Robin Taylor was my boss for nearly ten years. Too bad it wasn’t longer; he was a model for Canadian journalism. He died on June 12 2013, in Basingstoke, England. One of six children to William and Joan (née Hendry) Taylor, Robin was born on Boxing Day 1932, in South Shields, County Durham. A Labour town. Remember the year, and the name of that place!
After grammar school, the Newcastle Chronicle employed Robin as a photo engraver. Engraver? Sounds posh. Wearing thick rubber gloves he spread printer’s ink on printing plates. He moved to London. Then to Canada, where work on survey crews in the north paid his way through the University of British Columbia. A Woodrow Wilson scholarship to Stanford won him an M.A. in History. Next, to the Winnipeg Free Press; after that, to the Winnipeg Tribune and the Vancouver Sun. Ah yes, Winnipeg, home to the Winnipeg General Strike and Bloody Sunday, June 21, 1919. On the longest day of the year. Generous daylight hours let this become the nastiest strike in Canada’s history.
Robin held posts at the CBC in Winnipeg, Edmonton and St. John’s before becoming Executive Producer of The Fifth Estate in Toronto, and Head of Current Affairs Programming. Canadian journalism held him for life. Despite his management posts, Robin sympathized with organized labor. He was very much a product of South Shields. In the year Robin was born, community rage organized the largest British Hunger March on London during the Great Depression. Decades later, Robin was a strong defender of his Public Affairs team, a valued colleague to broadcasters across Canada, and a champion of Canadian journalism in public broadcasting.
In the year 2000, twenty-two major Canadian corporations charged the CBC with “inaccuracy, bias and lack of balance.” Perhaps the CBC had just reacted to corporations that were less than straight, biased against labour, and whose officers led by staring at rear-view mirrors, to borrow a phrase from Marshall McLuhan.
Rebutting all corporate charges, Robin Taylor challenged corporate use of “political power, financial power, labour power, business power, and so on…” Tweaking corporate noses, he pointed out that “a major responsibility of Current Affairs programming is to reveal how such powers are used.” / RSPF / Photo: Jan Tennant.