Our friend, Michael Finlay, died yesterday after being taken off life support. As I’ve written, he was randomly attacked on the Danforth in Toronto last week by an unknown person who pushed him down from behind. I didn’t publish Michael’s name at first at the request of his family. But he was a long-time journalist with many journalist friends, and it was inevitable that the news would get out. Now that it has, I wanted to write about Michael, in part to help counteract what his family was afraid of: that he would be remembered for the manner of his death rather than for his full and valuable life.

In other tributes that have been pouring out, the word most often used for Michael is “brilliant.” This was clear from the time I first met him, when I was a 16-year-old in my first year at the University of B.C. going to work on The Ubyssey student newspaper. Michael was already a graduate student, a poet working on his master’s degree in creative writing. But he’d been editor of the student paper a couple of years before, and he still hung out sometimes in the newsroom in the Student Union Building, or more usually the pub, and was already working part time at The Vancouver Sun. 

He was tall, with a child’s curly blond hair and a quick laugh. The book of poetry he was working on would eventually be titled The Harpo Scrolls, with a cover picture of Harpo Marx and his wild blond hair. Michael’s fingernails were bitten to the quick, and he often gnawed on a thumbnail while holding one of his ever-present cigarettes in the same hand. He didn’t miss a thing. Not a single thing that was going on—in the room, in the country, in the world. When someone said something new or interesting, he would go notably still for a minute, taking it in, maybe taking a drag on his cigarette or a pull on his beer. 

Then he would say something like, “What that means is…” and put whatever was being discussed into a broader context, evaluating its importance and what it would lead to in the future. Michael had one of the quickest minds I’ve never known, and an astonishing ability to put together bits and pieces of information into a coherent whole. This was incredibly intimidating to a 16-year-old, who noticed the brilliance but didn’t quite get the nervousness—those gnawed fingernails—the awkwardness and intensity that made him both compelling and difficult.

I learned a bit more about the difficult side the next year, when I moved into a grungy student house where he was already living. The other people there were mostly student journalists, many of whom eventually left journalism, or grad students like Michael and my future husband, Paul Knox, who stayed in the business for more than 30 years. All of us worked part time on The Sun, which routinely took on summer students and part-time reporters from The Ubyssey. We still talk about the address, 4424 West Twelfth, which is probably worth millions now but was shambolic back then, with worn flooring and cracked walls, the kitchen counters often sticky from a party’s worth of spilled beer. I can still hear Michael’s shrill outrage when presented with a chore: “You expect me to do what?” 

Brilliant, nervous, irascible, he wasn’t notably competent at daily life, cooking any more than cleaning. There were three cats in that house, and since this was the 70s, they were named The Great Catsby, Dare to Struggle, Dare To Win (ironically, of course, and known as Struggle) plus Ichiro, brought back from Hiroshima by one of our housemates, and lacking eyelids. Michael referred to them all as Cat. “Hello, Cat.” That has been the name he’s given to every cat I’ve ever had. He would look at them. They would look back. Finally he would wheeze out a laugh, amused at having caught himself in a staring match with a cat. The only animal he really liked was Bugs Bunny.

After publishing The Harpo Scrolls, Michael pretty much quit poetry, saying that he’d said all he had to say. Instead he focused on journalism, starting work full time at The Sun. He was a born journalist of the classic school, aiming to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. Throughout his career, by “the comfortable,” he meant not only politicians and businessmen, but often his bosses. He didn’t work up well, although he was an excellent colleague and eventually a pretty good boss himself, sometimes biting in his comments, but always sending people off in the right direction to get a good story. 

At The Sun, when asked to do a phone interview, some of the lazier reporters would refrain, filing a memo before knocking off for the day saying the person they were supposed to contact was “not available till end of shift.” Michael never did that. He was a dog with a bone, especially if he got the idea someone was avoiding him. He would work the phone for hours. This was when he was truly alive, nailing down a story. And afterwards, of course, in the Press Club, re-telling how he got it, blow-by-blow, over more than a few beer.

Michael moved to Toronto around 1980, where he got a job in CBC Radio as a chase producer at As It Happens. I was working there at the time and after I heard about a job opening, he came in for an interview. People tell this story differently, some saying it happened in Vancouver, some people at the CBC. I remember it as being As It Happens. He was asked how radio was different from newspapers. “You turn it on and it makes noise,” he replied. 

They still hired him.

Chase producers started the day with a morning meeting, pitching possible stories for the show, whether the war in Zimbabwe or a farmer in Quebec who’d grown a prizewinning pumpkin. We then tried to line up guests, writing bookings on a chalkboard and typing out questions that host Barbara Frum could ask. It was a noisy room, with big-time journalism going on at a high level. Future Senator Pamela Wallin was another chase producer back then, working on stories about the war in Zimbabwe, and trying to convince guerrilla leaders to come on the show. One time we heard her say, “Oh, Mr. Nkomo, you’re such a tease.” 

It was that sort of place, rude and edgy and bustling, and Michael loved it there. Found his element, working on international news stories. As a child, he’d lived in Bangkok for several years when his father worked for a UN aid agency. He knew the world was out there and now he could connect to it, using a killer contact book and the CBC’s telephone budget, his quick mind putting new developments together in double time, analyzing the latest news and answering Barbara Frum’s penetrating questions before going to air. 

He pre-interviewed the day’s newsmakers: cabinet ministers, diplomats, foreign correspondents caught on the ground during civil wars—although I don’t think there was ever a pumpkin farmer. That was too everyday. The one sort of dailyness I remember was Michael’s love of playing hockey in a pick-up game of mixed male and female journalists from The Globe, The Star, the CBC. I played too, and had to take Michael to hospital one night with a hurt knee. “Well, this isn’t right,” he said, sitting in emergency still half kitted out.

Michael was promoted to senior producer on As It Happens, and later moved to the documentary flagship, Sunday Morning. Glory days. He flew around the world making radio documentaries about huge stories, many in Africa, which became a specialty. Years on, you’d hear Michael at a dinner party: “The time I was in Angola…” “In Ghana…” “In South Africa…” He spent a lot of time in South Africa, and was there when Nelson Mandela got out of prison. He loved to be at the centre of things, taking risks, providing what comfort he could to the afflicted—at least assuring that their voices would be heard—and meanwhile still gnawing his fingernails to the quick.

When he became executive producer of Sunday Morning, Michael passed on his insights to other correspondents in the field, and frequently pissed off his bosses. “I’m trying to put out a show,” he would say, explaining his resistance to directives from above. But it was also a result of his impatience and growing irascibility, a slight tendency to think he knew everything when he only knew 99 per cent and, of course, his never-ending glee in afflicting the comfortable. The show was very good, and he was one big reason. People knew more about the world when they listened.

Then things changed a little. Michael had a heart attack, not major, but a warning. He split up with his lovely and forbearing partner, Terry, who moved back to Vancouver. And he found himself out of his executive producer role, moved to a job in CBC Radio News. He was bitter about what he regarded as a demotion, and he drank more. What he said when looking over reporters’ stories could sting. Tact had never been Michael’s strong suit, although his sense of humour and enjoyment of the ridiculous were always winning, and the journalists still knew their stories were better after he’d got through with them.

Michael stayed in news until he retired in 2010, and by that time, his health wasn’t very good. He’d quit smoking after his heart attack, although the bottle remained his friend. But he had a series of health crises, including several bouts of cancer of the colon, liver and lungs. Friends joked, Michael if you want to lose weight, you don’t need to get bits of you cut out. Yet when a group of old Vancouver housemates and Ubyssey writers gathered in Toronto in 2021, he said that he was cancer free, one of only three per cent of people who were alive five years after his particularly dire diagnosis.

We lived not far apart in east-end Toronto. I saw him quite often on the Danforth when I was out shopping. Michael was usually either shopping himself or on the way to his local pub, where he’d made a loyal group of friends over the years. Doctors had ordered him to cut down on his drinking, but the pub was his social life, and he still went there most days and nursed his beer. Sometimes in summer I’d sit with him at an outside table for a while. “There was that time in Angola,” he would say. He also developed a love of roots music, and a couple of times I ran into him at concerts, often by himself at a table by the side of the room. Pre-pandemic, he would fly down to Austin to hear the music that he loved. “There was that time at South by Southwest,” he would say.

Michael didn’t look at all well, despite being cancer-free. Radiation and chemo had taken a whack out of him. We all wondered what would happen. But who could have predicted some random guy would knock him over, probably when he was on the way to his local, breaking his ribs and puncturing his lung. Two days later, another heart attack, the ICU, the decision to take him off life support.

I wish we’d lost Michael at some vague future time after he’d enjoyed seeing his friends at the pub, talking about Mandela and South Africa, then headed off to a concert. At night, in bed, he goes to sleep.

“Sentimental crapola,” he would say. “Give it to me straight.” 

He called me Lester Krugee. I called him my friend.

Photo by Art Smolensky