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

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

 ***

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Scott Adamson

By Rebecca Melnyk 

Inside his west-end Toronto apartment, Justin Giovannetti was cocooned in blankets, sick in bed with a bad cold on his day off. His cellphone rang. Dennis Choquette, his editor at The Globe and Mail, wanted him in the office. Giovannetti rolled off his mattress, slipped into his least flattering clothes and schlepped in to work. Soon enough, he found out a train had derailed overnight in a Quebec town called Lac-Mégantic. He attempted to build stories from calls to the Sûreté du Québec, the provincial police force, and emails from the Globe’s chief Quebec correspondent, Sophie Cousineau, who was already on the scene. Finally, on that humid evening of July 6, 2013, Choquette told the summer intern to book a flight.

Around eight o’clock the next morning, the 26-year-old rented an SUV in Montreal and drove about three hours across the countryside until he saw smoke on the horizon. He pulled into town, where small clusters of locals huddled along Rue Laval—the main road leading straight to a metal barricade, and beyond that, a sea of black ash from the explosions that had set the downtown ablaze. Adrenaline set in and his cold disappeared as he viewed the disaster scene. He thought he’d be there for a few days, but he finally departed two months later. When he left on September 2, he knew many in the community.

This wasn’t just a parachute-in, sweep-up-the-facts reporting job, although many journalists rushed there to do just that. This was a story that needed to transport readers—farther than fleeting Twitter fixes can do—to a town that could have been just about any small town across the country.

Like the maple tree at the edge of the disaster zone—one side singed and dead, the other, verdant and alive—our relationship with trains now has stark sides. They bring energy, but they also carry hazardous materials and threaten our way of life.

One train was all it took to set a tragic narrative in motion. Some reporters raced to Lac-Mégantic to gather hard facts and keep us updated, but left gaps in the process. Others dug deeper and stayed longer to bring us to the heart of the tragedy. The reporters who stayed to tell stories showed how narrative journalism helps answer questions that others leave smouldering in the ashes.

***
Just after midnight on July 6, about 60 people are up late at Musi-Café on Rue Frontenac. They’re enjoying one of the first warm nights of summer after days of cold rain. Some are celebrating birthdays. Some are dancing to the songs of local musicians. Others are smoking on the terrace, about 20 metres from the tracks that loop through town. Around 12:58 a.m., less than 13 kilometres away, a driverless, 73-car train carrying crude oil from a Bakken oil field in North Dakota begins rolling toward them.

The sky flashes bright orange around 1:15 a.m. as the train derails and tanks burst into massive fireballs. Flames swallow the Musi-Café, illuminating the Appalachian Mountains across the lake. Residents stand silently on the streets while firemen wander helplessly around the edge of the inferno. Soon, police bang on doors and evacuate the area.

One confirmed dead. Many missing. Two thousand evacuated. Thirty buildings destroyed. That’s all reporters can confirm by the following morning as they wander around with recorders and notepads. Riley Sparks, an intern at Montreal’s The Gazette and one of the first reporters to arrive, has no idea what to write when he gets there in the early afternoon. Later, he steps out of his car and crouches down next to a couple sitting on their back porch, watching their town burn.

When Giovannetti arrives on Sunday afternoon, he, too, has no clue where to start. There are no reliable estimates of a death count; numbers keep fluctuating, and people who are missing may be on hunting or fishing trips. Giovannetti joins four other Globe reporters in the evening—Cousineau had spent the night in her car in front of a McDonald’s, one of the only places with Wi-Fi and power outlets. They pitch a tent outside the town since all the B&Bs are swarmed with journalists. In the thick heat of summer, with no running water for showering, the reporters have no time to think between getting to bed after midnight and attending 6 a.m. press briefings.

During those first updates, Giovannetti is among about 30 reporters, a number that doubles by the afternoon of Monday, July 8, when CNN, BBC and other international outlets show up. Four days ago he was writing about the battle over butter tarts in rural Ontario. Now he’s in his home province, which he left in May for the Globeinternship, scribbling notes on the worst train disaster in modern Canadian history. He follows a Facebook discussion group and learns some residents are angry at insensitive journalists failing to respect their privacy. But on July 10, Edward Burkhardt, CEO and chairman of the Chicago-based Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway, which operated the train that derailed, arrives in town, and Giovannetti sees the negative sentiment toward reporters turn for the better.

The press centre is one block south of École Sacré-Coeur, an elementary school serving as a temporary police station. When Burkhardt, a man in his 70s with a slight hunch, walks out the school’s glass doors, a reporter spots him. A horde of journalists soon follows. Giovannetti, who is across town when he gets a call from a Globecolleague, races up the street in his SUV. Seeing no parking spots, he leaves it in the middle of Rue Champlain, which is already jammed with abandoned vehicles. He runs toward Burkhardt, who’s now being grilled in a full-on scrum. Photographers climb trees to snap pictures. “You’re a rat!” one resident yells through the crowd. After about 30 minutes, cops lead Burkhardt into the back of a police car and drive away.

***
Back in Toronto, Choquette and others in the newsroom begin contemplating various story ideas, such as a magazine-like piece about life inside Musi-Café before the fire consumed the building. “We all wanted to hear the band playing that night,” Choquette says. That means speaking with witnesses who were at the bar, finding out how paths intersected that evening—and writing a story that captures the emotional toll of the train wreck. Good narrative arises out of a “profound need to make sense of the chaos,” he says. “It’s one of the best tools we have as journalists.” And reporters who value the tools of literary journalism often take on disasters because they’re great stories, full of danger, suspense, suffering and blame.

But making narrative sense out of chaos hasn’t always been a top priority in Canadian disaster coverage. There was a time when reporters distanced readers from tragedy with hard facts rather than offering meaning and context. The St-Hilaire train crash in 1864 killed close to 100 immigrants and resulted in fact-heavy coverage stacked into narrow columns. Stories sent by telegraph centred on identifying the dead and relaying the proceedings of the inquest that followed the disaster.

During the 1917 Halifax Explosion, in which a French cargo ship blew up and killed an estimated 2,000 people, various Canadian Press reports revealed stories about survivors without describing their emotional ordeal or giving a sense of who they were. One such article, “Late notes from a great disaster,” summed up assorted facts about the event—the destruction of a textile mill, missing family members and so on—but related no specific details to give readers any sense of the scene, the victims or their families.

Flickers of narrative began to appear during the third Springhill mining disaster in November 1958. CP’s “Wives and children waited at pithead” described the seconds before the rescue of trapped miners, turning eyewitnesses into three-dimensional characters. Bruce West, a Globe reporter who covered the disaster, returned to Springhill to write about what the paper called “a hard-luck town that refuses to die” for the now-defunct Globe Magazine. The feature focused on the emotional and economic implications of the disaster for the town’s residents.

Writing about the aftermath of a tragedy has purpose. Joe Scanlon, director of the Emergency Communications Research Unit at Carleton University, worked the Toronto Daily Star rewrite desk on the November day the last miners were rescued. The paper had pulled reporters from the scene days earlier, so Scanlon wrote the front-page report from Toronto. He says writing features about a disaster after the initial event is a way of keeping the story alive when there’s nothing new to write about.

This summer, the Globe spent thousands of dollars—on car rentals, phone bills and lodging—to keep Giovannetti in Lac-Mégantic building relationships and fine-tuning the chronology of events through survivors’ stories. Sticking around is essential to narrative, according to New Yorker editor David Remnick, who said in 2011, “The good stuff comes when you come back, and back, and back and back.” When the news caravan moves on, narrative writers can take the time to write meaningful stories.

***
Giovannetti is still in Lac-Mégantic on August 1. Other journalists return to their offices after the tragedy becomes more about the condition of railways, how to transport oil safely and the environmental consequences of the explosion. Yet what becomes increasingly clear after the disaster is how significant Musi-Café was to the town—a gathering space for young and old, and the place where most of those killed spent their final moments. Giovannetti not only speaks the language, but also understands the culture; that’s why he got the assignment. At the edge of a Maxi grocery store parking lot near a rundown suburban strip mall, he talks with workers as they set up a makeshift Musi-Café. Hammers nail white tents into the ground as locals carry in palm trees similar to the ones that stood on the bar’s patio. More than 1,000 people fill the grassy hills surrounding a large stage. Folk musician Fred Pellerin begins to play his guitar and rain falls hard as Giovannetti runs back and forth to his car, uploading photos and filing a story. He types on his computer: “For the bar’s staff, the trees were a reminder of the bar’s rebirth. . . . on an evening when dark clouds loomed.” He believes these narrative elements are important because few people he writes for have been to Lac-Mégantic.

Many reporters have branched out from the early, prosaic coverage of man-made disasters to write pieces that dig deep into the story, create room for emotion and stretch the boundaries of detached voice. After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the human toll and the resulting economic, political and environmental concerns spurred news outlets such as USA Today and The New York Times to reconstruct the event through profiles of different survivors who had escaped the World Trade Center.

A good deal of research has examined narrative coverage of 9/11, including Carolyn Kitch’s study, “Mourning in America: ritual, redemption, and recovery in news narrative after September 11.” She points out that newsmagazines replaced fear with patriotic pride, showing how journalists make sense of senseless news by placing these events in a “grand narrative” of resilience. Narrative doesn’t just take us places—it’s also powerful enough to change the way people perceive their country in the wake of violence and destruction. By transporting readers to the scene of 9/11, journalists let them become witnesses as well—personally involved in the event and, perhaps, more willing to care about the resulting circumstances.

On April 25, 2013, The Boston Globe published Eric Moskowitz’s “Carjack victim recounts his harrowing night,” a story about a man terrorized by the Boston bombing suspects. The reporter spent time in the victim’s home, getting to know him and developing trust, which helped his story unfold like an action film or, as Moskowitz says, like a “Tarantino movie.” During a live online chat hosted by the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, he wrote that narrative helped him avoid trying to “march readers toward a particular understanding.” But in the end, it let readers understand more. A resident near the Watertown shooting site emailed him to say the tick-tock piece “helped fill in gaps that had been gnawing at him.”

***
Rémi Tremblay, a reporter at Lac-Mégantic’s L’Écho de Frontenac for 32 years, hears explosions less than 500 metres away after his son wakes him abruptly. Without a computer and unable to get to his office, Tremblay drives down to Rue Laval where other residents are standing. “I was a witness more than a journalist,” he says. But the paper hadn’t missed a week of publication since 1929, so he begins to write a story in his head—one he will later say came from his heart and gut.

Later, his editor brings him a laptop and he sits down at the corner of a table in an emergency station kitchenette. His fingers pound the keyboard. “Everyone has a horror story to tell,” he types. “Images that will not fade.” What follows is an emotional narrative called “La ville des âmes en peine,” or “The town of suffering souls,” praised by readers for capturing the essence of how residents felt. The following Thursday, the newspaper adds 2,000 copies to its usual print run of 9,000.

A dentist’s nameplate still hangs on the door of L’Écho de Frontenac’s makeshift office. Until he can return to his old office on a leafy street beside the red zone, Tremblay works at a long, adjustable table surrounded by mismatched office chairs. He says he lost all objectivity that night. The result was an award from the Fédération professionnelle des journalistes du Québec for local and regional news coverage. The jury said the “poignant account” put readers at “the heart of the tragedy.”

The “heart” of narrative forges what Josh Greenberg, associate director of Carleton’s journalism and communications school, calls an emotional connection between storytellers and readers. Policy stories, he believes, may fail to resonate on their own. But with the context of narrative journalism, readers may be more engaged. With issues of national importance—in this case, railway safety and the transportation of hazardous materials—there’s good reason for the public to be emotionally attached. “Readers need to be reminded of why these stories are important,” he says. “But in order for them to re-experience an event, they need to be drawn back in, not just through digging up facts and probing questions, but also by the way the material is organized.”

Mark Kramer, founding director of the Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism at Harvard University, says non-narrative reporting is an impersonal language where the standard journalistic voice is most often not human; narrative voice is “more perfect, more delineated, a bigger voice that causes emotions.” It humanizes a story worth worrying about.

It’s also a voice that, according to Greenberg, can differentiate one paper’s coverage from another’s. When trains began to roll back into Lac-Mégantic in December, theNational Post focused on residents’ “psychological distress” over the reappearance, while the Globe emphasized the town’s economic dependence on the railway, speaking with residents who’d lost friends but were pleased for the train’s return.

The cycle of man-made disaster coverage—human loss, cause, rebirth—usually ends with the public choosing to stop expending brainpower on the tragedy. A feature on the last moments of the lives of survivors, like the one Giovannetti would write, may not be breaking news, but its intent is to draw readers back to the story they’ve wandered away from or, as Kramer says, to use “emotion for public purpose.” At the Poynter Institute, senior scholar Roy Peter Clark says narrative carries readers to another time and place. “It makes you more human,” he says. There’s more empathy to understand a richer variety of people in turmoil when you feel like you’re there with them.

***
Once a carrier of forest products, now a transporter of dangerous goods, the train is a character in a large but often ignored Canadian story. During the first week of coverage, Globe reporter John Allemang makes policy more engaging when he walks along a bike path 20 metres from the tracks. At one point, he transports readers to Nantes, where the runaway train originated. “You leave Lac-Mégantic,” he writes, “pass a highway roundabout where Guy Lepage believes the train line could be diverted from the town centre, and soon come across graffiti-covered freight cars that are at once a misplaced urban art project and a reminder of the diminished status of rail.”

Then there’s Les Perreaux, a Montreal correspondent for the Globe, who partly walks and partly drives along the MM&A tracks, tracing the destruction of the historic railway. “Journey to the end of the MM&A Railway line” takes readers back in time to what could have led up to the disaster. He points out that at Cowansville, Quebec, “the wooden support beams on the bridge are so rotten, saplings have sprouted from them” and how in Greenville, Maine, in October 1998, a train carrying butane ran “past the hospital and the school” and “rolled down an embankment into the town cemetery, landing on graves.” All man-made disasters have villains, but seeing the framework of a deteriorating railway suggests the possibility of more than one scapegoat.

Tom Harding, the train’s driver, appeared to fill that role after Burkhardt—who supported one-man crews—publicly accused him of improperly setting the hand brakes. And so, in the dense heat of mid-August, Star reporter Wendy Gillis drives to the dusty town of Farnham, Quebec—Harding’s hometown—to find out if he’s a true villain. She walks through his neighbourhood, past his stone bungalow, hoping to speak with him. He’s with his teenage son, strapping two yellow kayaks to his black pickup truck. She wasn’t sure she’d see him; he had supposedly gone into hiding. Her heart was racing—he’s said no to other reporters. She asks a question, but he shakes his head “no” and goes inside. Instead, Gillis knocks on the door of a neighbour who willingly spends a long time discussing Harding’s good character. She stays up most of the next night at a bar, chatting with a couple of local guys over a few beers. “Railway crossing signs dot Farnham’s wide streets, the thud-thud of tracks unavoidable on a drive around town,” she writes in a September 7 article that reflects her time spent in the town. “Sometimes there are no easy villains.”

If Harding is no easy villain, Gillis discovers, then “the train is no simple villain, either.” Instead of the usual report on Harding’s involvement in the train crash, she reveals how those who are blamed are three-dimensional. Clark says the “why” of a story is often a tricky element. “We often fall into the logical fallacy of the single cause,” he says. “In real life, people’s motives are more opaque.” If Harding grew up with the trains and learned to trust them—just as the people of Lac-Mégantic did—juggling odd jobs until he was old enough to work for Canadian Pacific Railway, perhaps he, too, was a victim.

***
Ten kilometres outside Lac-Mégantic, at around 6 p.m. on October 4, it’s the kind of fall evening when stars begin to seem brighter, the sky seems darker and summer feels like ages ago. Two hours before actors of La troupe des deux masques de Beauce perform the comedy Tuxedo Palace in an old steepled church on a grassy hill in Marston, Sue Montgomery, a straight-talking, curly-haired reporter for the Gazette, pulls out a used pad of paper. She hugs Karine Blanchette, an actress and former waitress at Musi-Café who is about to perform the same play she was supposed to on the night the fire killed many of her friends. The two sit down in blue-cushioned seats in the front row while the stage manager dashes up and down the aisle. “Macarena” blasts over the stereo in the empty auditorium that will soon fill up with locals who all seem to know each other. Before walking backstage, Blanchette updates Montgomery on how the town is feeling: angry, but gaining some semblance of hope.

Montgomery was on her way to her cottage the morning she heard about the disaster. She didn’t arrive at the scene until late July, long after most journalists had left. But that’s the way she likes it—it’s better to come in when the crowds fall off, when people have had time to let things sink in. “You’re not competing with a bunch of other journalists. There’s not the rush of the daily news, the updating of what’s going on, what’s going on, what’s going on,” she says, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. Being able to take her time and sit down with people rather than shoving a microphone in their faces during a disaster, Montgomery becomes part therapist, able to listen and understand what they went through.

Later that evening, she files a story about plans to rebuild the town: “The flaming red and orange leaves on nearby hills begin to fall and people stock their woodsheds for what will surely be an emotionally difficult winter.” Montgomery believes residents appreciate this patience.

During the first few days of the disaster, people were in shock, unable to fully grasp the consequences, but reporters probed for leads amid the chaos, biting at the same sources. While news reporting is essential—go in, get the necessary information, file stories by deadline—scrambling for hard facts doesn’t reflect Montgomery’s patience. Though also based on facts, of course, narrative requires context that takes time to build. In the rush to inform, some reporters angered the community by leaving gaps in the story.

Or worse. On July 10, Le Journal de Montréal, Quebec’s most read newspaper, published a list of missing people—some of whom were alive and accounted for. The newspaper depended on Facebook connections, even running photographs from the site next to some names. “We were stuck with the good and the bad of journalism,” says André Laflamme, a volunteer firefighter and paramedic, who saw a picture of his nephew in Le Journal and called his family to make sure the news wasn’t true.

France Dumont, founder of the Facebook group Lac-Mégantic: Support aux gens, says everything was a rush during the first week. Some reporters didn’t double-check information after interviews. One reporter claimed that it’s not customary to recheck pieces before publishing. Journalists asked to go on balconies and into living rooms of people with views over the barricades. Some residents felt invaded and became wary.

Gazette city reporter Christopher Curtis worried about striking the right balance. “I’d leave town at night and feel really shitty about not being able to be there and tell these stories about people who are so generous and brave,” he says. “Then, on your way back, you’d feel bad you were going in to exploit their tragedy.”

Although Curtis saw the disaster as valuable public information, his concerns were valid. “It was an absolute circus,” says Jeannette Lachance, a resident who knew half the people who died. Anytime she left the house she felt that reporters and outsiders would not see her; they would just see the fire. She recognized inaccurate stories, specifically in French papers.

Lachance’s niece, Katy Cloutier, a former sports journalist for Radio-Canada Montréal, moved back to Lac-Mégantic, her hometown, to write about the tragedy. She pulls up to Salon Noël, near the construction zone, in a lime-green car with two bumper stickers that read, “Support Lac-Mégantic.” She has the date July 6, 2013, tattooed in black ink on her left foot. She thinks back to the first week of coverage, when reporters packed the sidewalk she’s now standing on, itching to interview a female customer getting her hair done inside the salon. The woman, whose son owns a funeral home in town and lost half of his office space to the fire, didn’t want to talk. A neighbour distracted reporters so she could duck away.

Down the street from the salon, at the edge of the disaster zone, a brown cat scurries under the barricade along a familiar path, not far from the sugar maple singed by the fire. The same fire continued to flash on television screens from news outlets like TVA. Dumont says it caused trauma among residents who watched repeated images of the disaster. Carleton’s Josh Greenberg says that’s one of the risks of going back to write in-depth narrative stories: people must relive these events.

Still, many of the town’s residents were grateful for journalists. Gerard Begin, who’s lived in Lac-Mégantic for almost 70 years, looks over his shoulder at the construction site. “That’s my life,” he says, gazing over flattened ground where homes and businesses once stood.

If narrative journalism transports us to the scene to stand next to people who trusted the railway, who walked downtown often enough to call it their life—people who could have been us—then being there could quite possibly help us care a little more, and caring might lead to a disaster like this never happening again.

***
Back in Toronto, Giovannetti heads to the office after a short lunch break. He’s meeting his editor, Choquette, at 4 p.m. to discuss the feature he’s been writing since July. He’s also preparing to return to Lac-Mégantic for follow-up interviews. He’ll be back on the road, away from his desk—one reason he became a journalist.

The road he’s been on for four months led to a town moving through cycles of shock and grief. He went to witness the struggle and write that story. “We invested so much time with Justin in Lac-Mégantic and we had so much material that it cried out for something bigger,” says Choquette, who doesn’t view the piece as a conventional Saturday feature, but rather a story with narrative elements, such as suspense, to draw readers in, followed by three policy reports.

On Saturday, November 30, a photograph of a bright orange explosion hovering over the silhouette of a town spreads across the front page of the Globe with the headline “Last call.” Almost 8,000 words divided into 10 character-driven sections, plus an epilogue. The stories are a series of brushstrokes.

***
Near the barricade in Lac-Mégantic, on an October afternoon, there’s no noise except the dampened motor of an excavator and the hinges of a porch door. Looking east through the fence holes to where the sugar maple still stands, you can see amber leaves sway over the backyard of a home that the fire never touched. On the other side of the tree, curled black leaves cling to burnt branches—dozens, right there above the construction site. The tree stands on the forbidden side of the barricade, where workers in hard hats now decontaminate the earth.

The fire is a memory now—the fire that consumed 47 lives, the fire that spared part of this tree. But just as the lush leaves show us stories of good fortune, the dead leaves show our vulnerability. They warn of trains that come and go from town to town, they make us question our certainty. The dead leaves show us stories we must tell.

This is a story of cliches. An interview with Norman Webster sounds like a journalism 101 class, or an introduction to journalistic ethics. Norman Webster is fair to the extreme and adamant in his belief that every point of view has a right to be heard. If there is a “Queen’s scout” of Canadian journalism, it is Webster. He acts and speaks in a way that is almost too good to be true. But I should begin before the “lecture.”
Norman Webster drives his Saab 9000 up the hill and pulls into his driveway. He is wearing a blue housecoat over his running clothes to keep him warm after his workout. He wears an Expos baseball hat. Today he drove to the canal and ran along the relatively flat path next to the water. “Just 12 kilometres today,” he says, as he opens the door to the house in the heart of Westmount. I follow him downstairs, chatting about his training. (Webster, a friend for two years, shares my passion for training.) The basement contains a stationary bike and a television. In the winter, Webster can combine two of his hobbies-training on the bike and watching hockey. Webster does a quick change into some “real” clothes. The Expos hat remains.
Norman Webster, editor-in-chief of The Gazette, is a very happy man. He has returned to Quebec, the place he will always call home. His father grew up just a block away from where we are now. His mother went to school just down the street. The Webster family has almost 150 years of Quebec life behind it, and Webster feels a definite sense of community here.
He has been good for the Gazette because of that sense of community. He is the first bilingual editor-in-chief for the paper this century. Just the fact that he can do interviews in French has eliminated a huge stereotype. This bastion of English Quebec now has a spokesperson who can communicate with the rest of the province on their terms.
Webster is a competitive man. Then is a saying in sports that you are only a: good as your last race. If you believe that, then you approach every race very intensely. It is a burning from inside-the rest of the world rarely judges so harshly.

Canada hosted the Triathlon World Championship on September 12, 1992, in Huntsville, Ontario. After; 1.5-kilometre swim, the athletes ran up a steep hill to a transition are where they discarded their wetsuit and hopped onto their bikes. After biking 40 hilly kilometres, the athletes hurried onto a 10-kilometr run course. Again it was hilly, and challenging. The athletes finished next to the transition area-exhausted, but exhilarated.
This was Webster’s latest race. The Worlds capped off a seven-year involvement with the sport for a man considerably better known for his talents as a writer. How did he do? “I finished in the middle of the pack,” he says. This undercuts the fact that he was racing against the very best the world has to offer.
On Tuesday nights, Webster hits the ice with the boys. He has been playing hockey for as long as he can remember. At 51, he is one of the “old guys” on the ice. The word is he holds his own with the younger pups. After the game, the gang heads out to a local pub. Webster is usually seen as a solitary man, but the camaraderie of those Tuesday nights is very important to him. “He misses the companionship as much as the hockey [when he can’t go],” says Pat Webster, Norman’s wife. Another cliche sports can bring out the true nature of a person. During competition a person’s soul is bared for all the world to see. Maybe through sport we can learn about Norman Webster.
“Norman likes to win,” says Geoffrey Stevens, a longtime associate and friend. Stevens was Webster’s pick as managing editor at the Globe when he became editor-inchief in 1983. What Stevens recalls of the young Norman Webster is that he was a good newspaper man “who always looked like he needed a new suit, and drove an ancient Volkswagen with a dent in the side.” How did it get the dent?
Webster continues: “This was back in the days when filing a story was always a problem. In ’74, I covered Trudeau’s whistle-stop campaign tour for the Globe. Each day I would have to call in a story to a rewrite man, which was incredibly frustrating. These guys used to ask questions like ‘How do you spell Trudeau?’ A year later I was working at Queen’s Park, covering Bill Davis during the provincial election. About 5:30 I found a phone, and called in the story. I got a rewrite man who seemed unable to understand basic English. All the frustrations of a year before came out. As I walked back to the car, I kicked in the front fender.”
Getting the best story is important to Webster. Beating the competition is critical. Being the best journalist he can be is paramount. An incompetent rewrite man could very easily jeopardize any competitive edge.
So the man is competitive. That does little to explain the drive he has to be a good journalist. No one in the industry would say that Webster got where he is through anything but his own talent. Even the fact that his uncle, R. Howard Webster, owned the paper when Norman got his first job as an editorial clerk is forgotten when it comes to his talent as a writer.
David Hayes writes in his book, Power and Influence, “No one dismissed his rise through the organization as a case of nepotism. Webster was simply too hardworking and talented a journalist.”
“Norman not only earned all his spurs, he proved himself in what we all thought was the deadliest assignment-Queen’s Park,” says John Fraser. According to Fraser, Clark Davey, then managing editor at the Globe, had a firm belief that rich men’s sons couldn’t be good journalists. The Queen’s Park assignment would either prove what Webster could do, or destroy him. In fact, it brought out the very best in Webster. “He basically set the benchmark for all subsequent journalists covering Queen’s Park,” Fraser says.

“There aren’t many things that commits to that he does halfway,” says Pat. They met in England. He was studying at Oxford, she at the University of London. Since 1966 they have been a team, with Norman making great grounds in the newspaper industry, she bringing up their five children. Pat has kept the family unit working smoothly throughout their many travels. She is an optimistic woman, and no challenge seems too much. The fact that the family timetable has been quite out of sync compared to the rest of the world has been a minor challenge. That there never were family dinners during a weekday doesn’t faze her. “You either accept it or not,” she says of her husband’s 11-hour-plus work days. The years of travel, while difficult, were ultimately exciting, she says. “Norman has done what he has as a journalist because he wanted to,” Pat continues. “He is an achiever.”

WEBSTER QUOTES FROM JOHN MILTON:
“I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue.” This is for Webster the classic statement of the need for freedom of expression. Rick Salutin, writing in This Magazine, describes Webster’s approach to the media as “noblesse oblige.” Salutin saw in Webster a “sense of responsibility to appear fair, or even possibly to be fair. It arose from a confidence that the authority of the ruling elites could not be damaged by exposure to competing views.” For Salutin, this sense was the reason that Webster was so open to conflicting views in the Globe.
Webster thinks that idea gives the whole concept far more sophistication than it deserves. He might not agree with something that is said, but it is important that it be heard. “For what it’s worth, I really do see public debate in this way.”
Webster leans towards publishing things. His roots are still very much tied to being a writer, and this dominates his theories on what should and shouldn’t go into a paper. Both sides of the story need to be told. Of utmost importance is being fair. The journalistic process is paramount. Robert Fulford, who worked for Webster when the Websters owned Saturday Night magazine, says Webster never interfered with the content of the magazine. “Our business is to put different points of view in front of people,” says Webster. It is this belief that allows, almost looks forward to, columns by William Johnson and Don Macpherson which were staunchly against the Charlottetown Accord. Webster was very much a supporter of the accord, but it would never occur to him to censor any conflicting views.
“In my time with Norman, I never knew him to interfere with news coverage because of his own opinion. He might not like it, but what the hell, it would go in the paper,” says Stevens.
Webster is almost apologetic as he says that he really believes what he is saying. The bottom line is that he likes to see an honest, balanced newspaper. It’s that simple. It is why Webster is doing all this.
“It’s worth doing. That’s the most important thing,” he says. “It matters to society that journalists do their jobs,” he continues.
He uses, as an example, a column he wrote in the fall of 1991 about a speech by Pierre Elliott Trudeau to the Young President’s Organization-“presidents of their companies by the age of 40.” During the off-the-record speech, Trudeau questioned what might happen if the number of French-speaking people in Quebec began to decline. The definition of “distinct society” during the Meech Lake debate hinged on there being a French-speaking majority. Webster reported Trudeau’s words: “It will give the government of this society the power to say: ‘Well, let’s deport a couple of hundred thousand of non French-speaking Quebecers we have a right to expel people, certainly to shut their traps if they think they can speak English in public.'” Even in the column, Webster made it abundantly clear that he had problems reporting an “off-the-record speech.” The peculiar circumstances of this speech made it different in Webster’s eyes. “This man [Trudeau], saying these things-dramatic, scary ideas about the major public issue of the day to one of the most influential audiences in the country, in their hundreds-1 felt, one way or the other, it had to be put on the public record.” Within days, Trudeau’s words would have scattered among Canada’s elite, and Webster felt the rest of Canada deserved to hear what was going on. (In fact, within hours, Quebec Premier Robert Bourassa’s office was given a detailed report of the speech, as was the prime minister’s office, long before Webster’s column was published.) The column created quite a stir, but Webster is confident that it needed to be written. Like it or leave it, you have to respect his principled approach.
Robert Fulford chooses to leave it. “It was a mistake an athlete shouldn’t have made,” Fulford says. “You can’t change the rules in the middle of the game.”

It is now late on a Sunday night. We have adjourned to the living room. Norman Webster is trying to help me understand what makes him do what he does. He has been very direct, and words I might doubt from someone else (the importance of being fair could be a stock answer for some people) I am believing. Then comes the clincher. Webster sits back on the couch, the comfortable couch that fits so nicely in the comfortable living room, with its Chinese ceramics and Canadian paintings.
The clincher. “Cecil Rhodes puts a tremendous obligation on you. Whenever you might be tempted to say ‘to hell with it,’ you realize that you haven’t the right to sit on the sidelines.” Suddenly I begin to realize just how seriously Webster looks at this endeavour he has chosen. No wonder he works so hard to make it just right. With that burden on his shoulders, he would have to.
This would be too much coming from most people. Now the references to the “Hardy Boy,” and the “boy scout” begin to make sense. For many people, Webster must be too good to be true. There is a certain amount of contempt in those references, but probably also a grudging bit of respect. What else can you feel for a man who works so hard every day just to prove to himself that he can do it. Just to get the story right. This from a man who could live quite comfortably without that job.

“MY CAREER HAS BEEN A SUCCESSION of interesting tasks,” he says. The tasks began at university, but to tell the story properly, we have to begin a little earlier. On June 4, 1941, Norman Webster was born in Summerside, Prince Edward Island. He was the oldest of the three children-William and Margaret would follow. The family was raised in Sherbrooke, Quebec. Both Norman and Will went to Bishop’s College School, a boarding school in Lennoxville six kilometres from Sherbrooke. Webster grew up in a pocket of English Canada that was surrounded by French Canada.
Webster followed up his time at Bishop’s College School with a degree in Economics at Bishop’s University, just across the river. Webster was a good athlete at University-he played on the school’s hockey team. He was also a scholar-one of two Rhodes Scholars from Quebec in 1962. On top of all that, he was also a journalist. Webster served as the Sherbrooke Records stringer for the last two years he was at Bishop’s. He routinely wrote half-a-dozen stories for the paper each week, along with a column. Webster remembers himself as much as a journalist as a student in those days.
He really got the “bug;” as he calls it, in 1959. This was that editorial clerk job. But his love for newspapers really came a lot earlier than that. Webster remembers being fascinated with them at a young age. It began with keeping up with sports. From there it grew.
“What interested me then was the tremendous satisfaction with getting the story-it interested me then, and is still interesting to me now.”
Webster returned from Oxford to work for the Globe. His command of French made him a natural as the Globe’s correspondent at the Quebec Legislative Assembly. After a year there, he was moved to the Ottawa bureau. He edited The Globe Magazine, then worked as the assistant to the editor of the paper.
In 1969, Webster was stationed in Beijing, one of only three foreign correspondents in China at the time. After a two-year stay there, it was back to Canada where he worked as assistant to the “Brigadier”-Richard S. Malone, publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press. After a year in Winnipeg, he spent the next six years at Queen’s Park, first as Queen’s Park bureau chief and then from 1974-78 he wrote a daily column on Ontario affairs. “It was the best writing I’ve ever done,” he says.
Webster spent another foreign stint in London, where again he excelled, and was seen by many as one of the best London correspondents the Globe has ever had. He returned to Toronto in 1981 as assistant editor and became the editor-in-chief in 1983.
It was the culmination of almost a quarter-century involvement with the paper. It was the best of times, for a while, but somewhere along the line Webster’s relationship with his publisher went awry.
Possibly the most fundamental difference between Webster and his publisher, A. Roy Megarry, was their view of sports. Megarry was not a sports fan. In fact, on one occasion, when he was taken to a baseball game by some of the Globe staff, the rules of baseball had to be explained to him. Megarry had a disdain for the sports section of the Globe.
“He had a funny way of accounting,” Stevens says of Megarry’s approach. Megarry would break down the different parts of the paper, and do a cost analysis of each part-how much advertising was brought in, compared to how much it cost to produce. Sports was always a big loser. Megarry never understood why Webster and Stevens felt the sports section was so important.
Sports was but one of a number of differences the two men had. Webster, who even just a year ago was hesitant to speak much about the rift, is not nearly so hesitant now. “Megarry didn’t and doesn’t like journalists,” Webster says. There is no animosity as the words come out. Webster appears to have come to terms with his final break with the Globe.
If Webster had it in him to put aside what he thought was right, things might have been different. John Fraser says that Webster “could not prevent himself from saying what he thought.” His rigid belief in both rules and roles in the newsroom brought him to loggerheads with Megarry, since Megarry played the game very differently.
It was Boxing Day, 1988, when Megarry relieved Webster of his position as editor-in-chief. Webster looks back at that last year
at the Globe not with nostalgia, but as a very difficult time.
According to some, Webster’s apparent shyness prevented him from being good at staff relations. Mel Morris, the executive managing editor at the Gazette during Webster’s first year, remembers him as being “a bit remote.” Stevens says that “Norman’s door was always open, and people were in there” during Webster’s time at the Globe. That wasn’t the case at the Gazette, Morris reports-especially on a Friday when Webster prepared his Saturday column. “He was not as involved with the day-to-day running of the newsroom,” Morris says. “He preferred to let his managing editor run the newsroom.”
“Norman is probably miscast,” Morris says. “I say that for all the good reasons. I think writers are more valuable than managers, and Norman is an excellent writer.”
His shyness might be a managerial fault, but the most important measure of Webster’s popularity and respect from his fellow workers at the Globe must have been the “gift” he was given when he left: a scholarship in his name at Bishop’s University. According to Pat, it was the perfect present for her husband.
Webster sips a cup of tea in his at the Gazette. He is wearing a neat blue suit. The editor-in-chief of the Gazette is very much a public figure in Montreal. Webster dresses the part. The Gazette is well represented.
The office is crowded with newspapers. Webster apologizes for the mess. It is a week to the day that Canadians voted on the Charlottetown Accord, a missed opportunity, says Webster. In his view, the Meech Lake Accord was a tragically missed opportunity that came close to bringing down the country. He pulls out from one of the piles the special section the Gazette put together the day after the vote. “It was really well done,” he says with pride.
This is not a boast of anything he has done. He is quick to praise the work of the people at the Gazette. But the Gazette is a very different paper from the one that was the number one priority of his working life for so many years.
“I have moved on,” he says. Could it be that simple? Can I you go from being the “head honcho” at Canada’s National Newspaper, to I not, and Just move on? If anyone can, it’s probably Webster.
Pat expresses what most of us imagine her husband would say. “The whole Globe thing was tremendously difficult for me,” she says. In her eyes, though, Norman really has moved on. “He honestly doesn’t seem to mind. I think he’s giving you the honest goods about it,” she says from a different couch in the living room the next day. “Neither criticism nor praise seems to affect him. He doesn’t depend on other people for appreciation or blame.”
But even for Webster, there was anger. No Volkswagens this time, but anger. “The truth is that I’m a lot happier now than I was for my last year at the Globe. That last year was very unpleasant. I haven’t said these things to anyone-I really can’t emphasize enough that I’m a pretty happy man these days.” Webster has found a new place to ply his trade, to play hockey and to do triathlons. And boy is he happy to be here.