For decades, the Parliamentary Press Gallery excluded woman members. It was an old boys’ club and it took strong, independent women like Genevieve Lipsett Skinner to break down the barriers. She had been a reporter in Winnipeg, a lawyer, a member of the Political Equality League and one-time political candidate. Read more…
Narrator Richard Clarkin and I recently took to Zoom to discuss recording Power, Prime Ministers and the Press and how he managed to bring life to anecdotes and voices from 150 years of history during some 30 hours of studio work.
I’m indebted to Brian Dempson of St. John’s for sending me this picture with his comments on my book. He is the son of one-time Toronto Telegram reporter Peter Dempson (far right) who, with Press Gallery colleagues Mark Harrison of the Toronto Star (far left) and Clark Davey of the Globe and Mail, joined John Read more…
Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s decision to cancel the previous Liberal government’s plans to fund a francophone university for reasons of costs has eerie echoes in history. Tampering with historical francophone rights has inflamed passions from the earliest days of the nation. In 1895 John Willison, an otherwise enlightened editor of the Read more…
Few people in the world were untouched by the Great War, 1914 to November 1918. Some 70 million people were directly involved as military and more than 15 million —combatants or civilians — were killed. Journalists and journalism were marked forever as well. John Willison (pictured) graduated from the Parliamentary Read more…
When he was editor of the Globe and Mail, John Willison was a loyal supporter of Liberal Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, going so far at one point to hold back a story that would have embarrassed his friend before the 1891 election. But in 1911, after Canada signed a sweeping free Read more…