ROBERT STANLEY KOZAK

A journalism career that took in eight years as a correspondent with Reuters, in Ottawa and Mexico, and almost seventeen years as a bureau chief in South America for Dow Jones Newswires and then to include the Wall Street Journal. Government work includes being a World Bank consultant, and later a speechwriter for Global Affairs Canada and for IRCC. Other briefer gigs included working as a carpenter on a buildings and bridges crew for CN railway, as a daily newspaper reporter, and as a producer for CBC radio in Toronto.

The company name – liberation – is a nod towards my father, William John “Bill” Kozak, a gunner with the 5th Armoured Division during the liberation of the Netherlands. Before that, he saw action in the Italian campaign.

And to my grandfather and namesake, Percy Stanley Shewell, a private with the Princess Patricias Canadian Light Infantry. He was in the trenches in the First World War. The Patricias helped liberate parts of Belgium while units of the regiment pushed into Mons for the armistice.