Year in review roundup

CBC
CBC has a comprehensive section dedicated to documenting 2007, including top stories by section, audience picks and a photo gallery. As for news, CBC presented its list in a month-by-month format:

January – Maher Arar reaches settlement with Canadian government
February – Passport delays, dangerous destinations ground Canadians
March – Canadian pet food company recalls tainted products
April – Gunman kills 33 in Virginia Tech shooting
May – The kidnapping of Madeleine McCann
June – Canada’s mission in Afghanistan
July – 13-year-old Medicine Hat girl found guilty in murder of family/Final book in Harry Potter series released
August – Fisher-Price recalls close to 1 million toys due to high lead levels/Hurricane Dean hits the Caribbean
September – The Canadian dollar closes above parity/Buddhist monks protest in Burma
October – RCMP stun man with Taser at Vancouver Airport/Liberals sit out throne speech vote
November – Pakistan’s Musharraf declares emergency rule
December – Robert Pickton found guilty on six charges of second-degree murder/Conrad Black sentenced to 78 months in jail

CTV
After debating for over a month, the CTV News editors settled on this list of Top 10 Canadian news stories:

1. The high-flying loonie
2. Canadian casualties in Afghanistan
3. Media baron Conrad Black’s legal saga
4. Chinese product recalls
5. The deadly, and controversial, use of tasers
6. The trial and conviction of Robert Pickton
7. The hunt for Canadian pedophiles in Thailand
8. RCMP shootings
9. Multiple births — sextuplets, quadruplets — recorded this year
10. The scandal surrounding former prime minister Brian Mulroney

MACLEAN’S
Included in Maclean’s end-of-year collection are their Newsmakers, Comebacks, Disasters, Entrances (new faces) and Feuds. Conrad Black was voted “Newsmaker of the Year” — here are the other winners:

1. The loonie
2. Actor-turned-filmmaker Sarah Polley
3. Vladimir Putin
4. BCE takeover architect Jim Leech
5. Iran
6. Canadian amateur athletes
7. Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams
8. World Series of Poker finalist Tuan Lam
9. Blackberry makers Research In Motion
10. Winner of the world’s richest annual prize Charles Taylor
11. US$11.6 million civil suit winner Anucha Browne Sanders
12. Quebec natives
13. NYC subway hero Wesley Autrey
14. Anaheim Ducks

TIME MAGAZINE
Time has selected the loonie as the Canadian Newsmaker of the Year.

THE CANADIAN PRESS
The Canadian Press has their own Canadian Newsmaker of the Year: The RCMP. Yes, the troubled Mounties are the collective choice in the annual poll conducted by The Canadian Press among newsrooms across the country.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL
The Globe and Mail’s Nation Builder of 2007 is Don Johnson, “a fellow from small-town Manitoba whose tireless, 12-year campaign for more generous tax treatment on charity donations has opened the philanthropic floodgates from coast to coast,” as described by G&M.

The four finalists/runners up are:
– Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, whose crusade against global warming earned her a Nobel Peace Prize nomination.
– Two groups of young Canadians: The Nepean Hotspurs, a girls soccer team who boycotted a tournament when one of their teammates was not allowed to play wearing her hijab, and a group of Nova Scotia teens led by Travis Price and David Shepherd who wore pink shirts to show support for a bullied freshman.
– President of the Canadian Institutes for Health Research Dr. Alan Bernstein, whose fundraising efforts over the last seven years have focused on health systems and services rather than biomedical research.
– NBA star and two-time league MVP Steve Nash, who invests his time off the court with his family, his children’s foundation and the youth basketball league it launched.

Other nominees included:
– Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan
– Mr. Justice Dennis O’Connor (nominated by last year’s winner Maher Arar)
– Dave Williams, astronaut
– David Dodge, former governor of the Bank of Canada
– Jim Balsillie, RIM founder and philanthropist
– Jean Vanier, author and humanitarian
– Mary Simon, Arctic activist
– Maude Barlow, Council of Canadians
– Michael Kirby, former senator and mental health activist
– RCMP officers killed in the line of duty
– Paul Pritchard, the citizen-journalist who shot the infamous video of the RCMP tasering a Polish man at Vancouver International Airport
– Stephen Lewis, former United Nations envoy on HIV-AIDS in Africa and co-director of AIDS-Free World
– Chief of Defence staff Rick Hillier
– Roméo Dallaire, commander of UN peacekeepers in Rwanda during the 1994 massacre and post-traumatic stress disorder spokesman
– Don Chapman, who fought Ottawa for years after he and tens of thousands of others were stripped of their Canadian citizenship under an obscure part of a decades-old immigration law

THE TORONTO STAR
Most notable among the Star’s year-end articles is foreign affairs reporter Olivia Ward’s “Stories that slipped through the cracks,” a list of eight summarized issues that didn’t dominate the headlines this year but should not be forgotten. They are:

Somalia: Its people are battered by civil war and are now caught between American-backed Ethiopian troops and Islamist militias.
Zimbabwe: Under the regime of President Robert Mugabe, Zimbabweans have been hit by rampant unemployment, skyrocketing inflation, food shortages and political instability.
Sri Lanka: The beleaguered eastern and northern regions have slid back into warfare between government forces and Tamil Tiger rebels.
Democratic Republic of Congo: War has returned to the eastern province of North Kivu with a vengeance, as government and UN forces battle guerrilla gangs.
Colombia: After decades of turf wars over drugs, and fighting between government and guerrilla groups, militants have a “stranglehold” on half the rural areas.
Burma: The revolt this fall reminded us of the brutality of the isolated Burmese regime, but left unsaid were the underlying daily problems.
Central African Republic: Fighting between rebels and government forces in the north has forced thousands to flee their homes.
Chechnya: While Russia says the war has ended and the ruined capital Grozny has seen some rebuilding, fighting has spread to neighbouring areas.

THE NATIONAL POST
The Post has year-end articles in their Arts & Life, Business, Sports, Technology and World sections, but here we’ll take a look at their “Oh Canada” review. Top stories of the year in order of appearance are:

– Robert Pickton trial
– Conrad Black trial
– Provincial elections and the Liberal party’s struggles in Parliament
– Albertan Premier Ed Stelmach’s decision to charge energy companies 20% more for the right to develop Alberta’s oil and gas resources
– Karlheinz Schreiber

If you have any thoughts on the above media’s picks, or want to mention names or stories that you think deserve more recognition, add your comments below.