September 27 was a difficult day at work for Sheila Rider.
“It was really tough,” says the Niagara-on-the-Lake resident about her final day with CBC Television in Toronto. “I knew in my heart, though, that I had made the right decision. You know when it’s time to go. I told my boss to hire a couple of young kids. They’re the future.”
Rider retired that day from her role as a senior editorial producer with the national broadcaster. At her retirement gathering her colleagues read some well-wishes from journalists Peter Mansbridge and Adrienne Arsenault, both of whom she worked with during her 36 year career in broadcasting. Some of Rider’s former colleagues from her days with CTV Television even showed up at the party.
“It was lovely, I love these people, I loved the job,” says Rider in the living room of her Old Town home. “I never liked the focus on me. I held it together, but I cried all the way home. I was just a mess. And I couldn’t open any of the envelopes, I couldn’t look at anything until two weeks later.”
Rider’s career brought her into contact with Canadian Prime Ministers throughout the years, as well as other world leaders while travelling for her job. She produced election coverage many times over and worked with the cream of the crop of Canada’s journalists. She was in the control room during CBC’s 9/11 coverage and was responsible for some of the network’s most crucial programs during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Born in Toronto, a teen-aged Rider first attended the all-girl Branksome Hall Private School then graduated from Jarvis Collegiate. After earning a degree in HIstory and Politics from Kingston’s Queen’s University, she planned to travel for three months.
Those three months turned into three years when she accepted a position with a public relations firm in London.
“It was a very small company, only three people,” she laughs. “And I wasn’t very good at it. I was a publicist for these authors of mostly unreadable books. But I got to travel with the authors as they were interviewed at the BBC and ITV and the Guardian. I saw what happened in those places and I wanted to do that.”
When she returned to Canada she applied for a job at CBC Radio. She was told by an executive producer there that though she did not have a journalism degree, her three years abroad alone meant she was “worldly”, and she got the job.
“I ended up as an associate producer,” Rider recalls. “I would do interviews and edit them. I worked at As It Happens and the old Sunday Morning show, booking guests and writing.”
While working there one day in the early 1980s Rider ran into a technician named David Eadie, who was wearing a Queen’s University jacket.
“I asked him if he had gone to Queen’s and he said he had,” she laughs. “I told him I had, too, and he said ‘I guess you’re going to start talking about all the people we might know in common’. I thought he was a jerk.”
Jerk or not, the two eventually became a couple.
Rider got hired away from CBC Radio to help produce an afternoon talk show on CTV Television. She soon shifted over to Canada AM, then was transferred to CTV’s Ottawa bureau, a time she remembers fondly. Her job entailed travelling with Prime Ministers Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien.
“Mulroney is a lovely man,” says Rider. “And Chretien was so much fun.”
While working with longtime host of CTV’s Question Period Craig Oliver in 1993, Rider was involved with breaking the news that Mulroney was about to resign as PM.
“I was in the Ottawa bureau finishing some business when Craig arrived saying that something was going down in town that night,” Rider remembers. “He had the feeling that Mulroney was resigning. He called his people, I called mine, and together we gathered enough to go to air. We called Toronto and they gave us the go-ahead to break the story.”
Eventually she left CTV for a job as the assignment producer for CBC TV’s The National.
“I was working with so many unbelievable reporters,” she says. “Paul Hunter, Adreienne Arsenault, Reg Sherren, Ioanna Roumeliotis. I think I brought a bit of a private television sensibility. I once assigned Adrienne to cover a story about a boa constrictor that had gotten loose from a pet store. She loved it.”
She produced The National with Peter Mansbridge for many years, and ended up working with the station’s Specials unit, where she worked with Lloyd Robertson and Ian Hanomansing, among others.
Rider is proud of the work she did with Mansbridge, as well as of her more recent years producing current affairs and special programs.
“I think I was able to create narratives around our programming,” she says. “We were telling a story, and that’s what I loved at the CBC. They gave me lots of room to create programming. And I also loved mentoring the young kids I worked with.”
When the planes flew into New York’s World Trade Centre buildings, Rider had to get reporters there to cover the nightmare on the ground. It was something no one there had any experience doing before.
“The first person on the ground was Ioanna Roumeliotis,” remembers Rider. “She called the show, and told us all she could see was dust. She heard this constant beeping sound, and discovered it was from sensors in the packs the firefighters wear.to warn them they are going through smoke. But there wasn’t a firefighter anywhere. They were all buried in the rubble. She was devastated.”
During the pandemic Rider produced a series of specials about coping with COVID-19.
“Our craft was always evolving and the CBC, especially for a big organization, is pretty nimble,” she insists. “I worked from my kitchen, and I was trusted to come up with the format and the narrative. It was about helping people to understand this unprecedented event. And it did very well.”
Recent social issues also required prompt responses from Rider and her colleagues. She worked on a show called HERstory in Black with senior producer Emily Mills, a series about focussing on successful Black women. She also worked with Indigenous reporter Juanita Taylor when she became the first Inuk journalist to guest-host CBC’s The National.
Only retired now for a few weeks, Rider misses the rush of the television business, misses being on the ground floor for important stories, misses the chance to scratch her creative itch.
On thing she certainly doesn’t miss, though, is the commute from NOTL to Toronto.
She and Eadie moved to town with their young son Jake in 2004, following her parents Bill and Pat and her brothers, Peter and the late Hamish. Shortly after the move the family was dealing with Sheila’s breast cancer diagnosis. David left CBC Radio at the time to help her deal with her treatments.
“Jake was just four,” she says. “Dave and I didn’t know anybody. It was a horrible time. But our neighbours were so supportive. They just knocked on my door, they brought us food and took me to painting classes when I could barely walk. I knew right then that it was the people that made this a beautiful town.”
When she was ready to return to work her bosses at CBC were very generous, assigning her jobs that allowed her to work four days a week. She would drive up to begin her week, stay with Jake’s godparents in Toronto, and come back to NOTL for the weekend.
“When I produced The National I would do that three nights a week, and the fourth day was for prep,” she says. “That meant I didn’t have to be there all week. And they always let me work on a lot of my special projects at home. But it was tough on Jake, I missed his hockey and soccer games and many other things.”
Jake is now attending Acadia University, and the family owns some land on an island off of Cape Breton. They would like to build on that land, but that won’t happen soon. Meanwhile Rider plays tennis regularly at the NOTL Tennis Club and is open to some part time work where she might be able to exercise her ongoing love of creating a narrative.
And she’s already receiving calls from some of those younger CBC staffers that she mentored, and says she will never turn down a chance to help any of them with their questions.
“And I would really, really like to give back in some way to this town that has been so good to me,” she says. “I don’t know yet what that looks like, but I know I want to do that in some way.”
