Transcript: Brian Stewart

An interview with the veteran Canadian journalist

This week, as we went to air, my guest on the program took the stage at Toronto Metropolitan University to address the next generation. The legendary Canadian journalist was poised to reflect on the highs and lows he’d experienced in his ringside seat to history, and to discuss how to navigate what he calls “the spinning vortex of ever-more complex news” — all of which he covers in his riveting new memoir.

Brian Stewart is a former foreign correspondent for the CBC. His new book is On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview here.

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TH: It’s an honour to have you on this show. I grew up watching you on the CBC, and of all the reporters that I know of in this country, your work has had some of the biggest impact. You set out to have a ringside seat to history, and that is exactly what you got. I want to set this up for our listeners today with a few highlights. Your work on the Ethiopian famine sparked worldwide grief and action, which we will get to later in this interview. You sat down with Margaret Thatcher and with Nelson Mandela. You were there when the Berlin Wall fell, and indeed you have a piece of it on your desk. You saw the Beatles perform in 1964 in Madrid. You dined with then-Prince Charles in Ottawa. I want to start today with what led you to take up this career. At age 14, you wrote a school essay, “When I Grow Up, I Want to be a Foreign Correspondent.” Take us back to that pivotal year for you, 1956, and how the news events of the day inspired your trajectory.

BS: Well, thank you. Our family was living in England for four years, so I went to a British school. It was a boarding school, but fortunately I lived two blocks away, so I got to go home at night. And at night, I always watched the news. I had been a kid who was always interested in news, and certainly history. In October/November of 1956, the British, French, and Israelis invaded Egypt — the Suez Crisis — to try and win back the Suez Canal. There was a very short fighting sequence and war there. At the very same time, the Hungarian uprising took place and Budapest rose up against the Soviets. I was this kid at 14 watching, mesmerized, the limited TV coverage coming in. I realized that there are guys there with notebooks in their hands and cameras, and they seem to be right there. They get paid to be at the ringside seat of history, and that’s what I want to be. I would love a job where I could see history in the making. Within a week, I wrote a school essay saying, “When I grow up, I want to be a foreign correspondent.” The teachers thought I’d gone nuts. My schoolmates thought that was the weirdest thing they’d ever heard of. My parents thought, “He’ll get over it.” But I never did. That was my guiding desire to go into journalism — to basically see the world evolving before my eyes and history in the making.

TH: It was not a prestigious career back then. What was the general impression of reporters?

BS: Somewhere between bohemian and sleaze. [Laughs] They were the kind of guys that would go to ball games and have a press tag in their hats. They smoked cigars and cigarettes. Or they were bohemian guys who tramped around the world. No, it wasn’t very high prestige then. My father went on to be a very successful businessman, and I came from a background where my brother went into business. I had no ambition, certainly no talent whatsoever, like that. Making money didn’t really appeal to me when I was young. I just wanted to be on the road, following Kerouac and writing like Hemingway. So, I really thought [journalism was] a great profession to go into: “I may not be respected. I won’t be well paid, that’s for sure. But I’ll get to see more of the world than anybody else does.”

TH: One of the things that struck me, reading this memoir, was how much the stories of the past resonate with the reality of the present, including in our own country. You covered the first Trudeaumania; you were the one who coined that phrase. Tell us about that time and how you think it compared to the second Trudeaumania.

BS: Oh, very different. I came back from England. I’d been working on a separate trip as a journalist and came back to Canada in 1967 because I thought, “My gosh, this is the hundredth anniversary. It’s Centennial year. Canada seems to be doing all these wild things. I have to see the Expo in Montreal.” I arrived in Canada that year after a two-year absence, and the energy was just remarkable. Some places you get off an airplane and go into a city and you can just feel it in the air. Boy, what a place be! I thought Montreal was the most exciting city in the world to work in. I wanted to get a job there, and I did get a job at the Montreal Gazette paper. I’ve loved it ever since for giving me that great break.

I was quickly seen as a future political reporter, so I was [assigned] to follow national politics, while doing city stuff as well. They wanted me to follow this guy Trudeau, who they didn’t think would get very far because he didn’t seem to have all that much charisma. Then suddenly, within two months, this guy explodes as a kind of media darling. He just photographs really well; he’s wonderful on camera. I covered the convention, was put on the Trudeau campaign trail. I saw the screaming hoards, people cheering, jumping in the street, wild meetings. Having come back from England, we used the term all the time — Beatlemania, this mania, that mania. In a very cheap act of journalism, I wrote about Trudeau’s biggest rally in Toronto, which was about 80,000 people, I think, and I used the term “Trudeaumania.” That summed up the fact that I saw the mania, but I saw it as very manufactured. It didn’t strike me as organic. I got in a little bit of trouble from my desk for using that term, because everybody else in the media started to pick it up and they thought it was giving Trudeau unfair advantage.

But Trudeau was a man who was kind of difficult to warm to, actually. He had been private on the plane; he was kind of aloof. He could often be disinterested, and what appeared to be low energy, though he clearly was a fit guy. I think it was very different from the atmosphere of the second Trudeau period because Pierre Trudeau was a very learned, scholarly man. Very quick. A professor type. Which isn’t always a lovable type, actually. A lot of the media didn’t actually love Pierre Trudeau all that much. He could be cold and sarcastic. But he did his research. He was very program oriented.

I think the second Trudeau period was very different from that. It tried to instill that great spirit. But over time, the spirit seemed to be more and more manufactured by bumper sticker slogans, endless press conferences, more than substance. That would be my comment. Though let me say that I covered Trudeau Senior in Ottawa, but I didn’t cover Justin Trudeau. So I put that warning before your listeners — that I was not somebody who spent a lot of time the presence of Justin Trudeau. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw him in the flesh. He certainly never saw me.

TH: I was curious reading about the October Crisis, which you covered. For listeners who may be too young to remember, can you sketch out what happened and what your impressions were of that really historic time?

BS: It was an amazing time in Canada. In the 60s, the Quiet Revolution took place in Quebec, where the church lost a lot of its influence. Conservatism lost a lot of its influence. We saw the rise of a very strong Quebec nationalist movement, which was further inflamed when Charles De Gaulle, president of France, came over and made a famous speech from the balcony, which I was at. I was just below the balcony, actually. He said, “Vive le Québec libre!” Free Quebec. He basically called on Quebec to free itself from Canada. That had a huge energizing impact on the nationalists, and the nationalists became increasingly split into two factions. One wanted a form of Quebec separation, but still in line with Canada. And the second lot wanted a revolutionary movement to break from Canada by any means possible. That increasingly involved a bombing campaign, a terror campaign, which was very serious. Much more serious than Canadians tend to realize now. We’re talking dozens upon dozens of explosions in and around downtown Montreal. Up to 50 terrorist cells were estimated to be operating in Montreal and throughout Quebec at one time.

In 1969, the FLQ, which was called the Front de Libération du Québec, kidnapped a British diplomat and also kidnapped a Quebec minister, whom they were shortly to murder. That caused panic throughout Canada. I was at ground zero because I was covering Montreal City Hall and its powerful mayor, Jean Drapeau, at the time. Drapeau was one of three: the premier of Quebec, the mayor of Montreal, and Pierre Trudeau in Ottawa. They all decided to bring in the War Measures Act to really bring off mass arrests. They eventually arrested over 490 people and also sent the army into Montreal. I, at the time, thought a bit differently. Most people thought the three powers were reacting to the threat of insurrection in Montreal. I also think there was a very strong input from Montreal, which had had a police strike the year before, and the army had had to be called in Montreal because the police and the fire service had walked off the job. I think I’m sure the mayor, who I knew quite well, was fearful that, at the height of the crisis, the Montreal police would go out and strike again. Or at least threaten to strike, to drive up their wage demands or just to cause chaos. So, he was beating [the drum] for the army to come in for those reasons particularly, but also because the others were warning him that insurrection was on its way. There was no insurrection on its way. That’s a very important part to remember.

The FLQ was a very serious terror cell. It was the first of all the great urban terror cells of that time — before European ones, before the Black Panthers, before a whole range of other urban ones. So, the police really didn’t know how to deal with it. They were quite hopeless in many ways. But once the minister had been murdered, the support for the FLQ in Quebec absolutely evaporated, almost overnight. You saw the collapse of a revolutionary separatist movement and more a political movement, which in many ways was more dangerous. As we saw in later decades when it came very close to winning a referendum, for limited separation, at least, from Canada. That’s the short version, but it was a scary time. Canadians should read up about it. Remember your history well, because if you forget it you often end up repeating it. To let a movement like that get out of hand and then to be completely inefficient in dealing with it can lead to very severe repercussions. I think Canada came very close to the edge over the space of about 15 to 20 years.

TH: Help me understand. You said that it was a very serious terror movement, but also that no insurrection was coming. Can you explain that to listeners?

BS: Yeah. The big fear was at the universities at the time … This was the end of the 60s, but everywhere in the 60s, universities were in ferment. There had been university uprisings in Paris and Czechoslovakia, even under the Soviets, across the United States. Also, police have gone out on several movements against the protests. There was a lot of protest movements that were really flaring. The RCMP Secret Service thought that what would happen would be the university students would go out in the thousands to meet the terrorists in their hundreds. When combined, they might be a force in Montreal and Quebec City and throughout parts of Quebec that could really overwhelm local authorities. And that could lead to who knows what? Montreal falling into an insurrection, where the army then has to go into an armed city virtually.

In fact, a lot of it was fantasizing, A lot of it was intelligence reports that didn’t bear any real hold on reality. “Oh my gosh, students are meeting all the time talking about the need to separate Quebec from Canada. This means they are ready for the barricades.” Well, there’s a big leap from marching in the streets and having a fun time protesting — and those were often very fun protests — and then going to the barricades and risking severe consequences. So, it was exaggerated. But it is not to say there was not a possibility that Quebec could have gone into a period of much more street rioting and demonstrations. Still, I always thought the War Measures Act was an outrageous step too far. I had several friends who were dragged in who had absolutely no separatist ambitions whatsoever. They were thought to write things like left wing columns. The next thing you know they were sitting in jail cells in Montreal.

TH: Having covered the use of the War Measures Act, what was top of mind for you when you were watching the trucker crisis unfold in Ottawa, and the invocation of the Emergencies Act?

BS: I thought it was very different. But like many Canadians, I was struggling with the fact that, first of all, I could not believe that the police allowed the situation in Ottawa to get as out of hand as it did. I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t drag some trucks away. I could see the siege of Parliament laid out, but I didn’t see much similarity at all between [that and] the situation in Quebec, where you had hundreds of pounds of dynamite in terrorists’ hands. You had over 50 terror cells operating in Montreal alone — just one city. The truckers parked their cars there, and presumably could have been towed away if the RCMP had had the foresight to maintain five tow trucks as its own equipment, which I suppose they now do. It seemed to me not a very violent movement and a movement that could still be handled by police.

But then again, you didn’t have the mass arrests in Ottawa that you did in Quebec. People who compare them should remember that over 490 Quebecers, many of them actors and poets and playwrights and journalists, were dragged into police cells based on nothing, and were released within a week, after a very miserable week in jail. So, I thought it was too much authority in the hands of the government, as simple as that. Governments should be able to handle even the threat of crisis.

The problem is the media plays a role, a complicit role here, in some ways by exaggerating. They love conflict. And now it’s 24/7 conflict. It’s like a vortex of ever-spinning conflict-this and crisis-that. That tends to wind up all of us viewers and listeners more than probably should be. More than would have happened probably 30 or 40 years ago, when you didn’t have so much of it piling on you. Media should be far more careful in their handling of all crises to make sure they are very calmly covered, and there’s open access to views of all kinds so that people don’t feel they are completely locked out of society and have no other way to talk to society apart from a protest that gets more and more extreme as time goes on and tempers rise.

These are all things that I think the government must avoid in future, that kind of heavy-handed crackdown. But media should really do a better job of calming the waters a bit. Calming the waters is not an artificial act of suppressing discussion. It’s basically an act of not pumping every crisis up into an earth-shattering, “now is the time democracy falls apart,” or “now is the time our country falls into ruin.” It needs more measured coverage, more open discussion, and even debate, amongst people. I think maybe it has learned that lesson, I don’t know. But I think that was a big lesson and I think a lot of lessons have been learned from it.

TH: I certainly hope so.

BS: I certainly hope so too. I can’t guarantee that, by any means. I don’t know how it will react the next time we have a big … But the next time, who knows? It could be in a province; it could be back in Quebec. We should be thinking an awful lot about how to handle those incredible moments. The same way that other countries have to think about their own problems and how to handle it in a way that doesn’t inflame a bad situation into something even worse and more dangerous.

TH: One of the legacies of [the trucker convoy] that I hear from the public in the mail that I get is the extreme political polarization, and what you had mentioned — that feeling of being locked out of the discourse. Reading this book, I really had no idea what your personal politics were. You had one line addressing that, saying that you’re most comfortable in the centre. This was in the context of a description of your lifelong friendship with Conrad Black, someone you have been close to for more than 60 years, who is a controversial figure in some circles in this country. You bonded over your love of current affairs. Back then, he was a diehard liberal. I didn’t know that! You write about the fact that you have been in very posh settings with him, such as his wedding reception in London, which the Thatchers attended, but also visiting him in prison when he was incarcerated. I want to read a paragraph: “The political distance between us has since swelled to a galactic divide, but by setting up our own demilitarized zone around never-to-be debated topics and personalities, our friendship remains unaffected.” I loved that. What lessons have you learned from that friendship that might help all Canadians who are struggling with political polarization?

BS: We were old schoolmates. We wanted to continue that friendship. We both wanted to because we both got a lot out of it. I appreciated his mind, his way of thinking. He taught me a lot about strategy and the rest of it. And I think I taught him a lot about the world and some realities. But we realized certain subjects were coming up. Believe it or not, it happened quite a few years ago when we realized we couldn’t discuss the American General in the Second World War, in the Pacific, Douglas MacArthur, without both of us blowing our top. We got so animated. I thought MacArthur was an overblown fraudster in many ways, and he adored MacArthur. So, we realized we’d have to drop that as a subject. We couldn’t talk about it anymore, and we didn’t. Now, along came a more current reality, when we realized the mere mention of the T-word would set off an inflamed discussion that sank the evening. If we were having dinner, that was the end of a pleasant evening.

TH: This is Donald Trump.

BS: Donald Trump. We would just spend the evening yelling back and forth. This is what we didn’t want. Both being very historic-minded, we set up a DMZ, a demilitarized zone, across which the T-word could not be sent. In other words, if any member, of the two of us, were to throw a mention of Donald Trump across that DMZ during a social event or a social occasion, it would ruin the evening. So, we basically outlawed the use of the word, the T-word, the Donald Trump word. And we’ve gotten along very well because of that. It would have been a far less pleasant relationship, basically. Because I’m not a fan of Trump. I’m very far from being a fan of Trump. He is a very strong fan of Trump. They have been friends for a long time. It’s not just a political friendship; he was in business relationships at times with Trump in the past. What was more important: Winning a debate over our steak and chips, or not mentioning Trump and keeping the friendship going?

I think a lot of people should do that. If you know somebody you really like, and you have got a lot of out of the friendship, but they hold political opinions that just drive you nuts — well, just say that we won’t discuss those politics. And guess what? Life can go on as pleasantly as before. We tend to talk a lot about history. We go back over various wars, Napoleon and stuff like that. Or we talk about the need to improve infrastructure in society and stuff like that. And just a lot of reminiscing about the past. But we do not get involved in the current U.S. politics.

TH: I want to switch gears now and discuss some of your experiences overseas — and the impact of some of those experiences. There were a lot of close calls for you, including one flight in 1985 in Sudan that saw you writing a goodbye letter to some of your loved ones. Tell us that story now.

BS: Oh my gosh, that was a terrible time. We were in Sudan covering another famine story, and we got caught in the worst sandstorm in the Sahara in 25 years, or so we were told. We had a small bush plane, basically a twin-engine plane, to fly us back towards Khartoum, but we had to stop to refuel at a small airport. We get caught in the sandstorm, and lo and behold, the plane’s guidance system goes down. But it gets partially fixed. But then the guidance system at the airport that sends out signals to the planes so they find the airstrip — that went down. I had the pilot sitting just in front of me, sweat streaming down the back of his neck, which is never a good sign, and clicking on backup fuel tanks and the rest of it. I realized, my God, this guy does not know where we’re going. I said, “How are things going?” He said, “Well, we don’t have any signals. I don’t really know where we are. But I’m looking.” He kept tilting the plane over to peer down through the sandstorm. The only way you can see the ground is right down. And I said, “Okay, I’ve pushed my luck too far. I’m sure we’re going to crash, and the chances of survival are going to be not very promising.” So, I started writing in my notebook, goodbye farewells — sorry to have caused you such grief — to my various friends: “You won’t believe this, but I think this is my last.” I was getting well into this. Imagining that one day the headline would appear in, say, The Globe and Mail, saying, “After a 25-year mystery, the bleached bones of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation news team were finally found in the Sahara.”

We finally saw something in the airstrip and we went into a corkscrew movement down through the sand. Somewhat to my surprise, he actually landed it safely. I was, by then, about 10 pounds lighter from sweat. I staggered on the plane and asked him what was going to happen if he hadn’t found that. He said, “Oh, we’d be okay. I would bring her down through the sandstorm and land on a dried-out riverbed of some kind.” And I said, “Without water in the middle of Sahara and the worst sandstorm in 20 years — this is our best-case scenario? We land on a dried-out riverbed?” That’s when the headline, “The Bones of the Lost Crew Are Found” flashed in my mind. That was probably the most scared I’ve been, but it’s also the one time I was coming to terms with the fact that you’re not going to live beyond this day, which is kind of interesting. I wasn’t quite as panic-stricken as I thought I would be. I sort of assumed that I just pushed my luck too far, and guess what? Luck was running out. Now, mind you, if he had turned around and said, “We’re out of luck guys. We’re going down, and I don’t know where we’re going to land or what we’re going to hit,” I think then I would’ve panicked in the extreme and offered to jump even without a parachute. [Laughs] The funny thing is, I didn’t wake my crew. They were all sleeping away like babies. I didn’t want to go back and say, “Hey guys, I want you to wake up because we’re just about to crash in the sandstorm, and you should be awake.” I thought I’d wait till the last few minutes so they at least enjoy whatever dreams they were having.

TH: Oh, my goodness. I want to touch, now, on the Ethiopian famine, one of the stories that I think you are most well-known for, but also, it sounds to me reading the memoir, that affected you the most. Tell us about a little girl that you met, Birhan, and how telling her story inspired a massive global outpouring of empathy and compassion and care — and eventually landed you on Oprah’s couch.

BS: It certainly is not something that I planned. Very early on in our coverage of this famine in Northern Ethiopia, the worst famine certainly postwar, and maybe in the 20th century … I was in a feeding centre for families and many of these children are very sick. Out of my corner of my eyes, I saw this one small girl, about three and a half years old, collapse onto the pavement. I said to myself, “I think that girl is dying or maybe has just died.” I called a nurse to come over and see if she could do anything. She picked her up, ran her to an aid station. We were filming her face at the time when the nurse said, “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do. She’s going to die within 15 minutes.” And so, we backed off, out of the room, to let her die in dignity. That image of her face was already haunting me. The eyes seemed to be peering out into a faithless world that had betrayed her, her generation. I said it was almost like the face of famine.

We drove away, and we went back some hours later because we were going to bury her the same day, which they do in famines because there are so many dead. We arrive and there’s a small group of nuns from the feeding centre standing around. They are holding the girl and their arms and they’re all smiling. In Ethiopia people didn’t smile then, that’s for sure. I ran up and I said, “What is it, sister? We seem to have got a bit of a miracle today.” And she said, “Yes, yes indeed, we stuck a needle in her and she came alive.” So, I did a story on her, about if this girl can survive, maybe it’s a symbol that Ethiopia can survive. I did say that some faces stand out. Because there was something striking about her face. And that was basically it, this story. We went back three weeks later and saw her alive and going off somewhere into the storm, and I didn’t think much more about it. But our editor at the time, Colin Dean, had put together this strip of video of terrible scenes, just awful scenes of famine and children dying and mothers holding sick children. It ended with Birhan’s face — this face staring out into the world.

I didn’t know, but months later, Bob Geldof was approached that they should show this at the Live Aid concert, which was the biggest concert for charity ever organized, going around the world. In fact, over a billion people were watching Live Aid. And David Bowie, the great rock star of the past, said that he would not go out and perform his moment unless he was allowed to show that video afterwards. And Geldof said, “No, no, no, we can’t do that.” But Bowie said, “Okay, I won’t do it.” So Geldof said, “Okay, go do it.” Money hadn’t been coming in nearly as well as expected, but when they showed that tape, and the face of Birhan, it just brought tears around the world. The phone lines melted with money pouring in. They raised, according to our money today, our currency today, $600 million, which is an incredible amount.

A few years after that I got guilty feelings, that we had left her somewhere in Ethiopia, and I had to go back and find her. I did get CBC’s The Journal to back me going back looking for her. To my surprise, we did find her. I found her and her magnificent father and the family. So, I arranged for her education going forward, and a home for them, so they would be stable. And I sort of kept in touch, hard though it was in those years. 20 years later, Geldoff brings her to London for a performance of Live Aid 2 with Madonna. Birhan is up there singing with Madonna! The Oprah show gets our story and has us on. And then she says at the end of that that she wants to go back and finish her college, which I was helping her get through. We’ve stayed in touch ever since. I became great friends with the family and I’m involved in a couple of the charities there that she’s involved in. We’ve stayed in touch. And now our families actually zoom back and forth to each other, which is just a remarkable thing. To think that over 41 years since I first saw her, I’m now doing calm zooms on a Sunday. She is still in Northern Ethiopia, and has launched her own charity now for disabled children in a very poor area. She’s married and has two kids. And she says life is now wonderful. But she survived, in the meantime, another semi-famine and a terrible war. She survives everything. She’s just remarkable. Birhan Woldu is her name.

TH: It’s an incredible story. I’m glad we started with that really uplifting story. But there is more of a dark side to covering these stories as well. I had Sebastian Junger on the podcast talking about the PTSD that he himself suffered from going to war. You had a breakdown in the 90s. You experienced pretty extreme anxiety attacks. You went to see Dr. Anthony Feinstein at Sunnybrook Hospital, who said you were experiencing a kind of moral injury. What is that, and how did you heal from it?

BS: He didn’t say it at first. At first, I assumed that, like about 40% of foreign correspondents, or somewhere around that, I might have PTSD. I mean, you certainly get a lot of opportunities to pick up PTSD. But I was tested, and I became one of the studies of Dr. Feinstein on the effects of being a witness to these horrible events of the world. He has since become famous among journalists worldwide for working on the fact that journalists and their bosses must be more aware of the psychological damage and the mental damage that is caused when your profession is to go and be a witness to the worst horrors in the world. When I had a breakdown, I wasn’t diagnosed then as suffering from moral injury. But moral injury is the term now used for my kind of case. It’s like PTSD, but it’s not exactly the same. It’s more, as Feinstein has said, “a wound to the soul.” This affects many — not just journalists but aid workers and soldiers and military, you name it — who witness things that they feel they should help more with, or stop from happening. Witnessing these things over and over, you start to feel that you’re not living up to your highest moral image of yourself. You have these growing guilt feelings. This is what happened to me after what I had seen, above all, in Ethiopia. I was haunted for years afterwards by images of driving by a starving mother and her starving children and not saying, “Come on, get into our media van, we’ll drive you to the next feeding centre” because we have already packed with our equipment, and also there were 50 other families, a hundred other families. Do you play God and pick up one and not the others?

You stand around a lot as a reporter, in particular. You’re not even a cameraman or sound person. You’re watching and watching, and then reporting on it. It tends to leave you with this feeling that, okay, you may have done some good in your time … And I know reporting from Ethiopia did good. I mean, the Canadian outpouring alone saved over 700,000 lives, it’s been estimated. But you yourself might have done more. You might have somehow shared a chocolate bar or taken some loose change out of your pocket. It’s almost impossible not to start feeling that, if you’re there long enough. So, moral injury is being taken very seriously. I think Junger has written about it himself. But it’s being taken very seriously now. It’s something that’s quite hard to treat. It’s actually in some ways harder, I gather, to treat than PTSD. Because it’s in there in the soul. And it’s hard to get rid of that because it is a reality that you could have done more. There’s always something more you could have done.

Fortunately, I have been treated and I’m over it now. And in many ways, though it was a very painful thing that led me to a breakdown, it also enriched me in some ways. It gave me a much greater sense of our place in the world and our duty to fellow human beings. And what can be done realistically — but also what can’t be done. And you can’t go on flogging yourself for not having been pure and perfect in every way. That’s not going to happen. Certainly not when you’re surrounded by an estimated 6 million people in danger of starving to death. Whatever you do that’s good, it won’t be good enough for your memories.

TH: That term that you used is really striking to me: “a wound to the soul.” Throughout this book, there is an undercurrent of spiritual longing. There’s times when you go and sit in a church by yourself and just absorb that atmosphere. I hope you don’t mind me asking this question, but given what you’ve seen — given the heights of evil that you have seen in this world and also the incredible saintly acts that you have seen from people, and the transformation and change and healing — where have you landed on the subject of God?

BS: There was a term in England used in the 60s called “Christian agnostic.” That you’re very much in favour of Christianity, and the Christian method, and you very much wish you were a believing Christian, but you can’t quite sign on the dotted line. You can’t fully believe. But by heavens, do you ever wish you could. I used to joke that I was a Christian wannabe, going around wanting to become a Christian, but never quite [getting there]. I used to sit in my hotel room and read the Bible, which was often gibberish to me. I am somewhere, now, between believing and not quite fully believing.

But one thing I did come away with … I wrote a speech once about how Christianity was far more active in the front lines of the world than we give it credit for. You can’t go to 90% of the horror places in the world — disasters, catastrophes, war zones — without finding Christian missions. They get very little publicity. The news media go in and they give a lot of publicity to the various international aid agencies, as they deserve. And a lot of publicity to the lack of world response, which also is often deserved. But they don’t do enough to show that long before the crisis, and during the crisis, and long after the media leave these missions, these Christian-driven missions, will go on. I thought there was a kind of heroism in that — this endless struggle to never give up. To always be there, regardless of headlines or headlines not gained. It was immensely impressive to me. I wish that the media had actually done more on that subject. But come to think of it, how much did I do? Not really very much. Though I must say, I’ve interviewed an awful lot of Christian feeding centres and nurses and the rest over the years. That’s a topic I probably should have gone into in some depth. But in our era, of course, a lot of coverage of religion just wasn’t on.

TH: Yes. I feel that’s starting to change now, which I think is an interesting development.

BS: I think people have a yearning, as I had a yearning, and many of them are more successful than I was in finding a path to a real, fulfilling spiritual world. I think that has been predicted in the past but wasn’t quite seen to be happening. But now I think it is happening. Unfortunately, too often it is allied with politics, which is a worrisome trend. I don’t think it should be. I think, quite frankly, Christianity, as a great religion, is kind of above that. It should be remain above that, as a giant powerful force of its own. It is immensely more popular around the world than people think it is. I’ve covered, I think, seven Papal visits around the world, including this first one, of John Paul II of Mexico. I’ve seen crowds of 2 million, and up to 3 million people, going through a city past 5 million people or more cheering their lungs out. You can’t come away with that without feeling it is a force. It is a very profound force out there, still.

TH: We should, before we close, spend a moment on the CBC. Your former employer, and mine as well. I have been very critical of the CBC, but that criticism comes from a real love for the CBC and wanting to see it survive. You don’t talk a lot in the book about the institution and there’s not a lot of criticism. I’m curious, when you look at the CBC today, what is it that you see?

BS: Well, I see an institution that’s certainly going through a very troubled time, there’s no denying that. And if you go into the CBC, that’s what you hear as well. I think it went through a period of mismanagement, certainly in news services. It still has some fabulous people, really wonderful people. And from that, I started building my hopes back. I think the CBC is actually — I’m quite encouraged — it’s been in a phase now, a good time. The crises of the past year have focused the CBC. And also, the crisis that’s been born by one of the leading political parties saying that it might be defunded altogether. [The CBC] is a more serious institution now than I think it was two years ago. And I have some hope that new management there is starting to steer it back. But it has such grave weaknesses, which they have to acknowledge.

I mean, local reporting — that has to be rebuilt. It’s an enormous vacuum in many areas of the country that CBC must take a responsibility for. National reporting, too, must be expanded. But from my vantage point, the critical thing is the CBC has got to get back seriously into the kind of foreign coverage that I was fortunate enough to have experienced back in the 80s, 90s, 2000s. It is like all of the networks in this country started to abandon foreign news coverage, which is in danger of leaving Canada increasingly a myopic nation. We’re a nation that doesn’t even have a dedicated foreign intelligence service, and its diplomatic services have declined in many ways. Cabinets, whoever is in, seem to be out to lunch often on what developments are taking place in trade circles around the world and other circles around the world. That’s changing too, I think.

But it has a media that isn’t nearly as aggressive out there abroad, reporting with Canadian eyes and ears back to Canadians. I think that has to be rebuilt, as a priority. I say sometimes now that all of the foreign correspondents of all of the Canadian networks, broadcast networks in English, could fill one minivan. I mean, the private networks have two. No matter how rich they are, they have essentially two foreign correspondents — one in London, one in Washington. And the CBC has less than it had. It has to rebuild bureaus that have been closed, or have been evacuated under pressure, like from Moscow for instance. And it has to get active in whole parts of the Southern hemisphere. I think that that will start coming. I’m putting my bet down on the CBC doing a comeback.

But you have very successfully pinpointed a number of weak areas that the CBC has to address. Should it be an advertising? Should it be streaming entertainment shows? Should it not be pouring more of its essential muscle and funding into news information? And a serious return, I think, to arts as well. I remember when I read your writing on that, that rang a bell with me. I think we really lost something when we stopped covering things like the National Ballet and the National Opera and what have you. We need to get the arts back in play. But my priority is to see our foreign correspondents increased abroad, bureaus increased abroad. By doing that, we will also shame the privates into expanding their own overseas operations.

TH: You are speaking at Ryerson tomorrow, now TMU. You graduated from Ryerson in 1964, and at that time, you write, “the news industry was profitable, entry level jobs were plentiful.” What will you tell students tomorrow?

BS: Well, I’m going to be in conversation before I answer their questions. I can’t really, with a good, strong face say, “Come join a great career that’s going to assure you a very good future.” I can’t say that anymore. I have to say, “You have to be far more eyes open.” Certainly if you ever want to follow my course, which is the foreign correspondent — which I frankly wouldn’t advise anymore. Because I think that’s far more dangerous now than it was in my time, and harder to perform, under the circumstances today of the spinning vortex of ever-more complex news. But I will say journalism has to be rebuilt in Canada. I think there will be a period when we’ll start rebuilding our local news coverage. And I think, for heaven’s sakes, do not brush off foreign news. That’s where I got my break. I spent nine years in print before I ever went to TV, and there were very educative, informative years. So, that will come back. And I think we’re going to see a strengthening of the CBC.

Beyond that, I have to be very careful. I don’t want to be in there, saying, “Hey, why don’t you come and join what is a wonderful, upbeat, progressive future in the news business in Canada?” I say, “You have to look at reality. And we’re looking at a lot of rubble around us.” Smarter people than me, more up-to-date for sure than I, are racking their brains trying to think of how we can bring journalism back in this country. I just hope that the country itself sees it as a real priority. Because without good, solid journalism — local, national, and foreign — we are in a real myopic mess. And it is going impact politics too. Our politics is going to get less informed, probably less extreme because of that. And governments are going to get more out of touch because they won’t have to worry about what people think on the ground. Because of nobody covering what they do think on the ground.

TH: You mentioned this term, “the spinning vortex,” and that is very much where I live right now. I spend a lot of time figuring out how to survive it. One of the things that strikes me, and that we talk about a lot on this show, is that exactly at the time when current affairs has accelerated almost out of control, the news cycle has sped up, and there are so many terrible things going on in the world — at that exact time, so many of us have become more isolated and more lonely and have less strong relationships. And so, one of the things that I often ask guests, particularly in the media, is about the relationships that help them to weather the storm and help them to continue to contribute to the culture and to the country. You’ve been married for some four decades, to a fellow CBCer, and you are a father. How have those relationships sustained you?

BS: Totally critical. I don’t think I would have come through without that grounding of the family. And I was very late in getting married. I was in my fifties, if you can believe it — or at least touching 50. The life before that was just not sustainable. Doing the kind of work I did, people would get fed up; you were never at home. Even by the year I got married, I was on the road six of the 12 months, half the year. No, I’m sorry, nine months out of the 12! That was the year that wall came down.

So, that’s very important. I do think people in the media now have such a huge responsibility, and such pressure and stress on them. Because, again, there are so many 24/7 crises, conflicts, catastrophes, pouring in on them to try and manage the flow of this information. I think all journalists really have to look to the stress levels they are under. The pressures can be enormous. Stress can be very damaging — too much stress over a very long period of time. And that’s why the responsibility is so great on journalists. But at the same time, the responsibility to look after themselves is also more important now probably than it was in the past. Because this is not a normal world that we’re living in. I have a long memory. I have diaries going back to the early 60s. Believe me, the world has never been like this in terms of problems pouring in on one — debates, crises, extremism, you name it. This is all new ground. And by heavens, those that are trying to make sense of this new ground have an enormous responsibility to look after both that job and that stress level.