In Conversation with the Gazette's new Editor-in-Chief

Bert Archer on Bill 96, why he won't use the word "woke" and what the future holds for Quebec's oldest daily newspaper.

There’s this story my dad tells about skipping school, witnessing a heist and winding up in the newspaper.

The “only time” he and his friends ever cut class at Lake of Two Mountains High School, they heard some commotion on Oka Rd. So the pack of 17-year-olds ran from their hangout by the train tracks and came upon a manhunt for three bank robbers who’d just shot a cop on their way out the door.

The trio forced their way into an elderly woman’s house on the avenues before barricading the door and forcing a standoff with police. One of the cops, Nelson “Nelly” Lavallée, knew one of the robbers and managed to disarm his crew without firing a shot.

“Nelly had just seen his friend get shot, he was beet red and furious,” my father told me. “He said something like, ‘Chuck, you motherfucker, get your ass out the door or I’ll come in and choke you.’ And he came out with his hands up.

“That was Nelly. He was also great wing ding pitcher…”

I interrupted: “What’s a great wing ding pitcher?”

“Like softball but when you whip it underhand. You know, a wing dinger! A wing dinger, man!”

During the standoff, the Montreal Gazette dispatched a photographer to the scene and he captured a few shots of the action. In one of them, a young man dressed in a t-shirt and blue jeans (who bears a striking resemblance to this reporter) watches on as police arrest the robbers.

My dad (top right) makes the paper.

The photo of my teenage dad not in school on a warm May afternoon made its way onto A3 (the second most important page of a newspaper, for the uninitiated). Had my grandfather Charlie seen his oldest son playing hookie in his morning paper, he would have had a little tête-à-tête that may not have ended so well for dad.

But my grandmother cut the page out of the paper and Charlie — a World War II vet who brooked no bullshit — was apparently none the wiser. Or if he was, he never let on.

This is the role the Montreal Gazette played in so many of our lives. For Quebec’s anglophone population, it is both a window into ourselves and our seat at the table of democracy in Quebec.

Years before I joined the Gazette as a reporter, I remember spying Aislin’s cartoons over breakfast or losing myself in the folkloric writing of Canadiens reporter Red Fisher. Peggy Curran, Mike Boone, Josh Freed and Sue Montgomery were all household names alongside La Presse columnists like Foglia or Dennis Lessard (we were a two newspaper household).

That relationship deepened when I joined the paper 11 years ago. For all its flaws — the corporate culling of staff became a seasonal event — we were a family of reporters working for a paper that was central to the anglo identity in Quebec. Contrary to what some hateful columnists would have you believe, the Gazette isn’t merely dispatches from the Westmount elite to the dreaded Rest Of Canada.

Our community of readers included three Mohawk communities, Caribbean Montrealers, the Jewish diaspora, the tough-as-nails Irish of the Sud Ouest and our brothers and sisters in the Cree nations to name a few.

It was on behalf of the Gazette that I got to travel into Inuit territory, to share a private flight with the future prime minister, to get arrested during a riot and face off with some white nationalists who repeatedly threatened my life. Until the day I am forced to retire, I will consider myself a product of the Montreal Gazette, first and foremost.

Which brings me to Bert Archer, the Gazette’s new editor in chief.

When you work in a newsroom for long enough, you learn to greet a change in management with a mixture of garden variety pessimism and soul crushing dread.

There are only so many times you can hear the new boss use phrases like “do more with less” (prepare for layoffs) or “we’re learning to adapt to a changing media landscape” (we have no fucking idea what we’re doing) before your ability to experience joy dies.

Eventually, you realize that things at the paper won’t get worse before they get better. They’ll just get worse.

Archer is an interesting fellow. I met him at a party. He wore a suit jacket that looked like it once belonged to Arsenio Hall. Also, the Globe and Mail once referred to him as “Bad boy Bert … Canada’s literary bad boy.” 

More on that later.

I only worked under two editors in chief at the Montreal Gazette. The first, Alan Allnutt, came by the office once in the two years I worked under him. He called me Craig. I did not care for him after that.

The second, Lucinda Chodan, was at the helm for the better part of a decade. She came from the prairies and wrote country music songs with her husband. Once, when we were investigating white nationalists in Montreal, Lucinda took it upon herself to stake out the home of a suspected neo Nazi from 6 a.m. until her shift started hours later. I’d never seen a manager do that before. I have a great deal of respect for Lucinda.

From the handful of interviews Archer has given since he was hired, we know he’s originally from Montreal, moved out of the province when he was a kid and cut his teeth in the industry as literary critic and editor. In Toronto, he worked with Xtra magazine, was the city editor for Eye Weekly, the review editor for Quill and Quire and his work has appeared in every major national newspaper in Canada (that’s three newspapers if you’re keeping track).

I sat down with Archer at Reuben’s Delicatessen on Wednesday to talk about his new job, the role of anglo media in Quebec and his reputation as something of a literary shit disturber.

***

Bert Archer, the Gazette’s new editor-in-chief.

Christopher Curtis: Let’s start with the toughest question, how’s your French?

Bert Archer: My French is fine. I’m not fluent but my mother’s main language was French. Well, French, Portuguese and Spanish but her whole extended family spoke and lived in French. You move away, you lose some but for the past 10 years I’ve been travelling and travelling in the francophone world; Switzerland, Belgium, West Africa. I’m not totally out of practice but in these past few weeks I’ve had time to work on it. I’ve got a subscription to Journal de Montréal, I read La Presse, listen to Radio-Canada so it’s going pretty well.

It’s funny, you’re not the first to lead with that question. CJAD (radio) did an interview after it was announced I’d be taking the job. Well their first question was “Fairmount or St-Viateur bagels?” but I don’t want to start this job with one hand tied behind my back so I didn’t answer. Then they asked me to speak French.

CC: Your family left Montreal when you were a kid. That’s sort of how it went with my dad’s family. All five of his siblings left Quebec in the 1970s and 80s. I think that, just as a lot of francophones may have an inaccurate view of anglophones, many of the anglos who left the province cling to a Montreal that doesn’t really exist anymore. You’ve been around the city since leaving but was there a gap between your expectations of Montreal versus reality?

BA: Not much. There’s a tonne of details that I’m still catching up on but I’ve watched Montreal and Quebec evolve over the years. Family still lives here so you go to a reunion and you get all the gossip and updates on politics, culture. That’s 14 aunts and uncles, about 30 cousins still living here and so yeah, there haven’t been any big surprises yet. What kinds of things are people usually unaware of?

CC: People get a lot of the details wrong. So with Bill 21, for instance, you get people who think it bans hijab-wearing women from all public sector jobs when it blocks access to “positions of authority.” There’s a fundamental misunderstanding of politics here and a misconception about Quebec being more racist than the rest of Canada. When, I think, it’s more that francophone culture is upfront with its prejudice whereas anglophones tend to wait until someone has left the room to be honest about their biases.

BA: It’s the same thing in Australia with their anti-Indigenous prejudice. It’s not necessarily worse than Canada but it’s in your face. I think one of the big changes, in Quebec, is that the anglo-franco split is not what it was in 1979 or 1995. 

I think the people that are here want to be here. And there’s a real parallel with the Gazette in that sense. They want to be here, they don’t necessarily want to change the province. They’re not anti-French. Everyone is bilingual, with very few exceptions, and they are as interested in French-expressed culture as anglo-expressed culture.

And how could you not? The film, the theatre, the literary scene here is incredible and it’s mostly in French. So you get a front row seat to most of the best stuff that’s going on in the country.

CC: Linguistic tensions are probably worse now than they’ve been in a generation. Mathieu Bock-Côté has implied that anglophones here aren’t really quebecers but rather representatives of the rest of Canada in Quebec. You’re seeing some anglo commentators make apocalyptic predictions. It’s not great. I imagine there’s a tough balancing act for you here. On the one hand, if you react too strongly to a provocation, you’ll be seen as an angryphone, an entitled brat, a baby. 

But on the flipside, you have a duty to report on the excesses of the language debate. You look at Bill 96 and it creates more barriers for Indigenous people to get through college, it allows language inspectors to access your medical records without a warrant, it gives them search and seizure powers that are clearly unconstitutional. How do you strike a balance between being a good anglophone neighbour and knowing when to put your foot down as an organization?

BA: The Gazette’s mandate and audience is fairly clear. It’s the English language daily. That doesn’t mean it’s just for anglophones, it’s for anyone who reads English. We have a lot of French-speaking readers and so I think we’re aware of our place in the media ecosystem. But when something like Bill 96 — which has direct and possibly really damaging effects on the anglophone community — you have to speak out.

There is a line, you can’t be angryphones or even worse. There’s such a specific situation here. There’s some precedent for it around the world, but not a lot, where the perceived oppressed minority is part of a global hegemony. It’s not like most minorities and you shouldn’t behave like most minorities because it’s not the same situation. It’s like the Spanish in Catalonia. So there’s a balance that needs to be struck, not just by the Gazette but by anglo rights groups in general, where there’s a line you can’t cross.

Because if you do, you start to sound more extreme. I don’t see a lot of that here. I don’t think that line is so tough to see. Because, unlike 1979-1980, unlike 1995 it’s not us versus them. Occasionally when some legislation, like Bill 96, comes around it’s different. But the anglophones I know, and the Gazette, they feel they’re part of Quebec and not just a little pocket inside it.

CC: So if we go east of St-Laurent Blvd. we won’t disintegrate?

BA: No we won’t.

CC: The Gazette is as an old an institution as you get in anglo North America. It dates back to the American Revolution, when it was a French language pamphlet to spread the rebellion north. But it’s been a really tough 30 years; layoffs, buyouts and changes in ownership. When I was there, it often felt like it’s still being run as though it’s this enormous paper like it used to be. The resources just aren’t there anymore. Do you think it’s time for the Gazette to get more selective about what it covers? Which isn’t to say it doesn’t report on the big news of the day but that maybe you can’t send reporters to every press conference. How do you see yourself working with those limitations?

BA: I hope this isn’t too disappointing but I didn’t come here to impose a big plan. I’m in the process of talking to every staff member. Talking to each one for about an hour. What’s working, what’s not working, that sort of thing. So whatever change, whatever tweak there’s going to be, it won’t come from me. It’ll grow out of what the people who are the real experts, the staff. You look at Jill Page, she’s been on staff for 51 years, Terry Mosher, 50 years…

CC: JILL PAGE HAS BEEN ON STAFF FOR 51 YEARS?

BA: Yeah.

CC: Holy shit. She doesn’t look it.

BA: Almost certainly there will be changes but I don’t know what those are. I’m asking people about the future. Something that I was not entirely expecting is that everyone, no matter what their age, when you ask them where they see themselves in five years, they answer “at the Gazette.” When I ask what they want to be doing, it’s almost unanimous, they want to be doing the same thing. That’s extraordinary. They love what they do and they want to have as much resources and elbow room to do what they do.

I don’t get the sense that anyone’s trying to butter me up. I didn’t come here to lay off staff or make major changes. If we are going to make changes, I want them to come from the staff.

CC: What do you think the Gazette still does really well?

BA: I think we still have a really good sense of what kinds of stories will resonate with our readers. It showed in our Bill 96 coverage, which was not only good but drove coverage in other papers. Bill 96, among a lot of French speakers, wasn’t as big an issue until it started showing up on our front page again and again.

CC: (La Presse columnist) Yves Boisvert told me a lot of francophones haven’t combed through Bill 96 as much as some anglophones and many weren’t aware of the more problematic provisions. So when anglos started to speak up, it may have sounded like us whining about language again when in fact the criticism was rooted in specific provisions of the law.

BA: My impression is the columnists in le Journal de Montréal weren’t writing about Bill 96 two months ago. And after the Gazette’s coverage, they really started engaging with the issue. That’s a classic example of agenda setting. By highlighting overreaches — like unlawful search and seizure — those are overreaches that anyone can have a problem with regardless of language. You don’t have to be anglophone to think unconstitutional powers of search and seizure are a bad idea. So when you have someone like (Gazette editor) Enza Micheletti comes across a news item, she has so much institutional knowledge that she can say “This is big, this is something we haven’t seen before” and she’s right.

CC: Enza Michaletti scared the hell out of me when I was an intern. She also made me the writer and reporter I am. Hands down one of the best employees at the Montreal Gazette.

Maybe one of the hardest parts of your job is that you’ll always have two competing roles. You have a newsroom that wants to do labour-intensive reporting. And you have a company that has debts to pay off and shareholders to please. In the past, there’s been a perception that the editor-in-chief is representing Postmedia to the Montreal Gazette and not the other way around. I’m not saying that’s true but it’s how it was perceived. Is there a balance you can achieve there?

BA: Definitely. That was a big part of my hiring process. One of the first things I asked was, “What exactly are the perceived responsibilities of the Gazette to Postmedia and to what extent do I have autonomy to do what I think is right?” Their answer to the last question was “Total autonomy.” If we write something that’s politically to the left, that’s not something the National Post would write, I won’t get a call. I don’t get any pressure. There’s a lot of communication but no dictation.

And yeah, you have to be facing both ways when you’re part of a newspaper chain. But my job is to look out for what’s best for the Montreal Gazette. And only when that comes in direct conflict with Postmedia will that be a problem. And the fact is they don’t come into conflict. Our interests are the same. We want a profitable, successful paper.

CC: How is the Gazette adjusting to a business model that’s gone beyond just having the car dealerships buy ads in the paper? I know there’s been some adjustment in how money gets made — sponsored content, newsletters and the like but what can you tell me about how you keep the paper profitable?

BA: We’ve got newsletters already, one of former editors — Emma McKay — has moved on to take care of newsletters (for Postmedia) exclusively. These things come and go, there’s different things that work at different times. Not just for profit but to get your product into people’s hands, to get it to different audiences in different ways and newsletters are really working right now. 

It opens up a lot of different ways to talk to your audience. A lot of them are personality driven, it’s a way for journalists who might be behind the scenes to put a bit more of themselves out there. 

A month ago, I would have said it’s hard for people to love a brand and much easier for them to love a person. My first issue, I wrote a letter from the editor and set up a new email (tellbert@postmedia.com) asking for feedback and suggestions. That could have gone wrong in a number of ways but it didn’t. We’re north of 300 responses and they all start with “Congradulations!” Almost all of them use the word “love” in the same sentence as the Gazette. They’re not just writing a line or two, they’re writing five, six, seven paragraphs about their history with the Gazette, their parents history with the Gazette, their kids’ history with the Gazette. And it’s not all from people who remember the Gazette in 1976, it’s people who started subscribing recently as well.

The responses are all kind, they’re all respectful and they express an actual love for the Gazette itself. Which is not something I’ve experienced at any of the other papers I’ve worked at or for.

CC: I remember my phone number at the office was one digit removed from the subscription troubleshooting hotline. So I would get these calls from little old ladies asking why they didn’t get their paper and I really couldn’t get mad about it. Eventually, instead of transferring them, we’d have a chat and I’d send a few emails on their behalf. Or I’d try to straighten out their problem and call them back. I loved that about the Gazette.

BA: There’s a bunch of things that are unique about the Gazette; its age, its endurance but one of the things that’s both unique and surprising is the reader interactions. I’m not saying we don’t get complaints, we do but there’s a real connection.

CC: In a time where we’re talking about diversity and representation in media, the Montreal Gazette is still a pretty white newsroom. When the Black Lives Matter uprisings really took off two summers ago, the paper seemed to have a real “come to Jesus” moment and hired three columnists of colour: Emilie Nicolas, Saleema Nawaz and Martine St-Victor. What do you think they’ve brought to the paper and how can the Gazette do a better job of reflecting Montreal’s diversity?

BA: What do they bring to the paper? Good columns. Your experience of the city, of the world is different depending on who you are and if your skin is not white, everyone sees that, and you interact with authority differently, you interact with government services differently, you interact with policy differently. And so, we’re getting the benefit of that and it’s of enormous value.

Sometimes, they’re writing explicitly about those issues but often they’re just writing about the politics of the day but as processed through their life experience. As far as how the paper can reflect the diversity of our city better? There are initiatives that were underway before I arrived. Like the 50/50 project, which is trying to ensure that 50 per cent of everyone quoted in the paper is a woman. We have one staff member who does monthly audits and she sends out reports. Last month was 38 per cent, this month is 47 per cent but she keeps a bug in everyone’s ear. There’s no staff member I’ve come across who is resisting that. Representation at the paper is very much at the front of everyone’s mind. As far as staff is concerned, there are much fewer hiring opportunities now than in the past and, whenever that changes, diversity will be at the top of our list of criteria.

CC: Okay, we need to talk about “Bad Boy Bert.” In a 2000 profile of you, The Globe and Mail seemed to have you pegged as some sort of pre-Twitter shit disturber. What gives?

BA: Just like the anglo community in Montreal can sometimes feel small and you run into people all the time, the literary community in Toronto was rather small as well. I was a book reviewer for a long time and a review editor for a long time and Toronto is the centre for corporate publishing in Canada. Not only was I in charge of what books got reviewed, I wrote a lot of reviews as well.

CC: And you took on a few sacred cows?

BA: Yeah, it doesn’t take much. Like, I gave a not glowing review of one of Margaret Atwood’s books. 

CC: Oh God.

BA: That turned into a thing. It was mostly not always being on the same page as everyone else.

CC: And maybe having the occasional smart ass quip?

BA: Possibly. Possibly. No, it was the beginning of my career and I was feeling that independence, that kind of power you feel when you’re outside the fray. Your job is to report on it, to review it and it gives you a great deal of freedom to not care what people think about what you say. That’s like one of the core concepts of journalism. Ruffling feathers is part of the job. I took great joy in ruffling feathers.

CC: Do you look back and regret any of it? Do you think maybe there were some excesses of youth in there? Or do you think maybe literary criticism in Canada, much like media criticism, is way too polite?

BA: I got the sense then that the general approach was, “If you don’t have something nice to say, don’t say anything.”

CC: But bad reviews are so much fun to read.

BA: They’re not just fun — and really, really bad reviews can be really fun. It’s that some other literary scenes, where someone will give someone a bad review and that person will turn around and write a column about it and that creates drama. That never really happens in Canada. That was part of it. I very enthusiastically wrote negative reviews. 

CC: Well, just because someone got a shit review it doesn’t mean they’re a shit writer.

BA: But also, it’s just my opinion. Maybe the project is great but it’s just not for me. There’s a great value in negative criticism. You don’t really understand how something goes right if you don’t have an idea of how something goes spectacularly wrong. When you study literature in school, as I did, you study the very best, the most ambitious books that have ever been written. Of course, at the time, it was also the whitest books and that’s changing. You might say, “Oh, I like D.H. Lawrence more than E.M. Forster. E.M. Forster sucks.” No, E.M. Forster does not suck. Everyone’s debating the masters. So when you get a galley come across your desk, you realize “wow, this is how people actually write books.”

So I published negative reviews because it was my job to write reviews. I’m not going to spend 11 hours reading a book and not review it. I need the $150. I need to eat.

CC: I saw the word “woke” appear in one of your reviews. Do you think that term has been used so much it doesn’t mean anything anymore?

BA: I don’t think I’ve ever used that word in print.

CC: It was in your last review published in the Toronto Star. About an African woman taking on a dictator.

BA: Oh, right! Well, you got my first and last “woke.” It’s like the term “politically correct.” It had some value in the 1990s but it’s opponents made it a jeer. And this happens to words all the time. We have constantly shifting, changing words because of that. “Freedom” is another example of that. The word gets completely twisted around to mean its opposite.

With woke, unfortunately language goes where language goes. If words get tainted like that, you can either work hard to reclaim it or just … woke is being used as a derogatory term now. But, once again, it shouldn’t be. The half life of it was much shorter than “politically correct” because of social media.

But the concept of woke. I think it’s a good thing. It’s aimed at white women and white men. And you do need to wake up from certain misapprehensions, you do have to realize that so much of what you’ve achieved is a result of privilege that you had nothing to do with. This whole notion of like, “I don’t know why there aren’t more Black columnists but maybe if they just worked harder!” No. That’s not how it works. I worked harder and I got repaid for working harder but I also started on the proverbial third base. Yeah, we need to wake ourselves up to that. It might have seemed radical to white people before George Floyd. Now it’s the baseline.

CC: Last question. In 2000, you wrote a book called The End of Gay (and the Death of Heterosexuality). In it, you argue that sexuality is a spectrum and labels like “gay” and “straight” and “bisexual” limit the human experience. Would you have written that book today? Knowing how much the conversation about gender fluidity and LGBTQ rights has changed?

BA: If I wrote it today, I would write it differently. Not because I feel the climate is oppressive but because we’ve learned so much. Like, I paid very little attention to the trans experience in that book. And, like a lot of white guys, I did not notice that a lot of the guys I was quoting were white. I didn’t see white. White was just normal. That’s wrong. I’m much more aware of that now. Most of the world does not look like me and think like me. 

CC: The idea of labels and doing away with labels like “gay,” I would imagine that to many people those are a big part of their social and political identity. Because some of us aren’t free then we can’t all be free. Because, to some people, being gay means that by default you’ll be discriminated against. And not just with hate speech but also things like not being able to donate blood or facing discrimination when it comes time to adopt a child. Has your thinking on that changed?

BA: Definitely. My ideas are not that rigid. A book gets published at a certain point in time and I was there at a certain point in time. Labels have a great use. Primarily political. You can’t explain the complexity of human sexuality on a placard. So labels become useful. “Gay is good” or “Black is beautiful” that is how you achieve things. And it achieved a lot. Gay rights, same sex marriage, adoption, the right to treatment with HIV and AIDS, those were all hard fought and hard won. It was because people had placards that people could understand and empathize and sympathize with.

Labels are good but labels can also constrain. I think we can think of ourselves as anything we like and that’s a good thing.