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than most victims of such heinous crimes for having been able to get on with my life. But Dr. Warrick’s vicious killing haunted and nagged at me for days after. I’m not sure I even understood or cared to examine why at the time because I had buried the trauma so deeply. A consummate perfectionist and highly driven, I was determined to be the best at keeping up a tough facade. While I clearly chose to remain in the dark and ignore my own personal hell, something inside me motivated me to start my journey to expose the truth and advocate for others who didn’t have a voice. The more I worked those brutally long hours, the less time and energy I had to think about, or rather acknowledge, my personal issues – until 4 a.m., when the anxiety attacks would hit. But even those were attributed to relatively minor worries at the time.
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    MY PERFECTIONISM LIKELY GOT NOTICED at the paper. But it was only a few years later that I realized the way it was recognized was perhaps not the way I would have preferred. After eighteen months as a general assignment reporter, I was put on the city desk as assistant city editor, which meant that, depending on the shift, I’d either be assigning stories to reporters or batting cleanup – that is, helping to put the paper to bed. For the three years I was on the “desk” – as we called it – I worked with a terrific team (we actually had a team of editors and reportersin those days). Assigning stories helped me develop a sound sense of news judgment, and I did enjoy working with our team of reporters, even the prima donnas. But it took me away from what I had grown to love so much: writing and digging for stories. I wanted very badly to show my stuff by developing a “beat.” For months, I pleaded with my bosses to let me leave the city desk to develop contacts and hopefully get breaking stories as the new education beat reporter. It took some convincing, but they finally agreed. Even though I had no kids of my own in the school system, I sensed from the few stories we’d been covering that the system badly needed a wake-up call, and no one at our paper was calling them on it. It was in this same system that Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne got her political feet wet, first as an activist for an organization called the Toronto Parent Network and subsequently as a trustee with the Toronto District School Board.
    What bothered me, virtually from the outset, was the tremendous lack of transparency in the school system and the coziness between the very entitled trustees and the bureaucrats they were charged with overseeing. Within weeks of being on the beat, I journeyed up to York Region to cover a protest by parents over a plan by the region’s Catholic school board to lay off two thousand teachers in order to balance their budget. The protest took place in front of their brand new and scandalously expensive headquarters – shockingly bad optics that seemed to go right over the heads of the bureaucrats who ran the board and the trustees who rubber-stamped their decisions. It was a mild April evening, and when I pulled up, hundreds and hundreds of parents and teachers were marching in protest. The group subsequently marched inside the Catholic board’s new twenty-two-million-dollar monumentto itself to attend that evening’s public board meeting, only to find the meeting room doors locked and a phalanx of security guards barring entry to all. I was appalled that the trustees didn’t have the guts to face their teachers and the taxpaying public head on. It was arrogant and undemocratic, and it suggested they had much to hide.
    From that day forward, I promised myself that I’d force school trustees and those I started calling the “educrats” to come clean to the public who elected them. In mid-1994, I set about exposing the bloated salaries and the expensive meals at fancy restaurants and lavish junkets taken by the top brass at all Metro-area school boards – the same top