Broadcaster and commentator Rex Murphy dead at 77
is reporting that Rex Murphy, the pro-oil pundit who was at once the steady stickhandler of a national call-in radio show and a driver of divisive online discourse, has died.
The newspaper, where he worked as a columnist, said in an obituary on its website that Murphy died at age 77 following a battle with cancer.
Former prime minister Stephen Harper expressed his condolences on social media.
“Rex Murphy was one of the most intelligent and fiercely free-thinking journalists this country has ever known,” Harper wrote.
Murphy hosted CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup for more than two decades, holding the mic while the radio station opened its phone lines to callers far and wide.
Tasked with asking callers about their opinions and moderating on-air debates, Murphy said he was presented each week with a portrait of the country.
“You get a sense of how the citizenry like to deal with things. What gives you the most satisfaction is the tempered nature of Canadians, even when they’re disagreeing,” Murphy told The Canadian Press when he announced his retirement from the role in 2015.
Born near St. John’s, N.L., Murphy graduated from Memorial University before attending Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. Murphy got his start lending a hand at the private radio station VOCM in St. John’s, backfilling a talk show while its host went on vacation. He spent a month in that job in the early 1970s before jumping into a gig with CBC Radio’s Here and Now.
More than a decade later, he ran for provincial office twice — first in Placentia, N.L., in 1985 and then in a byelection in St. John’s East a year later — and lost both times. Though he ran for the Liberal Party of Newfoundland in both cases, he became a loud detractor of the federal party later in life, calling Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government “the worst Canadian government ever.”
Murphy was likewise an outspoken opponent of “wokeism,” progressive ideology sensitive to systemic inequities, and argued repeatedly in his weekly National Post column that conservative voices like his were being pushed to the margins.
In a 2022 column, he decried “the frenzy of woke politics and the cancel culture it has bred and nourished, the prescriptions on what may or may not be debated or talked about.”