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In Thunder Bay, Court Reporting Is Quietly Disappearing

Is justice being served? Without journalists in courtrooms, we can’t really know

When Lady Fantasia LaPremiere and Mz Molly Poppinz—or, to use the names by which they are known outside of Thunder Bay’s drag circles, John Forget and Felicia Crichton—first started getting messages about a hateful post circulating on Facebook in 2022, they thought the mature thing would be to ignore it. The post was on a page called “Real Thunder Bay Courthouse—Inside Edition” and featured headshots of Lady Fantasia and Mz Molly from a poster for a drag queen storytime event at the public library. “Apparently, our City Council is completely unaware of local drag queens who have been criminally charged with child pornography,” the post read. “Don’t ask yourself why drag queens need an audience of children. The answer might involve the word ‘GROOMING.’” The page featured an image of the city’s imposing courthouse, suggesting official status, and it had 6,500 followers.

Court reporting is critical to upholding due process and the presumption of innocence

Canada has lost 566 local news outlets in less than twenty years, and court coverage has dropped 30 percent nationally

In the absence of responsible journalism, there is a risk that false information about court proceedings will spread on social media

Thunder Bay is a mid-sized city of just over 100,000 people, but it can feel like a small town. The Thunder Bay region is also considered an area of news poverty. Its one daily newspaper, the Chronicle-Journal, currently has four reporters tasked with bringing local news to sixty communities over 1,200 square kilometres. The small local CBC station and Dougall Media, one of Canada’s few remaining independent media companies, cover an area that’s larger than France: from White River in the northeast to the Manitoba border, and from the northern shore of Lake Superior all the way up to Hudson Bay. Social media ends up being an important source of local news; Crichton’s son came home from kindergarten asking what “grooming” meant. Crichton and Forget decided to sue the owner of “Real Thunder Bay Courthouse—Inside Edition” for libel.

Douglas Judson, the lawyer who represented them, had been concerned about the Facebook page for years. Its administrator saw himself as a citizen journalist and excoriated local media for “refusing” to report on arrests. The account posted the names of people brought up on charges at the Thunder Bay courthouse, often using belittling or derogatory language (“WANTED JUNKIE FOUND LYING ON THE ROAD BY TBPS OFFICERS”). The anonymous posts also broadcast photos dug up on social media and sometimes published the names and home addresses of sureties. The comment section swelled with rage, with special venom reserved for Indigenous and racialized people.

As the case made its way through court proceedings, a court order forced Meta to disclose that “Real Thunder Bay Courthouse—Inside Edition” was registered to a man named Brian Webster, who admitted to authoring the post. In 2025, a judge found Webster liable, calling his conduct “high-handed, spiteful, malicious, and oppressive.” She ordered Webster to pay $380,000 in damages to Crichton and Forget, as well as Caitlin Hartlen, also a drag performer, and the Rainbow Alliance of Dryden and to reimburse their legal fees. Webster appealed the decision, and the case is still in litigation.

Thunder Bay is hardly alone in its paucity of news outlets. A 2025 update to a joint research project by Toronto Metropolitan University and the University of British Columbia found that Canada has lost 566 local news outlets in less than twenty years. The Canadian government currently counts only about 3,650 people working as journalists in Ontario, a number that sits somewhere between fishmongers and veterinarians. Research by Public Policy Forum found that between 2008 and 2017, coverage of court in particular dropped by 30 percent nationally. Some jurists may be tempted to quiet celebration; journalists can be a nuisance, and careless reporting can result in prejudicing prospective jury members or revealing the identities of anonymous witnesses.

But courts need us. They depend on the media to fulfill their institutional raison d’être: “Justice should not only be done,” Lord Hewart, chief justice of England said in 1923, “but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done.” The secret trial is a mark of authoritarian regimes, and in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, everyone is guaranteed a public trial. The scrutiny of the public gaze protects us from the enormous power of the state. This publicity is upheld by the open court principle, which allows anyone to walk into a courtroom and take a seat to watch the justice system at work. Anyone, that is, in theory; in practice, most people have neither time nor inclination to sit through slow legal processes and depend on reporters to fill them in.

At its best, responsible journalism about court cases serves to uphold due process and the presumption of innocence. As traditional media outlets fold or retreat from assigning full-time reporters to the court beat, it’s this function of the open court principle that is under threat.

Thunder Bay’s modern courthouse stands in the hollowed-out historic shell of Fort William’s downtown, surrounded by boarded-up businesses and nostalgic murals (one, a stone’s throw away, shows the red brick gables of the old Times Journal building). I’m here to meet Chronicle-Journal writer Doug Diaczuk, who arrives wearing, without apparent irony, a newsboy cap. The security guards greet him........

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