It’s hockey night in Windsor and the hometown’s Spitfires are hosting the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds in a Monday night battle at Windsor Arena. Nine rows above ice level, Scott Scantlebury is looking through the viewfinder of his Canon Hi-8 video camera. He could be the proud father of a player filming a home movie of the game, but in fact he’s a sportscaster and video journalist, or VJ, for CBET, the CBC’s Windsor station, on assignment for The Windsor Late News. Beside him stands the two-man crew from Baton Broadcasting, a reporter and a camera operator toting a Sony Betacam three times the size of Scantlebury’s Hi-8.

Ice level action is furious-a fight, a penalty-but no goals yet. Scantlebury can only stay for the first period-he’s got to get back to the station and put his sportscast together-and he’s counting on at least one goal to use as a highlight in his report. He picks up his camera and moves in behind the Greyhounds’ net-if the Spits score, he’ll have the best angle on the goal. The BBS crew stays put. The first period is half over when Scantlebury hurries back to his original position and rummages through the gym bag holding his extra equipment.

“My battery went dead. You should always carry a couple with you,” he explains as he shoves a new battery into his camera. He’s rushing back to his spot behind the Greyhounds’ net, camera in hand, when the Spits score. Scantlebury’s shoulders sag. He looks back at the BBS crew-still filming-and shrugs. There aren’t any more goals in the first period so he heads back to the station without the footage he needs.

For opponents of the VJ approach to news gathering, Scantlebury’s experience illustrates all that is wrong with the one-man-band method of television reporting.

Traditionally, most TV news was-and still is-covered by crews of two, three or four people: a reporter, a sound technician, a camera operator and maybe a field producer. VJs can get the story alone. While many television executives love VJs because they’re cheap, Cameron Bell, the former news director at BCTV, toldThe Vancouver Sun last spring, “The assumption that a guy can be a good cinematographer and a good reporter is debatable.” He thinks that some reporters could make the transition to shooting their own stories, but some could not. As critics argue, a reporter can get either great pictures or great interviews but never both. The technological responsibilities of the job distract the VJ from the story and the quality of the journalism suffers. That’s one reason VJs aren’t common in Canada; another reason is the unions.

Powerful unions like CEP-NABET and the Canadian Media Guild are worried, understandably, that if work done by a three-person crew can be done just as effectively by a VJ, a lot of camera operators and broadcast journalists may lose their jobs. Still, even the most ardent union supporters concede that video journalism is a rapidly growing part of broadcast journalism.

It’s like Kim Kristy, a VJ colleague of Scott Scantlebury’s, says: “It’s a natural evolution of what television is all about.” A lot of Kristy’s colleagues agree with this assessment. Among them is Nancy Durham.

Durham is a CBC foreign correspondent based in London, England. She’s worked as a traditional TV reporter for three years and toiled as a radio journalist for six years before that. Almost two years ago she started going on assignments by herself with a Hi-8 camera. One day in Sarajevo she walked right into the bathroom with a Bosnian woman. Durham aimed her Sony Hi-8 and filmed the woman putting on makeup by candlelight because the electricity was off. Later she recorded as the woman took water out of her bathtub, cup by cup, to fill her washing machine. And when the power finally came on for an hour, Durham filmed the woman rushing down her stairs to do a load of laundry.

“Journalism is more and more packaged and that’s another reason why this Hi-8 video journalism is a kind of salvation,” says Durham, who hates attending press conferences or doing prepackaged stories. “Its cheap, you can go out and gather yourself, get your own angle on a story.”

Foreign correpondent VJs like Durham go into war zones, they travel into restricted areas and they find the hidden story not despite being alond but because they’re alone. “You can get really intimate with people, into intimate places,” says Durham. “I don’t think you could do that with a crew.” There’s no way, for example, she could have crawled into a haywagon with Serbian refugees, as she did last fall. But by herself she traveled with the two women, capturing their journey to safety across the war-scarred landscape of the former Yugoslavia.

Durham’s only been a VJ for a couple of years, not like Sue Lloyd-Roberts, whom Durham describes as a pioneer of investigative video journalism. Lloyd-Roberts of the BBC began working as a VJ in the mid-eighties and in the spring of 1994 she hid a video camera in her bag and got the first footage ever shot in a Chinese forced labor camp. She’s been to Burma, Australia, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Iraq getting items conventional television news crews could never do. Last fall,she went to Eastern Europe for an investigative story on prostitutes during which she filmed the longest line of hookers ever, 400 standing shoulder to shoulder. She didn’t bring a camera operator and a sound technician with her. “They’d simply be lynched by the pimps, but it’s the type of thing you can film if you’ve got a small Hi-8 camera and a passing car.”

Of course, the solo television reporter has existed for years. Eccentric freelancers took their cameras to faraway lands, where they filmed, wrote and edited stories on their own. But these early VJs were rare and it wasn’t until the early eighties, when Toronto’s CityTV introduced its “videographers,” that new possibilities became apparent. While City’s VJs were mostly assigned to smaller feature stories, outside Canada the wider use of video journalists grew. In 1989 the world’s first all-VJ station opened in Bergen, Norway. Three years later, New York City became the home of New York 1, a 24-hour cable news station that armed its reporters with Hi-8 cameras and told them to cover North America’s biggest city. NY 1 has spawned copy-cat cable stations in Chicago, Washington, San Francisco as well as in England.

Will video journalism ever replace conventional news-gathering methods on daily news broadcasts? Norm Bolen, now the CBC’s head of TV news and current affairs, doesn’t believe so. “You can think of all kinds of situations where you’d probably want another set of hands,” he says. “It’s no panacea; you’re not going to immediately convert all national reporters into video journalists.” Dennis MacIntosh, a senior producer at CTV News, concedes that video journalism is a growing trend. But VJs haven’t come to CTV’s national news yet. “You get more pictures and better quality the more people you send out,” he explains.

Skeptics concede that VJs are useful for soft feature stories but question their ability to go out and get the breaking news day in and day out. The CBC decided to test the limits of video journalism and embarked on a two-year project that has been dubbed “The Windsor Experiment.”

In December 1990, CBC budget cuts led to the closing of Windsor’s TV station. Nearly 90 people lost their jobs and CBET took a station break that lasted more than three years. But on October 3, 1994 at 5:30 p.m.,The Windsor Evening News returned to channel nine in a slick new format driven by video journalists.

Norm Bolen, the CBC’s Ontario regional director at the time the station was resurrected, says that some CBC managers “thought that by doing an experiment in Windsor with new technology, new workplace methods, they might be able to bring in a budget and make it saleable to head office and get it back on the air.” Well, head office liked the idea it was necessary to convince the powerful, established unions in the CBC that allowing a reporter to pick up a camera wouldn’t put union jobs across the country in jeopardy. The Canadian Media Guild represents 3,500 CBC reporters and producers and CEP-NABET represents 2,500 technical employees like camera operators and editors. Mike Sullivan is a CEP-NABET repesentative who was heavily involved in drafting the agreement that put Windsor back on the air. “Early on in the negotiations we said let’s not get into video journalism in a big way, let’s just see if we can put Windsor on the air much smaller,” he recalls. Management insisted on using VJs and eventually the unions came on board. “So with some trepidation about the precend it might set, we sat down and worked out an experiment,” says Sullivan.

“The Windsor Agreement” allows reporters to use cameras, allows camera operators to do the work of reporters and makes it possible for fewer than 30 people to put together Windsor’s daily television news. There are now 10 VJs at the Windsor CBC. Five have technical backgrounds as camera operators or editors and five used to be reporters. Throughout the negotiations leading up to the Windsor agreement, both the unions and management agreed on one very important thing. As Sullivan says: “Whether it was an experiment or not, the CBC’s journalism had to remain the best there is.”

To achieve this. Cynthia Reyes, a top CBC trainer, was called on to whip everyone in Windsor into shape and to insure the maintenance of high journalistic standards. She studied the work of video journalists from around the world and designed a six-week program to teach camera operators how to report and reporters how to shoot. Although not everyone at the station is a VJ, every employee at CBET took part in the workshop. On October 3, 1994, Reyes sat back to see if “The Windsor Experiment” would work. It did.

“For me it was a combination of relief-that we actually had a professional-looking show-and a delight,” she recalls. Part of the training involved erasing any prejudices that reporters might feel toward camera operators and editors. “We greatly underestimated the talent and ability of our so-called technical people,” says Reyes. “I never refer to them as technical people, I always call them journalists.”

After nearly a year and a half on the air, the VJs at CBET reflect on the things they’ve learned. One lesson is that a VJ can do a whole lot but there are stories where more than one person is needed. “I think that people are embracing this as an answer to everything,” says Windsor VJ Pat Jeflyn. “It’s a mistake because sometimes you need three people. I mean, if the story’s really big, if there’s a lot of hostility involved, if there’s a lot of digging investigation, if there’s a lot of really tough technical work to be done or a lot of tough information to be dug out, you need two people.” The Windor VJs agree that press conferences, court stories, large symposiums and dangerous stories are best covered by two or three people.

But Jeflyn is quick to add that for many stories one person is ideal. She recalls her interview with an incest survivor who was very relieved not to face a room full of cameras, bright lights and people. He relaxed when he saw that Jeflyn was alone and it made for a better story.

Jeflyn, whos worked in both TV and radio, says she’s often asked if a VJ can produce good work: “I think if you’re a good journalist and you believe in what you’re doing, you’re going to keep the quality. I wouldn’t do it if I couldn’t.” Windsor VJs have proven themselves in the field?-former reporter Kim Kristy has sold footage to American companies, and one-time camera operators like Brett Morrison have become solid reporters.

Morrison doesn’t have any trouble shooting a story, but admits he agonizes over his script and, because he’s a little shy, he still often feels uncomfortable during his interviews.

Physical strain is also a factor, especially in Windsor, where all but two of the VJs use 20-pound Sony Betacams. A Windsor VJ carries a camera and a tripod-close to 50 pounds of equipment. Lighting equipment is extra. Jeflyn embarked on a weight-training program at the local Y to prepare herself for the physical rigours of her job and she and Kristy admit that there are days when they’re just too exhausted to move.

Only the confidence that comes with experience will help Brett Morrison and other VJs who find themselves learning new skills, but advances in technology are making it possible for VJs to use lighter equipment without losing very much sound or picture quality. Sue Lloyd-Roberts uses a Hi-8 and though she admits her pictures might not meet the high standards of the BBC’s technicians, viewers don’t complain. In fact, Hi-8 cameras produce pictures that are virtually indistinguishable from those shot on top-of-the line Betacams. And a Hi-8 is cheap, about one-third the price of a Betacam.

The sound recorded on a Hi-8 is excellent. “I sell the audio from my camera to the BBC,” says Nancy Durham, who adds that the technicians at BBC radio “nearly flip” when she tells them she’s managed to get such good sound with a little Hi-8.

The cameras are also user-friendly. Durham, having never touched a camera before, needed only two days of intensive training before she was ready to shoot pictures for the CBC’s national news.

Durham and the VJs in Windsor agree that their brand of journalism is going to become increasingly popular. In the very near future news directors are going to be looking for reporters who know how to use a camera. A number of journalism schools are preparing their students for this inevitability. Mel Tsuji teaches “videography” at Toronto’s Humber College. Tsuji’s course gives students the journalistic roots needed to be professional VJs. He stresses that the most important facet of the VJ’s job is journalism. “I think the prime condition of it is you have to be able to write a story,” he says. Tsuji’s been teaching the course for three years and a handful of his students have graduated and are already working as VJs. The course was created to help students adapt to “the changing nature of the business.”

Humber College is not alone in offering an education in video journalism. In 1992 Columbia University in New York City spent $75,000 on new equipment, including 10 Hi-8 cameras, and is credited with establishing the world’s first course in video journalism. Northwestern University, just outside Chicago, spent over $600,000 buying nine Hi-8s and upgrading its facilities in the early nineties to prepare its graduates for the new jobs in journalism.

Obviously, many journalism schools agree that VJs are a growing part of broadcast news. Sure, the work done by VJs will be criticized, but it’s like Paul Sagan, vice president of news and programming for NY 1 says: “I’d sympathize with the critics the way I’d sympathize with the owner of a buggy-whip factory who just looked out the window and saw a Model-T drive by.”

ROLL TAPE: On March 7, 1991, George Holliday, general manager of a plumbing supply company, videotaped police savagely beating black motorist Rodney King. Though the videotape was fuzzy, the image was unmistakably clear: two minutes of brutality.
REWIND: Seven years ago, in 1986, ABC and NBC “‘ broadcast what they thought was footage of the fire after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor exploded. The pictures were actually of a ire at a cement factory in Italy, and were shot by an amateur.
PAUSE: In North America alone, there are more than 14 million portable video cameras, and their popularity is spreading worldwide. From the Kayapo Indians in Brazil to tourists in California, people are shooting everything in sight, and their footage is airing on newscasts with increasing regularity. Journalists are only now starting to examine the vast potential of amateur video-and the possible pitfalls.
David Bazay, the Toronto-based executive producer of national television news at the CBC, says there’s been an increase in the use of amateur video in the newsroom. “If there is an air crash and we have no professional footage, we start looking for amateur footage.” The CBC always informs viewers they are watching video shot by an amateur.
Bazay says one difficulty i verifying the authenticity of amateur footage. Walter Porges, the director of news practices for ABC, discussed the fake Chernobyl fire footage in a 1986 interview with the Los Angeles Times. “Somebody contacted our Rome bureau, saying ‘I have pictures of the reactor showing smoke,’ and one of our people went to look at it, and from the pictures, you really couldn’t tell whether it was or was not. There was not a sign that said Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor.”
The visual quality of amateur footage is also becoming more professional. In 1987, when East German pilot Matthias Rust made a surprise landing in Moscow’s Red Square, an amateur video photographer was there. This footage was so well shot that Ted Koppel neglected to include it in his 1989 documentary, “Television: Revolution in a Box.”
In an interview prior to the documentary’s airing, Koppel said, “Frankly, I
did not realize that was shot on a home video camera.”
Large networks particularly like amateur recordings of natural disasters. On October 17, 1989, Oklahoma tourists Debbie and Thomas Kelly were in San Francisco when the earthquake hit. Their spectacular footage of a red car driving off the broken section of the Oakland Bay Bridge was replayed continually on networks and became the dominant image of that disaster.
A recent example of amateur video use in Canada was a CBC item about the attempted suicides among Innu youth at Davis Inlet. The amateur portion, showing youths high from sniffing gasoline, was given to CBC reporter Brenda Craig by an Innu leader. Its disturbing images focused worldwide media attention on this isolated community and forced the Canadian government to respond to the crisis. Even though all the networks use amateur video, the majority of the amateur footage we see is broadcast by local stations. This is the footage of four car pileups and two-alarm blazes. John Thornton,
chief assignment editor for “Citypulse News” in Toronto, says he will use amateur video “whenever it’s available,” as long as the “quality of the event and the quality of the footage is good.”
Some media organizations use amateur video in truly innovative ways. New York-based Globalvision is placing small portable Hi-8 cameras in the hands of local residents in countries across the world. Globalvision has already produced one Emmy-winning show, “South Africa Now,” shown on PBS in 1988. Soweto residents were given cameras-at a time when foreign news crews were restricted by censorship laws-that they used to tell the story of the townships from their insiders’ perspective.
Globalvision is planning a weekly television newsmagazine called “Rights and Wrongs” to air this spring on PBS. Don’t expect to see a Dan Rather signing off from the beaches of Somalia. Be prepared for unfiltered stories told by ordinary people in Bosnia, Kurdistan, Myanmar, Tibet and other places; in a rare departure from convention, the third eye of the reporter is being replaced by the activist eye of the citizen-controlled camera lens.
The difficulty in assessing the impact of amateur video is that there is so much of it out there, some of it benign, some of it brilliant and some of it brutal.
The Rodney King footage is a vivid example of the latter. It was a visual sledgehammer. Holliday’s accidental recording jolted consciousness and made them chew over the news rather than swallow it whole. It was also a catalyst, forcing news organizations, and all of us, to address the state of race relations in North America.
This is amateur video at its best: a recording of an important fragment of reality. At its worst, amateur video is voyeurism, littering tabloid news shows such as “Hard Copy,” “I Witness Video” and ‘A Current Affair.”
But all amateur videos, whether treasure or trash, create issues that news organizations must confront. Authenticity, the right to privacy and the ethics of using footage supplied by people who actually participate in the event, are all aspects of amateur video that are creeping into the fast forward world of television news. Maybe it’s time to slow the tape down and take a closer look at the big picture.
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Had the story been ready on time, it would have kicked off W5’s 19th season opener on CTV. It was-or at least it had the ingredients of-a very good piece of journalism, one of those coveted stories that makes news as it breaks news. The only reason it did not open W5’s new season last Sept. 22 was, quite simply, that it wasn’t ready on time. But it was ready a week later -ready for air and ready to make waves. At 10 p.m. on Sunday night, Sept. 29, 1985, as it has for so many years, the familiar WS logo flashed on TV screens across Canada, and the equally familiar theme music rolled in. Seconds later, the music ended, and the full-faced logo came to a stand-still, its white characters now overlaid with a red W5. An authoritative male voice announced, “W5. Episode 615.” The three stories of the night were introduced in 3D-second blocks, separated by flashes of the WS logo. Jim Reed came on screen to introduce the hosts. The theme music resumed and shots from previous shows sped past. They were accompanied, by clips of the four hosts, Reed, Bill Cunningham, Helen Hutchinson, and Dennis McIntosh. As the theme music ended, Bill Cunningham appeared, script in hand, and began the story of how Canadian uranium was being used by the U.S. military-in nuclear bombs.

“If our opposition to nuclear weapons is not to be hypocritical, we must be meticulous in ensuring that none of the Canadian uranium winds up in the U.S. military stream,” Cunningham said. “We have a treaty with the United States to ensure that it doesn’t. But if you follow the trail of our uranium south of the border, it’s hard to escape the conclusion of one U.S. critic that there may be a little piece of Canada in every nuclear bomb!”

It was easy to see why Canada’s longest running newsmagazine wanted to slot the item at the top of its season opener. It was a story of international significance. It was a story about hypocrisy in the Canadian government. It was a story about nuclear war. W5 hoped it would generate the kind of public and political outrage that had followed the rancid tuna scandal, broken by the fifth estate (W5’s CBC competitor) only 12 days earlier. Canada was selling uranium to the United States and part of that uranium was winding up in nuclear weapons, violating treaties stretching back 20 years. (W5 used a 1965 clip of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson to articulate our policy on uranium trade: No country shall buy uranium from Canada unless it agrees to use it for peaceful purposes.)

This should have been a major story. But it wasn’t. Part of the reason was that W5 got some of it wrong. Canadian uranium was helping the U.S. build bombs, but no treaties were being violated. This largely irrelevant reporting error allowed the government, or more precisely External Affairs Minister Joe Clark, to side-step the issue. The daily media returned to its preoccupation with bad tuna and all the follow-ups that it generated.

WS was technically wrong about the treaty, but it was essentially correct. If no treaty was being violated, a long-held public assumption was-the general Canadian belief, reinforced by political leaders, that we are not involved in the nuclear arms race. Treaties aside, WS showed its audience of almost 1.2 million Canadians that we are involved. But despite Canadians’ purported concern with nuclear war and the arms race, public indifference was resounding.

Close on the heels of Cunningham’s introduction, viewers witnessed antinuclear protestors gathered in the dark near Kingston, Onto Down by the riverside they sang quietly, while a truck carrying spent radioactive fuel crossed the Thousand Islands International Bridge. Antinuclear activists had known about the story for several years. (They say External Affairs makes no secret of it, if the right questions are asked. After all, the government doesn’t think it’s doing anything wrong.) One of those activists, a reporter named Paul McKay, found out about the story through his involvement with the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG). He walked into W5’s office one day last summer and offered to sell his personal research. W5 bought the material for an undisclosed price.

On Aug. 2, when McKay’s 76-page folder was W5 property, Gillian Cosgrove became the story’s producer, and Mike Moralis was assigned as the researcher. (He often gets the quick, tough stories.) The wo have worked together as an investigative team since Moralis joined CTV almost two years ago. Bill Cunningham would do the interviews and host the segment. He’s been with W5 since 1980. He began as the executive producer and, after three years, became managing editor and reporter/ host. Cunningham’s credentials as a television newsman match or surpass anybody’s in Canada. He has distinguished himself on all three Canadian networks (C’BC, CTV and Global) for well over 20 years.

Once W5 had established there was indeed a story to be done, Cosgrove and Moralis got started. They were excited about its possibilities; so were their coworkers. W5 believed it had an opportunity to reveal government hypocrisy, to tell Canadians that all was not right with the world. John Darroch, the show’s associate producer, said later he would have liked the story to have helped put the issue on the upcoming (and now current) Canada-U.S. free trade agenda. Cosgrove wanted to address, however remotely, people’s fear of nuclear war. And, if nothing else, she wanted to get the story on the record.

Moralis quickly discovered that McKay’s research traced the path of plutonium into warheads. But after a series of phone calls to nuclear institutions and organizations, the information he got contradicted McKay’s. However, he did discover the trail of Canadian uranium to the U.S. and that was an easier trail to follow. It became the focus of W5’s story.

Uranium is mined and milled in Key Lake, Sask. Nearly 12 million pounds are Jrought out of the ground ever’] year. The ore is mechanically and chemically milled to produce yellowcake, powdered natural uranium. From Saskatchewan, it is rucked in bins or large containers to Nouthern Ontario, to Crown-owned El Dorado Resources Ltd., the nuclear refinery at Port Hope. There, it is converted for use in nuclear reactors. Part of the uranium stays in Canada for domestic use. Uranium oxide is used in CANDU reactors. The rest, converted into uranium hexafluoride gas, has to be enriched before it can be used by foreign customers in their reactors. Canada has no enrichment plants, so it is exported to whatever country the customer chooses. Most of it goes to the U.S. Before being shipped across the border, the gas is cooled into a liquid, then poured into cylinders. The liquid, under its own pressure, turns into a solid as it is transported in the trucks.

Days after leaving Port Hope, the trucks pulled into Paducah, Ky. the location of one of the three U.S. enrichment plants. In his report, Cunningham said the W5 crew “followed the shipment.” They did not, in fact, physically follow the trucks. Arrangements were made to visit each site, but not in the sequence they appeared on air. Nevertheless, the four-man crew made it to Paducah, where footage of the enrichment process was shot. Cunningham explained how Canadian uranium is “blended with uranium from other sources as it’s fed into a continuous stream of miles of tubes and pipes. The end product is U-235, a radioactive material that’s capable of sustaining an explosive chain reaction. To get one part of U-235 you discard 140 parts of U-238, a non-explosive material known as depleted uranium.” The uranium is heated, then filtered several times over. The enriched uranium hexafluoride is then converted into small ceramic pellets of uranium dioxide. The pellets are inserted into tubes to form fuel rods for use in light water reactors to generate electricity. Over time the fuel will burn up and the rods will be replaced. The fuel rods are still highly radioactive; they will remain so for hundreds of thousands of years.

The enriched uranium is sent to the purchasing country. The metallic tailings of depleted uranium are stockpiled.

These tailings make up the material in question-the Canadian material that ends up in American warheads. It’s extremely dense. It’s two-and-a-half times heavier than steel, one cubic foot shields radiation is effectively as 12 cubic feet of concrete.

Unlike enriched uranium, depleted uranium is not a fissionable material; it cannot sustain a chain reaction. It can be safely used as tail weights in airplanes. But it’s more popular use is as a casing for the hydrogen bomb.

Depleted uranium is converted into fissile plutonium (Pu-239) during the second phase of the blast. It boosts the bang by 50 per cent. Depleted uranium can also slowly be converted into Pu-239 in a nuclear reactor.

Depleted uranium from various sources is combined during the enrichment process and stored in cylinders at another site Fernald, Ohio. “It’s here that they’ve located a key facility for the building of America’s nuclear weapons,” Cunningham said. “And it’s here, too, that Canada’s so-called peaceful uranium is diverted into America’s nuclear weapons program.” thousands of barrels of depleted uranium were shown stacked in the yard. Cun1ingham told his audience that 4,000 tonnes would arrive this year-“What percentage is Canadian is anybody’s guess.”

Indeed the uranium in those barrels was not just Canadian. This fact provided the political “out” that Joe Clark took to get his government off the hook.

From Fernald, the material-now in metal fuel cores-goes down to Savannah River, Ga., where it is used in military reactors to breed weapons-grade plutonium. Another stream of depleted uranium goes to Oak Ridge, Tenn., to be made into metal bomb components. Then all the parts head on to Amarillo, Tex., for final assembly into warheads. That’s where W5′:,’ trail ended.

The trail was one part of the story. The other part was the treaties, which were a little more difficult to follow. The treaty outlining civil uses of Canadian uranium in the U.S. was first signed in 1955. It has been updated eight times since, and now runs to 49 pages. Clauses and sub-clauses have been endlessly amended. This treaty, and the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), are meant to prevent countries without nuclear weapons from developing them. An agency called the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) makes sure the treaty isn’t being violated.

India exploded its first nuclear bomb on May 18, 1974 in the Rajastan desert. Canada was embarrassingly implicated. We had sold a nuclear reactor to India in 1972; India used it to extract plutonium to build its bomb. The Indian government had agreed to use the reactor for peaceful purposes only, but the agreement was very vague. Canada announced new safeguard policies that same year with IAEA inspectors overlooking the process. India refused to comply and all nuclear co-operation ceased. Now Canada sells uranium only to countries who agree to abide by the NPT, or bilateral agreements limiting use to peaceful purposes. Such an agreement exists between Canada and the U.S. But reading it, and understanding it (as well as following up on some of the extremely vague clauses) is tricky. That’s where W5 ran into trouble.

Time was running short. With five days to go before show time, Cunningham had interviewed all but one of the people the story needed-Joe Clark. With four days to go, he was finally cornered at a UN conference in Washington. The film crew may have been managing well, but back in Toronto, people were ready to drive their fists into cement walls.

What did the treaty say? John Darroch demanded to know. Were the Americans violating the treaty or not? The story was built around that assumption. Cunningham would tell a million-plus Canadians that “Our agreement with the United States is clear. No Canadian uranium, not a single molecule, is to be used for military purposes.” But was that really true? No one was really sure. Under pressure from Darroch, Moralis made a decision: The treaty means whatever you want it to mean: That wasn’t good enough. So W5 decided to go with the intention of the documents, that no uranium shall be used for non-peaceful purposes. Moralis was still bothered by the wording of the treaty. But a nuclear policy expert for the U.S. Library of Congress, Warren Donnelly, confirmed that the intention was reflected in the words. “That was encouraging to me,” explained Moralis. “If I was wrong, it was a debatable right or wrong. It was a matter of interpretation, of convenience as to how it was interpreted.”

Not exactly. W5 reported that depleted uranium falls through the cracks of the treaties, thus implying the government was negligent, that an important process was overlooked when that international document was being negotiated. But the treaty does cover depleted uranium. The most recent amendment (1980) says that designated nuclear technology and material will not be used for any military purposes. Depleted uranium is a designated source material and is therefore covered.

That was one technical error. The other was more serious. W5 overlooked a clause that justified the U.S.’s use of Canadian uranium. External Affairs knew it was there but federal NDP Leader Ed Broadbent didn’t. Cunningham briefed and interviewed the NDP leader on camera on Sept. 24, five days before the story went to air. He told Cunningham, and eventually all of Canada, that, “We should be insisting that all our uranium that goes to the United States be segregated from any uranium that they use for military purposes. That’s what the treaty says and we on the Canadian side, our government, should be enforcing that.”

The next day, Sept 25, in the House of Commons, Broadbent raised the issue. He asked the Prime Minister if it was Canadian policy to export uranium to the U.S. to be used for peaceful purposes. Mulroney answered, “This policy has been unchanged. It goes back to a decision by Mr. Pearson in about 1965, and that is the general thrust of what successive governments have followed.” Then Broadbent asked, “Will the Prime Minister assure the House that he will have people in his office look into this immediately to find out if the evidence, which I understand to be quite conclusive, is conclusive?” Mulroney said Joe Clark, who was in Washington on Sept. 25, would address the issue in the House the next day. The next day, as promised by the Prime Minister, Clark reiterated for the House what he had already told W5: “Over the last 20 years there has been no evidence of any breach of the language or obligations of that treaty.” The issue did not arise in the House again until Sept. 30, the day after W5 aired its story. Ian Waddell, NDP energy critic, was incensed: “He (Clark) said that he saw the program in question last night. Did he not see the pictures of the barrels of depleted uranium? Did he not hear the American official say that Canadian uranium was being mixed in and was in fact used for nuclear bombs? Did he not hear Americans say that there was a piece of Canadian uranium in every American nuclear bomb?”

Clark again insisted that everything was in order. “I have heard the allegation that the Canadian treaty assurances are not being respected. That allegation is false.”

Then he seized on that irritating treaty detail that had caused W5 so much grief. “I have learned that there is, in the treaty, a requirement for administrative arrangements to be put into place that deal with the residue as well as the original uranium those administrative arrangements are in fact in place.”

Those arrangements have to do with something called fungibility. Clark compared the process to putting a dollar in the bank. The dollar you get back isn’t the same dollar, but it’s still a dollar. Dave Sinden, manager of the Office of Safeguards and Physical Security Operations (which makes sure the safeguards that are in place are not being violated), compared it to putting sugar in coffee. Once the sugar has been stirred in, there’s no way you can get it back. But it’s there. The same principle applies to depleted uranium. There is Canadian material in there but it’s mixed with depleted uranium from a number of other countries; it can’t be extracted. What the Canadian and American governments agreed to do was set aside a little less than ten per cent of all the depleted uranium, call it Canadian, and never touch it. The 1980 treaty does have provisions in it for such an arrangement.

The arrangement, however, is stated in very general terms. The pertinent clause says, “The appropriate governmental authorities of both parties shall establish administrative arrangements to implement this Agreement.” It’s not difficult to see how W5 failed to spot this clause.

Cunningham said on air, “W5 was told that the principle of fungibility does not apply to depleted uranium.” External Affairs thinks it does. The United States thinks it does. And apparently so do some newspapers. The Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail reported the confrontation between the opposition and Joe Clark, both before and after W5’s story aired. But once Clark denied-or defused-the story, the papers dropped it.

Gillian Cosgrove was disappointed in the story’s lack of impact, especially in comparison to the fifth estate’s tuna scandal that had broken about two weeks earlier and was still making front page news. But then tuna is tangible, she conceded, everyone eats it, everyone has it in their kitchen. Peter Rehak, the executive producer ofW5, had a different theory. He said Clark hit on the crux of the matter in the House when he was being questioned by Pauline Jewett, the NDP external affairs critic, about W5’s story. He answered her queries by asking, “Why are you opposed to 7,000 jobs in Saskatchewan?”

The Ministry of Energy, Mines and Resources estimates that the value of Canadian uranium export contracts in 1984 was $900 million. Because the industry is so vital to the Canadian economy, it would clearly never make it on to the Canada-U.S. free trade agenda, as associate producer Darroch had hoped. When he was asked a few weeks after the show aired what effect the story would have, he closed his thumb and index finger around a big, fat zero.

Clark neatly sidestepped a potentially damaging story. But that September, the uranium issue could only have added to the Tories’ already lengthy list of problems: the tuna scandal, a pair of bank failures, and the resignations of Fisheries and Oceans Minister John Fraser and Communications Minister Marcel Masse. It was a month Brian Mulroney will not easily forget, with or without the uranium story. The Tories were saved by a clause in the treaty. W5 may have been technically wrong, but it was essentially correct. Loopholes were written into the treaty so the government could justify trade; Canada is still directly involved in the American nuclear arsenal build-up, regardless of what the treaty says. So the question remains, why did the public not rise up angry at the revelation? Why didn’t we care?

It’s not that we don’t care about nuclear war. A study done in 1984 in Metro Toronto indicated that young people between 12 and 18 were as worried about nuclear war as they were about unemployment. And in a 1985 poll conducted by Decima Research Ltd. for Maclean’s, a significant 1-6 per cent of the respondents said the fear of war, particularly nuclear war, was their greatest fear. It was “the most frequently cited specifIc concern,” Maclean’s reported. Interestingly, however, the non-impact of W5’s story may have been explained in the Maclean’s article that accompanied the poll. It concluded with: “No matter how they describe it, the underlying concern of poll respondents was that, somehow, they could lose control of their lives.”

If Canadians already feel helpless and afraid, and not without reason, why would they want to escalate those feelings by dwelling on the very real possibility that Canada is playing a role in the very thing they fear most? How much easier it is to turn away. Tuna, as Cosgrove said, was different. Tuna was something people could do something about. They could stop buying Star-Kist and the other publicized brands that were involved. They could punish the “bad guys.” They were not helpless. Tuna is “real” and so is food poisoning. Nuclear war is just an idea, and for most of us, an unthinkable idea. It can’t be touched.

The media had a chance to focus on our contribution to a potential nuclear war using the W5 story as a catalyst. But the media did not pursue the issue. When it does pursue issues such as rancid tuna, impaired driving, and even cigarette smoking, the public perception does begin to change.

Fred Fletcher, a media analyst at York University, confirms that the print media can often keep a story alive by running follow-ups. Then, as these stories feed back to television and radio, the cycle will continue. Then-and only then-people begin to pay attention. That was what happened with the tuna story.

That’s what didn’t happen with the uranium story. It did surface on the radio news on Sept. 26, three days before W5’s broadcast, a result of the Broadbent briefing. The newspapers carried it as well. The Toronto Star’s headline read, “Our uranium used in A-arms, Broadbent says.” But all Broadbent managed to do was give Clark his chance to deny the entire story before CTV even got its show to air. Clark continued to deny the story (and help keep it alive) for a few days afterward, but only one television station even carried Clark’s denial. CHCHTV in Hamilton reported the story the day after W5′, Sept. 29 revelations. The Toronto Star and The Gazette in Montreal ran a CP version the next day. And that was it.

While standing in front of Fat Man, a replica of one of the world’s first atomic bombs, Bill Cunningham ended the story by saying, “These days, the Reagan administration is committed to a further build-up of nuclear weapons, and it’s reasonable to assume that there’ll be a little piece of Canada in all those too. If nothing is done to inhibit this process, it makes a hollow mockery of Canada’s position as a fierce opponent of nuclear weapons.”

Off-camera, months later, Cunningham still believes the story was important. But the issue, he said, was just too complicated for people to deal with. “Do we care? We say we care, and our foreign policy politically says we care.”

But the question remains: how do we wake Canadians up to the reality of where our uranium is going, and most important, exactly what it is being used for?