The Globe and Mail : Canada’s Newspaper of Record That Still Feels Like Home

A Paper That Grew Up With the Country

I still remember the first time I held a real The Globe and Mail  in my hands. I was twelve, visiting my grandparents in Toronto, and the paper was spread across the kitchen table like a map of the grown-up world. It smelled of fresh ink and coffee, and the pages were so thick I needed both hands to turn them. That smell, that weight, that quiet authority—it’s stayed with me ever since.

Most Canadians have a The Globe and Mail  memory. For some it’s the Saturday edition arriving with the promise of a slow morning. For others it’s the Report on Business that helped them decide where to invest their first paycheck. For a few it’s the stinging editorial that made them argue out loud in the subway. Whatever the moment, the paper has been there, watching the country change, sometimes cheering it on, sometimes shaking its head.

It started way back in 1844 when a stubborn Scottish immigrant named George Brown decided Toronto needed a voice that wasn’t afraid of the bigwigs running Upper Canada. He called it The Globe and Mail, printed it four times a week, and filled it with fiery calls for responsible government. People either loved him or wanted to duel him. Often both.

Nearly a century later, in 1936, The Globe and Mail joined forces with The Mail and Empire to become  The Globe and Mail . Toronto suddenly had one serious national paper instead of two wounded ones. The country was crawling out of the Depression, war clouds were gathering in Europe, and Canadians wanted to know what it all meant for them. The new paper promised to tell them—straight, no nonsense.

The Long Road from Hot Type to Smartphones

Walk into the old The Globe and Mail building on King Street in the 1950s and you’d choke on cigarette smoke and the roar of linotype machines. Men in ink-stained aprons shouted across the composing room while editors in suspenders argued about headlines. By the 1980s the typewriters were gone, replaced by glowing green screens that nobody quite trusted. Today the newsroom is quieter—too quiet, some old-timers say—and most of the staff could do their jobs from a cottage in Muskoka if they wanted.

The biggest leap came in the late 1990s when the internet arrived like an uninvited guest who never left. Suddenly readers could get the news the second it happened, for free, from a thousand places. The Globe and Mail could have panicked and died. Instead it started charging for the good stuff online, built one of the cleanest, smartest newspaper websites in the world, and kept investing in reporters who actually leave their desks.

Print still matters. On weekends the paper feels almost luxurious—thick paper, gorgeous photos, long reads you save for the porch. But during the week more people meet The Globe and Mail on their phone at 6:15 a.m., bleary-eyed on the GO train, than ever open the broadsheet at the kitchen table. The editors know this. They hate it a little, but they know it.

Who Actually Owns the Place

The Thomson family. That’s the short answer, and for a lot of Canadians it’s the only answer they need. The Thomsons made their fortune in newspapers, radio stations, and then information empires most of us have never heard of. In 2000 they folded The Globe and Mail  into Woodbridge, their private holding company, and promised to leave the journalists alone.

So far they’ve mostly kept that promise. Editors say the Thomsons almost never call to complain about a story. When the family does speak up, it’s usually about money—subscriptions are down, costs are up, figure it out. That’s fair. Running a serious newspaper in 2025 is like trying to keep a 19th-century sailing ship afloat in a hurricane of Tik Tok and newsletters.

Before the Thomsons there was a parade of owners: mining magnate George McCullagh in the 1930s, the slick FP Publications chain in the 1960s and 70s, then a stretch under Conrad Black that left scars still visible today. Every owner left fingerprints. The current ones are faint, which is exactly how Canadian journalists like it.

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What the Paper Actually Believes

The Globe and Mail has never been neutral the way a weather report is neutral. It has always had a personality—cautious, urban, a little smug, fond of free markets but allergic to cruelty. It likes Bay Street but loves calling Bay Street idiots when they deserve it. It cheers for Canada on the world stage yet winces when the country acts small.

You can usually guess the editorial board’s take on big issues: careful on deficits, skeptical of populism, impatient with Quebec separatism, quietly proud when Canada does something decent abroad. But the opinion pages throw the doors wide open. You’ll find Marxists next to oil-patch libertarians, Indigenous activists beside old-school monarchists. The fights in the comment section are sometimes more honest than the columns themselves.

What ties it all together is a belief that facts still matter and that complicated things are worth explaining slowly. In a country that often mistakes politeness for wisdom, The Globe and Mail insists on being clear even when it’s uncomfortable.

The Sections That Keep People Coming Back

Open the Saturday paper and you’re greeted by a buffet most countries can only dream of.

News gives you the straight story—Ottawa scandals, prairie droughts, whatever mess Toronto’s mayor has made this week. The world covers everywhere else with correspondents who actually live there, not just parachuting in for the explosion. Politics is where the real blood gets spilled; the Ottawa bureau has broken more governments than any other newsroom in the country.

Business and Report on Business are the cash cows. Suits in Calgary and Bay Street traders still start their day with ROB the way their grandfathers did. Personal finance columns have talked generations of Canadians down from dumb investments.

Sports used to be mostly hockey, hockey, and more hockey. Now you’ll find sharp writing on soccer, basketball, and the quiet courage of minor-league curlers. Life throws everything else into the pot—recipes that actually work, style pages that don’t make you feel poor, Saturday essays that can break your heart before breakfast.

The Awards Shelf That Keeps Growing

Journalists are terrible braggers, except when it comes to awards. The Globe and Mail’s trophy case is obscene. More National Newspaper Awards than every other paper combined. Michener Awards for public-service journalism stacked like cordwood. Pictures of the year, investigations of the year, explanatory series of the year. Walk past the wall of plaques in the Toronto headquarters and you start to feel inadequate.

Some of the wins are legendary: exposing the sponsorship scandal, mapping the true cost of residential schools, following fentanyl from Chinese labs to Vancouver streets. Other wins are quieter—a single photograph of an elder crying at a graveside, a magazine profile that made a stranger feel seen. All of them remind the staff why the job still matters when the paycheques feel small.

The People Who Run the Show

David Walmsley runs the newsroom the way a calm sea captain runs a ship in a storm—quiet voice, steady hand, zero tolerance for nonsense. He’ll wander out of his office in running shoes, ask a junior reporter how their sick dog is doing, then rip apart a lazy headline ten minutes later.

Below him a small army of deputy editors, section heads, and designers keep the plates spinning. Sinclair Stewart watches over opinion like a hawk. Angela Pacienza makes sure the digital side doesn’t eat the print side alive. Gary Salewicz guards Report on Business the way dragons guard gold.

Out in the open newsroom you’ll find reporters who’ve been there thirty years sitting beside twenty-five-year-olds who grew up reading the paper on iPads. They argue about commas, ethics, and where to get decent coffee after the cafeteria closes. It sounds like family. Sometimes it fights like family too.

The Mistakes We Still Talk About

No 180-year-old institution gets everything right. The Globe and Mail endorsed the 1930s flirtation with eugenics. It spent decades downplaying residential schools. It ran columns that aged like milk. In 2001 a star columnist was caught lifting paragraphs from The New Yorker and the newsroom still brings it up when someone forgets to attribute a quote.

More recently, critics on the left say the paper is too cozy with corporate Canada. Critics on the right say it’s become downtown Toronto’s bubble wrapped in newsprint. Indigenous readers point out—correctly—that the coverage still catches up too slowly to their realities. Every few years a controversy erupts, heads roll or don’t, and the paper promises to do better. Sometimes it actually does.

Why It Still Matters in 2025

Canada is a big, weird, polite country that doesn’t always like looking at itself in the mirror. The Globe and Mail holds up the mirror anyway. When Parliament lies, when CEOs cheat, when the planet burns a little faster because we can’t agree on pipelines or carbon taxes, the paper is there asking the questions most of us are too busy or too scared to ask.

It’s not perfect. It’s too expensive for some, too wordy for others, too Toronto for the rest of the country on its bad days. But on its best days it still feels like the place where Canada talks to itself out loud—honestly, messily, and with the stubborn belief that words on a page, or a screen, can make the country a little wiser, a little braver, a little kinder.

And as long as there are kitchen tables, commuter trains, and quiet Saturday mornings, there will be people reaching for The Globe and Mail  the way earlier generations reached for it—looking for the story of us.

Conclusion

Why The Globe and Mail Endures

As I sit here thinking about The Globe and Mail, it hits me how this old newspaper has somehow kept its spot in our busy lives. In a world drowning in quick clips and endless scrolls, it stands like that reliable uncle who always tells it straight, even if it stings a bit. From its scrappy start in 1844, pushing for change in a young Canada, to today’s sleek apps and deep dives into global messes, the paper has grown right alongside the country. It’s seen wars, booms, busts, and scandals, always aiming to make sense of the chaos without dumbing it down.

What keeps it going? For one, the people behind it. Journalists who dig deep, owners who mostly stay out of the way, and readers who expect more than fluff. It’s not just news—it’s the glue that holds conversations together at dinner tables or in boardrooms. Remember how it broke stories on residential schools or corporate greed? Those weren’t just headlines; they sparked real shifts in how we see ourselves as Canadians. And yeah, it’s tripped up sometimes, like any family member, but it owns the mistakes and pushes forward.

Looking ahead, with AI churning out fake stories and social media yelling over facts, The Globe feels more vital than ever. It’s a reminder that good journalism costs time and guts, but pays off in trust. Whether you’re flipping pages on a rainy morning or swiping through on your phone, it connects us to the bigger picture—Canada’s quirks, triumphs, and tough spots. In 2025, as the world spins faster, this paper slows us down just enough to think clearly. It’s not flashy, but it’s ours, and that’s why it’ll stick around for another 180 years. Here’s to more ink-stained truths.