Sun/Province columnist wins national news award

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Vancouver Sun columnist Douglas Todd won a National Newspaper Award for his thought-provoking article on British Columbia’s mental health system and whether his father, who was institutionalized for 20 years, would have survived the modern version of the system.

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Read the column here:

•Douglas Todd: Would my father have survived the current mental health system? Probably not

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Todd, a veteran Postmedia journalist, received the William Southam Award for Feature Film at an event in Toronto on Friday, one of 23 awards recognizing excellence and achievement in print journalism in Canada.

“This is my attempt to understand what would likely have happened to my father if he had gone through what he did, but in the last decade, as most specialists believe BC’s housing and mental health settings have become deteriorated,” Todd wrote.

Another Postmedia journalist, Jane Sims of the London Free Press, won the Bob Levin Short Film Award for her story about Salman Afzaal, who, along with his family, was murdered by a white nationalist terrorist in June 2021.

Sims chronicled the tragedy the Afzaal family suffered and wrote about what London, Ontario, had lost as it struggled to cope with the aftermath and trial of murderer Nathaniel Veltman.

“It was feared that the more personal details of the horrific crimes would inflame the jury’s emotions. The events often seemed sanitized and stripped of the shock that drove this city to support our neighbors,” Sims wrote.

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Vancouver Sun and The Province journalists Lori Culbert, Katie DeRosa and Dan Fumano were finalists for sustained news coverage for their reporting on the affordable housing crisis in British Columbia. That category was won by reporters from The Toronto Star and The Narwhal for their joint efforts to expose details about the Ontario Greenbelt controversy.

Three other Postmedia publications, including The National Post, The Ottawa Citizen/Ottawa Sun and The Calgary Herald/Calgary Sun, were nominated for news commentary and photography, including coverage of last year’s wildfires.

On Friday, for the first time in its 75-year history, the NSA recognized work in a language other than French or English.

A team from Chinese-language publication Sing Tao, which has offices in Vancouver and Toronto, won the special topic award for its four-part series Embracing Canada, which explored the challenges facing Hong Kong’s second wave of immigrants.

The University of Victoria’s Climate Disaster Project received a Special Recognition Citation, which was created to honor journalism that does not fit into existing NNA categories but has an exceptional impact on the Canadian news industry.

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The project, essentially a teaching newsroom, trains journalism and writing students to cover climate change in a trauma-informed way.

Finalists and winners were selected from nearly 900 nominations submitted by 64 news organizations across Canada.

The awards program was established by the Toronto Press Club in 1949 to recognize the work of Canada’s newspapers. Competition has since expanded to news agencies and online news sites.

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