Ron Haggart

Ronald Bancroft Haggart (11 May 1927 – 27 August 2011) was a Canadian journalist.

Newspaper journalist Haggart was born in Vancouver into a middle-class family. An avid reader, he started writing stories in grade 6 and published a student newspaper in grade 7 that was banned by his teachers. Val Sears, another student journalist recalled in 2011: "Ron’s greatest coup on that paper was, we got a picture of the dean of engineering dancing with a stripper at an engineering ball and we were told if we ran it, everybody would be fired or something awful. So we ran a blank space on page one with the same caption and then sent the picture to the newspapers downtown, and they all printed it". Haggart heard MacKenzie shout to the other inmates at the top of his voice: "you guys have two minutes to make up your fucking minds!" MacKenzie then informed Haggart he would be releasing the hostages in exchange for a promise that the guards would not beat the prisoners if they surrendered.

The knowledge that the hostages were being released led to a rush to surrender before the Army stormed the prison. A scene of pandemonium ensured as hundreds of prisoners attempted to rush out of the front gate to surrender to be confronted by a squad of soldiers with their bayonets' drawn along with the law professor Desmond Morton of the citizens' committee. Morton shouted to the prisoners in his Irish accent "come forward one at a time, one at a time". When the inmates all pressed forward at once, the soldiers fired warning shots into the air. Haggart who was still on the phone with MacKenzie told him "don't go into the corridor". MacKenzie screamed "tell the fucking screws to back off", but Haggart told him "they're holding their fire". Haggart stated that it was time to release the hostage to calm the situation down. At 6 am, MacKenzie personally walked out the first hostage to be freed, who was Kerry Bushell, who was promptly embraced by his wife. To prevent beatings, MacKenzie told Haggart that he would release one hostage for every sixty prisoners, a demand that Goyer rejected as the solicitor-general wanted all of the hostages freed at once. When MacKenzie refused that demand, Goyer eventually accepted MacKenzie's terms. Over the course of the next hour, the hostages were released.

The last prisoner to surrender was MacKenzie who was greeted by Haggart and Goyer as he walked out. Haggart went up to shake MacKenzie's hand and told him: "Thank you, Barrie. You are a great man". MacKenzie refused to shake Haggart's hand and replied: "Fuck off! I didn't do it for you. I did it for the guys in there". Despite MacKenzie's rudeness, Haggart began his story for the Toronto Telegram newspaper: "Inside Kingston Penitentiary I met Barrie MacKenzie. He is the bravest man I have ever known and he will hate me for saying so." Haggart wrote that MacKenzie had "an endless flow of paranoid fears and delusions" but that he "brought Kingston Penitentiary under control again when it had gone mad." The journalist Grant Buckler wrote that MacKenzie and Haggart deserved much credit for ending the prison riot more or less peacefully as he noted that only 2 men were killed during the Kingston prison riot vs. the 43 men killed during the Attica Prison riot of September 1971, the majority of whom were killed by the New York State troopers as the policemen stormed the Attica prison. Buckler argued that if the Canadian Army been sent to storm Kingston penitentiary that something similar to what happened at Attica later that year might had occurred.

Haggart's reporting of the prison riot in the Toronto Telegram won the National Newspaper Award for 1971 for the best journalism in Canada that year. On 30 October 1971, the Toronto Telegram went out of business and Haggart moved over to the Globe & Mail newspaper. The journalist Scott Young wrote of Haggart's work at the Globe & Mail: "He knows City Hall like a bluejay knows his favourite feeding station. His battles on behalf of the taxpayer, the oppressed...the ordinary rank and file of humanity have given him an identity in this city that would take years to rebuild in another locale".

Television journalist In 1972, Haggart joined the newly founded Citytv station and launched the CITY news show. At the time, Citytv was mostly known for its "baby blue" soft-core pornographic films that it frequently aired, and Haggart's presence helped to give Citytv more credibility. Haggart then founded the Channel 79 news show.

In March 1975, Haggart left Citytv and joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC). In September 1975, he launched The Fifth Estate television show. Haggart also served as the co-producer of the debate show Faceoff (later renamed as Counterspin). About his work as the producer of The Fifth Estate, Haggart stated in a 1983 interview against efforts to "dumb down" his television show: "Don’t tell me there’s not an audience out there for quality". Haggart used the fact that The Fifth Estate had an average viewership of 2.2 million people to argue that there were people interested in more intellectual TV shows.

Haggart retired in 1991. After his death in 2011, the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression posthumously awarded him the Vox Libera award for the best journalism in Canada. In 2012, his daughter, Kelly Haggart, turned her father's articles about the prison riot into the book Cool Heads at Kingston Pen.

Work

Books