Press Freedom Awards

Congratulations to the winners of the 2025 Press Freedom Awards!

Press Freedom Award Winner Daniel Renaud

Daniel Renaud’s colleagues in the La Presse newsroom may know him as a quiet professional, but his courageous reporting speaks volumes about the importance of diligent, independent and utterly fearless journalism in Canada.

It also came perilously close to killing him.

In 2024, Renaud spent months collecting and organizing a massive amount of information from interviews and documents, ultimately providing his readers with an extraordinary portrait of Frédérick Silva as a hitman for the Montreal mafia.

Renaud is no stranger to the dangers of his craft – he has been reporting fearlessly on the world of organized crime for almost 30 years. But one of his many scoops on hitman Silva was particularly terrifying.

Renaud’s reporting had made him a target for murder with a $100,000 bounty on his head.

After the hitman turned police informant, Silva told investigators he had become “fed up” with Renaud’s exposés in La Presse, and targeted the journalist for a mob hit. Senior members of criminal organizations in Québec had approved the plot, and a team of professional killers had been chosen to carry it out.

Fortunately for Renaud, the plot was aborted.

Why was the hitman so “fed up” with Renaud’s reporting? Apparently, it was the journalist’s unwavering persistence, showing up in court for every hearing during Silva’s trial. He was often the only reporter in the courtroom, attending even when the matter of the day was technical or otherwise uninteresting.

Renaud’s near-assassination story was picked up by media organizations around the world including the BBC, the Daily Mail, the Times of India, French TV, and almost every Canadian news outlet.

In Quebec, members of the National Assembly from all four political parties stood in the Legislature to express their solidarity. In the House of Commons, MPs unanimously adopted a motion in support of a journalist “whose work is a pillar of our democracy” and underscoring the importance of reporters being able to do their work freely “without fear of reprisal.”

Québec Solidaire MLA Vincent Marissal, a former La Presse journalist, said Renaud maybe wasn’t boisterous in the newsroom, “but apparently he was doing a helluva good job disturbing some other people.”

Beyond the media, Renaud’s work generated an important public discourse about the importance of independent journalism, including among politicians, police, lawyers, the judiciary and the general public.

The World Press Freedom judges agreed.

As for Renaud, he took one day off to absorb the shock of learning he narrowly missed being murdered by the mob. The following day, he was back digging for more.

Press Freedom Certificates of Merit

Grant Robertson and Kathryn Blaze Baum

Three people died and many more were harmed by the listeria outbreak that was treated as a terrible accident. In reality, there was much more to the story than Canadians were being told.

An investigation by The Globe and Mail in 2024 exposed damning revelations about Canada’s food safety system and the ways the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has been operating.

In their series, ‘The Algorithm,’ reporters Grant Robertson and Kathryn Blaze Baum brought to light disturbing new information about how food manufacturing companies have effectively been allowed to police themselves in a system that puts the public at risk.

Through dogged reporting over several months, Robertson and Baum ultimately forced the CFIA to admit a fact it was keeping quiet – that the facility in question had never been inspected before the outbreak.

By corroborating information from sources inside the CFIA and throughout the federal government, along with hundreds of pages of documents, the investigation produced its biggest revelation: In an effort to make the system more efficient, the CFIA adopted a risk-based approach guided by an algorithm that decided which facilities were prioritized for inspections, and which were not.

Because of serious flaws in this algorithm, the Pickering factory fell through the cracks – and the deaths occurred as a result of that failure.

The reporters developed a network of more than 40 sources, many of them inside government and across the international food safety community. This included inspectors inside the CFIA who took great risks in talking to The Globe.

Robertson and Baum faced considerable pushback from the facility’s owner Joriki Inc. and French dairy giant Danone Inc., the two companies tied to the contaminated products. The reporters also worked under constant legal scrutiny and potential threats of litigation throughout the investigation.

The biggest stonewalling came from the CFIA. Over a two-month period, The Globe was forced to send more than 90 questions to the CFIA in order to extract the information necessary to detail what went wrong.

This work had an immediate impact that will reshape how the CFIA and the food safety system operate.

Patti Sonntag

Indigenous leaders have long called on the government to investigate suspected abuses of its Indigenous procurement policy.

Hearing these concerns, Patti Sonntag stepped up to do what the federal government would not. Leading a team of students at First Nations University of Canada, she diligently followed a trail that led to potentially fraudulent bids, negligent public oversight, and even a cocaine trafficking ring.

Along the way, Sonntag endured legal threats from major government contractors, and doggedly pursued government information that had been obscured from the public and from legitimate Indigenous business operators for 28 years.

The team’s reporting led to three parliamentary investigations, as well as the resignation of Liberal Randy Boissonnault from cabinet after Sonntag revealed his company had falsely claimed to be Indigenous-owned in correspondence about bids for government contracts.

Working with colleagues and on her own, Sonntag pursued multiple stories from initial investigation to final publication with the National Post and Global News. The series launched in August 2024, and the reporting continued through the fall to the present day.

Sonntag’s ability to pursue the story was founded on the trust she built with Indigenous organizations and community members over the years, says her FNU colleague Patricia Elliott. Whether investigating drinking-water contamination or treaty-breaking federal fiscal policies, Sonntag has proven herself to be a journalist who listens deeply to Indigenous voices and takes concerns seriously.

She recently joined the Investigative Journalism Foundation as its new Ottawa reporter, and says she’s eager to dive into the data to expose corruption in federal politics.

Press Freedom Award, Local Journalism – Waterloo Region Record

Front row: columnist Luisa D’Amato. Back row, left to right: reporters Robert Williams, Terry Pender and Jeff Outhit. Far right: Editor-in-chief Jim Poling.

The Waterloo Region Record is a daily newspaper serving the southwestern Ontario communities of Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge and the surrounding rural areas.

At a time when many newspapers are facing financial constraints, The Record continues to devote resources to deep, long-term reporting that cuts through government secrecy and holds decision-makers to account.

Rather than singling out one journalist, WPFC has selected the paper itself for our local journalism award. The nomination from editor-in-chief Jim Poling highlights the work of four staffers: Terry Pender, Robert Williams, Luisa D’Amato, and Jeff Outhit.

Each has pushed back against secrecy in public institutions, including local municipal governments, the public school system and the community college. They have done so through careful investigative reporting and persuasive, passionate commentary.

Some articles took months to prepare. In each case, The Record broke the story and has been the public’s main source of information on the developments. The articles uncovered:

• A secret land assembly, orchestrated by the provincial government, with municipal elected officials held to silence.
• A national scandal involving our local community college over its aggressive recruitment of foreign students who pay higher tuition. The Record created custom datasets on foreign enrolment, college finances, even transit ridership.
• Lack of transparency at the local public school board after it hired an education director who combined a “change” agenda with opaque decision making.
• Lack of transparency around a stalled plan by the Ontario government to reform our overly complex system of local municipalities. Five years ago, the government commissioned two experts to hold meetings, interviews and gather input. When the report was done, it was shelved and hidden from public view. The paper continues to challenge the secrecy.
• The secret, startling story of how the federal government allowed Nazi war criminals to resettle in Canada. Reporter Terry Pender battled Library and Archives Canada for five years to secure a copy of a classified report on the history of how this happened.

The Record’s pursuit of excellence in public-interest journalism demonstrates the important role local media plays in the democratic process at all levels of government.

Career Achievement Award in honour of Spencer Moore Winner, Bert Bruser

There used to be no such thing as a newsroom lawyer in Canada. Then Bert Bruser, who began his career as a teenage sports reporter at the Winnipeg Tribune, left journalism to go to law school. Over a 50-year career, Bruser pioneered the role of media lawyer in this country, helping to reshape the legal landscape that helps the press pursue, publish—and protect—public interest journalism.

At the Toronto Star, he worked with reporters, not just keeping stories alive but helping them land in print. His legal strategies underpinned some of the newspaper’s most impactful journalism—from systemic anti-Black racism in the police force to the mayor smoking crack cocaine.

In the early 1980s, he formalized media law as a legal specialty, blending criminal, constitutional and tort law. He helped launch the Canadian Media Lawyers’ Association and created the first media law courses at Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of Toronto.

Bruser defended courageous and often controversial journalism from lawsuits designed to intimidate and silence. When the Star faced a $2.7-billion lawsuit from the Toronto police union over a major investigation, Bruser guided the newsroom through it, ensuring the story stayed strong.

His strategic mind helped push the boundaries of press freedom, including through Grant v. Torstar Corp., a landmark 2009 Supreme Court ruling that established the “responsible journalism” defence, unlocking stronger protections for investigative reporting that resonated well beyond the Star. “Bert was the man behind the curtain on these great libel suits,” said Ontario Superior Court Justice Paul Schabas, who was the trial lawyer on that case. “He gave the Star confidence to push ahead with what could have been quite costly libel cases but that led to changes in the law.”

He was also a calming presence in the newsroom. His precise, fearless edits would help get their stories ready for publication, without watering them down. Reporters recall his unshakable belief in what they were doing, even while under attack.

Bruser retired in 2020. His legacy at The Star, and throughout Canadian journalism, remains. “His work reshaped media law, fortified press freedom, and armed journalists with the legal backbone to pursue the truth—without fear, and without compromise,” the Star’s editor-in-chief, Nicole MacIntyre, wrote in his nomination letter. “His fingerprints aren’t just on past victories; they’re on every tough, high-stakes story that still makes it to print today.”

Student Achievement Award Winner, Marieke Glorieux-Stryckman and Aidan Raynor, The Concordian

Marieke Glorieux-Stryckman, a news editor at The Concordian, a student newspaper, was shocked to receive a cease-and-desist letter from a lawyer representing Concordia University. The alleged wrongdoing by her and another second-year journalism student? Filing freedom-of-information (FOI) requests. The letter, sent by an outside law firm hired by the university, claimed the students’ requests for documents regarding complaints about the inter-campus shuttle, tuition hikes and other standard lines of inquiry for student media were “abusive and made in bad faith.”

The university’s attempt to silence its own journalism students set a troubling precedent. Instead of backing down, Glorieux-Stryckman, who is now editor-in-chief of The Concordian, took the case to its resolution through mediation at Quebec’s freedom-of-information commission. Then she and fellow journalism student Aidan Raynor turned the moment into a bigger act of watchdog journalism that shed light on how universities across Canada handle FOI requests.

They spent six months digging into transparency practices at 29 universities. They filed identical FOI requests at each institution, asking for logs of all FOI requests filed between January 2021 and May 2023. Their goal: to compare response times, delays, and denial rates across the country. They found Concordia had the longest average response time in Montreal. Other schools were not much better. They also interviewed student journalists and advocates across Canada about their experience with FOI requests.

They put transparency at the heart of their investigation, making their findings public through an interactive map and online database. They launched “The Transparent University Project.” The open-source platform helps students and others file and track FOI requests, including a tool that suggests how to word a request to increase the chances of success.