Globe journalist Hugh Winsor, who wrote the column The Power Game, has died at 87.Courtesy of family
Hugh Winsor, who has died at age 87, was a long-time Globe and Mail reporter and columnist. He spent most of his working life in Ottawa, where he had connections at every level: the cabinet, members of Parliament and civil servants. He thrived on talking with people and knowing things before anyone else. He wrote a column called The Power Game.
William Thorsell, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief from 1989 to 1999, said Mr. Winsor was the obvious pick to write the column.
“It was apparent that the best vehicle for [covering Ottawa’s power dynamics] would be a weekly column, rather than any kind of beat,” Mr. Thorsell said in an e-mail. “But who to do it? I knew enough about the people in our bureau to know it had to be Hugh Winsor, who got around, liked to gossip and was trusted by almost all.” Thus was born his column, which ran from 1997 to 2005.
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Mr. Winsor’s journalism, which encompassed far more than his political reporting, led to his admission to the Order of Canada in 2005. He said the story that made him the most proud was one that exposed injustices suffered by those harmed by thalidomide, a drug prescribed to pregnant women that caused physical deformities in their children.
Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson admits Hugh Windor to the Order of Canada.Bill Grimshaw/The Globe and Mail
The story was published in March of 1973, under the headline: “Thalidomide: After 10 years many Canadian victims have yet to receive any compensation.”
Mr. Winsor wrote: “It also points to the success of the drug companies involved in keeping the whole compensation process … in a blanket of secrecy. It also points to the failure of any public agency or government to intercede on the children’s behalf.”
Mr. Winsor’s articles on thalidomide prodded the federal minister of health and welfare to take action to help the victims – particularly those in Quebec, who had not received damage awards because of differences in the province’s legal system.
“The Quebec victims had missed their window in the Code Civil,” Mr. Winsor explained in 2014. “Although he couldn’t do anything about the law, Marc Lalonde, who was then the minister of health and welfare, was so upset about the unfairness to the Quebec victims that the federal government brought huge pressure on [pharmaceutical company] Richardson-Merrell to pay compensation along the scale of those payments made in the rest of the country.”
Mr. Winsor’s reporting on the thalidomide issue hinged on his knowledge of how courts and the legal system worked, something he picked up in his first newspaper job as a court reporter for the Oshawa Times.
Winsor said the story that made him the most proud was one that exposed injustices suffered by those harmed by thalidomide.Ernie Sparks/Supplied
Hugh Winsor was born on April 18, 1938, in Saint John, N.B., but was brought up in Norton, 55 kilometres away, where his father, Lacey Winsor, was the local doctor. His mother, Jean Winsor (née Townsend), was a public health nurse from Prince Edward Island. The two met on a ship going to a Vimy Ridge memorial celebration in France in 1936.
Dr. Winsor’s medical office was in the family home and Ms. Winsor helped out, sometimes taking over completely when her husband was away, as he often was during in the Second World War, as an officer in the Royal Canadian Army working in a military convalescent depot in Fredericton, N.B.
Young Hugh went to a local school in Norton but his parents wanted to send him to high school in Sussex because it offered better programs, so he took a 20-minute ride on the train over the Kennebecasis River. His sister, Elizabeth, said Hugh often ran late and the conductor would hold the train for him.
His lateness was a lifelong habit. His friend and colleague Jeffrey Simpson, a former national affairs columnist at The Globe, joked about “HWT,” or Hugh Winsor Time, at Mr. Winsor’s retirement party and also in a jocular goodbye column to him in The Globe.
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In a self-deprecating speech at his 80th birthday party, Mr. Winsor recalled playing hockey in his youth. “In semi-rural New Brunswick it was a lot easier to make the hockey teams,” he said.
In high school, he was on the debating team and was the valedictorian of his graduating class. He was also a Queen’s Scout, the highest level in the Scouting movement at the time, not an easy achievement.
His doctor father and nurse mother were delighted when their eldest child decided to study pre-med at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Dr. Winsor’s alma mater. But Hugh soon found himself writing for the school newspaper.
The Queen’s Journal had to go to the printer on Monday and Thursday, and those deadlines conflicted with the keen fledgling journalist’s commitments to organic chemistry and physics labs.
“The registrar said, if I couldn’t make it to my chemistry labs, the prognosis for medicine for me did not look good, so perhaps I should choose another path. I did — economics and political science — and it revolutionized my future,” Mr. Winsor said in his birthday speech.
A few credits short of graduating — which he made up later — he went down the road to the Oshawa Times, where as a court reporter he was surprised at the amount of trouble auto workers could get into. The job gave him lifelong insights into the workings of the legal system.
An idealistic young man, he volunteered to go to Tanzania in 1965 as part of a journalism training program under Canadian University Services Overseas (CUSO). He and his first wife, Judith Winsor (née Eubank), and their son, Chris, went to Africa for three years, with a short return to Canada when the couple’s twin daughters were born.
“They were three rewarding years in the communications agency of the government of Tanzania in Dar es Salaam,” Mr. Winsor wrote in The Globe and Mail. “I thought I was going to be writing speeches for [Tanzanian president] Julius Nyerere. That didn’t quite happen, although I got to know him, but I did train a number of Tanzanian journalists and did help start a features agency and made a life-long friendship with Ben Mkapa, the then editor of the party newspaper, who eventually won two terms as president of Tanzania.”
When the Winsor family returned to Canada in 1969, Mr. Winsor was hired to join The Globe’s editorial board as a foreign affairs writer, recognizing his experience in Africa. The same year, he wrote a profile of Mr. Nyerere, a man he deeply admired.
He also wrote an article about Zambia and its founding father, Kenneth Kaunda, another charismatic African leader, and the problems of managing the country’s rich copper reserves.
After a few years, Mr. Winsor drifted into covering politics and was a correspondent at Queen’s Park, the Ontario legislature. There the gregarious Mr. Winsor used his talents as a likeable, open person to glean information for more than one story a day.
“He would easily write 1,000 words a day when he was at Queen’s Park,” his son, Chris, said.
The Globe then transferred him to Ottawa, where he built his reputation as a political reporter. He was in demand as a commentator on television news programs, including doing regular spots on an Ottawa station with Mary Lou Finlay, who went on to co-host The Journal, the nightly CBC current affairs program.
The producers of The Journal reached out to Mr. Winsor when the program started in 1982.
“We wanted a political reporter connected to Ottawa who knew domestic politics and who had analytical skills,” said Mark Starowicz, the executive producer who built the program from scratch. “I remember he was very excited about coming to television.”
But compared to the adrenaline-fuelled work of daily news that he had been accustomed to, compiling longer think pieces for broadcast on The Journal was slower, involving much more waiting time.
“Hugh would pop into my office, eager to share the latest nugget from Ottawa. He strained at the bit because he wanted to do something with this information and he found it difficult to do it on television,” Mr. Starowicz said.
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After a stint at The Journal, Mr. Winsor was wooed back to his first love, The Globe and Mail, by managing editor Geoffrey Stevens and editor in chief Norman Webster.
Winsor in October, 1985.The Globe and Mail
“In June 1984, as we were closing in on the Liberal leadership convention to replace Pierre Trudeau, the one where John Turner defeated Jean Chrétien and started a civil war in the Liberal Party,” Mr. Winsor wrote, “I received a telephone call from Geoffrey Stevens inviting me to a lunch with him and Norman. I was busy preparing the so-called mandate biography documentary on Mr. Turner for The Journal but I decided that I could skip out of the edit suite long enough to have lunch,” Mr. Winsor recalled at his 80th birthday.
“One of them … said, ‘Look, you have been frigging around in television for almost three years. It’s time to get a real job again and do meaningful work. We have a vacancy in the Ottawa bureau and when can you start?’ After about 30 seconds, I said yes and it was the best decision in my whole career.”
Mr. Winsor never wanted to retire, but the rules said he had to leave at the age of 65. Ontario’s mandatory retirement law was abolished a short time later. As it happened, he kept writing for The Globe from Ottawa until a couple of years ago.
Mr. Winsor loved sailing. His grandfather had run a fishing company in Newfoundland, using schooners to ship cod to Europe. Mr. Winsor and his second wife, Christina Cameron, owned an old wooden schooner and they sailed around Lake Ontario and made some adventurous trips such as down the St. Lawrence River to Sorel, Que., and through the Richelieu River to Lake Champlain, where they visited his colleague Mr. Simpson at his cottage.
“Hugh was an excellent navigator in the days before GPS,” Ms. Cameron said.
Winsor loved sailing, and owned a wooden schooner with his second wife.Courtesy of family
The couple met when Mr. Winsor noticed a woman berating an architect outside the Royal Canadian Mint for damage he was doing to a heritage building. Mr. Winsor asked for her business card. She is an expert in World Heritage and worked for the federal government in that capacity.
“We had a lovely marriage,” Ms. Cameron said. “We had a lot in common. We played tennis, loved music and opera and sat down to dinner every evening for two hours to discuss who knows what.”
A frequent heart patient himself, Mr. Winsor was on the board of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. He was a patient representative with the Cardiovascular Network of Canada. He was a founding director of the North-South Institute, which promotes sustainable economic development.
Mr. Winsor died of a stroke on March 14. He leaves his wife, Ms. Cameron; his sisters, Margaret, Elizabeth and Pamela; his former wife, Judith Patterson; and their children, Chris, Megan and Stephanie. A sister, Barbara, predeceased him.
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