I felt guilty about leaving my news career, but some prairie dogs helped guide me to a happy retirement

As an eastern Canadian I had never seen a prairie dog, but when I pulled off the dirt road that cuts through Saskatchewan's Grasslands National Park there were dozens of them.

Amid the hundreds of dirt mounds, there they were—light brown bundles of fur on their hind legs keeping a watchful eye out for predators. One of those on sentry duty yipped noisily letting the others know of our every move. 

My wife and I stared back, content to spend time watching the inhabitants of this large prairie dog town.

Over the three days we stayed at the Frenchman Valley campground in August 2025, it slowly dawned on me that I shared a kind of professional kinship with those watchful prairie dogs.

For 30 years I covered Nova Scotia politics, keeping a keen and critical eye on the work of eight premiers and their governments. Like those chattering prairie dogs, I too have kept CBC audiences informed of what their elected representatives were up to.

In recent years, I’ve warned of government over-reach or potential threats to democratic norms and  traditions. Less life-threatening, perhaps, than a prowling coyote, ferret or a circling hawk but, to my mind, a kind of democratic survival information for my above-ground community.

But unlike my newly discovered black-tailed brethren, I was no longer on sentry duty after retiring last April.

For almost all of the nearly 40 years I reported, I enjoyed the fast-paced, high-stress, and public job I did in Ottawa, Montreal and finally in Halifax.

However in recent years, the adrenaline rush of meeting tight deadlines, filing the odd scoop or sharing my expertise no longer made up for the daily grind of trying to pry even the most rudimentary facts and figures from those in office and the bureaucrats under their control. 

My three decades at Nova Scotia’s Province House, covering Liberal, PC and NDP governments did little to insulate me from the unprecedented level of criticism and push-back political reporters now face every day.

Weariness, more than anything else, drove me to retire but I felt guilty about leaving an audience hungry for the kind of context and analysis I was able to provide because of my time in the political trenches. I also felt I was abandoning my colleagues, despite their assurances they could soldier on without me.

Those who stopped me in a grocery store aisle or mall parking lot to thank me for my work and to wish me well in retirement only exacerbated the feeling I had abandoned my post and left my community to the wolves.

Perhaps arrogantly, I felt I had been doing my small part to safeguard democracy.

The Trump government's sustained attack on reporters, civil liberties and democratic institutions in the United States further fed my guilt.