A a few weeks ago, Senior editor Harley Rustad sent me a list of properties via Slack. No comments. No context. Just a link. It was strange – Harley, as far as I knew, did not work part-time as a realtor. Of course I clicked.
On 157 acres of Niagara farmland, twenty-five minutes from Hamilton, there was a 57,650-square-foot complex with a “grand foyer,” a commercial kitchen, a gym with a climbing wall and boxing ring, a library, a science laboratory, and a football field. Sold for “educational use, corporate recreation or repurposing,” it cost $9.4 million and promised “outstanding potential.”
But the photographs told a different story: the dorms, the hallways, the cafeteria—everything was empty. The place seemed frozen, as if everyone had fled. It didn't feel like a purchase. It was like something had gone wrong on site.
And then it dawned on me. This was the Robert Land Academy.. Once a private, military-style boarding school for boys, now abandoned and bankrupt. Empty students. There are also no employees who, as we have consistently reported over the past year, abused them, according to lawsuits have been filed against the school. What the children endured is shocking: public shaming, racist harassment, denial of food, sleep deprivation, forced outdoor exposure in winter and isolation. The lawsuits, which now number more than eighty, allege that administrators maintain a system “designed to conceal” sexual, psychological and physical abuse. Survivors describe lasting trauma, with some saying the school “ruined” their childhood.
In other words, this “vast property” constituted a visual record of the crime scene. This was also proof of justice: the writer Rachel Brown Investigative Series helped close the facility in April.
We're no strangers to dramatic results. In 2017 joint investigation with CBC Fifth Estate Secret police documents and new details about a decades-long case have been discovered among missing elderly people in Muskoka. In 2024 our revelation of former art director Ferdinand Eckhardt's Nazi affiliation pushed the Winnipeg Art Gallery to sever ties with its founding leader and prompted Premier Wab Kiney to remove Eckhardt's name from the Manitoba Order of the Buffalo Hunt, one of the province's highest honors. Michelle Cica's recent report on so-called “challengers” forced a long-overdue public reckoning among people who had dodged responsibility for years. AND Soraya Amiri's reporting on Afghanistan has become a trusted post shared on WhatsApp, X and throughout the diaspora.
Will our November release cause tremors? May be. Are we summing it up? The first months of Mark Carney's reignassessing Progress of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission a decade later or careful study China's record for executing CanadiansEach story asks the same question about power: who wields it, who keeps the score, and who lives with the consequences?
But the impact of our reporting can't always be reflected in headlines or in page views, time on site and social media shares. More often than not, it's the strange, unpredictable directions that history takes when it leaves our desks. How it fits into the reader's life: awakens memories, sparks debates at the dinner table, or completely changes their mind about a subject. You can't plan it. You certainly can't control this. But this is the reason most of us got into this business in the first place.
