Behind the scenes stories from a Canadian Journalist overseas
The ride to the office is looking a bit different these days. My family and I left Moscow in late June and are now in London ! The correspondent’s job here is a bit different than in Russia – there, you have a fairly defined beat within a fairly defined geographic area. Here, on the…
Two years ago, a group of Siberian families who were fed up with the horrible pollution from nearby open pit coal mines made a plea to come to Canada, a place where “the snow is still white.” We went back to them and discovered not only were their pleas for help ignored, some of those…
Many things about living in Russia are great. Russians have fantastic stories to tell and the places they tell them are often incredible to travel to. But the beat-down from government propaganda is awful. The trolls are unrelenting and the lies spun from the top are depressing to hear over and over again. Take this…
Our story this week was about the mass firings of dozens, but probably hundreds, of Moscow metro workers. They didn’t show up for work late, or break safety rules or do anything wrong on the job – instead, their offence was signing what was supposed to be an anonymous petition calling for the release of…
Russia has shunned lockdowns at the expense of massive casualties from the COVID-19 pandemic. Russian propagandists like to take the worst case outcomes in the West and then say, see, we’re better than they are. In truth, Russia may end up eclipsing the United States and other hard hit western nations for COVID 19 as…
One of the most frequently asked questions I get about Russia is, “is it safe to fly?” For many westerners, the Soviet-era notion of dodgy aircraft falling out of the sky has been a persistent – but unfair – stereotype of Russia’s commercial airline industry. The overwhelming reality is that Aeroflot, Russia’s flag carrier, has…
A couple of years ago, an NGO reported that Russia has the worst sanitation record in the world among developed countries. Just back from a trip to the Caucasus region – Dagestan, in particular – and its easy to see why that’s the case. The report said 35 million Russians don’t have flush toilets in…
Huge thanks to the The Canadian Screen Awards and CBC News for putting my name forward as Best National Reporter. It is a great competition to be nominated for, and the competition is tough just to get this far. The nomination is for a year’s worth of work covering Russia, but it is specifically focused…
Earlier in March we filed a story on the extreme marathon they run across Lake Baikal. In the weeks since then, we’ve been doing our version of a journalistic marathon. Whenever you (ie: the CBC) spends some money to go somewhere far away or expensive, there is a strong incentive to wring as much content…
A few weeks back, we visited one the coolest – and coldest – places in Russia: Lake Baikal in Siberia. Its hard to get your head around the fact that 20 percent of all the freshwater on the planet is contained within its basin – and that, when you are out on its crystal clear…