TORONTO — Lisa LaFlamme had barely settled into the back of the cafe when two women approached her in quick succession. You are so beautiful, said the first, while the other woman handed LaFlamme a note on yellow lined paper.
“Thank you for being ‘you,'” read the message, written in clean cursive by “an admirer.”
The fleeting interactions that took place during a recent interview with Ms. LaFlamme, 58, in Toronto were full of the unspoken. Perhaps not much more needed to be said about three women of the same age who happened to meet in Toronto, half a year after Ms. LaFlamme repressed as one of the country’s top news anchors amid allegations of ageism and sexism.
“People are so incredibly friendly,” Ms. LaFlamme said, her eyes filling. “The support has been overwhelming. It was really a shock for me.”
Ms. LaFlamme was a household name in Canada for decades, unequivocally released last summer by CTV, the country’s largest commercial television network, after what her employer described as a “business decision” to acquire the program “in another direction.” Although her national news program on CTV had been one of the most viewed and she had won national award Just months earlier, Ms. LaFlamme had to opt out of being the best news anchor without a proper farewell.
Instead, in a poorly lit two-minute makeshift Video Uploading to her Twitter account, she said: “At 58 I still thought I had a lot more time to tell more of the stories that influence our daily lives.”
Her departure sparked a wide range of debates across Canada, particularly after The Globe and Mail newspaper reported that this may have been the case connected to Ms. LaFlamme’s hair — which she wanted to turn gray during the pandemic as hair salons and other businesses shut down. The network’s owner, Bell Media, denied that “Age, gender and gray hair” factors appointed a 39-year-old male correspondent, Omar Sachedina, to succeed her.
“It came as a complete surprise when they decided to end their contract early, as there was no apparent evidence that CTV was particularly down or actually performing poorly,” she said Christopher Waddell, Professor Emeritus of Journalism at Carleton University and former news producer at public broadcaster CBC. He added that Ms. LaFlamme’s 11-year tenure as host of CTV National News, the network’s flagship news show, has been viewed as a ratings success, especially when compared to its main competitor CBC.
The owner of CTV has not returned multiple emails and calls requesting comment on this article. Ms. LaFlamme declined to give details of her firing, citing a mutual separation agreement.
Immediately after the controversy surrounding her ouster, Mirko Bibic, the CEO of Bell Canada, made a statement That said, in part, “The narrative was that Lisa’s age, gender, or gray hair played a role in the decision. I am satisfied that this is not the case.”
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During a nearly two-hour interview, Ms. LaFlamme spoke about emerging after half a year of silence, and showed a journalist’s understanding and resignation that her departure would for now overshadow a long career that was ended by reporting in New York a day later highlighted the September 11 attacks and many trips to Afghanistan and Iraq.
“Most of the comments I’ve ever received weren’t in Baghdad or Afghanistan for months or any other story, but when I was turning my hair gray — other than that,” Ms. LaFlamme said. “And I’ll say that, 98 percent positive, except for a couple of men and one woman — it’s funny that I actually remember that — but they were unceremoniously smashed on social media because of women supporting women.”
Ms. LaFlamme said she still has to plan her professional life for the years to come. But her calendar is filling up with long-standing commitments to helping other women, including giving a public lecture for Dress for success, a private organization that provides women with free workwear. Ms. LaFlamme also planned a week-long trip to Tunisia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to shoot short documentaries about African women journalists Human Rights Journalistsa Toronto-based organization.
She shares a home in Toronto with her husband, Michael Cooke, a former editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star, but regularly visits her hometown of Kitchener, Ontario, a small town 60 miles southwest of Toronto where her mother and sisters still live.
Growing up there, she attended a Roman Catholic girls’ school and went home for lunch with her three sisters and parents, both “news junkies”.
“My dad was a contractor and came home for lunch every day and I’m in elementary school and the conversation turned to the morning talk shows and the topic of the discussions,” Ms. LaFlamme said. “And of course the last 15 minutes of lunch was Fred Flintstone.”
Hungry to discover the world outside of Kitchener, she accepted her school’s offer to work as a nanny in France for two years. Unable to make French friends at the time, she said the experience helped her understand the alienation some immigrants feel in Canada – “not getting to know someone in the country you live in”.
After college in Ottawa, Ms. LaFlamme landed a part-time job at CTV’s hometown affiliate after waiting six hours — without an appointment — outside the news director’s office.
she keeps “vivid memories of not being taken seriously as a reporter – as she passed an office where three senior managers “looked at one of her stories and laughed about it”. Or when, during a trip to Paris, a male colleague commented on a navy blue dress she had carefully chosen, “How does anyone take you seriously?” she remembered him telling her.
“Just a classic navy blue suit, the skirt was below the knee, nothing, nothing, nothing sexy,” said Ms. LaFlamme. “I wanted a navy blue suit because I thought that equated to professionalism.”
In the 1990s, she recalled, the newsroom had pictures of scantily clad women ripped from the local tabloid hanging on the cutting room walls.
Over the years, she received letters from two male colleagues apologizing for the way they had treated her, she said.
“I don’t know if they went through the 12-step program or what,” she said.
Her career took off quickly after she joined the CTV network in 1997 and was soon shortlisted as a potential successor to Lloyd Robertson, who was CTV’s top presenter for 35 years until he retired in 2011 at the age of 77 retired when Mrs. LaFlamme replaced him.
The National Post, a national newspaper, had already belittled Ms. LaFlamme’s chances in 2001, commenting that she was “known to be better-looking in person than on TV.” A veteran television news executive, in an article in the Toronto Star, recalled how he once tried to hire Ms. LaFlamme but was overruled by his boss, who “didn’t like her hair.”
A decade after her successful tenure as CTV’s top anchor, Ms. LaFlamme faced a predicament in the first wave of the pandemic in 2020, when hair salons were shut down. She has been dying her prematurely gray hair since her 20s. She took Nice ‘n Easy’s over-the-counter dye on reporting trips – to dye her hair in the women’s restrooms at Kandahar Airfield and in a bunker in Baghdad, where brown water came from a faucet sticking out of a wall.
At the beginning of the pandemic, Ms. LaFlamme hid the gray with spray paint.
“There was hair color on my pillowcases — and I also had menopause and night sweats — and the pillowcases were gross,” Ms. LaFlamme said.
She said she started going gray during the second wave of the pandemic, inspired by an older sister who had done the same and a boss who endorsed the decision.
The response, she said, has been overwhelmingly positive. In a year-end summary programShe joked: “Honestly, if I had known lockdown could be so liberating on that front, I would have done it much sooner.”
But the decision was criticized by then-CTV News chief, who according to The Globe and Mailasked in a meeting who approved the decision to “let Lisa’s hair go gray.”
As the interview wound down, Ms. LaFlamme frowned as she looked at her phone at the havoc her new Chocolate Lab puppy had wreaked on her living room — a chewed up burlap rug. She had to take care of the dog and prepare for her presentation for Dress for Success in two days.
“It’s an organization that really helps women get back into work, and for years I’ve donated suits to the organization,” she said. “Is not that funny?”
