[1] John Honderich, the owner of the Toronto Star stated: "Ron was one of those legendary gruff, tell-em-as-it-is reporters and columnists who delighted in controversy and was never afraid to ruffle feathers".
[2] In an interview in 1961 on CBC news radio he stated: "The mindset that war is inevitable scars our psyches and ruins our concept of normality.
[4] Haggart presented the Fish Net coffee house as a place that allowed the young people of Toronto to have intellectual conversations, albeit ones clouded by marijuana, listen to the latest music and to form friendships and relationships, and argued the eviction of the Fish Net coffee house was an outrage.
Knight did not trust the Crown to negotiate in good faith and demanded that citizens committee be formed to mediate an end to the crisis.
By contrast, the Solicitor-General, Jean-Pierre Goyer, was strongly opposed to Haggart serving on the citizens' committee under the grounds that he just co-written a book that criticized Trudeau and worked as the crime correspondent for the Conservative Toronto Telegram.
[10] Goyer tried hard to have Haggart removed from the citizens' committee as he accused him of being biased against the Liberal government and of leaking information about the talks to end the crisis.
[13] Haggart came to form a strong rapport with another member of the inmates' committee, Barrie MacKenzie, who impressed him as a man both more tougher and more reasonable than Knight.
During a phone call with MacKenzie, Haggart assured him that he just spoken with Major Edward Richmond, the commander of the task force at Kingston and gave him his word that the Army would not storm the prison as long as the hostages were not in danger.
[22] John Maloney, the regional director for Corrections Canada for eastern Ontario, accepted on behalf of the Crown the deal that the citizens' committee had made with Knight and MacKenzie.
[23] As Haggart was driving to his motel, he heard Goyer speak on the radio where he announced that the Crown would not make any deal with Knight.
[23] Haggart knew that the inmates had transistor radios and would listen to Goyer's speech, which had completely undermined the deal that he just made.
[25] The agenda that Beaucage pursued turned out to be an extended session of torture and murder as he and his followers had 16 of the "undesirables" (prisoner slang for child molesters) tied to chairs and beaten bloody with much sadism.
[26] Though he did not know what Beaucage was planning to do, Hagarrt woke early, on the morning of 17 April 1971, feeling very much at unease as he believed that because of Goyer's speech that something terrible was about to happen in the prison.
Early in the morning, MacKenzie called Haggart (who was the member of the citizens' committee he trusted the most) to ask him: "How much time do we have to make a decision?
"[30] Haggart heard MacKenzie shout to the other inmates at the top of his voice: "you guys have two minutes to make up your fucking minds!
A scene of pandemonium ensured as hundreds of prisoners attempted to rush out of the front gate to surrender to be confronted by a squad of soldiers with their bayonets' drawn along with the law professor Desmond Morton of the citizens' committee.
"[30] Haggart wrote that MacKenzie had "an endless flow of paranoid fears and delusions" but that he "brought Kingston Penitentiary under control again when it had gone mad.
[30] Haggart's reporting of the prison riot in the Toronto Telegram won the National Newspaper Award for 1971 for the best journalism in Canada that year.
The journalist Scott Young wrote of Haggart's work at the Globe & Mail: "He knows City Hall like a bluejay knows his favourite feeding station.
His battles on behalf of the taxpayer, the oppressed...the ordinary rank and file of humanity have given him an identity in this city that would take years to rebuild in another locale".
[2] About his work as the producer of The Fifth Estate, Haggart stated in a 1983 interview against efforts to "dumb down" his television show: "Don’t tell me there’s not an audience out there for quality".
[36] In 2012, his daughter, Kelly Haggart, turned her father's articles about the prison riot into the book Cool Heads at Kingston Pen.