Mark Bourrie (born 1957) is a Canadian writer, historian, and former Concordia University lecturer. He is the author of several books, including By Reason of Insanity: The David Michael Krueger Story (1997), Flim Flam (1998), and Many a Midnight Ship (2005). His work has also appeared in magazines and newspapers, including Toronto Life, Canadian Business, The Globe and Mail, The Toronto Star, Xinhua and The National Post.
Bourrie finished his BA at the University of Waterloo in 1990. He holds a diploma in public policy and administration from the University of Guelph; earned a Master's degree in journalism from Carleton University and a doctorate in Canadian media history at the University of Ottawa. His doctoral thesis was on the press censorship system in Canada in the Second World War and will be published by Key Porter of Toronto in January, 2011, as The Fog of War . His master's thesis was on the media's role in banning cannabis in Canada an was published by Key Porter as Hemp. His public policy and administration research focused on Canada's security intelligence agencies.
Before beginning a career in journalism, Bourrie worked in remote areas of Canada for the Canadian Pacific Railway.He worked as a forest fire fighter in northern Ontario 1976 and 1981.Bourrie was a summer student reporter at The Hamilton Spectator and The London Free Press and a student reporter at The Globe and Mail before taking a job on The Toronto Sun in 1979 as assistant business editor and news reporter. He worked for two decades as a freelance news and feature writer, primarily for The Globe and Mail from 1981 to 1989, and the Toronto Star from 1989 to 1999 and again in 2009-2010. He was Parliamentary correspondent for the Law Times from 1994 until 2006. He also wrote for the InterPress Service, the United Nations-sponsored news and feature service. By the late 1990s, he had branched out from newspaper freelance work to magazine writing.
Bourrie won a National Magazine Award (NMA) in 2000 and honorable mentions in 2001 and 2003, in the Social Affairs category.In 2003, he was nominated for a Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) award. The article was researched entirely in the National Archives of Canada. He won a Canadian Archaeological Association public writing award (1989) and several Ontario Newspaper Awards (formerly Western Ontario Newspaper Awards). He also won the Ontario Community Canadian Newspaper Award for columnist of the year in 2008. His 1979 eyewitness account of an F4 tornado in Woodstock, Ontario, helped earn his newspaper, The London Free Press, a National Newspaper Award nomination. Most of his NMA-nominated work focused on issues related to people wrongly accused of criminal offences or terrorism. In the CAJ-nominated article, Bourrie found new evidence that a man hanged in Ottawa in 1936 was probably innocent. He has been a member of the Canadian Parliamentary Press Gallery since 1994.
Bourrie was a lecturer at Concordia University's journalism school, teaching reporting, criticism and media history from 2007 until 2009. He is also a guest lecture at the Department of National Defence (Canada) School of Public Affairs, lecturing on propaganda and censorship, and was a consultant to the Canadian War Museum for a recent show on war propaganda art.
Ninety Fathoms Down was Canada's first collection of Great Lakes ship stories. Bourrie's Master's thesis was published by Key Porter as Hemp. His book on David Michael Krueger, a serial killer held in a psychiatric hospital in Ontario,was published as By Reason of Insanity and was excerpted by several major Canadian newspapers.Bourrie's tenth book, The Fog of War, will be published in January, 2011 by Key Porter.
Bourrie was born in Toronto and raised on the Georgian Bay area of Ontario but now lives in Ottawa. He is married to lawyer Marion Van de Wetering, who is author of two regional history books, An Ottawa Album (1999) and A Kingston Album (2000). Bourrie is a fossil hunter, collector, and amateur paleontologist, specializing in trilobites.
His family, the Boures, originally settled in Charlesbourg, Quebec in the 1660s and he is descended from King's Daughters Marie Bellehache La Famille Bourret
A close relative, Joseph Bourret, served as mayor of Montreal and in the Union government of Lafontaine-Baldwin and was Quebec's first francophone banker.
Bourrie's interest in shipwrecks was kindled by family stories of the loss of four of his paternal grandfather's cousins on the Sand Merchant on Lake Erie near Cleveland in 1933.
