gate revenues at zoos.

There will always be coverage when a new exotic animal arrives at the zoo or when a newborn animal gets a name. Rob Laidlaw of Zoocheck Canada, an organization that works to protect wild animals and improve conditions in captivity, says these stories reinforce an idea that it is acceptable to treat animals like surrogate humans.

For others, including Michelle Cliffe, a communications officer for the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the upbeat animal story is a news item that people can relate to. “We are bombarded by bad news,” she says. “Sometimes you need those little things that connect you in a positive way.” The appeal may also lie in the opportunity to see animals that only exist in the wild.

 ***

Although no outlet appears to have dedicated reporters on the animal beat, news organizations have lately shown a willingness to put more resources into such coverage. Kim Elmslie, communications and advocacy manager for the Canadian Federation of Humane Societies, says journalists are taking more time to listen to animal welfare groups and understand complex issues. “When there was a trainer who came out with a series of accusations of things going on at Marineland,” she says, “the Toronto Star really seized that issue.”

In 2012, Diebel received information from a whistleblower claiming that something had gone seriously wrong the previous fall with the water at Marineland. After publishing multiple stories following months-long investigation, Casey, then on contract with the Star, joined Diebel in her 11-month investigation.

It was a major undertaking to convince Marineland employees to violate their confidentiality agreements and speak about the private, seemingly impenetrable company. Since Diebel and Casey published their multi-part investigative series and
ebook, three of the 15 whistleblowers have been sued by Marineland for defamation.

Elmslie says she was impressed by the articles and the depth of the journalists’ expertise. The investigation is a prime example of a news organization that was supportive enough to dedicate the funds and reporting resources to properly cover animal issues. In 20 years, Cruickshank has gone from cutting one paper’s animal column to funding months of full-time work by two reporters on a substantial investigation into animal welfare.

Despite the lawsuits, widespread scrutiny of orcas in captivity is finally making headway in Ontario. At the end of January, the provincial government announced plans to ban the acquisition and sale of orcas. The new rules include guidelines for tank sizes, bacteria content, noise and lighting, appropriate social groupings and other regulations for handling marine mammals. If Ontario passes the legislation, it will be the first province with specific standards for these animals.

Little did Casey know an assignment he received in 2011 as an intern would eventually contribute to more groundbreaking journalism. His editors at the Star sent him to Niagara Falls for a story in the summer of 2011. After a custody battle, a St. Catharines judge had recently ruled that Marineland’s captive orca Ikaika must be returned to SeaWorld Orlando.

“SeaWorld alleged that Ikaika had some mental health issues,” Casey laughs. “As a joke, they told me to go and see if he looked depressed.” Not knowing what a healthy or depressed whale looked like, he went to the courthouse in St. Catharines and pored over boxes of records from the case.

He found out that Ikaika was Tilikum’s son, and the story he wrote was a cautionary tale questioning whether Ikaika would cause any fatalities with his aggression, as his father had. Soon enough, both an investigation into Marineland and the story of Tilikum’s tragic life were engrained in the minds of millions.

These are just some of the many stories that have helped usher in a sea change in the quality of what once was shoddy reporting. The challenge now for Canadian journalism is to maintain the momentum toward influential animal stories. Maybe all it takes is a good, hard look at a warm and fuzzy subject.

A previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the OPSCA claimed Marineland failed to adequately care for its animals, and that both Liam Casey and Linda Diebel spearheaded the investigation into Marineland. It was, in fact, eight whistleblowers who made the claim. Casey joined the Star‘s investigation months after Diebel first began reporting on Marineland. The story also incorrectly stated that six sea lions—not seals—were blind or had eye problems. The Review regrets the errors.

Susan Clairmont and her colleague John Rennison are fleeing to safety. It’s April 2003 and Clairmont is covering the case of Maria Figliola, who stands accused of hiring a hitman to kill her husband. According to prosecutors, she wanted her husband gone and she wanted his money so she could continue to buy her boyfriend lavish gifts such as a slick Mercedes-Benz and a steady supply of cocaine. Clairmont is outside Figliola’s home, but a man at the residence is unhappy with the reporter’s presence. He berates her and Rennison with angry threats of violence. He smashes Rennison’s camera and a car window before the pair manages to get away. They drive to the local hospital where a police car waits.

“It was definitely one of the scariest moments of my career,” says Clairmont, who has been a crime reporter and columnist at the Hamilton Spectator for 17 years, covering numerous murders and tragedies. Her crime coverage has taken her across Hamilton, creating what her husband jokingly calls her “murder tour.” When she drives by quiet homes and suburban streets, she talks openly about the cases that led her there.

Murder has always captivated journalists. The notorious Jack the Ripper, who terrorized London in the late 1880s, is still infamous today. By the 20th century, stories of American serial killers like Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer made national headlines. Then, in the early 1990s, Canadians became engrossed in the case of Paul Bernardo and
Karla Homolka.

Today, the widespread success of Sarah Koenig’s podcast Serial has tapped into the human attraction to true crime stories. The first season of the series analyzes the minute details of a single case: the murder of teenager Hae Min Lee in 1999. The podcast recounts in 12 episodes Koenig’s year-long research into Adnan Syed’s controversial trials and conviction for Lee’s murder. The former Baltimore Sun reporter draws listeners in by taking them through the events of the investigation into Syed’s case. Often, when listeners form opinions about Syed’s guilt, Koenig presents information that casts doubt and changes minds. She expresses her own confusion with the case and shares her views with the listener. The podcast forces listeners to ponder life behind bars, or worse, life as a wrongly convicted prison inmate. Koenig becomes a character herself, the model of a reporter-turned-detective digging deeply into a case. One of the reasons Serial is successful is that it involves listeners in the story by raising questions, inciting empathy and encouraging opinion. Serial, created by four women—Koenig and her production team—is an example of crime reporting at its best.

Historical stereotypes see the crime beat, like much of journalism, as primarily a man’s game. But in Canada, women have been strong voices in crime reporting for decades. Female reporters have helped redefine crime journalism and they’re responsible for some of this country’s most powerful stories.

***

While some reporters say gender no longer plays a major role in the newsroom, an academic paper published in 2012 by Ann Rauhala, April Lindgren and Sahar Fatima of Ryerson University found otherwise. “Influential beats such as politics and crime remain male-dominated, with women covering a third of those stories,” it states. Their paper cites studies that found women reported only 37 percent of crime stories in 2005, even though crime and politics (two male-dominated beats grouped together in the report) accounted for 50 percent of all news stories.

Still, women are increasingly some of Canada’s leading crime reporters—from Rhiannon Russell at the Whitehorse Star, to April Cunningham at The Telegraph-Journal in Saint John, New Brunswick and Kim Bolan at The Vancouver Sun. Catherine McKercher, a journalism professor emeritus at Carleton University, says it was inevitable for women to become leading voices in crime reporting as more and more women enter newsrooms once overpopulated with male reporters. Chasing criminals, she says, is unpredictable regardless of the reporter’s gender. “It’s a dangerous place for a man to be, too. Why is it more difficult for a reporter just because she’s a woman?”

Clairmont has never questioned her place as a crime reporter. She was always a curious person. On a day when she stayed home sick from grade school, she browsed her mother’s extensive book collection, choosing Truman Capote’s true crime classic In Cold Blood from the shelf. The book contributed to her fascination with crime.

“If I didn’t get into journalism school, I would’ve gone to law school,” she says. Her interest in crime was piqued again when one of her graduate journalism school classes sat in on the
infamous Guy Paul Morin murder and rape trial. In the
courtroom, the case of a man who would be convicted and later exonerated held her attention. She found herself returning to the trial without her classmates.

After completing graduate school, Clairmont began working the crime beat following a gig as a general assignment reporter at The Peterborough Examiner. She was unfazed by danger. While five-months pregnant with her first child, she spent a week covering 9/11 in New York City. “That probably wasn’t the smartest thing I could’ve done,” Clairmont admits, but her curiosity makes her someone who cannot stay away from a story.

For some time now, Clairmont has been covering the double murder trial of Mark Staples, who was arrested in 2010 for the murder of his father and sister. His motive, according to the prosecutors, was money. On a day in late October, the modern, chilly room on the sixth floor of the John Sopinka Courthouse in Hamilton, Ontario, is almost devoid of Staples supporters. While the lawyers present evidence and witnesses take the stand, Clairmont listens intently and occasionally stops taking notes on her iPad to grab her smartphone and live-tweet case updates, which her newsroom colleagues later post on Storify. On an hour-long recess, Clairmont retreats to the media office at the courthouse, uploading a quick brief about the morning’s events.

During her lunch breaks throughout the trial, Clairmont frequently sees Staples. But encountering those accused of heinous crimes outside the courtroom does not seem to throw her—Clairmont has covered some of the most grisly crimes in the city. She reconciles gruesome details and ordinary human interaction every day.

When she started at the Examiner, she primarily worked with men and says she sought to mimic their unemotional attitudes and their focus on perpetrators. Now, her coverage focuses on more than just the accused. She’s particularly passionate about the victims, sometimes preferring to write about them rather than the accused. In reporting on the Staples case, she uncovered that his sister, Rhonda Borelli, had a son whom she gave up after the boy’s father died. She tracked him down and wrote an article introducing readers to a sweet 21-year-old named William Swayze, whose biological parents were both dead by the time he was four.

***

On the west coast, Kim Bolan has spent more than 30 years on the job. During that time, she has covered murders, gangs and terrorism in B.C. Crime had always sparked her interest, but her reporting on the bombing of Air India Flight 182 solidified her status as a crime-reporting legend. For three years after the explosion that killed 329 people, she followed three men accused of being involved in the bombing. Years later, she still speaks to families of victims and attends memorial services, writing about them to help the community remember those who were lost. She reported the story despite the assassination of fellow journalist Tara Singh Hayer and the harassment of witnesses, newspaper publishers and reporters. While chasing the story, she travelled to Punjab, India, five times in 20 years, meeting with high-ranking Sikh extremists, along with victims of their violence. She also followed one of the accused men to Pakistan before he was slain in India and tracked down other suspects across the country and in England.

In 1998, Bolan received information that a group she was covering held a meeting to discuss “knocking people off.” Police warned her that she was a target and to exercise caution. In July, while her family was asleep, the sound of a gunshot resonated outside her home. She was awake to hear the shot and a car speeding away. She ran to her bathroom and called 911. Police suspected that people close to the Air India bombers were behind the warning shot. Sikh fundamentalist groups had previously sent her death threats. She investigated terrorist groups in B.C. and was later placed under police protection. The bullet, she says, was meant as both a retaliation and a warning to silence her.

Bolan is gruff and intimidating. She worked with police informant Micheal Plante, who infiltrated the Vancouver chapter of Hells Angels and became a part of the Angels’ drug enterprise. She eventually wrote a six-part series about his time with the gang. The Vancouver Sun exclusive detailed how Plante’s undercover work led to the arrest and conviction of a dozen members and associates of the gang. The investigative series about Plante’s time undercover came largely from Bolan’s experience interviewing him directly, rather than from information provided by the authorities. If she can’t get what she needs from the police, she says, she’ll get it straight from those with firsthand experience.

In the early 2000s, Bolan helped investigate the disappearances of 45 Vancouver-area women, mostly sex workers from the Downtown Eastside. As the list of missing women grew, Bolan and Sun colleague Lindsay Kines kept the story on the front page.

Bolan was on the driveway of Robert Pickton’s Port Coquitlam, B.C., pig farm the night the police executed their first warrant. Her reportage recognized the tragedy of what she witnessed, but was clear and informative. After speaking to an RCMP constable, she wrote: “The excavation and search for human remains at the [farm] resembles the massive undertaking at Ground Zero after the World Trade Center disaster.” Her writing often shows great empathy. She interviewed Pickton’s sister, Linda, who had pleaded with journalists to leave her and her family alone. After Linda reluctantly agreed to speak publicly, Bolan wrote an article discussing the family’s lives after Robert was charged, mixing facts about the family’s finances with clear sympathy for their emotional trauma.

In both 2011 and 2012, Bolan won the Canadian Association of Journalists prize for Daily Excellence. The Vancouver Sun’s editor-in-chief Harold Munro praised her work: “Kim is the best crime reporter in Canada because of her passion for storytelling and relentless pursuit of the truth. She courageously takes on difficult stories—even in the face of tremendous risk to her personal safety.” More than a decade after Pickton’s arrest, Bolan wrote a follow-up about several missing sex workers in a post-Pickton B.C.

***

A new generation is continuing the crime-reporting tradition in its own way, leaving a mark on a beat that always draws attention. Before Robyn Doolittle became known as the Toronto Star reporter who exposed Rob Ford’s crack use, she got her start working the crime beat and making important connections in the police force.

She wasn’t the only one. Tamara Cherry moved from writing about crime in The Toronto Sun to reporting crime on television for CTV, covering many high-profile cases in and around Toronto. Cherry has occasionally felt uncomfortable—when canvassing high-crime areas, for instance—but she says she’s never found herself in a position that “my mother would worry about.”

At 30, Cherry’s passion for the crime beat is clear. “I once wanted to go work in Detroit because the crime rate was so high and I thought it would be an exciting place to be a crime reporter,” she says. She decided against the move because she read a local newspaper and noticed most murders did not receive much attention. “I’m happy to live in a country where every murder is a big deal, where we haven’t become complacent when it comes to crime even though our numbers are drastically lower than those south of the border.”

Last May, shortly after Dellen Millard was arrested for the murder of Tim Bosma, Cherry revealed that Millard had exchanged 13 phone calls with another missing person, 23-year-old Laura Babcock. Police had access to the phone records, but it was Cherry’s investigative work that connected these two cases.

Journalists who deliver the best crime coverage recognize their duty to uncover a story, write about it and capture the reader’s attention. And more and more, in Canada at least, if the question is “Whodunit?” women are increasingly the ones answering.

Photos by Megan Matsuda

Rick Westhead stands half-dressed in the empty parking lot of BMO Field, Toronto’s soccer stadium. After hurriedly buttoning up his white shirt, he grabs a tie and blue suit jacket out of the back seat of his Jeep, using the window as his mirror. He just came from playing shinny and could have easily put the suit on at the rink, but he would rather stay comfortable as long as possible. As Westhead finishes dressing, TSN cameraman Marc Malette pulls up beside him and exclaims, “That’s not your look!”

Westhead chuckles. He can only recall a couple of times when he had to wear a suit during his 12 years at the Toronto Star. Now that he’s a senior correspondent for TSN, things are a little different. The suit is just one part; wearing a cage on his hockey helmet to avoid a puck in the face is another.

He’s here to interview Earl Cochrane, the Canadian Soccer Association’s deputy general secretary, about the organization’s support of Bill C-290, a private members bill that would permit single-event sports gambling in Canada. Westhead sets up with Cochrane on the sideline of the field, not quite sure how close to stand or where to hold the microphone. Malette helps him out with each shot.

Westhead may be a rookie when it comes to television, but he’s a veteran reporter, having worked for several publications including the Star, Bloomberg News and The New York Times. Since joining TSN in August 2014, he’s been chasing sports stories as far away from press conferences as possible, whether it’s outlining a hostage drill practiced by the federal government before the Sochi Olympics or exposing rampant steroid use in Canadian collegiate sports. He’s an integral part of TSN’s growing commitment to business, investigative and human-interest sports journalism—an investment that could be essential after the network’s recent loss in the battle for national NHL hockey rights.

In November 2013, Rogers Communications Inc. (the parent company of TSN’s main rival Sportsnet) paid $5.2 billion to become the NHL’s exclusive broadcaster and multimedia partner in Canada through the 2025-2026 season. It’s now airing several games every week across nine channels including CBC, City, FX Canada and the array of Sportsnet stations. It’s also bolstered its broadcast teams, expanding to 30 analysts and reporters focused on hockey throughout the country. George Stroumboulopoulos is now the face of Hockey Night in Canada, while long-time HNIC host Ron MacLean leads Sunday night’s Rogers Hometown Hockey. TSN retained some regional games for the Toronto Maple Leafs and Winnipeg Jets, as well as the Montreal Canadiens on its French sister station RDS. Both stations now also air Ottawa Senators games. But after losing the bid for national rights, TSN is in the unexpected position of having to re-evaluate exactly what it means to be “Canada’s Sports Leader.”

For years, TSN held the widely accepted journalistic edge in sports broadcasting. In Canada, hockey reigns, and TSN has insiders such as Bob McKenzie and Darren Dreger—respected reporters who have made careers out of breaking hockey news. Like ESPN in the United States, which has in recent years released improved video features and documentaries such as its 30 for 30 series, TSN has seen the value in covering sports in the context of the greater culture, outside the vacuum of the arena.

ReOrientation, the three-part series exploring homophobia in pro sports hosted by former NHL player-turned-analyst Aaron Ward, aired in January 2014. In June 2013, the network produced Neutral Zone, a documentary set in a hockey school in northern Israel that examined whether having Jewish and Arab children play hockey together could promote tolerance. Such engaging storytelling and in-depth reporting is increasingly important in sports journalism. Brian Cooper, a former vice-president of business development and operations at Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, sees everyone looking for the “extra edge” to draw in viewers; now that edge means having more to say than who played well in a game. “It’s everything about the league and the personalities that make it up,” Cooper says. “You have to go much deeper than ever before.”

Not just that, says Ken Volden, TSN’s vice president and executive producer of studio production and news information: “You have to give context; you have to be trusted.” His network’s brand, he says, is “Sports. Information. Entertainment,” and his goal is to make viewers feel something when watching TSN. To do that, he needs to hire strong reporters. “Substance, more than ever, matters.” But Sportsnet’s shadow looms ever-larger thanks to its expensive broadcast rights, improved production values and expanded roster of expert analysts and seasoned journalists. TSN can no longer simply coast on its reputation: “Canada’s Sports Leader” now has to prove itself.

 ***

Westhead fits neatly into TSN’s effort to emphasize emotionally stirring yet journalistically sound
storytelling. During his time at the Star, he served as the paper’s South Asia bureau chief based in India. When he returned to Toronto in late 2011, his reporting focused on foreign affairs and international development, while also dipping into some sports business. He chased stories that looked at the inner workings of Russia’s national hockey league expansion and the profitability of the Canadian NHL market as the game floundered in the United States after the 2005 lockout. “I think he views the world differently than someone who’s covered a team for 20 years,” says Volden, adding the network will continue to target reporters like Westhead: storytellers.

In the 1990s and even early 2000s, sports broadcasters trailed far behind newspapers when it came to breaking news. The networks would read the papers, then get the writers on air the next day to talk about their stories. They showed games, but did little original reporting outside of them. Over the past few years that mindset has shifted; networks now want to lead. Instead of piggybacking on print, they’re hiring the journalists who were writing those stories and turning them into on-air talent, bloggers and columnists for their websites.

Westhead joins the growing list of writers that sports networks have wooed away from print. In the past four years, TSN poached Mark Masters and Matthew Scianitti from the National Post. In 2011, Sportsnet lured Michael Grange from The Globe and Mail and, more recently, brought on Damien Cox, who’s now full-time at Sportsnet, though he still writes a column for the Star once a week. This is due, in part, to the shrinking pool of up-and-coming sports broadcasters: smaller shows such as Sportsline (later known as Global Sports) no longer exist. Only Sportsnet and TSN are left standing, both major networks owned by telecommunications giants. “Where do you hire your next wave of people,” Volden asks, “when there are so few television shows other than at our level?”

Westhead didn’t want to be a talking head, so it took several months of negotiations to convince him to join TSN. The network has given him plenty of journalistic freedom. In November 2014, he travelled to China to explore the world of counterfeit jerseys, tickets and memorabilia. He’s also reported on former CFL all-star Arland Bruce’s lawsuit against the league—one of TSN’s major broadcast partners. In the lawsuit, Bruce alleges the CFL doesn’t do enough to protect its players or educate them about the long-term effects of concussions. The suit also alleges the league is misleading the public about the dangers of playing football after such injuries. The allegations have not yet been proven and the CFL has asked for the case to be dismissed.

Chris Zelkovich, a sports media blogger for Yahoo! Canada who has been covering the sports industry for 17 years, says he’s never come across a sports reporter with Westhead’s responsibilities—to work in courts, gain access to executive boardrooms and file freedom of information requests, rather than break trade deals or file game recaps. This, Zelkovich says, is part of a greater trend in Canadian sports broadcasting: hosts and analysts becoming more professional. He’s noticed that the Rogers-run HNIC has a tougher journalistic approach than before. As a CBC production, analysts referred to NHL executives by their nicknames, calling former Leafs general manager Brian Burke “Burkie” and then-chief disciplinarian for the NHL Colin Campbell “Collie.” “These were their friends,” says Zelkovich. “But you’re not going to hear that now. There’s less of a feeling that, ‘We’re all in this together.’”

Sportsnet began stepping up its storytelling game in 2011 with the launch of its own biweekly magazine, which immediately became the only magazine dedicated to longform sports writing in Canada—a venue where 2,500-word stories are “lighter” pieces and major features run more than double that length. Dan Robson was one of the first employees hired to work as a senior writer at Sportsnet Magazine, leaving his job at the Star. “There’s no real outlet like this in Canada,” he says. “Sport lends itself to narrative, and this gives us a place to explore it.”

The writers measure their work against all other longform sports journalism written in North America, Robson says, whether it’s in Sports Illustrated or The Walrus. But there are only two major players in English-speaking Canada for cross-platform sports journalism, and he writes for the magazine arm of one of them. He can’t ignore TSN, even if it doesn’t have its own comparable publication. But with Westhead on board, Robson says, the network is making a statement that the days of running a website that relies largely on Canadian Press copy are over. “When I see Westhead go to TSN, I think we need to be reminded that this is a very competitive market.”

And compete Sportsnet has. Over the past few years, it has earned viewers’ attention with a solid team of reporters adding colourful insight, smart analysis and context to stories around the games that easily rivals TSN’s efforts. Where TSN is staking a unique position, though, is in its longform video features. To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 2014, the network aired a documentary about former NHL players Peter and Anton Šťastný, who escaped from Czechoslovakia in 1980, and their older brother Marián who joined them in Canada one year later. Viewers praised the feature, with commenters on social media calling it a great piece of journalism. In October, three months after joining the network, Westhead got his first shot at a video feature of his own.

 ***

Sitting in a dimly lit school gymnasium, Westhead studies his typed notes, furiously scribbling out interview questions he doesn’t like and writing in late additions by hand. Seventeen-year-old Sameer Fathazada sits across from him, staring into space, not quite sure what to do with himself while he waits for a question. The production lights flick on and it’s time to begin. Westhead gently guides Fathazada through the telling of his life story for the camera. He arrived as a refugee from Afghanistan in 2007, and is now being touted as the next Canadian soccer superstar. He’s been on two training stints with different German clubs, and if he went to play there, he could become a German citizen and qualify for their national team. This might be a goal for some players, Fathazada explains, but it’s not his. “It’s important for me to represent Canada because of the things they’ve done for my family,” he tells the camera. “There’s no other way to repay them than do something good for the country like play for the national team.” It’s a made-for-television moment.

“These are the stories that get me excited,” says Westhead. Normally, you might expect a feature on Fathazada after his first appearance for Canada, or if he signed a professional contract (and there’s no certainty he ever will). But it’s his story off the field that Westhead finds special: “It shows that there are good news stories to tell from us being in Afghanistan,” he says. It connects us as Canadians, whether or not you care about soccer. But this is still television. After the interview, the TSN crew stays to watch Fathazada’s game. During the second half, they shoot some footage of him as he rests on the bench—at one point even dressing the teen in a Team Canada jersey and having him pose with the Canadian flag draped around him.

Last year, Westhead might have turned Fathazada’s story into a Star feature, finding the power in the player’s words and history.But television adores these sorts of images—a talented young refugee, literally wrapped in his adopted country’s flag. Such stories hit Volden’s target dead centre: they make people feel something. Westhead’s job, then, is to elicit that emotional response without sacrificing journalistic integrity. That’s a challenging task when images are as important as words in a story.

As he drives home from the match, his car smelling of the Afghani food Fathazada’s mother gave him, he recounts his time in Japan right after the 2011 tsunami. “I was stuck in Sendai, relatively close to the Fukushima reactor that everybody was worried about. I didn’t know if I could get out,” Westhead says. “It’s thrilling when you feel like you’re in the centre of these stories. It’s what so many journalists want—to be there, to witness and document it.”

As he drives, he talks about the people he met there. One man got separated from his wife and went scuba diving through their town looking for her. He found her, alive, after three days. Another family wasn’t so lucky. As the warning sirens blared, a daughter helped her mother up the stairs to a safer floor of their house, then went back to get her own child. The daughter came back and handed over her child, just as a wave came crashing in and swept her away, leaving grandmother and grandchild clutching each other.

He pauses. “It’s tough after doing that kind of journalism to find anything that’s going to be like it.” Stories like Fathazada’s may be as close as he gets. The war in Afghanistan was long, the costs to both that country and Canada high, but here was a positive story to dig out of the aftermath. As the crew shot footage of her son, a giant smile stretched across the face of Fathazada’s mother. Westhead was smiling too: here’s a kid who survived, came to Canada and now has a chance to become a professional soccer player. You see Fathazada smothered in the country’s colours, but you hear his words, and the thought that creeps in—that this is shameless jingoism—is drowned out, even if only for a moment. There’s joy and hope here. In Westhead’s care, it’s more nuanced than most sports stories. In his telling, it’s tough to say this is just about a game.

 ***

At Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, TSN reporter Mark Masters gets set to watch the Leafs play the Tampa Bay Lightning. Two nights earlier, the Leafs suffered an embarrassing 9-2 loss to the Nashville Predators, so when the time comes for his pre-game over-the-boards interview, Masters goes after captain Dion Phaneuf, asking him about the team’s mood and what they need to do to improve. After the second period, Masters catches up with Leafs forward James van Riemsdyk—whose two-goal night would help lift Toronto over Tampa Bay—before he can enter the dressing room. “We want to be first to get player reactions,” says Masters. “They still have energy, they haven’t gone into the dressing room yet—it’s unfiltered.” But many athletes are now experts when talking to journalists, and those about to play a game will rarely give an answer worthy of a nightly recap show. “I’m not going to lie and say there’s always insight,” says Masters. “But there’s a chance, and why wouldn’t you do it if there’s a chance?” This access to players is a large part of what companies pay for with broadcast rights. Masters is down at ice level tonight because TSN is showing the game, but on Saturday he’ll be back up in the press box.

For hockey analysis, says Zelkovich, TSN has always been the leader, but “the problem for them is people will already be watching the game on another channel and won’t flip back to see what TSN is saying.” Cooper agrees that while TSN has the edge for now, Sportsnet is quickly catching up in terms of numbers of viewers. Cross-promotion means strong journalists, such as Cox and Elliotte Friedman, are showing up everywhere from news shows on Sportsnet to HNIC on CBC, as well as the website and radio stations. Stroumboulopoulos, too, is a dynamic interviewer who’s already managed to make interesting television with Sidney Crosby and Wayne Gretzky—not exactly the most controversial speakers. He also takes some weight off analysts such as Nick Kypreos, who’s far more natural having fun on the fake ice rink in the studio, acting out plays as former player and current analyst Kelly Hrudey chirps him from the net.

With a program that seems, for once, carefully crafted and suited to the skills and strengths of its contributors, it could be only a matter of time before Sportsnet overtakes TSN as the place to be for analysis too. “The public is getting used to them,” says Cooper. “Sportsnet seems irreverent and younger, while TSN is more serious and older.”

Irreverent or not, Sportsnet is making a serious bet with the NHL; the 12-year partnership has the network airing 350 national regular season games over nine channels. That’s a lot of hockey, and this season’s first Saturday night did earn HNIC a record 9.8 million viewers. But Zelkovich says the television business doesn’t run on audience reach—it’s more concerned with the average viewers per minute, and by that measurement, the inaugural HNIC broadcast was actually down from last year. According to Numeris broadcast ratings, Rogers’ average for Eastern games on opening weekend fell 40 percent from 2013.

The problem may be that Rogers, despite its enviable rights, is spreading the games across too many channels. But this partnership is still young, and its legacy will ultimately be much more than just a few early weeks of subpar performances. The network, Cooper points out, is creating new viewing days, and in a few years, Sunday night hockey could be a tradition of its own. Whatever learning curve Sportsnet experiences adapting to broadcasting all this hockey, it’s a better problem to have than the alternative.

 ***

On a September afternoon, Westhead sits at TSN headquarters in suburban Toronto as he and senior producer Paul Harrington discuss an upcoming video piece on the amount of income tax paid by NHL players. Westhead suggests focusing on three players: Phil Kessel of the Leafs; Dave Bolland, a former Leafs player who is now with the Florida Panthers; and Steven Stamkos, the Tampa Bay Lightning star from Markham, Ontario, who’s rumoured to be thinking about a move to Toronto in 2016 when he becomes a free agent. The premise is that Canadian taxes eat a lot of players’ salaries: Kessel is suffering, while Bolland pays no state income tax in Florida—will this affect Stamkos’s decision? Westhead leans back in his chair, legs stretched out, hands on his head, visualizing the piece. He wants to lead with Stamkos, the biggest star, but Harrington, the veteran producer, disagrees. “I’d put Stamkos last. He’s the meatier story, but he’s also theoretical, which works better with an actual example.”

Westhead mulls it over: “So, don’t take our word, ask Dave Bolland.” He laughs, sitting up and clapping his hands together, agreeing with Harrington. “This is completely different than newspapers,” he says. The rookie is learning how to mix good journalism with entertaining television. “It’s not for everybody—a piece on income tax in the NHL,” says Westhead. “Some people won’t want to see that every day on TSN, but it’s an important part of the business of hockey. If it’s helping drive decisions by free agents, then it’s worth people having a better understanding of how it works.” He returns to his desk, pounding out emails quickly on his laptop, coordinating a phone interview for a sports gambling story in a few minutes.

Westhead is slowly settling into his suit. “Television is really not easy,” he admits, but TSN is counting on him to master the technical aspect of it. He’s an essential piece in the effort to compete with Sportsnet.

Both networks are chasing many of the same stories, interviews and footage around the rink—and Sportsnet is just going to keep getting better at it. TSN needs Westhead to be out in the field, not just breaking stories, but setting a standard.

Photo courtesy PlainPicture