Remembering the Quiet Brilliance of Tom Barrett

One of the most important moments in the life of The Tyee occurred on a spring day in 2004. Tom Barrett, having wrapped his long career as a reporter for the Vancouver Sun, said he’d like to try writing for this digital startup not yet six months old.

I was grateful and thrilled. I’d worked with Barrett when I was an editor at the Sun, so I knew he combined prodigious investigative skills with a smooth writing style.

Could The Tyee be so lucky as to land Tom Barrett’s byline on a regular basis? At the time, naysayers were urging readers to disregard our fledgling experiment, implying The Tyee shouldn’t be taken seriously as a source for “real” journalism.

Barrett in our pages could help provide a resounding rebuttal. Colleagues in B.C.’s news media knew he was highly principled, impervious to spin. Whatever he filed was rock solid.

He had covered the B.C. legislature for the Sun for years, breaking stories on misuse of public funds that ended at least one political career. He understood that The Tyee, just starting out, couldn’t pay him close to what he was worth. But he told me that he got what we were trying to do. B.C. journalism needed new models. He welcomed the freedom to pursue the kind of stories he wanted to write.

Barrett had a famously spare, low-key way of speaking. This day, as I recall, he stayed true to form. “Yeahhh. Well. Let’s see how it goes,” he said.

He would write 203 articles for The Tyee.

The first three sentences of his very first story for us displayed his arid wit:

“Someone once threw a cue ball at John Coelho while he was standing on a street corner. Someone else tried to drop a full can of pop on his head from a West End balcony.

“Life’s like that sometimes when you write parking tickets for a living.”

The last Tyee piece to carry a Barrett byline, posted on April 10, 2017, was a highly read opus tapping his encyclopedic grasp of B.C. politics. It listed “117 BC Liberal Falsehoods, Boondoggles and Scandals.”

In between those two efforts Barrett made a specialty of deconstructing polling as he expertly covered elections. When governments would hype their latest policies, Barrett, like a forensic accountant toting numbers against claims, would fact check them. He also revisited the province’s most colourful political peccadilloes in a rollicking series co-written with Tom Hawthorn called “Some Honourable Members.”

“Tom Barrett was brilliant and I will forever be grateful I got to work with him on that series,” said Hawthorn, a longtime contributor to The Tyee.

When the effects of a neuromuscular condition caused Barrett to retire from reporting in 2017, he stuck close to home in the Maillardville neighbourhood of Coquitlam with his longtime love, his wife of 38 years Fiona McQuarrie. On Sept. 15, he died after suffering a heart attack.

The Tyee has established the Tom Barrett Investigative Journalism Fund to honour his spirit. For stories that require the kind of deep digging he did so proficiently, and which focus on policies that have weighty implications for citizens of B.C., we are dedicating $5,000 annually.

News of Barrett’s passing stirred sorrow and fond reflections among his contemporaries. In a note to The Tyee, veteran Sun columnist Vaughn Palmer wrote:

“Tom was a great political reporter, disarmingly so. He was so quiet I do wonder how many politicians were lulled into thinking he was therefore harmless... as opposed to being a rigorous and utterly reliable observer of their words, deeds and credibility gaps.

“His memory of this province's wealth of political scandals was excellent. And when working with Tom at the legislature, there was no need to wait for the Hansard transcript — he was a master of the almost lost art (among reporters anyway) of shorthand.

“In private he was funny, a lover of music (Roxy Music, Captain Beefheart, the list goes on), and great company.

“We did share a house with two other guys in North Vancouver for a time. I believe it is still standing.”

Another early friend and co-staffer at the Vancouver Sun, Rod Mickleburgh, said: “Tom was a true original. Such a beautiful human being. Someone you wanted to be with. I can’t believe we’ve lost him.

“In addition to being a great reporter — dubbed B.C.’s best political reporter at one point by the legendary Marjorie Nichols — he had a wonderful sense of drollery and whimsy. He loved Monty Python and the Three Stooges.

“Tom was quirky,” Mickleburgh recalled. “You never quite knew where his interests would take him. When he came back to the Vancouver newsroom from his long stint in the Victoria bureau, he was told he could have any beat he wanted that wasn’t already claimed.” Maybe Tom sensed something big was coming in those days when the internet was but a rumour. “He asked for the telecommunications beat, which hardly produced much big news, but Tom produced fascinating stories.”

Veteran Sun reporter John Mackie remembers a story Barrett liked to tell of his first day in the Sun newsroom in 1974. The shy 20-year-old was told to sit near the city editor, who promptly got into a loud argument with a business reporter, tore up his copy and stomped on it. Gee, what’s this editor going to do with my first piece, Barrett wondered.

Not to worry. Barrett was the Sun’s “boy wonder,” according to Mackie, who, during that heyday for newspapers, ran in a pack that included Barrett, Mickleburgh and Hawthorn, all sharing a love of baseball, comics and rock ’n’ roll.

Fiona McQuarrie, the Sun’s rock critic at the time and destined to become a university professor, was drawn to all the layers beneath Tom’s quiet exterior. When they began living together, she marvelled at the rigour and intellectual curiosity he brought to his stories. One he was particularly proud of, she recalled, was headlined “Using Her Brain.” A Jack Webster Awards finalist, it profiled University of Victoria researchers and the disabled woman they were trying to help better communicate by using computers.

Another series of investigative pieces, co-written with fellow Sun reporter Jes Odam, exposed a B.C. cabinet minister’s lavish lifestyle expensed to taxpayers, including a resort visit and fancy French wines. The minister resigned from cabinet and did not seek re-election.

McQuarrie remembers how carefully Barrett went through a trove of receipts and transcribed hours of interviews for that one. “Tom always took the craft very seriously. He didn’t draw inferences where there weren’t any. He made sure he had the goods.

“He cared about what ran under his name, not because he wanted to be a celebrity but because he cared about the integrity of the work.”

The Tyee was just one place where Barrett invested his energies after leaving the Sun. The former boy wonder circled back to get the bachelor’s degree he’d been in too much of a hurry to attain. He majored in communication studies at Athabasca University, taking five courses per term to graduate in 2007 with a bachelor of arts with “great distinction,” then taught journalism at Kwantlen Polytechnic University.

“Tom believed in good journalism and good writing, and wanted to help other people realize their own skills,” said McQuarrie.

He was a voracious reader, with working-class history a favourite topic. When he died, he’d just polished off The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel exploring faith and reason.

Beginning in 2015 he struggled with the effects of myasthenia gravis, an autoimmune disease that interferes with signals from nerves to muscles, causing weakness and vision problems. For a long stretch he couldn’t read, a blow he weathered with his usual quiet cheerfulness until altered medications restored the ability.

Through everything, as I experienced personally, he was unfailingly kind and helpful. When I recklessly ventured into writing my one and only academic paper, I found myself trying to understand how the social theory of German philosopher Jürgen Habermas might apply to digital journalism. I was in way over my head, but Barrett had studied Habermas for his degree and good-naturedly threw me a lifeline by breaking it all down for me.

As he did for The Tyee’s readers, again and again.

Picking the best of his work is an impossible task. Still, as tribute and remembrance, here are five stellar examples of Tom Barrett’s contributions to our pages over the years:

The Dangerous Life of a Parking Cop
People who ticket people are people, too. A new film even makes them heroes, sort of. (April 2, 2004)

Could New Breed of ‘Low Profit’ Firms Save Our News Media?
Canada has yet to allow hybrid ownership models operating in US and UK. (April 9, 2009)

In which Barrett offers an early forecast of the storm that enveloped ad-driven media and explores alternatives.

Politics Buffet BC’s Carbon Agenda
Premier Clark inherited bold climate policies and strong pressures on all sides. What will she do? (Nov. 22, 2011)

In which Barrett gets then-premier Christy Clark on the record on climate change: “I’ve concluded it’s the single most important issue facing this country.” Part of a series.

The Day a Legislator Tried to Do Away with Sex
Socred Agnes Kripps hated ‘that nasty little three-letter word.’ (April 16, 2013)

In which Barrett writes one of the all-time best “kickers” — journalist parlance for the last bit in a piece. Part of a series.

117 BC Liberal Falsehoods, Boondoggles and Scandals: The Complete List
The Tyee’s updated tally of 15 years of public messes, sourced and explained. (April 10, 2017)

In which Barrett’s deep knowledge of B.C. politics is on full display, helping to lay out a party’s record in office in detail far beyond what other media provided.

When news that Tom Barrett had died made the rounds, there was an outpouring of love for the guy who was so humble it could seem he sought none. As McQuarrie read Facebook pages and emails sent to her, she was heartened to see him “getting so much love and respect from people he worked with. He was very funny around people he knew and was comfortable with, and he had lots of great stories,” she said. “Tom did amazing work and influenced people so generously.”

Yes, he did. Thanks, Tom.