When Canada unveiled the discovery of a 19th-century British explorer’s ship in the Arctic last year, it was seen as a national triumph. The successful search for HMS Erebus was a scientific and historic coup – and a political one as well, playing into the Conservative government’s focus on securing Arctic sovereignty.



Prime minister Stephen Harper personally announced the Erebus discovery, found by a government-led search team off Canada’s northern coast where it had lain hidden in the depths for nearly 200 years.

The discovery of the vessel – one of two ships making up the doomed 1845 polar expedition led by British explorer Sir John Franklin – received worldwide acclaim.



Now, however, that find is getting a different kind of attention.



This week, Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Paul Watson suddenly resigned from the country’s largest newspaper in a very public spat over what he says is censorship of a story of “significant public interest” related to the successful six-year search for the lost Franklin expedition vessels.

Watson said he left the Toronto Star after a meeting with senior editors on Tuesday because they refused to allow him to dig into what he called “distorted and inaccurate accounts” of the successful search for the Franklin expedition flagship.



He also alleged that the CEO of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, John Geiger – the former editorial board head of another major Canadian newspaper – was inflating the organization’s role in the archaeological find.



The geographical society – which publishes Canadian Geographic magazine – was brought on board the search in early 2014 to help bring the story to the broader public.

“I’ve taken a million dollar stand because I think enough is enough,” he told the Guardian, referring to the money he calculates he left on the table by walking away from the Star before his retirement.

The Star rejected Watson’s accusations, saying the Watson affair was “fundamentally a personnel matter” and calling his suspicion that Geiger had pressed Star editors to constrain his reporting “an extremely odd idea”.

The paper also pointed to its muckraking track record, including its investigative reporting on former Toronto mayor Rob Ford.

“We have not suppressed such stories in the past, we’re not doing it now, we won’t do it in the future,” said Star spokesman Bob Hepburn.



Watson – who has reported on conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Somalia for the Star and the Los Angeles Times – was on a Canadian coast guard icebreaker covering the search for the Franklin ships for the Star when the Erebus was found.

He said that editors at the Star spiked his proposed story, which was based on two main elements. According to Watson, in the days after the Erebus was found, government experts complained about the official version of the discovery, but were hesitant to express them. Months later, similiar concerns were raised by Jim Balsillie, the former co-CEO of Research in Motion, the former name of the company which makes Blackberry smartphones.

Balsillie’s Arctic Research Foundation was part of the public-private partnership expedition that found the Franklin ship.

In the April letter to Canadian environment minister Leona Aglukkaq, Balsillie flagged what he thought were errors in “Franklin’s Lost Ships” a joint UK-Canadian documentary production about last fall’s discovery expedition.



He also claimed that the film exaggerated the contributions to the search to “the benefit of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society and its own partners” at the expense of government experts and agencies.



The film-makers are standing behind the accuracy of the film and deny any editorial meddling.



Director Andrew Gregg called it a “straight up narrative of finding a lost ship” but said with a 43-minute timeline “it doesn’t take time to stop and point at all the different partners who were up in the Arctic, and if some noses are out of joint because of that, then I guess I can understand”.



Geiger, meanwhile, told the Canadian Press he had no control over the editorial narrative of the documentary.



“We saw it for the first time when it aired on (TV) just like the rest of the viewing public,” he said to the wire service.



The Canadian Press also quoted him as saying there appears to be a “fundamental difference” between the Star and Watson.

Watson said that, until this week, he had a good relationship with his former employers but admits to clashes with management, which he puts down to normal back-and-forth between a reporter and editors.

The reporter said that the affair ultimately boils down to his concerns over newsroom censorship, an overly tight-knit media culture in Canada – and more broadly, the need to take a stand on well-publicized complaints by federal public servants about the Conservative’s stranglehold on government communications.

“I’m not the first to say there’s a broad problem in this country and people need to fix it before it’s too late,” he said.

He said he would continue his reporting into the Franklin discovery.