Roy MacGregor -Paper Trails: From The Backwoods To The Front Page, A Life In Stories

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From his early days in the pages of Maclean's, to stints at the Toronto Star, Ottawa Citizen, National Post and most famously from his perch on page two of the Globe and Mail,  MacGregor was one of the country's must-read journalists. While news  media were leaning increasingly right or left, he always leaned north,  his curiosity trained by the deep woods and cold lakes of Algonquin Park  to share stories from Canada's farthest reaches, even as he worked in  the newsrooms of its southern capitols. From Parliament to the backyard  rink, subarctic shores to prairie expanses, MacGregor shaped the way  Canadians saw and thought about themselves—never entirely untethered  from the land and its history

When MacGregor was still a young editor at Maclean's, the  21-year-old chief of the Waskaganish (aka Rupert's House) Crees, Billy  Diamond, found in Roy a willing listener as the chief was appealing  desperately to newsrooms across Ottawa, trying to bring attention to the  tainted-water emergency in his community. Where other journalists had  shrugged off Diamond's appeals, MacGregor got on a tiny plane into  northern Quebec. From there began a long friendship that would one day  lead MacGregor to a Winnipeg secret location with Elijah Harper and his  advisors, a host of the most influential Indigenous leaders in Canada,  as the Manitoba MPP contemplated the Charlottetown Accord and a vote  that could shatter what seemed at the time the country's last chance to  save Confederation.

This was the sort of exclusive access to vital Canadian stories that  Roy MacGregor always seemed to secure. And as his ardent fans will  discover, the observant small-town boy turned pre-eminent journalist put  his rare vantage point to exceptional use. His presentation will be  filled with reminiscences of an age when Canadian newsrooms were  populated by outsized characters, outright rogues and passionate  practitioners.