Former Globe and Mail investigative correspondent, 2005 to 2021. Carleton School of Journalism. Left after new ownership changed the editorial mandate. Founded PRINT Canada in 2021. Covered the Gomery Commission, the Senate expense scandal, and three federal elections. Has never accepted a government grant for the magazine.
Beats: political accountability, institutional failure, civil liberties, editorial
Contact: e.blackwell@printmag.org
A morning in the public gallery. Half the docket is people whose presence in the courtroom is the consequence of an illness the country has failed to treat. The other half is people whose disabilities the building cannot accommodate. The courtroom processes them anyway. The country has decided to call this justice. It is not. It is a spiral. The spiral is, on the building's own ledger, helping no one.
Every April, the country instructs its citizens to copy a series of numbers off forms the country itself has issued, onto another form the country itself has designed, and to mail it back to the country. The country then checks the numbers against the originals it issued in the first place. This is not a tax system. It is a country bothering itself.
Loblaw, Sobeys, Metro, Empire, and Costco. Five firms control more than ninety percent of the country's grocery market. The price of food in Ontario, by every available international comparison, is now the highest in the developed world. The country has, in the absence of competition, been left alone with five chains. The five chains have, in the same absence, done what oligopolies always do.
Bell, Rogers, and Telus charge some of the highest mobile-service prices in the developed world. They also, through their wholly-owned budget subsidiaries, offer the same network at a fraction of the price. Public Mobile, on Telus's network, is the country's quiet workaround. The arrangement is, on inspection, evidence that the prices the parent brands charge are not the price the service costs. The price is the price the parent brands have decided to ask for.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, on its present budget and its present mandate, does most of what its founders asked it to do. It does not, however, do the one thing the country most needs a public broadcaster to do in the year two thousand and twenty-six. The country needs the CBC to be the institutional anchor that lets small Canadian publications survive. The CBC has, in the years it has had this option, declined to be that anchor. The decision is reversible.
Ask the country who is to blame for the price of everything, and the country will name a politician, a foreign buyer, or a vague global trend. The honest answer is closer to home, lives in a brokerage on the corner of every Canadian commercial strip, and drives a German sedan. The polite lie is that the realtor is a service. The honest one is that the realtor is the structural beneficiary of an arrangement nobody else in the room can leave.
The federal file talks about supply. The provincial file talks about land. The municipal file talks about traffic. The country talks about rent. Notes on a deliberate confusion.
A small office. A single chair. A houseplant doing more emotional labour than the rostering code allows. Notes on the quiet collapse of primary care.
A minority Parliament. A country half-listening. What it means when the loudest voice in a democracy is the silence after a result.
A right to counsel that begins, by tradition, the moment a driver is pulled over. Why courts keep finding it begins later.
The civil court that handles ordinary disputes is the slowest part of the justice system most Canadians will ever meet. A reckoning with the queue.
