2000 ATWOOD AS A MOOSE
Terry Mosher’s editorial cartoons, penned under the name Aislin, have been a fixture of the Montreal Gazette for 50 years. We take a weekly look back at some memorable cartoons in this impressive and vast body of work.
Each region of Canada is blessed with cartoonists who do a great job of poking wicked fun at the locals: Bruce Mackinnon and Michael de Adder in the Maritimes, André-Philippe Côté in Quebec City, Brian Gable in Toronto, Graeme MacKay in Hamilton and so on. I would not be able to out-joke them on their own home turf as they couldn’t on mine. Nevertheless, I do come up with the occasional cartoon on the Rest of Canada from my perch in Montreal — particularly on the subject of Toronto.
Somewhere back in the 1970s, I was the first person to say that Toronto’s favourite expression was “Thank God it’s Monday.” You can even look it up in Colombo’s Canadian Quotations. While I eventually chose Montreal as the place I wanted to call home, much of my youth was spent in Toronto.
For as long as I can remember, Torontonians have been anxious to point out how much their city has changed, how world-class it has become. It is inarguably the most important city in Englishspeaking Canada. However, during a two-year period in the early ’90s when I worked at the Toronto Star, editorial page editor Haroon Sidiqui didn’t want any French in the cartoons. “Nobody speaks French here,” he insisted. “Nobody’s interested.” That would imply that Montreal — or even New Brunswick — possesses the truly pan-Canadian identity.
I still have many friends in Toronto, particularly in the media. I mainly visit with former Montrealers who are doing industrious things there. There is no better place to pick up a year’s worth of Toronto gossip than at the annual Giller awards gala. Another good reason I have to visit the Queen City is my younger daughter Jessica Mosher, who now lives there along with my three grandchildren.
Finally, for me, there is professional baseball.
In 1974, Margaret Atwood (who fancies herself a bit of a cartoonist) was kind enough to write an introduction to one of my books. She drew a small sketch of me that I have somewhere as a rescue dog delivering vitriol. In 2000, when the City of Toronto began installing artistic sculptures of moose all over town, I reciprocated. When I showed this At-wood-as-moose cartoon to Greg Gatenby, founder of the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors, he paused uncomfortably before saying, “You better get out of town.”