‘I’ve never, ever been ambitious,’ insists Trina McQueen. ‘My whole career has been a failed attempt to have weekends off.’

It’s a surprising assertion, given McQueen’s many triumphs in the world of broadcasting. Upon closer consideration, she admits, ‘I was ambitious to have a satisfying job and to have some control over the work I did. But I was never ambitious for hierarchy or money or status. Mostly, my career just unfolded without too much planning on my part.’

Despite this apparent lack of trying, McQueen’s accomplishments are impressive: currently executive vp at ctv, she is responsible for the programming, sales and administration of ctv’s network, stations and specialty channels. Before joining ctv in August, she was president of the award-winning Discovery Channel, which launched in 1995. Prior to that, she racked up 25 years at cbc, including a fair chunk of time as vp of television news, current affairs and CBC Newsworld.

She is chair of the Banff Television Festival and a member of various industry and professional boards, including chair of the broadcast industry’s Action Group on Violence on Television, which introduced the classification system for Canadian programs.

She has been named Woman of the Year by Canadian Women in Communications, Woman of Achievement by Canadian Women in Film and Television, and Woman of Distinction by Toronto Life Magazine. In 1995, she received an honorary doctoral degree from Mount St. Vincent University in Halifax, and in 1999, an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the University of Waterloo. And that’s just for starters.

While the resume is solidly outstanding, perhaps equally inspiring and worthy of respect is that she moved through the rigors of these ranks while remaining one of the best-liked and widely admired figures ever to come out of Canadian television.

High school reporter

Trina Janitch was the first born of five children and grew up in a middle-class household in Belleville, Ont. Her father, an engineer, was Yugoslavian in ancestry and her mother was of Czech background. By the time she reached high school, her leadership and journalism skills were beginning to take shape.

A student at Belleville Collegiate Institute and Vocational School, she was at various times a cheerleader, on the student council and president of the Drama Club. She also wrote a column on high school activities for the Belleville Intelligencer – an activity she shared at the time with another well-known journalist out of Belleville, Stevie Cameron (then Stevie Dahl, current editor of Elm Street and author of On the Take, a book about the Mulroney government).

‘That experience made me decide to go to Carleton for journalism,’ she says, an experience that in turn led her to a job reporting at the Ottawa Journal. There, she was noticed by ctv producer Peter Reilly, who wanted her to come to Toronto to work on the brand-new public affairs program W5, while also spending a couple of days a week as a reporter for cfto. It was an offer McQueen couldn’t refuse – not because it fit into any grand career scheme, but because ‘there was a guy in Toronto, so it seemed like a good idea to be there.’

Reilly, whom McQueen recalls as ‘a really interesting guy’ who had a house with his wife on Baldwin Street in Toronto, interviewed her for the job at his home sauna. (Well, it was the sixties after all.) ‘I thought maybe that’s just how television worked – you did a lot of work in the sauna,’ she says. Besides the interview, something else from those early days is etched in McQueen’s mind. When he hired her, she remembers, Reilly ‘said he thought I would be good as a woman on television because I was attractive but not sexy – a phrase that has hurt me for 30 years,’ she says with a rueful smile.

Journalism in the ’60s

With today’s proliferation of women reporters and on-air talent, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t that long ago that being a female journalist was a novelty – something McQueen says made her work both ‘absolutely wonderful’ and very frustrating.

‘It was the late 1960s and things were starting to open up,’ she says. ‘There were very few women around who were competitive with you [for jobs]. People would say, ‘Oh, we have to have a woman,’ and then they’d pick from a very slim talent pool. As a woman, one did attract attention and notice and people would remember your name, which is useful in journalism. Because you were the only woman at the press conference, for example, you would always get your question asked, and so on. That was the good side.

‘The bad side was that there was still an attitude that ‘This is a job that women shouldn’t be doing.’ There was this idea that women didn’t have the authority – read intelligence – to do journalism, especially on-air journalism. Also, when I first got into television, they always sent me to cover the Hadassah Bazaar. It was fun the first time, when I did a story on these amazing women who ran these bazaars. But it was not so much fun the second, third, fourth and fifth times.’

Gender aside, the 1960s, which McQueen figures really ended around 1973, were ‘a very exciting time for journalism. There was an upheaval in almost all the ways we thought about the world, that we thought about authority,’ she recalls. ‘So covering this kind of thing – from the hippie movement to Watergate, to rock and roll, to the Rolling Stones – you were seeing the world in transition. But the overlay to that was the whole Cold War, nuclear-fear atmosphere at the time. Just to be a part of the journalism profession at that time was profoundly interesting and profoundly dramatic. I think most journalists who were part of it never got over it.’

Never got over it?

‘It was a time when journalism was making a huge difference with things like Watergate and Vietnam,’ she explains. ‘There was that chant, ‘The whole world is watching.’ This was the first time the whole world had seen these major events. Journalists opened the curtains and showed things that people had not before understood and it changed the way the world operated. It was a time when journalists saw themselves as able to make a difference, to change the system, to make society better, to improve the lot of ordinary people. In that way, there was a sense of mission and sense that the mission could be achieved because of good journalism. Journalism was seen as a profession that was on the side of the people and it was a very honored profession. It’s a little less so today.’

The CBC years

When McQueen started at cbc, in 1968, she began as an on-air reporter. Soon, however, she stepped out from under the glare of the lights, rolled up her sleeves and went to work where she feels she really belongs – behind the cameras.

‘I was never entirely happy as an on-air person,’ she recalls. ‘My line about that is that ‘I’m not vain enough to think I always look good, but I’m too vain not to care.’ Every time I saw myself on television I would be watching through my hands, which were in front of my face. I was really affected by the notion of actually being on television. I’m more of an introverted kind of person and I just didn’t like that public aspect of on-air reporting.’

Another reason to go behind the cameras was that it allowed McQueen to be at least somewhat involved with all the top stories.

‘Even if you’re the top reporter, you can’t be on every big story – and I loved the big stories,’ she explains. ‘I discovered that if I went inside as a producer or assignment editor, then whenever a good story came along or there was a big event of the day, I would be involved. So I gravitated toward the big editor/producer roles.’

That gravitational pull led her to senior management positions in journalism, entertainment programming, business operations and advertising sales. It also led her to one of her all-time favorite topics: The Constitution. ‘I know I’m only one of 23 people in Canada who finds this stuff interesting,’ she quips, ‘but it is very dramatic to see people try to fashion their future in a democratic way. I am a passionate Canadian and I enjoyed being close to a country as it was trying to define itself, while accommodating diversity and distinctiveness and trying to stay together.’

After a lengthy stint as program manager for cbc, McQueen went back to her news roots in 1988 to tackle the position of vp of television news, current affairs and Newsworld, putting her stamp on such important shows as The National and The Journal and the launch of Witness.

By 1992, with a mood of restructuring angst infiltrating cbc, McQueen (along with other key women) was sidelined to a less senior role at the Corp. McQueen admits that it was ‘a tough time’ but doesn’t dwell on it.

‘Towards the end, I was offside with a lot of things going on at cbc. The president felt that I was not a big member of his team and I kind of felt that maybe he was right. After spending a long time thinking I would retire from there or that they would have to carry me out, I decided it was probably a good idea for me to leave. I started looking around at what there was out there.’

Jump to Discovery

In 1993, while still employed at cbc, McQueen found herself in an elevator with (current Netstar ceo) Gordon Craig, who was working to get a licence for a new specialty channel – a Canadian version of Discovery. The two spoke briefly in the elevator, with McQueen ending the conversation with, ‘That is, if I stay at the cbc.’ Craig remembered this, and later called her to ask if she wanted to be a part of this new venture.

She says today: ‘I thought, ‘Are you crazy?’ The fact is we might not have gotten the licence and I would then have no job at all. I’d have to leave the organization I had been with for 365 years and leave public broadcasting for a job that might or might not exist longer than a few months. Then I thought, ‘Yeah, I’m going to do this.’ My feeling was that maybe I was crazy – so there was an element of worrying about my sanity rather than any fear of what I was doing.’

After almost a year of arduous work, constructing an application, getting people onside, creating business plans and then presenting at the hearings, the Discovery team received its licence. Six months later, it went to air. McQueen describes this as one of the highlights in her career to date.

‘To be at the centre of something new like that was absolutely thrilling,’ she says. ‘For me, I had become a bit disillusioned seeing the country only as a constitution [from being involved in current affairs at cbc], so I found it great to be able to imagine the country in a different way, as a country of ideas and innovation and amazing natural beauty.’

This high point was somewhat tempered, however, by another issue that emerged. Discovery was introduced on a cable tier that required subscribers to take on the new channels in order to get the old ones.

‘It was probably the worst launch of a cable tier ever in the history of television,’ she laughs. ‘Every newspaper front page, every talk show, every editorial, every column – it was a huge news story. What it amounted to was about $2 a year in cable fees. It was one of those things that Canadians, God love ’em, get really upset over. Those of us who had the channels were flying across the country talking to provincial governments, who all got involved and wanted to pass laws. We were talking to regulators, going on talk shows and being denounced by talk-show callers.

‘But the fact is, from the beginning, people loved Discovery. While all of that was going on, we were getting batches of mail from people saying, ‘This is exactly what I want to watch.’ So I’d come to work spinning: on the one hand, there would be all this praise, acceptance and happiness, and on the other was this huge storm cloud. Eventually, though, people got over it and the cable companies began marketing the channels in a different way.’

Champion of Canadian programming

McQueen’s experience at Discovery gave her an enthusiasm and confidence in Canadian television that is still with her today. Sixty percent of Discovery’s programming is Canadian, with 30% hailing from Discovery International and the remainder being purchased from around the world.

‘It was the Canadian programs, the Canadian series that became our biggest audience drivers,’ she says. ‘And that is such an unlikely thing to happen in Canadian television – I am still excited about it. It was really the homegrown shows that drew an audience in Canada and they were exportable around the world. Other countries, other networks such as Discovery International, the British, Germans, pbs, started buying our programs. It was milk and honey – and it shows that you can do it. I know that was specialty television and that there are reasons that it is difficult for it to happen in conventional television – but it can happen and my belief is that it will happen on conventional television as well.’

A new vision for CTV

Today, McQueen counts making that happen – developing, promoting and selling Canadian television – among her challenges as executive vp at ctv. Recently appointed to the post by former cbc programming director and current ctv president and ceo, Ivan Fecan, McQueen is responsible for the programming, sales and administration of ctv’s network, stations and specialty channels.

‘ctv has been with Canadians for many years, since the 1960s anyway,’ she reflects. ‘It’s an institution within Canadian history – but it is an institution as a name, not an institution as a company. It was only when Ivan [Fecan] finally found a way to put the network and its affiliates together that ctv became a real broadcasting organization, rather than a string of cooperative – or uncooperative – station owners. It’s still in the process of becoming – and that’s what I find exciting.’

Conventional television’s loss of dominance in terms of both viewership and advertising dollars is something that McQueen says is uppermost in her mind.

‘Like conventional television all over North America, I think ctv is going to have to shift the way it looks at conventional television and how you advertise in conventional television. I am not saying I have the answer. It is a very difficult issue. What I know is, with the whole ctv group of assets, companies, stations, media platforms, there is an answer. I think the answer lies in the power of the whole rather than the power of each fragment. I’m talking about leveraging the strengths of every part of the organization to create a very strong whole.’

In spite of her move to private broadcasting, McQueen’s continued affections for cbc are obvious. ‘At this stage, I’m obviously more interested in private broadcasting,’ she says. ‘However, I think what would be wonderful for Canada would be if we had a very strong public broadcaster and an excellent private broadcaster, with both involved in Canadian programming and both with good news services. That kind of competition would be great. It would allow the cbc to do the things the cbc should do and allow the private broadcasters to do the things that they want to do.’

McQueen says that because private broadcasting was ‘pretty weak’ in the ’70s and ’80s, cbc had to be all things to all people. In the 1990s, she says, things have changed. ‘Now ctv is together as a network, there is Global and all the specialty channels. It would be possible for cbc to look around and say, ‘We don’t have to do this because other people are doing it.’ It would be great for cbc and great for private broadcasters. The cbc always gets nervous and upset about this [viewpoint], because they think it is saying that cbc should be a marginal organization. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that there is room in this country for several important Canadian broadcasters, and the cbc should be one of them.’

McQueen continues to have a job that, once again, thwarts her efforts to get weekends off regularly. Despite this reality, she says her many experiences in the centre of Canadian culture, journalism and broadcasting have all been worth it.

Asked about the most difficult or challenging times of her career to date, she says, ‘It’s all been pretty good. My ‘difficult and challenging’ tape erases quite quickly. I don’t have a long memory for tough times. I had some hard times at cbc towards the end, but compared to what has happened to other people in this business, I just find it self-indulgent to say that I’ve had tough times.

‘This is a tough business. It chews people up, it puts them under terrible stress. Often the work and effort that people put into the industry is not appreciated. Some people love this industry and work hard for it and never seem to get anywhere – or worse, they are treated badly. So when I look around and I see the number of people who strove so hard and had such tough times, it’s hard for me to say I’ve had tough times. I know that sounds Pollyanna, but there was no time in my career that I said, ‘Oh, that is despair.’

‘My happiest times,’ she continues, ‘have always been when I’ve been at the centre of something major, something wonderful or interesting or even awful, but at the centre of something going on. Launching Newsworld at cbc and overseeing the launch of both Newsworld and Discovery was great.’

In concluding her reflections on the challenges and triumphs of being a senior executive and woman of accomplishment, McQueen says, ‘There is a constant challenge, balancing the personal and the professional. It is a beautiful autumn, and I think about fall fairs, and I think about Niagara grapes, and I think about Algonquin Park. I think of the new plays and the new concert season, and I say to myself, ‘Boy, this better be worth it.’ In the end, for 30 years, my answer has been, ‘Yes, it’s worth it.’ ‘