Excerpted from Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way From Dublin to Canada, by kind permission of Rocky Mountain Books

By Brian Brennan

I never envisaged it would end the way it did. I had always expected that when my career in Canadian daily newspapering came to a close, I would write a farewell column thanking the readers for taking the time to look at my stuff, and sometimes taking the time to phone or write. I would gather with my colleagues in the centre of the newsroom, the managing editor would make a nice speech about me, and I would respond in kind. I would tell my colleagues that during my time as the Calgary Herald’s theatre critic I “gave my best jeers to Theatre Calgary.” There would be laughter, cards, cake and a chorus of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” My colleagues would present me with a framed replica of a dummy front page, filled with photographs of me, and mock news stories about my journalistic achievements. It would be a splendid send-off.

None of this happened, of course. Instead, I found myself, a few weeks after my 56th birthday, scurrying down the back stairs of the Herald’s red-brick fortress, clutching my well-thumbed copy of The Canadian Oxford Dictionary and the framed photographs of Zelda and Nicole that had been sitting atop my desk, held vertical by little cardboard flaps covered in fake velvet. There had been no fireworks, no marching band, no tickertape parade. This world was ending not with a bang or whimper, but with a step into the unknown. The first strike of newsroom employees in the 116-year history of the Calgary Herald was about to begin and I was about to end a 27-year career in Canadian daily journalism.

For more than 20 years at the Herald I had looked forward to going to work every day. I had gone from one enjoyable writing assignment to the next and felt appreciated by my bosses. But now I dreaded the thought of entering the red-brick building. I no longer felt appreciated; I no longer felt respected. Why? Maybe it was because I was getting older and the bosses were getting younger.

I told my family doctor about it: “As soon as I get to Memorial and Deerfoot and the Calgary Herald building comes into view, I can feel a dull ache rising in my chest.” He could tell I was feeling very stressed. He asked me some questions and gave me his assessment. “You’re working in a sick building,” he said. “Buildings get sick just like people get sick. If you can cure it, great! If not, start working on your exit plan. Give yourself three, five, however many years it takes to get out.”

I was 53 years old. Not yet ready for early retirement. But I also didn’t have the power to cure whatever sickness plagued the Herald building and infected some of us working there. I told a colleague about my dilemma, and she put it to me bluntly. “They just want you to bugger off and die,” she said. If that was indeed their desire, I thought, then, damn it, I was going to thwart them. I had no intention of giving them the satisfaction of seeing me leave before I was good and ready.

Then, unexpectedly in the fall of 1998, the promise of a cure arrived. My fellow editorial staffers and I did what many of us would have considered unthinkable, even laughable, a decade earlier: we voted to bring a union into the Herald newsroom. Most of Canada’s other major metropolitan dailies already had unionized newsrooms; the Herald, the Edmonton Journal and the tabloids in the Sun chain were among the few exceptions. We had never felt the need for a union. At the Herald, we had watched from afar while our unionized colleagues in Vancouver, Ottawa and Montreal weathered strikes and lockouts to win pay increases and better working conditions. Then we held out our hands, asked for the same deal and usually got it.

Up to the mid-1990s most of us had thought the Herald was a great place to work, and we enjoyed salaries and benefits comparable to those in unionized newsrooms. Our bosses asked for nothing more than that we get the stories and tell them truthfully, and that we not be dull. They spent the money necessary for us to produce the best journalism possible in a market of our size. When I worked as a theatre critic, my travel budget was the envy of colleagues across the country.

Between 1975 and 1995, you could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who left the Herald newsroom hoping to find a better deal in Vancouver or Toronto. In a newsroom of 160 staffers, that low departure rate suggested most of the employees were generally satisfied with their lot. But eventually, discontent began to simmer.

By the early 1990s, we knew the industry was in trouble. For the longest time, daily newspapers had been a guaranteed source of profit, a licence to print money as we used to say. Now they were printing in red ink. While the Herald continued to generate profits of between $30- and $40-million annually because it is located in one of the most affluent cities in Canada, its sister newspapers in the Southam chain were posting total annual losses of more than $150-million. To alleviate the losses, the Southam bosses began siphoning profits from the Herald and ordered the paper to cut costs.

Publisher Kevin Peterson, a former reporter and editor who had worked at the Herald since he graduated from the University of Calgary in 1969, tried to develop a business plan to meet Southam targets for spending, circulation and advertising. Peterson’s Toronto bosses entrusted him with the task of doubling the Herald’s profits: from between 12 and 15 per cent annually to between 25 and 30 per cent. Why? Former Herald managing editor Gillian Steward wrote in a Globe and Mail article on November 10, 1999, that the aim was to raise the share price, thereby making it more difficult for Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. to take over Southam. Peterson cut the total Herald workforce from 850 to 625 and slashed expense accounts and travel budgets. Then, with the hope that collectively we might find the right way forward, he organized staff into think-tank units known as “visioning groups.” To some of the editorial staffers, however, this smacked of desperation, and we viewed the process with a certain cynicism. We had never been consulted or included in management decision-making activities in the past, and we didn’t believe our suggestions would be taken seriously now. As it turned out, all efforts aimed at improving the Herald’s bottom line came to naught. Peterson never told us what the actual revenue targets were, but it was clear that we were not meeting them. On December 13, 1995, Peterson resigned.

A couple of months later, Ken King, previously the publisher of the rival Calgary Sun, took the helm as the Herald’s publisher. A few months after that, as feared by the Southam bosses in Toronto, Hollinger Inc. assumed a controlling interest in the company. For some of us editorial staffers, however, this actually seemed like a positive development. Hollinger owned some of the best newspapers in the English-speaking world, including London’s Daily Telegraph and the Jerusalem Post. For as far as we could tell, Conrad Black seemed to care as much about quality journalism as he did about making money, which could only bode well for those of us who worked for the Southam newspapers.

Ken King, a big bear of a man with a successful background in advertising sales and marketing, brought a TV pitchman’s approach to the job of fixing the Herald. Using the same networking and promotional acumen that had worked well for him at the Sun, he set out to raise the Herald’s profile in the community through corporate liaisons and marketing partnerships. Editorially, he oversaw the transformation of the Herald from a moderately liberal paper into a paper that leaned more to the right. Adding conservative columnists Peter Stockland, Barbara Amiel, Giles Gherson and Andrew Coyne to the editorial pages helped create what King described in a Herald article on October 14, 1996, as a “wonderful environment for political and social debate.”

The paper became a reflection of King himself, just as Peterson’s Herald had mirrored his personal style. Peterson, a left-leaning, university-educated intellectual, had worked his way up from political reporter in 1969 to the Herald’s publisher from 1989 to 1995. He often went to the theatre, boasted a fine collection of paintings and had a library full of Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies novels. During his tenure as publisher, the paper exuded intelligence and middle-class values. It revealed a social conscience and told the truth even when it was neither popular nor profitable to do so. It was also clear from the coverage that Peterson’s paper considered arts and culture to be a significant part of Calgary’s community life. A review of a Theatre Calgary production always occupied a more prominent place in the entertainment section than the reviews of that week’s Hollywood movie releases.

King’s Herald, on the other hand, reflected the values of this street-smart glad-hander from small-town Saskatchewan who smoked Cuban cigars, drank with oilmen and played old-timer’s hockey. Taking commercial television as its model, the new Herald promoted the interests of corporate Calgary, gave generous space to crime and sports coverage, and sponsored rock concerts. King worked long hours and liked his people to do the same. “He’s a dynamo,” said one senior Herald manager. “I can barely keep up with him.” Before King’s arrival, newsroom department heads came to work late and left early, ate lunch at the club, spent their summer afternoons on the golf course and were home in time to watch Seinfeld. Reporters filed their stories after the bosses left for the day and the night crew of deskers, assistant managers and deputy editors put out the paper. If a senior manager had appeared in the newsroom during the evening when the stories were being edited and the pages were being laid out, the staffers would have wondered what he or she was doing there. The job of the bosses, it seemed to us, was to set editorial policy and decide what should be in the next day’s paper. Our job was to take care of the nuts and bolts.

With King’s arrival, the newsroom turned into a white-collar sweatshop. Senior managers remained on the job scrutinizing copy, rewriting leads and changing headlines, until the paper went to bed. Reporters had always expected to see some changes made to their stories, especially when a story was chosen for front-page display and the editors wanted to incorporate material from the wire services or from other Herald [pullshow]journalists. But increasingly, reporters opened their papers in the morning to find their stories altered beyond recognition. This was top-down interference of a kind never seen in the newsroom before. The “drive-by editing,” as we dryly dubbed it, saw changes made without consultation with reporters, without re-interviewing people quoted in the stories and without checking facts. The published results included misquotes and embarrassing inaccuracies that regularly called for corrections, apologies and retractions.

My own stories emerged relatively unscathed from this process, but I too had to deal with some unwelcome editing changes. The most bizarre of these came when I wrote a first-person feature series entitled “Brian Brennan’s Canada” and a manager added in such mawkish lines as “Canada had seized my heart and wouldn’t let it go.” Cardiac arrest, anyone?

At the root of some editing changes, it seemed, was a desire on the part of newsroom managers to advance King’s goal of putting out a Herald that reflected Calgary with “fairness, accuracy and balance.” He elaborated on this concept in an interview with a Herald reporter published on October 14, 1996. The relevant questions to be asked by editorial staffers, King said, were: “Are the facts right? Are the quotes in context? And is this story being told fully and not with bias on behalf of the writer, be that either personal or political or with any other agenda?” He added that a policy of fairness, accuracy and balance did not suggest that every story in the paper should have a positive spin. “I’m not talking about boosterism here. I’m not talking about cheerleading. We do, in fact, have roles and obligations in those areas too. The greatest acid test is the response you get from people who are in the news.” If that response was positive, King said, the Herald was doing its job. If not, the paper was failing in its obligations to its readers. In his view, the Herald had become increasingly unpopular in the marketplace and thus disconnected from its readers. “It was not reflective of the city. If Calgary was an entrepreneurial, enthusiastic, upbeat city with a robust economy, the newspaper was not reflecting that.”

King professed not to know anything about news gathering and reporting, and declared himself happy to leave that to the professionals in his newsroom. “I’m like the administrator of a hospital,” King said. “I know how to run the business, but you wouldn’t want me doing open-heart surgery.” In King’s hospital, however, the triage process seemed to dictate that the only hearts that really mattered were those belonging to the Herald’s corporate and political friends. Among the paper’s most valued clients were those who occupied the executive offices located within a two-kilometre radius of the Calgary Tower. “It’s time we started supporting free markets and entrepreneurship,” said one of the editors who had previously worked at King’s Sun. “It’s time we came down off the hill and back into the city.” Also favoured were Premier Ralph Klein and his provincial Tory colleagues, who had long complained of unfair treatment at the hands of the Herald.

At most newspapers, reporters and editors come to believe there are written and unwritten rules about what stories get ignored, what get covered and how they get covered. At the Herald, the unwritten rule after King arrived was that articles critical of big business and big government were out and that civic boosterism – notwithstanding King’s public statements to the contrary – was in. The paper would no longer be infected by what one manager cynically referred to as “left-leaning groupthink.” If a picture of the Calgary Flames appeared on the Herald’s front page after a routine home game during the regular NHL season, it would do so because the paper had formed a marketing relationship with the team’s owners. The same held true whenever a big pop star came to town. If the Shania Twain concert was a Herald promotion, the country diva would appear prominently on the front page in all her navel-baring glory. If her show was sponsored by the Sun, the story would rate little more than a two-paragraph advancer in the back of the entertainment section.

By the spring of 1998, the newsroom staffers had endured about as much of this second-guessing and top-down interference as they could stand. Reporters had come to expect every piece they wrote would be routinely rewritten to make the stories more palatable to the Herald’s friends, who now seemed to include just about every business leader and important political figure in the province. Copy editors had been led to believe that they could never get a headline right and that the stories and pictures they chose for front-page display would never be the right ones. Dignity went out the window, along with respect. Some staffers quit in disgust. Others were pushed out the door because they dared to be defiant. What the bosses perceived as a “bad attitude” became grounds for constructive dismissal and firing.

In one instance, a respected left-wing editorial writer and international affairs columnist was encouraged to leave the editorial board to make way for a new right-wing commentator. He was told he could move to the newsroom and become a “senior features writer” with privileges – such as a semi-private office and no weekend shifts – not granted to less favoured writers. Only problem was, the newsroom didn’t have such a “star” system in place and wasn’t about to create one. After struggling unsuccessfully to satisfy the hard-news demands of an assignment editor who didn’t want the former columnist’s “point-of-view” feature stories appearing in the paper, the columnist was left to languish as a general reporter until eventually he took a severance package and left.

To add to these frustrations, Herald management systematically eliminated all structured means by which newsroom staffers could express their concerns. When the paper’s human resources director – a popular manager sympathetic to employee problems – left the Herald to seek other employment opportunities, we lost one of our most important allies. When members of the newsroom staff association tried to hold meetings on-site to discuss shared concerns, a manager told us such meetings were now considered an expensive drain on the company’s resources and should be ended forthwith. This left the employees with no way to collectively voice worries about such issues as the unfair application of the newsroom salary grid, the rescheduling of holiday shifts to avoid overtime costs, the hiring of contract workers to replace full-time staffers, and the increasing of workloads without additional compensation. If ever there was a workplace ripe for the union picking, this was it.

Next page: “By September, it was clear that the paper was actively preparing for  a stoppage. The managers had beefed up security inside the building, and rented a dozen Ryder trucks to move papers out of the building.”

Excerpted from Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way From Dublin to Canada, by kind permission of Rocky Mountain Books

After months of lunchtime discussions in the Herald cafeteria, the journalists made the first move. One employee talked to the Teamsters Union but was told the union had no interest in organizing the Herald newsroom without an assurance that at least 40 per cent of the 160 staffers would sign up. Another newsroom staffer talked to a friend who was an executive with the Communications, Energy & Paperworkers Union (CEP) of Canada. CEP is an omnibus union representing 150,000 members from a diverse range of industries including print shops, mines, telephone companies, chemical plants and forestry. In Alberta, the CEP represented sawmill workers in Hinton, Catholic school support staff in Edmonton and television workers in Calgary and Edmonton.

The prospect of organizing the Herald newsroom was very appealing to the CEP. The union already represented newspaper workers in Ontario and British Columbia, and was keen to extend its reach into Alberta. During the spring and summer of 1998, organizers for the union made several trips to Calgary to hold secret meetings with unhappy Herald employees. Many, including me, agreed to sign membership cards. I was worried that I would be pushed out the door to make room for a younger and cheaper employee. This had already happened to a couple of my contemporaries and I was feeling vulnerable.

The Tribute column, once characterized by the Herald ombudsman as “one of the best new features this paper has introduced to its pages in a long time,” was no longer appearing five times weekly and had been moved from the well-read city news pages to the section of the paper dealing with fashions and food. I still had the satisfaction of writing it once a week, but the rest of the time I was obliged to generate trivial stories about “trends” and “lifestyles” that were of little interest to me.

On the Thanksgiving weekend of 1998, the organizing drive moved into full gear. The CEP organizers set up shop in the Sheraton Cavalier hotel and conducted a certification blitz. They signed up 62 per cent of the 160 newsroom employees before Herald managers had a chance to digest their Thanksgiving turkeys. The number of signers came as a surprise to us, and undoubtedly a shock to management. We figured we would be lucky to get 50 per cent. A year earlier, we had doubted we could get 40 per cent of the staff to sign. However, the level of discontent had risen considerably since then. On the Tuesday morning, the union formally applied for a certification vote. Having certification meant that the union, under Alberta law, would be able to officially represent us in negotiations with management for a first collective agreement.

The certification vote, conducted under the auspices of the Alberta Labour Relations Board, took place two weeks later. In the meantime, the managers did everything in their power to try and block the union. They held meetings with employees, singly and in small groups, to find out why we were unhappy. Christmas came early to the Herald newsroom, with a flurry of staff upgradings and attendant salary increases. Temporary editorial employees acquired permanent status and all employees were assured that the mistakes of the past would be corrected. “Our goal is to earn a renewed relationship with every staff member,” explained one manager. “To do so, we must change and we will.” Few believed him. It was going to take more than a few personality makeovers to fix problems that we saw as systemic.

On the afternoon before the certification vote, King held a staff meeting in the newsroom and appealed to us not to vote for the union. “We were guilty of taking our eye off the ball,” he said. “Give us a second chance.” Asked by one reporter if the presence of a union would stop him from pursuing his stated goal of making the Herald a better newspaper, King responded, “You should ask the CEP about that.” The die was cast. It was clear that many of us were going to vote for the union.

The newsroom staffers, including those who had not previously signed membership cards, voted more than 75 per cent in favour of certifying the CEP as our bargaining agent. It was a significant majority for a newsroom that had never been unionized. Few of us believed that things would change for the better without a union. Management had said, in effect, “trust us,” but offered no blueprint for improvement. The result of the vote came as a bitter disappointment to the Herald managers, who had convinced themselves – based on the premise that most of the employees, like the residents of Calgary itself, were moderate conservatives with little appetite for union politics – that the certification application would fail. When the Labour Relations Board ratified the result, the bosses grudgingly accepted that the majority had spoken. But that did not mean they would make it easy for us to proceed.

Bargaining for the newsroom’s first collective agreement began in January 1999. King would not grant permission for us to negotiate on company property, so the talks took place at a nearby hotel. We were also refused permission to bargain on company time, so the four of us newsroom-elected staffers – reporters Andy Marshall, Lisa Dempster, Mark Lowey and I – had to work a full shift every day after we had been in negotiations from 4:00 a.m. to noon. At other unionized newspapers, we would have been granted paid leave to participate in the bargaining process. But we didn’t have a collective agreement yet, so there was no obligation on the part of management to give us that leave.

The talks proceeded at glacial pace. We argued at length over semantics and contract language. The company’s hired gun, a tough human resources pro named Gary Johanson, reminded us repeatedly that a contract was a legal document and could not contain language that was ambiguous or unclear. The fact that such language was common in other North American newspaper contracts was of no matter to Johanson. He was determined, he said, to develop a document that would not repeat the mistakes of past contracts: a flexible agreement that would be a model contract for the ever-changing workplace of the 21st century.

A couple of months into the talks, it was clear to our chief CEP bargainers, the late Joy Langan and current CEP president Dave Coles, that this was more than just a battle over contract language or any particular issue in the collective agreement. This was about something more fundamental: our very right to have a union. The contract we were slowly and painstakingly putting together had plenty of clauses about management rights but very little – aside from a legally mandated grievance procedure – dealing with the concerns that had caused us to unionize. The most significant omission from the union’s point of view was a clause providing for protection against indiscriminate firings – the kind of job security employees expect for doing their jobs responsibly. Another sticking point was our demand for a clause allowing reporters to remove their names from stories that had been substantially changed without consultation.

In April 1999, after bargaining for a total of 91 mostly unproductive hours, our CEP team applied for a provincial mediator, hoping this would help us achieve an equitable collective agreement. But the mediator did little more than ferry messages back and forth between the two sides. His shuttle diplomacy brought us no closer to our goal of reaching an agreement.

In May 1999, King’s Hollinger bosses transferred him from Calgary to Vancouver to run the company that jointly operates the Vancouver Sun and Province. Three months later, King resigned and left the newspaper business. He returned to Calgary to run an asset-management firm and two years later became the president of the Calgary Flames hockey team. He said he felt bad about the labour unrest at the Herald and “any contribution I may have made, because (a) that was not my intention and (b) my intentions were completely honourable.” King also said that the employees should have come to him with their concerns because he would have been their greatest champion. This was being a bit disingenuous, however. The practice at the Herald, as at other large workplaces, was for employees to bring their concerns to their immediate superiors, not to do end runs around management to speak directly with the top boss. Hollinger replaced King at the Herald with Dan Gaynor, the 43-year-old publisher of the St. Catharines Standard. Gaynor had fought unionization at the Standard in 1998, when the paper’s newsroom staff went on strike for three weeks in a first-contract dispute over wages.

Our negotiations dragged on intermittently through the summer and fall of 1999, while Gaynor and his managers simultaneously developed an elaborate contingency plan for publishing the paper in the event of a work stoppage. By September, it was clear that the paper was actively preparing for such a stoppage. The managers had beefed up security inside the building, installed Plexiglas screens and video monitors in the lobby, and rented a dozen Ryder trucks to move papers out of the building to designated pickup points for the carriers, who previously had driven to the Herald building to collect their papers.

On September 16, 1999, the company rejected all of the key proposals we had tabled during the eight months of negotiations. The principal proposal was the clause protecting seniority rights – the cornerstone of every collective agreement – stating that in the event of layoffs the most recent hires would be the first to go. It also rejected a non-harassment clause, which stated that employees should be treated with respect and dignity. Three weeks later, the Herald’s 160 editorial staff voted 82.5 per cent in favour of strike action, hoping this would be the hammer to forge a first contract. Three more days of bargaining followed, but the company persisted in refusing to deal with any of our key proposals. The talks broke off on October 28.

On November 5, a Friday afternoon, four of us newsroom staffers served 72-hour strike notice on the company, hoping this would aid our quest for a first contract. We did so knowing that publisher Gaynor had hinted ominously at a chamber of commerce dinner that such action would be folly: “I hope these people know that if they go on strike, they will be jumping off a cliff.”

I was reluctant at first to take strike action. I saw our attempt to reach an equitable agreement with the local employer now escalating into something much larger: an unwinnable battle against Hollinger boss Conrad Black, a millionaire newspaper tycoon who wrote in his 1993 autobiography, A Life In Progress, that he “never had much regard for organized labour, other than when it has taken on heroic proportions as in Poland.” However, Hollinger was already facing the possibility of a strike at its profitable Vancouver newspapers, and it was losing millions of dollars on the operations of the National Post, so I decided to gamble on the possibility that the management might not want to incur further expense by having a long strike in Calgary.

I wondered if my father would have given his support to our action. He had been dead for three years when we served strike notice on the company, and I often found myself thinking about him as I walked the picket line during the weeks and months afterward. Years previously, his bosses had characterized Dad as a “bit of a Red” when he served as general secretary of the tax officers’ in-house staff association. Would he have been proud of his son, the junior Red, for taking the stand that I did? I like to believe he would have been with me in spirit.

Though our strike notice did not expire until the Monday afternoon, something told me on that Friday afternoon that I would not be back at work on Monday morning. I turned off my computer, looked around my office cubicle and briefly considered leaving the photos of Zelda and Nicole on my desk to prick the conscience of the strikebreaker that would be occupying the space during my absence. I quickly thought the better of it and tucked the pictures inside my briefcase. Scabs were mercenary and opportunistic, I thought; why would they even care?

The following afternoon, I received a phone message at my home from a nervous Herald editor who was obviously reading from a script. The company had decided, she said, to give me a three-day “holiday” with pay. “I’ll see you when it’s over,” she said with a shaking voice. I tried phoning my office number and heard a recorded voice saying the number was invalid. I encountered the same problem when I tried to access my office voice mail and e-mail. I realized that this was no holiday. It was a lockout. It was a heartless and cynical move aimed at keeping us conveniently out of the way while they brought in their strikebreakers. Later that evening, a group of us set up an impromptu picket line in front of the newspaper building.

Next page: “We used to be the paper of record. Now we traffic in phony drama driven by the trash mentality of the tabloid press.”

Local television and radio reporters gave the lockout plenty of coverage. So did the rival Calgary Sun, which distributed an edition of the paper wrapped in what appeared to be a Herald front page. “I always pray for opportunity,” said Sun publisher Les Pyette. The Herald opted not to tell its readers that the labour dispute had intensified. Publisher Gaynor later told a television reporter “there was nothing new to report” and described the lockout as nothing more than “a day off with pay.”

Reporters for other media organizations, asking the only question that ever seems important to them when covering a labour dispute, wanted to know what kind of salary increases we were seeking. I’m sure we told them at the time, but I can’t for the life of me remember the details now because this dispute was never about money. That is what made this an unusual event in Canadian labour movement history. We were not looking for more money and we were not looking for shorter working hours. We were a group of well-paid white-collar workers who wanted nothing more than to be treated with dignity and respect. One of the Herald managers said we were naive to think that such subjective demands could ever be written into a union contract. But we were determined to prove him wrong.

The strike officially began at 3:00 p.m. on November 8, 1999, with 107 journalists marching down the hill toward the Herald building from our newly rented strike office, hoisting our hand-made signs and waving to passing motorists who honked their horns in support. Our numbers constituted about 70 per cent of the newsroom workforce at that time: 40 editorial employees were philosophically opposed to trade unionism and chose to remain inside the Herald building, while another 13 adopted a wait-and-see attitude and stayed at home. The rest of us were on the picket line, accompanied by 67 striking workers from the Herald mailroom, loading dock and machine shop, who had also hit a roadblock in their talks with the employer. Journalists who usually reported the news were now making the news, giving interviews and putting on a picket-line, slogan-shouting show for the benefit of the television cameras. This was a strange role for many of us. We had changed from dutiful, rule-abiding employees into unionized rebels. Some of us had even taken to calling one another “brother” and “sister,” and making the words “solidarity” and “comrade” a regular part of our vocabulary.

The Herald was in full battle mode by this time. The depleted newsroom workforce was augmented by 40 reporters, copy editors, photographers and editorial managers flown in from newspapers in British Columbia, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec. These strikebreakers were housed in an expensive hotel near the Herald building, given rental cars and free meal tickets for the Herald cafeteria (unlike regular Herald staffers, who still had to pay). On top of that, they were paid up to $600 a day for their replacement services, which was more than double what a senior Herald reporter earned. Sinister-looking, black-clad, commando-style security guards also patrolled the entrances to the Herald building 24 hours a day. Even with the newsroom on strike, a version of the newspaper was published daily with minimal disruption.

The union leaders moved quickly to ensure our battle would not be just a local skirmish like the three-week strike that St. Catharines Standard workers staged during the summer of 1998 when publisher Gaynor was running the paper. Money and other support poured in from union locals across the country, letters were written to politicians, and reader and advertiser boycotts were organized. Our story became national news thanks to the Canadian Press news agency, The Globe and Mail, Maclean’s magazine and the CBC radio and television networks. Also contributing to the flow of information about the strike was a cheeky union web page providing background detail unavailable elsewhere in the media, including a “Wall of Shame” featuring biographical snippets and photographs of the strikebreakers.

We told the media that the labour dispute began as a reaction by a group of Herald editorial employees to intolerable working conditions in the Herald newsroom. Publisher Gaynor begged to differ. He said the labour dispute stemmed from an “immovable core” of senior editorial employees resisting the paper’s efforts to shift from “advocacy” journalism to what his predecessor, Ken King, had described acronymically as FAB (fairness, accuracy, balance). “They want an environment in which they can continue their efforts to resist this new direction, free from the responsibilities of basic job expectations,” Gaynor wrote in a Herald column. None of the striking journalists had ever heard him use this far-fetched argument before, but I decided to respond to it. I published the following open letter to Gaynor on the union’s web page:

Let me tell you about new directions at the Calgary Herald, Mr. Gaynor. I have seen my share of them during the twenty-five years I have worked in the Herald newsroom.

I have seen the Herald progress from Underwoods to iMacs, switch from afternoon to morning publication, publish on Sundays, launch and subsequently abandon the Sunday magazine, embrace colour photography, and downplay the task of covering news and sports while actively promoting “line extensions” – otherwise known as advertising-driven special sections. Heck, I can even remember a time when we didn’t have rug on the newsroom floor.

Have I resisted any of these new directions? Of course not. I don’t make up the rules; I just play by them. Whenever someone brings in a new set of rules, I adjust my game accordingly. Whatever the gig calls for, as my colleagues in the music business used to say.

Because of advocacy journalism – which Mr. Gaynor suggests has no place in today’s Herald and which I would characterize as journalism practised selflessly in the public interest – city taxpayers received enough information to know that Calgary did not need a new city hall that would have been the Taj Mahal of Canadian municipal buildings, a lavish structure that would have given new definition to the term “edifice complex.” Because of advocacy journalism, Calgary received massive government funding for a performing arts centre that is rated by The New York Times as one of the finest in North America. Because of advocacy journalism, the Herald has won a slew of National Newspaper Awards and been nominated several times for the Michener awards in public service journalism.

What has FAB brought us? Let me count the ways. It has brought us celebrity gossip and turned us into purveyors of printed junk food at the expense of in-depth news and analysis. It has brought us seventeen – count them – front-page stories on Shania Twain, published before and after a concert that just happened to be co-sponsored by the Calgary Herald. It has brought us wall-to-wall coverage of such one-off events as the Rotary International convention, a bus-and-truck version of The Wizard of Oz musical, and the World Police/Fire Games – the kind of blanket coverage that even the participants in the games considered excessive.

We used to be the paper of record. Now we traffic in phony drama driven by the trash mentality of the tabloid press, the hysterical urgencies of commercial television and the blather of local talk-radio shows. We now fill our paper with sensation: Lewinskiana, Diana-itis, O.J. Simpsonitis; front-page rumour (remember the Spice Girls never coming to town?) and bloated Daily Telegraph trivialities, all at the expense of significant fact. We used to be the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra. Now, we play in a kazoo band.

As for the Herald’s supposed abandonment of advocacy journalism, how does one reconcile this with the fact that its current roster of scab writers includes both a former researcher for the right-wing Fraser Institute and a policy advisor to the Progressive Group for Independent Business – a right-wing lobby group that ran candidates in the 1997 Alberta provincial election under the Alberta Social Credit banner. The paper also has a replacement writer who belongs to the racist South African Institute, and a replacement writer with an anti-feminist, anti-gay agenda who pickets the Kensington abortion clinic on weekends.

I had a great job at the Calgary Herald before I went on strike. I wrote the Tribute column and feature stories about people and subjects that engaged me. I was well paid, had a semi-private office and generous company benefits. So why am I walking a picket line?

I am walking because I am one of the people chosen by the tribe to lead them from darkness into light. I am walking because I – together with Andy Marshall, Lisa Dempster and Mark Lowey – was elected by our newsroom colleagues to go to the bargaining table and bring back a collective agreement. I am walking because I believe in the fundamental need for a contract providing a measure of job security for all editorial employees, and protection against exploitation. My colleagues voted 82.5 per cent in favour of strike action supporting our efforts to obtain such a contract. I will not let them down. It would be a betrayal of everything I believe in if I were to do otherwise.

I have worked at the Herald for most of my adult life. I have the gold watch to prove it. I started as a police reporter and progressed through a succession of coveted writing assignments – arts and entertainment reporter, theatre critic, Sunday magazine writer, features writer – to my current position.

The Herald has been very good to me. It was a destination newspaper when I came here in 1974, and I have never wanted to work anywhere else. My sincerest hope for the future is that the people who come after me would be given similar recognition for their skills and years of service and be rewarded accordingly.

Mr. Gaynor, needless to say, never responded to my letter. Nor was I ever invited to run it in the newspaper as an opinion piece. As far as the Herald was concerned, the people working inside the building were the good guys and those of us on the picket line were the bad guys. If we had anything to say about the labour dispute, it would never be deemed sufficiently important to appear in the pages of the paper. I did, however, receive many congratulatory messages about my letter from union members across the country and around the world.

During the first month of the strike, we enjoyed some of the warmest weather in southern Alberta history, which helped boost spirits on the picket line. On November 11, Remembrance Day, the strikers were wearing shorts and T-shirts when I brought my accordion down to the line to play “The Last Post.” We observed two minutes of silence in memory of Canada’s war veterans and then sang a few choruses of “Solidarity Forever.” It was my 34th Remembrance Day in Canada, one I would always keep pressed in the memory book along with that wonderful day in 1966 when I became a landed immigrant. On other warm days, we tossed footballs and Frisbees around on the picket line, much to the annoyance of the grim-faced managers and replacement workers driving past.

We lost a few people from the picket line during the first weeks of the strike. Four returned to work, mainly for financial reasons, as Christmas was coming and they just couldn’t afford to go without their salaries any longer. Some of us were disappointed by this, others were angry. We were hurting too, but we were staying the course. Why couldn’t they do the same? The defecting strikers immediately became pariahs in our eyes. Such was the divisive, polarizing nature of this labour dispute. If they weren’t with us, they were against us. Friendships were broken as a result. But the defections did serve to cement the bonds between those of us still walking the line. Our numbers remained at a solid 103 for the next few months.

I could never see the point of the picketing. It was a 19th-century strike tactic that served no useful purpose in the late 20th century. We had no ability to shut down the plant, and nobody to give our message to aside from the workers going in and out of the building, the truck drivers who delivered mail and supplies, and the occasional individual who ventured into the building to buy an ad. If the Herald had been located in downtown Calgary, we would have had a more visible presence and the ability to remind passing pedestrians that we were the people responsible for giving them something worthwhile to read with their morning coffee. But the Herald building was located in an industrial district atop a hill on the outskirts of downtown, where the only passing creatures were rabbits, gophers, field mice and migrating Canada geese. Because we were journalists, we wanted to put out a strike paper to compete with the Herald, but the union leaders wouldn’t hear of this. Too expensive, they said. So, walking around the building became our daily routine, for hours and hours and hours at a time.

Though we could not stop the paper from coming out, we were able to delay cars and trucks entering and leaving the Herald building for the first six weeks. That allowed us to taunt the scabs, tell receptive individuals why we were striking and distribute our information leaflets. We received a sympathetic hearing from friends inside the building – non-unionized sales reps and other workers who brought us coffee and donuts – until senior management ordered them, under threat of termination, to keep their car windows closed and have no further truck with the enemy. The Labour Relations Board then took away our right to delay vehicles after a big labour rally outside the Herald building on the night of December 11, when the outgoing paper-delivery trucks were held up for more than the five minutes agreed to under the protocol ratified by the company and the union. That night, to stop the trucks from leaving the plant, several striking workers sat on the ground in front of the vehicles. The police asked us to move away, and when some refused, they were tossed into the back of a paddy wagon. One was CEP bargainer Joy Langan, who phoned fellow bargainer Dave Coles on her cell phone and said, “I have a really serious problem.”

“Yeah,” said Coles. “I know you have. You’ve been arrested.”

“No, it’s not that,” said Langan. “I need a cigarette.”

After the December 11 rally, the Labour Relations Board ruled we could no longer delay vehicles, so we shifted our focus away from the picket line and took our fight into the community. Though some of us were still walking around the building, despite the fact that we now saw picketing as mainly useless, most of us stood on city street corners with big banners urging people to, “Cancel the Herald.” We distributed 4,000 leaflets daily in Calgary neighbourhoods, at the stores and offices of Herald advertisers and at special events around town.

Our efforts met with some success. A survey conducted for us by Vancouver pollsters Campbell Goodell Traynor showed Herald readership down by 24 per cent. Chapters Online stopped advertising in the Herald and Ford Canada said it would consider doing the same. Other advertisers demanded rebates from the Herald. The paper’s daily press run dropped from 140,000 to 116,000, and the Herald tried vainly, with offers of free dinners and free subscriptions to the Hollinger-owned National Post, to woo back subscribers who cancelled their papers. Publicly, the Herald managers disputed our numbers and insisted the strike was having little or no effect on circulation. But among themselves they admitted that readership was declining precipitously and that they were powerless to stop it. By 2002, Audit Bureau of Circulations figures would show that the Herald’s weekday circulation had plunged to an all-time low of 112,258 during the strike.

A “cyber picket line” organized by CEP Local 2000 in Vancouver grew rapidly to reach 3,000 subscribers. Support for the striking workers came from people all around the world, including journalists in Britain, Lithuania, Brazil, Sweden and the Commonwealth of Independent States in the former Soviet Union. But for all the moral and financial support we received from other trade unionists, nothing brought us any closer to getting a first collective agreement. The CEP, while nominally a national union with members all across Canada, had little clout when it came to marshalling nationwide support for our cause. Unionized journalists at the Vancouver Sun and Province could not walk out in support, or refuse to handle copy produced by non-striking Herald employees, because they were bound by the terms of a contract signed with their local management. Unionized journalists at other Hollinger papers were in the same situation. A “national day of protest” planned by union leaders from different parts of the country fizzled out before it began.

We went to some lengths to ensure that the strike remained constantly in the public eye. Hundreds of letters went to Calgary’s Mayor Al Duerr and Premier Ralph Klein to complain about the mounted police in riot gear who intimidated participants at the labour rally outside the Herald building on December 11. A group of about a hundred community leaders, calling themselves Friends of the Herald, asked Calgary city council to vote on a motion urging the two sides to get back to the table. Six Christian church leaders did the same. The aldermen voted 13 to 1 in favour of the motion, but Gaynor responded by telling a radio reporter that nobody dictated to him how to run his business.

Throughout the strike, Gaynor insisted in radio, television and print interviews that returning to the table would be a waste of time unless the CEP dropped its demand for seniority protection. “It’s important we have an editorial department that encourages initiative and is motivated by pursuit of excellence, and that we have a framework for encouraging that,” he told Southam News. “I don’t think seniority contracts – last-in, first-out language – do anything to support that.” Yet at the same time, Gaynor conceded he did not know of any newspaper contracts that lacked seniority language. In fact, there was even a seniority clause in the first agreement he reached with the St. Catharines Standard workers in 1998.

On the picket line, during the weeks leading up to Christmas 1999, we had plenty of social activities – pancake breakfasts, barbecues, carol singing – to keep our spirits high. On Christmas Day, striker Dave Climenhaga served a turkey dinner cooked by his wife, Luanne, to 25 picketing strikers. Dave referred to it as a “union turkey” because the unionized workers at Safeway had donated it to us. “It was a great delight to carve a fine-looking fowl like that on the line and serve it up in a spirit of comradeship and fraternity,” said Dave. “Here we were, after several weeks on the picket line, serving up dinner to a happy throng, playing Frisbee and good-naturedly heckling the odd scab that scuttled past us.”

We started to become disgruntled, however, as the old year turned into the new. Repeated phone calls to Herald management went unanswered as we tried to get them back to the bargaining table. Finally, on February 1, 2000, they agreed to meet with us, but the talks went nowhere. After little more than an hour at the table, they left us with a take-it-or-leave-it contract proposal that would have allowed the company to indiscriminately fire workers without giving a reason or providing an avenue for appeal. Needless to say, we rejected the proposal. No further talks were scheduled after that.

While I hated being in limbo, not knowing when or how this labour dispute was going to end, I did manage to fill my time and preserve my equilibrium with activities unrelated to the strike. Because I was still on the books as a Herald employee, I could not freelance for competing publications, but I was able to do some commercial writing that helped to ease the financial strain. I also added some professional music engagements to my calendar, including a week-long concert tour of Saskatchewan with my friend Felix Possak, one of Calgary’s top banjo players. Plus, I made a little money appearing as a piano-playing extra in a B movie called Dead Simple, a forgettable bit of trash that went straight to video. And I began work on my first two books: a literary biography of my ancestor Mary O’Leary, one of the most celebrated Irish-language poets of the 19th century; and Building a Province, a collection of biographical profiles of notable Albertans.

The enduring support of Zelda and Nicole also helped me to stay calm. Zelda knew exactly what I was going through, because she too had been involved in labour disputes, as a teacher with the Calgary Catholic School District. She often joined me on the picket line, as did Nicole, a strong believer in workers’ rights. Zelda came down to the line whenever we held a rally or an event, such as a candlelight hymn sing, and Nicole joined me on the line when she wasn’t working or rehearsing as lead singer for Calgary jump blues band the Dino Martinis.

In early May 2000, we were joined on the picket line by one hundred pressroom workers, who rejected concession demands that would have seen them working additional shifts for no added compensation. We hoped this would cause the Herald to stop production, but the paper continued to publish without significant disruption. The press workers stayed on the line for just six weeks and then ratified an agreement with the company. At that point, the heart went out of our strike. We had been on the line for more than six months and hopes for getting a first collective agreement had all but faded. To drag out the negotiations for as long as possible, the company had taken full advantage of Alberta’s labour laws, which are viewed as among the weakest in the country because they allow replacement workers and have no provisions for compulsory first-contract arbitration.

In early June 2000, with our seven-month-old picket line crumbling, our bargaining committee decided to play the one last card that we hoped would win us an agreement: we dropped seniority protection from our list of contract demands. We knew this would draw criticism from people in the labour movement, as well as from some of our own members, but it seemed our only remaining hope. Then, just as we felt we were about to start scoring some points, the company moved the goalposts by saying that seniority was only one of several issues that would have to be resolved before an agreement could be concluded. Among the outstanding issues were the conditions for returning to work, which would involve finding new positions for the striking journalists in a soon to be restructured newsroom. This process, the company said, would be complex and take time. “We’ll grind them down,” said one of the managers at a staff meeting inside the building.

As a last-ditch effort, the union launched a bad-faith bargaining action against the company in mid-June. Hollinger’s chairman and CEO, Conrad Black, had told our local president, Andy Marshall, during a televised confrontation in the lobby of a Calgary hotel that the strike would be resolved “either by coming to an end after two years, by decertification, or by you people coming back to work.” Black added, in an interview with The New York Times, that he expected the strikers to continue with their job action for a further two years “and then [the company] won’t have to keep their jobs anymore” (because a union that goes for that length of time without a first collective agreement automatically becomes subject to decertification). This statement struck union leaders as being actionable, and they filed suit accordingly. However, with the prospect of the Labour Relations Board hearings carrying on through the summer and into the fall, the striking journalists were not consoled by this initiative. We wanted an end to the strike. And we wanted it soon.

Next page:  “The end, when it came, was not pretty.”

The end, when it came, was not pretty. Union bargainer Dave Coles met behind closed doors in June 2000 with senior company executives and came back with two offers from the employer that might have been drafted in Hades. The first involved continuing to bargain until all the outstanding issues, including the bad-faith legal proceedings, were resolved. That would mean us fighting on for many more months for a contract the company clearly did not want to give us, with the prospect of imminent decertification always hanging over us. The other offer was for us to immediately end our job action, disband the union and either return to work with a no-retribution promise from the company or accept buyout packages. We voted 68.5 per cent in favour of the second option. Of the 93 remaining strikers, only eight opted to return to the newsroom. The rest, including me, accepted buyouts. “I wouldn’t call it a loss,” said Andy Marshall, our courtly, soft-spoken local president. “I’d call it a disengagement with honour.”

Why did most of us take the money and leave? In my case, it was because I knew life would be unbearable for me in a non-unionized newsroom run by anti-union managers. This was not the “leaving-on-my-own-terms” exit I had envisaged four years earlier when I vowed I would never give younger managers the satisfaction of seeing me “bugger off and die.” But the protracted labour dispute, and the attitude of the managers toward it, left me with no choice. I simply did not believe the company’s statement that there would be no retribution. In fact, the reprisals had already started. Herald editor-in-chief Peter Menzies had sent us a “without prejudice” letter (meaning he could not later be held legally accountable for its contents) saying that the proposed newsroom restructuring would mean the loss of several full-time positions, including the Edmonton legislature correspondent; the theatre critic; baseball, hockey and golf writers; the chief business columnist; the books editor; the food columnist; and my own job as Tribute columnist. Menzies wasn’t bluffing. One writer who did decide to return to work, editorial page columnist Naomi Lakritz, had to hire a lawyer get her old job back after the employer invented a new position for her writing “personality profiles” that the editors had no interest in publishing.

A few of the strikers were upset over the way the strike ended. They had walked a picket line in solidarity for close to eight months to get a first collective agreement, only to see the company divide and conquer by offering buyouts in return for decertification. For me, the governing emotions were relief and sadness. This was not the outcome any of us would have wished for, but we had stood by our principles, fought until there was no longer a majority will to continue and ended our struggle with dignity. As my fellow bargainer Mark Lowey said:

Brian Brennan in front of soon-to-be-demolished, original Herald building, 2012

Which leads to the inevitable question: did we, as Gaynor suggested in November 1999, jump off a cliff when we decided to take strike action against the company? Though I had some reservations at the time, I now believe we took the only course left open to us as a newly certified bargaining unit with fading hopes of getting an equitable first contract. We used the strike option, the last tool at our disposal, to bring the company to the table to deal with our grievances. If the company saw this as an opportunity to rid itself of some journalists that it perceived as troublemakers, one of whom undoubtedly could have been me, then so be it. There are some battles you fight not because you think you can win, but because you know it’s the right thing to do. The defenders of the Alamo, who as legend holds opted to stay and fight, could have gotten on their horses and ridden away. We could have done likewise, but chose not to. This was our hill to die on.

The strike ended on June 30, 2000. Within a matter of weeks, the grass around the red-brick building had lost its trampled-down look, stamped by the feet of a hundred pickets. Our crudely built wooden picket shack was gone, as was the phalanx of black-clad security guards who had patrolled the building 24 hours a day. To all outward appearances, it was back to business as usual at the Calgary Herald. Yet, even a cursory glance at any issue of the paper showed that the pre-strike quality was now permanently gone, never to be regained. Missing were the familiar names of dozens of reporters and photographers, many of them national award winners, who had once combined to make the Herald one of the best daily newspapers in western Canada. With a new editorial roster of mainly young and inexperienced prospects, the Herald had become, as one sports-minded media commentator, John Mather, later observed, a minor-league paper in a major-league city. Management no longer viewed the reporters as writers, in the literary sense. They were now “content providers.”

I was sad to see the paper’s decline in quality, but hardly surprised. It was no longer the paper I had come to work for in April 1974. It was no longer the paper of my old mentor, Bill Gold, the respected and influential editor who ran the newsroom during the Herald’s glory days as the newspaper of record for southern Alberta. Retired early on disability pension, Gold had died during the last month of our strike. He likely would not have approved of our “left-wing” union activities, because he was a dyed-in-the-wool conservative who had once written speeches for Ontario premier William Davis. But then, there wouldn’t have been any need for a union when Gold was running the newsroom, because he believed in the importance of good journalism and supported his journalists accordingly.

I paid tribute to Gold in a chapter of my first book, Building a Province, completed during my 234 days on the picket line and published in the fall of 2000. After marking time for all those long weeks and months, I was now ready to get on with the rest of my life. I no longer felt a dull ache rising in my chest, and I had no desire to suffer a relapse. I had been in limbo for far too long. I wanted to write more books and experience the freedom and fear associated with being a freelance journalist. I wanted, in some manner, to return to the state of blissful uncertainty that defined those early years in Canada when my father thought I was “unemployed.” I had already started writing the next scene in the drama of my life, as an author of books about the social history and colourful characters of western Canada.

Excerpted from Leaving Dublin: Writing My Way From Dublin to Canada, by kind permission of Rocky Mountain Books

First of all, I’m not going to predict the end of the world. I know, 2012 is the year that the Mayan long count calendar ends, on December 21st, to be exact, but somehow I doubt it will be terminal.

Really, our best shot at near term extinction comes from science. But so far the scientists have failed utterly to destroy the world, despite spending billions of dollars on a massive super collider which was predicted to create a black hole which would swallow the earth. Do not let the light hearted musical approach in the following educational video fool you; this thing was supposed to be a planet killer (Fox News wouldn’t lie).

Instead, they may have discovered evidence of the Higgs boson, or “God particle.” Some days it seems like they’re just a bunch of geeks who have no appreciation of how seriously we take them and the threat they represent.

Scientists will next attempt to destroy the world using a super-laser which will rip the fabric of time and space, but that doesn’t come online until 2017 at the earliest. So it looks like we’ve got another five years or more before Armageddon.

My prediction last year that Adobe Flash would be killed by HTML 5 has not come fully to pass, but as I wrote when Adobe themselves released their own HTML 5 authoring kit, the writing is on the wall, and remains so. Much depends on having a solid authoring tool — Adobe is still in preview with theirs (preview three), but even so, I will renew that prediction for 2012.

I also mentioned both Nokia, and Microsoft’s phone OS, but did not anticipate a partnership between them. That will be interesting to watch in the coming year. Nokia makes good phones, and is a world leader outside of the North American market. I’m not sure it really needs Microsoft’s OS, as it could have continued with its own, or adopted Android. The real question is: Will the association with Microsoft open up the North American market to Nokia in a way they just haven’t been able to manage on their own?

I have to say I really don’t know. It’s a powerful combination in more ways than one, but Apple still holds an albeit fading first-to-market caché and has a large and largely uncritical fan-base.

But not everyone was influenced by Jobs’ reality distortion field, and now that he’s gone, Apple may be in more trouble than people realize. Android looms large on the mobile phone front. Is there room for a third party come late to the game?

I won’t go out on a limb with this one, except to say it will be somewhat bad for both Nokia and Microsoft if they haven’t made at least something of a splash by summer. It won’t be the end of the world (that’s coming in 2017 at the earliest, remember) — Nokia has its success in the global market, Microsoft its still near monopoly on desktop operating systems.

I would like to predict an iPad killer, but I don’t know if anyone can do what apparently needs to be done. So far the competition doesn’t get it. It’s not enough to create a tablet as good as or better than the iPad. In fact, quality doesn’t seem to matter so much as price.

If a company out there can come out with a tablet with reasonable features (doesn’t even have to be brilliant) for half the price, it will take a big bite out of iPad’s market. HP’s Touchpad was a disaster at its initial price point, but they cleared them out in no time at a hundred dollars. The Amazon Kindle Tablet shouldn’t be any kind of threat to the iPad based on features, but at the price of $199, they sold a million a week this month. The formula is clear – price matters much more than features in the tablet market.

Here’s hoping Santa brought you what you wanted this year, and that 2012 will be good to you as well.

A last blog post by Joe Bodolai has gone viral today after the L.A. Police ruled the well-loved comedy writer’s death a suicide. Bodolai, who worked on both “Saturday Night Live” and the “Kids in the Hall” before helping to launch Canada’s Comedy Channel, apparently intended the post as a combination suicide note and impromptu memoir.

Titled “IF THIS WERE Y0UR LAST DAY ALIVE WHAT WOULD YOU DO?”, the long farewell includes Bodolai’s list of “Things I Regret”:

Later he writes: “I wanted a channel. I felt the huge failure of comedy, such as sitcoms, on Canadian television, could only be successful if showrunners were comedy writers, not Telefilm form fillers. This is one of the proudest accomplishments I have seen come true. Mark Farrell, Brent Butt, so many more of you….”

Butt confirmed as much on his twitter feed. (See The Globe‘s complete round-up of social media tributes to Bodolai here.)

Bodolai, who was US-born, had apparently lost a TV job recently and, according to his own Twitter feed, undergone surgery. Over Christmas he volunteered at an L.A. Homeless shelter. “[It] may be my new home,” he writes. “I call it ‘Shawshank Summer Camp.’ 65 men on cots in one big space where sleep is victimhood.”

Bodolai opens his post with a list of “Things I Think Will Happen Next Year,” in which he mixes gags (“Sales of Mayan Calendars up  for 2012, drop for 2013,” “World Supply of Band Names will run out”) with more serious prophecies: “Martial Law in the USA, first probably in Louisiana”; “Americans will go along with this, but resisters will be FEMA camped.”

Unfortunately we think a lot of his readers won’t realize he’s not joking about that last bit.

Joe Bodolai would probably like it if you visted his youtube channel.

- Zeff Davies

Well I have to hand it to the Cons at Sun News, because if it wasn’t for them I’d never know that a brutal War on Christmas was raging.

Although so far most of the reports flowing in from the front seem depressingly familiar.

Mostly more scary Lezra and the endless War on David Suzuki.

Although the hairy hoary windbag Charles Adler has done his best to escalate the situation:

But I’m not worried about Santa.

Because I understand he’s ready for ANYTHING…

Even though the gun nutz at the National Rifle Association have betrayed him cruelly.

Now I have to be brutally honest eh? I’m willing to celebrate ANY religious festival, as long as it doesn’t involve shopping, as long as the religious don’t try to kill me, and most importantly as long as there is FOOD.

So I’m quite happy to wish my Jewish friends Happy Hannukah, because quite frankly when I’ve got the munchies, I sometimes fear I might kill for a latke.

And as for my Muslim friends, I feed them pizza during the hungry month of Ramadan, and then they bring me delicious stuff their mums make during the feast of Eid. So I figure I’m the big winner eh?

However, I have to admit that, at this time of year, I’m just a tiny bit biased. On two counts. First, although I’m an atheist, I was raised to be a good Christian boy by my most excellent parents. I like the whole “Peace on Earth, Goodwill to Men” thing. Plus, I’m gay. So when I hear the right-wing version of this seasonal classic:

I kind of prefer this one…

Hey, hug the ones you love. Be kind to strangers, especially the poor and the lonely. Enjoy all that good food. (Don’t forget to save me some eh?)

And Happy Holidays everyone!!!!

One is impressed by just how credulous the reading public — that would be you — can be. You see what I just did there? I just insulted you. Conventional wisdom would suggest that insulting one’s readers is not the best way to start an article. But conventional wisdom is pretty stupid, too.

It’s called “contrarianism,” and it’s what Christie Blatchford and Christopher Hitchens practise and practised, respectively, to a tee. And, as they know and knew, it’s good journalistic business, not least because readers will fall for it every time.

These thoughts — or rather, insults — are inspired by the response to Blatchford’s recent National Post Globe and Mail National Post column on man-hugging (I have trouble keeping track of who she’s writing for this week), and the recent outpouring of tweets and status updates beginning “I still can’t believe Christopher Hitchens supported the war in Iraq, but . . .”. Hitchens, of course, came out in favour of the invasion early on, and remained stridently unrepentant to the end. Blatchford’s column was on a less keen matter — the alleged sissification of the modern male, especially in Toronto — but the widespread astonishment that anyone could hold such an opinion, much less write it down, was about the same.

Dear Stupid Readers: these people don’t write broadsides and columns to be liked — they do it, at least much of the time, to rile you up. Why? Do I really have to write this? Because then you will continue to buy their books and newspapers. Thus endeth Street Journalism 101.

Readers don’t return to a writer or publication because the writer or publication is correct — they do it because, as a seasoned editor once taught me, to my own youthful astonishment, they have developed an emotional connection to the writer or publication. And outrage will do the job as well as any other emotion. The easiest way to forge this sort of codependent relationship with the reader is to look for a widely-held assumption and then argue its opposite. Babies cute? Babies suck. War in Iraq bad? War in Iraq good. Rinse and repeat.

It also gives the writer something new to say. After a decade-or-two of spouting left-wing pieties, even the most earnest of fellow-travellers is liable to hanker for a change of subject. This explains P.J. O’Rourke. For some reason, it doesn’t seem to work the other way as often — right to left — though we are currently seeing a variant in David Frum’s reinvention of himself as a critic of the Republican Party. In Frum’s case, though, it is likely a matter of survival — having been frog-marched out of the clubhouse, he doesn’t have much choice.

This is not to say that these people don’t believe what they write — I have no doubt Hitchens was sincere in his support of the Iraq invasion. It just means that, when they sit down to put their unpopular thoughts out into the public sphere, they don’t get all quivery and “Gee, maybe I shouldn’t say this.” Instead, they go, “Oh goody.” Because they know how you are going to respond.

And so, dear Stupid Readers (as well as the rest of you), you might save yourself a lot of turmoil if, when Blatchford produces her next unspeakable column about how, really, smoking is good for you or Stephen Harper is actually kind of cute, you smile and respond, “Oh, Christie” (and perhaps also observe how freaking funny and well-written her stuff is).

And by the way: Babies really do suck.

I could run this old video of Peter Kent introducing a documentary where he calls global warming “the greatest threat to life on the planet” and warns that the devastating effects of climate change “will be seen in our children’s lifetime.

Or I could run this picture of him returning from the Durban conference yesterday, like some shabby Neville Chamberlain declaring “There will be peace grease in our time…”

After declaring that Kyoto is dead.

Claiming that we would have to pull every car off the road, or pay $14 billion to stay in the treaty. Which is totally absurd. But even if it was true would be less than we are going to pay for our shiny new prisons.

Or I could tell you how Stephen Harper refused to answer a question in the House of Commons today about whether he is a climate change denier.

Even though his record speaks for itself.

Or I could just run this video from these Taiwanese animators . . . .

Because the shame is going viral.

The shame of the Cons.

And the shame of us all . . .

In this week’s episode, Steve lays a cunning trap for Barry. In exchange for agreeing to pass travel and “informal” info about Canadians on to Homeland Security, Steve gets Barry to promise to maybe match $1-billion in Canadian taxpayer dollars to fund some pilot projects sometime in the future that will principally benefit the 40% of Canada-US corporations that rely on a cross-border supply chain. Will Barry take the bait?

Well you can clearly see the advantage to Canada here. If US security dudes are openly operating in Canada, never again will the RCMP suffer the humiliation of delivering a Canadian citizen to the US border so he can be tried and jailed in the US for acts committed and not considered criminal in Canada.  So there’s that.

And “informal information exchange” –  ie, unsubstantiated spook-thinks about brown Canadians with funny names like Abdelrazik and Arar — has clearly worked out really well in previous informal information exchanges.

From the Canadian Perimeter Security and Economic Competitiveness Action Plan:

Canada and the United States have a long history of working together to defend the freedoms and rights of our citizens and to deal with threats to our collective way of life. Cross-border cooperation and information sharing are crucial to these efforts.

See how that works?

None of that old “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety” nonsense. It’s all the same thing now — it’s “collective.” And if we have to pitch a few more hippies/troublemakers/brown peoples into the gaping maw of US security paranoia, well that’s just a price we’re willing to pay to keep those trucks rolling back and forth over the border.

Most of the TV and print media commentary in favour of this latest episode of Beyond the Border has come from Canada-US Project luminaries Derek Burney, Colin Robertson, and Fen Osler Hampson, whose Blueprint for Canada-US Engagement appears to be the blueprint for Steve and Barry’s deal. They say it will be very good for Canada and is in no way a threat to our sovereignty, a defence which would be rather more reassuring had Hampson not made a pitch to the Foreign Affairs committee in 2009 in favour of dropping the national border altogether.