The Globe and Mail

• 1. Introduction

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  The Globe and Mail carries on its editorial page a quotation it has never retired. Drawn from the writings of Junius, the line reads: "The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures." George Brown chose it in the 1840s, and it has sat there ever since, outlasting every editor, every owner, and every redesign the paper has ever undergone. That stubborn continuity is the key to understanding Canada's most widely read weekday newspaper. How did a weekly party organ in mid-19th-century Toronto become the voice of a nation? And what does it mean to be a "newspaper of record" in a country that sometimes suspects you of being Toronto's paper in disguise?

• 2. George Brown's Ambition

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  George Brown founded The Globe in Toronto in 1844 as a weekly organ for his Reform Party. Brown was a Scottish immigrant who would go on to become a Father of Confederation, and his liberal politics drew him toward the Clear Grits, a forerunner of the modern Liberal Party of Canada. But Brown quickly spotted something beyond partisan usefulness in the newspaper business. He shifted his sights to a broad audience of liberal-minded freeholders, transforming The Globe from a party sheet into a serious daily by the 1850s. The paper began shipping by railway to other Ontario cities shortly after Confederation, threading itself into the national fabric before there was much of a national fabric to thread through. By the time the twentieth century arrived, The Globe had added photography, a women's section, and the banner slogan "Canada's National Newspaper" across its front page.

• 3. The Conservative Rival

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  Brown's political rival, Conservative politician and then-Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, founded The Empire in 1887, giving Toronto a second influential newspaper operating in direct ideological opposition to The Globe. The Toronto Mail had been established separately in 1872, and the two conservative papers eventually merged in 1895 to become The Daily Mail and Empire. That paper grew large: by the 1930s its circulation stood at 118,000, well ahead of The Globe's 78,000. When mining magnate William Henry Wright decided to unite the two papers, he used George McCullagh as his front man. McCullagh arranged the merger on the 23rd of November 1936, and press reports at the time noted the irony with a phrase that stuck: "the minnow swallowed the whale."

• 4. Ownership and Expansion

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  McCullagh served as publisher of the newly merged paper until his death by suicide in 1952, after which the Webster family of Montreal took ownership. The paper's position in the Toronto market was weakening relative to the Toronto Star, and management responded by pushing harder into national circulation. Unionization came in 1955 under the American Newspaper Guild. Winnipeg-based FP Publications, controlled by Bryan Maheswary, bought the paper in 1965 and poured investment into the Report on Business section, which had launched in 1962. That section gave the Globe a firm identity as the voice of Canada's business community. The Thomson Corporation, run by the family of Kenneth Thomson, acquired both FP Publications and The Globe and Mail in 1980, bringing a greater editorial emphasis on national and international coverage in place of the paper's earlier focus on Toronto and Ontario.

• 5. Editorial Voice and Politics

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  Under editor-in-chief William Thorsell through the 1980s and 1990s, the paper aligned itself closely with Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's free trade agenda and gave strong support to the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords. Its editorial the day of the 1995 Quebec Referendum consisted largely of a Mulroney speech in favour of the Accord. At the same time, the paper was advocating for decriminalizing drugs, including an editorial in 1995 that specifically supported legalizing cocaine, and for expanding gay rights. Historian David Hayes noted that even in the postwar decades, when the Globe was seen as a conservative business voice, its editorials "took a benign view of hippies and homosexuals" and "supported legalizing marijuana." A the 12th of December 1967, editorial by Martin O'Malley declared that the state "has no right or duty to creep into the bedrooms of the nation." Nine days later, Justice Minister Pierre Trudeau borrowed that exact framing when defending the decriminalization of homosexuality, coining the phrase "There's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation."

• 6. Reinvention in the Digital Era

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  The Globe launched globeandmail.com in 1995, and by the 9th of June 2000 the site was generating its own breaking-news coverage with dedicated journalists rather than simply mirroring the print edition. The 2001 merger with BCE's broadcast assets to form Bell Globemedia came partly as a reaction to the National Post, which had launched in 1998 and prompted talk of a "national newspaper war." In 2004, some online features moved behind a paywall for paying subscribers. On the 1st of October 2010, editor-in-chief John Stackhouse called the new print and digital redesign "the most significant redesign in The Globe's history." The new format introduced full-colour pages throughout, slightly glossy paper printed on heat-set presses, and a heavier emphasis on lifestyle coverage. One media critic labelled the approach "Globe-lite." During the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, the paper published a Sunday edition for the first time in its history.

• 7. Controversies and Accountability

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  On the 25th of September 2012, The Globe announced it had disciplined senior columnist Margaret Wente after she admitted to plagiarism. The scandal had been driven into public view by University of Ottawa professor Carol Wainio, who had repeatedly raised the accusations on her blog before the paper acted. That same month, the online Canadian magazine The Tyee published a critique of the Globe's advertorial practices, citing an eight-page section titled "The Future of the Oil Sands" in the 2nd of October 2012, print edition as an example of blurred lines between editorial content and paid advertising. The section was produced by Randall Anthony Communications in conjunction with the paper's advertising department, though Page 2 of the section acknowledged that fact. Former Minister Michael Chan filed a libel lawsuit against the paper in 2015 for $4.55 million, alleging the paper had suggested he posed a risk to national security because of ties to China. The Ontario Superior Court of Justice dismissed the case in August 2024 after Chan failed to file court documents on time.

• 8. Record, Reach, and Legacy

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  The Globe and Mail's foreign correspondents are spread across London, Rome, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, and Washington, among other postings, maintaining the global presence the paper has built over decades of national expansion. Its Report on Business section, commonly called ROB, runs fifteen to twenty pages daily and is regarded as the most comprehensive daily compilation of economic news in Canada. The Report on Business Magazine, released on the last Friday of every month, publishes the Top 1000, an annual ranking of Canada's largest public companies by profit. In 2017, the paper digitized tens of thousands of photographic negatives and prints dating from 1900 to 1998, working with the Archive of Modern Conflict to make more than 10,000 images available to subscribers. With a weekly readership of more than 6 million reported in 2024, the Globe reached that figure while still not publishing on Sundays, a gap that keeps its overall weekly circulation just behind the Toronto Star.