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Used with permission of Michael de Adder

Seasoned journalist Dan Leger knew writing a book about a PEI senator’s troubles in under five months would be a challenge. What he didn’t anticipate was how fast the story would grow

The proposal was unexpected but straightforward: write a book of at least 50,000 words on the career of PEI Senator Mike Duffy and his entanglement in the Senate expense scandal. The deadline was another matter entirely.

In mid-June last year, Nimbus Publishing suggested that a Chronicle Herald column I had written about Duffy could be expanded into an interesting and timely book. And why not? The story was rocking the national headlines and after decades of covering politics, I had the contacts. Plus, publishing a book was a lifelong personal goal.

I figured I could have a manuscript completed by the spring of 2014. Problem was, Nimbus was thinking October 2013. After some negotiation, we settled on Nov. 1, giving me four and a half months for a full book, from a standing start.

Now, I have dealt with deadlines all my working life. As a wire-service reporter, I filed to newspapers in six time zones. At the CBC, I helped produce more than 15,000 newscasts.
But this was four and a half months for a first book, on a developing story, from a bare outline.

I started by writing what I already knew about Duffy, which was substantial. We had worked in the same pack during my six years in the Parliamentary Press Gallery. Duffy had spent a career in the media and political limelight, leaving a wide digital wake. And I worked the phones, tapping political and media contacts in Ottawa, on PEI and across the country. Parliamentary transcripts and RCMP documents were invaluable primary sources.

The words flDanLeger_01 copyowed. After the first week, I had 3,000. Ten days later, I had almost 10,000. They weren’t all pretty words and the narrative was rough, but it was progress. I tried to get down 1,000 words a day and in fact, the first draft ran to 85,000 words. I worked 110 days straight, sometimes hunched over a table in my old sailboat.

Problem was, the story kept developing. By summer, Duffy was the key figure in the biggest political scandal of the Harper years. The press gallery’s best reporters were on it.

They turned up a lot of information about Duffy, but also about Senators Pamela Wallin, Patrick Brazeau and Mac Harb. The “other three” tainted senators became separate branches of my research.

In August, I spoke to Duffy at his place at Cavendish, PEI and the story changed again. We exchanged more than 80 emails in the months that followed.

Then in October came the climactic events in the Senate, full of dramatic speeches and political bloodletting. Duffy would be suspended, and Nimbus agreed that event would make a good punctuation mark for the story and the book.

I edited right up to the deadline, a TV set on the news channels and an audio feed droning from the Senate. The final edits were
finished on Christmas Day.

Today, Duffy remains in legal and political limbo, facing 31 criminal charges with his fellow Islanders alienated. The book, Duffy: Stardom to Senate to Scandal , might be finished, but the story is still evolving.

Dan Leger is a print and television journalist based in Halifax. He has worked for The Canadian Press, the CBC and the Chronicle Herald.

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John TattrieAn author’s perspective on the public reaction to a hot-button historical subject

The first time I wrote about Edward Cornwallis, it was for a front-page article in the Chronicle Herald in 2010. A company selling hair-care products in Halifax had run an ad for “real human hair extensions” featuring models posed with a statue of Cornwallis in a downtown park. Given the city founder’s notorious role in ordering a scalping bounty against Mi’kmaq people, it led to a hot debate about history, racism and colonialism.

People emailed me, called my home and wrote letters to the editor. The conversation went national when the Halifax Regional School Board ordered Cornwallis Junior High to drop the English aristocrat’s name; it was eventually renamed Halifax Central Junior High.

I wanted to know more about him. To my amazement, I found that not a single book had been written about him—in fact, he barely earned a few mentions in Thomas Raddall’s Halifax: Warden of the North. If I wanted to read Cornwallis’s biography, I’d have to write it.

I spent two years digging through the archives and history books. My search led me to experts in Canada, Gibraltar, Scocornwallis statue halifaxtland and England.

The result, Cornwallis: The Violent Birth of Halifax (Pottersfield Press), came out in May. Normally, authors have to beg for media coverage of books. But Cornwallis was a force of nature: on launch day, I gave interviews from 6 am to 6 pm. The launch was standing-room only, attended by more than 130 people, and I had to field increasingly hostile questions. Was I defending a genocidal butcher? Was I trying to rewrite history in the name of political correctness? The moderator had to cut people off as emotions threatened to boil over.

A week later, I spoke to Dalhousie’s University Club. At the end of my talk, a prominent historian accused me of fudging the research to bend the book to pre-held opinions. Another week later, someone sprayed graffiti on the statue declaring Cornwallis to be “fake” and a “self-righteous ass.”

I was back for another full media blitz.

“Stepping onto the contemporary battlefield, surrounded on all sides by belligerents with bayonets fixed, the author produces a peace offering,” wrote the Herald’s book reviewer.

That’s exactly what it felt like. I asked myself: Why am I doing this? I have a lovely wife and a baby son at home. I’m a full-time writer, but books make up a tiny proportion of my income. I’m not in it for the money. I love writing, but don’t enjoy facing hostile audiences. So why?

The truth is, I wrote CornwCornwallis: The Violent Birth of Halifax - Pottersfield Pressallis not in spite of the controversy, but because of it. It was like that scene in Stephen King’s The Tommyknockers where Roberta Anderson stumbles on a metal object poking out of the ground. She scrapes away the dirt to reveal an ancient alien spaceship. The “real human hair extensions” was the pokey metal; this book is the spaceship.

Now that the truth about Cornwallis has been exhumed, it’s my hope that we can have a thoughtful post-mortem discussion about history and contemporary identity. Now that we know how Halifax began, we can better map out where we want the city to go.

Nova Scotia has given me a lot. This book is my way of giving a little bit back.

Read a review of Cornwallis: The Violent Birth of Halifax.

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"Warrior-moms" Ana Acevedo, Isabelle Hains and Marcella Kelly, whose sons died when their school van collided with a truck on a snowy highway.
“Warrior-moms” Ana Acevedo, Isabelle Hains and Marcella Kelly, whose sons died when their school van collided with a truck on a snowy highway.

A journalist and author recounts how two warrior-moms drove the search for the truth behind the Boys in Red tragedy

If the news media had done its job and shouldered its responsibility in the wake of the 2008 Bathurst High School tragedy—in which seven members of New Brunswick’s Bathurst High School basketball team and their coach’s wife died when their school van collided with a tractor-trailer on a snowy highway—there would have been no book for me to write when I set out to tell the incredible story of Ana Acevedo and Isabelle Hains.

That’s because those women would never have needed to transform themselves from ordinary, small-town mothers into two of Canada’s most outspoken political activists.

Their long campaign to find the truth about the crash that killed their sons Javier and Daniel and six other people is detailed in my 2013 book Driven: How the Bathurst Tragedy Ignited a Crusade for Change (Goose Lane Editions). [Editor’s note: You’ll find a review of Richard Foot’s Driven here]

At the heart of the story is a disturbing question: why were two grieving parents, with no experience with or fondness for public activism, compelled to turn their lives upside down by asking questions, launching petitions, holding news conferences and lobbying governments following their sons’ deaths?

Conventional wisdom
I was among the journalists from across Atlantic Canada who descended on Bathurst, NB, to cover the tragedy and the mass funeral for the seven boys. We wrote our stories about sorrow and heartache, and then drifted away, assuming there was nothing more to say about what appeared to be a random, unavoidable highway collision. That was the conventional wisdom floating around town. It’s what the mayor and school officials—even many of the grief-stricken parents—were saying.

Photo 3B-Driven
The Hains family (clockwise from top left: Daniel, Clark, Allan and Isabelle) in a portrait taken 15 days before Daniel’s death. Photo: Isabelle Hains

But the conventional wisdom was wrong, and reporters like me were too quick to buy into it. Accident investigators later found that the school van was mechanically faulty and unsafe to drive, that it lacked winter tires, and that driver fatigue was a possible factor. Ana and Isabelle had by then also uncovered Education Act guidelines that said their boys should not have been driving home late at night in the midst of a snowstorm.
For five years these warrior-moms, as I call them, fought a sometimes lonely campaign for accountability, and for changes to the way children are transported to extra-curricular events. They had many successes and have raised national awareness about this issue.

Courage and perseverance

Yet many in Bathurst still believe the crash was a freak accident, including some of the other parents who lost boys, whom I interviewed for the book. In fact, the hostility Ana and Isabelle encountered in their own community as they tried to uncover the truth of the tragedy remains today. I felt it as I researched the book—many people at the centre of the tragedy declined to talk to me, or expressed deep skepticism about what the two mothers had done. It was nerve-wracking, to say the least, cracking open this hornets’ nest and writing the tale of two women who were supported by many New Brunswickers, but scorned by many others.

The prevailing view after the tragedy, at least among school and town officials, was that people should grieve for a bit, and then move on; there was no need for hard questions about why it happened and what could be learned from the deaths of seven boys—an understandable sentiment in any small, insular town full of hurting families.

Less understandable is why news reporters were so willing to accept this view. Fortunately, for the sake of the truth, two mothers had the courage and perseverance to think otherwise.