Canada’s National Observer is proud to announce we have been nominated for two Canadian Association of Journalists awards.
The first, a moving piece written by our executive editor Karyn Pugliese, is a finalist in the human rights reporting category. Karyn’s story was written in the aftermath of the first discoveries of unmarked graves of children on former residential school sites.
The article explores the history of residential schools and carries us to modern times, making the point that the legacy of past human rights abuses inflicted on Indigenous children continues to this day.
Karyn says she had always known there were missing children. “But the discovery of the first gravesites at Tk'emlúps still felt surreal, leaving our communities overwhelmed with sorrow and anger — not just for the past but for systems that continue to harm our children today.”
She adds that she could not have written about the discoveries without including the survivors, elders and advocates she met along her journey as a reporter. “They taught me our people are stronger than we know. They changed the shape of history. I am deeply grateful to Canada’s National Observer for giving me the freedom and the space to share their stories with all of Canada.”
The second nomination, an exclusive investigation by our former Queen’s Park reporter Emma McIntosh, is a finalist in the online media category. Emma had watched Ontario’s Ford government ram through developments with special ministerial zoning orders (MZOs) that circumvented the usual checks and balances, including input from citizens with environmental concerns.
“When we started working on this story, few outlets were covering MZOs and even fewer were covering them in-depth,” Emma says. “I had been thinking about the best way to go deeper, but then a source spurred me on, telling me that there was a bigger pattern there that the public wasn't seeing. And that's exactly what we found.”
Emma pulled land titles for the projects to find out who stood to profit. Then she combed through election donation records to find out who each developer supported. She found the orders benefited developers who donated more than a quarter-million dollars to the Progressive Conservatives and a supportive third party, Ontario Proud. Emma’s initial investigation was the catalyst for more stories that turned up similar links between developers and the Ontario government.
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