I’ve been asked the question a lot over the years. It’s an issue some of friends feel compelled to put to me whenever it comes up. And I feel compelled to respond. But friends and peers have asked it of me repeatedly these past months, in particular, this past week.
“What’s with all this rottenness at the CBC?” people ask. (more…)
Radio, television, the newspapers and most of social media were all buzzing, Monday night, because Toronto Police had found a tunnel a stone’s throw from an indoor tennis court facility in northwest Toronto. It wasn’t just any tennis court. It wasn’t just any tunnel. The tunnel was big enough to live in and apparently pointed in the direction of the Toronto Pan-American Games tennis venue – the Rexall Centre. But when asked at a press conference if he thought the tunnel was part of a terrorist plot, Deputy Chief Mark Saunders had a simple response:
“There’s no criminal offence for digging a hole,” he said. (more…)
The deadline for getting my news story on the air was fast approaching. My TV producer, a long-time filmmaker and friend named Sue, made some speedy recommendations in the editing room to help me get the story finished in time. At the time, her experience was wider and deeper than mine. And thanks to her skill, we managed to get my TV story broadcast that night. That’s when I delivered that horribly cliché and patronizing line about her talent.
“That’s why you get paid the big bucks,” I said condescendingly. (more…)
It began rather innocently as a group of students naively wanting change. It was the ninth year of the war in Vietnam. I was in my second year at Ryerson. The U.S. National Guard shootings of four students at Kent State had just happened. On University Avenue in Toronto, we joined others whose agendas were wide-ranging. Some wanted world anarchy. Others were Americans burning their draft notices. Most were like us, just students wanting to change things for the better. Then, things went haywire.
“The police are on horses,” somebody shouted, “and they’re coming at us.” (more…)
In the introduction to a book, “A Doyle Reader” by Newfoundlander Marjorie Doyle, CBC Radio host Shelagh Rogers described a get-together between the two longtime friends. Shelagh said, on this particular visit, that she presented Marjorie with a couple of ceramic coffee mugs with the title (of the show Shelagh was then hosting) “Sounds Like Canada” on them.
In accepting the gift, Rogers said Doyle immediately ran to her office, returned with a thick black Magic Marker pen and crossed out the word “Canada” and scribbled in “Newfoundland.”
“Now I can use them,” she told Rogers. “I’m stuck with what I am, who I am,” Doyle recently told a panel discussion I attended in Newfoundland. “On an island, borders are intractable.”
Back in May, The Writers’ Union of Canada gathered its executive, its administrators and several hundred of its members (myself included) in St. John’s for its annual general meeting. Traditionally, TWUC holds workshops on the first day the union meets. Marjorie Doyle appeared on the panel entitled “Writing From My Centre.” She admitted that her home province did not appear in her earliest work as a journalist for the Globe and Mail, the National Post or even on her late night CBC Radio show “That Time of the Night.”
But eventually – perhaps because she often worked away from Newfoundland, in Toronto, Montreal or on Vancouver Island – she realized how much her home island affected her.
“When I was away,” she said, “ I was very aware I wasn’t from that place.” Newfoundland shaped her taste in music, in travel and in language, so she embraced it and celebrated it. I suspect place has a lot to do with the works of many Canadian writers.
As well as Marjorie Doyle, author Wayne Johnston has always captured the political and social bloodlines of Newfoundland. The writings of Earl Birney, Dorothy Livesay, George Woodcock and P.K. Page have almost always been associated with British Columbia, just as Pierre Berton’s and Farley Mowat’s works of non-fiction are often linked to Yukon and the Northwest Territories respectively. Think of some of this country’s best fiction or poetry with Montreal as a setting and you read Mordecai Richler, Gabrielle Roy or Roch Carrier. Similarly, W.O. Mitchell, Margaret Laurence and Guy Vanderhaeghe are Canadian writers with their feet and creativity firmly planted in the Prairies.
Over the weekend I joined the 18th annual Saskatchewan Festival of Words in Moose Jaw. For a time – back in the 1970s – I lived and worked in Saskatchewan; I have enjoyed a following there and have twice presented at the festival. But a new generation of Prairie writers has emerged in recent years. They too have found their fictional characters, non-fictional stories, plot lines, settings and even their muses in what one character described as “this dry and barren landscape.”
In her adopted home, Regina, Gail Bowen has written 15 books known as “the Joanne Kilbourn mystery series.” Six of her books have been adapted to television movies; she has also written stage plays and radio dramas. Throughout, she has remained in content and in voice a Prairie writer. Nor has Bowen ever shied away from dealing with contemporary Prairie urban issues, such as the poverty, prostitution and low-rental housing in a Regina neighbourhood known as North Central.
“I always try to portray my locations accurately,” she told a writing panel about the Prairie landscape. “When I write about North Central, I write about it warts and all.”
Seated next to Bowen on the panel was celebrated crime writer Anthony Bidulka, known best for his mystery series featuring detective Russell Quant. On his website, Bidulka describes his hero as “a world-travelling, wine-swilling, wise-cracking, gay PI.” He remembered a unique moment when Quant’s origins suddenly emerged as an issue during a Q & A session in the U.S.
“This big Texan got up to the mike and began to speak,” Bidulka said. “He said, ‘I would like to know how you can write a series about a detective who is … from Saskatchewan?’” That’s when Anthony Bidulka realized how powerfully his home in Saskatoon affected his personality and writing. “We’re a fly-over province,” he added, “but I’m driven to write about Saskatchewan.”
Similarly, as I pointed out in the beginning, Marjorie Doyle is a proud Newfoundlander. She writes critically about her home. She writes passionately about her home. She has strong feelings about its past and its future. She’s even been known to profess that her island province should eventually secede from Canada and return to Dominion status (as Newfoundland was prior to its joining Confederation in 1949).
However, Marjorie is realistic enough to recognize where she is and from where she writes (at least for now).
“I’m the only member of my family born in Canada,” she said at the St. John’s writers’ conference. “The rest of my family was born in Newfoundland (before 1949). Still, I’m rooted to this place … in all I think and write.”
I really had no idea what was going on. I was a long way from being in the front row, or being in the know. As a member of the supporting cast, I didn’t really understand the point of the exercise. But then band leader John Rutherford invited me down to the front where he stood and instead of having me play my instrument, he asked me to listen to everything from where he stood. And after he led the band through the same musical number again, he explained.
“You see, Ted, while you’re going um-pah, um-pah, um-pah, um-pah,” he said imitating my trumpet part, “the rest of us are down here playing Howard Cable’s ‘Newfoundland Rhapsody.’”
I had to admit, sitting in the back row of the third trumpet section of the school band, I had no idea what the rest of the student musicians were playing. I was just reading my part as diligently as possible, making sure I didn’t lose my place in the music and (most important) ensuring I didn’t play any of my “um-pahs” in the wrong place. John Rutherford knew I’d never amount to much of a trumpet player, that I had achieved in brass-instrument performance terms the equivalent of the Peter Principle. More important he understand that, up to that point, the orchestral results of our rehearsal were kind of lost on me. But in that sudden Eureka moment, our band leader and music teacher, Mr. Rutherford, realized if I could see and hear how I was contributing, that I would realize the value of my input, in short, why I mattered.
Memories of Rutherford and our Agincourt Collegiate Institute concert band came rushing back to me this week as I read some rather disturbing statistics about the decline of music in Ontario elementary schools. For example, according to a report on “The Arts in Ontario Schools,” just issued by the People For Education (PFE) lobby group in Toronto, while in 2012 nearly half of all grade schools in the province had a teacher dedicated to instructing music, last year (2013) that number slipped to just above 40 per cent. Is that significant? Sure it is when you consider that in the late 1990s as many as 60 per cent of schools had specialist music teachers such as Mr. Rutherford.
The study goes on to say that those of us in the Greater Toronto Area may have it better than in rural Ontario. It points out that about six in 10 GTA schools have some kind of music instruction going on. In northern Ontario learning about bass and treble clefs, key signatures, melody and harmony is restricted to just over a quarter of all schools. And while the study is designed to sound an alarm about how music training has declined, Annie Kidder, a spokeswoman for PFE, warns that a fading music curriculum may also have an economic impact on society.
“When you talk to people in business now,” she told Canadian Press, “they feel that capacity to think creatively, to innovate, is a core part of being an entrepreneur – being able to lead a change in a knowledge economy.” In other words, Kidder says music gives kids 21st vocational century skills.
I wholehearted agree. Anybody who can read music charts, pick up tempo, translate that to a motor skill and make the results come to a musical conclusion, must have an arithmetic capacity. And that can’t hurt when it comes to deductive reasoning or motivational capacity either. Good musicians can certainly make successful business leaders.
But I think the value of music goes beyond quarter notes and time signatures. Music, some say, also heals. I know a dozen years ago, when my own father suffered a series of strokes in the last year of his life, resulting in aphasia and limiting our ability to communicate with him, that music helped us get through to him. If we played a bit of Jean Sibelius or Benny Goodman into his headset, that music almost always brought a smile to his face and a sense of calm to his demeanor.
Just this week, Toronto played host to a conference on music and health research. Dr. Jane Edwards, who works with neuro-scientists in Europe, told CBC Radio that her members are exploring ways in which music is used as a standard treatment against depression and even as means of assisting young people to fight cancer.
“Teenagers in music therapy have an increased resilience against the disease,” she said. “Doing such things as music videos during traditional cancer treatment, helps them get back to school and get on with their lives.”
Whatever other tangible things music delivers, as a young person, I will never forget how maestro John Rutherford and his music teachings gave me a sense of self-esteem and belonging that sitting in the back row of the trumpet section had always escaped me.
That summer of 1969 came to an end for me with a flourish. I pulled out all my favourite LPs (record albums) from the CKLY Radio (Lindsay, Ont.) library to air that night of the finale. I assembled all the best recording star anecdotes that I could use with each of my choices of songs. I called all my friends who’d been listening to many of my all-night broadcasts from Victoria Day to Labour Day, through that summer, in hopes they would listen. And when 6 a.m. arrived and my final show of the summer came to an end, I signed off.
“That’s my final All Night House Party broadcast,” I said into the microphone. “Thanks for listening. Maybe I’ll see you next year.”
That summer I had worked from May 24 weekend – 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., six nights a week – through to the September Labour Day Monday. I was proud of the broadcasting I had done. I was honoured to have gathered a pretty loyal following around the Kawartha Lakes region. And I felt pretty confident the manager of CKLY Radio would invite me back the next summer to repeat the show. (He didn’t.) But most important, I deposited my last on-air pay-cheque in the bank. I had worked about 13 weeks. I had added an important broadcast credit to my resume. Even better, I had raised enough cash from my CKLY pay-cheques, to cover my tuition – about $1,200 – to go back to Ryerson that fall and complete the courses for my Radio and Television Arts diploma.
I discovered this week, from data released by Statistics Canada and from listening to senior economist Armine Yalnizyan of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA), that by comparison I had it very easy back on 1969. Yalnizyan explained on both CBC Radio and TV that I had probably worked – on average – about 230 minimum-wage hours at CKLY to pay for my undergraduate diploma, while students attending much the same kind of media course today would have to accumulate the equivalent of 570 minimum-wage hours.
“We say to our kids, ‘Go to university if you want a good professional degree,’” Yalnizyan told the CBC. “But that’s getting more difficult to do.”
In other words, tuition – the money today’s youth and their families have to save to keep those students in class and accumulating the appropriate credits – costs two and a half times as much today as it did when their Babyboomer parents or grandparents were saving cash for a college or university education 40 years ago. According to the latest research from Yalnizyan’s CCPA the smallest increase in the number of hours required to pay for tuition was n Newfoundland and Labrador – about 16 per cent; while Ontario has experienced the greatest increase of minimum-wage work to pay tuition – about 173 per cent.
There’re a lot of numbers in there. But what they mean essentially is that our kids and grandkids, trying to pay for their post-secondary educations, have to work at two or three jobs during their down time (usually in the summer) in order to emerge from their holiday break with enough cash in their bank accounts to pay colleges and universities the tuition for the coming year.
In addition to the hardship this whole scenario inflicts on students, it also creates an odd result at colleges and universities, perhaps to their benefit. The post-secondary institutions now have to gear their programs to have students in their halls of higher learning not for three or four years. Now the students enroll in programs over a period of five or six years, inflicting even greater hardship on families funding their kids’ education. And if the students can’t raise the cash in their savings accounts, it means they have to go further into debt, not by just a few thousand dollars, but more often by tens of thousands of dollars.
“I’ll be paying off my student loans well into my 40s,” I remember hearing one of my students lament.
Just this week, I overheard a number of my own journalism program students. They were discussing the nature of the courses, the background of the students and the tuitions they paid for their educations. Typical are the tuitions for University of Toronto (Scarborough College) – somewhere in the neighbourhood of $8,000 per semester. That’s about five times what I would have paid 40 years ago. But when I asked one of my students about the UTSC tuitions, she shocked me.
“That $8,000 is nothing,” she said. “I’m an international student (from outside Canada). Our tuition for the same course is nearly four times that amount, over $30,000.”
I wondered how many more summertime all-night shows I might have had to broadcast had I been an international student. I’d never have made it.
The morning the world changed, I had tumbled from my warm bed, found a cup of coffee to help me on my way and driven from the countryside to the old CBC Radio building on Jarvis Street, next to CBC corporate head offices in downtown Toronto. By 5 a.m. I had cleared my head and my throat to deliver one of my first newscasts for the CBC Network that morning. Little did I know within the first hours of my shift, I would be part of something momentous.
“Here is the CBC News,” I said at the top of each hour that morning to begin the five-minute hourly newscast. But that day I also got the chance to announce repeatedly as the top story, “Nelson Mandela, the black African leader imprisoned for treason since 1963, has this morning left notorious Robben Island prison, a free man.”
A few weeks ago, as I showered, shaved and made my way to work, CBC Radio’s local Toronto morning show invited audience comment. Host Matt Galloway wondered: “Where do Torontonians go, to find absolute silence?”
In a matter of a few seconds, I had an answer and texted it to him: “Sealed inside the rare books section at the Robarts Library, right down to the white gloves so your hands don’t rustle pages.”
I hadn’t thought about Ontario’s 17th premier in a long time. But when Galloway posed the question, I quickly remembered research I had conducted back in the early 1970s. I needed to find excerpts from particularly rare books and the only source was the then brand new John P. Robarts Research Library at the University of Toronto. By coincidence, this past week, I’ve been reading my colleague Steve Paikin’s new book, “Paikin and the Premiers.” Among other things, Paikin reminded me that Premier Robarts gave this province much more than a quiet research library.
About a year ago, I was invited to speak to the Writers’ Community of York Region. As the date of the talk approached – last Sunday, Dec. 9 – I began to prepare my presentation. Normally, for these kinds of talks, I rely on my collection of personal anecdotes, remembrances and war stories – literally and figuratively – to get me through the event. Then, I remembered why I had been invited.
“This is a group of writers,” the speaking convenor had said. “So they’ll be interested in your research and writing… You might want to address the challenges of being a journalist and non-fiction writer.”