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Beverly Thomson photographed at the CTV building in Agincourt, Toronto, in December, 2003.Louie Palu/The Globe and Mail
Beverly Thomson, who died of cancer on Sept. 14 at the age of 61, was a TV reporter, news anchor and then long-time co-host of the CTV morning show Canada AM. Throughout much of her career she fought cancer.
“She was undergoing chemotherapy right from the start at Canada AM,” said her co-host Seamus O’Regan. “She had been diagnosed just the previous year.”
Her cancer was part of the story of her moving to Canada AM. At the time, columnist Sarah Hampson wrote in The Globe and Mail, “Beverly Thomson, 39, is the new co-host of CTV’s Canada AM, a mother of two young children and a wife of 14 years. Not only that, she is a recent breast cancer patient.”
Along with her rigorous daily work schedule, Ms. Thomson was heavily involved in raising awareness of breast cancer. When she took time off for treatment, she did a short documentary on her cancer.
“My focus was always on getting better. It’s a conscious decision, like deciding to be happy, ” she told Ms. Hampson. “I have been through enough adversity to understand how that works.”
The adversities she experienced included the death of her older brother, Doug, in a car accident in June of 1984. He was 25, she was 20. The other person in the car was her boyfriend at the time, Tim Horton (no relation to the famous hockey player), who was also killed. Ms. Thomson’s mother died of cancer a short time later.
Beverly Thomson was born in Toronto on April 15, 1964. She grew up in an upper-middle-class neighbourhood in north Toronto. Her father, James Thomson, was a stockbroker; her mother, Lois Thomson, a housewife. All the members of the family were news junkies and in the Thomson household there were heated debates at the dinner table about current events.
Bev, as she was known to friends and family, went to Lawrence Park Collegiate, where she was a cheerleader. In the summers she went to camp, which she loved. She was always a friendly, outgoing person, and curious.
“My parents used to say when I was a child [that] people would come into our home and I would ask them: What do you do? And how? They were sometimes taken off guard because I would never stop with one question,” Ms. Thomson told her close friend and work colleague Liz Travers. The two women spent a lot of time together in recent years.
After high school, Ms. Thomson studied communications at York University and then journalism at Seneca College in Toronto.
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Beverly Thomson looks at some tapes before going on live for a news brief.Patti Gower/The Globe and Mail
She idolized the veteran broadcaster Betty Kennedy, who worked at the radio station CFRB and appeared on the CBC’s Front Page Challenge. Ms. Travers says Ms. Thomson was excited when she went to interview Valerie Pringle, who was also a broadcaster at CFRB at the time, before her own leap into television.
“I met with many students,” Ms. Pringle said. “Everyone wanted to know the secret of getting a job. Bev was charming and curious, as she was throughout her career. She reminded me of that meeting when she took over at Canada AM.”
Jobs in radio and television were hard to come by. But Ms. Thomson landed one at a tiny radio station in suburban Newmarket, Ont.
“It was in a small strip mall underneath a laundromat,” Ms. Thomson recalled many years later. She joked that her father was the only one listening. She hated the job and moved on to work for a radio station in Belleville, Ont., which she loved.
She moved back to Toronto to work at CFTR in Toronto, which involved a small amount of on-air work. She got a call from Ted Stuebing, the legendary tough-guy news chief at CFTO, the station with the biggest audience in the country. She thought it was a prank. It wasn’t, and soon she was a daily news reporter, chasing stories and attending news conferences all over Toronto.
“I was a little too female for some in those days, definitely too blonde for others and a little too small to be taken seriously in a political scrum,” said Ms. Thomson, a rugby reference to when reporters crowd around a politician shouting for a quote. “I was getting [assigned] the fashion stories and the pet adoption stories.”
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Jack Layton speaks to Beverly Thomson on Canada AM, in April, 2011.Jacques Boissinot/The Canadian Press
Her big break came when an anchor didn’t show up one day, and with nine minutes notice, she was thrown into the studio to co-host the hour-long newscast. Eventually she was the weekend anchor and then she was snapped up by Global to co-host its newscast. That was a success, but CTV came calling and wanted her back to co-host Canada AM to replace Lisa LaFlamme, who was moving to CTV National News. Global was not happy, and there was a lawsuit. But Ms. Thomson was over the moon to land the Canada AM job.
The bad news was that her alarm clock went off every weekday morning at 3:15 a.m.
By the time she was on Canada AM, Ms. Thomson was a seasoned television anchor, able to react to news and come up with original questions, things other people might not be asking. One example was an interview with Hillary Clinton before she said she was running for the presidency. It was Ms. Clinton’s only Canadian interview as she was promoting her book.
“Everybody and her sister had asked her if she was going to run for president,” Ms. Thomson said. Instead, she asked: “You have a grandson potentially on the way. You have even said you’re in a good place in life. Why would you consider running?”
“That’s a good way to ask it because most people ask it the other way,” replied Ms. Clinton, who went on to say why she would run, but she still dodged whether she had made up her mind.
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Canadian country music superstar Shania Twain co-hosts CTV’s Canada AM from Yonge-Dundas Square with hosts Seamus O’Regan, Beverly Thomson, and Jeff Hucheson, in November, 2004.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
Along with the serious interviews, there were those with ordinary people and those that went where no one could predict.
Her fellow host Jeff Hutcheson remembers an interview with an aviation expert that went sideways.
“At the start of the interview, the guest stopped and said, Bev, I’d like to sing Danny Boy to you, and that’s exactly what he did, the entire first verse with words changed to praise Canada AM,” Mr. Hutcheson said. “We were all laughing but Bev, who was on a double shot, couldn’t do a thing.”
Ms. Thomson was an open person with a great sense of humour.
At a TEDx talk at Queen’s University in 2015, she warmed up her audience by telling them about a fan who met her outside the hall. “He told me he wakes up with me every morning.” A dramatic pause was followed by the audience laughing.
“She didn’t have a manufactured TV personality – the friendly, intelligent woman you saw on air was the genuine article,” said Peter Moreira, a close family friend. “She spent more than two decades with cancer slowly occupying more and more of her body. Through a lot of it, she was leaving home at 4 a.m. each day for her job, raising a family and coping with the curves life throws at you.”
From Ms. Clinton to Leonard Cohen and Paul McCartney, Ms. Thomson interviewed an endless cast of people, famous and not so famous.
“She said she was never nervous around these famous people,” Mr. Moreira said. “The part of Canada AM that terrified her was the cooking segments. ‘What do I know about cooking?’ she’d ask with a laugh.”
The news business, like academia, can be nasty. But Ms. Thomson tried to stay clear of the vicious part of the gossip mill.
“Bev was a rarity in TV; she didn’t backbite and kept negative opinions to herself. She was equally nice to everyone, and the crews loved her because she was down to earth and generous,” said retired senator Mike Duffy, who worked at CTV when Ms. Thomson was with CFTO and who was a frequent political commentator on Canada AM.
Ms. Thomson leaves her husband, Robert Dale; daughter, Taylor; and son, Rob.
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