By Tyler Buist
Kim Bolan got a job at the
Vancouver Sun right after graduating from Western’s MAJ program in 1984 and she has worked there ever since.
For 29 years she has covered issues like social services, multiculturalism and education, but after the Air India bombing in 1985, most of her career has been focused on covering crime.
“Air India is one news story that’s been a backdrop to my entire career,” says Bolan. “That was the way I got into the crime beat.”
In June, 1985, 329 people were killed after a bomb exploded on Air India Flight 182 as it flew over the Atlantic Ocean. The bombing occurred just one year into Bolan’s job at the
Vancouver Sun, and it’s a story she’s covered for decades since.
“The thing with Air India is it continued for a long time and arguably it’s still continuing,” she says. “It becomes career-defining but also becomes something that can be extremely frustrating when you see that there is no resolution.”
Bolan wrote a book about the bombing, called
Loss of Faith in 2005. Her investigation was one of the factors that led the government to call for a public inquiry into the Air India incident, says Bolan.
Bolan likes to report on the kind of stories that are important to the public. “I think journalists like… to think that their stories contribute to a resolution of a problem in society or an issue that’s come up,” she says.
It was exactly this kind of public interest reporting that pushed Bolan to pursue journalism in the first place. Like many journalists of her generation, Bolan says she was inspired by journalism’s role in uncovering the Watergate scandal.
Bolan says she always wanted to be a journalist. In fact, she has worked at newspapers since she was in high school. Growing up in Courtney B.C., she wrote for the
Comox District Free Press and she sent stories on the bus to Victoria to be published in the
Colonist. While attending The University of Victoria she worked as sports editor of
The Oak Bay Star.
Even with all of her experience, Bolan decided to attend Western in 1983 to get a formal education in journalism. “Western really was where I got all the basics that I needed to have a career,” she says.
After covering the same beat for over two decades, Bolan has a cumulative knowledge of crime in Vancouver which adds great add depth and context to all her writing.
Bolan has won many awards for her work over the years, but she says the awards aren’t as important as having something good come from your reporting.
For instance, after she and her colleagues wrote an 11-part series on Vancouver’s missing women in 2001 the police put more resources on the case and finally caught serial killer Robert Pickton.
At the end of her career – which is not any time soon – Bolan says it’s not the awards that she’ll remember.
“I’ll be focusing on the stories that I wrote,” she says. “And the people that I met.”
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