TORONTO — Lisa LaFlamme had barely settled in in the back of the cafe when two ladies approached her in fast succession. You’re so lovely, stated the primary, whereas the opposite slipped Ms. LaFlamme a word on yellow-lined paper.
“Thanks for being ‘you,’” learn the message written in neat cursive by “an admirer.”
The fleeting interactions, which befell throughout a current interview in Toronto with Ms. LaFlamme, 58, have been laden with the unstated. Maybe little else wanted to be stated amongst three equally aged ladies assembly by likelihood in Toronto, half a yr after Ms. LaFlamme was ousted as one of many nation’s high information anchors amid prices of ageism and sexism.
“Persons are so amazingly sort,” stated Ms. LaFlamme, her eyes welling up. “The help has been mind-blowing. It’s actually been a shock to me.”
A family identify in Canada for many years, Ms. LaFlamme was unceremoniously dismissed final summer time by CTV, the nation’s largest non-public tv community, after what her employer described as a “enterprise determination” to take this system “in a different direction.” Although her nationwide newscast at CTV had been one of many most watched and he or she had gained a national award for finest information anchor simply months earlier, Ms. LaFlamme was left to log out with no correct farewell.
As an alternative, in a poorly lit, two-minute, makeshift video uploaded on her Twitter account, she stated, “At 58, I nonetheless thought I’d have much more time to inform extra of the tales that affect our every day lives.”
Her departure set off multifaceted debates throughout Canada, particularly after The Globe and Mail newspaper reported it might have been linked to Ms. LaFlamme’s hair — which she had chosen to let go grey through the pandemic when hair salons and different companies shut down. The community’s proprietor, Bell Media, which denied that “age, gender and gray hair” had been components, named a 39-year-old male correspondent, Omar Sachedina, as her successor.
“It was a whole shock once they determined to terminate her contract early as a result of there was no apparent proof that CTV was particularly decline or was truly doing poorly,” stated Christopher Waddell, a professor emeritus of journalism at Carleton College and a former information producer at CBC, the general public broadcaster. He added that Ms. LaFlamme’s 11-year tenure as anchor of “CTV Nationwide Information,” the broadcaster’s flagship newscast, had been thought of a rankings success, particularly in contrast with its important rival at CBC.
CTV’s proprietor didn’t return a number of emails and calls requesting remark for this text. Ms. LaFlamme declined to provide particulars about her dismissal, citing a mutual separation settlement.
Within the speedy wake of the controversy over her ouster, Mirko Bibic, the chief govt of Bell Canada, issued a statement that stated, partly, “the narrative has been that Lisa’s age, gender or gray hair performed into the choice. I’m glad that this isn’t the case.”
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Throughout a virtually two-hour interview, Ms. LaFlamme spoke about rising from half a yr of silence, displaying a journalist’s understanding and resignation that her departure would overshadow, in the interim, a protracted profession highlighted by reporting in New York a day after the Sept. 11 assaults and lots of journeys to Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Probably the most feedback I ever acquired weren’t for months in Baghdad or Afghanistan, or any story, however once I let my hair develop grey — bar none,” Ms. LaFlamme stated. “And I’ll say this, 98 p.c optimistic, besides a few males and a lady — it’s humorous that I can truly keep in mind that — however they have been summarily destroyed on social media as a result of ladies do help ladies.”
Ms. LaFlamme stated she has but to map out her skilled life for the years forward. However her calendar is filling up with longstanding commitments to assist different ladies, together with a public speak for Dress for Success, a non-public group offering free skilled clothes to ladies. Ms. LaFlamme was additionally planning a weekslong journey to Tunisia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to make brief documentaries on African ladies journalists for Journalists for Human Rights, a Toronto-based group.
She shares a house in Toronto together with her husband, Michael Cooke, a former editor in chief of The Toronto Star, however commonly visits her hometown, Kitchener, Ontario, a small metropolis 60 miles southwest of Toronto, the place her mom and sisters nonetheless reside.
Rising up there, she attended an all-girls Roman Catholic faculty and used to go dwelling for lunch, together with her three sisters and fogeys, “information junkies” each.
“My father was a contractor and would come dwelling each day at lunch, and I’m in grade faculty, and the dialog was concerning the morning speak reveals and the subject of discussions,” Ms. LaFlamme stated. “And, in fact, the final quarter-hour of lunch was Fred Flintstone.”
Hungry to find the world exterior Kitchener, she jumped at a suggestion by her faculty to work as a nanny for 2 years in France. Unable to make any French mates on the time, she stated the expertise helps her perceive the alienation felt by some immigrants to Canada — “to not get to fulfill somebody within the nation you’re residing in.”
After school in Ottawa, Ms. LaFlamme earned a part-time job on the CTV affiliate in her hometown after ready six hours — with out an appointment — exterior the information director’s workplace.
She retains “vivid reminiscences of not being taken significantly” as a feminine reporter — strolling previous an workplace inside which three senior managers have been “watching and laughing at one among her tales.” Or the time a male colleague commented a couple of navy blue gown she had picked out fastidiously throughout a visit to Paris: “How is anyone going to take you significantly in that?” she remembered him telling her.
“Only a basic navy blue swimsuit, the skirt went under the knee, nothing, nothing, nothing attractive in any respect,” Ms. LaFlamme stated. “I’d needed a navy blue swimsuit as a result of I believed it equaled professionalism.”
Within the newsroom within the Nineteen Nineties, she recalled, photos of scantily clad ladies ripped from the native tabloid paper have been put up on the partitions of the edit suite.
Through the years, she acquired letters from two male colleagues apologizing for the best way they’d handled her, she stated.
“I don’t know in the event that they have been going by the 12-step program or what,” she stated.
Her profession took off quickly after she joined the CTV community in 1997 and was quickly on a shortlist of potential successors to Lloyd Robertson, CTV’s high anchor for 35 years till his retirement in 2011 at age 77, when Ms. LaFlamme changed him.
The Nationwide Submit, a nationwide every day, had handicapped Ms. LaFlamme’s possibilities again in 2001 by commenting she was “identified for trying higher in particular person than on TV.” A veteran tv information govt recalled in an article in The Toronto Star that he had as soon as tried to rent Ms. LaFlamme, however was overruled by his boss who “didn’t like her hair.”
A decade into her profitable tenure as CTV’s high anchor, Ms. LaFlamme confronted a predicament within the first wave of the pandemic in 2020 when hair salons closed. She had been dyeing her prematurely graying hair since her 20s. She took Good ‘n Simple over-the-counter dye together with her on reporting journeys — coloring her hair within the ladies’s bogs at Kandahar Airfield and in a Baghdad bunker the place brown water got here out of a spigot jutting out of a wall.
Firstly of the pandemic, Ms. LaFlamme hid the grey with spray dye.
“There was hair dye on my pillowcases — and I additionally had menopause and had evening sweats — and the pillowcases have been disgusting,” Ms. LaFlamme stated.
She stated she began letting her hair go grey through the pandemic’s second wave, impressed by an older sister who had performed the identical and a feminine boss who endorsed the choice.
The response, she stated, was overwhelmingly optimistic. In a year-end roundup program, she joked, “Actually, if I had identified that the lockdown could possibly be so liberating on that entrance I’d have performed it so much sooner.”
However the determination was criticized by the pinnacle of CTV Information on the time, who, according to The Globe and Mail, requested in a gathering who had accepted the choice to “let Lisa’s hair go grey.” Ms. LaFlamme additionally disagreed sharply together with her boss over information protection and assets, based on The Globe.
Because the interview wound down, Ms. LaFlamme, checking her cellphone, frowned on the havoc her new chocolate Lab pet had wreaked in her lounge — a chewed up jute rug. She wanted to handle the canine and to organize for her speak for Gown for Success in two days.
“It’s a corporation that actually helps ladies get again into the work power, and for years I donated fits to the group,” she stated. “Isn’t that humorous?”
