Mark Bourrie, BA (Waterloo, History) MJ (Carleton journalism), PhD (Ottawa, History) JD (Ottawa, Common Law) wrote for the Globe and Mail from 1978 to 1989 and for the Toronto Star from 1989 to 2004. He also contributed to other newspapers and major magazines in Canada and the United Kingdom.
He was a member of the Parliamentary Press Gallery from 1994 to 2018.
In 2018, he was called to the bar and now practices law in association with former Ontario Ombudsman Andre Marin.
He taught media history and journalism at Concordia University, history at Carleton University and Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa.
Mark is the author of 14 books. The most recent is Big Men Fear Me: The Fast Life and Quick Death of Canada's Biggest Media Mogul. His 2019 book Bush Runner: The Adventures of Pierre Radisson, was a Canadian best-seller, winner of the $30,000 RBC Charles Taylor Prize for literary excellence, was short-listed for the Ottawa city book award, and was a Globe and Mail Top 100 Book. His 2015 book Kill the Messenger: Stephen Harper’s Assault on Your Right to Know, was placed on the Globe and Mail list of Top 100 books of that year. The Fog of War: Censorship of Canada’s Media in The Second World War, an adaption of his PhD thesis, reached No. 6 on Maclean’s magazine’s best-seller list in 2012.
Mark has won several major media awards, including a National Magazine Award, and has been nominated for several others.
His academic writing in history and law has been published in Canada and The Second World War: Essays in Honour of Terry Copp (Geoff Hayes et al, eds, Wilfrid Laurier Press, 2012), the Global Media Journal and the Canadian Journal of Communication, The Canadian Journal of Commercial Arbitration and The Journal of Parliamentary Law.
Q: How long have you been in Ottawa, and what first brought you here?
Since 1994. I wanted to write about Parliament, and my wife’s father and sisters were here. I thought it was an interesting, beautiful place.
Q: How did you first get involved in writing, and subsequently, the writing community here?
I started as a newspaper reporter. I had written a commissioned book about a small village on Georgian Bay and had a contract for a collection of Great Lakes maritime disaster stories before I moved to Ottawa. My contacts with Ottawa’s writing community have been, for the most part, limited to historians and people who write about politics. I came across them quickly in my research work and met some fiction writers through Ottawa Magazine, where I was a contributing editor for a long time.
Q: How did being in such a community of writers shift your thinking about writing, if at all?
Writing – the actual putting words to paper -- is a solitary practice. That’s why it’s even more important to have a community, or at least a circle of friends who understand what you’re doing. I don’t see other writers every day, but I am always happy to run into them or be at their events. Colleagues reaffirm your work and value.
Q: What do you see happening here that you don’t see anywhere else? What does Ottawa provide, or allow?
Ottawa allows me to pitch projects that simply can’t be done anywhere else. I would never have been able to write Big Men Fear Me as a commercial project if I did not have fast and repeat access to Library and Archives Canada. In terms of the community, Ottawa lacks for nothing except a commercial non-fiction publishing house. We really need an Ottawa-based national publisher that can get books into independent book stores and the major chain across Canada.
Q: Have any of your projects responded directly to your engagements here? How have the city and its community, if at all, changed the way you approached your work?
I’ve written a little book on the Parliament buildings and wrote the text for Malak’s Parliament book. I also wrote a critique of Stephen Harper’s information control, published by HarperCollins in 2015 as Kill the Messengers. My latest book is really a Toronto story, but about half of the material in it came from Library and Archives Canada, often buried deep in the personal papers of political actors of the 1930s and 1940s. That kind of work requires a lot of time in the archives.
Q: What are you working on now?
A biography of the 17th century Jesuit missionary Jean de Brebeuf called Echon.
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