[6][7] He worked for two decades as a freelance journalist and feature writer, primarily for The Globe and Mail from 1981 to 1989 and the Toronto Star from 1989 to 1999 and sporadically since then, and maintained a blog.
[13] In a 2012 article, Bourrie stated that the Chinese government-owned Xinhua News Agency asked him to collect information on the Dalai Lama by exploiting his journalistic access to the Parliament of Canada.
[14][15][16] Bourrie stated that he was asked to write for Xinhua in 2009 and sought advice from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), but was ignored.
Bourrie stated that the request for information about the Dalai Lama caused him to refuse to continue to write articles for Xinhua.
Sloly alleged that an article published by the magazine falsely and maliciously painted him as mismanaging misogyny problems within the force.
[2] In a review of his 2024 book Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brebeuf and the Destruction of Huronia published in The Globe and Mail, historian Charlotte Gray wrote: "Bourrie has done more than any other Canadian historian writing for a general audience to disinter the root causes of degenerating settler-Indigenous relations and disrupted Indigenous societies in the 400 years since Brébeuf’s death.