Page 12 - Toronto North Lifestyle March 2021

JOURNALISM IN THE TIME OF THE PANDEMIC
Contributor / Q&A Written by : Clay Sandhu
Photography : Alex Nanoff
Colin D’Mello is a videojournalist for CTV where he serves as Queen’s Park Bureau Chief. Born in Kuwait, D’Mello was marked by the events of the Gulf War — events that would precipitate a career covering monumental events in contemporary Canadian society. From the 2008 Sunrise Propane explosion to the case of Bruce McArthur, D’Mello has never shied away from covering the issues of importance to Canadians. Today, during an unprecedented global health crisis, D’Mello covers the polarizing, nuanced and often divisive nature of provincial politics at a time when news from Queen’s Park has never been more relevant. We spoke with D’Mello about journalism in a pandemic, his role as president of the Queen’s Park Press Gallery and the increasing importance of provincial politics.
How has covering Queen’s Park changed since the beginning of the pandemic and what does an average day look like for you? There has been such a massive change in terms of
the forefront of the reporting, it made us the ones asking the most important questions about how the province was responding. From about mid-March [of last year] until mid-March this year — that would be about an entire year that I’ve covered the exact same story. I’ve never in my entire career covered one story for an entire year. That’s been the biggest change.
With so many Canadians stuck inside, following the news is one of the few ways people connect with the outside world. As a journalist, do you feel an increased sense of responsibility?
Absolutely! At the early stages of the pandemic, there were a lot of sources where news was flying out of, and it was very difficult to keep track of what was verifiable and what wasn’t. In the early days of the pandemic, we didn’t know exactly what Covid-19 was — there was just a lot of information and misinformation. We really did take it upon ourselves to ensure that people had access, through us, to the right information from the right sources. My number one focus is always: how will this affect people, how will this change their lives for the better or for the worse? When you add the pandemic on top of that it does add a lot of pressure and stress to make sure that people aren’t being misled and that, at the end of the day, we are the best stewards for them at home.
how we cover it, both physically and the way we do our journalism. From a physical standpoint, very few of us are coming into Queen’s Park. I go in there every day now but from about March until September I was working from home with my two children because daycares were closed. Not being in the building presented a huge new challenge: how do we tell our stories without actually coming in contact with the politicians? That put an enormous burden on us to start reaching out to politicians in new ways. Since January of last year, Covid-19 started taking up more and more of the stories that we were telling out of Queen’s Park. That’s because the response, dealing with the pandemic, intersected directly through Queen’s Park. It put us at in which people have reached out to us in the numbers
Public engagement with provincial politics is at an all-time high, do you think it’s a trend that’s here to last? Iwould certainly hope so. I don’t know whether it’s
entirely sustainable. Typically, it’s municipal governments that will determine what a lot of your life will look like. Provincial politics is a little bit removed from the everyday lives of Ontarians. It is very rare that a provincial measure will have an almost immediate and direct impact on people’s lives. But that’s where we find ourselves with the pandemic. I can’t remember a time
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