Investigative journalist Elaine Dewar was not content to sit out the 2020 COVID-19 lockdown in her comfortable Toronto home doing nothing. Even before the novel coronavirus arrived in Canada, she was skeptical of official reports claiming that a few sick bats in a single Chinese food market in the sprawling city of Wuhan had triggered a pandemic that encircled the globe in a matter of months. And so, she did what she did best - she started digging. Twenty months later, her book On the Origin of the Deadliest Pandemic in 100 Years: An Investigation hit stores and the news media.
Recalling her longtime friend's work ethic in a eulogy, reporter Marci McDonald, remembered "she relished the chance to bore deep into what seemed to me absolutely impenetrable legal, academic or scientific documents."
Typical of her previously published suppositions, Ms. Dewar's theories proved both controversial and compelling. She suggested that an isolated outbreak of a SARS-like illness among a handful of Yunnan miners in 2012 led to the global pandemic when Chinese military research laboratories accidentally released the deadly germs collected from the small rural cave.
In the years since the book's publication, Ms. Dewar's theory of the pandemic's origin has not been substantiated and many of the questions she raised remain unanswered because of insufficient evidence.
Ms. Dewar, a tenacious researcher and investigative journalist at times mired in controversy over her reporting, was diagnosed with stage four cancer in late August at the end of a family vacation and died in Toronto's Hennick Bridgepoint Hospital on Sept. 18. She was 77 years old.
Ms. Dewar shifted from magazine writing to books after attending a fundraiser in the late 1980s for the Amazon's Kayapo Indigenous people that made her curious about contradictions she saw in the environmental movement.
She made a solo visit to the Amazon rainforest and began to dissect the environmental movement's pieties and its questionable ties to the backrooms of Brasilia, Washington and Geneva, as well as the CIA, The Body Shop and the United Nations. Her research was the foundation for her first published book, Cloak of Green: The Links Between Key Environmental Groups, Government and Big Business (1995).
Ms. McDonald recalls that her friend was "terrified" before heading off to ask tough questions but "she always had a [strong] feeling of when things didn't make sense -- good instincts."
Ms. Dewar's muckraking descriptions of incestuous ties between government and environmental NGOs and her scornful tales of bumbling by green heroes like David Suzuki and Maurice Strong, caused a stir back home and set the tone for six more investigative books, one of which has yet to be published.
The topics she explored included the origins of the Indigenous people of the Americas, the ethics of biotechnology and the government sell-out of the Canadian publishing industry.
Elaine Ruth Landa was born on June 18, 1948, in Saskatoon, Sask., to Sam and Petty (née Davidner) Landa, whose Jewish homesteader parents had immigrated from Russia and Romania respectively. The couple had three children, the youngest two after Dr. Landa's demobilization from the Canadian Medical Corps in 1946.
As a student, Elaine, the middle child, excelled at science and hoped to pursue medicine in the footsteps of her father, a general surgeon with an interest in sports medicine. But after attending a creative writing retreat in high school, she became enamoured with feminist author Simone de Beauvoir and won a scholarship to study political science at Toronto's York University, where she joined the ranks of the city's nascent Second Wave feminist movement.
Her feminist ideals did not prevent her from falling in love at age 18 with CBC radio producer Stephen Dewar, 23, also from Saskatoon (although of Icelandic/Scottish descent). Within two years they were sharing a communal house in Toronto's South Annex neighbourhood with a gaggle of young writers, feminists and intellectuals. The couple were married in 1969 by radical Abraham Feinberg, the "Red Rabbi," who was an outspoken critic of the war in Vietnam, and a friend of musicians John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
While Mr. Dewar gained traction as a radio and television public affairs producer, Ms. Dewar joined Maclean's magazine after graduation as a fact checker and researcher. A tall, willowy woman with long, straight hair, she told her daughters that a tight jumpsuit had won her that first job - and that hard work had preserved it.
Daughter Danielle Dewar, 40, a writer and marketing consultant, recalls being told that her mother's good looks had "helped her get through some doors but she had worked hard to be taken seriously. She knew how to take opportunities and how to prove herself."
By age 26, Ms. Dewar had become an editor at the magazine where she worked with a new generation of magazine staffers that included Ms. McDonald, June Callwood, Roy MacGregor, Walter Stewart, Michael Enright and Heather Robertson. She left a few years later when Maclean's became a weekly newsmagazine with a formulaic reporting style.
Her research abilities and talent for long-form journalism with a personal narrative gave her steady work as a freelancer. Today, her literary agent Sam Hiyate recalls her as "a feminist Tom Wolfe" with an appreciation of the New Journalism style.
"No story was truly objective," Mr. Hiyate says admiringly. "She always put herself in the story. ... And she kept digging and digging. She was relentless."
She was a seasoned 39-year-old journalist with two youngsters at home when a story she wrote for Toronto Life magazine led to a $102-million lawsuit by one of the world's richest families.
The Reichmanns, who founded the global commercial real estate firm Olympia & York, sued over allegations Ms. Dewar made in a 1987 article about the family's business activities during the Second World War.
The legal action was fuelled by a $5-million review of Ms. Dewar's research by the plaintiffs. One Toronto Life staffer later joked that the Reichmanns were probably among the few people who actually read the entire sprawling 40,000-word magazine story.
The article eventually cost Toronto Life publisher Michael de Pencier an apology and an undisclosed sum (donated to charity) after he settled the matter personally with Paul Reichmann.
It took a toll on Ms. Dewar and her career. "She was not in a position to pitch magazine stories. Everything was at risk," journalist Marci McDonald, her longtime friend, recalls.
Random House's plan to publish a book by Ms. Dewar on the Reichmanns was shelved.
But the following year, Ms. Dewar won two National Magazine Awards for the profile, including the President's Medal, which she accepted to a standing ovation of her peers. Throughout her career, she won a total of four gold medals and one silver at the National Magazine Awards, as well as seven honourable mentions.
After her first book, Cloak of Green, she graduated to the big leagues with two hefty titles for Random House, Bones: Discovering the First Americans (2001), in which she espoused the controversial (and later disproved) theory that North America had been settled by early migrants from the south rather than across the Bering Strait, and The Second Tree: Stem Cells, Clones, Chimeras and Quests for Immortality (2004), about biotechnology.
Critics were divided on whether her lack of formal scientific credentials undermined her innate curiosity and thirst for information, but criticism and contention came with her job. Ms. McDonald explains that Ms. Dewar, "didn't do things that didn't break new ground." The Second Tree won the 2005 Writers' Trust Award for Non-Fiction.
When Random House declined her proposal for Smarts: The Boundary-Busting Story of Intelligence, she signed on with agent Hiyate who appreciated her zeal.
"She thought I was fun," he says. "She liked my spirit." But he also notes that she "expected to have an antagonistic relationship with her editors after her first draft. She expected editors to be tough."
That editorial rigour extended to her family's homework assignments. Daughter Danielle remembers, "she became my merciless editor. Every book report went through an easy seven drafts."
Older daughter Anna Dewar Gully, 44, an activist and "change leader," learned early that her parents expected their children to have opinions and be ferociously independent thinkers.
"We had to develop a voice of our own to participate in dinner table conversations. ... Nothing was kept from us," she says.
Just six years old at the time, Anna was nevertheless aware of the consequences of the Reichmann lawsuit for her mother. "It forged her, gave her a capacity to be fearless. Having survived that, she wasn't afraid of anything."
Ms. Dewar's final three books transformed a small literary press in Windsor, Biblioasis, into a publisher of newsworthy non-fiction. In a blog post reminiscence, publisher Dan Wells wrote that she described herself as "a happy warrior for the public good."
He wrote, "She loved to know things, and grew infuriated when the standard account didn't make sense. ... She was fierce, and tough as nails. But she was also a warm, beautiful person."
In their first publishing project, The Handover: How Bigwigs and Bureaucrats Transferred Canada's Best Publisher and the Best Part of our Literary Heritage to a Foreign Multinational (2015), Ms. Dewar castigated Random House, her earlier publisher, for swallowing up McClelland & Stewart, Canada's iconic publisher, in violation of federal government policy. The book garnered lots of media attention and gave Mr. Wells his first threat of a libel suit, later withdrawn by an unhappy retired cabinet minister. Prominent publisher Jack Stoddart called it, "the single most important book about Canadian publishing ... in fifty years."
Ms. Dewar's last project, due out in spring 2026, was finished in the author's palliative care room, as she and Mr. Wells thrashed out the final draft of Growing Up Oblivious in Mississippi North, a very personal narrative about secret medical experiments conducted at segregated hospitals for Indigenous patients in Canada, including Saskatchewan, her home province. Mr. Wells says, "We worked on the last paragraphs of her conclusion, arguing over word choices as if we had all the time in the world."
Elaine Dewar leaves her daughters, Anna Dewar Gully and Danielle Dewar; three grandchildren; her older sister, Kahrellah Landa; and younger brother, Murray Landa. Her husband, Stephen Dewar, predeceased her in 2019.
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