About Justin

Justin Ling is a freelance journalist who specializes in covering stories untold, misunderstood, and often missed by the media. He got his start in community journalism in Nova Scotia, before working for a local online news start-up in Montreal. While there, he stumbled upon the existence of a Greek neo-Nazi party quietly fundraising within Quebec, covered civil unrest amid a province-wide student strike, and was even arrested by the city’s riot cops. From there, he moved to Ottawa, joining the Parliamentary Press Gallery and joined VICE News as their Canadian political reporter, where he uncovered a massive surveillance effort by Canadian intelligence agencies on Indigenous protesters, revealed the existence of an ill-fated infiltration of a university communist group by Canadian spies, reported on major constitutional issues with federal legislation, and turned the government’s treatment of the press into a national issue.

Since he arrived in Toronto, Ling has proved how a major cellphone manufacturer handed over its global decryption key to Canadian law enforcement, documented the existence of a previously-secret watchlist of travellers across the U.S-Canada border, and detailed an extensive lobbying effort in Washington, D.C. by the Trudeau government to preserve its most crucial trade deal. While there, Ling became one of the most effective users of Canada’s Access to Information system, using it to consistently break major stories.

Today, Ling is working on a book profiling how eight men disappeared from Toronto’s Gay Village, and how police, for eight years, failed to catch the man they believe responsible for those deaths. The book stems from him popular CBC podcast, Uncover: The Village, where Ling sheds a light on these unsolved murders.

He is also investigating Russian meddling in Canadian politics, a project that has taken him from inside the headquarters of the Department of National Defence to a NATO training base in Latvia. His work has appeared in the Globe & Mail, National Post, Maclean’s, VICE News, BuzzFeed News, and he has appeared on CBC, CTV, Global, CNN, the BBC, and a host of other outlets.

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