Robin Taylor was my boss for nearly ten years. Too bad it wasn’t longer; he was a model for Canadian journalism. Robin 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 that! Both 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. That’s where we met. Canadian journalism held him for life. Despite his several management posts, Robin sympathized with organized labour. He was very much a product of South Shields. In the year Robin was born, that community’s rage organized the largest British Hunger March on London during the Great Depression. Decades later, Robin strongly defended his Public Affairs team: a valued colleague to broadcasters across Canada; 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, or whose officers led their people by staring in rear-view mirrors, to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s phrase.
Rebutting all corporate charges against CBC, Robin 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.” / Robert Fripp / Photo: Jan Tennant.