Canada is as impossible to describe as it is to cover. The Globe has never stopped trying

Which is the greater miracle: that The Globe and Mail has lasted 180 years as Canada’s self-styled national newspaper, or that a country as unlikely as this (vast and varied and frozen and underpopulated) ever came to be, never mind survived? Both prospects were long bets. But this we can say: One wouldn’t have existed without the other, not in the form they take today. Canada has always been as improbable as the challenge of covering it.

The parallels between the two endeavours are almost spooky. As has been made sparklingly clear in this series of essays, George Brown, the founder of The Globe, was an impatient, stubborn, bullheaded thrasher whose ambitions for his four-page, 1844 weekly paralleled – or were at least congenitally intermixed with – his hopes for the nascent country he had emigrated to from class-locked Scotland.

Brown’s bombastic editorship of The Globe was described by a contemporary as a “long reign of literary terror.” (It wasn’t the last one, either.) But he had a vision. He instinctively understood that a new, bursting, eager-to-expand town – one that had been controlled for too long by a small and wealthy establishment known as the Family Compact – was fertile ground for a fresh and rambunctious newspaper.

The New York Times had a similar mission, but Brown’s Globe – started at a cost of £250 then, or about $68,000 in 2023 dollars – predated the Times by seven years. Brown was always ahead of the mainstream.

Toronto in 1844 was still a hick town, with a tenth of the population of New York. Water was still sold door to door. Gaslight was only just being installed, and electric power was unknown (though The Globe’s editorials would later be instrumental in the creation of Ontario Hydro). Railways were little more than a promise: Goods and people got around by stagecoach – that is, if there was a plank road for the stagecoach to follow, a luxury that in 1844 still didn’t extend to nearby Hamilton. “Local” was the only purview to be had.

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Toronto was all future, a newly incorporated city of under 20,000 souls. In the ensuing four decades, that number quadrupled. The Globe’s circulation jumped quickly, from an initial run of 300 for its first weekly edition to 2,300 within three months. By the time The Globe went daily in 1853, with a circulation of 6,000, it was the largest local newspaper in British North America.

How did that happen? As John Ibbitson makes very clear in his essay about the paper’s founder, Brown – as was the practice in journalism at the time – had zero compunction about using The Globe to further his Reform (now Liberal) Party campaigns against his arch-enemy, Sir John A. Macdonald, the leader of the Conservative Party.

The Globe and Mail styles itself today as the daily read of ambitious professionals and high-end executives, the paper of the establishment. But at the outset it was the rag of the upstarts, the runty but ardent organ of Brown’s English-speaking, pro-British, righteously Presbyterian ilk. Its strong views appealed to the yearning middle classes, stoking their resentments and justifying their acquisitiveness.

Brown hitched his newspaper to two novel developments in the Province of Canada. The first was new technology. Brown was Canada’s earliest early adopter. Within three years of The Globe’s founding, Brown was publishing telegraph news from as far away as Buffalo, in upstate New York.

The telegraph shifted public consciousness then the way the internet has challenged the mainstream media today: It made the world at once bigger and smaller and more reactive. This was especially true in wildly underpopulated Canada, where annexation by the Americans was still widely feared and occasionally threatened (as was the case during their Civil War). Connected to the larger world via telegraph, The Globe would warn us if the Yankees were coming.

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The other mainstay of Brown’s Globe was his non-stop campaign for a larger and more diversified (that is, less centralized and less protectionist, more business-friendly) Canada. Like most ideologues and idealists, Brown was a born malcontent. No solution was ever quite good enough. But he was also a product of the Scottish Enlightenment (the same movement that gave us the Encyclopedia Britannica and Edmund Burke), and therefore convinced of the rightness of human reason.

The Globe didn’t start calling itself Canada’s national newspaper until 1909, but in Brown’s large dome of a head, it was the country’s rational newspaper from day zot. When Brown wasn’t going after Macdonald’s cronies for malfeasance (see Doug Saunders’s recap of the Pacific Scandal), he was rounding up all the reasons rational men ought to want a bigger and more sprawling Canada, as Tony Keller notes in his deft history of Junius, the notional author of The Globe’s unsigned editorials. A divided Canada risked being swallowed up, piece by piece, by the United States.

To that end, by 1859, Brown was lobbying hard in The Globe for a united federal Canada that (eventually) encompassed the Maritimes, the North-West and Rupert’s Land (what is now Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta and beyond), part of which territory Brown helped wrest from the hands of the Hudson’s Bay Company by 1870. Brown may have been a Father of Confederation, but he was also its obstetrician, and The Globe was the forceps he used to yank the newborn country into being.

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Whereupon, in an early example of what public intellectual Noam Chomsky later dubbed “manufacturing consent,” The Globe immediately declared Confederation a complete success. “The unanimity and cordiality with which all sections of the people of Canada accept the new Constitution, give the happiest omen of its successful operation,” The Globe declared on our very first Dominion Day, July 1, 1867. The paper went on to proclaim “the inauguration of a new nationality [my italics] to which we committed the interests of Christianity and civilization in a territory larger than that of the ancient Roman Empire.”

Which was disgracefully presumptuous (what about the new country’s Indigenous forefathers?) and largely untrue. As Alexander Willis notes in History of the Book in Canada, there were 380 “newspapers” in British North America in 1865, each one espousing the point of view of a different regional, political, religious or cultural interest group. The Conservatives had their megaphones, as did the Liberals, as did the French-Canadian Liberals (the anti-clerical Rouges), the French-Canadian Conservatives (George-Étienne Cartier’s Bleus) and many others.

This “second legislature,” as the cacophony it created was called, was still arguing violently about the pros and cons of Confederation when Confederation happened. Meanwhile, in the Maritimes, both Nova Scotia and New Brunswick instantly regretted their decision to leave the bosom of Britain and join Canada. Haligonians marked the nation’s first Dominion Day by burning their premier, Sir Charles Tupper, the Father of Confederation who persuaded them to join the party, in effigy, alongside a live rat.

The country was a nation in name alone. In a lot of ways, it still is.

Having used his newspaper to birth the improbable Frankenstein called Canada, Brown and The Globe set about trying to describe the monster. Never mind covering it thoroughly, or fairly, or justly, or consistently: The essays of Jana G. Pruden and Ann Hui and Gary Mason and Marsha Lederman and Dakshana Bascaramurty and Rachel Giese and Willow Fiddler all offer plenty of evidence of the contradictory, biased, racist, sexist, ignorant and even excellent reporting and opinionating The Globe and Mail has committed over its lifespan.

Brown was an abolitionist, ardently anti-slavery, and a keen defender of prison reform. But his newspaper was still capable of comparing the arrival of thousands of Irish Catholic famine refugees in Toronto to the descent of the locusts on Egypt. Six years later, the newspaper was writing in support of them: They were, after all, potential readers and potential Liberal voters. Brown’s beloved daughters (he married late, in his 40s) were two of the first women to graduate from the University of Toronto, but The Globe was always a hesitant fan of feminism, even balking at the use of Ms. roughly a century and a half later, as Elizabeth Renzetti notes in her essay on the rise of the women’s movement.

The real news isn’t that The Globe covered all these subjects well and poorly, fairly and otherwise. The surprise is that The Globe attempted to cover the whole country at all.

Geography alone made it impossible. George McCullagh, who merged The Globe with The Mail and Empire and became the first publisher of The Globe and Mail in 1936, flew copies of the paper to Vancouver by plane every day to justify the claim that The Globe was a national newspaper. But we know from Temur Durrani’s essay, which tracks The Globe’s embrace of technology, that it wasn’t until the introduction of satellites into the production process in 1980 – a move that “confirms the destiny of The Globe,” publisher Roy Megarry brashly declared at the time – that the newspaper could claim with any honesty to be a national publication. (The satellite instantly increased the paper’s circulation by 40,000 readers.) And even then, with a page a minute being transmitted to printing plants across the country, delivering those printed papers through Canadian weather was a gargantuan challenge, and still is.

Fog and snow and floods shut down B.C.’s Coquihalla Highway at least half a dozen times a year, preventing the six-hour daily run of 1,200 newspapers – at the time of writing – from Delta, B.C., to Vernon and stops along the way. The driver, who makes the return trip six days a week, goes through a truck a year delivering The Globe: He has smashed into mountains and moose and more. The Globe has long flown copies of the newspaper to Iqaluit and Yellowknife, which only underlines the economic absurdity of publishing a national newspaper.

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And then there was the impossible task of reporting on a country as large and diverse as Canada.

That reporting was bound to be criticized, even as The Globe became more profitable in the early decades of the 20th century, and could finally afford to be more politically independent. The pallid history of the opening of The Globe’s domestic bureaus, staffed by its own reporters, is a case in point. It was 1954 before The Globe established its first out-of-province bureau, in Quebec City. (It was the first newspaper outside of Quebec to do so.) It was 1956 before the paper opened its first foreign bureau in Washington.

As Nathan VanderKlippe explains in his essay, The Globe was the first Western newspaper to open a bureau in Beijing in 1959; was that so much more important (or profitable) than opening a Vancouver bureau, which happened only later that year? Halifax, Edmonton, Calgary and Winnipeg had to wait until 1970, 1979, 1980 and 1981, respectively. That’s how young, how unexamined, how uninvestigated, how untold this country still is, from a national news perspective.

How could it be otherwise? Consider the challenge of covering the North, which Patrick White outlines in his essay about Northern Canada and its presence in our national consciousness. A subcontinent that hadn’t changed much in 10,000 years is suddenly, because of climate change and southern capitalists, changing so fast that even its residents don’t fully grasp the consequences.

“You’re literally dealing with a culture here that’s evolving so quickly that it’s happening before your eyes,” a mining executive on Baffin Island told a Globe reporter a decade ago. On weekends, his crew of newly trained Inuit equipment operators took classes in how to work an ATM and how to make a budget, to help them manage the $75,000 salaries they were suddenly receiving. There are now 25 communities in Nunavut, none of which are as yet connected by roads of any kind.

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In 2012, Globe photographer Peter Power and I traversed the Arctic from Iqaluit to Inuvik, stopping along the way to write about the region. This is what a national newspaper is supposed to do, after all: cover the land. It took us six weeks. Our flights alone cost $100,000.

Despite such hindrances, a succession of Globe writers has brought stories of the North to the consciousness of southerners. Our reports read like dispatches not just from the pioneer days, but from a previously undiscovered (and sometimes not particularly admirable) stage of human evolution: the year the federal government allowed Inuit to buy liquor (1959), the year federal ballot boxes arrived up north (1962), the stretch during which Ottawa assigned the Inuit identification numbers (which they wore around their necks, on leather thongs, now collector’s items) so Canada could claim geographic sovereignty over the North by dint of the fact that it was “populated.”

The Inuit were strangers to us, and we were strangers to them, albeit often friendly. George Qulaut, one of the founding fathers of Nunavut, told The Globe that he remembered his father approaching him, in all seriousness, and asking, “George, what is this place, Canada, that I keep hearing about? What is a Canadian?” That was in 1971, for God’s sake, well within living memory.

These days, the federal government’s subsidy of Nunavut amounts to $57,273 per resident. Is that a tenable situation? It had better be, because the “inhabited” Canadian North is the only entity that lies between us and the northern marauding of Russia and China.

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One reason this country’s stories still feel only partly told, despite the repeated efforts of the national newspaper, is because the stories are too complicated, too evolving, to be told in any simple, fixed way. As Konrad Yakabuski makes clear in his crisp but comprehensive overview of Canada’s two solitudes, the separation of English and French cultures was built into Canadian life from its outset. The separateness never goes away, entirely, which is perplexing, but it always abates and then resurges, which is just as perplexing. Is the rise and fall of interest in separatism as much a function of simple demographics, of the average age of the population, as it is of any deeper cultural dissatisfaction?

In 1850, Brown’s Globe was omnidirectionally hostile to Quebec’s early political domination of the Province of Canada. But by 1863, Ontarians outnumbered Quebeckers, and a subtler and more experienced Brown, with Confederation in his sights, had become more understanding of francophone Canada’s existential nervousness. That anxiety has been ponging back and forth from side to side, like a germ that will not die, ever since. The Constitution Act recognized the use of both languages in Parliament back in 1867, but the Official Languages Act wasn’t passed until 1969, by which time there were seven million francophones in Quebec.

There are now 150,000 Manitobans who can claim French heritage, 50,000 of whom list French as their first language – but for 60 years Manitoba schools were officially English-only, a crisis of political paranoia Evan Annett outlines in his essay on the Manitoba Schools Question. In 1992, after a decade of constitutional wrangling and only months before the (ultimately unsuccessful) Charlottetown Accord, Don Getty, the unilingual premier of Alberta, declared his government’s intention to abandon official bilingualism.

Alberta’s Conservatives soon faced a much wider challenge to their narrow definition of who is and isn’t an Albertan: The most frequently spoken language after English in Calgary today is either Tagalog or Punjabi. That further complicates the always jittery (and some would say unanswerable) question of provincial and national self-definition, of who we are as a place, if we are ever just any one thing at all. The more narrowly you define a nation, the more arguments you will have as to whom it belongs.

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The West, as Kelly Cryderman astutely observes in her contribution to the collection, has in fact become Canada’s third solitude, the breeding ground of its own populist and separatist alienation, some of which manifested in the now-infamous 2022 national park-in of Ottawa, a.k.a. the truckers’ convoy. Maybe that alienation was inevitable: The 4.5 million square kilometres that became the west and northwest of Canada were jammed on in a panic, to serve the interests of central Canada by creating space between the westward-expanding Americans and the money-grasping, London-based Hudson’s Bay Company, which did not want to let go of its territory.

Is it any surprise that central Canada – and even “the Toronto Globe and Mail,” as westerners sometimes call it – has on occasion (but certainly not always) treated the West as an economic colony? And has done so in spite of the region’s distinct farming and ranching and resource-based economy, that in turn has produced its own proud political traditions, such as socialized medicine. Old mistrusts die hard. Alas, the standoff is infinitely more complicated today, because it isn’t just Bay Street that wants to control Alberta’s oil patch. It’s the entire planet, suffering as it is from human-caused, fossil-fuel-induced climate change.

Whether it takes the form of a website or a podcast or a physical object printed on a byproduct of harvested trees, a daily newspaper today performs the same function it always has: It is a compressor of time and space that curates an illusion of order out of the chaos of random happenstance.

In that way it is not unlike a national identity, another, equally artificial organizing principle. Benedict Anderson, the late, undersung Anglo-Irish political scientist and author of Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, thought the two were related. He likened the reading of a daily newspaper to a “mass ceremony” whose purpose was to consecrate and make real the abstract entity we know as a nation. (One current fear is that if you demolish the ceremony – as online technology has undermined the newspaper business – you weaken the cord of connection.)

Anderson’s point was that every nation is an artificial creation, imagined into being by almost hilariously selective details of geography, history, religion, ethnicity, civic-mindedness, military might and financial convenience. We hope the arrangement of values is just and convince ourselves it will last, but in a young, (relatively) underpopulated country as wide and tall as Canada, the past is still too geographically scattered and recent to have the heft of solid tradition. Hence the steady bickering and nattering existential doubts that characterize our politics and so much of The Globe’s reporting over a mere 180 years. Everyone wants to own this place, and only the callow and the careless think they actually can or do.

Which is the weird and somehow reassuring thing: The unlikelihood of Canada turns out to be its most distinguishing feature, so far. All the reasons Canada ought not to exist, chronicled by The Globe over the decades – its physical immensity and tiny population, the dissimilarity of its regions, its tense and complicated mix of ethnicities and languages, its penchant for apology and compromise, its bland civic idealism and watery political system, its often feckless and dependent economy, the lies and contradictions of its touted but also real inclusivity, to say nothing of the precariousness of living on top of the unhinged but thrilling, hyper-argumentative but bracingly confident, gun-toting but world-defending meth lab of capitalism known as the United States of America – are the same reasons Canada survives.

Brown described Confederation as a coming together of dissimilar regions under the unifying authority of a brand-new federal government. But as one of his successors, former Globe editor William Thorsell, once pointed out, Confederation was actually an agreement of mutual separation. The French and the English, the East and the West, the Liberals and the Conservatives, didn’t triumph over one another or even resolve their differences: They simply agreed to co-exist by ignoring one another, by – to put it a slightly more flattering way – giving each other enough space to co-exist. They decided to honour not their sameness, but their tolerance for difference, which was their most impressive sameness.

That may be justification enough to proceed with the wobbly but continuing Canadian project. It’s the identity of no identity, the definition of a place that is wary, for very practical reasons, of definitions. The Globe and Mail has now spent 180 years trying to discover and describe the details of that undefinability, and the job still isn’t finished, because the country keeps warping and moving and growing and changing. That’s actually the good news.

Ian Brown is a feature writer at The Globe and Mail.

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