I took a certain satisfaction in lacing up my jogging shoes and taking my dog out for a walk along Lake Ontario earlier this month, on the day that Conrad Black went to jail for fraud and obstruction of justice.

These are the shoes I wore for months while walking the picket line outside the Calgary Herald during the frigid winter of 1999/2000.

While I walked freely, I took pleasure in thinking about Lord Black, who is living in a place where no one will treat him with an ounce of respect. He should have lots of time to think, too, and I can only hope that he, with his bent toward Catholic repentance, will reflect on how his actions have hurt Canadian journalism.

When we began our quest in the fall of 1999 for a union to represent journalists, photographers, librarians and support staff in the Calgary Herald newsroom, little did we expect that the strike would drag on for eight months - during which our reasonable request for fairness and integrity, not only for ourselves but also for the news we provided to our community, would be beaten back at every turn by Black, David Radler and their Hollinger underlings.

We knew it would be a tough fight. When Hollinger bought the venerable Southam family chain of newspapers and other western papers belonging to the Sifton family, workers at the Regina Leader-Post and the Saskatoon StarPhoenix were the first to be hit.

Just two days after Hollinger bought Saskatchewan's two non-unionized largest daily newspapers in March of 1996, more than 170 of 600 staff were dismissed.

At the larger Calgary Herald, we feared a similar fate. We knew that without union protection, we would face layoffs, too.

Nor would it be long before technology would allow Hollinger to produce cookie-cutter pages in a central location and send them to all of the newspapers in the former Southam chain - most of which were already unionized, except for the two in Alberta.

With the establishment of the National Post, Black's message to the journalists working in daily newspapers in Canada's hinterland was made clear. They were to be milked as cash cows to pay for the extravagant spending needed to establish his neo-conservative national mouthpiece in Toronto.

While National Post writers were being given yards of space to write on any topic of their choosing, at the Herald, the Alberta legislature bureau went empty for months.

When Ralph Klein's Conservative government posted a surplus due to higher-than-predicted oil prices - a regular occurrence - a sympathetic columnist brayed the news in front-page play that, in the minds of many journalists, blurred the line between opinion and news coverage.

In the interest of fairness and balance, we asked Herald managers why the columnist had failed to ask the opposition parties for their views on how the province should allocate the new-found riches - a debate that continues in Alberta today. We were told, basically, to shut up.

A long-standing group representing Herald journalists, which met occasionally to discuss matters of coverage and integrity, was told it could no longer meet on company property.

Hockey writers were pressured to curtail criticism of the Calgary Flames because the newspaper had entered into a marketing agreement with the team. And on it went - what we came to call drive-by editing by senior managers so the news fit with Black's neo-con agenda.

We were passionate about delivering first-rate news coverage to Calgarians; soon we were left to conclude that the only way we could ensure that journalistic standards would be kept up was to form a union where, at least, there would be a forum where we could take our concerns to Hollinger management.

But our good-faith attempts to negotiate the crucial first contract were stymied at every turn, and Alberta's labour laws did little to help. When labour disputes grow protracted and nasty in other provinces, an arbitrator is brought in to hear the issues and impose a settlement.

But in Alberta, there is no appetite for binding arbitration. Labour disputes are allowed to drag on without resolution.

At the Herald, a publisher with a reputation for breaking strikes was brought in. A security company from Ontario was hired to privately police and spy on our legal picket lines. The message to managers and replacement workers at the newspaper was clear - those who stuck with the union were simply not to come back into the building, ever.

That message was made plain to me one bitterly cold night when a senior manager charged the picket line with his car, narrowly missing me and nearly clipping a colleague.

In that instant, I knew that I could never return to the paper where I had spent most of my career, where I grew from a copy editor to senior editorial board writer, to deputy night news editor.

Making a visit to Calgary during the strike, Black described us in his famously bloated language as a "gangrenous limb that needed to be amputated.'' Pleas from respected local leaders, such as Jim Gray of Canadian Hunter Exploration and Bishop Fred Henry of the Catholic Church, to settle the strike were rebuffed with similarly offensive language.

About three-quarters of the way through the strike, Radler cut a behind-the-scenes deal with the only unionized portion of the Herald - its pressmen, without whom the beleaguered newsroom group could never win.

It was only when the Aspers of CanWest made their bid to buy the chain from Hollinger, that we were faced with an unpalatable choice.

Go back to work with a toothless founding contract that wouldn't be worth the paper it was printed on, or take buyouts. Ninety-three of us chose to take buyouts and leave.

In one fell swoop, the Calgary Herald lost its collective memory.

I uprooted my young family and moved to Toronto, where I was welcomed at a major daily.

The newspaper war was still on; Toronto journalists and their readers were oblivious to how much daily journalism in other Canadian cities had suffered because of Black's ownership.

And they continue to suffer. As our stillborn union had feared, this year CanWest has began producing pages in Hamilton, resulting in copy editors losing their jobs across the chain.

I bristle when I hear journalists, inevitably from Toronto, speak fondly about Black's brand of journalism.

Court filings prior to his and Radler's incarceration tried to portray them as "kind, decent and generous" men. Those are not the adjectives I would use.

(Christine Mushka is a displaced western journalist working in Toronto.)