He returned to Canada in 1948 and worked at the Ottawa Journal and Timmins Daily Press and married Virginia Byfield.
[6] Through the St. John's Cathedral choir, Ted Byfield became part of a cell or group of seventeen men, which included Frank Wiens, that shared similar beliefs.
[8][9] The Company of the Cross had acquired the abandoned Dynevor Indian Hospital in Selkirk, north of Winnipeg where they held their weekend schools.
Byfield taught history which required that students read copiously from Thomas Costain to Francis Parkman.
The new school property, which was thirty kilometres west of Edmonton, at Stony Plain, Alberta had "110 hectares of bush, park and farmland".
[12] The school practiced corporal punishment, and was eventually sued by an ex-student, Jeffrey Richard Birkin, who alleged that he was "forcefully exposed to experiences on the trip that put his life, health and safety at risk.
Twelve boys and a staff member died of drowning and hypothermia on a canoe trip on 11 June 1978 on Lake Temiskaming.
[17] In the early years, all employees of the Company of the Cross—which included teachers and staff at their school and writers at their magazines—earned a dollar per day, plus room and board.
They lived in a three-story walk-up communal apartment block on 149 Street and 91st Avenue in Edmonton, called "Waverly Place," where they "attended morning and evening chapel services.
With the formation of the Alberta Report, Byfield shifted to a commercial enterprise model with staff receiving regular wages.
The article blamed "white liberal guilt about cultural assimilation, on the transformation of residential schools "into symbols of shame.".
The 2006 IRSSA's C$1.9-billion compensation package for all former IRS students,[22][23] was the largest class action settlement in Canadian history.
[26] In his 1998 The Book of Ted, Epistles from an Unrepentant Redneck, he published a collection of his "back-page" Alberta Report articles, where he championed "balanced budgets, back-to-basics education and tougher sentences for young criminal".
In 2020, Chris P. Champion, social studies curriculum advisor to the Alberta Education Minister, Andriana LaGrange, strongly supported the inclusion of Byfield's history series as required reading for Grade 11 social studies, calling it a "comprehensive analytic narrative of the Province in the context of historians' debates and Canadian and world history".
Champion said that these volumes would "increase students' knowledge of the past and provide counterbalance to the prevailing, politicizing social justice tendency that has already gone too far."
In 1999, Byfield had plans to sell shares in Alberta Report in the hope of raising $5 million on the public stock exchanges.
In order to raise funds to complete the series, Byfield created the Society to Explore and Record Christian History (SEARCH) as charities, with one in Alberta and the other in Virginia.
[35] [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] [41] [42] [43] [44] [45] [46] In 2013, with The Christians completed, Byfield turned his focus to increasing the influence of SEARCH by introducing an online journal with current interest topics.
[49] Other recipients included Ralph Sorenson, who served in the Legislative Assembly of Alberta as a member of the Social Credit caucus in the official opposition from 1971 to 1975.
[51] The fictional journalist, Dick Bennington in Frank Moher's 1988 play Prairie Report, is widely considered to be based on Ted Byfield.