NEWS THAT LEFT A MARK
Star reporters reminisce about 2015 stories that left a lasting impression in the final part of a series,
Sara Mojtehedzadeh, Work and wealth reporter On my desk, right in my line of vision, sits a thank-you card.
“All my best wishes for you,” it reads. Signed, “Your friend, Angel.”
I received the card the same day I learned he had been fired.
Angel worked in the same temp agency gig for five years without a raise or benefits.
Despite that, he had the courage to speak to me about how our laws fail to protect vulnerable workers. It cost him his minimum-wage job.
The hardest part of my work is asking people to risk their livelihood. When I learned what happened to Angel, I felt an indescribable, awful weight. But there was a happy twist: a reader took action. He called up his old local, construction union Liuna 183, and got Angel decent work.
The city of Toronto took action, too: it initiated a fair-wage investigation into Angel’s former employer, which enjoyed a lucrative city contract.
It doesn’t always happen this way, but in the case of Angel, a sliver of justice was served.
His card sits on my desk to remind me why I became a journalist.
San Grewal, Urban affairs reporter My favourite story in 2015 was a piece about an effort by Mississauga residents, business owners, politicians and community leaders to help settle 32 Syrian refugee families.
In 1974, when I was 4 years old, I moved to Manitoba from Zambia. Arriving from an equatorial country to a small town on the Canadian Prairie during the dead of winter wasn’t so bad.
But the circumstances facing my family — my mother, really — were daunting: my elder brother and I, two young turban-wearing Sikh boys, in a town of white faces. My father, a physician, had chosen Canada after he was diagnosed with a form of cancer that ended his life less than a year after we arrived.
A beautiful, typically Canadian story unfolded: a single mother who, despite immense obstacles — psychological and societal — raised two sons on the third continent that she would call home, in a country as welcoming as any on this planet.
When I wrote about the efforts in Mississauga involving another typical Canadian community coming together, I was overwhelmed by one thought: that the desperation and despair felt by Syrian families will one day be commensurate with the feeling of joy and good fortune among those who will eventually land in Canada. Alex Ballingall, Staff reporter So many momentous things happen in a year, but the story that lingers in my mind is somewhat marginal in the grand current of the news.
An elderly couple from Courtice, Nonie and Bill Paterson, had to move out of their long-time home to make way for the incoming extension of Hwy. 407. The home was historic, built by an early Clarington Township settler in the mid-19th century, and the Patersons had lived there for 43 years.
There was no glaring injustice here, no outrage. Just the melancholic note that accompanies the inevitable end of something, which seems to me to ring true with anyone who has ever had to leave a chapter of life behind.
And that, of course, is all of us.