Former P.E.I. broadcaster turns author

“I think the book will give Canadians a new and fresh look at the North and some of its most remarkable people.” Whit Fraser

A former P.E.I. broadcaster has launched a book called “True North Rising’’.

Whit Fraser was a reporter with CBC in Charlottetown for a year but long before that he was in the RCAF in Summerside where he also worked part time for the local radio station.

“True North Rising’’ is a reporter’s memoir of a period in Canada’s north and his lasting friendships with Indigenous leaders who, against tremendous odds and with unwavering personal determination and commitment, changed Canada’s mindset and reconfigured the map of the North.

It is more than a personal journey, it is an eyewitness account of how a new north began shaking off the bonds of colonialism.

“Although it is about the north, I know it also has a broad national interest,’’ Fraser said. “During my time in television I got far greater responses and reaction to items I filed from the Arctic than anything I did on Parliament Hill.”

Along the way, “True North Rising’’ captures deeply personal moments filled with warmth and free of anyone’s cultural baggage — whether in a log home by a magnificent northern river, at a dinner table in a high Arctic seniors’ home or amid the ice-floes of northern Greenland--moments where the only thing that matters is just being there and knowing it could only happen here.

“I think the book will give Canadians a new and fresh look at the North and some of its most remarkable people,” said Fraser. “And it’s not all serious politics — there is humor and good company wherever you go in the North just as in P.E.I.”

“True North Rising’’ is now in selected bookstores. It is also available directly from the publisher at www.burnstownpublishing.com.