Memories, broken hearts and the cop that wasn’t
Baxter Road was always a particularly soulless place to practice journalism.
Chasing news in what felt like a suburban strip mall never felt right, but the Ottawa Citizen put its newsroom there for quick access to the expressway running through the city, long before actual traffic in a sleepy capital became a concern.
The night shift in a small city which yielded a paucity of real news was bad enough without having to head to the ’burbs to do it.
I had landed there after a stint at the Winnipeg Tribune – followed by some extensive travel – for my second stint in Ottawa by the age of 25. Many more moves back and forth to Ottawa, four more in all, would follow.
There were moments during those Ottawa nights, but they were few and far between.
There was, however, a stunning amount of talent sitting in the Baxter Bunker when the streetlights went on.
I worked nights with the likes of Neil MacDonald, Jane Taber and Andrew Cohen, three of the best journalists of their generation, but denizens of the Nepean nights with me back then.
The memories are sporadic.
The nightly round of police checks meant mumbling your media affiliation or outright lying to the police in Hull (now Gatineau), who never forgave the Citizen for calling them out for chasing a suspect over the bridge into Ontario, out of their jurisdiction, and firing bullets at their prey like they were starring in a bad cop movie.
We blamed MacDonald.
Cohen will still tell you about the night he was assigned to get to the bottom of some kid’s claim that he was a suburban Batman and could climb the walls of his parents’ bungalow.
We all drove gaudy yellow Citizen staff cars and when Cohen turned down the Kanata cul-de-sac in search of boy Batman, he was met with a prepubescent greeting party which lapsed into delirium and chants of “the Citizen is here, the Citizen is here,” as they chased the car down the street, pounding on the doors, providing an escort for Cohen.
From Batman, Cohen went on to write or co-edit six books, including How We Lost Our Place in the World, a national bestseller that was shortlisted for the Governor-General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction.
Taber made her mark in both television and print, perhaps most notably during a remarkable turn with The Globe and Mail, and MacDonald was a CBC star foreign correspondent and, later, a must-read columnist.
None of us were any of those things back in the late 1970s, when tedious nights were punctuated by torpor.
This was, after all, what was dubbed the era of “disco journalism,’’ defined by the esteemed Citizen columnist Charlie Gordon as “news for those who move their hips when they read.”
Occasionally I got sprung.
I was once dispatched to write about the other Ottawas in North America. I was never sure why, but the night I spent in Ottawa, Ohio, is one night of my life I will never get back.
It was once proposed to me that I go undercover in a Petawawa biker bar that was running guns. Since I was a stick of about 160 lbs., and could never have gone under cover anywhere but a cooking class, I passed. I actually thought it was a plot by Citizen brass to be done with me at the hands of a biker or a barrel of a gun, didn’t much matter.
Similarly, it was proposed that I head to the Central Canada Exhibition and ask children to review rides and candy for the paper. I weighed the thought of telling little girls that I was a reporter and I would buy them cotton candy but, don’t worry, everything was cool, just don’t tell your parents. Somehow that didn’t seem like a solid idea to me.
Again, I demurred.
I was once dispatched to Kansas City, Mo., to report on a killer heat wave. When I filed my breathless missive, MacDonald thought the quotes were so perfect they almost appeared fabricated (they weren’t).
So at midnight I went across the street from my marvellous digs at the Holiday Inn, met workers coming out of the night shift at the Post Office, and collected a new pail full of quotes.
I fired up the suitcase-sized Tandy, punched in the quotes and got the old rubber couplers affixed to the phone – all but sitting on them to be sure, as we often did – and listened for the then-magical whirring sound that meant somehow it was transporting those words from Kansas City to Baxter Road.
MacDonald felt that harvest of quotes rang truer, I suppose, because he never questioned them.
To understand that era of night city news in the quiet capital, one would be well-advised to turn to Zotique Laframboise.
Laframboise, a plucky Hull police constable, had just started to disappear into the mist when I arrived in Ottawa.
He was a stalwart friend of the Ottawa media, particularly the night crime reporters at the Journal.
Unfailingly, he was first on the scene of any murder, car crash or garden variety mayhem across the river where late bar closings and an often dodgy clientele provided a gritty counterpoint to the public servants dreaming of bureaucratic work pods in somnambulant Ottawa.
And Laframboise never lost his sense of wonder.
“Me, I never saw nothing like that before,” he would breathlessly tell an inquiring Ottawa reporter in his broken English.
His knack for sussing out crime scenes understandably won him a number of promotions. He moved to sergeant, then inspector. His upward trajectory seemed unstoppable.
Until, of course, both Journal management and the Hull police hierarchy started asking questions about this oft-quoted man of the night.
And that was a signal for the Journal to transfer Laframboise to another police detachment galaxies away.
There were rumours he had died in a fiery car crash in Florida in the late ’80s – oh, the irony, he never experienced nothing like that before – but that can be debunked because he has an active Facebook account and resurfaced as recently as 2014 as co-author of a scientific paper published in the Citizen.
The study was as fictional as Laframboise.
I don’t mean to imply there was never a night of serious news on the Citizen nightshift.
I was working the night Hull police shot a kid trying to rob a gas bar.
I was dispatched to get reaction from the grieving mother. Except, when I knocked on her door, she asked me why I had questions about her son. I had beaten the police to her door.
This was way above my pay grade. I hit reverse and told her to call the police and got the hell out of there.
Most nights, however, ended with a few tokes and a Doctor Pepper from the 7-Eleven at the end of the street.
Thursday end-of-shift usually meant a rolling, all-night party at someone’s house, someone who was prepared to piss off their partner (usually me) by having a bunch of drunken colleagues telling war stories all night while their long-suffering loved ones sought sleep needed for a regular day job.
Many a morning I sat in a cab in rush hour trying to get home to bed while everyone else was headed to the office.
Glamour, this was not.
The night of August 27, 1980, was radically different.
When I arrived, publisher William Newbigging was in the newsroom. So was the managing editor. There was a lot of whispering.
This didn’t feel like a joint-and-Doctor Pepper night.
Eventually, the managing editor approached my pod and fell into his best conspiratorial whisper.
I had to climb on my horse and ride downtown to the Journal. The newspaper was closing.
I can’t remember whether I was stunned, thrilled to get out of the newsroom, or just thought I had myself a hell of a story, but I moved with dispatch to the building on Laurier Ave., hopped in the elevator and opened the double doors to a newsroom I fully expected to be a scene of abject grief.
I took one step inside and a friend working the universal desk, looked up and said: “Hey, Harper, what are you doing here?”
Shades of the gas bar shooting. I had again beaten the authorities to the scene of the crime.
Journal editor Jim Rennie spied me. He knew why I was there and I became the cue to break the news to the staff.
I felt like I was watching friends lined up against the wall as a firing squad loaded and reloaded.
Rennie got up to make his speech and I tried to will myself invisible, even as the Journal night shift began eyeing me like a conspirator in murder.
My colleague, Linda Drouin, and I filed some stories, then filed some more (oh, the morbid appetite at Baxter Road for more and more and more), then headed downtown again, this time for the wake at the old National Press Club across from Parliament Hill.
The booze and the stories and the hugs and, yes, the tears, flowed until the sun peeked in through the blinds and official Ottawa began gearing up for another day in the endless cubicles.
I staggered home, depressed and drunk, plunked myself in a lawn chair in the backyard and enjoyed some much-needed sleep … for about 90 minutes.
My partner came out to the backyard with a cup of coffee and news that my friend Carol Picard, an old Tribune colleague, was on the phone from Winnipeg.
The Tribune was closing.
With the sun pounding down on a hangover for the ages I felt like an idiot. Somewhere in the night just past someone asked me what I thought this meant for the future of the Winnipeg paper and I responded by ordering another drink, not seeing the collusion that should have been obvious.
Thomson had killed the Journal to give Southam’s Citizen unfettered market access to the Ottawa market and Southam had killed the Trib to hand Winnipeg to Thomson’s Free Press.
Mourning quickly turned to anger. I had friends all over the place suddenly without jobs because a couple of corporations felt they weren’t making enough money.
The Tribune headline read: “It’s Been 90 Great Years.” But my memories of my short stint at that newspaper were beyond great. I worked hard and played hard and so did my colleagues who quickly became friends. Some remain friends to this day.
And it was a damn fine newspaper, taking on the bigger and greyer Free Press and more than holding its own. It had established its own magazine and it promoted itself heavily. I had been in one of its television commercials.
Now, by my mid-20s I had already worked at two papers that had folded, Ottawa Today and the Trib.
It seemed a little early to become so cynical about a craft I had decided would be my calling, seeing as I couldn’t find more stable employment because I couldn’t replace a carburetor or repair a leaking faucet.
What I didn’t know yet was that there would be a straight line from my emotions that morning to the remainder of what became a 40-year career in daily journalism.
There was a breather following the carnage and life went on.
And then … a year later, the Citizen asked me to take on a big project.
Editors wanted a three-part series looking at the state of journalism in Ottawa and Winnipeg and journalism in general one year after that black day.
I was a dangerous choice. I had already blown the whistle on my own newspaper about under-the-counter cash payments it made to “amateur” athletes at a major sports event it sponsored each year in Ottawa.
The paper actually dispatched an editor to the airport to meet the athletes and pay them in cash. When I learned that, I pressed to write a story and, although initially rebuffed, the paper actually did let me (gently) expose its own hypocrisy.
I may not have made any fans in management, but they relented nevertheless.
So, I quite reasonably asked for assurances before tackling my state-of-journalism opus.
No interference or control on the messages of the stories? None, I was told.
If I was critical of the situation in Ottawa I would get reaction from my bosses, but the story would not change? No problem, I was assured.
One must be reminded of the times we were living in.
The appearance of collusion had led to the creation of Tom Kent’s Royal Commission on Newspapers.
It came at a time when 89 per cent of all Canadian adults read a newspaper in the course of a week and spent on average 53 minutes weekdays reading a paper, 66 minutes on weekends. According to Kent, 69 per cent of Canadians read an average of five or more editions per week.
The 1970 Keith Davey Commission had already told us the newsrooms of most Canadian newspapers were the “bone yards of broken dreams.”
Kent went further: “Some of the cynicism is the deeper one of not having had dreams. Journalists’ confidence in their publishers is thin or worse. They are frustrated but, even more, confused. This malaise is, in the Commission’s view, part of the price we pay for conglomerate ownership.”
Even in 1980, the demise of the industry was being predicted. No matter how dark this must sound, no one could have predicted where we would be 40 years later.
“Journalists have always recognized the ephemeral quality of their work, trying to illuminate the human condition by a rapid sequence of news flashes,’’ Kent wrote.
“Even if their brilliant capsules of yesterday’s existence were soon used to package today’s garbage, the institution of the newspaper endured.
“Only for this generation of journalists has the disappearance of newspapers had a terrible finality.”
If only, Mr. Kent.
But as he pointed out in his study, with no competition in your market, one can maximize profits by minimizing costs, in particular editorial costs.
So against this grim backdrop, yet armed with assurances from my employer, I set out to commit some journalism.
I headed out to Winnipeg to research the situation in my old stomping ground.
I had lengthy interviews with a blunt Rennie, who died tragically in a car crash a few years later.
Initially, all went well.
Part one played on the Citizen front with a good promo for part two.
Part two also got a good ride with a solid promo for the final instalment, a rather unflattering portrayal of newspaper journalism in Ottawa one year later – i.e., my employer.
I was feeling pretty good about the maturity level of my bosses and thankful for my freedom until … someone read it.
I was called into the office of editor Russ Mills who bluntly told me he was going to have to kill the third story – the one he had already promoted in his own pages – because it was too critical of the Citizen. He was quoted in the story, for chrissakes.
So much for freedom. So much for no harassment or guidance or interference from the brass.
I smiled. I told him I understood.
I left his office, went back to my computer and printed out my story.
I called a reporter named Michael O’Byrne at CJOH, the leading television station in Ottawa and, really, the Citizen’s only competition.
I didn’t know O’Byrne, but I knew his work and he was happy to come to my home to pick up his gift.
And then I waited.
At precisely 11:30, CJOH began its newscast with a shot of my printout and the ominous pitch to its lead story – The story the Citizen doesn’t want you to read.
The tone was the one usually reserved for a plane crashing into an orphanage.
I opened a beer.
Before midnight – I was stunned by the speed – one of those garish yellow cars pulled up in front of my Sandy Hill home and out hopped the night copy girl.
She was armed with an envelope she gave me as if she was handing me my death warrant. She couldn’t make eye contact.
I wondered momentarily whether Mills had called the RCMP and a SWAT team was going to be my next visitor.
I opened the envelope and read my sentence.
My promotion to the Parliamentary Press Gallery had been cancelled and I was suspended indefinitely.
I opened another beer.
Now, when you’re 25 and you have no mortgage and no kids to feed, it’s easy to play freedom fighter, even if you end up martyred.
Maybe I shouldn’t have done that. Maybe I shouldn’t have done subsequent interviews with the Canadian Press or local radio stations. Maybe I shouldn’t have told CP I was in “self preservation mode.”
But I did.
Yes, I went to my union, the same one that I had bargained for in the past contract negotiations, and I got the suspension lifted.
Even my union brothers and sisters didn’t know what to make of me. Perhaps, if I was toxic, it was contagious?
But I was just going through the motions.
I had no respect left for the Citizen. And upper management there was only too happy to dump me on the Queensway.
But, I wasn’t going to give them the pleasure of firing me so in a final flourish I resigned and hit the road again.
It was a sign of the times, despite Kent’s gloom, that when I returned from months in South America, I was offered jobs by both the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. I chose the Star and never looked back. I worked there for 34 years, in a series of bureaus, and cherished every moment of a career at a great newspaper.
The Citizen went on to thrive. The Free Press also hit new heights. Kent’s report landed with a thud and was never heard from again.
I couldn’t be happier.
There are some lessons here.
In the business of 2018 there is no room for someone with a rebellious streak. The job pickings are just too meagre if you lose your job making a point.
Martyrdom is a waste of time.
Thomson and Southam proved you can collude, throw hundreds of people out of work and get away with it.
It happened again.
Thirty-six years later the Star and Postmedia swapped 41 newspapers and closed 36 of them, costing nearly 300 jobs.
Instead of a Kent Commission, the Competition Bureau was doing the probing.
Another lesson we all know is that journalistic freedom is only granted until you piss off your employer.
If you’re going to fuck with your employer, do it when you are young. And, sorry, do it in the early 1980s.
RIP Winnipeg Tribune and Ottawa Journal.
This is a business that can break your heart.
But, man, it can also leave you with a lot of memories.
TIM HARPER has spent a lifetime tilting at windmills but has too often been hit by the blades.