Swain moving away to Toronto

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 11/04/2003 (8438 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

IN the end, it was more about air miles than airtime.

CBC broadcaster and former local news anchor Diana Swain confirmed yesterday she’s leaving town, transplanting her family to Toronto in hopes of better balancing her career and home life.

“In a nutshell, this move will cut my travel time in half,” said Swain, who in addition to co-hosting CBC News: Disclosure, also serves occasionally as a substitute anchor on The National and other CBC news programs.

“I spend several weeks of the year on the road with Disclosure, and then when I get home I’m off to fill in for Peter (Mansbridge) or work on some other project in Toronto. It’s a lot of travel. So for me, it’s a combination of the kinds of things that I want to do and CBC’s desire for me to do more of them that just makes it simpler for me to move there.”

Swain said because most of her TV-related travel goes either to Toronto or through Toronto, she came to the conclusion that she was spending too much time in that city’s Pearson International Airport.

“The reality of air travel these days is that if you want to go somewhere, you have to go through Toronto first,” she said. “That had become my reality more often than not — if I went to Ottawa or Montreal and I couldn’t get that one flight a day that’s direct, I would end up sitting in a lounge in Toronto for a few hours waiting for a connection.

“It’s a cumulative thing. If you’re doing it once in a while or even once a month, it’s not an imposition. But when you’re doing it once or twice a week, you start thinking, ‘This is crazy — I could be at home right now if I lived in Toronto.'”

Swain, husband Ron Kuipers and youngsters Mason, 7, and Lara, 5, will make the move east this summer, after the school year ends. She said relocating will be an emotional process because of the close ties the family has to Winnipeg.

“We’re leaving a lot of personal history here,” she said. “This is where Ron and I met and got married; this is where our kids were born; it’s where I spent some valuable time with my dad before he passed away. Those are really emotional ties, and that’s what makes this really hard.”

Despite the departure of its high-profile anchor, Disclosure will continue to have a presence in Winnipeg, said the CBC’s director of current-affairs programming.

“Diana is certainly a prominent face on the show, but there’s still a core group of 16 that will continue to function in Winnipeg,” said Julie Bristow. “Our goal is to have more programming coming out of Winnipeg, not less.”

Swain, 37, moved to Winnipeg in 1988 to co-anchor CKND’s local newscast alongside her father, Brian Swain. She moved to CBC in 1990 and took over as anchor of CBC’s supper-hour newscast in 1994.

In 2000, she was named the nation’s best news anchor at the Gemini Awards, garnering more votes than Mansbridge and CTV’s Lloyd Robertson.

She left the CBC’s local news program in 2001 to become co-anchor of Disclosure with Wendy Mesley, who left the show last year and was replaced by Gillian Findlay and Mark Kelley.