“Sometimes, his views were unpopular.”

What do you call a newsroom professional who is part editor, part lawyer, and part teacher?

“Mr Bruser,” maybe, if you had time as he rushed between his Toronto Star office and the exit with an unlighted cigarette en route to grizzled lips, he’d more easily answer to “Bert.”

That’s if a stride-unbreaking “Yeah?” counts as answering, but once he got wind that you, well, needed something, or had a useful story to tell, his monster-straight face weirdly dissolved into a brief, boyish grin, and then he listened.

And, well, if cutting the legal knot, filling the reporting gap, probing the story’s implied meaning, or suggesting an editorial clarification, took a little time, that was OK. Because Bert Bruser, whose successive degrees are from Princeton (arts), Columbia (journalism), and U of T (law), who led the first and only media-law group at a Bay Street law firm (Blake, Cassels & Graydon LLP), who taught one of our ivy-clad neighbour’s most popular law courses (on defamation and media, naturellement) and has lectured here at ivy-absent RSJ longer than most students have lived…

(Wait, am I channeling Bert’s Star mate and RSJ grad Rosie Di Manno here? Type a period, dammit, as Bert might suggest.)

So, anyways, Bert has had a law written on his not-as-stony-as-tends-to-appear heart for nearly half a century and it goes like this: a media lawyer must be AVAILABLE.

Always.

Which makes it newsworthy that on Sunday, May 31^st, 2020, he rested.

All day, he claims. Maybe for the first time since graduating law school in 1974, he alleges (this particular assertion being neither defamatory nor declarative, let it pass unverified).

And what was that like—being unavailable for a day?

“It was….,” he told me, “interesting.”

Um, Bert?

“A major day.”

Oh, c’mon.

“Like when you graduate from school or something, and all of a sudden it’s, now I have a new life.”

With which to do what?

“That’s a good question, because I don’t have a clue.”

Oh-kay?

“Look, I’m HAPPY about that. I had a wonderful career, which makes it much easier to retire. I’m happy with what I’ve done. I’ve loved it. I love journalism and I love journalists. I’d much rather hang out with journalists than lawyers.”

He was, after all, a reporter before he was a lawyer. He worked for the Canadian Press before law school, and chose to article at Blake’s because it had big media clients like Southam (look it up) and Torstar. He’s never really left Blake’s, mandatory retirement-age notwithstanding (he’s now 75), but as senior partner wrangled a unique deal to park himself in the newsroom (external link)  at 1 Yonge Street two days a week for a fixed fee.

Seven days a week, and nights, he worked (external link)  with the Star’s reporters and editors to break stories both infamous (think Jian Ghomeshi and Rob Ford) and unremarked with minimal interference from the legal system. (Bert’s son, David Bruser, is a reporter with the investigative team nowadays.) Newsroom life was busy enough for most, but he and fellow free-press advocate Brian MacLeod Rogers, pioneer of the Canadian Media Lawyers’ Association, created the RSJ’s first media law course in 1991 and kept it up, rolling with successive undergraduate and post-graduate program changes, for the best part of three decades.

All of it pro bono, which is lawyer-talk for, none of them earned a dime doing so, while lucky instructors of record, such as this indebted author, took care of syllabi and marking. 

Bert manifestly loves teaching. I remember watching him role-play “Detective Sergeant Bruser” at a mock police press conference staged for the class, as students “tweeted” the highlights of the “detective’s” intentionally error-laden and hyperbolic tirade about society being safe from a newly accused man’s undoubted (never merely alleged) bad acts.  It was hilarious, but our “Sarge” cracked no smile until, after the performance, as the students’ (safely firewalled) news posts flashed up on the screen, Bert calmly explained what was, and was not, OK about reporting time-of-arrest “revelations.”

“The thing about teaching is,” Bert says, “you gotta know what you’re talking about. You gotta make SURE you know it. So it was self-education.

“Sure, in any class there are some people who don’t care, but at Ryerson, I was amazed at the number of people who did care—how many people really wanted to be journalists.”

Joined in recent years by their younger fellow-adjunct professor Ryder Gilliland, Bert and Brian have helped provide legal knowledge and reporting smarts to generations of Ryerson students ever since. Plus, the three top-of-their-game lawyers have donated uncounted, otherwise-billable hours of pre-publication legal advice to RSJ publications and students, saving them and the university the blood, sweat and dollars of potential litigation.

Not once in all these years has the school or its student reporters been sued (a few go-nowhere blustered threats notwithstanding). Instead, we got teachable moments.

“Get both sides of the story,” Bert explains. “Don’t say a guy is a crook without putting the allegation to him and trying real hard to get his side. And then present it fairly. Don’t put bad stuff in screaming headlines on the front page and the rest on page 29. Be fair to the person you writing about—that’s been one of my mantras….”

And?

“…And doing that gives you a much better defence if you get sued.”

The first time I met Bert Bruser I was a shy-ish young-ish j-school prof who had been “volunteered” to “coordinate” (yeah, try that) his and Brian’s course. So the two suits bought me a Bay Street lunch. Bert’s monosyllabic growl was as frightening as Brian’s gentle-giant banter soothed. Good-lawyer, bad-lawyer; cool act, I thought afterward.

Even the steelier Lisa Taylor, a tough broad and former lawyer who is RSJ’s current teacher of media law and ethics, broke sweat during early Brus-ing encounters.  “If you went to central casting to find the guy who should play newsroom lawyer, you’d hire Bert,” Lisa says. “He’s brilliant and intense and rumpled, and you can see wheels turning in that big brain of his. He talks slowly and precisely and the more engaged or enraged he gets, the quieter he talks.”

Lisa remembers, as I do, Bert taking breaks from teaching to smoke a couple of cigarettes on Gould Street while talking fast into a phone to put out fires at 1 Yonge Street. (He once fruitlessly begged a cop to arrest him for smoking too close to a Bay Street building entrance so he could persuade a judge it was public space.) “He’s a journalist first and foremost,” she told me. “He cares about the public’s right to know and he cares about the journalists who do the work.”

My next-to-oldest memory of Bert is from a few weeks later, in the RSJ coffee-room where he  jabbed a darkened forefinger at a fax printout of a House of Lords appeal judgment (external link) , and I was, like, “Um, in England?”

“This changes EVERYTHING,” Bert barked, jabbing harder. The case was about something I’d never heard of called the “responsible journalism” defence for libel. No j-student today should need to look that up today; it’s Canadian law, too, thanks in part to Bert. For it was Bert himself who guided Star reporter Bill Schiller through a way-to-beat-back-a-libel suit story about a rich associate of then-Premier Mike Harris named Peter Grant (external link) , who was smoothly clearing environmental and zoning hurdles to build, well, yes, a private golf course at his cottage on the shores of pristine Twin Lakes near New Liskeard and Temiskaming.

“Yeah, one time Schiller was being chased around Grant’s property by some cars,” Bert mutters down the phone. “And he called me and said, ‘Bert, what should I do?’

“And I said, ‘Just do what you do.’”

So, yeah, Schiller did so, and eventually filed a story that Bert lawyered, and the Star published, under the headline, “Cottagers teed off over golf course: Long‑time Harris backer awaits Tory nod on plan.” And so, yeah, Grant sued (external link) , and Blakes defended and argued the case all the way to Ottawa, with help from sympathetic litigators such as the aforementioned Brian Rogers, until then-Chief Justice Beverley McLaughlin wrote an epic judgment (external link)  that, indeed changed EVERYTHING here, just like in merry England.

“Responsible journalism,” Bert insists on calling it, English-style, defying McLaughlin C.J.’s longer and more precise label. He loved the entire idea, and he loves it still. It means, basically,  that journalists can stay out of libel trouble even if they make mistakes—so long as they seriously try to do their jobs right.

Which isn’t, as he reminds me, easy. From those pioneering English judgments, the courts made it clear, Bert says, that “they care about the details. They don’t care about scoops, about being first to publish. Courts don’t give a shit about that, although they didn’t say ‘shit.’

“So I told reporters, ‘Do things right, not quickly. Be fair.’”

His commitment to press freedom and sound journalistic practice went beyond the newsroom and the classroom. I remember being on an ethics committee with Bert, listening to his measured murmurs down pre-Zoom phone lines as he closed holes in our thinking. We sometimes had to await, but were always thankful for, his lawyering of panel reports on thorny topics like reporters’ social-media (external link)  conduct, guidelines for  (PDF file) digital corrections (external link) , and (later, under then-panel chair Lisa Taylor) the  (PDF file) naming (external link)  of sexual assault complainants.

So, yeah, after the fright, Bert grows on you, as a teacher, editor, advisor—and, above all, advocate for press freedom. Anyone who attended Ryerson’s press-freedom conference (external link)  in March, 2012, will remember the lunch-time formal debate between Bert and a really smart antagonist and fellow lawyer on the conflicting rights of privacy and press freedom.

Let’s just say Bert won graciously.

Today, Ryder Gilliland (whom I dimly recall Bert calling “the kid,” affectionately) reminds me of the breadth of Bert’s impact on Canadians’ liberty. He was “counsel and trusted advisor to Canada’s largest circulation newspaper throughout its peak period of influence,” Ryder points out, and advised the Star “on virtually every story to break in the past half century.”

Ryder is a sober non-smoking quiet-spoken watch-the-words lawyer’s lawyer who doesn’t do hyperbole, but here’s how he sums up Bert’s career: “No one has had a greater impact on press freedom in Canada over the past half century.” 

And what does Bert think of Bert? Back in November 2002, the Star published a rare piece by its own lawyer, under the headline, “Often my views are unpopular.”

This was the lede:

“I am not well liked. In the newsroom, they call me names, often to my face. Rosie DiManno—the fierce soul of The Star—[once] got so angry with me that she refused to speak to me for a whole year.”

Well, Bert was doing his job: keeping the Star out of court. It came to a head during the 1995 trial of sex-murderer Paul Bernardo (look it up, if you must), when Rosie got, well, pissed about Bert’s lawyering of her daily attacks on the credibility of witnesses, particularly Bernardo’s wife Karla Homolka.

“Every night during the trial,” Bert wrote, “the editors and I read her columns religiously. On one such night, we felt she went too far, and it fell to me to tell her on the telephone that three paragraphs had to be deleted. DiManno, who defines her job in terms of the freedom it gives her to express her opinions, disagreed.”

(Did I mention Rosie’s an RSJ headliner (external link)  alum?)

"‘You're not a lawyer,’ she snarled,” according to Bert. "’You're just a copy editor.’ (DiManno doesn't get along with copy editors, either.) Her point was that there was no legal reason for cutting the paragraphs.

“In hindsight, I confess that she was right, but at the time, I would have none of it.

"’F--- off, Rosie,’ I shouted, and slammed the phone down,” Bert wrote, typing hyphens to which he’d never shrink orally. And then, within parentheses, added: “Rosie and I have since made up; on those rare occasions when she's in town, she always asks me to go for a smoke.”

Well, Bert Bruser isn’t doing his smoking outside 1 Yonge Street anymore.  Of course he’s got a wife, kids, and seven grandchildren to spend time with, plus old friends, so maybe he won’t miss the likes of us. But we’ll miss him.

Because, as Lisa Taylor put it: “There’s no one like him.”

Period.

Ivor Shapiro is a professor in the Ryerson School of Journalism.