My fellow blog editor Fatima Syed wrote an important blog post yesterday responding to the Twitter debate regarding BuzzFeed Canada senior writer Scaachi Koul’s appearance on The National. I agree with the main argument put across in Syed’s post: we need to fight for newsroom diversity in order to allow more women of colour to have careers in journalism and reduce the unfair expectations placed on those who have attained some success.

Yet if we’re going to discuss race and representation in Canadian journalism seriously, it needs to be with nuance. Syed’s post lacked a bit of that nuance because she ignored, or wasn’t aware of, an important part of the conversation that Koul’s appearance sparked.

Syed characterized the backlash Koul faced solely as “abuse,” or as inappropriate comments about her appearance and mistaken whiteness. Koul certainly did receive disturbing abuse from some, and it’s no secret that women of colour on social media are disproportionately harassed. But Koul also faced very legitimate criticism from a number of black women, most notably another female journalist of colour, Septembre Anderson.

Anderson’s criticism of Koul’s appearance on The National focused on her perceived lack of insight regarding the importance of women of colour in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet. Anderson presciently noted that focusing solely on arguments for gender parity without deeper critical analysis will likely result in white women dominating the cabinet.

After Koul published an article at BuzzFeed Canada defending herself from perceived attacks, and attempting to address her privilege, Anderson responded in the comment section by saying, “So, rather than address the very real criticism you use your power and privilege to humiliate Rachel Décoste [a woman whose tweet was linked in Koul’s article], totally downplay accountability and play victim? Classy.” Anderson also took to Twitter claiming Koul unfairly portrayed her as aggressive, an “age old” tactic used against black people.

Syed unintentionally perpetuated this portrayal by characterizing the entire backlash Koul faced as abuse, without pointing out the valid criticism that came from other female journalists of colour like Anderson.

Obviously, Koul is not solely to blame for the fact that a panel on gender parity did not have enough critical insight regarding race. If the demographic of Canadian journalism reflected Canada’s population instead of being dominated by white people (especially older men), the responsibility for this sort of nuance would not have rested solely in Koul’s hands.

Still, Anderson and others absolutely have the right to critique Koul’s performance on the panel, as well as the perceived privilege they believe she used in an inappropriate manner. This sort of critical discussion should be encouraged instead of demonized if we truly want to build a more diverse Canadian journalism landscape, because nuance is of the utmost importance in this matter.

As with many things on the internet, it all started with someone stating their 140-character opinion about something they had watched.

what else do i need to do here pic.twitter.com/zi8HpLpOA7

— Scaachi (@Scaachi) November 2, 2015

The comment was made in regard to Scaachi Koul’s appearance during a segment on The National about affirmative action in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s cabinet.  Koul, a senior writer for BuzzFeed Canada, spoke in agreement with Trudeau’s promise to have a 50-percent-female cabinet, which placed her in opposition to her fellow panelists Jonathan Kay, editor of The Walrus, and Tasha Kheiriddin, a CBC political commentator and National Post columnist.

Koul was the only person of colour on the panel. That’s a double-edged sword. It’s great for diversity and representative opinions. It also, however, implicitly means she has higher standards and expectations to meet, which she notes in her response to all the comments she received:

“I spent too much of the morning looking at Twitter, watching my feed fill with people trying to guess my race, whether I represented WOC appropriately, whether I had been crushed by the other two panelists. Not just the question of whether I did an okay job, or if I made valid points — rather, was I everything?”

The internet applauded Koul’s blunt reponse. From André Picard to other women journalists like Denise Balkissoon and Heather Mallick, many retweeted affirmatively. All of them implied that the abuse female pundits like Koul face is absurd, unwarranted and just plain wrong. I say “implied” here because that’s how I interpret the quoted retweets of Koul’s article.

Retweets, however, are not a step toward affirmative change. As an industry, we talk a lot about the need to increase newsroom diversity, but we refuse to delve into specifics. If we do, we don’t see changes implemented, or  we haven’t yet.

Why not, though? Why have we still not taken steps toward addressing the integration of journalists of colour? It is so rare to see a panel that is representative of society in terms of gender and race, which is probably why those who try to break the glass ceiling receive reactions like the one above.

Judging by the retweets, Koul is not the only female journalist of colour who has had to face more commentary about her appearance than her content. While most of Twitter may have responded in kind, there is a discussion to be had about the formation of panels, who is on them and how we respond to them. As Koul wrote,

“I want to do the panel and try to be the voice, but it so frequently results in coming home to attacks on my character, my race, my looks, my existence. If I don’t do the panel, my existence is merely entirely ignored by the public consciousness. You suffer consequences either way.”

From one female journalist of colour to another, I salute Scaachi Koul for surviving yesterday and bringing problems faced by female journalists of colour to light. It’s not just about the inclusion of diverse voices anymore, but the acceptance of those voices without commentary on what they look like.

The irony is that so much time was spent on Twitter yesterday debating the pros and cons of a 50-percent-female government cabinet, when the mirror in front of us shows that we, the journalists, should be talking just as seriously about parity and proportional representation.

For young reporters, journalism is a game of chicken. You can swerve away early, taking a relatively cushy job in public relations, but if you wait too long to jump ship, you might find yourself without a job at all. It’s hard to think about anything other than survival.

That’s a metaphor that Vivian Smith shared in her talk at Ryerson on October 8, taken from an interview with the Calgary Herald’s Jen Gerson for her PhD thesis, which she turned into the book Outsiders Still: Why Women Journalists Love – and Leave – Their Newspaper Careers.

A lot of the young j-schoolers in the room probably think about gender only when they notice the large majority of their classmates are women. But those who graduate into newsrooms find a whole different reality. Only a third of editorial employees are women, and the numbers get smaller the higher up the masthead you go.

Entry-level reporters don’t spend much time thinking about gender, either. When you’re wondering if your job will still exist in six months, it’s hard to think about longer-term challenges such as structural discrimination. Smith, who spent four years interviewing journalists between the ages of 25 and 61 for her thesis, noticed that the younger journalists saw themselves as individuals able to take on anything, including sexism.

Sure, overt hostility is much less common than when women were first entering newsrooms. Obviously it still happens (you remember Jian, right?), but many women are able to enjoy successful careers in the field and feel like they are treated equally at work.

But here’s what Smith’s research found: the same inequalities that faced women in the early twentieth century are still limiting or ending women’s careers. They’ve just been brushed under the surface. There is still a real wage gap between male and female reporters, and women have fewer opportunities to advance into leadership positions.

They also still worry about whether or not to have a family. While in theory it shouldn’t come down to the woman to take the lead in childcare, many of the journalists Smith studied still felt that they had to choose between having children and advancing in their careers.

After the talk, one student asked Smith what advice she has for young women. “Think about diversity all the time,” she answered. Think about how you can promote it within your newsroom, and also in your stories.

I have another piece of advice: keep having these conversations. Thanks, Vivian Smith, for giving us something to talk about.

On Day 11 of the Egyptian uprising against the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak, Globe and Mail correspondent Sonia Verma and her colleague Patrick Martin were walking through what she describes as the “nouveau riche” neighbourhood of Mohandeseen. Verma was filming a pro-Mubarak crowd marching in the streets. At first this all-male crowd seemed friendly, some of its participants even smiling and waving flags for the camera. Suddenly, though, the scene turned menacing as some armed marchers charged Verma and Martin. As she recalls, “We were basically surrounded by this mob on all sides and they were becoming violent toward us.”

Fortunately, a security guard from a nearby apartment block emerged, firing gunshots into the air. The crowd froze. He grabbed the two journalists and hustled them into an apartment building. A woman living on the first floor took the three of them in. They stayed for several hours until the mob moved on. It was only after the security guard had escorted the two reporters back to their hotel that Verma realized she had deep bruises along her back and one arm.

Today the incident is an afterthought. But that day in the apartment in Mohandeseen, Verma’s immediate concerns were escaping and the safety of the family who sheltered her, leaving her no time to think about her daughters: Annie, then three, and Sarah Jane, two.

It was thinking about her own two children—ages one and two—that may have kept Lara Logan alive on February 11, 2011, the day Mubarak resigned from office. As is widely known, the CBS News chief foreign correspondent was not as lucky as Verma when she ventured into the celebratory crowd in Cairo’s Tahrir Square with her bodyguard, producer, fixer, cameraman and two Egyptian drivers. As she noted later about the response to Mubarak stepping down, “It was like unleashing a champagne cork on Egypt.”

But the mood wasn’t purely triumphant. Logan’s fixer, Bahaa, could hear men shouting in Arabic to attack her.

In a 60 Minutes interview, Logan recounted how, after she was forcefully separated from her crew, men began to grab her everywhere. They stripped her of clothing, pulled at her hair, scalp and limbs, beat her with sticks and raped her with their hands. She believed she was going to die and had essentially given up. Then she thought, “I can’t believe I just let them kill me…that I just gave in, that I gave up on my children so easily.” She decided to survive for them by surrendering to the assault.

In response to the attack on Logan, the Toronto Sun’s Peter Worthington wrote an inflammatory column that posed the question, “Should women journalists with small children at home, be covering violent stories or putting themselves at risk?” His answer: “It’s a form of self-indulgence and abdication of a higher responsibility to family.” Logan’s decision to report from Egypt was, he said, “the right thing for her to do journalistically—unless, of course, she had small children, which was the case. Her son…should have taken precedent over her wishes to cover the world’s biggest story for the moment.” Worthington continued, “This holds true for any woman covering wars or revolutions.” (Worthington later clarified that by small children he meant those under age five.)

Not surprisingly, the response among journalists was almost universally negative. Jan Wong, a former Globe reporter, called him a misogynist. Stephanie Nolen, the Globe’s South Asia bureau chief, was also dismissive: “It’s not 1940.… My partner is every bit as engaged, as involved, as important to my children, and it would be an equally devastating loss for my children if either of us were killed. And I think it is profoundly insulting, not only to women, but to men who are parents and care about their children, to suggest otherwise.” Wilf Dinnick, Verma’s husband, wrote an open letter to Worthington demanding an apology and indicating that Verma chose not to write about her mob experience in Egypt “because she feared sexist and antiquated views like yours might take away from the importance of the story in Egypt.” He concluded: “Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Middle Eastern dictators of your vintage are being tossed out of power for being so out of touch.”

Heated rhetoric aside, is the journalistic community out of touch with the particular risks faced by female reporters, mothers or not, in conflict zones?

Even as the New York–based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) launched an investigation into sexual violence as an occupational hazard, more incidents surfaced. A little more than a month after Logan’s ordeal, New York Times photojournalist Lynsey Addario was released from six days of captivity in Libya, during which she was repeatedly sexually assaulted. Four weeks later, CBC reporter Mellissa Fung’s memoir Under an Afghan Sky, about her 2008 kidnapping that lead to 28 days as a hostage in Afghanistan, revealed she had been raped while in captivity.

To research the CPJ paper, senior editor Lauren Wolfe spoke with more than 50 women who reported assaults ranging from aggressive physical harassment to groping to gang rape. (She notes that male reporters, to a much lesser degree, are also at risk for rape.) In the resulting report, “The Silencing Crime: Sexual Violence and Journalists,” released in June, she charged that “sexual violence has remained a dark, largely unexplored corner.”

Four years before Wolfe’s report, Judith Matloff, now an adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School and a former long-time foreign correspondent, wrote “Unspoken,” about the sexual abuse experienced by female foreign reporters. The piece appeared in the May/June 2007 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, but went largely unnoticed. Only in the wake of the Logan episode, when CJR featured her article prominently on the website, did 30 news organizations interview Matloff. Today, she says the Logan episode “really blew the lid off what had basically been a dirty secret in the industry for a long time.”

Gillian Findlay of CBC’s the fifth estate regrets not revealing that she found herself at the mercy of groping hands while caught in a Baghdad crowd in 1999. It wasn’t until March 2011 that Findlay publicly spoke about the incident for the first time, at a symposium on female reporters. She recalled how she had been separated from her crew and was terrified before her fixer came to the rescue. Now, Findlay describes what kept her silent: “I didn’t want my male colleagues—at the time most of my colleagues were male—to look at me differently or feel differently about me or feel they had some responsibility to take care of me. I just knew it wasn’t good if I talked about it.”

In “Unspoken,” Matloff tells a more extreme version of Findlay’s experience: the case of a photographer working in India who was set upon by a group of men “baying for sex.” Rescued at the last minute, she later decided not to tell her editors what happened. “I put myself out there equal to the boys,” she says. “I didn’t want to be seen in any way as weaker.”

Wolfe and Matloff also discuss women’s feelings of shame, their fear of being labelled troublemakers and their concern that they won’t be believed. But both highlight this issue of self-image. In her CJR article, Matloff wrote, “[T]he compulsion to be part of the macho club is so fierce that women often don’t tell their bosses.” More recently, she elaborated: “The bosses don’t know about it because the women don’t talk about it. And then because the bosses don’t talk about it, the next generation of women don’t talk about it.” Even today, those bosses are predominantly male—the foreign editors for the National Post, the Toronto Star, CTV, the Canadian Press and the Globe are all men.

Ann Rauhala was one of the exceptions when she served as the Globe’s foreign editor from 1989 to 1994. Based on her experience, she speculates that having a female boss could make women dealing with sexual abuse feel safer speaking up and more likely to seek help. She adds: “It might make editors [and] newsrooms more inclined to make sure that everybody who goes out there gets training and education that takes into account the possibility of sexual assault.”

On the other hand, Stephen Northfield, the Globe’s foreign editor for the last six years, doesn’t see safety as a gender-specific issue. “We support everybody who wants to do this kind of work,” he says. The paper has 12 staff foreign correspondents based overseas, three of whom are women, in addition to Verma, whom the paper parachutes in.

Of course, as the Globe figures suggest, it’s no longer unusual to find women in the field, unlike the days of Kit Coleman. The journalist and war correspondent for Toronto’s Daily Mail and Empire in the late 1800s to early 1900s, was credited with being one of the first female foreign correspondents. Even in the 1970s and ’80s, female correspondents such as CBC’s former Beirut bureau chief Ann Medina, who covered mostly the Middle East, were a novelty.

The types of conflicts journalists cover have been transformed too. “Things started to change in the 1990s with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the end of formalized conflict,” says Paul Knox, a former Globe foreign editor and reporter. In an email, Sherry Ricchiardi, senior writer for the American Journalism Review and professor at Indiana University’s School of Journalism, explained the implications of the shift from wars between states to wars within them. In Libya, for example, the conflict originated within the country between opposing factions. Thanks to “no designated front lines or definite chain of command,” she says, “danger, including sexual violence, is far greater.”

Though Matloff agrees, she emphasizes that rape can happen in all kinds of situations. “Most of the cases I documented occurred in hotel rooms—from Russia to Iraq—or in rowdy crowds in such places as Pakistan and Egypt,” she says, adding that journalists can also be abused when detained.

How aggressors perceive journalists generally has also changed. Knox notes that there used to be an unwritten rule that journalists, male or female, weren’t targets. One example he gives from his days reporting in Latin and Central America is the practice of pasting the letters “TV” (an international code for journalist) on vehicles. To do that today would be like painting a “target on your back,” Knox says, because reporters are no longer viewed as independent or as likely to provide fair coverage. “They’re seen in many ways as agents of one side.” This also translates into greater peril for female reporters, according to Melissa Soalt, a women’s defence expert who was inducted into Black Belt Magazine’s Hall of Fame in 2002. The combination of reporters viewed as targets and blurred enemy lines means more risk. “When all bets are off and chaos prevails and men are armed and law and order and conventional boundaries break down, you have prime conditions for attack against journalists,” she says. “And for women that means targeted for sexual assault.”

Still, Tony Burman suggests that journalists who live and work in the developing world are more apt to be aware of the risks. The former CBC News editor-in-chief and, more recently, Al Jazeera English managing director says, “From the Al Jazeera perspective, some of our most prominent and most experienced correspondents are women and they [have been] dealing with these challenges for years.”

For everybody else, there’s hostile environment training.

To prepare their staff for modern-day conflict, many major media outlets send newbie foreign reporters to training conducted by former British Royal Marines and U.K. Special Forces who work for companies such as Centurion Risk Assessment Services Ltd. and AKE Ltd., respectively. Journalists learn how not to die of dehydration, how to identify certain weapons just by their signature noise and how to be a good hostage—essentially, how to stay alive. At Centurion, they also undergo mock kidnappings. In her 2011 book, Decade of Fear: Reporting from Terrorism’s Grey Zone, Michelle Shephard, national security reporter for the Star, recalls the week she spent in Virginia at Centurion’s U.S. camp in 2006. She writes of the instructors’ “Oscar-worthy performances” as they “threw burlap sacks over our heads and then had us march, kneel, lie motionless face down in the dirt in a drill that felt all too real.”

Such verisimilitude isn’t cheap: AKE charges $3,950 (U.S.) for a five-day course; Centurion’s fees are $500 to $800 a day. But what these courses don’t offer is much—or any—training on how to deflect or, at worst, come to terms with sexual assault. AKE takes female journalists aside for a live video chat with a female representative to address rape and sexual assault; Centurion will offer “extended closed sessions about rape and sexual assault for female journalists if wanted,” according to Carole Rees, the company’s business development manager. Since the attack on Logan, she says, there have been a lot of inquiries as to whether sexual and gender-based violence is offered in Centurion’s hostile environment training. However, according to “Unspoken,” the BBC, which Matloff calls “a pioneer in trauma awareness,” is the “only major news organization that offers special safety instruction for women, taught by women.”

This omission isn’t always the trainers’ fault, according to Matloff. Since the responsibility is on the employer to request any specific training, she says, “We can’t blame Centurion and AKE for not offering it if it wasn’t requested.” Scott White, CP’s editor-in-chief, for example, did not ask for any specialized sexual assault training beyond the regular hostile environment courses before sending his reporters to Afghanistan. The female reporters who covered that war encountered dangerous situations, but he says, “I don’t think they encountered them because they were female.” CP’s Stephanie Levitz, who did two rotations in Afghanistan, is dubious about what specialized training would look like. Is it “How not to get sexually assaulted?” she asks. “That’s impossible.”

But Matloff disagrees. She is one of the primary organizers of a new course, Reporting in Crisis Zones, recently launched by the continuing education department of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Specifically designed to fill the gaps in training journalists receive elsewhere, with an emphasis on conflicts and “avoiding unnecessary peril,” it first ran last November. Topics in the first two days included cybersecurity, risk assessment, situational awareness, dealing with emotional trauma and emergency first aid. But the third day, open only to women, addressed rape and assault prevention (the pilot version of the course cost $795 for the first two days and $895 for all three days). “The goal is to provide rape prevention training for foreign correspondents so that they can avoid situations like Lara Logan’s, and better cope should the unmentionable occur,” Matloff says. The website lists delay tactics, basic self-defence and healing as part of the third day’s curriculum. Matloff explains the reasoning behind this specialized instruction: “[A]s we saw with this horrible incident with Lara Logan, where her male colleagues were beaten, she was beaten and sexually assaulted.”

Obviously passionate about the issue of women’s safety and the need for addressing the issue of sexual assault, Matloff recalls a friend who was raped while on foreign assignment but felt too uncomfortable to tell her editor. Fearing that she might have contracted AIDS, the reporter told a convoluted cover story to her boss so she could leave the country where she was stationed and then spent a fortune on anti-retroviral drugs in another country. Had she divulged the rape, her employer could have covered her expenses. “I never want to see that happening to another colleague,” Matloff says with conviction.

CP’s White calls the fledgling course “a welcome and needed addition to this type of training.” Although CP has no immediate plans to send any staff into conflict zones, White says he would consider the program in the future. And Colin MacKenzie, the Star’s political editor, says, “The rape-prevention module is overdue.”

Still, some female reporters aren’t sold on the Columbia course. Medina is skeptical about the program’s aim to teach participants how to work effectively and safely in volatile situations. “The only way to do that,” she says, “is to not work effectively or to stay home.” She’s also wary about attention given to the threat of sexual assault: “The more the academics and media and articles, perhaps, such as this [story], talk about rape and sexual assault, the more journalists will fear it,” says Medina. “If you go into a situation wearing that fear, you can invite it.”

Meanwhile, Corinna Schuler, a former Post correspondent who served in Africa, believes the course is not practical “for people who are already working as full-time reporters,” partly because when a journalist is in the field, a lot comes “down to instinct and learning on the job, on the fly.” And Stephanie Nolen says, “I think it’s really dangerous to frame this as a conversation about the vulnerability of women in this job when I don’t think women are any more vulnerable than men,” although she concedes women may sometimes be “differently vulnerable.”

One reporter who does believe Matloff’s program could teach her something new and valuable is Sonia Verma. She notes that when she did training in Kingston, Ontario, about 10 years ago, she was only one of three women in a class of about 20, so she didn’t think specific training for women made sense in that context. (She does recall that the instructor did mention sexual violence, but it was regarding male journalists being raped in Mogadishu.) Verma thinks the Lara Logan incident is a wake-up call for the industry. “There isn’t really specific training for women—the unique situations that women might find themselves in,” she says. “The question should be how can we better equip women to do their jobs.”

Heather Robertson wanted no part of a football team.In 1961, the University of Manitoba was again considering forming a squad, even though teams had already folded twice due to high costs and low support. But “the football boys,” as Robertson called them, wanted to try again—at the expense of the students and administration. So, as editor of the school’s newspaper, The Manitoban, the 19-year-old wrote a fiery editorial denouncing the proposal. “Again this year they are peddling football—an easy, instant remedy for all the ills that affect Manitoba,” she began. “Are three expensive games per season in a makeshift stadium in foul weather against teams from places most of us have only heard about and wouldn’t particularly care to visit going to suddenly make us full of college spirit?”

The jocks called for her head. They wanted their team and they wanted Robertson fired for speaking out against it. So the student council called on her to justify her words. “She wasn’t objective!” the football fanatics argued. “It was an editorial!” she countered. As she stood inside the student centre making her case, she heard a dull roar outside as a group of protesting jocks shouted into a megaphone and demanded their team. Then, through the windows of the small room, Robertson watched in shock as the throng raised a stuffed figure by a rope around its neck. She quickly realized that the bundle of straw, with its long hair and skirt, was her effigy. It wasn’t enough to just symbolically hang her; the crowd outside wanted more. The mob lit a fire under the straw and soon “Heather Robertson” was up in flames. All this over an editorial?

The football boys were just the first of many opponents Robertson would face in her journalism career. She’d win some battles and lose others, be labelled a communist and get sued for libel. But when she was just a sheltered 19-year-old girl, inspiring a demonstration was incredibly exciting—journalism was exciting. She didn’t know it then, but the excitement wouldn’t end there.

Today, at 69, Robertson walks with a slight limp, has short white hair and wears slacks and loafers. She has a warm laugh, works on her garden and can’t help but talk about her kids (her son is a film editor who worked on the Angelina Jolie action movie Salt). But in many ways, Robertson is far from ordinary. For 15 years she fought two class action lawsuits against the largest media corporations in Canada—and won. She filed on behalf of all Canadian freelance writers who had their work reproduced on electronic databases without their knowledge, consent or compensation. The media giants paid millions.

Many journalists now associate Robertson with those landmark lawsuits. They celebrate her for standing up for her peers, keeping everyone updated on the case and, of course, for the “Heather Robertson cheques,” some in the tens of thousands of dollars. But plenty of the freelancers who were thrilled to cash those cheques know little about the woman who fought for them. They don’t know about her 50-year career, her 18 books and her three novels, or her role in the creation of the Professional Writers Association of Canada. Though Robertson’s lawsuits have been important to Canadian journalists, they are just the latest battle in a career marked by activism. “She was a muckraker,” says Don Obe, her editor at Toronto Life. “She was out to right wrongs and she was her whole magazine-writing career.”

“It was in my blood to stick it to the corporation,” says Robertson, who was born in Winnipeg in 1942. Her grandfather emigrated from Scotland, worked as a pattern-maker for the Canadian National Railway and took part in the Winnipeg General Strike in 1919. “He was a proud labour man,” she says. “I still have his copy of Das Kapital by Karl Marx on my bookshelf.” Unions, the CCF, medicare—these ideas, prominent in Western Canada, were a formative influence on Robertson. She now lives in King City, just north of Toronto, but still longs for the prairie.

In 1964, after she completed a master’s in English literature at Columbia University, which she attended on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the school offered her a scholarship to do her PhD. Her thesis adviser told her the degree would make it easy to find work at a New England women’s college. Robertson’s whole future flashed before her eyes. “I saw myself as this hag in a black robe—spinster—teaching these girls with the perfectly coiffed pageboy, blond hair, coming from these wealthy families—the cream of the Boston crop, whatever—in some sort of rusticated, rural, ivy-covered college,” she recalls in mock horror. Then, from the depths of her subconscious, where the memory of the exciting Manitoban demonstrations lived, she blurted out a revelation that surprised both her and her adviser: “I’m tired of reading books! I want to write them.”

She got her start by landing a job at the Winnipeg Tribune, where she learned a lot from the fraternity of heavy-drinking, crude and talented reporters. “They believed in truth-telling and accurate reporting,” she says. “So they taught me a great deal about standards and being courageous to tell the story that you found, not the story that somebody thought that you should be telling.”

Robertson was part of a new generation of female journalists in the 1960s. Unlike the veteran male reporters working next to her, she was university educated. And unlike most of the women who came before her, she didn’t write about social gatherings and bazaars for the women’s pages—she reported. In her 1980 piece, “The Last of the Terrible Men,” in Canadian Newspapers: The Inside Story, she reflected on the new wave she was a part of. “We had no tits. It had been customary to measure the talent of female staff members at the Tribune by the size of their bra cups; the women’s editor was a statuesque 38D, columnist Ann Henry a stunning 36 triple C. We were all As.”

In 1965, the First Nations of Kenora staged a peaceful demonstration demanding recognition and equality. The protests captivated Robertson. Just 23, she entered a 1966 Imperial Tobacco contest to write a book about Canada in the year 2000. Her theme: the status of the country’s Aboriginal Peoples. With $3,000 and a deadline of September 1, 1967, Robertson left theTribune and set off in her dad’s 1958 Nash Rambler. The Department of Indian Affairs warned her of the “bad Indians” to avoid. She sought them out first. For eight months Robertson travelled the Prairies visiting aboriginal reserves by car, train and even plane. She kept her distance and did not stay overnight on the reserves. “I thought, I’m a journalist, I’m not a sociologist. I’m not going to pretend to be one of these people.”

James Lorimer and Co. published Reservations Are for Indians in 1970. It was the first time a white journalist had approached the social problems facing Canada’s aboriginal population in such depth. Robertson discussed suicide, alcoholism, dependency, backward government policies, treaties and culpability. In one chapter, Robertson described the “mudlarks” of The Pas, Manitoba. “These pathetic little dark girls are not seductive, bundled up against the cold in ski pants and ugly nylon jackets, shivering,” she wrote. “It is not really accurate to call these women and girls prostitutes. There is so little money involved and they are so apologetic, unassuming, and unprofessional, they will go with a man for nothing, just on a gamble that something will turn up.” Some Aboriginal readers were so offended that investigators were sent to The Pas to prove the mudlarks did not exist. But they did. When Lorimer accompanied Robertson to a public debate with aboriginal leaders in Flin Flon, he was impressed that, despite her relative inexperience, she didn’t hide from the story she wrote or the people she angered.

Though her first book was controversial, it sold. In 1971, following that success, Maclean’s editor Peter C. Newman hired Robertson to write a monthly television column. “Nobody in the country was writing as well as she,” he says. “I got into huge trouble when I was visiting Winnipeg and interviewed on the CBC. I was asked, ‘Why don’t you hire more people from Winnipeg?’ and I remember saying, ‘I’d give my right nut to find another Heather Robertson.’” A typical column included at least one jab at CBC’s uninspired adaptation of the hit novel The Whiteoaks of Jalna, but she always offered more than just what was or wasn’t good on TV. Instead, Robertson used television to present a social critique and discuss important issues, says Newman. In her November 1971 column, for example, she took on the medium’s inherent biases. “Like all class systems, television tends to exploit the people it excludes. Ethnic groups, hard hats, rural people, religious sects make it onto TV only as part of a news item or as subjects of a documentary,” she wrote. “They are categorized, observed, manipulated, interviewed, photographed, edited, scripted and packaged.” The networks, she argued, needed to put “real people” on the airwaves.

Robertson wasn’t afraid to express her opinions—no matter how contentious. In an April 1975 column titled “Confessions of a Canadian Chauvinist Pig,” Robertson voiced her intense anti-Americanism. “I am sick of all the snivelling hand-wringing cant about our good friend and neighbour to the south, the longest undefended border in the world blah blah while this good friend, violent and exploitive abroad and corrupt at home, treats us with contempt and robs us blind,” she wrote. “I suspect most of us have our revolution/invasion fantasies—I confess to a desire to toss a hand grenade into every American camper I pass on the highway.”

Months later, Elaine Dewar, the editor on the piece, found out that the column had infuriated the higher-ups at the magazine. “The plan was: throw those women out the door,” she recalls. Yet again, somebody wanted Robertson dropped. Though she and Dewar stayed, Maclean’s soon changed from a monthly to a bi-weekly newsmagazine (on its way to becoming the weekly it is today) and Robertson didn’t want to be confined to a column. “I sort of have a theory that columnists tend to burn out after a few years,” she says. “You’ve said what you have to say.”

But she was far from finished pissing people off. By 1979, working as a freelancer, she visited the Royal Ontario Museum and found it a dusty relic in disarray. “The collection is a mind-boggling hodgepodge,” she wrote in a Toronto Life story called “The Royal Ontario Muddle.” “The only motive for some of the displays seems to be vanity—the donor’s name on the label is the first thing I notice.” She saved her harshest criticisms for the dubious ways the museum attained its collection. “The cheapest way to acquire treasure was to rob tombs; much of the ROM is a necropolis.”

The magazine’s publisher, Michael de Pencier, was on the museum’s board of directors and wanted the piece killed. But Obe defended it because he believed it was “a good, irreverent piece for Toronto Life to be presenting.” Working as the middleman, he attempted to squeeze some concessions out of Robertson. “She was prickly. She was standing her ground and she wasn’t prepared to give very much at all.” Obe says de Pencier gave more than she did. In the end, she made some minor compromises and agreed to a byline that read “Opinion by Heather Robertson.” She maintains she simply wrote what she found and it wasn’t her job to keep the publisher in mind. But de Pencier wasn’t the only one upset with the piece, says Obe. “We got all kinds of letters saying that this communist from Winnipeg was out to destroy our museum.”

When Robertson started freelancing in 1971, editors could assign her a story, make her write three or four drafts, kill it and never pay her a cent. Veteran writers never saw rates increase and discussing how much a writer made was taboo. So, Robertson and some colleagues, including June Callwood, Alan Edmonds, Erna Paris and Myrna Kostash, tried to improve the situation. Their idea was that strength in numbers would lead to greater respect. “We wanted acknowledgement from people that paid us the cheques that we were professionals,” says Kostash. In 1976, they formed the Periodical Writers Association of Canada (PWAC) and created a freelancing contract that established kill fees and conduct standards. But few editors signed on and one dismissed them as a pack of lone wolves. “They said we would disappear in a matter of months,” says Robertson. Though they didn’t get much support from management, she believes the fact that freelancers would actually join together caused quite the stir in the publishing industry. Today, PWAC (which has since changed the P in its name from Periodical to Professional) still uses a standard contract and has 21 chapters and more than 600 members.

Then, in 1996, The Globe and Mail demanded its freelance writers sign contracts giving all rights to all media, in perpetuity. A freelancer for more than two decades, Robertson had always dealt with editors verbally, so she found these new contracts alarming. “For them suddenly to start wanting all of these rights, we got to thinking, well, what are they doing here? Are they trying to legitimize something?” The internet was still far from a household convenience at the time, so Robertson went to the Toronto Reference Library and asked the librarians to search her name on the InfoGlobe database. They found a recent excerpt of her book, Driving Force, which had been published in Report on Business Magazine in October 1995. She hadn’t given anyone the right to put it online; neither had her agent or her publishers. Many of her colleagues’ work was online as well. They were furious. After failed negotiations with the Globe, Elaine Dewar suggested the freelancers band together and sue.

Class action law was only four years old in Ontario when Robertson and her colleagues, including Dewar and Callwood, approached Michael McGowan (who was recommended to her by a friend because he “never quits”) and his associate, Kirk Baert, to take on their case. “The freelancers believed that this wasn’t permitted, that they had only sold a one-time use of the articles and that publishers didn’t have any right to sell it again and again and again by putting it on a database,” says Baert. The writers filed a lawsuit against Thomson Corporation, its affiliate companies and what was then Bell Globemedia Publishing. Because Robertson’s book excerpt had been printed in the Globe and her publishers had a contract, which said nothing of electronic rights, she was an obvious choice to represent the class.

And by this point in her career, Robertson had largely moved on from features to books. She’d written eight non-fiction books on topics that ranged from the life of Kenny Leishman, one of Canada’s most notorious thieves (The Flying Bandit), to profiles of four Prairie towns (Grass Roots) to Canadian art and literature of the two world wars (A Terrible Beauty: The Art of Canada at War). She also had three novels to her credit because she felt writers weren’t—and still aren’t—considered real writers unless they write fiction. Her first, Willie: A Romance, about a love triangle involving Prime Minster William Lyon Mackenzie King, won both the Books in Canada Best First Novel Award and the Canadian Authors Association Fiction Prize. Because she was primarily an author in 1996, it was easier for Robertson to agree to represent the class in the lawsuit. “I wasn’t dependent on journalism for my income. So, I could offend these people,” she says with a laugh. And she wanted to take the media corporations on. Harkening back to her Scottish roots, Robertson says, “Here I was, this middle-aged Canadian woman, suddenly being robbed of my creative work by a laird. It’s one of those blinding moments. I guess in a way, I saw it as this tremendous challenge. I reached for my dirk and off I went.”

In 2003, Robertson launched a second suit against ProQuest, Rogers, Toronto Star Newspapers, Canwest and CEDROM, which she calls “Robertson vs. Everybody Else.” Three years later, the Supreme Court of Canada found that “newspaper publishers own the copyright in their newspapers and have a right to reproduce a substantial part of that newspaper but do not have the right, without the consent of the author, to reproduce individual articles.” In 2009, the Thomson suit was settled and the corporations had to pay $11 million to the class. Almost 850 Canadian freelancers who had filed claims split more than $5 million. They received anywhere from $1 to just under $55,000; the average claim was $7,500. Every settlement was calculated using the same formula—even Robertson’s. For the hundreds of hours she put in each year toward the lawsuits, she received only the minor amount of $5,000 for the time she committed to the litigation on behalf of the class. But she doesn’t seem to mind and even downplays the significance of her role as class representative. “It wasn’t that onerous, just sort of keeping people up to date with what was going on,” she says. “It was a collective effort.”

Though freelancers are thankful that Robertson stood up for her peers, some question whether these lawsuits have actually benefited writers in the long run. Kim Pittaway, who has been working for magazines since the late 1980s, says the suits are important because they articulate writers’ rights to their own work. However, she says the suits haven’t necessarily helped anyone maintain control over those rights because lawyers have simply created more comprehensive contracts, demanding rights to all media “now known or ever to be discovered” without increasing fees. But Baert says these contracts are not the media corporations’ response to the class actions. In fact, the Globe’s contract was the catalyst that brought Robertson to court in the first place. “The fight is just beginning now,” says Robertson. “We’ve got our copyright but these contracts are still there. So we now have to deal with contract negotiations so that we get a fair compensation.”

But that’s a fight for other writers. After spending 15 years on the class actions, it’s now time for Robertson to think about her future. She’s had an idea for a new novel—a family saga—in her head for years and maybe she’ll try to put the pieces together. But her biggest task is figuring out what to do now that the class actions are over. “When you’re carrying a bag for 15 years, then all of a sudden it’s gone, it’s a funny feeling.”

Robertson sits in the middle of a canoe as her friendsand guides Paul Pepperall and Ann Love paddle her up the Nottawasaga River. It’s a miserable, cold October day in 2009 and the 67-year-old is doing research for a book. They are searching for a long forgotten waterway called Willow Creek. She later described the trip in Walking into Wilderness: The Toronto Carrying Place and Nine Mile Portage: “As we enter the swamp we are engulfed by dense, drowned forest, a monochromatic landscape of greens and browns. It has been an unusually wet summer, and rivulets are running into the river from all directions. I have been warned that canoeists get lost in this watery labyrinth.” For hours, Pepperall and Love manoeuvre between dead logs and fight the strong current while Robertson scours the landscape and her maps for the inky-black creek. At last they finally see it. “We stop, and look at each other amazed,” she wrote. “We have made a discovery!”

Nearly two years after that adventure, on a rainy June morning, Robertson sits in the front row of an auditorium in north Toronto waiting to receive her award for Walking into Wilderness from the Ontario Historical Society. The presenter says, “This is a well-conceived, well-researched, well-written and beautifully designed book of regional history.” A month earlier, Robertson learned her second class action had settled (and the class would share $7.9 million). But today, she isn’t celebrating her successful lawsuits; instead, others are celebrating her for her writing. And that’s just as it should be.