Shining a light in dark places: A New Year's message from our newsroom

Since you’re reading a news website right now, we’d like to start the new year by saying “thanks.” Thanks for supporting local journalism. And these days, your support is more important than ever.

With the world’s biggest internet companies taking a large piece of the Canadian advertising market over the past several years, the financial pressure on local newsrooms – which keep the lights on by selling commercials – has never been greater. And that’s a shame, because local news at its best is the place where people can stay informed about what’s happening in their communities.

So as the calendar flips to 2024, we’d like to share a few examples from the past year of work by CTV News Vancouver that we hope has made a helpful contribution. As you’ll see, some of the stories we looked into and uncovered in 2023 may have never been told at all, if not for the efforts of local journalists.

For one telling example, you actually have to go back to September of 2022. Ken Sim was running to be Vancouver’s next mayor and making public safety a big part of his platform, with a promise to hire 100 new police officers. The Vancouver Police Union endorsed candidate Sim as he leaned into a powerful talking point: four people a day were being randomly assaulted in Vancouver. There was just one problem with that startling statistic. It was out of date. In fact, we now know, thanks to the work of our reporters in a piece we published in November, that “stranger attacks” were dropping dramatically at the time, down more than 50 percent, to an average of 1.8 per day in the first half of 2022. (The average would drop further, to 1.1, in the first half of 2023.) Sim's public safety platform helped sweep him into office, but it’s still not clear why the police – who compile and keep crime statistics – never publicly corrected the candidate who was promising to swell their ranks. What we do know for sure is that we had to ask the department repeatedly before we finally got our hands on information that might have played a major role in an important election – long after the votes were counted.

B.C.’s struggling health-care system got a lot of our newsroom’s attention in 2023, and once again, information the public deserves to know about was hard to shake loose. CTV News reporter Penny Daflos spent months speaking to health-care workers who feared being reprimanded over publicly raising concerns about poor quality care. When they finally made the courageous decision to speak out, they described a culture of fear and silence that pressures workers to stay quiet about unacceptable conditions in a system plagued by long delays for some procedures and chronic staff shortages. Once again, local reporting helped shine a light on something the authorities would rather keep in the dark. And shining that light into dark places is actually getting harder in B.C.

For some of the most important stories of 2023, CTV News reporters had to navigate the provincial government’s Freedom of Information process, a process made more difficult and more expensive under the NDP administration. In one case – after paying the NDP’s newly-required FOI fees – we still waited almost two months before we finally got our hands on a damning report into sexual harassment and other toxic workplace practices inside B.C. Emergency Health Services, the agency responsible for paramedics and dispatchers. That’s local journalism at its most tenacious: exposing problems that those at the top of the public service would prefer to keep from the public they serve.

Because, when it comes right down to it, serving the public – the community – is perhaps a local newsroom’s highest calling. And last fall, newsrooms across the Lower Mainland came together to help a community grieve for a fallen hero. That hero was RCMP Const. Rick O’Brien. The 51-year-old was shot and killed in the line of duty in September while executing a search warrant in Coquitlam. When thousands gathered on Oct. 4th at the Langley Events Centre to pay their respects, the procession and service was carried live on local television and streamed on local news websites. While B.C. is a highly competitive media market, we all helped each other for this story, sharing resources and technology to make sure people across the province could watch the proceedings.

And finally, we’d like to draw your attention to a new initiative from our newsroom that we plan to continue in 2024. It comes in response to something a lot of people have been asking us for: more uplifting stories on the news. While Mike McCardell always gets The Last Word on CTV News Vancouver with stories that inspire, we think we can do even more to bring much-deserved attention to people making a difference in our community. We’re calling them CTV’s Community Heroes and we’re sure they’ll make you smile. You can nominate someone you know who’s making a positive impact here.

From chasing hard hitting investigations, to telling the stories of tragedy and triumph that bring us together, our newsroom was busier than ever in 2023 keeping our community informed. So again, thank you for watching, clicking and reading local journalism. Your support makes a big difference – and we wish you the very best for 2024.