Lafleche says au revoir after 24 years at Standard
Veteran Niagara journalist starting new chapter with Hamilton Spectator
It was not exactly the most auspicious beginning to a journalism career, sitting as I was in the office of an American border agent while his colleagues rummaged through my truck.
In fact, the predominant thought in my mind on these first moments of my first assignment on my first day with the St. Catharines Standard was, “I am so fired.”
I arrived in Niagara from Calgary late on a July night in 1998 with my ancient, rust-tinged GMC Jimmy packed with my worldly belongings. The very next morning, I excitedly accepted my first assignment for the paper — a cross-border shopping story.
This wasn’t exactly a Dick Tracy job. All I had to do was cross the border and interview Canadian shoppers at stores in New York state. Easy peasy, right?
In the hurried excitement of starting a new job, I neglected to unpack my truck, which was filled with clothes, books, musical instruments and a few unique bits and pieces collected from the travels of my youth.
To the suspicious border agent staring at me through mirrored sunglasses, the contents of my vehicle didn’t exactly line up with my story of being a Standard reporter on assignment. It didn’t help that I had not yet been issued press credentials and my licence plate and driver’s licence were both Albertan.
So while they searched my truck for contraband, I was trying to sort out how I would pay for a return trip west. Twenty-four years later, I still marvelled that my career at the Standard was not extinguished before it truly began.
Obviously, the border agents let me pass, the story was written — albeit several hours behind schedule — and I became a permanent fixture at Niagara’s newspaper of record.
Until Friday. This is the last article I will write with a Standard byline. Starting on May 2, I take up my new post as a member of the news team at The Standard’s Torstar sister paper, the Hamilton Spectator.
That new byline will take some getting used to.
The past two and half decades have been anything but dull or routine. I’ve reported on criminal biker gangs, covered world championship boxing from ringside, exposed local clergy abuse, explored environmental damage in the Great Lakes, followed missing persons across the country and witnessed incredible acts of generosity by Niagara residents in an impoverished mountain community half a world away.
I’ve literally eaten my own words (a shredded column garnishing a bowl of soup), interviewed prime ministers, been taken down by a Niagara Regional Police dog and chronicled how some local politicians tried, sometimes in the open and often from the shadows, to undermine the paper.
And of course, there was All The Chair’s Men — The Standard’s two years of investigative reporting that uncovered the worst political scandal in Niagara’s history.
It’s been one helluva run. The Standard has been my home, its dedicated reporting staff my family. Nothing published under my name would have been possible without them.
Being a journalist means having the privilege to be invited into the lives of people to tell their stories, be they tragic or triumphant. That trust comes with an unyielding responsibility we can never surrender.
So much has changed. When I started, the paper had a single computer capable of connecting to the internet and social media was, at the most, a hypothetical construct more science fiction than today’s omnipresent fact.
It was also a little easier in the beginning. The disinformation campaigns, fuelled by legions of frothing internet trolls and bots, didn’t exist. No one called for the arrest or execution of journalists, let alone people running for public office, and ignorance wasn’t exalted as a badge of honour.
We are now in a world where partisan political actors cosplay as an independent press and faceless Twitter accounts whip up panic under the pretense of reporting the news.
Through all these challenges and more, to my enduring pride, The Standard’s news team has diligently pursued the facts, clear in its mission to inform the public. It has shown, time and again, why newspaper journalism matters. Now more than ever.
The Standard will be even more important as we collectively walk into an uncertain future, plagued by challenges from attacks on democracy at home, foreign wars and global climate change. It is in these pages that you will learn what your local governments, sports teams and educational institutions are doing. It is The Standard’s journalists, not the unaccountable underbelly of social media platforms, who will investigate and report the news responsibly so that you will be informed.
While this is my final Standard column as a member of its staff, this is not goodbye. It is merely an au revoir, and a sincere thank you for reading all these long years.