"My boss, the Gazette's national editor, was Brian Kappler, strawberry blond and in his forties, viewed with suspicion among my fellow Serious Young Reporters because he was unfashionably conservative (he liked Rush Limbaugh's radio show) and sometimes not serious (he earned good side-gig money moonlighting as the paper's celebrity gossip columnist, using the pen name Doug Camilli). But I liked Kappler fine."
"He was from Windsor, Ontario, near my hometown of Sarnia. So, unlike some Gazette lifers-including the previous national editor, a proper Montrealer if Westmount counted-he didn't hold my outsider status against me. He had assigned me to the Ottawa bureau a year earlier, with instructions to expect I'd be stranded in the boring capital for two years or so. This turned out to be a low guess."
On October 4, 1995 a referendum campaign on Quebec sovereignty had just begun, with the vote set for October 30. A reporter in the Montreal Gazette, aged twenty-nine and with six years at the paper, covered the unfolding campaign. Jacques Parizeau, Quebec's premier, had called the referendum soon after winning a narrow 1994 election victory and aimed for swift separation. Early Léger polling showed Yes and No supporters within a point of each other, surprising newsroom figures because Léger was seen as PQ-friendly and house effects usually explained only a small difference between pollsters.
Read at The Walrus
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