It’s near midnight in October on Bloor west near Keele in Toronto’s west end. All is quiet except for whirring winds and the thunder of late-night transports, but the neighbourhood coffee shop-reminiscent of a garage-turned-game show set-is still open for business. Under the pulsating glow of the flashing bulbs bordering the Galaxy Donuts sign, a man sits alone at a pressure-treated picnic table, hunched over in a green windbreaker and faded jeans. Gaunt and pale, he writes, longhand, on yellow foolscap, pausing only to draw on a cigarette or sip coffee. “Writing is isolating,” the man says. Which is why David Olive, regarded by many as Canada’s foremost business journalist, writes mostly in public.

Olive’s daily work route begins at Golden Embers restaurant, just up the street, where he chews on six morning papers (The Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Financial Times of London). He heads home to file newspaper clippings, arrange and conduct phone interviews and then he shifts to either Galaxy Donuts or the nearby Coffee Time to scratch on yellow pads late into the night. He eventually returns home to shape the story on his personal computer. And then Olive sleeps.

Since October 2001, the fruits of these long days have been appearing in the Toronto Star, where Olive, 45, is a business columnist. He writes feature-length stories, usually about what he wants, when he wants. But the daily 18-hour effort goes back to his days writing for Canadian Business, Toronto Life, the Financial Postand the National Post. His first book of 10, Just Rewards: The Case for Ethical Reform in Business, became a bible for business in the 1980s (during which time he co-founded the Canadian Centre for Ethics and Corporate Policy). At times, he’s swapped his picnic table for a desk as the editor of Report on Business Magazine or a seat on The Globe and Mail‘s editorial board. Since the late ’80s Olive has picked up 12 national magazine and book awards and honourable mentions. Writing is not what David Olive does for a living; it is his life’s work. “I’m wholly consumed,” he says, “with writing.”

So, for that matter, is the old Victorian house he’s lived in for the last decade and a half. The walls of the front room, which Olive calls his “office-library,” are lined with hundreds of books, alphabetized and categorized: classic and contemporary literature, politics, media, Bibles, biographies and, of course, business. Sliding Peter C. Newman’s The Flame of Power from one bookcase, Olive motions toward English literature on the opposite wall and says: “The elements of Shakespeare can be found in business.”

Indeed, drama is everywhere in this age of Enron and Nortel (insert preferred corporate catastrophe of late), but business writing is more than accounting scandals, share-price manipulation and stock market collapses. Olive says there are three kinds of business stories: triumph, tragedy and turnaround-stories of ambitious goals achieved, setbacks suffered and redemption revealed. He says the beauty of business is that a product can be conceived and implemented, acclaimed or killed with astonishing speed. “I love business,” Olive says. “I love what business can do by bringing together resources and driving ambitions, and matching that with an idea that may fly-or not.”

A five-metre beeline from the office-library, just off the kitchen, Olive has fitted the space above the basement stairs with shelves that hold six white binders, five inches wide each. These thick volumes contain hundreds of alphabetized profiles of every national and international company that has made news since Olive began this collection with an eight-page Duo-Tang in Grade 12. Showing off the corporate profiles he’s researched, written and updated, Olive flips open the second binder and runs his finger down the pages-Canadian Tire-Canon…CanWest Global-a sounds off highlights. On the top right-hand corner of the first page of each profile, Olive has electronically copied the company logo in red. “It’s just for me,” Olive says of the collection. “It’s one of the joys in life.”

It’s also raw material for the production line of Olive Inc. His newspaper and magazine stories have spotlighted convergence (BCE), corruption (Nortel), nepotism (Quebecor) and patriarchy (Rogers). He’s written about politicians as businessmen (Paul Martin, Jack Layton), businessmen as celebrities (Garth Drabinsky, Paul Reichman, Edgar Bronfman Jr.) and one litigious journalist-businessman (Conrad Black). He’s also covered housing shortages and evictions.

His books survey business leadership (No Guts, No Glory: How Canada’s Greatest CEOs Built Their Empires, 2000), business ethics (Just Rewards, 1987), business terminology (White Knights and Poison Pills: A Cynic’s Dictionary of Business Jargon, 1998, and A Devil’s Dictionary of Business Jargon, 2001) and Canadian identity (Canada Inside Out: How We See Ourselves, How Others See Us, 1996). He has also authored quirky quote collections including Genderbabble: The Dumbest Things Men Ever Said About Women, 1993, three volumes of political babble quotes and his 2002 release, The Quotable Tycoon: A Treasury of Business Quotations.

Last summer, he wrote a five-part series in the Toronto Star about the death of the new economy that described high-tech pipe dreams, overpaid CEOs, misinformed investors and merger madness. The series showcased Olive’s ability to synthesize information and provide historical context. “The corporate landscape today looks like a gigantic yard sale,” he wrote. “Buy high, sell low, sack the CEO. That is how the new economy ended, not with a bang but with a severance package. And a reminder that we’ve seen this before, from the damage wreaked by takeover sprees in electronics in the 1960s, oil, mining and forest companies in the 1970s and PC makers and real estate in the 1980s.”

“He seems to know everything that’s going on,” says Don Obe, Olive’s friend and first editor at Toronto Life. Fellow journalists say that when they stumble on a story written by Olive that has to do with a topic that they are researching, they experience simultaneous exaltation and panic: the article is an invaluable resource but it makes them realize how much they don’t know. “He just helps you get a grasp of what’s going on in the world,” says Rick Salutin, the lefty Globe and Mail writer known for his anti-business sense. “He helps you feel as if you’re not quite as much at the mercy of distortions and delusions and self-promotion.”

Just talking to Olive is like entering a keyword into a search engine. Ken Kidd, a long-time colleague and Olive’s editor at the Star‘s business section, calls it a “data download”: ask Olive a question and he spews every related micro-byte of info stored in memory. Why is business more interesting to write about than politics? “Because business people get things done really quickly,” Olive responds, and proceeds to cite the success of Imperial Oil, Starbucks, Home Depot, McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Holiday Inn and WalMart compared to the logistics of passport offices and the labour laws of Tennessee.

His speech is speckled with historical references:

History is important to Olive, which is why his favourite part of annual reports is the 10-year summary. He says the best businesses have staying power. They create loyalty and maintain integrity for generations. Olive says: “They manage for the long term.”

slipping the white binder back on the shelf, Olive springs up the basement stairs and pauses in his kitchen. There’s no food or culinary equipment in sight. There are, however, four large black filing cabinets in the corner opposite the stove. Inside, hundreds of file folders contain clippings collected over three decades. “I cut them and then I label them and then I file them according to topic,” Olive explains. The three-drawer cabinet nearest the wall is for Canadian companies like Algoma Steel. The next two cabinets, four drawers high each, are for internationals-General Motors, IBM. The last, also a four-drawer, is for subjects, places or people that interest him-Buffalo, diamonds, Frank Lloyd Wright. Olive’s system: if, say, Home Depot acquired Canadian Tire today, he would combine the folders on both companies and the corporate profiles in the white binders to see how history had brought matters to this point.

Olive’s own history begins in a white, middle-class Toronto Star door-to-door. His interest in business began in a high school economics class, where he discovered that a small group of people could have great control over immense financial, natural and human resources. Reading the daily newspapers became a habit and he subscribed to magazines like Forbes and Fortune.

His parents, both children of the Depression, were keen to see their only child get a good job that offered benefits and long-term prospects. Olive studied journalism at Ryerson in the 1970s and remembers once expressing concern to his father about the scarcity of writing jobs. Harold Olive suggested he go into insurance sales, because, of course, the insurance man who showed up at their house selling mutual funds or car insurance always seemed prosperous. “That’s when I became even more resolved to succeed in journalism, because I didn’t want to go into insurance,” Olive says, expelling first a gust of air, then three chuckles and a sigh of satisfaction.

So when Olive landed his first journalism job, as editorial assistant at Toronto Life in 1980, he was determined to make an impression. One of his first nights there, he stayed at the office until after midnight organizing the shelves of back issues. And his filing system was already in progress. Joann Webb, then managing editor of the magazine, remembers Olive’s arcane catalogues, in which he would record on index cards, for future reference, all the business news of the day. “He had a startling fascination with Canadian business,” Webb says.

Several months later, Olive moved to Canadian Business magazine to work under editor Margaret Wente as editorial assistant. Jennifer Wells, Olive’s current colleague at the Star, was copy editing at CB then. She recalls the sounds of papers rustling and three-ring binders clicking in Olive’s cubicle every morning as he organized his indexes. Around a year later, Olive moved up to senior writer.

Olive left Canadian Business in 1984, at the age of 27, to help strengthen the recently launched Report on Business Magazine as staff writer. The release of Just Rewards in 1987 cemented Olive’s authority; awards were bestowed and his reputation established as one of the country’s top business journalists.

But for all the success of those years, Olive’s voice softens and his eyes lower when he remembers 1983. It was his third year as working journalist, his second as husband. Olive was writing his first cover story forCanadian Business, a 40,000-word, two-part feature on the 10 largest private companies in Canada. He’d often sleep at his desk at the office; other nights, he’d come home at 10 and write for two or three more hours in the second bedroom, which he’d commandeered as his private workspace. Sometimes, Olive says, he’d come home early enough to cook dinner for his wife. They’d eat in front of the television and barely speak until he retreated to the second bedroom and shut the door to write for the night.

“This has been a problem in all my relationships,” Olive says. “I’ve always put the work first. But I don’t really know how it could be any other way.” Wente, former editor of the daily ROB section of The Globe and Mailand now one of the paper’s most prominent columnists, says, “He was so focused on what he was doing that he did it 99 hours a day.”

In 1986, the marriage dissolved. “I knew I was this sort of person,” Olive says. “It was more important to prove that I could write than to prove that I could make a marriage work.”

Proving himself has been a theme in Olive’s life. He remembers being in Grade 6 and starring in a school production of The Pirates of Penzance. Minutes before the curtain rose on opening night, the stage fright that hadn’t occurred to Olive during six weeks of rehearsals finally befell him. Sick and sweating, he made for the nearest washroom. The teacher/director saw him and demanded, “Where are you going? We’re on.” Near tears, Olive sputtered, “I can’t ? I can’t do this.” The apathetic response: “That’s fine, David. We’ll just get John Raymer to do it.” John Raymer was the coolest kid in class, with a Kennedy smile and all the girls’ affections. With that, Olive spun on his heel and pronounced, “No, I’ll do it.” And he did, nausea and all. “One of the motivators for me has always been that if I don’t do it, somebody else will, will do a fine job of it, and hell, I’ll have missed my chance,” Olive admits.

In the late ’80s, Olive left business writing for a brief stint at Toronto Life to see if he could write about unfamiliar territories like homelessness, urban decay and municipal politics. (He could, winning a gold National Magazine Award for a story on the homeless.) In 1991, a 33-year old Olive became editor of Report on Business Magazine, succeeding Wente. At a time when the recession was killing publications like the Globe’s other magazines (West, , , Destinations and Domino), he wanted to see if he could spend prudently yet produce quality.

Prerecession RoB Magazine had enjoyed popularity for its irreverent zeal, typified by the famous cover shot of Harry Rosen, naked save a strategically placed necktie. But as the economy slumped, Olive sobered the magazine with more managerial and how-to-cope content, hiring Ken Kidd and Jennifer Wells as senior writers. The focus was on cost-cutting, so Olive slimmed the book in order to maintain its profit margin. As editor, Olive thought of himself as a businessman with a $1.3-million budget. He’s kept profit-and-loss statements from his tenure showing the magazine’s performance relative to the entire Globe company. “I really prided myself on spending that money wisely,” he says. “We were the only profitable part of The Globe and Mail for part of that time.”

Always the nighthawk, Olive would often arrive at the office after the others had left for the evening. Kidd remembers coming into work in the morning and finding a memo from Olive, sent at 3 a.m. “I’ve been accused of being a workaholic and I hate that because it sounds like a disease,” Olive says. “But I guess I do live for my work. It’s the one thing that will cheer me up. And it’s the one thing that will drag me down.”

Bolting down the stairwell housing the white binders, Olive stands just outside his bathroom. Adorning the door is a copy of the Globe‘s front page of February 17, 1919, the day that Wilfrid Laurier died. Framed speeches by Martin Luther King and Pierre Trudeau flank the mirrored medicine cabinet-“Just something to look at while I’m brushing my teeth,” Olive laughs. He’s hung a picture of Roosevelt and a sketch of Churchill upstairs. And there’s a Clinton/Gore campaign sign in his Flag Room, a den-cum-storage space at the back of the house where the flags of locations he’s visited drape the walls and ceiling.

The first three words of Olive’s first book, Just Rewards, read: “I like business.” He believes that the capitalist system works better than any other that’s been experimented with over the last 300 years but that it’s in constant need of reform. Fifteen years after that first book, Olive says he is more wary of the free-market system and the “cupidity” that accompanies economic booms. He expects more of business than mere profit. “I will never embrace the excitement of closing a big underwriting deal or selling shares of companies to the investing public,” he says. “What’s important to me is what businesses do with the money.”

Accordingly, Olive criticizes and commends Canada’s business elite case-by-case. Air Canada’s Robert Milton? An unfit leader who’s squandered public goodwill to his company’s cost. Paul Tellier, CEO of Bombardier and formerly of CN Rail? A smart businessman with the experience and personality to nourish an ailing company. Olive describes himself as a Red Tory, but says that left and right are subjective terms. “I’ve been accused of both, so that’s how I know things are probably going well,” he explains. “I like to think of myself as a radical moderate. If I criticize big drug companies, I’m a left-wing pseudo-communist. If I make the case Frank Stronach is a good businessman, I’m a right-wing zealot.”

In the late 1980s, Olive and a group of business executives, accountants and academics started the Canadian Centre for Corporate Ethics and Policy, an organization that tracks and promotes business ethics. For over a decade now, Olive has been a columnist for the Corporate Ethics Monitor, a bimonthly subscriber-based business publication that analyzes and rates companies in various industries from a responsibility perspective.

“Olive’s forte is in having the courage to say what he thinks about situations, and particularly individuals, who have performed badly or well in the corporate world,” says Len Brooks, editor of the Monitor. Adds Ed Waitzer, former chair of the Ontario Securities Commission, a senior partner at the law firm of Stikeman Elliott and one of the ethics centre’s founders: “I can’t think of any other journalist who’s consistently focused on corporate responsibility issues as thoughtfully as he has in Canada.”

Money could have coaxed Olive out of journalism for a lucrative career doling out corporate advice. A brief hiatus from business writing in 1989 led him to paid speaking engagements at Alcan and trade associations and he helped update the ethics manual for Imperial Oil employees. During the referendum-obsessed mid-’90s, he spoke to the Conference Board of Canada about separatism being the by-product of an eroding social safety net. And Olive still works the corporate lecture circuit addressing issues ranging from corporate governance to branding. Last fall, he spoke to executive MBA students at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business about the need for enhanced accountability in the capital markets.

But writing has always called Olive back, as demonstrated during his last year as editor of RoB Magazine. Olive was getting stale, both he and colleagues say. He’d never been at a job for more than a few years and he missed writing full time. The magazine wasn’t reflecting the excitement of the high-tech times. Olive began suffering severe intestinal cramps, though he said little about it to anyone. The staff was forced to compensate for his frequent absences. In 1997, Patricia Best took over as editor and Olive moved down masthead as senior writer for a short time. Trish Wilson, a senior editor at the magazine during his tenure, now says of Olive: “Writer mode liberates him.”

at galaxy donuts, late night is becoming early morning. Olive’s coffee is cold, but the du Maurier perched between the yellowed fingers of his left hand glows warmly. Black pen and yellow paper shoved aside, Olive watches a white car drive out of the doughnut shop’s parking lot, looking but not seeing; he’s thinking, maybe trying to find the right word.

Major criticism of Olive’s work is scarce, but last October an article in Frank magazine accused him of plagiarizing John Cassidy’s book, Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. Most people who get “Franked” dismiss the criticism as cheap charges from a disreputable source. Instead, Olive ended his next Star column with a mea culpa: “Although I didn’t copy Cassidy’s prose, I relied too heavily on his superb book, which I had praised March 8 and should have cited in this piece. My apologies.”

But it’s criticism of his first published work, in the early 1970s, that Olive remembers with pathos. On page 14 of the Sir Wilfrid Laurier high school yearbook appeared Olive’s poem about his first crush. It began, “Skies of azure blue-” With a fresh-off-the-press copy, Olive approached his English teacher, who began reading silently, looked up at a beaming Olive, then down at the page, and proceeded to read the first line aloud. Now Olive mimics the teacher’s Brit-snob scoff: “Skies of azure blue…azure…ajour…asher…” The teacher slammed the book shut and continued, “Could you have started the poem with a more clich?d sentence? You have committed this to print with the idea that people are going to pay attention to what you have to say. You want to call attention to yourself. And you have. With this azure. And it’s terrible.” Olive says he tried to defend his work but soon realized that the man might be right. Some 30 years later, he shakes his head and says, “I’m never satisfied with what I write.”

The Globe‘s Wente noticed Olive’s harsh self-judgement at Canadian Business. “He’s one of these people who’s very competitive with himself,” she says. “You had the sense that the standards he set for himself were impossibly high, that he was, in his own mind, never quite living up to them.”

But opinions of Olive have always been high; editors have sought him out. Charles Davies, a colleague from the Financial Post, remembers the scramble to recruit Olive in 1997 when he was on his way out of RoBMagazine. “It was a one-time opportunity. It was like van Gogh was passing through town.”

By 1998, Olive was back writing full time at the Financial Post (eventually swallowed by the National Post), his cramps and discontent having subsided. He stayed as senior writer until 2001, when Ken Kidd lured him to the Star to build the business section of Canada’s largest daily. Olive, who’d wanted to write for the Star since his days as a paperboy in the 1960s, says he likes the freedom to pen stories with a dramatic narrative. “You’re looking for companies that have ambitious goals, which seem impossible to achieve,” he says, “or that were in terrible trouble but have managed to turn around.”

And so he sits at his picnic table, writing and rewriting, striking out redundant words, searching for the right verb, comparing history with present day. He sometimes ruminates over stories for days or weeks before he figures out what he wants to write. But Olive is certain about what business writing, at its best, is about. “It’s the story of passion and ambition and one lonely company,” he says, “one lonely person up against the world of competitors and droughts and floods and other acts of God that we don’t have control over.”

When the series was published, the lead story contained a paragraph that read, “The actual number of AIDS deaths is difficult to determine. But it appears priests are dying of AIDS at a rate of at least four times that of the general U.S. population, according to estimates from medical experts and priests and an analysis of health statistics.”

Controversy followed. A number of critics and colleagues felt that what The Kansas City Star published was not accurate journalism. The first grievance can be found in an article written by Columbus Dispatch reporter Jennifer Halperin, who described the above statistic as misleading. Mentioned in her article is a senior analyst with the Statistical Assessment Service in Washington, Iain Murray, who pointed out that the article looks as if it says one thing but upon further scrutiny says quite another.

He and other critics called the comparison between priests and the general public invalid. “Priests are adult men,” Murray told Halperin. “The general population includes women and children, and thus is much less likely to be infected with HIV.” Women are said to account for only 20 per cent of new AIDS cases and children make up a relatively small percentage of AIDS victims. “By some calculations the AIDS death rate of adult males is about 4 per 10,000-about the same as the death rate among priests, and four times as high as the general population,” continued Murray.

The Star fought back, quoting an AIDS expert who deemed the comparison to be common and legitimate, also pointing out that the series also made the comparison between priests and all adult males. But Halperin wrote, “Not all reprints in other newspapers included that element.” Also, the comparison between priests and adult males was not published in the second paragraph of the lead story; the comparison between priests and the general public was.

The second grievance concerned the Star‘s survey of 3,000 priests. Only 801 of the 3,000 responded, a number many critics deem unrepresentative. Also, because the poll was anonymous, it is difficult to ascertain where the responses came from, and again if it was representative. The poll, although meant to add credibility to the series, did the opposite.

In an Editor & Publisher magazine article five weeks later, Star editor Mark Zieman was quoted as saying, “We had the story reported at the time we decided to do the poll. But we felt the poll would lend more credibility. We believed we would be criticized for being too anecdotal, not scientific enough. We learned a big lesson. This has been a cautionary tale.”

Numbers saturate every page of our newspapers and magazines, and at times act as the cornerstones of good reporting. They need to be given the same consideration that words do, and this just isn’t happening. Journalists build their stories around facts and statistics, assuming that they’re correct. “There is something so magical about numbers,” says Don Gibb, a reporting instructor at Ryerson University in Toronto. “You come back with numbers and just toss them into a story, or even better than that you toss them into a quote, and somehow that gives it authenticity.” But the result can be the opposite: numerical inaccuracies threaten the credibility of writers and in turn the publications they write for. “There are continual problems with the way reporters handle basic math, everything from issues as simple as percentages to probability theory and news accounts. It’s endemic,” says Jack Hart, managing editor of The Oregonian, a daily paper in Portland, Oregon.

Fear of math pervades the industry and as a result numbers aren’t being questioned. Even more alarming is the fact that numeracy isn’t even being considered by aspiring journalists. In his 1995 Editor & Publisherarticle “Young Journalists Are Terrified by Numbers,” Melvin Mencher, professor emeritus of journalism at Columbia University, wrote that a group of Japanese sixth graders gave more correct answers on a math test than did applicants to the university’s prestigious journalism school.

Innumeracy in journalism is not a new phenomenon. In 1936, Mitchell V. Charnley wrote in Journalism Quarterly about his discovery of habitual numerical errors in newspapers. Almost 70 years later, inaccuracies continue to plague the pages of our dailies.

Numeracy – an acquaintance with the basic principles of mathematics – is not required to enter the industry, nor is it required to enter most journalism schools. As a result, while journalists may generally be good writers, they are generally weak mathematicians.

Consider Christopher “Chip” Scanlan, of the Poynter Institute, “a school dedicated to teaching and inspiring journalists and media leaders,” in St. Petersburg, Florida. When you read his chapter on numbers and the novice journalist in Reporting and Writing: Basics for the 21st Century, you wouldn’t know that Scanlan is math-challenged, except for the fact that he tells you. You wouldn’t know that in his newsroom days he kept the back of a calculator package in his desk drawer because it had instructions for calculating percentages, or that he almost declined my interview, wanting to refer me to a better source. Scanlan knew that he had to include a chapter about numbers in a textbook for journalism students, but writing the chapter failed to give even Scanlan himself confidence with numbers. Instead it gave him confidence regarding where to find information about numbers. He describes the result as “the expanded version of the back of the calculator package.”

While many journalists fear and dislike math, they love a good statistic. As Scanlan says, numbers “come kind of cloaked with this authority and if it’s a really sexy number then journalists love dropping it in there.” He offers the example of the widely used statistic declaring that the average child watches 100,000 acts of violence on television by the time he finishes elementary school – a stat he thinks he may have used himself. He emphasizes the need for reporters to ask why they like that number. “Do you like that number because it fits your preconception, or are you looking at the number and saying, ‘Okay, let me do the math here’?” The statistic originates with a study done by the American Psychological Association, and it is an estimate based on the average American child watching 28 hours of television a week.

A number is not by nature automatically a fact. Obvious mistakes get past reporters and copy editors purely because they aren’t looked at critically. Don Sellar, who runs the Bureau of Accuracy at the Toronto Star, mentioned an article in which the Canadian Press misstated the losses for the wireless firm Look Communications Inc. in the third quarter of 2001. The figure printed was $103,091; the company’s actual net loss was $103 million. The mistake may seem trivial, but it involves powers of 10, understating the loss by over $100 million-a mistake stockholders would deem anything but trivial.

There are obvious mistakes like this one, where percentages are calculated incorrectly or zeros are dropped from a number, but there are also subtle mistakes, which are even more dangerous. These mistakes involve the interpretation of numbers and affect a reporter’s control over a story. Consider this line: “Ottawa estimates up to 16,000 Canadians die prematurely each year from pollution caused by burning fossil fuels.” This appeared in a Toronto Star article concerning the Kyoto Protocol. Contrary to the article’s assertion, the Canadian Health Coalition statement being quoted made no direct claim that all 16,000 lives could be saved if Canada ratifies the agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions by one-third. A diligent reader informed theStar of the error and a correction followed, but the mistake demonstrates the danger of misinterpreting statistics. Credibility is jeopardized and the entire angle of a story can change.

Information is the heartbeat of journalism, and sources are the blood. Journalists rely on the information sources provide in order to do their jobs. But sources can have their own agendas.

By blindly accepting numbers, journalists may be forfeiting control over their stories to those agendas. “I think reporters are easily snowballed because they’re not comfortable with the idiom,” says The Oregonian‘s Jack Hart. “It’s like trying to order food in a different language, and they’re just happy if something edible comes along.” Usually something edible does comes along, but that doesn’t mean it’s what was ordered. Numbers shouldn’t get through the gate unchecked.

A reporter must understand what the numbers in a story mean before even attempting to explain them to readers. A major inhibitor of this is the comparison of apples to oranges. Comparing annual figures to semi-annual figures, for example, is hardly insightful. An article in the Toronto Star last November about gang violence said that Toronto police laid 4,165 charges for illegal possession of a firearm in 2001, up from 3,565 in 1997. The article also cited a 1996 figure of 809 charges, suggesting a major increase from 1996 to 2001. The 1996 statistic was accurate, but it only represented part of the year.

Many articles about innumeracy in the industry have surfaced over the last couple of years and heightened awareness, but few yield concrete solutions to the problem. Education is critical, but involves time, initiative and money. In-house training programs are surfacing, but not in every newsroom.The Toronto Star, the Kitchener-Waterloo Record and The Oregonian are among those that offer numeracy courses. The St. Petersburg Times in Florida has even implemented a three-phase math-training program.

Ryerson’s Don Gibb wishes there were numeracy police in the newsrooms. “There is always the style person who says, ‘That’s not the way we write daycare. Day care we write as two words, not one word.’ There has always been that person there and there’s always that person who has a fine eye for syntax but I’ve never met anyone who billed himself or herself as a numeracy expert.”

Using outside experts is another solution. University of Toronto mathematics professor Ed Barbeau believes that every newsroom should have a Rolodex of statisticians they trust and can consult. One of his colleagues has been called in by news stations at election time to help deliver coverage of the election race as votes come in. Barbeau also recommends having a statistician come into the classroom or newsroom to talk about how stats can be manipulated. Experts – or even math-proficient colleagues – can act as checks and balances.

On their way to the newsroom, some journalists spend a few years at journalism school. Unfortunately, they aren’t likely to be any more adept with numbers than those already in the business. Although math content in curriculums is increasing at university-level journalism schools in Canada, it’s still not pervasive. Almost all Canadian journalism schools include some sort of math training in their reporting courses, but the concentration varies. The University of Regina is the only one that offers an entire journalism-related math course. Concordia University in Montreal and Ryerson University in Toronto are the only schools that offer a course designed to teach students how to find and analyze information using digital technology.

Several schools also have specific beat-related courses that address numeracy issues. But this is a bit idealistic considering journalists are almost never assigned to their desired beat upon entering the newsroom. Also, those who don’t specialize will still face numbers daily.

The nonexistence of journalism-related math courses isn’t a result of apathetic curriculum committees; it’s more an issue of budgets and balance. It’s not that directors of journalism schools don’t care about numeracy-they actually take it very seriously. It’s that they care more about other things. To add a course you have to drop a course, and most schools aren’t willing to do that. “We don’t believe there is a journalism requirement we would be prepared to drop to add such a course, and we believe that the balance of academic credits is equally important to our students’ education,” says Stephen Kimber, director of journalism at University of King’s College in Halifax. Unless innumeracy in journalism acquires a larger profile, journalism-related math courses will continue to take a back seat to other interests.

Those who are deprived of math lessons in newsrooms or classrooms can certainly learn a few from the staff at the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, who broke a major story simply by taking a closer look at the numbers.

When Record editor-in-chief Lynn Haddrall saw the interest rate of a city park financing agreement, she saw two reasons to launch an investigation. The first: her need to know how the City of Waterloo got such a beneficial arrangement, while other municipalities weren’t enjoying the same good fortune. And the second: her need to know if this deal was in fact too good to be true.

The City of Waterloo joined forces with MFP Financial Services Ltd. of Mississauga to finance the building of a large sports complex called Rim Park. Waterloo said it was repaying the loan over 30 years at an interest rate of approximately 4.7 per cent – two per cent less than the usual rates for this type of loan. Haddrall called in Kevin Crowley-then a business reporter, now the paper’s business editor – to investigate. After unsatisfactory interviews with city officials, Crowley decided to try his hand at calculating the costs of the park himself. The results he came up with were nearly double those given to him by the city.

Crowley knew his way around financial statements. He had taken the Canadian Securities Course-a course for aspiring stockbrokers-at the suggestion of a friend who billed it as great for investigative journalism. Though Crowley calls the course a “confidence booster,” he still didn’t feel comfortable enough to run with his own numbers. He decided to pursue a more tangible angle-the tax breaks in the deal, which conflicted with federal tax laws. A few weeks later, he put everything on hold to take a vacation with his family.

It was shortly before lunch about 12 days later and Crowley had just come in from the beach in Gabriola Island, B.C., where he was vacationing, when his father-in-law told him to call the paper right away. His editor was inquiring about the reliability of a tip he had received claiming that actual costs of the park were twice what city officials had thought. Having done similar calculations himself, Crowley confirmed that it was a possibility. Just like that, he and The Record staff uncovered one of Canada’s largest municipal-government money scandals.

The interest rate of approximately 4.7 per cent turned out to be closer to nine per cent in reality. The actual costs of the park were about $227.7 million, more than double the original estimate of $112.9 million. Waterloo city officials had signed contracts that they didn’t understand and taxpayers almost had to pay the price. The Record published a series of articles detailing the scandal, for which it received the 2001 Michener Award for public service journalism. Since then, Waterloo has reached an out-of-court settlement said to save taxpayers $82 million, a judicial inquiry is currently underway, and city treasurer John Ford has resigned.

Following the scandal in Waterloo, several other MFP clients decided to take a closer look at their deals. Brock University has reached a settlement with the company said to save the school millions of dollars. The municipal governments of Toronto and Hamilton, county officials in Windsor and Essex County, and the Union Water System near Leamington have all filed their own suits against MFP, and an inquiry is also underway in Toronto.

Meanwhile, the Ontario government is developing regulations to guard taxpayers from similar deals, and two finance officials in Windsor and a technology manager in Toronto have lost their jobs. The catalyst that set this all in motion: an editor who looked at the numbers and asked, “Does this make sense?”

Haddrall doesn’t think she learned how to be skeptical; she thinks she was born that way. “I think for some journalists you’re always just always asking, ‘Well, why? Well, why?’ and ‘Show me, show me.'” She urges journalists to never stop asking questions. Especially when it comes to numbers.