Neil Macdonald licks his lips and pats his hair gently into place. Sporting a slick navy suit, rose-coloured tie, and shiny brown shoes, he paces the room reciting his lines. Macdonald is taping intros and extros for CBC Newsworld’s Face to Face, a show that features interviews with passionate American politicos such as conservative queen Ann Coulter. When he’s ready for his standup, he crumples the script, stares into the camera through his black-rimmed glasses, and barks, “Let’s start.”

It’s March 25, 1999, and health reporters across the country are hard at work. “Some people can hardly contain their excitement,” gushes a front-page article in the Calgary Herald. They “may have an extra bounce in their step today,” it adds, “but it’s not just because spring arrived this week.” The event that floods newspapers across Canada with joyful articles is the arrival of Viagra. The release of Pfizer Inc.’s anti-impotence pill to the Canadian market sparks a deluge of one-liners, from The Toronto Star‘s “swell of eager customers” to the

Edmonton Journal‘s “pharmacists are expecting potent sales,” as well as the more straightforward description of “the tiny blue pill that can salvage a limp sex life,” in Halifax’s The Daily News. Clever or crass, journalists are caught up in the hype of the new drug, with articles appearing in almost every Canadian daily.

Almost six years later, the coverage continues to flow. In 2000, the National Post carried 26 articles with the word “Viagra” appearing in either the headline or first paragraph; in 2004, it published 33. The Star‘s archives show that since the drug’s release, it has appeared in more than 500 articles.

While Viagra received unusually high media attention because of its sex appeal, daily newspapers write about prescription drugs all the time – as they should. There has always been high reader interest in medication, and that interest is on the rise. Baby boomers are reaching an age when pharmaceuticals become their best friend. Canadians spent $15.9 billion on prescription drugs in 2003, averaging 11 prescriptions per Canadian – a 7.9 per cent increase over the previous year. Today, the ease of online shopping makes drug reporting all the more important. Anybody with an email account knows that offers for the “cheapest meds you’ll find” are not in short supply. Dozens of unsolicited offers per week are not only annoying junk mail, they can be dangerous. If we don’t need a prescription to get prescription drugs, we don’t need a doctor or medical history either. It is up to journalists to provide accurate, fair, and balanced drug information. Despite some success, there is still a lot of work to do in this area.

Studies that have examined the quality of newspaper drug reporting have found ailments. “Drugs in the News,” published in April 2003 by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), set out to determine whether we can rely on daily newspapers to provide us with “the good, the bad and the ugly about new drugs.” Researchers found the good, but the “bad and ugly” seem to be missing in action. Of 193 articles examined, every one mentioned the benefits of a particular drug, but 68 per cent did not mention any side effects. Only four per cent of the articles explained the conditions under which it is not safe to take a drug. In addition, they rarely discussed the financial conflicts of interests of drug-study sponsors or spokespeople.

Health journalists got some redemption in a study published last April in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Looking at reporting on drugs used to treat genetic disorders specifically, it found not only an overemphasis on benefits in newspaper articles, but that scientific journals – often journalists’ sources of information – were guilty of positive spin too. The study indicated “journalists may not always be the primary source of exaggerated claims.” Rather, it’s a combined effort of overenthusiastic scientific journals, researchers looking for recognition, and journalists’ desire for attention-grabbing stories.

Scientists are generally pleased with newspaper articles offering glowing reports, but doctors are more critical. A 1999 survey of 250 Canadian general practitioners found that only 34 per cent believe medical news is accurate. Their most common explanation for poor reporting is a journalist’s desire to grab the reader’s attention, followed by limited scientific knowledge and limited research time. Regardless of who is to blame, health journalists play a crucial role in disseminating drug information to the public. But they are producing too many unbalanced, deceptive articles. It’s frustrating because the problems are, for the most part, rectifiable.

Viagra is unusual because of the excessive amount of coverage it has received, but that makes it an exemplar of the kinds of problems facing journalists. Up to three million Canadian men suffer from erectile dysfunction, which is often a side effect of more serious conditions such as diabetes or hypertension. Damage to blood vessels caused by both of these conditions hinders the ability of blood to flow to the penis, so impotence becomes a symptom. Yet Viagra has become the target of countless jokes about enhanced male performance. When it comes to this drug, journalists have to deal with a lot of misconceptions, but it’s up to them to set the record straight.

Some problems with drug reporting are easy to spot, like a lack of balance. On the happy day six years ago when the blue pill entered the Canadian market, one of the Herald‘s front-page headlines read, “Viagra hits Calgary pharmacies today.” The majority of this 507-word article is devoted to praising “the hot-selling anti-impotence pill,” followed by a mere two sentences – five per cent of the article – warning men that Viagra is not for everyone. No side effects were mentioned. One month later, the Star ran an article about Viagra. The story cited several “minor side effects,” but left some out. The article mentioned facial flushing, minor headaches, and stomach upset, but ignored the possibility of temporary blue-tinted vision, prolonged erection, heart attack, stroke, or irregular heartbeat. People have a right to know all risks involved with taking a particular drug and journalists have an obligation to tell them. “If people are not informed about drug benefit and harm,” says Alan Cassels, the lead author of the CCPA study, “they will waste their money and the money of our health system for very little result.”

Being overly positive is one thing, but not mentioning the dangers of a drug is quite another. The potentially lethal combination of Viagra and drugs containing nitrates, commonly found in heart medications, is clearly explained in all Viagra patient information. The combination can cause blood pressure to drop to an unsafe level, leading to heart attack, stroke, or even death. But most Viagra articles minimize this danger, often mentioning it in the last quarter of the piece, when many people have stopped reading. In fact, two articles ran last March, one in The Vancouver Sun and one in the Herald, based on a study telling readers that Viagra is safe for men with congestive heart failure. While the opening paragraph of the study’s abstract explains that the men studied were carefully selected to ensure that they were not taking nitrates, the article in the Sundownplays this danger. After explaining that “many men with congestive heart failure can safely take Viagra,” the last line admits half of men with congestive heart failure still can’t take Viagra because their heart medications contain nitrates. The article in the Herald does not mention nitrate danger at all. A man taking medicine containing nitrates might read this article and order some Viagra online.

Other drug reporting issues aren’t as easy to spot – and may not be dangerous to readers – but certainly are misleading. When reporters base articles on studies funded by profit-driven pharmaceutical companies or rely on statements made by doctors being paid by these companies, readers ought to know. The studies may be accurate and the doctors sincere, but financial incentives can also colour results. Too often, journalists fail to inform readers of these conflicts.

Such was the case with Dr. Jack Barkin, who was quoted in four Star articles between 1998 and 2000, and one each in the Post, the Ottawa Citizen, the Charlottetown Guardian, and the Herald, among others. Barkin, identified as chief of urology at Humber River Regional Hospital in Ontario, praises Viagra in the articles, saying things like, “It’s a revolutionary drug,” and, “People have called it the Prozac for the penis.” It turns out that while Barkin is, in fact, the chief of urology, he also happens to be a consultant for Pfizer. Only the Heraldinformed readers of his financial tie to the drug company. Barkin might have been genuine, but if there is a potential conflict of interest, the reader ought to know about it.

Health journalists recognize the importance of finding independent sources, but it’s not always easy. “The difficulty,” says Rita Daly, who covered the health beat at the Star for five years and still writes numerous health-related articles as a feature writer, “is trying to determine who is independent, since so many medical researchers have financial ties to the industry.” Karen Palmer, a former health reporter at the same paper, agrees. “Sometimes I’ll phone an organization like Cancer Care Ontario and they’ll provide experts who are actually linked to similar research,” she says, “so it’s questionable whether they’re actually independent.” While readers don’t question the validity of doctors’ claims, journalists certainly should.

They should also question the validity of scientific studies that might be biased. On September 10, 2004, theStar published an article about a potential new use for Viagra. In a study published in the peer-reviewed medical journal Annals of Internal Medicine, researchers reported that mountain climbers who take Viagra are better able to tolerate hypoxia – a lack of oxygen – at high altitudes. The Star‘s article suggested the findings may have implications for patients with lung disease and pulmonary hypertension. As a person with chronic breathing problems, I read this article and considered popping a few of the little blue pills myself. But before everybody with lung problems goes filling up on Viagra, there is something people ought to know – the study was partially funded by a research grant from Pfizer. In the journal, the grant is clearly identified as a potential financial conflict of interest, but not in the Star.

Most journalists are wary of studies like this. Elaine Carey, medical reporter for the Star, says, “I always ask the researchers whether they have been funded by the drug company, and I think most good reporters do.” The article in question, though, came without a byline and was attributed to the Los Angeles Times. In this case, the blame must fall to the editors who, likely pressed for time, let the article through. “We do occasionally run less objective stuff from the AP wire,” says Carey, “and we’re constantly trying to educate the foreign desk about how to assess it.” While the findings of the study may still be valid, people should be able to consider the company’s influence before taking Viagra to perk up their lungs.

But journalists are not scientists. When the information upon which they base their stories is simply false, it’s not always their fault. “It’s important to double-check anything contained in a press release, because sometimes they’re wrong or just subtly incorrect,” says Palmer. She once received a news release bragging about findings that would have implications for Alzheimer’s patients. Wisely, she spoke to the researcher, who told her the findings had no bearing on Alzheimer’s at all. Sharon Kirkey, health reporter for CanWest News Service, has also had a bad experience with inaccurate information. For her, it resulted in published articles containing false news. In October, Kirkey (and many other journalists) wrote about research conducted by a team of scientists at Wayne State University and presented at the annual meeting of the respected American Society for Reproductive Medicine. Based on data from the Women’s Health Initiative, the scientists found that women who take birth control pills are significantly less likely to develop cardiovascular disease. Naturally, it was big news. Two months later, WHI released a statement saying that both the study design and data interpretation were flawed. There was no evidence to suggest that using the pill lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease. Kirkey wrote another story to explain the mistake. “I’m not a scientist,” she says. “I couldn’t review their data for accuracy.” Although there isn’t much Kirkey could have done to avoid the error, she admits: “One thing I would have done differently was to note the ‘recall bias,’ meaning the study relied on women to remember what they had done years earlier.” The researchers should have recognized that too.

On the surface, it’s hard to comprehend why reporters have such difficulty covering health. But taking a closer look into the world of studies, statistics, and scientific method, the pitfalls become understandable. Health reporters need a special set of scientific skills that are not taught at most journalism schools. It’s important for journalists to be able to assess the quality of drug studies before deciding to report on them. A study that looks at 100 people, for example, holds much less water than one that examines 1,000. And it is easy to get lost in technical jargon. There’s a big difference between a double-blind, placebo-controlled study and a study with no blinding. In the first, neither the researchers nor the patients know which group is on the drug and which is on the placebo, limiting biases; in the second, everybody knows who is taking what, which leads to expectations.

Numbers can be confusing too. Let’s say a study looks at the effect of a certain drug on the risk of having a heart attack. Out of 100 patients studied, two people on a placebo (two per cent) had heart attacks and one person on the drug (one per cent) had a heart attack. There are two ways to interpret these findings. In absolute terms, there is a one per cent reduction in the risk (two minus one). But in relative terms, the risk is cut in half (one person versus two people). A press release is likely to report the latter. A 50 per cent reduction in risk is a far more impressive statistic, but it’s misleading. It is a reporter’s responsibility to understand whether it’s a relative or absolute risk being reported and, in turn, explain the numbers to readers.

Understanding the information is only half the battle. Fighting corporate influences is the other half. Newsrooms are inundated with press releases from drug companies every day. These companies – and the public relations firms that represent them – are profit-driven organizations. They do everything they can to promote the sale of their drugs, including obscuring negative study results. “Drug company research is proprietary, and they actively prevent researchers from releasing information about their drugs,” says James Winter, professor of communication studies at the University of Windsor and author of Lies the Media Tell Us, a book about misinformation in the media. “We read the good news and the bad news is kept from us.” Unbiased information is hard to find, and the urge to use the prepackaged information provided by drug companies can be strong, particularly when a deadline looms. With financial interests at play, press releases are usually upbeat and exciting- an appealing prospect for journalists looking for a quick story. Journalists must be vigilant to avoid being spun by PR. When asked what is the main problem with health reporting today, Palmer says it’s sensationalism. “Everyone wants a cure, including our editors,” she says. “Sometimes it’s easy – but not technically accurate – to see a small step in science as a big, big headline.”

The big buzz these days is not Viagra, but the tale of two widely prescribed arthritis drugs. Merck & Co, Inc. yanked Vioxx – Canada’s 10th most-prescribed drug in 2003 – off the market in September 2004 after researchers found it greatly increased the risk of cardiovascular problems. Pfizer’s blockbuster seller, Celebrex, remains in limbo after similar results were found. It has outsold Viagra to become Canada’s top-selling new drug, and hasn’t been withdrawn. However, the safety of Celebrex is under review. Both drugs fall into the category of a COX-2 inhibitor – a relatively new class of drug that is said to target pain and inflammation without producing the stomach problems associated with other forms of treatment.

In retrospect, following the worldwide withdrawal of Vioxx, it would be easy to go back and criticize the news coverage. After all, this widely used drug turns out to have been controversial all along, with numerous studies expressing concern about increased cardiovascular risk. But there isn’t much to criticize – and that’s part of the problem. The Vioxx fiasco is a perfect example of what happens when a drug isn’t covered sufficiently or critically enough. Unlike erectile dysfunction, arthritic pain isn’t as entertaining for journalists, so they don’t rush to cover it. In each of the six years it was on the market, Vioxx was featured in fewer articles than Viagra – despite the troubling studies about the drug’s safety.

On the upside, most of the Vioxx articles that were published drew attention to the scattered reports of dangers. But it wasn’t until the actual recall – a dramatic event – that it repeatedly made the front page. Just four months before the recall, a Canadian study showed that people taking Vioxx were 80 per cent more likely to be put in hospital for heart failure than those not on the drug. This surprising statistic was only mentioned in the Star, the Post, The Windsor Star, and the Herald. The massive recall, however, attracted the attention of almost every Canadian newspaper. Vioxx has taught us a lesson: it isn’t only the quality of drug stories that matters, but also the quantity.

With Celebrex, on the other hand, there was plenty of coverage to criticize. Although there were exceptions, the media generally overlooked numerous reported safety concerns and printed a large number of positive articles endorsing the drug. After a study found increased risk of developing stomach ulcers associated with Celebrex, Health Canada issued a warning in May 2002, stating that the drug offered no gastrointestinal advantages over other medications. Newspapers barely covered this warning.

On December 17, 2004, however, another warning issued by Pfizer – about a significant increase in cardiovascular risk – was not overlooked. Although the recent warning was arguably not more serious than earlier concerns, it snared journalists’ attention. Why? With the withdrawal of Vioxx fresh in the minds of readers, this warning became more than a warning – it became news. Journalists paid attention. Had it happened several months earlier, Celebrex likely wouldn’t have made headlines.

There are two schools of thought on how to fix what ails drug reporting. One says good old-fashioned hard work will do the trick, while the other says specialized training is the ticket. Some firmly believe that journalists covering health cannot do a good job without training. Melinda Voss is the co-founder of the Association of Health Care Journalists, an American organization dedicated to improving the quality of health reporting. In an article published in the spring 2003 issue of Nieman Reports, a quarterly journalism review magazine from Harvard University, Voss explains that health journalists require scientific knowledge and skills that aren’t easily acquired on the job. She says the solution for sloppy reporting includes improving the training process for health reporters through systematic health education. The medical/science journalism course offered at the University of Western Ontario teaches students which sources to approach and how to interpret study results.

Most of the journalists interviewed for this article have not had any special training. Generally, they learn from experience. “You might say I’ve been training on the job,” says Daly. “I had no medical training, but the learning curve is steep,” says Dan Arsenault, health reporter for Halifax’s The Chronicle-Herald until May 2004. “Trust me, if you put your name on a story day after day, you quickly pick up on things.”

Even without training, it’s easy to see there are problems with drug coverage. Sure, some background knowledge would help, but it doesn’t take a scientist to ask the right questions. Healthy skepticism is one tool many reporters and health experts say is needed. Journalists must work hard to fight the urge to write dramatic “breakthrough” stories that bury negatives. They must find sources with no financial interests. And they must let readers know when information might be biased.

Another essential tool is having good interview skills. Many health journalists identify good questioning as a crucial part of the job. Who funded this study? How many patients were in the trial? Are these relative or absolute risks? When Palmer was on the health beat, she kept a list taped to her computer of seven questions to consider when writing a medical story.

Health journalists seem to know the ropes, though they don’t always use them to tie up the loose ends in their stories. General reporters, however, lack the necessary skills. For them, there are resources newsrooms should supply. The AHCJ, for example, offers a 220-page resource guide for journalists covering health. It also runs conferences on health reporting, as does the Canadian Science Writers’ Association.

Recent developments should help health reporters produce unbiased drug articles. In September, members of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors announced a new policy to foster openness in study results. As of July 1, 2005, in order for studies to be considered for publication in any of the 11 members’ journals, including the Canadian Medical Association Journal, studies must be publicly registered before they begin. That way, a company can’t decide not to register and publish studies with negative findings. An editorial published online by all members of the committee says, “Honest reporting begins with revealing the existence of all clinical studies, even those that reflect unfavourably on a research sponsor’s product.” With this change, journalists will have access to all drug trial results, both good and bad. Similarly, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Canada’s primary funding agency, announced this past summer that it, too, will require all CIHR-funded clinical trials to be publicly registered.

“Drugs in the News” co-author Alan Cassels is confident that journalists can do a better job. “There are some great drug stories out there, and people need to hear about them,” he says. “Journalists must do their work: dig for the details and talk to people who have no conflicts of interest – people who can give real perspective on a drug.”

Almost six years after its Canadian debut, Viagra is back in the headlines. On January 24, 2005, journalists describe a new potential benefit of the pill in treating enlarged hearts. As many as nine newspapers across the country run versions of a CanWest reporter’s article, all beginning the same way: “After propping up the flagging morale of millions of men in the bedroom, Viagra could tackle a fatal problem above the belt.”

Sure, the drug’s effect on enlarged hearts has only been tested on mice and has no known effect on humans, but the fact is, a lead like this is too hard for editors to resist. The Montreal Gazette put it on the front page.

Case study. Subject: Report on Business magazine, The Globe and Mail‘s almost monthly business insert (published 11 times a year). Business challenge: competing for readers against a host of other sources of financial information. Question: can a magazine stay comfy with Bay Street while reporting – in an entertaining yet critical way – on its world, leaders, and conduct?

It’s a legitimate question, but Laas Turnbull, the editor of ROB, is going to hate this story. He’d sooner wage war against rival National Post Business (NPB) or biweekly Canadian Business (CB) on the ad sales street than be in the pages of the Ryerson Review of Journalism. He’d rather shun the limelight altogether (he once refused a “Lunch With” interview with Jan Wong, telling her, “I don’t want to look like some paranoid little freak”). And he’ll really detest this story because of the way it’s packaged: it’s not, after all, a gripping narrative with a character at its centre, as he would expect of a story in ROB.

Instead, it’s a case study (see Turnbull stifling a yawn), the kind of thing people read in business school, or in NPB every month. And the last thing Turnbull wants is for anyone to mention the two magazines in the same breath. He’s set on “positioning” (one of his favourite words) ROB in a league of its own. As he told readers in a March 2003 editorial: “I’m no writer. If anything, I’m a marketer, and the magazine is, in many ways, a product like any other. It requires strategic planning, a clearly defined target audience, long-term vision and slick, focused promotion. More than anything, it must stand above its competition.”

According to its advertising kit, ROB is “written by experts… for the people in power at Canada’s top corporations. It’s pro-business, pro-Canada, pro-reader.” Turnbull claims his book has “an absolute lock on bigwigs in the business” (although it’s not clear if he’s talking about readers, story subjects, or both). Meanwhile, NPB promises to “[delve] into the most important news, trends, ideas, and ways of doing things that are constantly changing our lives.” Bill Shields, the editor of Masthead, which covers the magazine industry, calls the ROB-NPB fight “one of the great rivalries in Canadian publishing.”

But some readers, at least, can’t tell the difference between the two books. “I get them mixed up,” admits Françoise Lyon, former editor of a business publication and now the president of the Montreal chapter of the Quebec Business Women’s Network Association. That makes her Laas Turnbull’s worst nightmare.

The Problem

Complicated product, tired marketing: “Power failure: how did things go so wrong for Ron Osborne at OPG?” “What the strong dollar means for you.” “Victor Victorious? If Victor Li closes on Air Canada, he can emerge from the shadow….” Headlines like these (selected from 2004 issues of NPB, CB, and ROB respectively) mark the dull and predictable content often associated with business press. It’s also indicative of the category’s tone – Turnbull’s predecessor, Douglas Goold, proudly says he produced a “serious” magazine.

ROB traces its roots to the “Top 1000,” a chart-heavy ranking of the largest publicly traded companies in Canada by profit, which debuted as a stand-alone in 1984, a year before the magazine was born. It’s still “our bread and butter,” says Turnbull. When I asked art director Domenic Macri how he’d freshen up this staple for its 20th anniversary, he laughed. “I don’t know. The ones and the zeros have been done to death.” (ROBeventually settled for a white cover with “one thousand” in plain black type.)

If reporting complex financial details with pizzazz isn’t easy, neither is the underlying job of covering biotechnology one month and mining the next. “You have to know the right questions to ask,” says Dawn Chafe, editor of Atlantic Business Magazine. “And too many of us don’t.”

Small market, limited access: Eric Reguly, an ROB columnist, says Bay Street is like a little club, making it tough to cover. “There are 10 guys who run the business community in Toronto,” he says. “It’s such a small community that everyone’s afraid of being critical of the guy down the street, ’cause who knows? Next week you might have to buy that guy down the street, or sell to him, or do a deal with him.” Even if a reporter gains access to executives, businesses still try to exert control. “You have investor-relations and PR people tagging along every single minute you’re with somebody,” says Joe Chidley, editor of CB. That magazine actually sells 83,500 copies per issue, rather than giving them away. It also opted out of the monthly magazine war in 1997 by publishing biweekly, setting its sights on breaking news, and launching editorial projects based on number crunching.

ROB contributor Konrad Yakabuski says CEOs are especially wary of reporters. “I think they would take the point of view that ‘they’re all a bunch of raging communists in the business press who … are out to get us,'” he says. BMO Nesbitt Burns chief economist Sherry Cooper has been quoted in the magazine itself as calling a ROB cover photo “the kiss of death” in business.

Busy readers, stiff competition: by definition, a business magazine’s target audience has little time to read. “The pace of business information has picked up a lot,” says Christopher Waddell, Carty Chair in Business and Financial Journalism at Carleton University, who generally passes up monthly magazines for more immediate sources: newswires, websites, and the daily paper.

I got a small taste of this time-is-money world when I accosted business types at the Schulich Executive Education Centre and at a meeting of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives,seeking comments on their magazine preferences. I heard “Sorry, I’m busy” a lot, and got one partial quote from a CEO who muttered that ROB could be “less sensational” before his cellphone rang and he vanished. Judy Smiley, president of the Canadian Association of Women Executives and Entrepreneurs, told me that juggling a career and motherhood leaves her with a two-foot-high reading stack that she breaks into when she can.

The latest ROB is somewhere in that stack, but its editor surely wants to do better than that.

The Boss

The latest occupant of ROB‘s editor’s chair often talks about old white guys in suits, and has vowed to change all that. In two years’ worth of covers, three issues featured women and one showed Michael Lee-Chin, a self-made billionaire from Jamaica.At 38, Turnbull himself shows boyish freckles and an athletic frame. He won a soccer scholarship to Simon Fraser University before he moved back to Toronto in 1990, and dropped out of Ryerson University’s journalism program. He says he was perceived early on as a “young punk,” and that in 1993, he was asked to leave a job at Canadian Airlines’ in-flight magazine for defending a writer who made fun of the city of Sudbury. Ross Laver, who worked with Turnbull at Maclean’s in the early 1990s, remembers the then copy editor aspiring to be editor-in-chief: “He was more ambitious than most, and more importantly, he wasn’t afraid to say it.” (Turnbull now admits setting his sights on a publisher’s job.)

After a stint at Toronto Life, Turnbull joined ROB, where he helped create a brash 1998 redesign that earned harsh reviews for former editor Patricia Best. He became editor-in-chief of Shift later that year and carried the digital-culture book ambitiously – but unsuccessfully – into the U.S. market. Turnbull worked briefly at thePost‘s magazine and at CBbefore his appointment as ROB editor in September 2002.The publication had scrapped its old logo, “R.O.B.,” by the time Turnbull was on the masthead and introduced his blueprint for success, namely, taking “the visual and editorial idiom of a general interest magazine and imposing it on a business title.”

The Strategy

Play up the personalities: “We’ve gotta own the big business profile,” Turnbull tells his staff at ROB. He counts on his readers, like any other audience, to be captivated by epic tales of brave attempts, grand successes, heartbreaking failures, and glimpses of hidden worlds. A rare profile of the Bank of Canada’s governor took them to David Dodge’s farm and revealed that he drove a Chevy Lumina for years and used less than $100 of his generous annual expense account at a previous job. A 6,000-word Yakabuski piece about former Bombardier CEO Paul Tellier captured the tension between him and chairman Laurent Beaudoin, three months before Tellier quit. And when Roland Keiper, a former proprietary trader who sued RBC Dominion for wrongful dismissal, refused to be interviewed, Turnbull sent senior writer John Daly slogging through divorce records to get details of the spending habits of “The Smartest Guy on Bay Street.” Meanwhile, a photographer staked out Keiper’s home, paparazzi style. “It was a great story,” chuckles Turnbull.

The competition, NPB, is not immune to featuring the stars of business and entertainment (witness “Inside Avril’s Pants,” a story on Parasuco’s attempt to woo Avril Lavigne into their clothing), but is just as apt to feature a Hells Angel on the cover (for a story on the bikers’ lock-hold on Canadian ports) or a bright red lipstick (for Shoppers Drug Mart’s “facelift” to an upscale beauty boutique).The Post‘s target magazine reader seems to skew middle-class, judging by the regular offerings on family finance and the “101” feature, which translates economic jargon into plain English. (Brian Banks, NPB‘s editor since 2004, declined to tell me anything specific, on the record, about his own editorial vision.) But Turnbull seems as unapologetic for his elite focus as for an editorial approach that’s a lot closer to People and Vanity Fair than the Harvard Business Review. “These guys are our celebrities,” he says of his cover subjects. “They’re the equivalent of Jennifer Lopez or Britney Spears.”

Embrace the unexpected: “Readers don’t just want to read rah-rah blow-job stuff on the business community,” says Reguly. Last April, after CIBC’s disastrous U.S. expansion venture crumbled, Reguly’s column asked why the bank’s CEO, John Hunkin, hadn’t been fired. Turnbull ran the column under a shock-jock headline: “Hit the Road, Hunkin.” But other ROB surprises have come in more benign forms: a December 2002 profile of fallen tycoon Garth Drabinsky portrayed the former Livent boss as a philanthropic showman, and the cover line read, “Garth Vader: If that’s how you see him, you’ll hate this story.” Last year saw the advent of “Off the Clock,” a regular column that features those “bigwigs” living life outside of the office – fly-fishing or Harley-tripping.

One of Turnbull’s favourite articles travelled far from corporate headquarters: writer Susan Bourette took a job at Maple Leaf Foods’ hog-processing plant in Brandon, Manitoba, and wrote a gut-churning account of the bloody ordeal. It earned ROB a National Magazine Award for investigative journalism.

Package everything: Turnbull’s anti-staleness recipe – his promise of “a good time” for readers, as Yakabuski put it – comes down to a word that people in Canada’s magazine business automatically associate with Turnbull: packaging. In part, it’s about assigning timely, sharply angled stories on themes with a bit of sizzle: the money dramas of divorce law; the romance between Quebecor CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau and his partner, Julie Snyder. It’s also about coming up with unique visual effects: paper airplanes “flying” through the pages of the Bombardier story, or a mock tombstone for a piece about a troubled Canadian funeral-home consolidator.

Another bold move was March 2004’s Corporate Social Responsibility survey, which scored major companies by their charity donations, environmental policies, employee relations, and more. (Alcan topped the mining category for using a high ratio of consumer-recycled aluminum.) But most obvious of all, Turnbull’s ROB is “packaged” inside grabby, sometimes zany, covers. A special issue on ruthless bosses featured nine stern men in black suits on a gatefold cover with the title, “The Toughest SOBs in Business.” For a History of Business special edition: a wax-museum display called the “Hall of Fame (and Shame).” A nude, retired banker smoked a cigar as he kicked up his feet at a boardroom table for August 2003’s “Get a Life” issue, which spotlighted vacation spots, best barbecues, and summer fashions.And Justice James Farley, who saved Air Canada from financial collapse, got this cover line: “When it comes to tough talk, he’s the Judge Judy of Bay Street.”

And why not? Chidley, of CB, says presentation is “half of the battle” in his business: “Don’t be cute and don’t be coy, tell people what they’re getting, shove it in their face.” But Turnbull knows he’s pushing the envelope with his readers. “You’re only on the earth once,” he says. “You have to be willing to fail…. The question is, how far can you go in terms of format and the packaging and even the storytelling, keeping people on their toes but not putting them off?” So far, the answer’s far from clear.

The Results

For some ROB readers, Turnbull’s packaging has threatened the magazine’s credibility. Take that “Toughest SOB” issue: a bold move, but Shields questions the substance behind the sell. “I can remember reading at least one, maybe two of those guys; there was nothing son-of-bitchy about them. Why let a couple of nice guys ruin a nice coverline, right?” Along the same lines of journalistic under-delivery, readers have taken issue with the Drabinsky story (a “little piece of fluff,” said one letter to the editor) and the Corporate Social Responsibility survey (“marshmallowy” and a “marketing gimmick,” sniffs Susan Reisler, a former business journalist with CBC Television, who believes surveys of this kind make corporations feel undeservedly good).

Apparently, the juries at last year’s National Magazine Awards took a more positive view. Turnbull’s writers and editors swept the business category and collected 17 nominations in all – much more than CB and NPBcombined.

But the numbers that matter are readership measures and their fruits – ad sales. There, Turnbull’s success is harder to gauge, because of the peculiarities of a business that gives away its product for free. Print Measurement Bureau figures show a 52 per cent rise in ROB readership, which is gaining on NPB‘s lead. As the former editor of the Post mag, Tony Keller, told me: “I don’t think anybody in the entire industry ever believes readership surveys are 100 per cent accurate.” But advertisers do pay attention, and ROB‘s ad sales – the magazine’s lifeblood- have been draining away steadily (from 844 pages sold in 2000 to 568 pages in 2004), while NPB has seen a slow rise (from 501 to 575). Such comparisons leave ROB publisher Phillip Crawley red-faced with exasperation: unlike the Globe, he told me, the Post sells its ads for deep discounts, “chasing cheap business which really doesn’t pay for itself.” By revenue, ROB is making gains, Crawley insists: he flashed a clear plastic folder and said the chart within proved his point, but he wouldn’t disclose the numbers. And my repeated calls to the Post‘s advertising department were not returned.

So, for all his marketing glitz, how is Turnbull really doing? If he ran a public company, you’d assess his performance by share price. If readers paid for his magazine, you’d look to sales. As things are, circulation means little, because the business inserts’ fight is a tiny piece of their parent papers’ war. As Shields says, “It would be interesting to see these two free magazines do battle in a new theatre – the newsstand.” Now that, he says, “would really utilize Laas’s packaging skills.”

I’m standing at rec-eption in The Drake Hotel, a posh Toronto haunt for artists, authors, and alternative scenesters, waiting for Paul Wells. He’s flown in from Ottawa to hear Branford Marsalis. The show was “absurdly sold out,” he said in the email, but the first set was an industry showcase, so he might have some pull. The Maclean’s back-page columnist suggested I meet him at his hotel around 5:30 and then we could catch a cab to the Top O’ the Senator, where the quartet is performing. The receptionist lets me use the house phone, and moments later a five-foot-nine man in a black suit appears at the top of the main stairs, adjusting his cuffs. “Amber!” he booms, pausing to point at me.

It’s a crisp and sunny Sunday afternoon and I’m standing inside the sparse lobby at the University of Toronto’s Innis College. I’m looking for Mary Lou Finlay in a crowd of about 30 people. I don’t see the face I’ve memorized from a small, frosted picture on CBC’s website. But I do hear a familiar voice – that low and throaty voice – booming in the hall. Eventually, Finlay materializes from behind a large brick column. With her grey hair set in curls and wire-rimmed glasses resting on her nose, she looks nothing like her website picture. But she sounds everything like the voice of As It Happens, the CBC current-affairs radio program she’s hosted for the past seven-and-a-half years.

I first meet Nick Pron outside the police tribunal room at Toronto Police Headquarters. He is dressed in black and his six-foot-seven frame towers above me. He has intense green eyes and buzzed silver hair and he smiles an easy smile. We introduce ourselves and he tells me to turn off my cellphone, joking, “to save both of us the embarrassment.” He swings open the courtroom door and slides into a chair in the middle of the back row, whispering “good mornings” to the arriving journalists.

To Pron’s right sit the people from Professional Standards, the police department responsible for investigating internal complaints against officers, including a prosecutor named George Cowley, for whom Pron testified when Cowley himself faced the tribunal in the early 1990s. (Cowley was being investigated for failing to stop the press from photographing a prisoner, but was later acquitted. Pron had testified that Cowley hadn’t stood a chance against himself and two other reporters.) To Pron’s left sits the family of Mike McCormack, a Toronto police officer facing charges under the Police Services Act for his alleged connections to a shady car dealer. Having covered the police beat since McCormack’s father, William, was chief, Pron knows the family well.

“Very rarely does a reporter know both the prosecutor and the defendant,” The Toronto Star crime reporter admits. “I just feel awkward because, as a journalist, I’m not supposed to care one way or another.” He doesn’t elaborate, but he emails me the next day, writing, “I’m flattered you want to write about me and I probably said way more than I should have said.” I infer that the flattery of being profiled overrode his normal reserve. He forgot I had the power to make public his private vulnerabilities. He forgot that we had our roles – that I was the journalist and he the subject.

It wouldn’t be the last time. As we talk, the 56-year-old reporter often drifts from passive subject into the role of storyteller, entertainer, and mentor. After I riled up the Star‘s senior staff by suggesting Pron was passed over on a promotion to investigative reporter over a decade ago (as one of Pron’s coworkers implied), Pron reassures me by saying, “Hey, you don’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.” Pron is open, rambling, and often confessional with me, revealing more about himself in five minutes than the other crime reporters I interview reveal in an hour. It’s this congenial side of Pron I see most often. While his height gives him an intimidating presence, he works at making people comfortable. He slouches forward when he sits and he smiles often. He greets people with a joke and chuckles at their response. He is easygoing and straightforward, the kind of person the cops like to play pranks on – and drink beer with.

But over the next few months, I catch a different glint in Pron’s eye. He gets edgy, defensive, and he starts to backpedal. He wonders if my article might accuse him of being too close to the cops. He’s suddenly unsure I’ll treat the stories he’s told me with the appropriate sensitivity. He wants to know what the police officers I interview say about him – “Did he say what side he thought I was on, whether I was pro-police or anti-police?” He wants to know what his competitors are saying – “See, they’re not even talking to you. They’re going to think I’ve got a screw loose for talking to you.”

Pron is not good at toeing the line, which is especially troublesome for someone who has conservative views on crime and punishment and writes for a small-l liberal paper. While he’s adjusted to the stiff and sombre air of the courts after covering the police beat for almost 20 years, he hasn’t completely shaken the idea that crime reporting is for the tough and brazen – for those with a penchant for booze and pranks, a strong stomach for blood, and a belief that the rules don’t always apply to them. Perhaps it is this old-school style that gives Pron his confident charm, a swagger so convincing many don’t realize that the stress of juggling both office and police politics gets to him. As someone who has partied with many of the police officers he’s reporting on, Pron faces critics both in newsrooms for being pro-police and at police headquarters for reporting too negatively. These days, getting the story isn’t as easy, or as fun, as it once was.

Born to working-class parents in Winnipeg, Pron got his first hint of the reporter’s life from his mother, who worked as a cleaning lady at the now-defunct Tribune. “Her stories of the newsroom made me think when I was growing up, ‘Wow, what a neat job – the drinking, the fighting, the arguing, the boozing,'” Pron says. Halfway through his master’s in sociology at the University of Manitoba, Pron decided to enroll in Ryerson University’s graduate journalism program. In his first year at Ryerson, Pron and another classmate had an opportunity to go to New York to cover a United Nations meeting. Realizing it would take two or three days to secure press credentials, Pron decided to instead write about walking through Central Park at night, a dangerous endeavour in 1975, when gang and drug crime were rampant. “I wasn’t going to take a weapon, but as I walked by Lasker Pool I picked up a stick and slid it up my sleeve,” he wrote. “To make myself look tougher I dabbed some mud on my face and pulled up my collar.” The story ran in the centrefold of theRyersonian, and Pron thinks it helped him land a job at the Star after his first year. “The other student and I got into a fight at a party,” laughs Pron. “He accused me of thinking I was Hemingway.”

The glory was short-lived because the Star soon placed Pron on the crime beat, then considered “the lowest of the low.” At the time, the Star only had a few scanners, and Pron’s editor often asked him why he had missed a story the more crime-centric Sun had run. Pron kept telling his editor heneeded more scanners to compete. The desk he shared with another reporter was soon so noisy that walls were built around it, leading to the establishment of the “radio room” that’s now infamous among generations of interns. Pron went on to cover Toronto’s cocaine busts in the 1980s and cowrote a book with Star reporter Kevin Donovan on “The Body-Parts Killer,” Rui-Wei Pan, who scattered his girlfriend’s body parts along a highway west of Kingston.

Copies of that book, Crime Story, sit on the shelves in Pron’s cubicle beside copies of his contentious second book, Lethal Marriage, which quotes, verbatim, much of the video transcripts of the Bernardo/ Homolka murder trials. “The public has the right to know all the gruesome aspects of this case before there’s any debate on whether Bernardo should ever be released,” Pron writes in his author’s note. Those gruesome aspects include the possibility that a victim was “aroused by the deft tongue movements of her more experienced captor,” as well as Bernardo’s macabre comments on the lightness of another victim’s decapitated head. When I ask Pron how he responds to the criticisms that his book went too far, he says, “I just wrote what came out in court.” Still, of the three major accounts of the Bernardo murder trials, which also include Deadly Innocence by Alan Cairns and Scott Burnside, and Invisible Darkness by Stephen Williams, Pron’s was the only one to be removed from the St. Catharines public library after appeals from the mother of one of the victims and the Niagara Regional Police. Though the book was a bestseller, Pron tells me he never wanted to write it, but his publisher begged him to. It’s perplexing, then, to see the book displayed in front of him.

The rest of the décor is equally confusing, though I assume it serves as some kind of motivation. Pron has hung pictures of blood-splattered crime scenes and Colombian drug lords, Paul Bernardo’s head shot, and a twisted prayer from serial killer Christian Magee. Perhaps the most surprising accessory is a sign that reads, “The secret to success is sincerity. Once you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” The adage seems incongruous with the adrenalin-pumping, bravado-rousing world Pron presented to my class four years ago during a guest lecture on crime reporting. But then, it might serve as a reminder that this isn’t the world portrayed in his favourite cop movie, L.A. Confidential. Pron still must contend with Star politics.

It’s a difficult task for someone who’s given to shooting his mouth off in defensive rages. Earlier this year, it took all of Pron’s social graces not to tell off Williams while covering his trial. (Williams pled guilty for violating a court order after publishing names of Bernardo’s rape victims on a website.) During a media scrum before the trial, Williams had suggested he’d been singled out by the police because his book was the one most critical of their investigation. “Nick, you published three banned names in your book,” Williams said. Caught off guard and infuriated by the comment, Pron played it cool as the attention of the other journalists turned to him: “Whoops,” he smiled. Later, Pron told me he could have started an argument with Williams, but chose not to berate him on his day in court (after all, the police investigation into Lethal Marriage several years ago concluded Pron didn’t break the publication ban). Still, just as I start to think Pron’s belligerence is softening, he emails to say he’s contemplating suing Williams for defamation – not for money (“They don’t have any and I don’t want their money”), but for a public apology.

Pron has a quick temper. When a juror from the Bernardo trial went on a radio show and denounced him as a pervert for writing his book, Pron asked another juror to pass along the following message: “What you said is slander. If you pull something like that again, I’ll sue you. I’ll take your house; I’ll take your car; I’ll take the toy from your kid’s hands.” Pron reiterates, “The thing that really upset me was she said that I must have really enjoyed writing that book. I didn’t even want to write the fucking thing.”

Still, Pron says, “Bernardo changed everything.” The Star‘s Tracey Tyler hasn’t talked to Pron since he covered the Bernardo case, even though she shares the tiny Toronto courtroom office with him. Pron recalls one argument between the two resulting in him kicking a newsroom chair a few feet in the air. “It’s probably my fault; I probably overreacted,” Pron says now. Pron also doesn’t speak with the Sun‘s Cairns, who was critical of Lethal Marriage. Since both Cairns and Tyler refuse to speak to me, I can only guess that after each had criticized Pron, he’d responded with a vengeance.

While Pron has incensed his share of reporters, he’s fared better among the police, where the political rules are more clear-cut. Early on in his career, Pron was warned by a senior police officer, “You only get one chance to fuck me over.” Pron knew that if he leaked confidential information about an investigation or disclosed his source, he would never get an interview with that police officer – nor most of the cops who work with that police officer – again. Pron gained the trust of some officers early on when he declined to print a bogus story the police had fed him during a night out drinking. “After that, I was ‘good people,'” Pron laughs. Later on, Pron would visit the cops at their office after his shift, sometimes taking the gift of a laminated copy of a story he’d written about them.

Because police feel they can trust him, Pron is often given more information than other journalists, though he can report little of it. He tells me that once, while drinking with the cops, he found out that a suicide attempt he had written about a few months earlier had actually been a couple of cops threatening to push a thief off a rooftop. When I ask him why he didn’t run the real story, he says simply, “I’d be screwed. No one would talk to me.”

Back “before Mothers Against Drunk Driving,” as Pron puts it, alcohol consumption was a common way for cops to unwind after work, and Pron was one of the few reporters cops would trust to drink with them. A common hangout was the Monarch Tavern, a second-floor dive hidden in a residential neighbourhood west of downtown Toronto. Although Pron hasn’t been to the Monarch in years, a police officer friend of his recently invited him there for lunch and Pron agrees to let me come along. In keeping with tradition, Pron buys everyone hot veal sandwiches from the separately owned deli below and takes them upstairs to the pub.

“Oh God, it’s so bright in here,” Pron moans when he reaches the top of the staircase and notices the blinds that used to cover every window are gone. “I think they cleaned the carpets too! God, I hate it,” Pron says. He’s equally dismayed when he finds out another old police watering hole is now an oyster bar.

Pron and his friend tell me the Monarch used to be filled with Toronto cops, and that due to restrictions in Ontario’s old liquor laws, women were not allowed to drink in the Monarch’s upstairs room. “I was kind of worried. I thought maybe they still didn’t allow broads up here,” Pron laughs. Over draft beer, Pron and the police officer talk almost in code, throwing out names and switching from one topic to another without warning, chuckling at inside jokes while I smile warily. At one point in the conversation, Pron tells the officer that he doesn’t think he’ll be covering any more police corruption cases, and his tone suggests the decision wasn’t his own.

When I call John Ferri, Pron’s editor, to ask if Pron had indeed been pulled off corruption trials, I’m told, “It’s not that we’re taking him off the corruption cases, it’s that we’re not putting him on them.” Ferri explained that the Star decided to only have one reporter on the major corruption trials, and that he wanted to keep Pron on other important criminal cases, like murder trials. He adds that although Pron covered McCormack’s corruption charge, it wasn’t considered criminal, and was held in the police tribunal room rather than in a courtroom. The more serious corruption trials, a slew of which will go through the criminal courts in 2005, hadn’t yet begun at the time of our interview. So while Pron won’t be covering the upcoming criminal corruption trials, it’s not as though he had covered them in the first place, Ferri says.

That’s not how Pron sees it. Although the trials haven’t started yet, Pron did report on many of these major corruption cases when charges were initially laid last year, and thought he’d be a shoo-in for the trials. So when I ask him what he thinks of the Star‘s decision to have John Duncanson cover all of the trials, he scowls and turns away: “No comment.”

Pron won’t admit it outright, but I suspect the Star‘s decision played a part in his month-long stress leave at the end of 2004. Though I press him on the subject, Pron’s explanations for the leave remain vague: “All I can tell you is that I’m on sick leave”; “You can just say one too many murder trials sent me over the edge”; “Twenty-five years of crime writing takes its toll on a person.” Pron’s uncharacteristic tight-lipped behaviour isn’t the only reason I suspect politics are at play. In unrelated conversations, Pron’s admitted he’s “not good at politics,” and Donovan told me,”The Star hasn’t treated Pron as well as they should have. The Star doesn’t like personalities.”

The decision to assign Duncanson, rather than Pron, to the corruption trials might well have more to do with appearances than anything else. Pron’s interviewing tactics, though effective, are not always by the book. He interviews cops off the record, never uses a tape recorder, and rarely writes anything down. When a police officer says something he wants to use, he asks, “Can I quote you on that?” and proceeds accordingly.

Off-the-record interviewing is a technique employed by other reporters on the police beat, according to police lawyer Peter Brauti, but it’s not one all reporters agree with. When I ask the Globe‘s Christie Blatchford if she interviews police differently than others, she snaps sardonically, “Yeah, I get naked first.” And the Sun‘s Sam Pazzano, though not specifying if he’s talking about Pron, says, “The whole arm-around-the-shoulder thing is disingenuous. You don’t have to be everybody’s best friend. You just have to be fair and accurate and everybody will talk to you.”

Carleton University’s journalism ethics professor Klaus Pohle agrees, arguing sources should be kept at arm’s length. “When people are your friends, you’re much more likely to give them the benefit of the doubt than when you’re new, fresh, and eager,” he says. Pohle allows that the “atmosphere of secrecy” adopted by the “quasi-military organization” of the police makes it difficult for reporters to get information through traditional interviewing methods, but he maintains that honing friendships with police is neither a necessary nor ethical tactic: “There’s a difference between being trusted by your sources and being friends with your sources,” he says.

Still, it’s perhaps unfair to judge Pron’s reporting based on the standards of a professor who’s never covered the police beat. So in seeking a practical and unbiased opinion, I call freelance crime reporter James Dubro, who is neither friends with Pron nor his competitor. Dubro almost never socializes with police beyond interviews, and says he deliberately avoids friendships with police out of concern that he would face a conflict of interest. But judging from Pron’s articles, Dubro doesn’t agree with the idea that Pron has crossed over. “He’s a journalist first,” he says, pointing out that Pron has written many stories critical of the police. Pron had his tires slashed and “Fuck you” carved into the side of his car soon after he wrote a controversial story about a cop. The McCormacks were also unhappy with Pron’s coverage of their son’s trial. And Pron recently angered a longtime source, police lawyer Gary Clewley, for reporting on a case that Clewley was handling.

Pron himself launches into a defensive rant after a cop I had interviewed told him my angle is that he’s “cozying up with the police, practically climbing into bed with them.” During the outburst, Pron informs me the police brought him before the press council because they were upset about the almost 40 stories he had written about coke-addicted Gardner Myers, who choked to death while in police custody. The press council supported one of the police complaints related to accuracy: “They dined on that for months: ‘We got you good, Pron!'” Pron laughs. “It’s quite a little game you play with them.”

Pron’s description of his dealings with cops as a game is an apt one. A journalist’s standing among members of the force can change so quickly that the whole journalist-cop rapport seems largely artificial. But Pron is a quick-change artist – one moment the old buddy and the next the detached critic. The dramatic shift is exemplified by Pron’s dealings with Rick McIntosh before and after his corruption charges were laid. Upon hearing about the charges, Pron staked out McIntosh’s house to get a quote. The usual jovial repartee between friends quickly turned sombre and tense.

“I can’t believe you’re out here doing this,” McIntosh said as he climbed out of his car and saw Pron waiting for him.

“Yeah, well, I can’t fucking believe it either, but here I am. You wanna talk?”

McIntosh didn’t want to talk, and the two friends awkwardly shook hands goodbye. They haven’t talked since that meeting.

While the transition from comrade to critic would be difficult for others to make (which is why most crime journalists either refuse to befriend officers or end up functioning as force cheerleaders), it’s one that Pron seems used to. It’s an unnerving skill I witness firsthand: the day before we visit the Monarch, Pron writes in an email that he thinks it was a mistake to trust me, wonders if I’m being malicious, and says he’s not sure taking me to the Monarch is a good idea. But after we’ve discussed his concerns, namely that I’m trying to make him look more like a cop crony than a reporter, he agrees to meet me again, the next day sneaking up behind me as I wait at our meeting spot: “Lookin’ for someone?” he quips. He’s easy to forgive.

The more I get to know Pron, the more I realize his sometimes exasperating suspicion is a consequence of being in the business for so long. Once a self-described “bleeding-heart liberal,” Pron’s years on the crime beat have led him to see the justice system as too lenient. He tells me about a police officer who decided to teach a stalker a lesson by shoving his head through a nearby window. “The cop said, ‘I’m gonna pull a 117 on you. It’s called sudden death! You, falling to the ground. You, suddenly dead!'” Pron recounts, clarifying that code 117 was fictitious. While assuring me it’s rare that police dole out their own form of justice, and that the incident in question happened many years ago, he seems pleased with the outcome. “He never bugged the girl again,” he says. “She was happier than hell, as I would have been if that were my daughter.”

Aside from adopting many of the cops’ conservative views, Pron has also picked up the tough-talking patter of the old guard of police officers. He swears often and uses jargon like “M.I.” for mentally ill and “D.O.” for dangerous offender. He calls women “hon” or “dear,” depending on their age, and men “buddy” or “sir.” He refers to most criminals as “fucks.” And when he calls a cop, the conversation is full of relaxed, easy banter. When I ask him for the number of a police officer, Pron calls him and quips, “There’s an attractive, young girl here asking about you. Something about a baby?” Pron also takes cops’ practical jokes good-naturedly. Pron’s Monarch Tavern initiation involved his police buddies forcing him to drink beer squirted out of a fake penis.

Pron tells me the reason he likes crime writing is because he appreciates cop humour. “You wouldn’t get that on any other beat. Like, sports? Life? C’mon.” When I ask Pron why he’s remained on the crime beat for so long, he says, “It’s the characters, the guys you meet afterward. I’ve had cops over at my house holding my son when he was just a baby, and I’ve been invited to their houses. You see a side of people that you never really see.”

Pron is at ease around cops. He doesn’t have to worry that the cops will take his brash humour personally. Journalists, on the other hand, “are some of the thinnest-skinned people you’ll ever meet,” according to Pron. I sense Pron’s cheekiness, once referred to by Blatchford as “blowing smoke out of his ass,” doesn’t fare well among many crime journalists, who already have to deal with the insults hurled at them by anguished families and agitated police. (“Why don’t you write about Blatchford? I’m sure her ego could use a little stroking,” he once joked to me as Blatchford stood scowling two feet away.)

Still, there’s no shortage of reporters who respect Pron. The Star‘s Dale Anne Freed says, “Nick has a brilliant sense of analysis.” Donovan says he’s “never laughed so hard in his life” as he did while writing Crime Storywith Pron. And Jim Wilkes tells me Pron, who lives with his wife and teenage son, “strives for excellence, not only in his reporting, but as a husband and a father.”

Despite his temper, Pron can also be compassionate. He once had to interview a mother whose six-year-old son had been killed crossing the road after his school bus had dropped him off on the opposite side of the street. While the bus once turned around to drop off the boy in front of his house, it had stopped doing so in an effort to save time and money. As Pron recounts the tragedy, he squints as if he still can’t comprehend it. “I had to go talk to this woman whose son had died because of budget cuts… because of fucking budget cuts,” he says. “People think you get desensitized to this. You don’t. You never do.”

Similarly, while Pron laughs over the old newsroom joke, “How terrible they lost their only child, but what a great front-page story,” he also says the Farah Khan case made him never want to cover another child murder trial. “In one chilling account of her slaying, jurors heard that he [Muhammad Arsal Khan] and Fatima chased the terrified child around their basement apartment, beating her with fists and a rolling pin before the two grabbed her and smashed her head into a coffee table, knocking her senseless,” Pron wrote in his front-page Star story.

Witnessing the human suffering behind crime often requires great inner strength, but it can also draw out a person’s weaknesses – something Pron learned after being invited to a “choir practice” 15 years ago. (The practice was once a common way for cops to de-stress. They’d gather in a remote area of town, pass around alcohol, and vent.) When one of the cops realized Pron was a journalist, he started ripping into him. “Every time he thought of something he didn’t like about the Star or reporters, he’d tell me,” Pron says. The officer drove home that night and was arrested for an impaired driving violation. He vanished shortly thereafter, only to be found dead weeks later in a secluded forest, having shot himself in the mouth.

“He was leaned up against a tree, and by the time they found him, the gun had fallen into his rotting corpse. I think about him a lot,” Pron says. And I don’t catch any fake sincerity in his voice.

Julie, don’t be paranoid, O’Neill chided herself. But that night, she went to bed spooked.

“The events made me nervous,” she says. “I was very worried for the next couple of nights.”

On another morning that January, O’Neill awoke to an even more unpleasant surprise: 10 RCMP officers at her front door. They announced they were investigating the identity of a person who had given O’Neill a confidential document that she’d subsequently used for a story. The Mounties confiscated her laptop hard drive, address books, and some interview tapes. They also rifled through her lingerie drawer and pulled back the quilts on her bed. “It felt like a slow-motion robbery,” O’Neill wrote afterwards.

The Canada that O’Neill met at her front door that January day isn’t the Canada that most people recognize. We live in an open and democratic society. Journalists aren’t persecuted and thrown in jail. Other hallmarks of a police state – extrajudicial killings, abductions, widespread fear – are absent, and the press has no fears about embarrassing a sitting government.

Yet the raid on O’Neill is not the only recent incident that suggests the RCMP believes the media are just a bit too free in Canada. Having lost her position as a paragon of Canadian journalism after the RCMP named her as an informant in its Airbus investigation, Stevie Cameron feels “maimed.” And fellow investigative journalist Andrew McIntosh has pulled up stakes and left the country. The Mounties tried to bully McIntosh and theNational Post into turning over a document that embarrassed former prime minister Jean Chrétien. Having established himself as one of Canada’s best journalistic diggers, McIntosh, tired of putting his career aspirations on hold, opted for a change of duties and location. He moved to The Sacramento Bee in March.

Apart from its purely political implications and its effect on these three people’s careers, the outbreak of Mountie mayhem has raised enough bothersome questions about journalistic ethics to prompt plenty of soul-searching and mudslinging among Canada’s journalistic elite.

Why are the Mounties being so aggressive? The RCMP’s own thinking is opaque; press inquiries net only anodyne responses or no-comments. The cops are, after all, in the secrecy game. In the absence of transparency at our national police force, there’s no shortage of theories about its motivations. One is that the RCMP is doing its political masters’ bidding. Another is that it’s scapegoating journalists for its own bungled investigations. In any case, the source of the conflict is clear enough: journalists and the RCMP want the same thing – information. Occasionally, journalists and police share information as they pursue stories and investigations. But ultimately, their interests collide. Journalists want to publish and educate. Police want to arrest and prosecute. That is where the trouble begins.

The most infamous and complex of these three cases – Stevie Cameron’s – can be traced to the arrival in Canada in the mid-1970s of Karlheinz Schreiber, a glad-handing German who was a go- between for companies bidding on government contracts in Canada. In the consulting business, the aircraft industry is a particularly rich slice of the pie, as airlines are often government owned and manufacturers heavily subsidized. Of the three European companies that employed Schreiber to bolster their Canadian business, two were in the aviation sector: Airbus Industrie and Eurocopter, both of which hired him in the mid-1980s. To Airbus, created with massive investments by four European interests, Canada represented an easier entrée to the North American market than going to the U.S., where its primary global competitor, Boeing, was the home-team favourite.

Since it was a Crown corporation, Air Canada’s $1.8 billion purchase of 32 Airbus 320 planes in 1988 was effectively a government purchase. Airbus’s primary lobbyist in Canada was former Progressive Conservative premier of Newfoundland Frank Moores, a friend of former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney (and Schreiber). Moores also sat on the board of Air Canada, an obvious conflict of interest that led – once leaked to the press – to him resigning his board seat. For each Airbus plane that was sold to the Canadian government, Schreiber earned a commission, which he shared with some Canadian politicians. There is absolutely no evidence Mulroney received any form of kickback, despite rumours to the contrary.

There were many such tangles in Mulroney’s Ottawa – enough to fill Cameron’s On the Take: Crime, Corruption and Greed in the Mulroney Years. When it was published in 1994, Tory-weary Canadians were a receptive audience. It became the most successful political book in Canadian history, selling more than 200,000 copies in hardcover and paperback within two years. At the time, Cameron had just finished her stint as a political reporter for The Globe and Mail and was working as a contributing editor to Maclean’s. The book cemented her reputation as one of Canada’s top investigative journalists.

When the book came out, it was early days in the Airbus story – “It may take years for the whole story to unfold,” Cameron wrote with more prophetic resonance than she could have guessed – so the subject filled only eight pages of the nearly 500 in On the Take. It was enough to pique the interest of the RCMP. In January 1995, Cameron met with two Mounties. She says they wouldn’t say why they wanted to meet, but it was known that the RCMP had been investigating Airbus since the deal in 1988. Cameron had loaned her On the Take files to another reporter, but agreed to let the Mounties see them after she got them back.They also requested an electronic version of her book to better plumb its contents. Cameron refused, but her publisher, Macfarlane Walter & Ross, complied as a courtesy.

That is all Cameron and the Mounties agree happened in 1995. They don’t even agree on where they met – whether it was in Cameron’s kitchen or at their office. Cameron says she knew her name would come out in court if Mulroney was tried, but she also knew the chances were slim this would happen. She believed she had nothing to hide – she says everything she told the RCMP was on the public record.

Around September of that year, a Crown prosecutor working on the RCMP investigation into Airbus sent a letter to Swiss authorities, pursuing an allegation that Schreiber had stashed money in a Swiss bank for Mulroney. In 1995, when Mulroney got wind of the Crown prosecutor’s letter, he launched a $50 million libel suit against the federal goverment. He settled for an undisclosed sum out of court the following year.

Meanwhile, in the spring of 1995, the RCMP again called on Cameron. They wanted more details about political corruption, and Airbus in particular. At the time, Cameron was freelancing for Maclean’s and looking to write another book focusing on Schreiber and Airbus. She recalls that both her Maclean’s editor and her book publisher encouraged her to continue the contact: “Maybe we’ll get a great story out of it,” she quotes them as saying. After that meeting, Cameron busied herself as editor of Elm Street magazine, and later began working with CBC producer Harvey Cashore on the Airbus book.

The RCMP, however, considered the relationship far from over. By October 1997, officers were debating whether or not to assign Cameron confidential informant status. According to RCMP files, Cameron asked for a guarantee that she not be revealed as a police source. This is the crux of the dispute between the two parties – whether or not Cameron agreed to be assigned confidential informant status. She says she asked for no such guarantee. She already knew her name would be revealed if Mulroney were charged. “They said, ‘We’ll have to disclose it when it gets to trial.’ And I said fine,” recalls Cameron. “Once I knew that, I thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to be the one to say I talked to them first.’ … I didn’t want to be sandbagged years later and then I never really talked to them again about this.” The Mounties left the question of her confidential informant designation hanging.

At any rate, the Mounties had to document any evidence provided by Cameron, because of a 1991 Supreme Court ruling in the case of a lawyer named William Stinchcombe, who hadn’t been told of Crown evidence that would have been favourable to his defence against breach of trust and fraud charges. The court ruled that Canadians accused of crimes have the right to full disclosure of the government’s case against them. While the intention is to minimize the chances of a wrongful conviction, the upshot for the media is this: if a journalist provides information to the police relating to the alleged crime, then the police could be required to disclose this fact to the defence team when charges are laid. However, those who are identified as confidential informants may still have their identities protected.

At the second meeting between Cameron and the RCMP, in 1995, two officers explained the implications of Stinchcombe. She says she understood the ruling and didn’t take offence to it. But many journalists can easily get caught in its web. That’s because it’s not a ruling in media law, says Dean Jobb, who teaches the subject at the University of King’s College School of Journalism in Halifax. “If a journalist decides, ‘Well, I’ll help the police,’ then chances are it’s going to become known at some level, either in courts or in the media,” says Jobb. “There are no off-the-records with the police.”

In 1997, the RCMP publicly stated that Mulroney was absolved of all charges, but it would continue its investigation into Airbus. The case faded from the public eye, and the RCMP turned its attention to Eurocopter. (The eventual publication of Cameron and Cashore’s book about Airbus, The Last Amigo: Karlheinz Schreiber and the Anatomy of a Scandal, in 2001, though a bestseller, received little media attention.) The German manufacturer had sold helicopters to the Canadian Coast Guard during the Mulroney years, employing Schreiber as a middleman to seal the deal. Relying in part on information from Cameron, the RCMP obtained a search warrant to raid Eurocopter’s Canadian branch office in Fort Erie, Ontario, in December 1999.

By 1999, RCMP Superintendent Alan Mathews had taken over the Airbus-Eurocopter file. That spring, he decided Cameron should have been labelled a confidential informant in 1995 and informally made her one, according to Cameron, though she says she was not aware of Matthews’s decision at the time. In 2001, he formalized the arrangement and filed an affidavit to the Ontario Superior Court in April, stating that Cameron had been asked and she had insisted upon confidential informant status, which she would waive only if Mulroney were tried. From that point, Cameron was known as A2948. Mathews’s affidavit was required for a proceeding brought by Eurocopter’s lawyers, who were seeking disclosure of the search warrant materials so they could attack the search’s validity. The hearing was held in secrecy in a Toronto courtroom until the issue of disclosure could be decided, in view of the Crown’s concern for confidentiality. CBC petitioned for access and was admitted on condition that it maintain secrecy.

In the spring of 2003, Cameron’s lawyer, Peter Jacobsen, corresponded with the Crown prosecutor. The issue was the extent to which information needed to be blacked out in the documents in order to protect Cameron’s identity as a source. This was on the basis that she was a confidential informant. Cameron says she was unaware her lawyer had acted on her behalf and didn’t learn about the letter until later. Jacobsen had attached a copy of the letter in an email to Cameron, but she never opened it.

Then, in October 2003, the judge finally ruled there should be disclosure and made all search materials available. There was a caveat: one person was protected from being disclosed, and that name was blacked out from the documents. Later, it came out that the name was Stevie Cameron’s.

By the end of 2003, the federal government formally called off the Airbus investigation and the Eurocopter case became open to the public. The Globe hired freelancer and lawyer William Kaplan – the author of a 1998 defence of Mulroney, Presumed Guilty: Brian Mulroney, the Airbus Affair, and the Government of Canada – to write a three-part series on the secret hearing. The second installment splashed Cameron’s face across the front page of the Saturday edition, asking, “Could this journalist be the secret informant?”

By January 2004, Cameron had made it clear she’d refused confidential informant status. This led to a hearing in the Eurocopter case. Mathews prepared an affidavit for the court laying out the grounds for the RCMP treating Cameron as a confidential informant. Then, in May, Mathews filed a further affidavit saying that the 686 contacts between the RCMP and Cameron that he had earlier referred to included 680 media references. “The actual number of contacts was tiny,” says Clayton Ruby, Cameron’s lawyer. Cameron has since lodged a complaint with the RCMP about the way she was treated by Supt. Mathews. The investigation continues.

Cameron’s informant status has come to overshadow the original story – the relationship between Schreiber and Mulroney. In his lawsuit, Mulroney described Schreiber as someone he knew only peripherally, yet Schreiber gave Mulroney $300,000 shortly after he had stepped down as Prime Minister, but while still a Member of Parliament. Schreiber and Mulroney have given accounts of the purpose of the payments.

The entire dustup has left Cameron with a stack of legal bills and a journalistic community split into two camps. On one side are detractors who think that by helping the police pursue criminal investigations, she violated a public trust and is now trying to rewrite history. On the other are defenders who think the blame in the Airbus affair has been misdirected, and Cameron is being unfairly maligned. Many of the latter have contributed to fundraising efforts to offset Cameron’s legal bills. Both sides have hammered each other in an acrimonious debate on the Canadian Association of Journalists’s online forum. Kaplan, one of Cameron’s fiercest critics, wrote, “No other journalist to my knowledge became a police informer and provided business, financial and other records to the RCMP. No other journalist asked to become a confidential informant and was designated as such.”

Hamilton Spectator columnist Bill Dunphy, one of the more vocal Cameron defenders in that forum, found that the affair hit close to home. In the early 1990s, he spent six years investigating the white supremacist movement for the Toronto Sun, nurturing contacts among the supremacists and the police. “With the police, I had to get close to them to find out what they were doing, what they were up to, without becoming an agent,” he says. How does a reporter walk that fine line? “It’s very hard.”

But when Dunphy came across proof that police were obstructing justice to avoid exposing Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) undercover agents embedded with the supremacists, he realized he had to write about it. “In a long-term investigation, you gain information by developing trust,” says Dunphy. But truth is more important than trust. “Here’s where journalists go wrong. You have to be prepared to betray that trust because you have to put your own principles first.”

Victor Malarek, senior reporter at CTV’s W-5, was shocked when he read the Globe‘s story. Malarek has had many conversations with the RCMP over the course of his career. If the RCMP is calling Cameron a source, he thought, then any journalist could be one too. Malarek called her up shortly after. “I asked her point blank, ‘Were you feeding information to the cops?’ and she said no. Well then, there but by the grace of God go I.”

“A lot of journalists met with the RCMP,” says Cameron. “I seem to be the only one who has been maimed.”

In 1988, fromer Prime Minister Jean Chrétien bought shares in the Grand-Mère golf course and the adjacent Grand-Mère Inn, in the riding of Saint-Maurice, where Chrétien had previously been a Member of Parliament. Both businesses did poorly, and in April 1993, Chrétien and his business partners sold the inn to Yvon Duhaime, a man with a criminal record. In November 1993, just after being elected prime minister, Chrétien sold his shares in the golf course. By 1996, he had not been paid for these shares. In 1996 and 1997, Chrétien called the president of the Business Development Bank of Canada, a Crown corporation, and pressured the president to give a loan to Duhaime. In 1997, the BDC gave Duhaime a $615,000 loan.

National Post reporter Andrew McIntosh, who had been one of Cameron’s two research associates for On the Take, had been following the Grand-Mère Inn’s money trail since 1998. In 1999, he wrote a pair of articles about the properties and implied that Chrétien had a financial interest in seeing Duhaime receive a BDC loan. In April 2001, a sealed brown envelope with no return address landed in McIntosh’s hands. Inside was a confidential BDC document about the loan to the inn. What McIntosh found particularly interesting was a footnote showing that the inn owed $23,040 to JAC Consultants, Chrétien’s family holding company.

According to court files, McIntosh made copies of the document and squirrelled away the original. He then forwarded copies to the BDC and the Prime Minister’s Office, asking for comment. The PMO denounced it as a forgery; the bank claimed its original copy had no footnote. In a separate letter, the bank also accused thePost of possessing a confidential bank document. The RCMP then met with McIntosh and requested that he hand over the document. – the officers wanted to dust it for fingerprints and DNA in order to track down the confidential source who had mailed the document. McIntosh refused.

McIntosh gave his analysis of the situation at a symposium, “Democracy and Journalism in the 21st century,” held in March 2004 in Halifax. “When the RCMP came to interview me initially, the officer said, and I quote, ‘My job is, there is a problem. There are confidential bank documents circulating and my job is to put a stop to it.’ And I thought, ‘This gentleman is not here to conduct a police investigation. He is a political plumber. He is here to plug a leak at the bank.'”

On July 4, 2002, the RCMP went to court to ask for a search warrant and assistance order, which made it former Post editor Ken Whyte’s responsibility to find the documents and hand them over to the police. The assistance order was unique – it had never before been used against the media to force them to reveal information. Again McIntosh refused to hand over the document, and the Post took the case to court.

Speculation flew over why the RCMP wanted the document. “It was never just about $23,000. It was about so much more,” said McIntosh. “It was about gross abuse of power. It was about giving away taxpayers’ money to people who weren’t supposed to or didn’t deserve to get it. It was about trying to silence and crush those who dare question and expose what was clearly wrong. It was about engaging in deception and half-truths to cover your tracks, and it’s about using $4 million more of taxpayers’ money [on the investigation] to try to bury and destroy a man who tried to stop it.”

“I knew a lot more about the Grand-Mère Inn and politics and its finances than the RCMP did then and still do now, more than four years later,” said McIntosh.

The Globe and CBC intervened in the case,throwing their support behind the Post, McIntosh, and Whyte, who was also named in the warrants. CanWest Global Communications Corp.’s legal team and corporate wallet also rallied behind McIntosh, covering $500,000 in lawyers’ fees. After more than a year of legal wrangling, the media won. On January 21, 2004, Senior Justice Mary Lou Benotto of the Ontario Superior Court quashed the search warrant and ruled that in this case, maintaining source confidentiality takes precedence over the RCMP’s right to investigate. “Confidential sources are essential to the effective functioning of the media in a free and democratic society,” the Judge said.

McIntosh thinks it was an important case. “At some point there was an understanding that it would be useful, should we win, to have a landmark precedent in which a journalist could shield the identity of a source during a police investigation,” he said. “We had no idea and we couldn’t have dreamed of a better day for that judgment to be delivered as it did. I can only wish it came one day earlier.” The Ontario Attorney General’s office said it would challenge the ruling, but as of March 2005, it had not filed its appeal papers. McIntosh moved to California that month. “I’ve put my career aspirations on hold for a long time and I just couldn’t do it anymore,” he says. His absence should not affect the appeal – McIntosh has agreed that he won’t touch the documents until the case is resolved.

The Benotto ruling set a precedent, but it came a day too late for Juliet O’Neill. The very day of the ruling, January 21, 2004, is also the day O’Neill became a media martyr when the RCMP raided her home.

The article of O’Neill’s that inspired the raid was published in the Citizen on November 8, 2003: “Canada’s dossier on Maher Arar.” Arar’s case was a cause célèbre, turning on the question of how far Canada would kowtow to a security-obsessed United States. It began in September 2002, when Arar was in New York City catching a connecting flight from Tunisia, where he’d been vacationing, to Montreal. American officials suspected Arar had ties to the terrorist group al-Qaeda and shipped him to his native Syria, where Arar says he was jailed for 10 months and tortured.

No evidence of a solid connection between Arar and terrorists has yet been produced. O’Neill’s article, about Arar’s supposed al-Qaeda connections, was based on information contained in the leaked confidential document. The RCMP badly wanted to find the leak.

Having had her lingerie drawer rifled on the authority of the new Security of Information Act, O’Neill became a poster child for the threat to civil liberties posed by post-September 11 security measures. O’Neill hasn’t been charged. If convicted, she faces up to 14 years in jail for possessing official secret information. (That penalty, she points out, is four years longer than for people charged with participating in terrorist acts.)

The officers at her house, including those from the Truth Verification section, tried to get her to reveal her source. (The Truth Verification section specializes in lie-detector tests and forensic hypnosis. “Police call it the reverse – truth verification instead of lie detection,” says O’Neill. “It’s very Orwellian.”) She wouldn’t budge. Public scrutiny had already focused on the force and its role in Arar’s deportation to Syria by the U.S. The raid only made the RCMP look worse – like bullies. In the wake of the outcry, the federal government launched an inquiry into the role the RCMP played in the deportation.

“They should have known that a reporter is much more likely to protect her sources. And they obviously didn’t understand. They didn’t grasp it but they should have, that this was going to become a cause célèbre for the media. It was dumb,” says Reg Whitaker, distinguished research professor emeritus at York University and an adjunct professor of political science at the University of Victoria, who specializes in security issues. (Whitaker is an adviser to the Arar commission.)

Normally, search warrants and the affidavits used to obtain them become public information after the warrant is executed, in part so the person searched knows the reasons for the search. But after the O’Neill raid, the RCMP sealed the warrants. National security was one rationale. This circular logic – the rationale for secrecy is secret – helped inspire Reporters Without Borders to downgrade Canada from 10th to 18th place on its press freedom index. O’Neill says she has felt an effect personally. “I’ve got certain restraints in who I can talk to, what stories I can work on. I feel very silenced,” she says. “I’m not saying, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to come after me,’ but it’s a matter of loss of part of the confidence that you should have in the police in a democratic country.”

Ontario Superior Court Judge Lynn Ratushny agreed when she ruled last November that the sealing order on the search warrants used to raid O’Neill’s home and office was invalid and violated press freedoms. National security claims don’t always trump the principle of open courts, she noted. “Every time the public is excluded from some part of Canada’s court process, there exists the potential that the operation of Canada’s rule of law and its democracy is being secretly undermined,” she wrote. Among the information the judge ordered revealed was such top-secret information as the address of a clearly signed RCMP building in Ottawa and O’Neill’s listed home phone number. But the judge has ordered some information, such as code names and investigation techniques, be kept secret in part for national security reasons.

“The shame of it is that we had to spend eight months and more than $120,000 in legal bills for CanWest Global for a series of court hearings in which the government conducted a disclosure striptease, slowly revealing bits of information,” O’Neill told the Hill Times. (That cost has since soared to $250,000.) O’Neill learned that a municipal employee had indeed snatched her garbage on several occasions and passed it on to the Mounties, and that the woman spying on her in an Ottawa café probably wasn’t her imagination. O’Neill had been under surveillance by the RCMP.

However, the RCMP hasn’t seen O’Neill’s information, either. After the raid, O’Neill’s lawyers obtained an order to seal all of her possessions taken by the RCMP and store them in an Ottawa courthouse. If she wins the whole case, she will get everything back unopened.

Why the RCMP would even need to raid a journalist’s home comes down to one thing: information. O’Neill had information that the RCMP didn’t want her to have. The force wanted it, and O’Neill wouldn’t give it up. “The RCMP brass or someone at the top makes the decision that they’re going to launch an investigation and find out who in their own ranks has behaved this way and do something about it,” says Whitaker. “So what do they do? They decide they’re going to land on Juliet O’Neill and lean on her, scare the hell out of her, threaten her, and get her to divulge the identity of whoever she was talking to.”

And who is to going to oversee the RCMP, which has been known to follow expressly political orders from Ottawa and go a bit overboard pursuing them? Most famously: with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s quell-Quebec-separatism carte blanche tucked into their tunics, the way the Mounties got their man in Quebec in the ’70s was by breaking countless laws and then lying about it. So Canada’s security and spy-agency functions were hived off to the newly created CSIS in 1984, with a separate civilian body to oversee it. The RCMP commissioner now reports to Parliament.

In 2001, the RCMP again got involved in national security. After September 11, 2001, Parliament rushed to pass the Security of Information Act, which handed the RCMP new tools. Some say it is now easier for the Mounties to use electronic surveillance, to arrest suspects before they commit a crime, and to detain suspected terrorists without charges. What the RCMP still doesn’t have are CSIS’s safeguards, resources, or expertise, says James Travers, a Toronto Star columnist who has followed CSIS and the RCMP for years. In those circumstances, Travers says, “it was just a matter of time before an Arar event happened.”

Any effort at oversight will come up against an embedded culture where secrecy is its own rationale. “They sometimes use national security as an expansive and often unjustifiable reason to keep as much as they can out of the public domain,” says Whitaker. “And it’s really at that point that others should take a very critical eye and say, ‘Now wait a minute, maybe this is just covering up embarrassing information that you don’t want out there, that doesn’t make you look good or reveals incompetence or unlawful behaviour.'”

If the three incidents – Cameron’s, McIntosh’s, and O’Neill’s – don’t foreshadow a worrisome trend, then perhaps all that connects them is the competitive and sometimes ultimately conflicting ways that media and police mine various netherworlds for information. “We journalists gather information in order to make it public. That’s our end goal,” says the Spectator‘s Dunphy. “Police gather information for a different end – to increase their knowledge and not to release it.”

Meanwhile, journalists have different motives for releasing information. Yet the RCMP didn’t understand why O’Neill and McIntosh would fight so hard when it pressed them to reveal sources. And Cameron, currently working on a book about Robert Pickton, the pig farmer accused of serial murder in Vancouver, says she’s through with writing about politics.

“I’d take a serial killer over a politician any day.”

On a late wintry afternoon, Dave Donald zigzags through the magazine aisles at the Indigo bookstore in downtown Toronto. Chatelaine‘s former senior associate art director points to New York magazine. “There’s a lot of buzz around this,” he says. Then he looks for Chatelaine and Canadian Living, commenting, “Must be in family mags.” Sure enough, he twirls around and finds both magazines, side by side in the family section. “These magazines are very aggressive at luring in their readers,” he continues. “There’s not much else in the Canadian English market in this category. You can actually buy the things in the magazine. That’s why they’re successful.” He starts flipping through a copy of Canadian Living and is surprised to discover it went through a refreshment in October 2004. “It looks like Chatelaine did before its relaunch,” he says. “The type is a bit different, but it’s not a very contemporary look.”

In 1942, Gwyn “Jocko” Thomas went to Cobourg, Ontario, to cover the murders of a private detective named William Wallace Cunningham and his assistant, Agnes Fardella. The detective specialized in staging adulterous events for clients who wanted divorce papers. The pair had been shot in the middle of the night on the side of Highway 2, a few yards outside city limits. By the time Thomas got to the story, the case was stale. The police had no leads, nor did reporters. But Thomas and Toronto Daily Star photographer Fred Davis needed a front-page story, so they bought a bundle of posies and tried to coax Fardella’s husband into kneeling at her grave for a photo. “I was afraid that he would knock me down the stairs,” Thomas remembers. “He told me to go to hell.”

In Inuktitut, the word used for news is pivalliajut. Its literal translation is “things that are gradually developing.” For Jim Bell, editor of the weekly Nunavut newspaper, Nunatsiaq News, things always seem to be developing too gradually. This early November morning, for instance, he is fed up with the persistence of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS) in the territory. In a story meeting with his staff, he is twitching with frustration about a Government of Nunavut (GN) “pilot project” to teach women about the dangers of drinking while pregnant. At 52, Bell is robust and fit, with silvering hair that waves dashingly at his brow, and a full beard that comes and goes according to the dictates of his vanity. His face reaches its height of handsomeness at moments like this one, consumed with confusion and contempt, as he reflects that FAS has been “news” for more than 10 years. “Maybe,” he says, “people are doing it even though they know it will harm their babies.”