I'm a journalist ... and I'm here to help

For as long as I can remember, I have been trying to pick the lock of the truth with words.

It has been an enterprise with mixed results. As a journalist who can recognize an SOS no matter how well it is disguised, I have answered many calls for help over the years.

This may come as a surprise to those who — in these Trumpian days of lies and madness in high office — revile reporters and the entire news industry, but it’s true nonetheless: Journalists remain the Hail Mary option for a lot of ordinary people in trouble. After the doomed court case, the feckless appeal, the dubious letter to the MP, the scribbler is often the last resort of the hopeless.

Party of One author Harris calls his book an ‘indictment’ of PM Harper

When Michael Harris was driving to distant corners of Canada while gathering facts and conducting interviews for his 500-page opus on the political turbulence the country has gone through under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, one former member of the Conservative caucus insisted on speaking to Mr. Harris on condition the two meet at a lonely highway gas station—more than 20 km outside the city.

And even then, in afterthought and following consultation with a lawyer, the interviewee, however eager to assist Mr. Harris, was so concerned about anything being traced back, that Mr. Harris not even paraphrase what he told him in his book.

Author Michael Harris’s new book is a takedown of Stephen Harper

By the time author Michael Harris nears the end of his magisterial review of the strife and times of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, it is as if he felt the need of a shower.

Almost 500 pages of Party of One: Stephen Harper and Canada’s Radical Makeover have by then been devoted to chronicling the Harper government’s bullying, abuse, duplicity, betrayal, affinity for crooks, public shaming of individuals, diminishment of democratic institutions.

“It was hard every day getting up and working on this particular government,” Harris told the Star in advance of the book’s publication this week. “It made you feel poorly.”