About Mike

 

Mike Hornbrook is happily retired after 33 years in journalism.

He joined the CBC, Canada’s national public broadcaster, in 1983 and worked at or managed local bureaus in Saskatchewan, Yukon and Nova Scotia.  He became a national reporter in 1989 covering the Maritime provinces.

Mike always had a lively interest in international politics and in 1994 the CBC promoted him to foreign correspondent.  His first assignment was Russia and with his family he moved to Moscow from Halifax.  From that base he covered the rise and fall of  Boris Yeltsin and Russia’s difficult transition away from Communism. The CBC sent him to Jerusalem next to establish its first full-time radio bureau in the Middle East. The move was prescient. Two months after he arrived the second Palestinian ‘intifada’ erupted.

Mike’s work abroad as a network correspondent was challenging and often involved considerable personal risk.  He covered wars in Chechnya, Bosnia, Iraq, Russia’s invasion of Georgia in 2008, the Israel-Hizbollah war of 2006, and numerous flare-up’s of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza and the West Bank.

When he returned to Canada after more than a decade the CBC appointed him national economics correspondent covering business, markets, financial services, white collar crime, as well as major economic developments at the national and international levels. He was deeply involved in CBC’s coverage of the 2008 global financial crisis.

When he retired in the summer of 2013 CBC colleagues had high praise for Mike’s dedication and the outstanding work for which he won awards.

“Mike has been the steady voice of expertise and reason around the often dizzying ups and downs of economic trends affecting Canadians” wrote Jack Nagler, managing editor of CBC News, in a memo announcing the retirement.

“Mike is one of those reporters who has truly earned all the respect he gets from his colleagues. He possesses so many of the classic qualities that make a good reporter: curiosity, skepticism, determination, high-level critical thinking, and a good stubborn streak. But for someone who’s stubborn, Mike also showed real flexibility. He’ll be the first to tell you how hard it can be to return to Canada after a foreign posting. But he threw himself into his economics beat and turned these past few years into some of the best of his career. His chronicling of Conrad Black’s legal woes was astonishingly good, and always – ALWAYS – fair”.

Mike now devotes his time to health and fitness, and avidly pursues his interests in music, politics and writing. Currently, he and wife Mary are exploring Canada and the United States in their 38′ Newmar Coach, an extremely well-equipped home on wheels. Neither of them knows how long the trip will last.