Update: Linda Solomon Wood, editor of the National Observer, disputes the characterization of the Observer as “anti-corporate” and “green.” It is the Review writer’s own analysis and does not necessarily reflect the mandate of the publication. The Observer would rather describe itself as “anti-corruption.” Also, while the Observer did indeed win a CJF award for Excellence in Journalism in 2012, it also won the award in 2014.

Bruce Livesey has been working for 30 years, putting time in with CBC’s the fifth estate, Al Jazeera English’s People and Power and Global TV’s 16×9—all investigative shows. His beat is corporate affairs. In late 2014, when he was researching a story about the Koch brothers, owners of the second-largest private business in America, and their Canadian connections, he uncovered what was only to be expected: big money, American influence and pipeline politics. 16×9 commissioned and approved the story and published a teaser on its website, but in late January 2015, two days before the air date, the show pulled the piece from its broadcast schedule without explanation. Soon, a Canadaland post blamed the documentary’s removal on Global TV’s associations with the oil industry. Rishma Govani, a spokesperson for the network, says the story was “set aside solely for editorial reasons.”

Livesey says that he was later fired because of the Canadaland article, though he maintains he wasn’t the one who leaked the story of his documentary’s removal. He took the Koch brothers story with him when he left. Three months later, the National Observer published the piece as part of the independent publication’s launch.

The National Observer, which debuted in April and markets itself as Canada’s national news source for both environment and politics, has a mandate that’s resolutely green and anti-corporate. Energy journalism in Canada has generally been split—on one side, corporate coverage from energy business reporters in national publications, and on the other, green bloggers and activists. The Observer delivers the attitude of the activists with the quality reporting of national publications. “This is what I like about the Observer,” says Livesey. “It’s a journalistic enterprise, but it definitely has a point of view.”

The news site is the second founded by Linda Solomon Wood. The Vancouver Observer, a local daily she launched in 2006, won the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s Award for Excellence in Journalism in 2012. Following that success, Solomon Wood took the concept of a grassroots, crowdfunded news site and made it national and green.

As a Vancouver-based site, the National Observer has an advantage over publications that have their heads wrapped up in Toronto and Ottawa, says Solomon Wood. Readership quadrupled to 1.2 million unique readers from across North America between April and November 2015. Still, a lack of funds means the Observer, despite its energy focus, doesn’t have an Alberta correspondent. “It’s always been hard,” says Solomon Wood.

A link on the website asks visitors to “support our reporting” with a monthly donation or one-time contribution. A series last May about the April earthquake in Nepal includes sponsored content—a reported multimedia article that promotes Kina, a non-profit organization that educates Nepalese girls. The Observer also asks for donations via letters to its readers, and it relies on advertising, subscriptions, crowdfunding and fundraising to pay for everything—from daily journalism to the salaries of its 10 staff members to its investigative projects. The Tar Sands Reporting Project produced by the Vancouver Observer raised $53,040 by January 2016 with the promise to explore the relationships involved in the tar sands industry—local workers to green activists to First Nations leaders—on the West Coast.

The National Observer focuses on the type of stories Livesey produces and uses grabby headlines to lure people in (and, once they’ve read the article, to donate). When Livesey produced his story on the Koch brothers for 16×9, it was called “The Koch Connection.” For the Observer, it became “How Canada made the Koch Brothers rich.” Other stories he’s written for the site have a similar tone.

The website is a mix of the social activism of Rabble and the headlines of BuzzFeed. But Solomon Wood says that instead of producing clickbait, which drags people in only to disappoint them, she tries to publish stories that only get better once on the page. The investigative team has completed 11 special reports on topics ranging from the global refugee crisis to animals in the face of climate change.

An energy beat reporter might call the website biased toward environmentalists in the same way the Observer might call mainstream newspapers biased toward the industry, says Shawn McCarthy, global energy business reporter for The Globe and Mail. But he simply covers a “different side of things.” Energy reporters at other publications watched the website’s launch with enthusiasm. Most are impressed, says McCarthy. “The Observer is filling an important niche here.”

Rebecca Penty, energy industry reporter at Bloomberg News, agrees. But she says she can’t see a clearly defined strategy from the Observer. Within the jumbled array of stories, from the Nepalese earthquake to senate scandals, it’s hard to define the site’s mission. The website covers the environment and energy industry, she says, but it seems to still be in the process of determining its priorities as a national publication.

Perhaps that’s why, for Livesey, working at the Observer offers freedom. He can write stories about corporations and corruption from his home office, and Solomon Wood gives him the time to follow wherever his research may lead. Livesey adds that he doesn’t have to worry about his stories getting cut because of corporate influence. “When you work in the private sector media, they’re generally not interested in going after big companies,” he says. “With the Observer, that’s never an issue.” Quite the opposite: going after corporations is part of the mandate.

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Scott Adamson

Kevin Donovan, investigative reporter at the Toronto Star, tells us about his most memorable moment as a journalist.

Q: What happens when an internationally-recognized Canadian journalist who has written extensively on what is arguably the country’s biggest political scandal to date holds an online question-and-answer period?

A: She receives a bunch of really, really stupid questions.

Robyn Doolittle should be applauded for her efforts to connect with Torontonians on Reddit Tuesday after hosting an “Ask Me Anything” (AMA) thread in which her readers could ask their burning questions. She braved the possibility of encountering a cesspool of trolls; but while they seemed to stay at bay for this AMA (Daniel Dale excluded), the session still fell flat. What could have been an opportunity to peek into the world of Canadian investigative journalism, instead turned into a boring collection of queries regarding Doolittle’s House of Cards lookalike, her dog grooming schedule and if she had ever met Rob Ford (seriously).

The outcome is a shame. Reddit has long been a launching pad for great crowdsourced journalism. In 2012, several major Canadian publications commended and cited the Redditor-produced timeline on the Danzig shooting. The forum has also been a platform for connection, a place where those who have been out of reach from the general public can converse with laypeople.

For journalists, AMAs serve as an opportunity to answer the questions behind their stories, help readers better understand their jobs and be transparent about how they gather and report news. The AMA subreddit is five years old, and boasts more than 6 million members and there have been plenty of well-informed journalist-hosted AMAs: In June, Ricochet editor Ethan Cox held one that yielded questions about the sustainability of a Canadian journalism start-up. In January 2013, Andy Carvin discussed the implications of covering Arab revolutions using social media. And last October, Postmedia columnist Andrew Coyne talked paywalls and Canadian politics.

Why, then, are Doolittle’s readers so interested in her resemblance to Kate Mara and her relationship status? It’s impossible to pinpoint. Her gender plays a role in how she’s perceived, but so does the fact that she uncovered such a sensational story about one of Canada’s strangest political figures and has appeared globally on late-night TV shows. Doolittle is a female journalist who was thrust into the spotlight—and as research shows, it’s not a surprise she faces intense scrutiny and an onslaught of irrelevant questions.

Not all was terrible: Doolittle did glean some insight on her move to The Globe and Mail (spoiler: she loved it) and paying for news. Otherwise, all we can take from her AMA is that she likes creeping people’s brunch and her love for the Eyeopener is undying.

Can we try a little harder next time, Internet?

Photo courtesy of Zach Copley.

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This story has been updated from a previous version.

By Lisa Coxon

After a few glasses of Côtes du Rhônes, Stephen Maher asks if we can turn the recorders off—one faces him; the other, Glen McGregor. We’re on the patio of Métropolitain, a restaurant just below Parliament Hill that’s a popular after-work hangout among political reporters and parliamentary staff. McGregor is less concerned about inappropriate chatter getting picked up as the wine flows. His tieless light grey suit looks casual compared to Maher’s black ensemble, which is accented with a striped tie. On the Hill, journalists dress more formally. The two reporters, both 48, are recounting how they uncovered one of the biggest election scandals in years when an acquaintance—one of several who have stopped to chat—approaches our table. “Plotting the next Michener, are they?” 

The duo earned that award, among others, in 2012, for their coverage of the robocalls scandal. The Ottawa Citizen’s McGregor and Postmedia’s Maher broke the story that, in 2011, Elections Canada was investigating fake election-day calls that misinformed voters in Guelph, Ontario, that their polling stations had moved. Maher and McGregor’s investigation revealed voter suppression by Conservative operatives, reminding us all of the value of investigative journalism. 

***

McGregor has been on the Hill since 1998. Maher began working there in 2004 as the bureau chief for Halifax’s The Chronicle Herald. During the 2011 federal campaign—before the robocalls story—Maher began looking into strange, harassing calls to voters in Prince Edward Island and Toronto. Following the May election, several news outlets covered the Guelph robocalls. That August, Postmedia hired Maher as a columnist. In his job interview, he told senior vice president of content and editor-in-chief Lou Clan- cy what he’d been working on. “There sure was a lot of smoke coming out,” says Clancy. “It wasn’t rocket science to think that could be a hell of a story.”

After the election, in December 2011, McGregor wrote a story about a Conservative call centre phoning Irwin Cotler’s constituents; the calls falsely implied the Montreal MP had already announced he was going to resign and asked which potential candidate his constituents would support in a by-election. McGregor downplays the story today, but Maher gives him more credit. “It got some chum into the water,” the Atlantic Canadian insists. “It started to make things move.”

Eventually, Maher convinced McGregor to join him, and the two pitched the idea of collaborating to their managing editors—Christina Spencer, then of Postmedia, and the Citizen’s Andrew Potter. “McMaher” was born.

At first, neither editor fully understood the scope of the story. “I kept thinking at some point they’ll either get something or they won’t,” recalls Potter, now the Citizen’s editor. “It wasn’t anything I was terribly excited about at the time.” Maher, meanwhile, told Spencer, “I’ve been working on this thing, and it looks like it’s kind of coming together. When do you want to talk?” She thought about it and realized it sounded “amazing.” 

Colleagues use the word “dogged” to describe the pair, so it’s fitting that Spencer calls Maher a “terrier.” When it comes to interviews, the two reporters have different philosophies: Maher tries to build trust while McGregor tries to get information. Maher is the good cop and McGregor the bad, but as interviewees, the roles are reversed. There’s McGregor, who offered his iPhone recorder so I don’t have to keep moving mine back and forth. Then there’s Maher, suggesting again that we turn the recorders off, after thetwo debate why CTV’s Robert Fife—McGregor’s hero—is the most important political reporter in Canada right now. McGregor says it’s because he’s the best, while Maher suggests it’s because of CTV’s reach and influence. “If you’re the prime minister’s director of communications, you can deal with two dozen shitty stories in the Ottawa Citizen. You can tell the boss, ‘Ah, it’s those fuckin’ jerks at the Citizen again,’” says Maher. “You get one bad day at CTV National News and you are in big trouble with Mr. Harper.”

Early in their research, the pair mostly sniffed for a pattern, either geographical or among call companies. They created a spreadsheet of reported calls, assembled media reports and ran searches on Infomart and Google News. They asked campaign managers open-ended questions such as, “Did you have any strange calls?” Though McMaher hadn’t heard of anything similar targeting Conservative voters, they also talked to the Conservative Party’s director of communications, Fred DeLorey. The Guelph story had surfaced, but a pattern had not.

***

Investigative journalism is time-intensive and costly, and it doesn’t guarantee a story at the end. It requires patience while waiting for sources to talk and time to analyze data, chase court documents and conduct extensive research. But data journalism, which encompasses everything from developing apps to computer-assisted reporting (CAR), has made the process easier. For example, “scraping” is a time-saving technique in which specialized computer software extracts unstructured data from a website—typically in HTML format—and structures it so that it can be analyzed in a spreadsheet. 

While CAR is a good example of how investigative journalism adapts to new technologies, it’s just another tool in the arsenal. Investigative reporting also depends on a newsroom culture that views it as a priority—but as newsrooms shrink, it’s often one of the first things to go. The catch: investigative journalism is crucial to setting a newspaper apart.

For reporters, gaining the trust needed to get the time to investigate a story requires a track record of “catching rabbits,” says Maher. “Every time you go down the rabbit hole for a week or a month and come back with a rabbit, your bosses look at you and say, ‘Okay, he says he wants to go back down the rabbit hole again.’”

Not all news organizations can afford to pay salaries for several months of research, but Spencer says newsrooms should foster an environment in which every reporter is an investigator. “Investigative reporting has much more to do with getting that into people’s minds than saying, ‘We’re going to create a team’ or ‘We’re going to give people six months on a project,’” she says, pointing to McMaher as an example. “Almost every story they do, even if it’s a minor story, will reveal an investigative mindset in the way they go at it.”

Catching rabbits doesn’t always mean being cleared of other work; investigative reporters still must juggle daily assignments. “Is it asking for the moon?” says CBC’s David McKie, who has used CAR for many of his investigative projects. “Yes. Are you going to get away from it? No. It’s just reality.”

***

McMaher work in the “hot room”—named for its characteristic buzz of activity—with fellow members of the parliamentary press gallery. And it’s actually warm in here on the third floor of Centre Block, which holds the House of Commons and the Senate. Six large windows, one featuring a dingy air conditioner, line the back wall. Four televisions suspended from the ceiling broadcast the Commons feed throughout the day. Reporters shout to each other from their desks. “It’s like being in a monkey cage,” McGregor says. The room is one giant fire hazard: 26 desks overflow with papers and books. Everything reporters need is on this floor—cafeteria, washrooms, the Commons, the Senate. They call eating lunch off the Hill “going ashore.”

McGregor and Maher sit five rows apart. Both have Mac desk- tops, though McGregor’s is balanced on a stack of three fat phone books—he’s taller—while Maher’s sits flat on his desk beside three boxes containing Deadline, his self-published political thriller, set in Ottawa.

Various pins, including one that reads “Stop Harper,” line the left side of his cubicle. Just above those, taped to a white cardboard box, is a black and white photo of Elections Canada investigator Al Mathews. In a cheeky attempt to signal to Mathews that they wanted to talk, McMaher posed beside the picture, in March 2012, for The Hill Times, a politics and government newsweekly based in Ottawa that ran a story about their work. (Mathews never agreed to McMaher’s interview requests.) In keeping with their modest sense of humour, both men have the same newspaper clipping tacked up—a headline with a comical typo: “Citizen calls McGregor and Maher ‘McMaher’: reporters who broke explosive roboballs story.”

***

McGregor’s order of eight oysters arrives at the table. Maher jumps at them after he learns they’re from Cooks Cove, Nova Scotia. McGregor doesn’t like to put a lot of “stuff” on them; Maher agrees that’s not the point.

“Poor you, listening to this later,” Maher says to me. “I don’t know about you, Glen, but I find that oysters . . .” The two of them start to chuckle. Maher begins asking a question, then answers it himself: “Is this going to end up in the—never mind.”

McGregor and Maher have a symbiotic relationship; each re- porter has strengths that complement those of the other. McGregor has a reputation as the data-mining mastermind—“Probably a little overblown,” Maher says, “but they say that about him.” McGregor has learned to combine data skills with storytelling. “Glen has a skill set that very few journalists have,” says Potter. “He’s the only one who knows how to do the analysis, the scraping, but also the reporting.”

Maher is the source guy, the one who develops contacts. “He knows everybody,” says Spencer. “He’s easy to talk to and knows how to make people talk.” That’s one of the reasons McGregor liked working with him. “I had gotten so far into data journalism that I wasn’t talking to human sources anymore,” he says. McGregor chased court documents and access to information requests, but the stories involved a lot of talking to people. Since there wasn’t a huge data component to robocalls, he had to get his interviewing skills “back up to snuff.”

***

In January 2012, McGregor obtains the Guelph campaign phone records (and learns other journalists have obtained them too). For weeks, he pores over the list, trying to determine who is be- hind the robocalls. He gets excited, believing there are about four different suspects: “This guy has gotta be it because of all these weird calls to Calgary!” But the leads are all dead ends. Then, in early February, the first big break happens: a source revealsElections Canada is looking into the robocalls. One source leads Maher to another—code-named Simone de Beauvoir—who tells him the investigation is linked to RackNine Inc., an Edmonton voice broadcast company working nationally for the Conservative Party, and confirms Mathews is going through campaign phone records. A Conservative source admits the party is rattled and conducting its own internal probe.

Finally, two numbers at the bottom of the phone list jump out: calls made on the morning of election day from the Guelph campaign to RackNine, just minutes after the robocalls went out. “And that was like, ‘Shit,’” says McGregor, who still can’t explain why he didn’t see the suspicious calls earlier.

Doing what Maher describes as a “fist-pumping slow-walk,” McGregor comes around the corner in the hot room and puts the list on Maher’s desk. “RackNine!” he says, pointing at the numbers. Maher got the source, McGregor got the document and now they have a story.

One morning soon after, McMaher are discussing the story in the lounge adjacent to the hot room—a regular meeting place. Previously a smoking lounge, it features dark wood, black leather furniture, cathedral windows and photos of press gallery members dating back to 1873.

The reporters need to contact RackNine’s owners: McGregor will call Rick McKnight and Maher will phone Matt Meier simultaneously so the men don’t have time to compare notes. McGregor prepares scripts so they will at least get the allegations on the record in case the owners hang up on them.

At their desks, McGregor and Maher peek above their cubicles: “Ready, one, two, three, go.” Maher comes over to McGregor and says he struck out, getting Meier’s voicemail. McGregor gets a live voice, but it’s not McKnight—it’s Meier. He covers the receiver, mouthing “Meier!” When McGregor alleges RackNine is being investigated, Meier plays it “clever and cute” and says he’ll call back. Eventually, he does: he had no idea RackNine’s servers were used to initiate the robocalls until he was contacted by Elections Canada in November 2011; Elections Canada has obtained a search warrant and executed an Information to Obtain (ITO)—the judge’s orders to hand over phone records; he’s co-operating with the investigation. Weeks later, McMaher learn McKnight doesn’t exist; he’s an online persona created by Meier.

The reporters now have evidence tying the Conservative campaign in Guelph to RackNine. McGregor files a draft to Potter, who, realizing what they have, says, “Holy fuck.” The story appears online on February 22, 2012, and runs the next day on A1 of the Citizen.

The following week, Ryan Cormier, court reporter for the Edmonton Journal, faxes a copy of the ITO to McMaher. The two publish a story on it, but McGregor knows from his work on the “in-and-out” scandal of 2006 (a scheme that saw the Conservatives spend a million dollars more on advertising than they should have during the election campaign) that they need more. The investigating officer—in this case, Mathews—has to swear an affidavit that will become part of the public record. “Go back,” they tell Cormier. “You gotta get the affidavit.”

Cormier finally scores it. On February 28, McGregor tells Potter they’ll have it by 2 p.m., 15 minutes before Question Period.

12:32 p.m.: McGregor emails Potter: “just worried about our useless fucking website taking 30 minutes to update.”
12:49 p.m.: Potter replies, saying the URL can be up within two minutes, but the server needs 30 minutes before it will show up in the index.

Huddled over the fax machine, McMaher can only wait. They want to break the story online during Question Period and tweet it so the Opposition can get a question in. The fax machine ticks along, and they read every page as it spits out: “Okay, I know that, I know that, we know that.” Finally, at 1:30, they get the affidavit and spot something unexpected: Pierre Poutine of Separatist Street, Joliette, Quebec. Elections Canada traced the number on the call display to a disposable cellphone with a Joliette area code that was used to set up the robocall account with RackNine.

“We have this moment where we kind of look at each other,” Maher remembers. “I think we embraced and kissed.” Several reporters in the press gallery are now chasing the story, and even though McMaher are ahead of the curve, they’re worried The Globe and Mail’s Daniel LeBlanc and Campbell Clarke might beat them to it. Maher’s desk is closer, so he grabs the affidavit and starts writing—500 words in 15 minutes. McGregor runs to his own desk and, at 1:46, unable to resist, tweets, “The made-up name ‘Pierre Poutine’ will be on all lips later today.”

1:49 p.m.: Cormier emails everyone involved: “Yeah, CBC has the Racknine ITO . . .”
2:14 p.m.: Maher emails Spencer and Potter: “hurry cbc has this”
2:17 p.m.: Potter emails the Citizen’s web guy, ccing McGregor, asking him to put the URL up. “HIGH PRIORITY” is in the subject line.
2:21 p.m.: McGregor replies to Potter’s previous email: “Whatever . . . just need the URL soon. Globe and CBC both have same docs!! We gotta move here!”

McGregor does not like to be scooped. “He loves to be first,” says Michael Bate, editor of Frank magazine, where McGregor worked for eight years. “It’s a game for him.” However, as the robocalls story demonstrates, in investigative journalism, collaboration can sometimes be more helpful than competition.

The co-production model—two or more news organizations working together on a story—brings journalists together to pool resources and produce more comprehensive investigations. This is especially useful in a time of budget cuts. The Toronto Star’s “enterprise team,” comprising reporters Robert Cribb, Jennifer Quinn and, until recently, Julian Sher, has experimented with co-pros on several investigative stories since late 2012. Now senior producer at The Fifth Estate, Sher says co-pros were always useful, but today “they’re a life-saving necessity for good investigative journalism”—not because they save money so much as because they maximize what news outlets are willing to spend. Handing over sources and research to colleagues isn’t easy; it requires trust. But once journalists build that trust, Sher says, “It is unshakeable.”

***

Maher heads into the Commons press gallery and sits in a green-leather-upholstered wooden chair, overlooking the MPs. Meanwhile, McGregor is in the lobby, ready to scrum interim Liberal leader Bob Rae. Maher repeatedly hits refresh on his phone, waiting for the link to show up from the Citizen’s website. At 2:27 the story lands and Maher tweets it. Opposition members start showing each other their phones. 

2:39p.m.: A Liberal researcher emails McGregor: “Sending a Q into the House.”

An NDP and a Liberal MP step behind the mustard-yellow velvet curtain to prepare questions. Government House leader Peter Van Loan shows his phone to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who scrolls through the story without showing any emotion. Denis Coderre, then a Liberal MP, addresses the prime minister, informing him the Opposition has just learned of the direct link between RackNine and his party. “Can someone please explain to us why this electoral fraud took place? Could he set the record straight and tell us why the Conservative Party did such a thing?”

These are the moments investigative journalists live for. McGregor admits, “That was pure adrenaline for an hour.”

***
Predictably, McGregor and Maher faced mockery and ridicule from Conservative bloggers and right-wing news organizations such as Sun News Network. Ezra Levant implied that Maher had once been booted from a Conservative conference for being drunk. Byline host Brian Lilley used McGregor’s college job—DJing at a strip club—and the fact that his mother once worked for the NDP to try to discredit him. Lilley also suggested McMaher willfully omitted facts from their stories; Maher denies this, noting that some facts were leaked only to party-friendly news outlets.

At the time, Maher was bothered by the cheap shots, but now he’s more philosophical. “When we put politicians in the crosshairs and they are subject to negative public scrutiny, it is extremely unpleasant for them,” he says. “I didn’t understand how unpleasant until I was subjected to something similar.” But if anyone tried to put pressure on their editors, the reporters never knew about it. Potter says the same about Gerry Nott, then the Citizen’s publisher and editor-in-chief. “For all I know, he was getting calls from the PMO. I don’t know, but there was never any pressure on that front from Gerry,” says Potter, who adds that the paper kept the reporters in a bubble so they could just do their jobs. “We put that story on the front page almost every day for two months, and I know some readers and other people thought we were making a mountain out of a molehill.” Clancy remembers it the same way: “There were a lot of naysayers outside of government too. Not all the media bought into this story right away.” But the editors told the duo to keep reporting it. And they did.

In early 2013, proposed redrawn Saskatchewan riding boundaries would have favoured opposition parties. A robocall disguised as a poll told voters that eliminating the province’s hybrid ridings (part country, part city) would pit urban areas against rural ones and “offend Saskatchewan values.” While Maher was on holiday, McGregor pursued the story. The Conservatives denied responsibility, but when one of the phone numbers associated with the calls surfaced, McGregor called it and immediately recognized the voice of Matt Meier. After recording the outgoing message, he sent it to Maher, who then sent it to a forensic voice analysis expert in the U.S. The expert compared McGregor’s recording with the RackNine voicemail and concluded both were the same guy. McMaher emailed the Conservatives, who later sent a memo to the press gallery admitting to arranging the robocalls. McMaher’s subsequent story proved the Conservatives had again hired RackNine, to execute the Saskatchewan robocall. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s Watergate investigation and Harvey Cashore’s coverage of the Mulroney Airbus affair are part of a long history of investigative journalists uncovering political scandals. But reporters, no matter how persistent, can only know as much as they’re allowed to find out. In the beginning, Maher says, the government had all the information, but now, “A lot of marbles have crossed the table from them to us, and there’s every reason to believe that they will be sliding more marbles to us before it’s over.”

So far, Elections Canada has charged only one person in connection with the robocalls scandal: Michael Sona, a young Conservative Party staffer who worked on the Guelph campaign. Still, McGregor and Maher talk about it almost every day. “We don’t move the puck a whole lot,” says McGregor, but they’ve followed up on new developments. In November 2013, after a judge lifted a publication ban on the names of six witnesses who alleged Sona bragged about arranging the Guelph robocalls, McMaher wrote a story identifying the witnesses and outlining their accusations.

“It’s ultimately an unfinished piece of work,” says McGregor, highlighting one reason the story was so explosive. The reporters uncovered a lot, but not the most important part: the smoking gun. That hole drove the story forward, dominating political news for weeks. If McMaher had identified Pierre Poutine, it might have been a one-week sensation. “Ottawa is a very competitive media environment, and everybody wanted a piece of that story,” says Spencer. Even though they didn’t crack the case, their reporting earned much acclaim. In one weekend, they won the “triple crown” of awards: Press Freedom, Canadian Association of Journalists and National Newspaper. “I think it’s what could be called a grand slam,” says Clancy, adding that as a result of the story, Maher spends more time on investigative reporting. His once triweekly column now appears only weekly so he has time to pursue investigative pieces.

“Like a lot of things that turn out extremely well,” says Potter, “you don’t plan them and you don’t expect them.” McMaher believe the story mattered to the public. “What’s important in politics is what’s important to people, and with robocalls, you have voters who want to exercise their franchise being deceived,” says Maher. “You can write a lot of important stories, and if nobody gives a shit, then it will have no impact.”

***

Hours have passed, but Maher is still playing bad cop. “I’m worried that this is all a scam, and she’s really writing a feature on Bob Fife,” he says before he beat-boxes into McGregor’s iPhone, which, despite Maher’s many requests, is still recording. He leans forward, looking at me with ice-blue eyes, one brow raised. “Could it be . . . Bob Fife: a good reporter or not a good reporter? You could hang us with that.”

McGregor appears to remember something. “Can we tell her about the Manitoba thing?”

Maher pauses: “I don’t think we should. We’ve given her enough. We’ve given her too much.”

The recognition they’ve received—including that Michener—makes nostalgia inevitable. “I’ve never done any work in my career that has been as satisfying or as interesting,” Maher says. “Stories like robocalls come along maybe once or twice in a career,” McGregor adds. “I love paper chases, having a mystery to find out.”

It was the most fun they ever had on a story.

***

A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the headline of the clipping above McGregor and Maher’s desks as “Citizen calls McGregor and Maher ‘McMaher’: reporters who broke explosive robocalls story.” “Robocalls” should instead be “roboballs.”

This piece was published in the Spring 2014 issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism.