Mark Bourrie

Mark Bourrie is a Canadian lawyer, journalist, author, historian, and lecturer at Carleton University and the University of Ottawa. His work has appeared in many major Canadian magazines and newspapers.

Education

Bourrie earned his BA in History at the University of Waterloo in 1990. He holds a diploma in public policy and administration from the University of Guelph, a master's degree in journalism from Carleton University, a doctorate in Canadian media history from the University of Ottawa and Juris Doctor degree in common law from the University of Ottawa. He is a practicing member of the Ontario bar.

Journalism career

Before beginning a career in journalism, Bourrie worked in remote areas of Canada for the Canadian Pacific Railway. He worked as a forest fire fighter in northern Ontario in 1981. Bourrie was a summer student reporter at The Hamilton Spectator and The London Free Press and a student reporter at The Globe and Mail before taking a job on The Toronto Sun in 1979 as assistant business editor and news reporter. He worked for two decades as a freelance news and feature writer, primarily for The Globe and Mail from 1981 to 1989 and the Toronto Star from 1989 to 1999 and sporadically since then. He was Parliamentary correspondent for the Law Times from 1994 until 2006. He also wrote for the InterPress Service, the United Nations-sponsored news and feature service. By the late 1990s, he had branched out from newspaper freelance work to book and magazine writing.

Bourrie won a National Magazine Award (NMA) in 1999 and honorable mentions in 2000 and 2003, in the Social Affairs category. He was part of an Ottawa magazine team nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2015. In 2004, he was nominated for a Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) award for an article about the Depression-era execution in Ottawa of a man who was probably innocent. The article was researched entirely in the National Archives of Canada. He won a Canadian Archaeological Association public writing award (1989) and several Ontario Newspaper Awards (formerly Western Ontario Newspaper Awards). He also won the Ontario Community Canadian Newspaper Award for columnist of the year in 2008. His 1979 eyewitness account of an F4 tornado in Woodstock, Ontario, helped earn his newspaper, The London Free Press, a National Newspaper Award nomination. Most of his NMA-nominated work focused on issues related to people wrongly accused of criminal offences or terrorism. He was a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery from 1994 to 2018.

In 2012 Bourrie stated that the Chinese government-owned Xinhua News Agency asked him to collect information on the Dalai Lama by exploiting his journalistic access to the Parliament of Canada. Bourrie stated that he was asked to write for Xinhua in 2009 and sought advice from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), but was ignored. Bourrie stated that the request for information about the Dalai Lama caused him to refuse to continue to write articles for Xinhua. He wrote an article exposing the Chinese agency's actions.

In the fall of 2012, he and several other Parliament Hill journalists started the online publication Blacklock's Reporter, a paywall-funded daily news report. The publication concentrates on news that is normally missed by media that focuses on partisan politics. He continues writing for mass media and legal publications on defamation and expression issues, propaganda and censorship. He also writes on criminal and civil legal issues.

Academic

Bourrie's PhD thesis was on Canada's press censorship system and was published by Douglas & McIntyre as "The Fog of War". From 2007 to 2009, he was a lecturer at Concordia University's journalism school, teaching reporting, criticism and media history. He is a contract lecturer in Carleton University's History department and the University of Ottawa's Canadian Studies department. He has written in scholarly publications on the media relations strategy of William Lyon Mackenzie King. He has also written academic papers on the legal rights of journalists to membership in Canada's Parliamentary Press Gallery and the culpability of mainstream journalists in criminal states like Nazi Germany and Rwanda during its 1990s genocide.

Books

Ninety Fathoms Down (1995) was Canada's first collection of Great Lakes shipwreck and disaster stories.

His book on David Michael Krueger, a teenage serial killer held in a psychiatric hospital in Ontario, was published in 1997 as By Reason of Insanity and was excerpted by several major Canadian newspapers.

In the 1990s and early 2000s, he also wrote books on Canada's Parliament buildings, corporate scams, and Great Lakes ship disasters. His second Great Lakes shipwrecks book was published in 2004 by the University of Michigan Press.

An adaption of Bourrie's master's thesis, on the role of the Canadian media in the banning of cannabis was published by Key Porter as Hemp in 2004.

His study of Canada's press censorship system in the Second World War was adapted from his PhD thesis. The Fog of War was published by in July, 2011 by Douglas & McIntyre. It reached sixth on Maclean's magazine non-fiction bestseller list on September 1, 2011.

His collection of Canada's best war correspondence from the time of the Vikings until the deployment of Canadian peacekeepers in the Balkans in the 1990s, Fighting Words, was published by Dundurn Press in the fall of 2012.

HarperCollins published Bourrie's book on Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government's information control, called Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper's Assault on Your Right to Know. Previously, the book was under contract to Thomas Allen and Sons but was dropped before the company was sold to Dundurn Press The book was released by HarperCollins Canada on January 27, 2015 and began appearing on best-seller lists ten days later. This book was listed as one of the Globe and Mail's Top 100 Books of 2015.

In March, 2015, HarperCollins announced it had acquired Canadian rights to The Killing Game, Bourrie's study of ISIS propaganda and recruitment, for publication in the spring of 2016. This book began appearing on the Canadian independent bookstore bestseller list in late April, 2016.

He is scheduled to publish a biography of French fur trader and adventurer Pierre Radisson in the spring of 2019. It will be published by the Windsor-based publishing house Biblioasis.

Personal life

Bourrie is from the Georgian Bay area of Ontario but lives in Ottawa. His interest in Great Lakes shipwrecks was kindled by the loss of four of his paternal cousins in the sinking of the Sand Merchant off Cleveland during the Great Depression. He is married to Marion Van de Wetering, a corporate lawyer employed by the Government of Canada who is the author of two regional history books, An Ottawa Album (1999) and A Kingston Album (2000). Bourrie is an amateur paleontologist specializing in trilobites.

Bibliography

• Chicago of the North. Annan and Sons, 1993.
• Ninety Fathoms Down. Toronto: Dundurn, 1995.
• The Parliament Buildings. Toronto: Dundurn, 1996.
• By Reason of Insanity: The David Michael Krueger Story. Toronto: Dundurn, 1997.
• Flim Flam. Toronto: Dundurn, 1998.
• Parliament. Toronto: Key Porter, 1999. (preface to Malak Karsh's photo essay on Parliament Hill)
• Hemp. Toronto: Key Porter, 2004.
• True Canadian Stories of the Great Lakes. Toronto: Key Porter/Prospero, 2005.
• Many a Midnight Ship. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press/Toronto: Key Porter, 2005.
• The Fog of War. Vancouver, Douglas & McIntyre, 2011.
• Fighting Words: Canada's Best War Reporting. Toronto: Dundurn, 2012
• Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper's Assault on Your Right to Know. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada, 2015
• The Killing Game: Martyrdom, Murder and the Lure of ISIS. Toronto: HarperCollins Canada 2016
• Bushrunner: The Adventures of Pierre Radisson. Windsor: Biblioasis, 2019

External links

• Mark Bourrie's political blog
• Paper on Mackenzie King's media relations strategy.