W5

Background History

W5 debuted on 11 September 1966. The premiere was just a few months after the cancellation of This Hour Has Seven Days, a groundbreaking but controversial CBC news magazine show. (See This Hour Has Seven Days: Canada’s Most Subversive Television Series.) The nascent CTV network was on the verge of bankruptcy. It was willing to take a chance on what was then considered an unconventional approach to television journalism. Peter Reilly was hired as the show’s first executive producer and host, though he quit only a few weeks into the first season.

W5 went on to become CTV’s longest running and most influential program. It inspired similar programs, such as the CBS’s venerable 60 Minutes, which debuted two years after W5, and the CBC’s The Fifth Estate, which featured Peter Reilly as one of its first hosts.  

Over the course of the program’s history, W5 underwent several changes to its title. It was briefly called CTV Reports in the late 1970s. It was also called W5 with Eric Malling (reflecting chief reporter and host Malling’s tenure) for several years in the mid-1990s. In 1996, it changed its name to W-FIVE before reverting to W5 sometime later.

For decades, W5 was Canada’s most watched current affairs and documentary program. In 2020, the series appeared to be going strong, achieving a 12 per cent audience growth for a total average viewership of 2.2 million per episode.

In February 2024, W5 was cancelled after 58 years on the air. The move came amid news that CTV was cutting 4,800 jobs at all levels of the company. CTV said that W5 would “evolve” from a stand-alone series to form “a multi-part, multiplatform investigative reporting unit.” CTV also announced that new CTV News documentaries would be produced and broadcast under the title W5: Avery Haines Investigates.

Journalists

Many prominent Canadian journalists worked for W5 over the years. These include veteran CTV News personalities, such as Lloyd Robertson and Sandi Rinaldo. Valerie Pringle, Susan Ormiston, Bill Cunningham, Helen Hutchinson, Eric Malling, Lisa LaFlamme, Henry Champ, Tom Gould, Helen Hutchinson, Tom Clark, Kevin Newman and Avery Haines have also reported for W5.

Controversial Episodes

W5 was a well-known and well-respected source of hard-hitting investigative journalism throughout its duration. But the program produced at least two controversial segments whose legacies have long resonated.

A 1979 W5 report titled “Campus Giveaway,” hosted by Helen Hutchinson, argued that foreign students were taking places away from Canadian students. However, it was later determined that none of the students filmed were foreign Chinese students, as alleged by the program. The report focused on the plight of a single student who couldn’t gain admission to a pharmacy program at the University of Toronto. But at the time, foreign nationals were not able to apply to pharmacy programs at Ontario universities.

The segment had a galvanizing effect on Canada’s Chinese community. The episode was videotaped and shared with Chinese Canadians across the country. Moreover, university officials revealed that W5 had inflated the number of both student visa holders and foreign students by a factor of five. The community’s outrage resulted in the creation of the Ad Hoc Committees of the Council of Chinese Canadians Against W5 in 16 Canadian cities in early 1980. In January of that year, some 2,000 Chinese Canadians held four protests in front of CTV offices and studios. CTV at first issued an on-air apology. Then, in April 1980, Murray Chercover, CTV’s president and managing director, issued a full apology and retraction.

A February 1993 report hosted by journalist Eric Malling called “New Zealand” also gained considerable attention in Canada. Malling argued Canada should follow New Zealand’s lead in drastically cutting social spending, including the possibility of privatizing public health care and ridding itself of publicly owned forests. The episode was viewed by more than 1.6 million Canadians and was used to justify Conservative efforts to reduce the public debt. However, other journalists argued the report was full of misinformation, and that it had misrepresented New Zealand’s economic problems as national bankruptcy and the loss of credit, when in fact the country was having a short-term currency crisis. Malling was accused of tailoring the story to suit a predetermined narrative.

Honours

Over the course of the series, W5 won many awards from the Radio Television Digital News Association (RTDNA). In 2010, W5 won a Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) Award for a documentary it produced concerning the failure of the justice system to hold RCMP officers responsible for people they killed. In 2023, the series won two national RTDNA Canada Awards.

Awards

Gemini Awards

• Best Information Segment (Michael Hannan, Robert Holmes, Leora Eisen) (1992)
• Best Photography in an Information/Documentary Program or Series (Mike Nolan, “Railriders”) (1994)
• Best Information Segment (Susan Ormiston, Ian McLeod, “Multiculturalism 1 & 2”) (1996)
• Best Photography in an Information Program or Series (Paul Freer, “A Wing & a Prayer”) (1999)
• Best News Information Series (Malcolm Fox, Anton Koschany) (2001, 2005)

Canadian Screen Awards

• Gordon Sinclair Award (2014)
• Host or Interviewer, News or Information Program or Series (Tom Kennedy) (2015)
• News or Information Segment (“Hands of God,” Victor Malarek, Mary Dartis, Litsa Sourtzis, André Lapalme, Jerry Vienneau, Brian Mellersh) (2016)
• News or Information Program (“Healing Hands”) (2017)
• Editorial Research (“Making a Terrorist,” Madeline McNair, Brennan Lefler, Victor Malarek) (2018)
• News or Information Program (“The Baby in the Snow”) (2020)
• Host or Interviewer, News or Information Program or Series (Avery Haines, “The Narco Riviera”) (2020)
• News or Information Program (“The Invisible Man”) (2021)
• Photography in a News or Information Program, Series or Segment (Jerry Vienneau, “The Survivors”) (2021)
• Host or Interviewer, News or Information Program or Series (Avery Haines, “A Town Divided”) (2022)
• Editorial Research (Stephen Bandera and Shelley Ayres, “Flight 752”) (2022)
• News or information segment (“The Humboldt Driver”) (2023)
• Host or Interviewer, News or Information Program or Series (Avery Haines) (2023)
• News or Information Segment (“Narco Avocados”) (2024)