CBC Ottawa recognized with Canadian Screen Award for feature on fentanyl

CBC

30-05-2025

CBC Ottawa at 6 has been recognized with a Canadian Screen Award for a feature on the impact of the fentanyl epidemic on Pembroke, Ont.
The documentary Priority Purple: Overdose in Progress was awarded the best news or information segment at the annual awards by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television.
Priority Purple, which first aired last June, was the third in a CBC Ottawa docuseries exploring the human side of the opioid crisis in eastern Ontario.
CBC Ottawa's Omar Dabaghi-Pacheco and Ryan Garland reported from Pembroke, a town of 14,000 people about 120 kilometres northwest of Ottawa that has more than double the number of fatal overdoses per capita than the rest of the province, according to Public Health Ontario.
Renfrew County is responding with a new experimental approach to responding to opioid overdoses, called the mesa Team. Its goal is to build personal relationships between the experts and the vulnerable population by sending teams out to the community on a regular basis.
Over three days, the CBC journalists followed paramedic Lori Shannon on the job and see the work through her eyes.
Accepting the award at a ceremony at the CBC Broadcast Centre in Toronto on Friday, Dabaghi-Pacheco thanked the subjects of Priority Purple for trusting him to tell their stories.
"They trusted us with their vulnerabilities and their stories because they believed their stories would get out there and their stories were important enough to get out there," he said. "This award just means that they have."