Bruce Cheadle of The Canadian Press writes a scorching attack on the Liberal candidate in Toronto-Centre for the byelection to be run this month. “A high-profile federal Liberal candidate campaigning in Toronto on a platform of restoring the middle class oversaw the decision to move two dozen full-time media jobs from that city to India,” Cheadle writes. “Chrystia Freeland was the head of Reuters Digital in New York when Thompson Reuters moved its Toronto digital newsroom to New York and shipped the bulk of its work to the Bangalore operation. “The December 2011 move put about 25 Toronto staff under Freeland’s supervision out of work, including 17 permanent and five temporary unionized employees. Thomson Reuters won’t say how many employees remain — only that the company has “a fully staffed and functioning newsroom in Toronto . . . “A common refrain from former Reuters employees is a sense that Freeland didn’t go to bat for them when their jobs were on the line. Aviva West spent three years as a full-time contract editor who worked every weekend at the Toronto operation. “’We had zero contact with (Freeland),’ said West. “’She was in charge of consumer news, and that’s what we were doing in Toronto, programming 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, Reuters.com. We never, ever saw her.” Yonge and Roxborough News
