Did “d” or didn’t “d”?

That’s the question Canadians are asking themselves today about Saskatchewan MP Tom Lukiwski’s victory speech on October 19. In the speech, he refers to the provincial election coming up next April and puts his support behind the Tory candidate, who he says is “too important of an MLA to let go down to an NDP–” and here he either says “whore” or “horde.” A small difference in enunciation and a world of difference in meaning.

The video of this speech was recorded by Saskatchewan journalist Mickey Djuric while she was working at the Moose Jaw Times-Herald. She quit her job at the newspaper on Wednesday when editors decided not to publish the video and the story she wrote, which suggested that he may have said the word “whore” in reference to NDP candidate Karen Purdy.

Djuric says while she was at the event filming, recording and tweeting, she thought she heard Lukiwski say “whore” but assumed that she must have misheard him. It was only after she came back from vacation and revisited the video of the speech–which she realized she hadn’t uploaded–that she was certain she heard him say it. “I gasped,” she says.

Djuric called other people in the newsroom over and asked them to listen to the video. She says they all heard him say “NDP whore.” They sent the audio, not the video, to Purdy, who agreed that he had used the word. Lukiwski didn’t hear the audio or see the video but told Djuric over the phone that he didn’t use that word. She says he called her back a few minutes later after asking his co-workers, who said they remembered him saying “hordes.” Djuric remembers the editors feeling that this story was important and agreeing that Lukiwski said “whore.”

The Moose Jaw Times-Herald decided not to run the story on Monday, according to Djuric, because the editors didn’t want the story to be buried under the news of Brad Wall’s announcement on Syrian refugees. But when she got to the newsroom on Tuesday morning, Djuric says she sensed a change. “I just had a feeling, because the whole mood in the newsroom changed regarding the story,” she says.

Craig Slater, the managing editor, says that Lukiwski’s different version of events “made us pause a little bit.” Slater says he and other editors were concerned that nobody had reacted to the speech on election night. “When someone of that stature says something like that, you would expect there to be a reaction,” he says. “But there wasn’t any.”

Djuric says Slater was worried the paper could be sued, and she argued that they could publish the video and use Purdy’s interpretation to avoid liability. “I was very adamant that the public needed to see the video. They had a right to see the video and I knew it was of public interest,” she says. Slater says he was concerned that it wasn’t their place to suggest what Lukiwski may have said. “We didn’t want to create a he-says-versus-we-allege situation,” Slater says.

On Tuesday evening, she was given the final word that the story wouldn’t run: not Wednesday and not ever. “It just hit me that I had to walk away,” Djuric says.

She went in to Slater’s office the next morning and handed in her resignation after almost 18 months at the paper. Djuric says she feels that she did the right thing because she became a journalist to uncover the truth.  Slater says he’s confident that the editors made the right call. “Unless there’s a 100 percent, without a doubt, bet your life that’s the word you heard, we weren’t going to go with it.”

– With files from Fatima Syed

In his book, Company of Adventurers, Peter C. Newman is at times a very enchanted writer. The book is the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its crucial place in Canadian history. While the work is extensively researched, one prominent anecdote reveals a shining example of enchantment leading to error.

Newman presents the tale in the first page of his foreword. Two men were hiking in northern Saskatchewan far from any other human contact. One night as the pair were preparing their camp they noticed something glinting high in a spruce tree. One climbed the tree and brought down, “a weathered copper frying pan with the letters HBC still clearly stamped on the green patina of its handle. The two men had their dinner and sat around the campfire, cradling and examining the intriguing object, asking themselves why anyone in his right mind would have hung it 40 feet up a black spruce.

“In one of those moments of heightened sensitivity that sometimes telegraph the flash of understanding, the truth dawned on them simultaneously. They broke into smiles that collapsed into belly-pumping laughter. Of course. The frying pan, much like the one they had just used to make their meal, must have been hung on a sapling by some long-gone Hudson’s Bay Company trader. It had inadvertently been left behind the next morning, and the little spruce quietly continued growing-and growing.”

Anyone with any knowledge of trees might already see a problem. Unfortunately Newman didn’t and continued to promote the story, which he saw as a “graphic reminder of how deeply the Hudson’s Bay Company is woven into the memories and dreams of most Canadians.”

Last Nov. 4 Newman again related the anecdote-this time on CBC Radio’s Morningside. Listeners wrote in to point out that the frying pan could not have reached its position in the tree simply through the tree’s growth.

One wrote that “spruce trees, in common with all other trees, grow from the top. A frying pan or anything else for that matter, attached to a branch five feet above the ground 200 years ago would still be five feet above the ground today no matter how high the tree had grown in the meantime.” Another used examples to illustrate the point: “Old tap holes in maple trees don’t migrate skywards. Old telegraph transformers along logging roads stay at transformer height. The tree house that you built as a kid probably seems lower now, not higher.”

Tree experts agree with the letter writers. As Philip Brennan, management forester for York Region of the Ministry of Natural Resources explains, “The way a spruce tree grows is by extending new shoots from buds on the old branches. By late summer, the new shoots have formed their own buds, so they can’t extend anymore. The shoots can’t extend, so the frying pan can’t move.” Brennan says the possibility of the frying pan’s transference from shoot to shoot would be “a small miracle if it happened once,” but this method couldn’t possible carry a frying pan 40 feet up a tree.

At the University of Toronto a similar tall tree story is told in second-year forestry classes. “We use it as a fallacy that people hear,” says Dr. T.J. Blake, associate professor of forestry. “It’s an old wives’ tale that’s been spread around.”

Somewhere in northern Saskatchewan stands a black spruce that was almost a legend.

Every so often even the best writers become too enchanted with a story. They are captivated, and perhaps a wish not to disturb the tale causes them to overlook any faults that might be found by less involved observers.

In his book, Company of Adventurers, Peter C. Newman is at times a very enchanted writer. The book is the story of the Hudson’s Bay Company and its crucial place in Canadian history. While the work is extensively researched, one prominent anecdote reveals a shining example of enchantment leading to error.

Newman presents the tale in the first page of his foreword. Two men were hiking in northern Saskatchewan far from any other human contact. One night as the pair were preparing their camp they noticed something glinting high in a spruce tree. One climbed the tree and brought down, “a weathered copper frying pan with the letters HBC still clearly stamped on the green patina of its handle. The two men had their dinner and sat around the campfire, cradling and examining the intriguing object, asking themselves why anyone in his right mind would have hung it 40 feet up a black spruce.

“In one of those moments of heightened sensitivity that sometimes telegraph the flash of understanding, the truth dawned on them simultaneously. They broke into smiles that collapsed into belly-pumping laughter. Of course. The frying pan, much like the one they had just used to make their meal, must have been hung on a sapling by some long-gone Hudson’s Bay Company trader. It had inadvertently been left behind the next morning, and the little spruce quietly continued growing-and growing.”

Anyone with any knowledge of trees might already see a problem. Unfortunately Newman didn’t and continued to promote the story, which he saw as a “graphic reminder of how deeply the Hudson’s Bay Company is woven into the memories and dreams of most Canadians.”

Last Nov. 4 Newman again related the anecdote-this time on CBC Radio’s Morningside. Listeners wrote in to point out that the frying pan could not have reached its position in the tree simply through the tree’s growth.

One wrote that “spruce trees, in common with all other trees, grow from the top. A frying pan or anything else for that matter, attached to a branch five feet above the ground 200 years ago would still be five feet above the ground today no matter how high the tree had grown in the meantime.” Another used examples to illustrate the point: “Old tap holes in maple trees don’t migrate skywards. Old telegraph transformers along logging roads stay at transformer height. The tree house that you built as a kid probably seems lower now, not higher.”

Tree experts agree with the letter writers. As Philip Brennan, management forester for York Region of the Ministry of Natural Resources explains, “The way a spruce tree grows is by extending new shoots from buds on the old branches. By late summer, the new shoots have formed their own buds, so they can’t extend anymore. The shoots can’t extend, so the frying pan can’t move.” Brennan says the possibility of the frying pan’s transference from shoot to shoot would be “a small miracle if it happened once,” but this method couldn’t possible carry a frying pan 40 feet up a tree.

At the University of Toronto a similar tall tree story is told in second-year forestry classes. “We use it as a fallacy that people hear,” says Dr. T.J. Blake, associate professor of forestry. “It’s an old wives’ tale that’s been spread around.”

Somewhere in northern Saskatchewan stands a black spruce that was almost a legend.