After News Anchor’s Long Career, She Found Herself Focus of the Story

TORONTO — Lisa LaFlamme had barely settled in behind the cafe when two girls approached her in fast succession. You’re so stunning, mentioned 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 occurred throughout a latest interview in Toronto with Ms. LaFlamme, 58, have been laden with the unstated. Maybe little else wanted to be mentioned amongst three equally aged girls assembly by probability in Toronto, half a 12 months after Ms. LaFlamme was ousted as one of many nation’s prime information anchors amid costs of ageism and sexism.

“Persons are so amazingly type,” mentioned Ms. LaFlamme, her eyes welling up. “The help has been mind-blowing. It’s actually been a shock to me.’’

A family title 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 unique course.” Although her nationwide newscast at CTV had been one of the crucial watched and she or he had received a nationwide award for greatest information anchor simply months earlier, Ms. LaFlamme was left to log out with no correct farewell.

As a substitute, in a poorly lit, two-minute, makeshift video uploaded on her Twitter account, she mentioned, “At 58, I nonetheless thought I’d have much more time to inform extra of the tales that impression our each 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 in the course of the pandemic when hair salons and different companies shut down. The community’s proprietor, Bell Media, which denied that “age, gender and grey hair” had been components, named a 39-year-old male correspondent, Omar Sachedina, as her successor.

“It was an entire 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 really doing poorly,’’ mentioned 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-about a rankings success, particularly in contrast with its most 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 present particulars about her dismissal, citing a mutual separation settlement.

Within the quick wake of the controversy over her ouster, Mirko Bibic, the chief government of Bell Canada, issued a press release that mentioned, partially, “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.”

Throughout an almost two-hour interview, Ms. LaFlamme spoke about rising from half a 12 months of silence, displaying a journalist’s understanding and resignation that her departure would overshadow, in the intervening time, an extended profession highlighted by reporting in New York a day after the Sept. 11 assaults and lots of journeys to Afghanistan and Iraq.

“Essentially the most feedback I ever acquired weren’t for months in Baghdad or Afghanistan, or any story, however after I let my hair develop grey — bar none,” Ms. LaFlamme mentioned. “And I’ll say this, 98 % constructive, besides a few males and a girl — it’s humorous that I can really keep in mind that — however they have been summarily destroyed on social media as a result of girls do help girls.”

Ms. LaFlamme mentioned 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 girls, together with a public speak for Gown for Success, a personal group offering free skilled clothes to girls. Ms. LaFlamme was additionally planning a weekslong journey to Tunisia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to make quick documentaries on African girls journalists for Journalists for Human Rights, a Toronto-based group.

She shares a house in Toronto along 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 dwell.

Rising up there, she attended an all-girls Roman Catholic college and used to go residence for lunch, along with her three sisters and fogeys, “information junkies” each.

“My father was a contractor and would come residence day by day at lunch, and I’m in grade college, and the dialog was concerning the morning speak reveals and the subject of discussions,” Ms. LaFlamme mentioned. “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 college to work as a nanny for 2 years in France. Unable to make any French pals on the time, she mentioned the expertise helps her perceive the alienation felt by some immigrants to Canada — “to not get to satisfy somebody within the nation you’re dwelling 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 critically’’ 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 few navy blue costume she had picked out fastidiously throughout a visit to Paris: “How is anyone going to take you critically in that?” she remembered him telling her.

“Only a traditional navy blue go well with, the skirt went under the knee, nothing, nothing, nothing horny in any way,’’ Ms. LaFlamme mentioned. “I’d wished a navy blue go well with as a result of I believed it equaled professionalism.”

Within the newsroom within the Nineties, she recalled, photos of scantily clad girls 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 way in which they’d handled her, she mentioned.

“I don’t know in the event that they have been going by the 12-step program or what,” she mentioned.

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 prime anchor for 35 years till his retirement in 2011 at age 77, when Ms. LaFlamme changed him.

The Nationwide Publish, a nationwide each day, had handicapped Ms. LaFlamme’s possibilities again in 2001 by commenting she was “identified for wanting higher in individual than on TV.” A veteran tv information government 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 prime 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 along with her on reporting journeys — coloring her hair within the girls’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.

Initially 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 mentioned.

She mentioned she began letting her hair go grey in the course of 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 mentioned, was overwhelmingly constructive. 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 quite a bit sooner.’’

However the determination was criticized by the pinnacle of CTV Information on the time, who, in keeping with The Globe and Mail, requested in a gathering who had accredited the choice to “let Lisa’s hair go grey.’’ Ms. LaFlamme additionally disagreed sharply along with her boss over information protection and sources, in keeping with The Globe.

Because the interview wound down, Ms. LaFlamme, checking her telephone, frowned on the havoc her new chocolate Lab pet had wreaked in her front room — 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 company that actually helps girls get again into the work drive, and for years I donated fits to the group,’’ she mentioned. “Isn’t that humorous?”