Ontario Legislature Press Gallery Continues To Shrink
By Eric Dowd, Orangeville Citizen – Journalists who cover the Ontario legislature should feel overjoyed that one of their own has been named to the province’s top job of lieutenant governor, but the harsher reality is that they are becoming a vanishing breed.
David Onley, a TV reporter and commentator admired by many, including his peers, for his skills in his work and the way he carried it on, despite being afflicted by polio and in a wheelchair or with a cane, is the first journalist ever named to such high office.
As the Queen’s representative, he becomes the first citizen in
the official order of precedence. Prime Minister Stephen
Harper has never gone out of his way to help journalists and
presumably chose him mainly because he is a prime example
of someone who has overcome a disability and can be a role model for others.
Published in the Orangeville Citizen July 19, 2007
Fellow journalists will take some pleasure in seeing Onley honoured because of their respect for him and because he is one of their number. The highest rank their profession had achieved in recent decades was as a cabinet minister.
Frank Drea, who wrote an Action Line column for the Toronto Telegram, was a minister under Progressive Conservative premier William Davis and a stereotypical heavy-drinking newspaperman. After one liquid lunch, he addressed condo owners in the belief they were wine growers and wished them good luck with their current vintage, but he had real strengths that kept him training have little respect for.
But Onley’s appointment also comes at a time when the Press Gallery of journalists who cover the legislature full-time has been shrinking. A decade ago it had 52 members, but it is now down to 33.
Part of the reason is that most newspapers now are owned by a few chains. the papers were independently owned, half a dozen of them in bigger cities across Ontario used to send their own reporters to cover Queen’s Park, but when they are acquired by a chain, one of the chain’s reporters at the legislature normally covers for the whole organization.
This is a loss, first because reporters sent by these newspapers were usually among their most skilled and brought experience and insight that added to the combined gallery intelligence, particularly in the grilling of politicians that is a daily routine.
They also brought and were fed knowledge of issues in their own circulation areas, so if a reporter from Windsor, for example, had information on a government failing in that area, it quickly became a story for the whole gallery and province.
A Queen’s Park-based reporter for a chain usually has to cover many geographical areas and lacks time to watch for them all adequately. Some, but not all, chains also have cut staffs to help pay the costs of their acquisitions.
The chains are growing and soon the vast majority of newspapers in Ontario will be owned by one of three or four chains.
Most Toronto newspapers also have cut staffs at Queen’s Park. A dozen private radio stations, which are noted for penny-pinching, once had reporters at the legislature, but they are down to two, and the provincial government’s TVO has dropped its French-language reporter at the legislature to save money.
The fewer reporters at the legislature continue to give their employers good value for their money. Among many issues they have brought to light recently were frauds by lottery ticket retailers, abuse of children in daycare centres and barriers to patients
finding whether doctors had committed malpractice, which the government acted on.
They also curbed the province issuing parking permits for the disabled to many not entitled to them and grounded an expensive trip that MPPs had planned quietly to study voting systems around the world.
The news media covering the legislature also have faults, but to their employers and the public that provides space for them they are a bargain – this is not where they should be relaxing their watch. Published in the Orangeville Citizen July 19, 2007
Eric Dowd, dean of the Ontario Press Gallery
Eric Dowd, was the “dean of the Queen’s Park Press Gallery. He died at 79 years on Christmas Day after a lengthy battle with cancer.
He started covering Queen’s Park for the Globe and Mail in 1963, moved on to the now defunct Toronto Telegram and wrote for the Sun in its early years. He also wrote for several British newspapers. Recently, he’d been covering the Legislature for his own company, Independent News. Toronto Sun
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