Career
He had long experience as reporter, editor, Ottawa Bureau Chief and foreign correspondent in London, England and Washington, District of Columbia for the Toronto Star. He is author of the book Hello Sweetheart: Get Maine Rewrite, which is a lively account of the 1950s newspaper wars between the Toronto Telegram and the Toronto Star, both of which employed him. The book become a cult classic among journalists and appears on the curriculum of journalist schools in Canada.
After retiring from the Toronto Star, Sears became a columnist for the Ottawa Sun from 1998 to 2005.
Sears always had an intense interest in the career of the Prairie populist conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker. He was commissioned by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation to write a trilogy of television plays detailing the life of John Diefenbaker, which were ultimately not produced due to budget cuts at the Canadian Broadcasting Company. In 1991, Sears accepted the Bell Chair as Visiting Professor of Journalism at the University of Regina.
Sears was the father of Robin Sears, a communications, marketing and public affairs advisor, and of Kit Melamed, a producer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation investigative journalism program, the Fifth Estate. He died in Almonte, Ontario on January 21, 2016, aged 88.
