Editor’s Letter
N , I was a bit dismayed to read a colleague’s description of Saskatoon, the city where I was born, as a small town. Even if you don’t subscribe to the ironic idea that the city of 272,000 is the “Paris of the Prairies,” it’s still the largest city in Saskatchewan.
The tendency to write o places smaller than (or west of ) Toronto as backwaters is a particular failing of journalists in this city of more than 2.9 million from which I write, where an increasing number of the country’s “national” media outlets are based. The decline in local news coverage across the country and the concentration of media ownership in recent years have contributed to a more homogeneous news climate. As Sarmishta Subramanian wrote in Maclean’s before the last federal election, Postmedia now operates thirty-four daily newspapers across Canada, all of which have only one executive editor of politics: “A single voice — and an ideological one — will now oversee or directly run political coverage in a eet of papers, many of which are not conservative.”
From a journalistic standpoint, to exclude perspectives can lead to everything from inaccuracy to the propagation of stereotypes. Lack of sensitivity to regionalism feeds the same kind of bias that, this past January, led to the New York Times’s promotion of a story on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s potential move to Canada with a tweet about them injecting “some razzle dazzle to the sprawling, bonechillingly cold country.” Well! “Never been to Canada or spoken to a Canadian, have you mu n?” is one of about 9,000 replies.
For this issue, our contributors turned to the theme of western alienation that reemerged during the recent federal election, in which Alberta and Saskatchewan contributed no seats to the Liberal minority government. To produce his visual essay “Inside Wexit,” photographer Brett Gundlock spent time with the group that seeks to turn Alberta into its own country. In “The New Separatists,” Edmontonbased journalist Max Fawcett traces the historic roots of Alberta separatism and the movement’s link to current populist sentiments around the world. And, in “Go Sell It on the Mountain,” Tom Jokinen showcases another side of the province, which has made long-standing contributions to the national arts scene. Founded in 1933, Ban Centre is well known to the country’s professional artists and musicians. As the institution adapts to a world where commerce and creativity feel increasingly linked yet often seem at odds, Jokinen considers the signi cance of an artists’ retreat nestled deep in the mountains that seeks to be an international creative hub.
At The Walrus, we’re paying more attention to the issue of regional identity. In the past year, we’ve greatly bene ted from interprovincial migration. A couple of editors have moved from our head o ce to Montreal, enhancing our coverage of Quebec. We’ve also recently welcomed Phoebe Sutherland, our second Indigenous Editorial Fellow and our rst sta er based in Moose Factory, Ontario. Although a relatively small newsroom for a country of this size, we at The Walrus are trying to expand our knowledge base and strengthen our connections to di erent communities, in part by having more people in more places.
Outer space is, as always, the nal frontier. In “The East Coast Takes O ,” Matthew Halliday explains the rami - cations of a company arriving in a small Nova Scotia community to build the country’s rst commercial spaceport. And, in “Of Needlework and Nebulae,” Pamela Young explores the world of Margaret Nazon, an artist in the Northwest Territories who creates beadwork inspired by images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. While we have no current plans to install a bureau of The Walrus on Mars, it’s clear that our potential audience is limited only by the imagination.
— Jessica Johnson