Elaine Dewar, one of Canada’s most influential investigative journalists and an award-winning author died in Toronto on Sept. 18. She was 77.

She was renowned as a meticulous researcher who couldn’t bear inequality or injustice. “She hated, as she called them, ‘lying liars who lied,’” her publisher, Dan Wells wrote in a tribute.

Her non-fiction books covered a range of topics – Cloak of Green explored environmental politics; Bones: Discovering the First Americans uncovered that the answer to the question of who were the First Americans was steeped in racism; The Second Tree assessed moral issues raised by breakthroughs in biology, such as cloning, and won the 2005 Writers Trust prize for non-fiction; Smarts looked at who defines intelligence and what displays it; The Handover is an investigation into the Canadian publishing industry;* On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 years*, probed links between international political connections and COVID-19.

Dewar was born in Saskatoon and the story of her family became integral to her final book, Growing Up Oblivious, which is scheduled for publication in 2026.

“She discovered that her grandparents were really the most unlikely prairie pioneers,” her friend and colleague Marci McDonald told The CJN. “On the one side they were urban Romanians, and on the other side, Russian Jews fleeing persecution and pogroms. They were recruited by the Canadian government who was looking for prairie settlers–homesteaders for an agricultural tract that was north of Fort Qu’Appelle in what was then the Northwest Territories.

“They arrived between 1901 and 1905 in this godforsaken chunk of frozen prairie. It was with the OK of John A. Macdonald that some Jews were ‘allowed’ to settle there.” The Jewish homestead in Saskatchewan was known as The Lipton Colony. “So, Canada, a colony, had its own colony. It was right next to several Indigenous reserves and Elaine believed that her ancestors would not have survived without the help of the Indigenous people around them.

“Her grandfather, Wolf (William) Landa was a blacksmith in this tiny colony who didn’t believe in God but believed in all the Jewish holidays and all the food laws, except there was no one to ensure kosher meat.” He set up a Talmud Torah there and later he headed for Saskatoon as the patriarch of the city’s first Jewish family.

“Being Jewish there was pretty amazing,” her daughter Anna Dewar told The CJN. “It was a very tight-knit community. My grandfather’s house was the hub of the Jewish community. They were a cornerstone.”

As a teenager, Dewar had a front row seat to the 1962 Doctor’s Strike which she preferred to call ‘The Medicare Crisis’. Doctors in Saskatchewan went on strike against premier Tommy Douglas’ imposition of medicare. During the strike her father, Dr. Sam Landa, helped organize medical emergency care for the entire province. “That sense of civic responsibility was what she would always talk about,” McDonald said.

Landa was a celebrated figure in Saskatoon’s history as the first president of the Canadian Association of Sport Sciences, chair of ParticipACTION Saskatoon – the test community that helped launch the ParticipACTION movement in Canada, and a member of the medical team at the Munich Olympics in 1972, where he witnessed the terrorist assault on the Israeli team. He was awarded the Order of Canada in 1976.

“She felt so strongly about being a part of that community that it shaped her sense of being someone who belongs for her whole life,” her daughter Anna said. “Even when she moved to Toronto, she felt she had a place to belong. She had a special upbringing in Saskatoon in a strong multigenerational Jewish community that grew from the ground up. It was only the last couple of weeks of her life that I realized how much of a hub she was, and our home was. So many people came to Toronto and stopped in, connected with my parents and I think she got this from her roots in Saskatoon. There was a group of them who were pillars of the community in the best possible sense. Real civic actors and part of the fabric of Saskatoon.”

Elaine’s goal was to leave Saskatoon for the “big city” and by the time she received a scholarship from York University in Toronto, she was a burgeoning feminist with a passion for Simone de Beauvoir.

She met her husband, Saskatoon-born Stephen Dewar, when she was 12 and he came to her house to play guitar for her older sister, Kahrellah. Almost 10 years later when she was in her second year at York, she had her first date with him, engineered by a friend. He had just started working at the CBC.

“Throughout her 50-year marriage they would remain each other’s favourite sparring partner,” McDonald said. She became a key strategist in his production company and a scriptwriter for its most successful series, Lorne Greene’s New Wilderness which ran for five years and won three Emmys. He died in 2019.

Her first journalism job was working as a fact-checker on a story for Maclean’smagazine that claimed the upcoming Montreal Olympics were going to be a financial disaster. She was hired full time after that.

By the 1980s she had left Maclean’s to pursue a freelance writing career. She found a niche writing for City Woman – a magazine that featured some of Canada’s best magazine writers, all women, at the height of the magazine era. She credited City Woman with helping her invent herself as a writer.

Her interest in corporate culture combined with a passion for fearless reporting led to a series of stories that exposed backroom deals and power plays on Bay Street. In 1987, she wrote an explosive story for Toronto Life on the origins of the Reichmann family’s real estate empire. It resulted in a $102-million libel suit and took three years to settle. During that time, Dewar began to investigate the environmental movement which led to her first non-fiction book Cloak of Green.

“Passion was something she brought to everything she encountered,” McDonald said at Dewar’s funeral. “Ideas, friendships, her family, and the stunning art pieces she created when words failed. But most of all she brought it to the stories that she decided needed telling. No matter how steep the cost.

“We talked about the challenges of her final book which she handed in only a few months ago about reported claims of medical experiments on Indigenous students in residential schools. I was blown away by the shocking links she unearthed. She was not content with another explosive investigative book. Instead, she turned her unforgiving eye on the society she had grown up in that failed to notice or stop such unethical medical practises.

“She resisted the topic at first when somebody came to her with a bare bones investigative idea, but it became apparent to her that it was something which touched on her roots. It became very important to her in a way of sending up alarms that we never fall back on this kind of ‘obliviousness’ or these excuses again in our society to the terrible things that are happening.”

During the last month, Dewar told her publisher Dan Wells, that although she felt “as spiritual as an old sock”, she also insisted that having been born in June 1948, a month after Israel’s own birth- she had lived “through the best time to be Jewish in history” – a period she felt had ended Oct. 7, 2023.

“She was the fearless warrior in her life, in her work and in her death,” her brother, Murray said. “She was dedicated, determined and decisive. Even while in pain she finished her final book and got it off to the publisher. She ran her life right down to the wire.”

Dewar is survived by her daughters Anna and Danielle, three granddaughters, her sister Kahrellah, brother Murray, and many nieces, nephews and cousins. She was predeceased by her husband of 50 years, Stephen.

Author

Heather Ringel is The CJN’s obituary writer. She lives in Toronto.

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