Sarah MacDonald

Reporter

Sarah MacDonald joined the Global News team in 2018.

An award-winning journalist, Sarah spent the first decade of her career with the CTV News network, based in Vancouver and Toronto, before joining the Global News network.

Sarah has led nationwide and international coverage of major regional, national and international stories—including the Enbridge natural gas pipeline explosion that forced the evacuation of the Lheidli T’enneh First Nation near Prince George, Canada’s only recorded double-fatal grizzly bear mauling in the Yukon Territories, British Columbia’s worst flooding in more than a century in the town of Grand Forks and the province’s most destructive wildfire season on record.  Sarah has also led national, network-wide coverage of global acts of terrorism in New York, Las Vegas, London and Quebec.

In 2019, Sarah’s coverage of the province’s historic flooding in the town of Grand Forks was recognized by RTDNA Canada, winning the Ron Laidlaw Award for Best Continuing Coverage. The same body of work, the result of nine days of on-the-ground reporting, was nominated as a finalist in the Best Breaking News category of the Jack Webster Awards, and led the newscast nominated for Best Local Newscast by the Canadian Screen Awards.

Sarah has also played a key role in extensive team coverage that has earned multiple awards for journalistic excellence on regional and national levels: a BCAB Award for continuing coverage of the tragic line of duty death of Abbotsford Police Constable John Davidson, and an RTNDA Canada award for the network’s live coverage of British Columbia’s historical provincial election in 2017.

Sarah has extensively covered regional, federal, and international political and environmental issues impacting British Columbians and Canadians at large—including federal and provincial budgets, municipal and provincial elections, the legislation and legalization of recreational cannabis in Canada, the Trans Mountain Pipeline expansion project, the election and presidency of United States President Donald Trump, and the wide-reaching international implications of the Islamic State’s rise and reign in Syria and Iraq. In 2018, Sarah filed a multi-part series from Bella Coola, British Columbia, where an alarming behavioural shift in the region’s grizzly bear population has resulted in increased human-animal encounters.

Sarah’s reports regularly air on Global National and on regional programs and platforms across the network. Her work and bylines have appeared in internationally distributed print publications and broadcasts—including CBS News, NBC News, VICE and VICE News, BNN Bloomberg, CTV National News and CTV News Channel.

Sarah studied Political Science at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, before graduating from the Broadcast Journalism program at the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

A fifth-generation Vancouverite, Sarah was born and raised in Vancouver.