Judith Robinson
A Formidable Canadian Journalist
By: Jamie Bradburn
Jamie Bradburn
Contributing Historian
Jamie Bradburn is a Toronto-based writer/researcher/historian who specializes in the stories that have shaped his city and province. His work has been published by TVO, the Toronto Star, Spacing, Historica Canada, and Torontoist.
In its obituary for Judith Robinson, The Toronto Telegram observed that “shy and gentle, Judith had a delightful sense of humour and sometimes wrote with generous warmth, but she was capable of the most devastating satire and contemptuous exposure of self-righteousness.” For more than 30 years, Robinson was one of Canada’s most formidable journalists, one who championed principle, personal liberty, and underdogs.
Robinson was born on April 6, 1897, in Toronto. Her father, John “Black Jack” Robinson, was the editor-in-chief of The Evening Telegram newspaper between 1889 and 1928. He filled the editorial with short, angry, venomous attacks that resembled modern social media platforms like X and Bluesky. His crusades bordered on obsessive, whether he was supporting the public ownership of hydro and other utilities or bestowing an almost god-like aura on the politicians he favoured. As The Globe’s obituary of him observed in 1928, “he fought because he was spiritually and mentally incapable of remaining neutral. Everything was white or black to him; there was no grey or middle tone.”
From her father, Robinson inherited strong dislikes for pretentiousness and self-righteousness, along with strong beliefs in principles and individual liberties. These passions may have developed out of the intellectual discussions she had with her father, especially after she dropped out of school at the age of 12 because of health issues.
Following her father’s death, Robinson began her journalism career at The Globe. “I started to write,” she once observed, “because it seemed to me it would be more difficult to make a living scrubbing. I have sometimes felt mistaken in that, but on the whole, perhaps not. Writing is a little easier, though the hours are worse.” She refused to write for the women’s and society pages, taking on news and sports assignments.
After freelancing for The Globe, she was put in charge of its letters page in 1934 and wrote editorials. She was fired soon after by owner William Gladstone Jaffray for writing sarcastic comments about the Conservative Party when it considered changing its name, about which she wrote that “a skunk by any other name would smell the same.”
Following a stint as Saturday Night’s correspondent in Ottawa and New York City, Robinson rejoined The Globe, newly renamed The Globe and Mail, as a columnist in 1937. She was among the first North American mainstream journalists to raise alarm about the Nazis in Germany, which brought her sarcastic touch to the forefront. After the Munich Agreement was signed in 1938 and Hitler promised he wouldn’t pursue further aggression against “other nationalities,” Robinson wrote that Hitler was sad, as “who can doubt that it hurts him worse than it can 850,000 Czechs, to have all those people he doesn’t want cluttering up his Fatherland?”
Her anti-appeasement views created conflict with Globe and Mail management. She took a three-week vacation after the Munich conference, since it was likely she would criticize British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. Many readers sent letters to her and the paper, fearing that her break would become permanent. “In my opinion,” Mrs. A. Lipman wrote, “her column was the one bright and worthwhile feature of the newspaper, and since its discontinuance the paper has lost its sparkle.”
Days after the Second World War began in September 1939, Robinson admonished editorial writers in the United States for criticizing countries that took the developing conflict seriously. “Nobody is asking the United States of America to consider the safety of the United States of America, but it would be nice if its editors could refrain from being self-righteous as well as safe.”
Robinson often saw the contradiction between a newspaper’s role in serving the public interest and its need for profitability. “A large daily produced at a profit is not necessarily corrupt, even though that paper had given much space to the condemnation of the profit motive in business,” she wrote in 1948 following the death of Toronto Star publisher Joseph Atkinson. “But the publisher who regards news as a product to be prepared, packaged, and sold for profit, like any other product, is apt to be corrupt. For news is not lard or sausage meat.”
Increasing conflict with her editors over her belief that the Canadian war effort was inadequate and ineptly led was a key factor in her departure from The Globe and Mail in spring 1940. Readers who sent letters to the paper wondering where she went this time were told that she was doing “war work.” In a letter to The Globe and Mail written in June 1940, Robinson noted that she had departed “because the war work I was then trying to do was embarrassing my employer.”
That work was Calling Canada, a campaign that bought five newspaper ads in May and June 1940 that criticized the federal government’s war policies in areas such as tank production and troop training and bore sensationalistic banners such as “Canada Sold Out” and “The Impeachment of a Government.” The campaign’s directors included Robinson, her brother John, and former Globe and Mail colleague Oakley Dalgleish.
One striking ad focused on child refugees. It noted that the King government had approved the admission of around 100 child refugees in February 1940, but none had arrived. It pointed out how, when The Globe and Mail suggested in July 1939 that British children should be brought to Canada if conflict occurred, the public reaction was positive across the country, with private citizens and provincial governments willing to help with lodging and healthcare. The ad warned that with the war ramping up and Britain being attacked, the process of considering taking in refugees was starting again, but, it said, little more than “platitudes and promises” from Ottawa as children died were expected. Readers were urged to contact Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s government, or else “next week the deaths of thousands may be on our heads.” It should be noted that King and Robinson were not fans of each other – in his diary, King described her as “a writer whom I thoroughly dislike.”
The Vancouver Sun criticized Calling Canada for damaging the war effort, even if the paper’s views outlandishly compared them to Nazi propagandists and insulted them for being “so gifted with hindsight that they have their glasses fitted to the back of their necks.”
The campaign came at a cost to those involved, including having their movements followed and phones tapped.
While working on Calling Canada, Robinson felt that subservient war coverage in the press didn’t serve the public. She envisioned a tabloid-sized newspaper consisting of analysis, short news articles, and plenty of photos. “The policy would be to give the public its news straight and present opinion as opinion; to pull no punches in friendship’s name, to serve no interest but the interest of the whole of Canada and to grind no axes for any person or class,” she wrote in a letter.
By spring 1941, Robinson and Dalgleish were ready to launch their new weekly project, which would simply be called News. A press release issued before it debuted on May 8 noted that News would be aimed at Canadians who were “mature enough to look at this country honestly and to view its peculiarities objectively.”
An editorial in the debut edition noted that it was the editors’ belief that Canadians needed news that was “stripped of verbiage, gives a coherent background, a human approach, and honest comment” similar to what readers experienced in the US and British presses. The paper was based in Fort Erie, Ontario, where the editors felt it was good to be detached from major cities.
Among Robinson’s personal crusades that trickled into her News work was her work on a campaign protesting the overcrowded, poorly ventilated conditions at Toronto’s Christie Street Veterans’ Hospital. While the federal government promised to build a new veterans’ facility that became Sunnybrook Hospital, the Women’s Emergency Committee for Soldiers’ Hospitalization grew alarmed when improvements began at the dilapidated old facility (the federal government had previously cancelled a plan introduced in July 1943 to build a new wing at Christie Street). Robinson likely had a hand in a petition pleading with the King government to act immediately to build suitable accommodations for returning soldiers at the Sunnybrook site. Their actions were successful, and the new facility officially opened in 1948.
Keeping News afloat was a financial challenge. Robinson drew upon her own money, borrowed from her family, and asked friends for support. Over its five-year existence, what News lacked in circulation (which peaked around 5,200 copies), it made up for in causing a stir in political circles; it was frequently quoted during parliamentary sessions. After it folded in April 1946, Globe and Mail columnist J.V. McAree eulogized it as the victim of a country “not sufficiently cultured to support a Canadian counterpart of the New Republic . . . or the New Statesman.”
After News ended, Robinson became a columnist for the Thomson newspaper chain. She also wrote two books: Tom Cullen of Baltimore (1949), a biography of Ontario-born, Johns Hopkins University–based gynecologist Thomas S. Cullen; and As We Came By (1951), which chronicled her adventures travelling through Europe after covering the 1950 British election.
In 1953, Robinson joined her father’s old paper, The Telegram, as a columnist specializing in federal politics. She described her column as “reasonably entertaining and reasonably informative.” Robinson enjoyed working under new Telegram publisher John Bassett, who tended to stay out of the way even when he disagreed with her.
The Toronto Star noted that her column made Louis St. Laurent’s Liberals “wince under her flaying criticisms,” then offered “equal zest to scourge” MPs in John Diefenbaker’s Progressive Conservative government “when she thought their performance failed to measure up to election promises or their duty.” In a letter to Bassett, lawyer Edwin Goodman wrote that he felt that Robinson was providing a great public service with her keen observations and that “her clear, honest column might do what any of the speakers of the opposition have failed to do during the past few years.”
Robinson believed that parliamentary governments were not great but were better than most other democratic options. Powerful, united oppositions, she thought, kept governments in line and prevented any rot from gaining hold as parties in power grew fatigued. “All freedom needs for its safety is an electorate with sense enough to see that freedom cannot live without a free parliament.”
In April 1954, Robinson became the first woman to win a National Newspaper Award for news reporting for uncovering the details of an incident in 1950 where Regina contractor Harvey Lunam received nearly $700,000 worth of federal building contracts, then wrote Qu’Appelle MP Austin Dewar seven cheques totalling $71,800. Robinson discovered these payments while investigating Lunam’s subsequent default on the contracts. It was also discovered that subcontractors who had received the work and lost money when Lunam defaulted were denied their claims for redress by the feds. Dewar did not run for re-election in 1953.
When the award was announced, a PR firm wrote to Robinson that “your detective work was even better than that of the Mounted Police and the Income Tax Department.” Bassett reputedly bounded excitedly through The Telegram’s newsroom, yelling “Here’s a scalp for Judith!” while waving a newspaper.
A collection of her Telegram columns, This Is On the House, was published in 1957. Her introduction painted a picture of the Ottawa she loved:
Coming back to Ottawa when you have been a long time away, you find you had forgotten things that anyone should have remembered. How beautiful Parliament Hill can be, for example, on a clear winter evening.
The light at the top of the Peace Tower shows as high and almost as bright, though perhaps not quite as enduring, as Venus. The roofs and turrets and pinnacles of the West Block lift dark against a sky whose smoky crimson drops sheer to infinity beyond the blue of the Gatineau Hills. New snow makes comic arabesques for foreground contrast all along the wrought-iron railings of the lawns of Parliament.
Robinson died on December 17, 1961, when she collapsed while cleaning ice off her car’s windshield aboard the Glenora Ferry near Picton, Ontario. A Toronto Star editorial declared that she was “a columnist of fearless integrity, with a slashing style that caused many a politician to fear a thrust from her journalistic sword.”
Her final column, which ran the day following her death, revolved around injustice. She wrote about British parliamentary tradition in relation to what was eventually passed by the British Government as the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, which tightened restrictions on the immigration of citizens within the British Commonwealth. Robinson felt the proposed legislation was racist, especially affecting Asian and Caribbean migrants.
“When frightened men and women, all with their votes, see their jobs and their living standards threatened by the influx of cheap labour from the East and West Indies, the appeal to a noble British tradition is hard for Members of Parliament to make,” she wrote. “It takes courage of a sort not all members of Parliament have, even in Canada.”