National Post

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The National Post arrived on Canadian newsstands on the 27th of October, 1998, a few weeks later than its founders had planned. The delay itself was a sign of things to come: financial complications, competing pressures, and a paper perpetually fighting for its place in a market that was not sure it needed another national voice. Conrad Black, the press baron behind the launch, had a clear target in mind. He wanted to take on The Globe and Mail, which he and many others saw as the platform of the Liberal establishment. What he built would become one of only two newspapers in Canada that could genuinely call itself national. How it survived, changed hands multiple times, nearly closed overnight in 2009, and eventually declared its first-ever yearly profit in 2011 is a story about the economics of print, the politics of ownership, and the peculiar role a newspaper plays when it becomes somebody's ideological instrument.

• 2. Black's Blueprint

  ›

  Conrad Black did not build the National Post from nothing. He built it around the Financial Post, a financial newspaper based in Toronto that his company Hollinger Inc. purchased from Sun Media in 1997. The Financial Post name was kept for the new paper's business section, a decision that shaped the Post's identity from the outset as a paper that took economic and political commentary seriously. Outside Toronto, Black used the printing and distribution infrastructure of Hollinger's national newspaper chain, formerly called Southam Newspapers. That chain included the Ottawa Citizen, the Montreal Gazette, the Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald, and the Vancouver Sun, giving the Post a built-in spine running from Ontario to British Columbia. Black appointed Ken Whyte as editor and installed an editorial board that included Ezra Levant, Jonathan Kay, Neil Seeman, Conservative Member of Parliament John Williamson, and the author and historian Alexander Rose. The paper's original design was created by Lucie Lacava, a design consultant based in Montreal, and its magazine-style graphic approach won awards early on. Today the Post carries the motto "World's Best-Designed Newspaper" on its front page.

• 3. Politics and Editorial Identity

  ›

  When the Post launched, its editorial stance was openly conservative. It pushed a "unite-the-right" movement intended to create a viable alternative to Jean Chrétien's Liberal government, and it supported the Canadian Alliance. The op-ed page was never a monolith, though. It ran dissenting columns by ideological liberals such as Linda McQuaig alongside conservatives including Mark Steyn, Diane Francis, and David Frum. The paper's relationship with conservative politics proved unsteady over time. Under editor Matthew Fraser, the Post endorsed the Conservative Party in the 2004 federal election. The Conservatives narrowly lost to the Liberals. After that result, the paper surprised many readers by shifting its support to the victorious Liberal government of Paul Martin and became sharply critical of the Conservatives and their leader Stephen Harper. Then it shifted camps again heading into the 2006 election, in which the Conservatives won a minority government. This oscillation was complicated by the fact that the Asper family, who had taken over the paper from Black, were long-standing Liberals. Izzy Asper had once led the Liberal Party in Manitoba. His sons Leonard and David Asper took control of CanWest after Izzy Asper died in October 2003, with David Asper serving as chairman of the Post. The Aspers had controversially dismissed Russell Mills, publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, for calling for the resignation of Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien.

• 4. Near Collapse and Rescue

  ›

  By the late 2000s the Post was hemorrhaging money. It had never managed to run without annual budgetary deficits during the Black years, and the broader crisis in print media made recovery harder still. In 2009, the paper stopped printing Monday editions from July to September as a temporary cost-cutting measure. Then, on the 29th of October, 2009, CanWest Global announced the Post might close as soon as the following day. The only path forward involved moving the paper into a new holding company. Investment bankers hired by CanWest had received no offers when they tried to sell the Post earlier that year. Lawyers for CanWest argued to Ontario Superior Court Justice Sarah Pepall that closing the paper would actually cost more than liquidating its assets, and that the Post added value to other newspapers in the CanWest chain. Late on the night of the 29th, Justice Pepall ruled in CanWest's favour. The paper survived. In 2010, National Post CEO Paul Godfrey assembled an ownership group to bid for the CanWest newspaper chain. Godfrey secured financial backing from the U.S. private-equity firm Golden Tree Asset Management and other investors. The group completed a transaction worth $1.1 billion on the 13th of July, 2010, forming the Postmedia Network. Postmedia's shares were listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange in 2011, and on the 28th of October, 2011, the Post announced its first-ever yearly profit.

• 5. Controversy and Criticism

  ›

  On the 19th of May, 2006, the Post ran two pieces alleging that the Iranian parliament had passed a law requiring religious minorities to wear identifying badges. One was a front-page news item headlined "Iran Eyes Badges For Jews," accompanied by a 1935 photograph of two Jews wearing Nazi-ordered yellow badges. Experts began coming forward on the same day to dispute the story, and it proved to be false. Before the correction could catch up, the story had been picked up by other news outlets and generated comments from world leaders. Comments by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper prompted Iran to summon Canada's ambassador to Tehran, Gordon E. Venner, for an explanation. On the 24th of May, editor-in-chief Doug Kelly published an apology on page 2, admitting the paper had not exercised sufficient caution or checked enough sources. Separately, the now-defunct Canadian Islamic Congress, which monitored media for anti-Muslim sentiment from 1998 to 2014, singled out the Post as consistently ranking first among anti-Islam media outlets in Canada. A 2021 academic study examining climate change coverage across seventeen mainstream media outlets in the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand found the Post performed worst of all. The study found the Post represented scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change only 70.83 percent of the time, presented natural climatic variance as equally relevant 9.17 percent of the time, and treated anthropogenic climate change as negligible 20 percent of the time.

• 6. Ownership and Reach Today

  ›

  The National Post is now the flagship publication of the Postmedia Network, itself American-owned. The paper publishes Monday through Saturday, with Monday available only as a digital edition. Print distribution covers Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, and British Columbia; weekend editions also reach Manitoba and Saskatchewan. In 2016, Chatham Asset Management acquired a 66 percent stake in Postmedia, a transaction that resulted in significant staff reductions, including the loss of a third of the Post's editorial staff. The Post maintains a separate Toronto edition that includes additional local content not found in editions distributed elsewhere in Canada. That Toronto edition is printed at Postmedia's Islington Printing Plant in the Rexdale neighbourhood of Toronto, alongside the Toronto Sun, the London Free Press, and various other Postmedia and Metroland-owned weeklies. The paper's main office is at 365 Bloor Street East in Toronto, having moved from its former location at 1450 Don Mills Road, which it vacated in 2012. Toronto itself is the fourth-largest English-language media centre in North America after New York City, Los Angeles, and Chicago, a context that has shaped the Post's sense of its own national ambitions since Ken Whyte took the editor's chair in 1998.