CBC journalist Michael Finlay travelled the world as a CBC journalist and producer before retiring in 2010 after working at the public broadcaster for 31 years.Karin Wells/CBC
Michael Finlay revealed his ear for news and obstinate streak nearly 50 years ago.
It was October, 1974. The evening had begun with a gathering of a group of Young Turk reporters at the Press Club across the street from the Vancouver Sun. When he went in for his night shift at 6:30 p.m., he was given an assignment: Could he get the Kamloops coroner on the line and find out whether there would be an inquest into a fatal train derailment?
Working from the city desk, Mr. Finlay placed calls but got hung up on each time. “Well that’s none of your business, is it?,” the coroner said from his home, growing more perturbed as the phone kept ringing. “Can’t you get it through your mind I’m not discussing it – and don’t you ever phone me again!”
The young reporter, however, was too stubborn to take “no comment” for an answer.
Next he called the province’s associate deputy attorney-general and also the chief coroner to ask them whether such silent treatment was appropriate in the midst of deadly train tragedy. The Sun got its story when the senior justice officials conceded that public transparency perhaps had been lacking. “Overruling of coroner hinted on CNR death crash inquest,” read the next day’s front-page headline.
Mr. Finlay became a CBC Radio documentarian who interpreted world-shifting events in Africa and Europe for a national Canadian audience during the 1980s and 1990s. He retired in 2010 from the public broadcaster, where he had taught a new generation of reporters by forging their scripts in the crucible of his own encyclopedic knowledge. He died Jan. 31, at age 73, after a random assault on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue.
Douglas Michael Finlay was born Sept. 15, 1949 in Brookline, Mass., the second of three sons. His father was a social worker who took jobs in Canada, the United States, and even in Thailand, after landing a United Nations contract to help emotionally disturbed children there.
This was how, in January, 1962, Mr. Finlay came to leave his Grade 8 class in snowy Canada to step off a Cathay Pacific flight that landed in Bangkok.
According to his older brother, Andrew Finlay, the family of expat Canadians lived in a compound with servants. But only the parents’ room had any air-conditioning, so they often all crowded in there. There was not much to do in the house except read, and that was necessary to keep up with the rigorous demands of International School Bangkok. Outside there were ox-carts in the streets. Vendors were hawking Fanta for about a nickel – or one baht – and that was a great price for a can of pop if you were a boy prepared to risk the deadly snakes hiding out in the weeds.
Mr. Finlay spent his Grade 9 year in Bangkok, his Grade 10 year in Ottawa, and his Grade 11 year in Toronto, before his family finally settled down in Vancouver during his Grade 12 year. Friendships had been difficult to maintain during high school, but in the Lower Mainland he found his flock.
At the University of British Columbia he landed among a group of misfit students living in a shared house on West 12th Avenue and who spent their free time working for The Ubyssey.
The storied campus newspaper was a launching pad for many prominent Canadian journalists. In 1969, Mr. Finlay was chosen editor in chief by his peers by a one-vote margin – and given a mandate to resist the editorial direction that the student politicians were trying to impose upon the publication.
For a time, the Vancouver Sun editors came to campus to scout the Ubyssey as a farm team for journalism prospects. What they found was a cohort of confident student reporters surfing a wave of youth empowerment. Several jumped to the daily newspaper, but when Mr. Finlay joined around 1971 he stood out for knowing more facts, synthesizing stories more quickly, and crafting his writing more carefully.
He was attuned to words, their importance, their impact and their cadence. “I think he really understood that with sound, and language, you could not only tell a compelling and faithful story, but you could really make it your own,” says Paul Knox, a former roommate who later became a Globe and Mail foreign correspondent.
Mr. Finlay studied creative writing at UBC. He published a 28-page book of poetry in 1971, the harpo scrolls. The cover was a drawing of the hapless, silent Marx brother. The back jacket carried a photo of the young author smiling and with the same hairstyle. His position as a reporter at the Sun then did not earn him any special favours with the newspaper’s literary critic. “I felt when I was reading Finlay that he was deliberately trying to estrange me,” reviewer Lorraine Vernon wrote.
Never approaching his writing as a way to make a friend, Mr. Finlay could still use it to express a yearning to travel. He called one of his pithy poems Ox-Carts in the Morning: “The wanderer kneels in holy sand, prays, pays his premium and walks away,” it says. “He does not know the sand is in his shoe forever.”
For several years in the 1970s he worked in British Columbia including as a legislative reporter covering the province’s first NDP government. But he then quit newspapers to travel and when he returned from abroad, he found out he had no position to return to.
There was nothing left in his storage locker, even. “Something went awry with the payments and the storage guy sold the contents of his stuff. It was a lot of personal stuff,” his friend and fellow journalist Malcolm Morrison recalls.
With a blank slate, Mr. Finlay moved to Toronto to take a job at CBC Radio as a chase producer for As It Happens. He spent the early 1980s at the show lining up lively interviewees to be grilled on air. This job was done by Barbara Frum, a high-profile CBC personality then working out of a cramped and dark studio.
During a holiday gift exchange among the show’s staffers, Mr. Finlay drew Ms. Frum’s name and was presented with a dilemma: What do you get the host for a holiday gift?
Whimsy was his guide. “Michael, with crayons and this big piece of paper made Barbara a window. It was a brilliant thing to do. With this big sky, green lawn – it was really quite well done,” says Patsy Pehleman, who worked with him at the CBC.
That window never went up in the studio, but Mr. Finlay was soon out to expand his own vistas by making his own stories for CBC Radio. “If you had any brains, yourself, what you would do with Michael is pretty much get out of his way when he was doing his own documentaries,” Ms. Pehleman said.
He caught on as a producer at Sunday Morning, an ambitious show that featured deeply reported documentaries from foreign lands.
Mr. Finlay filed several pieces from Africa, including an hour-long 1985 feature on apartheid-era Johannesburg. Bookending his story with song, he painted a vivid picture of a gold-mining country where rich whites drove around in BMWs and dispossessed Blacks died in shantytowns at the hands of police.
“I don’t know if anyone, even God, can save South Africa,” he said during his sombre sign-off. “I would be a fool to suggest that I, after a short visit, have the answer for this tortured, anguished land. But I do believe that some day there will be a revolution in this country – a revolution in the literal sense of the word: a turning around.”
His aura of on-air gravitas could be immediately dispelled by quirkiness when you met him. He was a man with nicknames for his closest friends, a bottomless drawer of sloganed T-shirts, and who wore his affection for Looney Tunes on his sleeve.
“He loved all the characters: Daffy. Bugs. Sylvester. Foghorn Leghorn. I mean all of them. I would be hard pressed to try to pick a favourite,” says Terry Paterson, who lived for years with Mr. Finlay. She bought him a Bugs Bunny bomber jacket that he wore proudly.
For several years Mr. Finlay ran Sunday Morning as the show’s executive director.
During that time, he led a radio-reporting team across several countries to chronicle a Europe that was being remade by the Maastricht Treaty.
Former CBC host Mary Lou Finlay (no relation) recalls a sudden crisis arising on the tour’s London leg. “We got in the taxi, and we had no sooner taken off than the cab driver slammed on the brakes and jumped out of the cab screaming, because Michael’s bag was ticking,” she recalls. “Of course this was the time when the IRA was blowing things up left right and centre – and he thought we had a bomb in our bags.
“Michael opened his bag and showed him an alarm clock.”
Ms. Finlay remembers how both of them temporarily misplaced their passports on that journey, something they could ill afford to do in a continent that hadn’t yet erased its internal borders. But they managed to stick to their travel schedule. And they never lacked for a challenging crossword.
“He taught me how to do cryptics on that train in Germany,” she said. “I’ve been an addict ever since.”
Mr. Finlay moved on to more behind-the-scenes roles at the CBC, including by helping to launch the foreign reporting show Dispatches in the early 2000s.
“I think he was better at being a producer than being an exec – and I’m sure he was happier anyways,” says Ms. Pehleman, his long-time colleague. “He was difficult for senior management and everyone else. But boy – if you could get through it was worth it.”
By “it” she was speaking of Mr. Finlay’s gruelling journalistic processes. He embraced being an editor and challenged reporters on their facts and their structures, breaking down their scripts, explaining to them what worked and what didn’t.
These lessons stuck. “I quite literally think of him almost every time I write a script,” says Peter Armstrong, the CBC’s senior business reporter. “By the time I was a national reporter he was one of the editors at The World at Six. And you’d be terrified that he would be the guy that edited your script because he knew everything – he knew the story you working on better than you could possibly know it.”
But the outcomes were always good.
“He would inevitably make you sound smarter,” Mr. Armstrong said.
Mr. Finlay retired from the CBC in 2010. Within a few years, he discovered he had an aggressive form of cancer. He was treated with invasive surgeries to his lungs and other organs.
Though weakened by time and fate, he always found time to walk from his house in Toronto’s east end to a preferred pub on Danforth. He would hold court and complete his crossword puzzles there. His lifelong love of roots music persisted. He was planning to attend a country show in late February at the Phoenix Concert Theatre.
Around 3:35 p.m. on Jan. 24 Mr. Finlay was out buying groceries when a chance encounter ended his life. A man whom he was walking past on the Danforth grabbed him and threw him down toward a concrete planter.
The suspect in the case is still at large. Mr. Finlay died in hospital of his internal injuries one week later. He leaves his two brothers, Andrew Finlay and Steven Finlay.
With files from The Globe and Mail’s Rick Cash