The Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife receives Michener-Baxter Award

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The Globe and Mail’s Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife received the Michener-Baxter Award for exceptional service to Canadian public service journalism during a ceremony at Rideau Hall on Thursday.

Mr. Fife, who joined The Globe in 2016, became the 10th journalist to receive this citation, with Governor-General Mary Simon bestowing the award Thursday evening during an event that also saw La Presse win the 2024 Michener Award for its investigation into rampant dysfunction in Quebec’s youth protection system.

The exceptional service prize was first introduced in 1983 in honour of the first Michener Award-winner Clive Baxter just over a decade earlier.

“At a time when journalism is under fire around the world, it’s even more important that we honour great Canadian journalists who work tirelessly to uncover the truth, keep us informed and inspire future generations of journalists to do the same,” said Margo Goodhand, president of the Michener Awards Foundation.

Mr. Fife says the keys to his success in the trade – and he does believe journalism is a trade that requires constant practice – have always been reporting on Ottawa from the perspective of the interests of people in his small hometown of Chapleau, Ont., as well as talking to everybody with respect.

“I talked to the cleaners, the guards, the messengers, political staffers, Cabinet ministers because everybody has a set of ears,” he said. “And if you treat people nicely they’ll tell you.”

Getting information out of governments of all stripes got immeasurably harder during the administration of former prime minister Stephen Harper, who barred civil servants from explaining their work to the media and forced reporters to deal with communications staffers, Mr. Fife said. This excessive secrecy worsened with the election of former prime minister Justin Trudeau, he said, and there is no indication that Prime Minister Mark Carney’s new government intends to improve this trend.

Plus, he added, Canada’s weak access to information laws are so antiquated it can take two to five years to get a reply to a request for certain facts.

The Globe’s editor-in-chief David Walmsley heralded Mr. Fife’s mentorship of young journalists as well as his many scoops over a long career. He said the most outstanding piece by Mr. Fife was his breaking the SNC-Lavalin affair, which revealed allegations in 2019 that then-prime minister Trudeau put pressure on his attorney-general, Jody Wilson-Raybould, to help the engineering and construction firm avoid criminal prosecution.

“Bob was not only ahead of the pack – but ahead of the Prime Minister – in being able to reveal what had gone on,” he said. “It was a high-risk but essential piece of digging that gave us a true understanding of what was going on behind cabinet doors.”

Mr. Fife said he learned to work hard by fighting fires each summer while studying at university and entered journalism by fluke one summer after graduating, opting to join his friend at a radio station in Ottawa.

Mr. Fife has covered Parliament Hill for nearly five decades, working in an array of newsrooms including The Canadian Press, the Sun Media chain, the National Post and CTV.

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He said he was proud of his many scoops in federal politics, but was struck by the stories he did on a federal no-fly list that saw Muslim children barred from getting on planes with their family members because they shared a name with another person accused of terrorism.

“Those stories really made a difference in terms of forcing the government to change it so that these kids weren’t on the no-fly list,” he said.

The Globe was also named a finalist for the 2024 Michener Award for two separate investigations. One was nominated for exposing how private for-profit nursing agencies operated during the pandemic and another found serious flaws in Canada’s food-safety system after a listeria outbreak that killed three people and sickened many more.