Underdog (28 page)

CCMW officials say they hope to expand the survey – with the help of public funding, of course – to include other niqab wearers who don't speak English, don't have access to the Internet, or live in rural communities. I can hardly wait. I only hope that the CCMW sees fit, considering they are using
public money, to speak to those who have decided to assimilate into this country, come into the twenty-first century and have ditched the niqab. After all, if the eighty-one participants in this first study mean what they say about coming here for freedom and life-changing opportunities, then I would think the first act of freedom would be to cast aside the shackles that have kept them bound to eras gone by. That means facing the realities of their new chosen home. Now if we could just get our public policy-makers, our politicians, and the media not to be held ransom by this religious extremism in the name of political correctness. All it takes is a few people to speak up about the Muslim limo drivers trying to ban my little dachsie “terrorist” to expose the ridiculous demands of a group imposing their archaic religious customs on a country that is supposed be a democracy. No one forced them to come and live in a country with twenty-first century values. Our society should not be expected to change to accommodate their beliefs. If they don't like the way things are in Canada, they have an alternative.

Nothing is cuter to Denise and me than our three dachshunds – Kishka, Flora, and our adoptee, a sweet rescue we've named Fritzy – running side by side on their short little legs, their furry little bodies pressed together on a walk in our midtown Toronto neighbourhood. They form their own little pack, although Flora, being female, dominant, tinier, and extremely athletic, usually takes the lead, and Kishka, being lazy and chubby, always struggles to keep up. Reminds me of how my fellow journalists at City Hall chased after Mayor Rob Ford, their bodies pressed up to each other moving in a synchronized pack, almost from the moment he came to office. They prowled the halls outside the mayor's office hoping to sniff out any councillor who was eager to disparage the mayor on camera or in print. They never had to look far. There were always the yappy, self-serving, attention-seeking councillors – Shelley Carroll, Joe Mihevc, Josh Matlow, and Adam Vaughan, to name just a few – positively
panting at the idea of giving a nasty sound bite. In contrast to my gorgeous, sweet, and always loyal pack of long-haired dachsies, there was never anything cute about this media pack, who as time went on became increasingly dogged about one thing only: dishing the latest dirt on Rob Ford, even if it meant stalking his family at his home or the family cottage. The usual boundaries were maintained for most politicians, particularly those on the political left, but any and all sense of propriety was thrown out the window once Mr. Ford's troubles started coming to light.

To be honest, the pack journalism didn't begin with the most controversial and highly troubled mayor Toronto has ever seen. My media colleagues at City Hall made it quite clear by their actions long before Rob Ford came on the scene as mayor that many of them did not have an interest in sinking their teeth into any complex issue. They preferred to cover the sideshow, the day-to-day dose of political “he said, she said” and anything that would require only minimal effort to produce a story. The more stories and story material they could be spoon-fed, the better. Reading meeting agendas from beginning to end was far too taxing. Attending council and committee meetings proved far easier if they could find the requisite number of councillors and professional protesters to manufacture outrage. Outrage certainly played better on TV and to an audience that often suffers from attention deficit disorder. These colleagues were largely what I now call repeaters, not reporters. What I found particularly disconcerting during my fifteen years in the press gallery at City Hall was how their tongues would wag continuously – forever gossiping, checking out what each other was doing, and sharing information that would help each of them cobble together
what they regularly and shamelessly decided by consensus would be the story or stories of the day. Many times at council, I wondered if they were as attention-challenged as the politicians they covered, seeing as they talked with each other and councillors so much they couldn't possibly be following the proceedings. Now, to be fair, often in council meetings councillors rarely added anything new to the discussion. They just enjoyed hearing the sound of their own voices. Still, I never got tired of hearing their political rhetoric because I felt it defined what they were all about.

The media pack mentality at City Hall bothered me so much that I made a conscious decision to keep to myself and do my own thing pretty much throughout my fifteen years there. As the unofficial opposition during the Miller years, I produced some of my best critical opinion pieces and repeatedly broke stories and scooped the competition. I really had to dig to get whatever I got, but there were stories galore if one just searched for them. I read city reports, pursued tips, answered e-mails, and talked to anyone and everyone at City Hall, including the security guards. I regularly had coffee with my trusted clerk friends to keep up on the latest scuttlebutt. I didn't mind the challenge. After all, when I got into the business – almost ten years later in life than most of my media colleagues – I was naive enough to think it was my job to compete with Toronto's other mainstream media for the best stories on any subject.

It
was
very much like that in my early days at the
Toronto Sun.
I still remember one of my first assignments, when I'd finally convinced editor-in-chief Les Pyette to hire me as a general assignment reporter in late 1989, after an eleven-year career in corporate communications. A couple of young
people had been snowmobiling on thin ice on a lake north of Oshawa and had gone through, dying instantly. I was assigned to do the “pickup,” as we called it then – to get words and, hopefully, pictures of the deceased from their shell-shocked families. It was the least favourite assignment, and since I was the newbie in the newsroom, it was handed to me.

It was made clear that I was in a race with the
Toronto Star,
whose editors had the flexibility to assign a couple of reporters to be the first on the scene to get the same pictures and words from the bereaved families. I had a heck of a time when I got to the first family's home. But I managed to talk my way into the house and get a good story, even though the family refused to provide a picture of their deceased loved one. At the second family's home, they practically shut the door on my foot. When I returned to the newsroom without any photos, my editors put one of my more seasoned colleagues on the story to “bat clean-up.” It was reassuring to later find out he wasn't any more successful than me. But there was tremendous pressure back then to beat the
Toronto Star
and other media outlets on stories like these and to hopefully not end up reading a story we'd missed on the front page of the competition. The race to be first was very real in those days.

To be fair, the way we report has changed a tremendous amount in the twenty-six years I've been in the business. The Internet and social media have had the greatest impact on those of us who have made print journalism the mainstay of our careers. When I started at the
Toronto Sun
in 1989, there was no such thing as social media, and our deadlines were geared toward getting a morning print edition off the floor by midnight. We actually had three editions in those days and something called “re-plate,” which allowed us to insert
a late-breaking story at 2 a.m. Cost-cutting and the Internet have put an end to that. Although our
Canoe.​ca
website has been up and running since 1996, I don't really remember having to adjust to online deadlines until about five years ago. Somewhere around 2006, we started doing videos with a vengeance. These videos were used to accompany our stories online. In fact, one of my first was of Denise, when I wrote a column about her troubles with City Hall in July 2006. When I ran for MPP in August 2009, I was introduced to Twitter and Facebook for the first time. Before I knew it, our jobs and deadlines had changed, re-plate was long gone, our newsroom had shrunk considerably due to a series of layoffs, and the demands on our time had increased exponentially. Researching and reporting a story or writing a column is not enough anymore. There is constant pressure throughout the day – more on reporters than on columnists – to do web hits for the
Sun
online site and to be the first to break a story on the web. Often when I conduct an interview with a photographer, I am required to do video hits. Attending a press scrum, conference, or meeting and simply taking notes is a thing of the past as well. We are encouraged to give a running commentary on Twitter – so much so that it is not uncommon to see the heads of journalists focused more on their smart-phones than on the subject at hand. As much as I use social media, I believe the immediacy of the Internet has not been good for journalism. It's not just that there are countless bloggers and amateur news gatherers masquerading as journalists. It has also affected how we actually focus on the story. Instead of really working a story, many journalists – and I certainly can't completely exempt myself from this – due to the demands placed on them, are more intent on delivering
a steady stream of online commentary, mostly on Twitter. Their attention in scrums and at press events is often divided. As good as one may be at multi-tasking, it is impossible to tweet regularly and really concentrate on what is unfolding at a meeting or ask follow-up questions in scrums. Too often, sloppy reporting shows the superficiality of the media focus. The ability to remain anonymous on Twitter has led to a certain aggressiveness online as well. As Rob Ford found out many times – the hard way – the advent of sophisticated cellphone cameras has created a “gotcha” kind of journalism in which no one is immune from scrutiny, even when individuals are out in public on their own time. Again, I confess I've caught more than one picture of city workers asleep in their trucks or four standing around and observing while one works, and then posted the pictures on Twitter. It's just too tempting. If he were still alive today, my journalism law and ethics professor from my Carleton days, Wilf Kesterton – an honourable and well-respected man – would be shaking his head in disgust (and at me as well) at how often the lines of professionalism and common courtesy are crossed in the name of getting a story.

Even e-mail has had both its negative and positive points. I welcomed it initially because it allowed readers or contacts to e-mail me with story ideas, instead of spending considerable time on the phone. I am able to easily weed out what is a potential story and set up interviews by e-mail, saving valuable time needed for research. But it has also been problematic, and more often than not frustrating, for an investigative reporter like me, who is seasoned at follow-up questions and digging out valuable information in a telephone or face-to-face interview. A telephone or in-person interview provides
context and a window into a subject's tone and speech patterns, and allows me to better judge whether my interviewees are telling the truth or not. Kathleen Wynne's Liberals are absolutely adept at manipulating the message by choosing only to respond via e-mail – so they can contain and spin the information and address only the questions they select. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times during my six months at Queen's Park, and since then in my new investigative role, I've been given direct access to a cabinet minister or a senior official to grill by phone or in person. The Liberals know what they are doing. They didn't and don't want to lose control of the message by submitting to phone or face-to-face interviews. Not only that, but initially, at least, they would more often than not deliver the answers just before what they thought was my deadline, making it impossible time-wise for me to respond with follow-up questions. Soon, I started to try to trick them at their own game by telling them my deadline was much earlier than it was, even by a day, and I continue to do that.

My
Sun
editor and friend, Zen Ruryk, often jokes that in our business, reporters and editors have their own form of attention deficit disorder – namely that we are easily distracted by the latest “shiny penny” that is tossed our way. The Liberals are skilled at taking advantage of that disposition. The situation with the discovery of the gas plant e-mails is a perfect example. When in September 2012 the gas plant scandal was heating up, Neala Barton – then media relations director in Premier McGuinty's office – decided to try to change the channel (and distract journalists from the gas plant issue) by proposing that the premier have a press conference to voice sudden support for a private member's bill
banning the use of tanning beds by Ontario youth under eighteen. Barton even mused, in an e-mail obtained as part of the gas plant document dump, that the tanning bed story is “really good” and would “make a fabulous headline in Saturday's papers.” And so they trotted out cancer survivors and announced the legislation to grand applause at Sunnybrook's cancer centre. Then nothing happened with the bill, mostly because Mr. McGuinty prorogued the legislature the next month. The following March, after Kathleen Wynne became leader, health minister Deb Matthews held her own photo opportunity at Princess Margaret Hospital with more cancer survivors to resurrect the legislation. Again nothing happened, until my uncle, Jeff Lyons (who was involved with the Melanoma Network of Canada as a survivor himself), brought the issue to my attention and I did a column attempting to embarrass the Liberals about dragging out cancer patients for their “political gain.” I was very pleased, as was Jeff, when the Skin Cancer Prevention Act passed less than two months later. This time, the Liberals got caught at their own game.

Sadly, however, the Liberal style of avoidance – or shall we say their ability to adeptly massage the message – has trickled down to many government departments and agencies now, including those at Toronto City Hall, where a phalanx of communications flacks control the information flow. The Pan Am people used it continuously. I was only granted one sit-down interview with former TO2015 CEO Saad Rafi – never to be invited again after I asked him hard questions. In the summer of 2015, when I attempted to approach Pamela Spencer, the former general counsel for Toronto Community Housing Corporation, to ask her a question directly, one of the housing
authority's PR agents tried to push me away. I was at a press conference, I saw her there, and since I was writing about a consultant study she'd allowed to go over budget, it made perfect sense to try to catch her for comment when I saw her. But Ms. Spencer refused to answer any of my questions, tried to bully me for approaching her directly, and insisted I send her an e-mail with my questions (so she could spin the answers the way she saw fit).

Despite the many changes in my profession and the pressures on us to be multi-media journalists, I experienced a rude awakening when I first got to City Hall in 1998. The pack journalism was so pervasive that I quickly got labelled as the outsider because of my less than popular views on so many subjects. I often likened myself to a salmon endeavouring to swim upstream. On the flipside, these are the very aspects of my writing that my readers can't get enough of and that I've built my reputation on. Former
Globe and Mail
city columnist John Barber took an instant dislike to me, not just because of my politics but because I happened to be Jeff Lyons's niece. Jeff, a well-known lobbyist, was tight with the Mel Lastman regime – a connection of mine that I never hid. There were whispers of nepotism since Jeff's friend Paul Godfrey was our publisher at the time (and, with the Postmedia takeover of Sun Media in April of 2015, is once again in charge). I'm not sure whether that rumour was started by Mr. Barber or by former Sun Media journalist Don Wanagas, who thought he'd be a shoo-in for the
Sun
's City Hall columnist job. This wouldn't be the first time in my career that an issue was created from nothing. In any event, Mr. Barber had a mad-on for Jeff, as he did for all those he perceived to be the “enemy,” and particularly those he considered behind-the-scenes
dealmakers. While an excellent writer, he was a bitter and often angry man, who would savagely attack politicians who didn't agree with his world view, without ever getting their side of the story. I never understood how he got away with it. He seemed to forever get a free ride either because politicians were afraid of him or because he worked for a left-of-centre newspaper where his then wife held a senior position. Just saying.