Tom Zytaruk
Tom Zytaruk brings long institutional memory and a blunt, straight-ahead writing style to coverage of civic decisions, public safety and the people affected by them. He writes both news and opinion for the Surrey Now-Leader, moving between city hall, policing, courts, infrastructure and education when it touches local planning. His work is anchored in on-the-ground detail, with stories that track how policies, hearings and sentences land in everyday life rather than staying at the level of bureaucratic process.
City hall, housing and education projects
Zytaruk’s civic reporting follows council agendas closely, with particular attention to housing, accessibility and infrastructure contracts. He covers education when it intersects with municipal decision-making, such as student housing projects at Kwantlen Polytechnic University that must go through public hearings before they are built.
He reports on accessibility in the housing system, including stories on councillors pushing the city to explore more accessible housing for people with disabilities and the policy steps that follow.
Council spending and infrastructure are recurring subjects in his bylines, from coverage of a $1.6 million contract for pothole repairs to stories on Surrey and Vancouver being shortlisted in a $50 million traffic infrastructure competition. His election and council coverage extends to profiles of sitting councillors, documenting how they describe their workload, experience and plans for subsequent terms in office.
Across these pieces, the emphasis is on concrete proposals, dollar figures and procedural stages, rather than personality-driven politics.
Policing, justice and public safety
Public safety is a dominant thread in Zytaruk’s reporting, running from police governance through to individual court cases and crime’s human consequences. He produces in-depth interviews with senior policing figures, such as his extensive sit-down with the first chief of the Surrey Police Service, which probes the challenges of building a new force, the chief’s plans for the future and even the oddities of public recognition.
He tracks how mayors respond to violent crime and parole decisions, including pieces that examine the pattern of Surrey mayors voicing outrage over paroled convicts and what that says about political ritual around public safety.
Court coverage in his portfolio includes sentencing stories, such as the 12-year sentence for Pritpal Singh’s killer in a Surrey shooting, where he follows the case through to its outcome and reports the terms of the sentence. He also returns to older cases and memorializes victims, as seen in his reporting on a mother saying “evil won that day,” which revisits a past tragedy and foregrounds the family’s perspective.
Beyond policing and courts, he covers preventive programs like the Surrey Fire Service’s HomeSafe initiative, detailing how fire officials say the program is saving lives and how it works at the household level. The through-line is a concern with accountability and impact: how institutions act, how those actions are explained, and how they are felt by residents and families.
Opinion columns on local people and events
Zytaruk writes regular opinion columns that are explicitly positioned as unvarnished commentary alongside his news reporting.
These pieces often focus on individuals caught up in major events, using his long familiarity with the city’s stories to give context and voice to people who might otherwise appear only briefly in the news cycle. His column on Eileen Mohan, for example, is a portrait of a “remarkable lady” shaped by a notorious crime, written in a way that foregrounds her character as much as the case itself.
In another column marking three decades of reporting, he reflects on having been “in the middle of” strange and significant events over more than 30 years on the beat, underscoring the breadth of his experience in crime, politics and much else. These opinion pieces are less about staking out ideological positions than about drawing together memory, detail and empathy, extending his reporting by attaching personal texture to public events.
Experience, recognition and range
Zytaruk has been a reporter with the Now-Leader for more than three decades, which gives his coverage deep continuity across multiple eras of local politics and public safety.
His author bio notes that he writes both opinion columns and straight news and that his work has received more than 30 writing awards at North American, national and provincial levels in categories such as opinion, columnist work, reporter initiative and election coverage. That mix of recognition reflects the range in his portfolio: hard-news stories from council chambers and courtrooms, feature-length interviews with institutional leaders, and columns that revisit long-running cases or profile residents shaped by them.
He has also written books on local history and on a political figure, further grounding his reporting in detailed knowledge of how civic institutions and political careers evolve over time. In 2026, he was honoured with a lifetime achievement award from a regional journalism foundation, underlining his status as a veteran reporter whose work is seen as part of the area’s journalistic record.
Taken together, his tenure, awards and book projects mean that when he writes about education, housing, policing or infrastructure, he is placing each new story inside a long-established narrative of how decisions in those areas have played out for residents over many years.
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Alexandra Holyk
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Annabelle Olivier
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