Mark Bourrie

Education

Bourrie earned his BA in History at the University of Waterloo in 1990. He holds a diploma in public policy and administration from the University of Guelph, a master's degree in journalism from Carleton University, a doctorate in Canadian media history at the University of Ottawa and Juris Doctor. His master's thesis was on the media's role in banning cannabis in Canada and, while his doctoral thesis was on the press censorship system in Canada in the Second World War. They were published by Key Porter as Hemp and by Douglas & McIntyre of Vancouver as The Fog of War in 2004 and 2011, respectively. His public policy and administration research focused on Canada's security intelligence agencies.

Journalism career

Before beginning a career in journalism, Bourrie worked in remote areas of Canada for the Canadian Pacific Railway. He worked as a forest fire fighter in northern Ontario in 1981. Bourrie was a summer student reporter at The Hamilton Spectator and The London Free Press and a student reporter at The Globe and Mail before taking a job on The Toronto Sun in 1979 as assistant business editor and news reporter. He worked for two decades as a freelance news and feature writer, primarily for The Globe and Mail from 1981 to 1989 and the Toronto Star from 1989 to 1999 and again in 2009-2010. He was Parliamentary correspondent for the Law Times from 1994 until 2006. He also wrote for the InterPress Service, the United Nations-sponsored news and feature service. By the late 1990s, he had branched out from newspaper freelance work to book and magazine writing.

Bourrie won a National Magazine Award (NMA) in 1999 and honorable mentions in 2000 and 2003, in the Social Affairs category. He was part of an Ottawa magazine team nominated for a National Magazine Award in 2015. In 2004, he was nominated for a Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) award for an article about the Depression-era execution in Ottawa of a man who was probably innocent. The article was researched entirely in the National Archives of Canada. He won a Canadian Archaeological Association public writing award (1989) and several Ontario Newspaper Awards (formerly Western Ontario Newspaper Awards). He also won the Ontario Community Canadian Newspaper Award for columnist of the year in 2008. His 1979 eyewitness account of an F4 tornado in Woodstock, Ontario, helped earn his newspaper, The London Free Press, a National Newspaper Award nomination. Most of his NMA-nominated work focused on issues related to people wrongly accused of criminal offences or terrorism. He has been a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery since 1994.

In 2012 Bourrie stated that the Chinese government-owned Xinhua News Agency asked him to collect information on the Dalai Lama by exploiting his journalistic access to the Parliament of Canada. Bourrie stated that he was asked to write for Xinhua in 2009 and sought advice from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), but was ignored. Bourrie stated that at that point he refused to continue to write articles for Xinhua and gave the agency no information about the Dalai Lama.

In the fall of 2012, he and several other Parliament Hill journalists started the online publication Blacklock's Reporter, a paywall-funded daily news report. The publication concentrates on news that is normally missed by media that focuses on partisan politics.

Academic

Bourrie lectures in History at Carleton University and Canadian Studies at the University of Ottawa. From 2007 to 2009, he was a lecturer at Concordia University's journalism school, teaching reporting, criticism and media history. He is also a lecturer at the Department of National Defence (Canada) School of Public Affairs, specializing in the history and practice of propaganda and censorship, and was a consultant to the Canadian War Museum for a show on war propaganda art. He has also written on the media relations strategy of William Lyon Mackenzie King.

Books

Ninety Fathoms Down (1995) was Canada's first collection of Great Lakes ship stories. His book on David Michael Krueger, a serial killer held in a psychiatric hospital in Ontario, was published in 1997 as By Reason of Insanity and was excerpted by several major Canadian newspapers. Bourrie's master's thesis was published by Key Porter as Hemp in 2004. His tenth book, adapted from his PhD thesis,The Fog of War, was published in July, 2011 by Douglas & McIntyre. It reached sixth on Maclean's magazine non-fiction bestseller list on September 1, 2011. His collection of Canada's best war correspondence, Fighting Words, came out in the fall of 2012. HarperCollins published Bourrie's book on Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government's information control, called Kill the Messengers: Stephen Harper's Assault on Your Right to Know. The book was released by HarperCollins Canada on January 27, 2015 and began appearing on best-seller lists ten days later. This book was listed as one of the Globe and Mail's Top 100 Books of 2015. In March, 2015, HarperCollins announced it had acquired Canadian rights to The Killing Game, Bourrie's study of ISIS propaganda and recruitment, for publication in the spring of 2016 and it began appearing on the Canadian independent bookstore bestseller list in late April, 2016.

Personal life

Bourrie was born in Toronto and raised in the Georgian Bay area of Ontario but later moved to Ottawa. He is married to lawyer Marion Van de Wetering, who is author of two regional history books, An Ottawa Album (1999) and A Kingston Album (2000). Bourrie is a fossil hunter, collector, and amateur paleontologist, specializing in trilobites. His interest in Great Lakes shipwrecks was kindled by the loss of four of his paternal cousins in the sinking of the Sand Merchant off Cleveland during the Great Depression.