Reporter’s reporter

From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall: Stories of Canada
by Whit Fraser

Madeira Park: Douglas and McIntyre, 2026
 $26.95 /  9781771624695

Reviewed by Ron Verzuh

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Reading retired journalist Whit Fraser’s third book revived memories of living in Yellowknife, NWT, in the early 1970s and seeing the poverty-riddled First Nations and Inuit communities as they fought to educate us about the problems that could come with the Mackenzie Valley pipeline.

Fraser, a transplanted Maritimer (Sellarton, N.S.), was instrumental in setting up the CBC’s multilingual coverage of the Berger Inquiry. As he recounts in this memoir, he travelled with Justice Thomas Berger as he visited many remote communities to try to understand what concerned them about the massive pipeline project.

“I was with Justice Berger the first time I saw both the Porcupine caribou herd and the tiny, picturesque, and somewhat antiquated village of Old Crow in northeast Yukon,” he recalls. “I am sure that trip changed both of us, although we never spoke to each other about those feelings. Perhaps to do so would have been an admission of a growing bias.”

Many of the 19 stories, packed with Fraser’s fact-filled remembrances, deal with disasters and tragedies. He was the reporter the editors on the assignment desk in Edmonton or Toronto would call if they needed a reliable and “objective” journalist to fly to the trouble zone on short notice.

I use the word “objective” because that is what Fraser practiced as a journalist. He was a “just the facts” reporter with no bone to pick. The story was everything, the social and political concerns were another matter. With this book, and perhaps his other two, the 83-year-old has decidedly dropped “objective.”

Where he might have once disregarded pipeline protesters, environmentalists, and banner-waving street activists, now he has joined many of them. He has embraced the true calling of all journalists. With Ragged Ass Road he writes to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. In these stories he has chosen a side.

Often it is with indigenous people and their struggle for political recognition and land claims settlement. But his newfound advocacy includes workplace safety. In the chapter on the 1982 Ocean Ranger oil rig disaster off the Newfoundland coast, he writes that “these companies [Mobil Oil in this case] disregarded safety standards and practices that cost lives.” Eighty-four lives to be exact.

In his coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, “the disaster that kept on destroying,” he turns his journalistic guns on corporations blaming them for the millions of gallons of oil that devastated the Alaskan coastline in 1989. “The company’s handling of the accident in the immediate days following was so bad that politicians, normally ready to give some latitude to big business – particularly big oil – were swift and brutal in their condemnation.”

Fraser also expresses his patriotism and his love of country. In the chapter on the U.S. icebreaker Polar Sea, he describes confrontations with the ice breaker when it penetrated sovereign Canadian waters without permission. He travelled to the site with Canadian nationalist Mel Hurtig and novelist Mordecai Richler. “Most Canadians appear indifferent to the Great White North until somebody messes with it,” Fraser writes, “and in 1985 the Americans were using their Coast Guard icebreaker to mess with us.”

As with many of his stories, Fraser consulted the archives and provided snippets of related history. In this case, the Arctic sea captain Joseph Bernier sounded the alert about U.S. northern explorations and signaled concerns about “the Yanks,” calling them “the greatest threat” to northern sovereignty.

Of all the stories, the one about the downed pilot Marten Hartwell struck closer to home for me. “Full disclosure,” as Fraser says several times in the book: in 1973 I worked at the same CBC radio station as he did. Hartwell crash landed the previous November and publicly admitted to eating the nurse on board. Despite that gruesome fact, Fraser reported that “Hartwell was seen as a pilot in an impossible situation.” He also reported on the heroics of the young Inuit boy who kept the pilot alive.

He has much praise for another courageous Inuit, his wife Mary Simon. In fact, he dedicates the book to her. Simon is the Inuit leader who replaced the scandal-ridden Julie Payette to become Canada’s 30th governor general. In one chapter he also defends her and criticizes the media. As the vice-regal spouse, “I knew there would be times I would have to bite my tongue. I also knew I had limits, which were reached in the autumn of 2024 in Quebec City. There, a reporter – I’m using the term loosely here – turned a visit to a food bank into self-serving outrage to attack Mary’s capacity to learn French.”

It was unusual to hear such a comment from Fraser, the quintessential newsman. After all, reporters have always raised the bilingual issue in federal appointments. It was a fair question. But Fraser was no longer a reporter. He now understood what it meant to be on the receiving end of a journalist’s pointed questions. Clearly he had also become more advocate than reporter.

Fraser was executive director of Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami (2001–06), a national voice for Inuit Canadians, and the founding chair of the Canadian Polar Commission. In those roles he recalls many occasions where he and Simon worked side by side in the cause of indigenous rights. To further those ends, he says he “will look for ways to bring Indigenous and non-Indigenous together.”

Readers of Elizabeth Hay’s Giller-Prize-winning novel Late Nights on Air (McClelland & Stewart, 2009) might remember a Fraser-like character. Is he Hay’s Harry Boyd, described as the “hard-bitten broadcaster fleeing a failed television career in Toronto, who returns to his roots”? He just might be.

From accomplished journalist to northern storyteller, Fraser joins the ranks of popular historian Pierre Berton, novelist Farley Mowat, and Fraser’s favourite poet Robert Service. Now he is one of our storytellers, a defender of truth and reconciliation. He is also master of the vice-regal dog, Neva, and guardian of the Rideau Hall skating rink. I like this Whit Fraser.

*

Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. [Editor’s note: Ron Verzuh wrote about Tom McGauley and has recently reviewed books by Jim Harding [ed.], Steven Scanlan, Joline Martin, Patricia E. Roy, Lisa Anne Smith, Charles Demers, and Graeme Menzies for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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