Bruce Livesey (journalist)

Bruce Livesey is a Canadian investigative journalist and author, based in Toronto, Ontario, who has over thirty-five years experience in journalism. His television experience includes work with CBC's The Fifth Estate, The National, and CBC News Sunday, Global Television Network, as well as special reports with PBS Frontline, and the Discovery Channel. He has published articles in most Canadian newspapers and magazines of note, including Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, National Post, The Financial Post, The Gazette, Canadian Business, Buzzfeed, The Walrus, and Christian Science Monitor. with the CBC and the Global Television Network as well as contributing to The Globe and Mail and other outlets. He is currently a journalist with the Vancouver-based National Observer. His 2012 book, Thieves of Bay Street, was reviewed by the Literary Review of Canada, the National Post, Quill and Quire, Maclean's and the Globe and Mail. In 2017, he was listed as one of the "top nominated creators", for receiving two nominations at the 40th National Magazine Awards for long-form feature writing and investigative reporting" for his Report on Business Magazine article entitled "Company Province, Provincial Company" on the outsized impact of the Irving family from New Brunswick. From 2005 through 2013, his work has been nominated and/or won the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award, two Gemini awards, National Magazine Award, National Newspaper awards, and the Arthur Ellis award.

Early life

Livesey grew up in Fredericton, New Brunswick. While attending university in the 1980s, his summer job was at the The Daily Gleaner. He volunteered at that time with the NB Film Co-op.

Career

Bruce Livesey worked for six years at CBC TV’s the Fifth Estate and at the CBC's The National, and CBC News Sunday as producer. He then worked for Global Television Network, before joining the newly-launched Vancouver-based National Observer. He was one of Observer’s first reporters. Based in Toronto, Livesey worked as an investigative journalist and author, formerly with CBC and Global. Livesey has contributed articles to The Globe and Mail, Report on Business Magazine, National Post, Toronto Star, The Gazette, The Walrus, Canadian Business, Canadian Lawyer, The Financial Post, and most other major newspapers.

In 2005 he wrote about the Salafist movement. He was co-producer in a joint project between CBC's The Fifth Estate and WGBH PBS Frontline, "Al-Qaeda's New Front", which won Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award for broadcast journalism in 2005. In 2006 he was nominated for the 21st Gemini Awards for Best Newsmagazine Segment for his CBC News: Sunday Night article, "Crack." In 2008 he wrote about organized crime in The Walrus. In 2010, Livesey as investigative producer, collaborated in a partnership with National Public Radio (NPR) and CBC-Radio on "an investigative radio exposé on the collusion of Mexico's army with drug cartels.

In a profile of Livesey for the 2012 Ottawa International Writers Festival, it was noted that Livesey had been one of the winners of the prestigious American television award—the Alfred I. duPont–Columbia University Award—and that he had been nominated to other national awards related to his investigative journalism including two Gemini awards. A 2014 Shaw Media profile described how Livesey's work on the Portus scandal, had been awarded a National Magazine Award from the Canadian National Magazine Awards Foundation (NMAF) in 2013.

Livesey's 2012 investigative report in the Globe's Report on Business, "Where are the Portus diamonds?" focussed on millions of dollars of missing diamonds and the short sentence served by Boaz Manor for his role in the alleged fraud at Portus Alternative Asset Management—which had become one of Canada's largest hedge funds with $800-million AUM by 2005 when it was shut down by the Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) in 2005.

In 2014, Livesey had been commissioned to produce an investigative documentary for Global Television's 16×9 investigative series, about the American billionaire brothers, Charles and David Koch, who own Koch Industries, a "global behemoth" with extensive holdings in Alberta's oil sands—"from 1.1 million to as much as two million acres" worth "tens of billions of dollars", and "their interest" in the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. Paul Jay was the executive producer of the 2017 Donald Trump, The Koch Brothers and Their War on Climate Science documentary written by Livesey.

At the 38th annual National Magazine Awards in 2015, Livesey was nominated for his Report on Business article "Where the Clothes Come".

Canadaland reported on February 5, 2015 that Global had pulled Livesey's Global News article and the documentary two days before it was to be aired. Although Livesey says he had nothing to do with the Canadaland report, Global fired him immediately. His beat is corporate affairs. Livesey undertook further research on the Koch brothers connections to the oil sands, and published the article, "How Canada made the Koch brothers rich" on May 4, 2015 as part of the launching of the National Observer.' In the article, he described how the Koch brothers had launched attacks on numerous media outlets, including an attack against Edmonton Journal's reporter, Karen Kleiss, for her 2011 article that said that the Kochs had hired a lobbyist in Alberta. His and other National Observer reporters' coverage of the oil and gas industry's push to build or enlarge pipelines across Canada has sparked interest amongst politicians, journalists, commentators, academics, NGOs, and social media influencers.

A review in the Literary Review of Canada says that Livesey's 2012 book Thieves of Bay Street is weak on solutions, "After 259 well-argued pages, he devotes only two pages to “What Can Be Done?" The National Post said that Livesey's 2012 book Thieves of Bay Street should be "assigned reading" for those interested in financial industry. The review said that Livesey's perspective as a financial industry outsider, provided the necessary distance allowing him " to say things an insider might not". A Quill and Quire review described Livesey's book as a "corrective for much of the cheerleading" found in Canadian business journalism since 2008. In their introduction of Livesey at the 2012 Ottawa International Writers Festival, his book was described as an exposé on Canada’s financial industry and how it became a "haven for fraud". A review by the Ivey Business Journal, disagreed with Livesey's book, citing former Prime Minister Stephen Harper who said in 2013, that most other developed countries envy Canada’s problems in comparison with the problems they faced. The author added that instead of expressing his outrage because people lose investment money, Livesey should have educated consumers consumers on the risks inherent in investments—"buyer beware". A rabble.ca review described how Thieves of Bay Street contradicts Prime Minister Harper's claims about the effectiveness of Canada's regulations and the stability of the country's finance industry. A Maclean's review said that while the book was "sobering", and that Livesey had "deftly [woven] together dozens of examples" of shady practices, his message about Canada's financial sector was not "novel". Livesey was described in a Canadian Dimension review, as a "longtime muckraker" who avoided a "descent into histrionics" in the book, in spite of the inclusion of several caricatured "sob stories". Al Rosen, writing in the Globe and Mail, disagreed. He said the grief was real and that Livesey's book resonated with his own three decades of experience as a forensic accountant. He said the "message was clear", the book "well-written", "easy to read", and contained extensive "additional source notes". Thieves was on the 2013 short list for the Arthur Ellis award for Best Crime Nonfiction.

In 2017, Livesey's 8-part series entitled for the House of Irving for Observer on K. C. Irving's family won a National Newspaper Award. When Livesey's series won the award, Tracy Glynn, the NB Media Co-op editor, said that he "National Observer is changing the media landscape in Canada, showing that business can be reported on in a way that has the public interest at heart, which is the task of journalism". Livesey's series on the Irvings was a follow-up to his February 26, 2016 Globe and Mail article, "Is the secretive Irving family ready for its close-up?." In their 2018 article, Harvard University-based Nieman Journalism Lab wrote that when Livesey, the Observer's lead investigative reporter, won a National Newspaper Award for the Irving family series, it was the "first time a digital-only outlet had won the award." Livesey earned "two nominations' at the 40th National Magazine Awards for long-form feature writing and investigative reporting" for his Report on Business Magazine article entitled "Company Province, Provincial Company".

In the CBC Ideas episode on November 2, 2020, host Nahlah Ayed introduced Bruce Livesey as an award-winning investigative journalist. The episode featured Livesey's documentary, "Money Rules: Is Capitalism Destroying Democracy?", with Timothy D. Snyder, Stephen Kinzer, and Andrew Bernstein as special guests. Livesey said that "authoritarian capitalism" was systemic and that it was "threatening democracy itself", according to CBC.

Lievsey's publications

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