The Decibel - How The Globe and Mail covered and influenced Canada’s history

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

For 180 years, The Globe and Mail has covered the biggest issues and events in Canada. To commemorate its history, editor John Ibbitson and more than two dozen Globe and Mail journalists dug into the archives to answer the question: “how did the Globe’s coverage intersect with Canada and influence its story?”. The answer to that question can be found in the new book, ‘A Nation’s Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada.Menaka Raman-Wilms hosted a panel discussion in front of a live audience with Ibbitson and Globe reporters Ann Hui and Kelly Grant about the essays they wrote, the times the Globe was ahead of the curve and the instances where the paper got it wrong.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

The Globe and Mail turned 180 this year. To commemorate the occasion, reporter and columnist John Ibbotson had the idea to turn the paper's reporters back on the paper itself. To dig through the archives and see how the Globe covered the major events in Canada's history. What did we get right? Where did we get it wrong? And how badly? How does producing the first draft of history reflect what Canadians think about this country? And how does it influence those perspectives? I spoke with John, along with health reporter Kelly Grant, and Generations reporter Anne Huey at an event in November. We talked about the book that came out of this project, a nation's paper, and what the process of researching and writing it was like.

So today on the podcast, you'll be hearing an abridged version of that conversation. I'm Mainika Raman-Wellms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. John, Kelly, Anne, welcome to the stage. So, John, we're going to start with you because all three of you contributed essays to the book, but of course, John, you also played the role as editor. Let's just talk about the motivation behind this project, behind this book. Why did you want to put this book together? Well, it actually starts while I was working on another book, The Duel, a joint biography of Diefenbaker and Pearson that Signall brought out last year. And this was summer of 2021. And there was this lovely story that I came across. In 1957, it looked as though John Diefenbaker

would be forming a minority conservative government, but Louis Saint Laurent was not yet ready to concede as Liberal Prime Minister and therefore refused to send a government plane to Saskatoon. Diefenbaker and his entourage had to fly commercial and, of course, the predecessor of Air Canada lost his luggage. So he's storming around in the airport, I want you to know who I am, and Clark Davy who is a very young Globe and Mail reporter.

How young? Well, Clark, when he was publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, hired me in 1988. But then was reporting for the Globe and he saw all this and he ran to a phone and said, I'm re-topping,, I'm gonna do a rewrite. Then he started, so the lead now was this enraged Prime Minister Desmond, and I laughed, and said, that's going in the book. And that night when I was just sort of thinking about things,

I thought, you know, there's never been a history of the Globe and Mail, and it has played such, that anyone who studies Canadian history is always coming across the Globe and saying this and the Globe doing that, the Globe breaking this. this so I thought I should write a history of the golden male and so we wanted to make a huge long memo uh to send to David Walmsley but you don't just dump a 3 000 word memo to the editor and she's lapsed so I phoned him up and said you're going to get a memo take your time let's talk about it later he said no let's talk about it

now what does the memo say so we began talking the memo, and he's already riffing on ideas and things that he would love to see. And I said, well, wait, wait till you get the memo. Instead of the memo, he took it to Philip Crowley, who was then the publisher. The next morning, Philip Green landed on the spot. And that was it. That was the summer of 2021. And starting part-time, then increasingly full-time, we began the summer of 2021 and starting part-time then increasingly full-time we began the process of selecting the essay topics sinclair stewart was invaluable in that and i'll just mention one thing about sinclair i'd come up with a long list of topics and we were trying to get it down to the 30 final topics and there was sink who came up with what turned out to be the sort of the mission statement of the paper he said john we're not writing a history of Canada. We're not writing a history of the Globe and Mail.

We're looking at 30 issues or events in which the Globe intersected with the country, influencing its course. And that's how we then focused on the 30 essays. And away we went. The first essays were underway in the fall of 2022, and the last essay was finished on the 1st of December 2023. When did the Globe really become a national newspaper, John? Like not just kind of a regional paper? From day one. So George Brown was determined that the Globe would have a national reach

and in 1844 that meant about London, Ontario. But he made sure that the paper was being delivered by stagecoach and then later by train to as far as Upper Canada was settled at the time and then east to Montreal. And so quite often, the Globe would scoop the New York papers because as the ship came into Montreal with the news, before the ship got to New York with the news, it would be telegraphed to the Globe,

and the Globe would have it the next day. And very shortly, it was by far the most read newspaper in British North America. So it has been a national paper from literally its first publication. Interesting. Kelly, let's come to you here. I want to ask you about your essay, because you were writing about two pandemics, 1918 pandemic and, of course, COVID-19.

And so I guess I just wonder, maybe you can talk a little bit about that experience of writing those. But how the globe covered those two pandemics? What did you find about the difference between the coverage a century ago and, you know, just a few years ago? Well, the differences were really significant. I just want to start before I go into those differences, just to tell you a little bit about the process of how we wound up settling on that subject. So I had been covering COVID full time for a couple of years as our health editor. I was very steeped in it. And when John and Sink approached me to do the essay, The brief was to review how the Globe and Mail had covered every public health crisis ever in 2,500 words with two weeks. So it didn't take long once

I actually dove into doing the work that I realized we'd have to find a way to focus things. And I thought diving deeply into how we covered what was then referred to as the Spanish flu would be really interesting because here we were 100 years later experiencing probably the closest corollary that really anybody could imagine. And so then I dove into reading essentially every story that the Globe wrote about the Spanish flu. And my biggest takeaway was actually that it didn't get as much coverage or as much play as I would have anticipated. There was a function, like we were able to use sort of digital archives, and there was a function that allowed you to search by whether a story had run on the first page. And I think in, at sort of the height of the Spanish flu, which was in the fall of 1918,

we only ran something like 12, maybe 15 front page stories. And sometimes they were passing mentions. And the reason for this really seemed to be that once I was able to pull out and kind of read beyond just the Spanish flu stories is just World War I was coming close to its end. And it just so totally overshadowed the Spanish flu, that there's a reason why historians actually look back on that episode in our history and say

it is in some ways the forgotten pandemic, despite the number of people that it killed. And that is in part because it really existed in the shadow of this incredibly huge and important global event. Whereas when I was covering COVID, it was the huge and important global event. And in those first two months of the pandemic in 2020, I think we ran 116, 115 front page stories. It was on the front page multiple times every day. And of course, everywhere on the web and our sort of infinite space of the internet. And so the difference in sort of the space of the internet. And so,

so the difference in sort of the volume of coverage and what was happening at the same time really shaped the coverage of both those pandemics. Yeah. Did you learn anything about, yeah, I guess the role of the Globe and Mail when something like that happens? I mean, the thing that sticks out the most to me, and I don't know if readers here remember this, but I can remember Andre Picard, who is our longtime wonderful health columnist who really knows his stuff. In maybe the second week of March, write a new column called Shut It Down. And I'm sure that Andre's column is not the only reason why this happened, but it was he was ahead of the curve. And within a couple of days, we started seeing, you know, the NBA canceling games, schools being shut down.

And so that really stuck out to me as an example of the role that the paper played when the country was sort of at a bit of a loss as to what to do. And then I think beyond that, God knows we made mistakes. And if you want to ask me about that, they haunt me. And so I think about them, things that we covered in ways that I wish I personally had covered differently. But as a general rule, I think we really tried our best to be very focused on accurate information

and also in trying to reflect back to Canadians what they were experiencing during this time when people were sick and dying, or if they weren't touched personally by somebody who was sick or dying, were experiencing this kind of remarkable event of everybody in the world being trapped in their homes for months at a time.

Yeah. I remember reading Andre's column and thinking he's jumped the shark. You know? Yeah. But you look back on this now, right, and it's a very different perspective. Yeah.

Instead, he looked like he was ahead of the game. He was indeed. Yeah. Kelly, you was ahead of the game. He was. Kelly, you mentioned some of the mistakes. I just wonder, is there something that comes to mind? Like when you look back now on that coverage, is there something that stands out that you say, wow, we should have done that differently? You know, one of the things that really sticks out is that I can remember writing a story like in maybe, maybe March of 2020. And it was a story that was like, people are sewing their own masks. Isn't this crazy? And like that was, it was a news story, but that was like the general vibe of like, things have gotten so nuts that people are sewing their own masks. And I remember going and covering virtually a news conference with the then chief medical officer of health in Ontario. And people were starting to ask about masks. And he said, well, no, you shouldn't wear them. It'll make you touch your face too much. They're not effective. And so I have these early stories where I've, I mean, I'm reporting what the public health officials say,

and I was trying to be responsible in doing that. But I mean, in retrospect, I don't think they were right. And we, me, just, you know, we did report their sort of early, like, poo-pooing of masking. That sticks out to me. Yeah. Wow. Anne, let's bring you into this. Your essay is on immigration in Canada,

and it's rooted really in the early tensions between English Protestants and Irish Catholics in Toronto, but also more broadly, too. I guess, why root the essay in that period? What does that period tell us about immigration and how Canada kind of handled it at the time. I'm laughing because I have to say right off the bat, this idea did not come from me. It arrived more or less fully formed from John and probably Sink and the other editors involved. Although I have and had written about immigration quite a bit in the past, I think I was still the food reporter maybe even when this came across my desk. And so it was it was definitely met with a lot of puzzlement. Definitely for me, it became kind of a running joke in the newsroom for a while to refer to me as the noted historian of Irish Canadian immigration to Canada. So it arrived very much, you know, fully formed idea. But I believe the thinking behind the idea was that, you know, to explore this one moment in Canada's history. This is the mid 19th century. This was the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Irish Catholic, but Irish immigrants to Toronto and how they were received. It was very much the first example of a large wave of visible outsiders,

a large wave of visible newcomers to this country. And so I think it's a good example by looking at sort of how Canada responded, how the Globe and Mail responded to that wave of newcomers. I think you can draw a straight line between that example and how Canada has responded to subsequent waves of newcomers and immigrants as well. And you mentioned how the Globe and Mail responded to that. So how did the Globe respond at the time? So the Globe initially was vehemently opposed to this influx of Irish Catholic newcomers. George Brown himself was staunchly, he believed strongly in this idea of a secular state and that this idea of Canada had to be based on a strict separation between church and state. And so he was very much against the idea of these

newcomers coming to this country because he questioned their loyalty because so many of them were Catholic. He and the paper very much questioned whether these newcomers would be loyal to this country. So I think that the example was the first real example that we have of this country and the idea of Canada being tested in a real way. You know, there were a lot of questions around that time, around what kind of a Canada are we trying to create here? Which groups do we believe can fit into this idea of Canada? There were a lot of questions around sort of morality, around whether certain groups of newcomers would be a drain on this country.

So again, I think it's such an important history and example to know about this country because I think that often, even now, there is this narrative that Canada as a country has always been welcoming to newcomers, that our country has been built on this principle of multiculturalism. And this shows that you don't have to look that far into our history to see that that's not always been the case. That's interesting.

And you're talking about really looking at past examples and then with the modern lens and how things maybe relate to each other over the years. And Kelly, you're kind of looking at similar things too. So maybe, maybe actually I'll ask John, I'll ask you this one first, like this idea kind of, maybe not history exactly repeating itself, but maybe kind of echoes or like similar themes that we could see in from modern day in the past. Was this something that was coming up in a lot of essays? Like, was this a bit of a theme in the book? Yeah, over and over and over again. I mean, the reason Sink and I were particularly keen to have an essay on Catholics versus Protestants was that until not that long ago, at least until the 1960s, it was a defining tension within the country. And if you told a

young person today that we used to believe the Irish would never be able to integrate into Canada, then it was the Ukrainians would never be able to integrate into Canada, and then there was the Vietnamese and the Syrians and the Somalis. Every time it's the same thing. And also we discovered as the essays proceeded that there was a bit of a pattern. Not all the time by any means, but the Globe would often be at the forefront of trumpeting the prejudice of the day, whatever that prejudice was. And on our good days, and there were more good days than bad,

the Globe would start to come around to this before others did. Now in the case of the Irish Catholics, it was George Brown realizing that they had the vote, and the Globe in those days was a liberal paper. So all of a sudden, we welcomed Irish Catholics, thought they were darn fine people to bring into our country and vote liberal.

But in issues of immigration, of sexual minorities, of First Nations, of covering the North, of covering the West, the particularly unfortunate way in which we covered Africville and Halifax. There would be the globe leading the charge of whatever prejudices of the day existed, and then the globe sort of asking itself, well, really? And then if we were on top of things, the globe beginning to push the country to rethink what it is we were thinking. Not always. Sometimes the country led us, but on good days, we were a voice for whatever reform was needed.

John, was there anything that really surprised you, I guess, when you're going back and you're looking through the history of the paper and how it intersected with the life of Canada? I wonder, is there anything in particular that you didn't really know before and it, yeah, it caught you off guard? Well, I didn't know until Ann told us that until 1952, every mayor of Toronto was a member of the Orange Lodge. That's just astonishing. I mean, I knew about part of the Catholic tensions. They were in my hometown of Gravenhurst when I was growing up. But I had no idea it was that intense. And I'll think of others, but I had no idea it was that intense. I don't think of others,

but I'll think of them only after this is over. Kelly, and anything come to mind for either of you? I know you both did an incredible amount of research to go through the old reams of the paper and also outside of the paper. Anything that really surprised you? Can I tell you one? And that was our coverage of venereal disease in 1918 and 1919. My God, the editorials are just wild. The sort of level of vitriol, particularly aimed at women who were prostitutes, which is what sort of our paper was kind of saying that, you know, these women are the vector. So like, I mean, we ran a whole series from the head of the medical school at U of T where, you know, he referred to them as feeble minded and fallen women who should be confined to industrial schools. And this was a bit peripheral from what I was writing about, but just the language in all of our coverage of venereal disease

kind of blew my mind. The things you find when you go back through history. And no one ever blamed the young soldiers who were consorting with those folks. Well, of course not, John. They're just being men. Well, the whole thing was new to me, so. It was a lot of learning.

But in a similar vein to what Kelly just said, I was surprised at the level of vitriol aimed against Irish immigrants. globe and mail coverage, referring to these groups as, you know, questioning their morality, questioning their hygiene, questioning, you know, whether it was safe to bring these people in. So it was eye-opening for sure. Yeah. John, you are, of course, one of our internal political experts at the paper here. So I wonder what you learned about kind of the relationship between the media and the federal government, I'll say over time, specifically like the relationship between the globe and the government. How did that change over time? Or were there instances where there was actually really significant impact there? There were several, not always for the good.

Some people will remember or not remember, will know about the Manitoba schools crisis. Was Manitoba, Manitoba was constitutionally required to have French language schools, but the Manitoba government had no intention of having French language schools. And it was a major national issue. John Willitson, the Globe's editor, went out to Manitoba and wrote to Wilfred Laurier,

who was then the leader of the official opposition, and said, look, I'm out here, I'm talking to these people, they are never going to French language schools, they just aren't. So we have to find a way to accommodate. And they did, study ways, as Wilfrid Laurier called it, but essentially the federal government caved on the issue of minority language schools in all of Western Canada, which was regrettable. There was also a time David Park did his essay on censorship during the Second World War. We almost were courageous.

As you know, the Canadian troops in Hong Kong were sent too soon, ill-equipped, unprepared, and were quickly, many of them were killed and the rest were captured by the Japanese when they invaded Hong Kong. There was a report into the decisions that the federal government had made at the time. The report was highly critical of the King government for its handling of the issue. The King government then proceeded, of course, to suppress the report. But the Globe got its hands on the report through the conservative opposition, actually.

And George McCullough, who was then the publisher, was determined to publish the report, even though it was censored. And literally a senior official from Ottawa phoned McCullough and said, if you print that, you go to jail the next day. And he caved. However, he didn't actually print the report itself, but the Globe did become increasingly critical of the way in which the King government was prosecuting the war. So it had that benefit.

But yeah, McCulloch just didn't want to go to jail. David would go. David certainly would not judge. Let me just ask you a question, Kelly. I just want to think about your coverage of the pandemic and kind of the fact that you've gone back now and looked at the coverage from the 1918 pandemic. I'm sure you get comments online all the time from an audience, but I guess I wonder if you think about your work being read decades from now, like do you wonder how it's gonna be received or do you think people might, yeah I guess, how do you think people might perceive it? That's a good question. It's so hard to say. I mean right now when I think about looking back to the Spanish flu, so much has changed not just in public health but also in the media. So it's hard for me to imagine,

like, well, I don't know, will people in the version of TikTok that is the only way anybody ever gets their news 30 years from now, will they look back and even understand, you know, what a newspaper was? I mean, I hope it will hold up well. I mean, I can say we really, really tried our very best to reflect lots of different views and to cover things accurately and to do as much on the ground reporting as we could, especially when it was hard. And we were in those early days where we were sort of trapped doing a lot of things virtually. So I genuinely don't know. It's hard to even picture what the future will look like for media and how people who consume media in a different fashion would look back on today's media to even really get a grip on it, if that makes any sense. Yeah, yeah.

And I mentioned earlier that you're the new generations reporter. So I just want to give you a little bit of time maybe to maybe just explain to us kind of what that beat really encompasses. And I guess I wonder if writing your essay here, did it make you think about generational conflict or change in any way now that you've got this new beat to kind of reflect on? That's an interesting question. So to answer the first question about what my new beat is, in covering generations, it's really kind of putting a sharper focus on the work that I was already doing as demographics reporter. But I'm looking more at these generational differences and specifically exploring the different ways that our generational differences lead to us experiencing the world differently.

And I think that, you know, we don't have to search too far, even the pandemic. I think that definitely laid bare the fact that depending on when you were born, depending on sort of what life stage that you're at, you have a very different experience of this world, of this country, of living in this place. I'm also looking at the flip side as well. So looking at how this big generational shift that we're seeing, so we have this large kind of aging population, we're seeing more and more millennials and Gen Z entering the workforce,

how that big shift is also changing or reshaping the country around us as well. So I'm really excited and I think that it's going to yield some interesting stories. You can find A Nation's Paper in any of your favorite bookstores. It has essays written by John, Anne, and Kelly, as well as dozens of other Globe journalists. That's it for today.

I'm Mainika Raman-Welms. Our producers are Madeline White, Michal Stein, and Allie Graham. David Crosby edits the show. Adrian Chung is our senior producer, and Matt Frainer is our managing editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.