Curt Petrovich

Limited Term - Fall 2024

I was born and raised in a suburb of Toronto, Ontario where I graduated from Ryerson in 1983 with a B.A.A. in Radio and Television Arts. In 1986 I joined the CBC by accepting a job working in what was then known as Frobisher Bay, in the North West Territories. I planned on giving it six months. I ended up staying nearly seven years.

My career with the CBC then took me to Winnipeg, Manitoba, where I became a National Reporter for the network. It was in Winnipeg that I began working on what today is still the single-most significant story of my career. My investigation revealed a scheme hatched in Premier Gary Filmon’s office to create a dummy political party in the 1995 Provincial election, using First Nation dupes as candidates, in order to try and siphon votes away from the NDP in the 1995 Provincial Election. My work exposed both the audacious and brazen attempt by political elite to steal an election as well as the complete incompetence of Elections Manitoba which was the oversight body which should have discovered the crime, but didn’t. I won the Michener Award for meritorious public service journalism in 1999.

In 2001 I joined the CBC’s parliamentary bureau in Ottawa, leading coverage of two other seismically stunning stories that unfolded in public inquiries: The extraordinary rendition of Maher Arar, and the Sponsorship scandal. My job also involved travelling with the Prime Minister from time to time on global trips. Four years later, I left the Hill for BC, where I took on the job of National reporter for the province. In between foreign assignments in the U.S., Europe and Asia, my investigative work has been recognized by a number of groups that celebrate excellence in journalism, including The Jack Webster Foundation, The Radio and Television News Director's association, the Canadian Association of Journalists, and The New York Festivals.

Since 2007, no story has occupied more of my time, interest and curiosity than that of the death of Robert Dziekanski and the investigation into what happened. It has been a manifestation of my credo which is to keep asking questions until there are satisfactory answers, especially after other journalists have decided to abandon the issue, out of either frustration or misjudgment.

Over the years, I have been called on to report on countless critical incidents, catastrophes and humanitarian crises: from the devastating Manitoba flood in 1997 which overran the entire city of Grand Forks North Dakota, to the seminal Columbine school shooting in Littleton, Colorado, to more recent events including the 2011 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan, the worst drought in Eastern Africa in a generation that same year, and Typhoon Haiyan’s swath of destruction in the Philippines in 2013. It was following my trip to the Philippines, after some particularly difficult conditions, that I was eventually diagnosed with PTSD. I was fortunate to have been one of only six Canadians admitted to a global study into the efficacy of using MDMA (Ecstasy) in clinical therapy. Ever the journalist, even when I was at my darkest point, I collaborated on a documentary which for the first time in my career would make ME the focus of the story. Throughout my illness and treatment, I maintained an interest in the sprawling and complicated story that is the subject of Blamed and Broken. My treating physicians encouraged me to use writing as a therapy, even when I was unable to carry out the job which has been my life’s work for more than thirty years. It was good advice.

In 2020 I developed and taught a course at KPU on advanced audio story telling. That same year and into 2021 I wrote a series of pieces for The Tyee, centred on the renaissance in psychedelics to treat mood disorders and the regulatory and legal bias against them.

I currently live in Port Moody, BC.