How Globe foreign correspondents have been Canada’s eyes and ears in a changing world

There they were – and here we are – a gang of scribbling adventurers, some of us deeply troubled, who believed our writings could somehow make Canadians care a little more about what was happening to human beings living far away.

Sometimes we succeeded. A Globe and Mail correspondent landed with Canadian troops in Normandy on June 6, 1944, sending home news of the D-Day invasion. Two generations later, Globe reporting from Afghanistan shone a light on the complicity of Canadian troops in prisoner abuse. Dispatches from the 1980s famine in Ethiopia and later from the forefront of the HIV-AIDS crisis helped spur incredible generosity from readers.

Occasionally, the foibles of the journalists sent abroad overwhelmed the rest of their mission. Over the decades, the newspaper’s commitment to foreign bureaus rose and fell along with Canada’s confidence in itself and with the financial strength of the newspaper. How The Globe covers the world often reflects the ambition, or lack of it, of Canada on the international stage.

Though The Globe has delivered news from abroad to its readers for nearly all its 180-year history, the paper only began opening bureaus in the 1950s. It was a time of international tumult. The Second World War was a decade in the rear-view mirror and the Korean War had ended in a bloody stalemate. A new crisis was emerging centred on the Suez Canal, and Canada, improbably, was the country providing answers, in the form of Lester Pearson’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning proposal to create a force of United Nations peacekeepers.

Richard Doyle, then a reporter and later the paper’s editor-in-chief, wrote in his memoir Hurly-Burly that the 1950s witnessed an “acute consciousness of Canada’s rising status as a middle power, with unlimited natural resources, an established manufacturing capacity, and a friendly, even compassionate, interest in world-wide redevelopment.”

The first Globe and Mail reporter to be permanently based outside of Canada had a backstory few of his successors could match. The 1956 announcement of Philip Deane’s hiring as the paper’s Washington correspondent introduced him as the son of a Greek general who had been born on a troop train “and has more or less been on the move ever since.” Deane’s real name was Gerassimos Svoronos Gigantes, and later in life he readopted his family name for a career in Greek and then Canadian politics as Philippe Deane Gigantes.

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After serving in the British navy during the Second World War, Gigantes’s postwar career as a journalist for The London Observer landed him in Korea, where he was captured by North Korean troops. “For the next 33 months he suffered the hardships and tortures of a Red prison camp, including a ‘death march’ and a 17-day ordeal of brainwashing,” read the Aug. 9, 1956, announcement, “The Globe and Mail goes to Washington.”

Gigantes’s work, and presumably his salary, were shared between The Globe and The Observer. In his 1976 autobiography, I Should Have Died, Gigantes writes that the two newspapers “made a deal” – partly motivated, he suggests, by The Observer’s “guilt complex” over his captivity in Korea – that allowed him to serve as the Washington correspondent for them both. It was also The Observer that had given him the “Philip Deane” name.

Gigantes was a creature of the Mad Men era he lived in – someone who perhaps would have struggled to fit into a more politically correct 21st-century newsroom. “What kind of jollies he gets from putting other people down is his secret. He has been known to wear spats on assignment, to strut with a walking stick, and to refuse to sit at press tables,” Doyle regaled. Gigantes tired of journalism, and set off on a new career in 1961, which would take him from a senior post at the United Nations to the inner circle of King Constantine of Greece to a seat in the Canadian Senate.

Editor-in-chief Oakley Dalgleish’s decision to hire an outsider for the new Washington bureau ruffled feathers in the newsroom, but tempers calmed in 1957 when veteran Ottawa columnist George Bain became The Globe’s London correspondent.

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Of course, Gigantes and Bain weren’t the first journalists to report from abroad for The Globe.

In the paper’s earliest days, George Brown received dispatches from a London correspondent. During a nine-month reporting assignment to South Africa at the end of the Boer War, correspondent Frederick Hamilton was “present at every action in which the Canadian infantry has been engaged, and was frequently under fire,” The Globe claimed in July, 1900. Stringer George Ashton sent occasional dispatches from the battlefields of France during the First World War.

The Second World War, meanwhile, transformed sports columnist Ralph Allen into a soldier, after he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Artillery in 1941, and then a “Globe and Mail War Correspondent,” which was his byline after he was honourably discharged in 1943 so that the 29-year-old could file reports while embedded with the Canadian Corps.

Allen was one of nine reporters who accompanied Canadian troops as they stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day. In a delayed dispatch that was printed in The Globe two days after the events, he described the landing as “a short, choppy run to the beaches and we make a wet landing on French soil.”

Then came Gigantes and Bain, who were soon joined by others in long-term postings outside Canada’s borders. In 1959, The Globe would open an office in Beijing (then known in the West as Peking), becoming the first Western newspaper to have a bureau inside Mao Zedong’s China.

The Globe finally had a network of correspondents, based abroad and charged with describing the world to Canada.

A long lull followed that flurry of ambitious moves. Not for the last time, both Canada and The Globe seemed to pull back from international affairs.

The 1960s and 70s were a time of dramatic developments on the home front, from Trudeaumania and the FLQ crisis to the Quebec referendum of 1980 and the repatriation of the Constitution two years later. Coverage of the planet beyond Canada’s borders seemed like an accessory.

Interest in the outside world surged again in the late 1980s and early 90s, as Mikhail Gorbachev brought glasnost and perestroika to the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall started to wobble – along with South Africa’s apartheid regime – and even peace in the Middle East seemed within reach.

Flush with advertising revenues, Roy Megarry, The Globe’s ambitious new publisher, dispatched Oakland Ross to Mexico City and Michael Valpy to Harare, the latter to cover the unfolding drama in South Africa without paying taxes to the regime there.

In 1985, former Washington correspondent Lawrence Martin bashed through the bureaucratic hurdles to open an office in Moscow, the capital of what then-U.S. president Ronald Reagan was calling the “evil empire.”

“Roy was an adventurous sort of guy. I made the case to him that ‘this is crazy, we’re only covering one side of the Cold War,’ ” Martin recalls. He knew his Soviet government-assigned translator, cook and driver were reporting on his movements, “but it’s not as if the KGB were in their glory days with Gorby in power – and I think the staff were picking up on that.”

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Between 1985 and 1990, shorter-lived bureaus appeared in Tokyo, New York and Los Angeles. And Bryan Johnson, another sports reporter-turned-foreign correspondent, convinced The Globe to let him open a temporary bureau in the Philippines, a passion project that saw him produce world-leading coverage of the People Power Revolution that toppled dictator Ferdinand Marcos, as well as groundbreaking reporting about Manila’s child-sex trade. The Globe’s interest in what was happening in the Philippines dropped off sharply after Johnson quit the paper to open his own go-go bar in Manila’s sex district.

In 1991, in the wake of the first Gulf War, Patrick Martin won a years-long battle to convince The Globe to open a Middle East bureau, in Jerusalem. John Stackhouse, a future editor-in-chief, created a unique beat that saw him based in New Delhi, but focusing on long-form reporting on poverty and development around the world. For a few years, The Globe and Mail was one of the most important outlets anywhere when it came to covering international news.

“People came to respect at moments like this – and the war in Ukraine is another one – why we have a team on the ground,” says Patrick Martin, who served as foreign editor between his two tours of duty in the Middle East. “You build respect over the long haul, not by flying in someone very quickly.”

Then came a recession and a new publisher, Roger Parkinson, and editor-in-chief, William Thorsell, who wanted to refocus the paper on its core audience – Bay Street’s Report on Business readers and the politicos following every development on Parliament Hill. Foreign news became an expensive luxury, though the paper did regularly send reporters to cover the Balkan wars of the 1990s.

One by one, offices were unceremoniously shuttered, leaving only the original trio of Washington, London and Beijing, plus Moscow.

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The trend reversed again after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Stackhouse, who became foreign editor in the aftermath, believed Canadians would no longer need to be convinced of the importance of events happening a world away. They had tragically seen for themselves why it mattered if a country on the other side of the planet fell into chaos.

Foreign budgets surged with the so-called War on Terror, under a new publisher, Phillip Crawley, a Brit who came to The Globe in 1998 from foreign postings of his own, having served as editor of the South China Morning Post and managing director of The New Zealand Herald. The Globe gave full-time coverage to the war in Afghanistan for a decade, with correspondent Graeme Smith living for much of that time in Kandahar, where Canadian troops were based.

Reflecting The Globe’s resurgent ambition, Stephanie Nolen, Geoffrey York and I were dispatched to report on the U.S. invasion of Iraq. A Middle East bureau was recreated by Paul Adams (whose wife was posted in Tel Aviv as a Canadian diplomat). Nolen reopened the dormant Africa bureau (based this time in Johannesburg) and delivered world-leading coverage of the HIV-AIDS crisis before moving to New Delhi and then Rio de Janeiro.

It was a thrilling, if dangerous, time to be posted abroad. Smith’s office in Kandahar was raided in 2007 by masked gunmen, who beat up the cook and rummaged about before leaving without explanation. Nolen says she found herself “wandering around Mogadishu with my personal militia of 14-year-olds with AKs hopped up on qat” while covering Somalia’s early-2000s descent into anarchy.

I became perhaps too adept at slipping across international borders, smuggling myself into Taliban Afghanistan (under a pile of carpets) and Kim Jong-il’s North Korea (claiming to be a historian studying the relationship between Moscow and Pyongyang). Years later, I used those skills in reverse to evacuate a source from Russian-occupied Ukraine, and – with Smith’s help and the support of Crawley and senior management – to bring The Globe’s Afghan translators and their families to Canada after the Taliban retook control in 2021.

Even in times of expansion, few women joined the ranks of The Globe’s foreign staff. Jennifer Lewington was the first woman posted abroad by The Globe when she was sent to Washington in 1984 – something she describes as “a struggle, though other newspapers had sent women abroad years earlier and to genuine battlegrounds” – but only a half dozen other women have followed in her footsteps. It’s a problem Globe management says can be partly attributed to the fact few women on staff have applied when foreign posts at the paper have come open.

The second woman assigned to a foreign bureau, Latin America correspondent Linda Hossie, found herself caught in the middle of a 1989 gunfight between Salvadoran rebels and U.S. troops, and saw a close friend shot and killed in the fray – an experience that friends say troubled her for the rest of her life. When Hossie died in 2020, her Vancouver Sun death notice said, “her successes were tempered by the frustrations she and other women encountered trying to make their way in a newsroom that still had many barriers to advancement by women.”

Nolen – who now covers global health issues for The New York Times – considers it an enormous asset to be a woman working in the field. “I cannot think of a single time when that presented a problem. And I can think of a thousand times that it was enormously useful,” she says. “From people not taking me seriously, people not finding me threatening, getting access to 50 per cent of the population in the Muslim world, which my male colleagues generally were not doing. It’s just been enormously useful. Why are there not more women in these jobs?”

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Even fewer visible minorities have been assigned by The Globe to tell Canadians about the changing world around them. At the time of this writing, all six Globe correspondents posted outside Canada are white men, albeit led by an all-female team of foreign editor Angela Murphy and her deputy, Belinda Lloyd.

Fixing that problem is complicated by the fact that the paper’s international coverage has entered a new era of retrenchment, at least in terms of the number of overseas posts it maintains. The Moscow and Middle East bureaus are both dark. The Africa bureau remains, now staffed by York, making The Globe the only Canadian media organization reporting regularly from the continent. But no one followed Nolen into India or Latin America. Instead, The Globe increasingly covers overseas news with reporters who live elsewhere and parachute in to cover an event or an issue.

It’s a model that’s hardly cheaper. The Globe spends millions each year maintaining its network of correspondents, and paying for them to fly to cover the stories of the day (including myself, based in London but travelling to report on events around the world). It’s a system the paper’s management sees as more suited to a constantly changing global scene, even as veterans of the craft see a danger in moving away from having correspondents based full-time in the countries they cover.

“If you don’t have a commitment to the infrastructure, you’re not going to do as good a job covering the trends and events,” says Paul Knox, a former Globe Latin America correspondent, and later foreign editor, who is now a professor emeritus at Toronto Metropolitan University’s school of journalism.

Knox defends the need to have Canadians – who understand the audience they’re reporting for – tell their country about the world.

“If fewer news outlets are doing their own international reporting on the ground, there’s more reproduction of talking points from people who want to influence events – and at a certain point the policy-makers are going to be driven by that chatter, rather than the reality of what’s actually happening over there,” he says.

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The Globe is nonetheless bucking the trend by maintaining any reporters abroad. Many rival news organizations have shut down overseas bureaus. CTV announced in 2023 that it was effectively ending its foreign news gathering. For years, none of the Toronto Star, Canadian Press or Postmedia organizations have had offices outside North America.

The Globe is the only Canadian media organization with anything like a full-time presence in Ukraine, which Russia invaded in February, 2022. The absence of competition, and continuing downturns in the fortunes of media companies, leave the future of that effort in question even as the war looks set to continue for years.

The Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel may prove to be a turning point akin to Sept. 11, 2001. Like 22 years before, The Globe reacted by dispatching a large team of journalists – York, Nathan VanderKlippe, Goran Tomasevic and myself – to cover the eruption of a new war in the Middle East.

Just when it seemed that Canada, and The Globe, were on the verge of again turning inward, events half a world away dragged the paper – and its readers – back abroad, to see what happens next.

Mark MacKinnon is a foreign correspondent at The Globe and Mail, based in London.

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