CBC News senior correspondent Brian Stewart

Though he’ll be back on the air from time to time to help cover major events, today marks the last day on the job for CBC News senior correspondent Brian Stewart. After he anchors The National tonight in place of Peter Mansbridge, he’ll saunter off into semi-retirement.

Stewart is a journalist’s journalist and has had a remarkable career. Like so many others of his generation, the 1964 graduate of Ryerson‘s journalism program started in print. He was a reporter and columnist at the Montreal Gazette in the late 1960s, winning a National Newspaper Award in 1969 for feature writing. From there, it was on to a current-affairs show on CBC-TV’s Montreal affiliate, CBMT, and then to Ottawa as a political reporter in 1973. It was while Stewart was in the nation’s capital that he honed his skills and broadened his knowledge in foreign and military affairs — a specialty that would shape the rest of his career.

After a three-year stint as the CBC’s foreign correspondent in London, Stewart joined NBC News in 1985. However, he returned to the CBC two years later to become senior reporter with the CBC’s The Journal.

The rest, as they say, is history. Quite literally. What motivated Stewart in the decades that followed were the things that drive all great journalists: to satisfy one’s curiosity about the world and why things happen the way they do; to bear witness to the unfolding of history at home and abroad; to tell meaningful and important stories in compelling and interesting ways; to find out, firsthand, what will happen next in some of the greatest historical and human dramas of our time.

Like many others, I’ll remember Stewart best for his unparalleled coverage of the famine in Ethiopia in the early 1980s. He and fellow CBC journalist Tony Burman were the ones who, almost singlehandedly, alerted the world to the unfolding human crisis in that part of eastern Africa, prompting a massive aid response.

As a foreign correspondent, Stewart was on the front lines of other big international stories too. He reported extensively from Beirut on the Lebanese civil war; he filed gripping accounts of child slavery in Sudan. When the international coalition drove into Kuwait to wrest it from Saddam Hussein’s grip in the Gulf War of 1991, Stewart was the first Canadian reporter on the scene. He witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and filed extensively from the war zones of El Salvador, Iraq and Afghanistan. In all that time amid the dangers of the field, Stewart’s greatest fear appears to have been that he’d somehow get the story wrong.

The CBC has, fittingly, built a special Web tribute page in his honour; several compelling interviews are there, including chats with Burman and Mansbridge. Also available there is the profile that aired last night as part of The National.

Though he’s already past the traditional retirement age of 65, Stewart’s departure from the CBC is part of the public broadcaster’s efforts to downsize through attrition and buyouts. He lives in Toronto with his wife, former broadcaster Tina Srebotnjak, who now works in the communications and marketing department of Toronto Public Library. They have a daughter, Katie.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Holmes, 45, has become the latest poster child for Americans hoping to stave off Canadian-style “socialized medicine.” She has appeared at press conferences on Capitol Hill and been interviewed on CNN and Fox News. She has repeatedly told the story of how she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and eventually had surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix, Ariz., when it became apparent that the wait for treatment in Canada would take months. She remortgaged her home to pay the clinic’s $97,000 bill and is suing the Ontario Health Insurance Plan (OHIP) to recoup the costs.

(Holmes certainly isn’t the first media darling to be featured on U.S. networks on the issue of Canadian health care. British Columbia businessman Don Neufeldt, who went public earlier this year about lack of timely access to a cardiologist in Canada, forcing him to seek treatment in Oklahoma City, Okla., is another).

As one might expect, Holmes’s case is slightly more nuanced than powerful lobbies or ratings-driven newscasts care to reveal. In today’s Globe and Mail, columnist André Picard offers a piece that provides some background, balance and clarity. Holmes’s tumour was not malignant; it was a benign cyst that, yes, was impairing her vision, but was not life-threatening. Frightening as vision loss would be for any patient, Canadian doctors believed it to be temporary and reversible. They were doing what, in the Canadian and British systems, doctors must do: prioritize patient care.

Meanwhile, Holmes has come under personal attack by defenders of the Canadian system, including bloggers and Facebook users, who are giving the family mediator a little more grief than she’s accustomed to.

Having lived and worked under both systems, I don’t understand the overheated rhetoric deployed by both sides of the health-care debate. Each system has strengths and weaknesses. In the U.S., thanks to competition among hospitals and an abundant supply of health-care professionals, care is often more immediate, especially when specialists are involved. For those with health insurance, most trips to the doctor or operating room carry a cost in the form of a deductible or co-payment. For those without, the quality of care is less robust or comprehensive. Depending on the condition, it may even be absent. Long-term catastrophic illness, for either the insured or uninsured, can spell financial disaster.

In Canada, taxes are substantially higher to bear the massive burden of a national health-care system, but illness is seldom financially catastrophic. Everyone working in the system — from nurses to doctors to specialists — must ration and prioritize care, and that can mean long waits. (See CBC News correspondent Neil Macdonald’s open letter to Americans in the wake of the Neufeldt story.) The system is imperfect at best. Sometimes, wait times can get so long that they threaten Canadians’ right to personal security, as specified in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Remember the case of Chaoulli v. Quebec (Attorney General [2005] in the Supreme Court of Canada? “Delays in the public system are widespread and have serious, sometimes grave, consequences,” wrote Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin and Justice John Major, as part of a split decision. “Inevitably where patients have life-threatening conditions, some will die because of undue delay in awaiting surgery.”

Picard’s final observation is a salient one, brimming with irony: Given her medical past, Holmes is now in a position where she would find it nearly impossible to buy medical insurance in the U.S. In Canada, she will continue to be covered and will get the same access to the system as any other Canadian.