From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall: Stories of Canada

Douglas & McIntyre, April 2026/232 pages

Reviewed by Don Newman

March 22, 2026

Whit Fraser is a man of the North, a man of the people, and a reporter with an impressive record of major stories. He is also a strong believer in reconciliation with the Indigenous nations that have been on this land of Canada forever.

Whit Fraser is also married to Mary Simon, Canada’s 30th Governor General and, being Inuk on her mother’s side, first Indigenous Canadian to serve in the role.

The transition in Whit’s trajectory from covering everything from a Soviet Satellite raining nuclear debris across the Northwest Territories to question period on Parliament Hill into the lofty position of viceregal consort has itself been a great story.

Hence the memoir with what has to be the best title of 2026: From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall: Stories of Canada. It includes the big stories he covered as a CBC correspondent, plus the love affair with Canada’s North that he developed as a correspondent in Yellowknife, across the territories and in CBC‘s parliamentary bureau for much of the 1980s.

Outside Robert Service’s cabin, Dawson City, Yukon

Full disclosure: Whit and I were colleagues in that bureau for about six years. He was gregarious, dashing, unpretentious, and good fun. He was also the fellow journalist I would have judged least likely to be, 40 years later, living in Rideau Hall.

The leap in official status of going from chilly cabinet-shuffle stakeouts outside what is now called the Queen’s entrance to throne speech escort duty and co-hosting royal visits cannot be overstated.

But since his better half was sworn in as Governor General in 2021 and he accompanied her to the viceregal residence, I have been at a number of receptions where Whit has been a most gracious and welcoming host.

Whit’s reporting career began in the Northwest Territories. Transplanted from his boyhood home in Nova Scotia, he soon fell in love with the grandeur of the North, its bitterly cold temperatures that forged a sense of community and cooperation and its immense distances.  He also witnessed its subtle and not-so-subtle racism, which permeated the way Indigenous people were treated.

The leap in official status of going from chilly cabinet-shuffle stakeouts outside what is now called the Queen’s entrance to throne speech escort duty and co-hosting royal visits cannot be overstated.

That realization began to mark him as he covered some of the biggest stories; the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry of Justice Thomas Berger, which changed the way development and land rights were adjudicated in Canada. In this book, Fraser refers to the impact of those hearings, which figure more prominently in his 2023 memoir, True North Rising.

From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall recalls other stories he covered either in the North or from the Ottawa bureau: the Ocean Ranger oil rig disaster off the coast of Newfoundland; the mysterious crash of the Soviet space-spy vehicle, Cosmos 954; the crash of a chartered jetliner full of American servicemen after taking off from Gander in Labrador; the Exxon Valdez inquiry; and with a contemporary resonance, the U.S. Icebreaker Polar Sea incursion into Canada’s Northwest Passage in 1985.

Mary Simon installation ceremony, July 26, 2021/Sgt Johanie Maheu, Rideau Hall © OSGG, 2021

In recounting each of these stories, Fraser brings a sense of skepticism his original reporting conveyed. But the limits of television, the official spin-doctor story lines, and the constant pressure to move on to the next story limited what he could uncover and what he could report.

He has no new solid information to add to what happened, but the perspective of time has raised questions on which Fraser ruminates.

Throughout the book, the respect, pride and admiration that Fraser has for his wife, Mary, is apparent. For each it is their second marriage. They had originally met in Cambridge Bay in the early 70s, when Mary was getting involved in Inuit land claims.

In Ottawa, in 1994, they married, and then her career took off. She became the Canadian head of a number Arctic organizations, culminating in being named Canada’s Ambassador to Denmark.

The couple were planning to “retire” to a home they had built in her hometown in Northern Quebec when what Fraser describes as “The Gift” arrived from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

As recounted in from From Ragged Ass Road to Rideau Hall, Fraser and Simon have been conscious for years of the racism and indifference facing Indigenous people in Canada and are honoured humbled by the representation element of her daily duties.

Fittingly, the book is dedicated to:

“My dearest Mary: May her dream for an equitable and inclusive Canada be fulfilled.”

Policy Columnist Don Newman is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a lifetime member and a past president of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery.