Rex Murphy dead at 77: NP columnist honoured by fans and critics

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Tributes and remembrances from across the political spectrum have poured in for Rex Murphy, who died aged 77.

Mark Critch, a fellow Newfoundlander who parodied Murphy on the CBC program This Hour Has 22 Minutes, recalled that Murphy had worked with his father at VOCM radio in St. John’s, N.L. “You might not always agree with what he had to say but oh, could he say it,” Critch wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “I hope he makes it home to Gooseberry Cove.”

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That theme — of not always agreeing with Murphy, but admiring his style — has been frequent in remembrances of his life.

Bob Rae, a long-time Liberal member of Parliament, former premier of Ontario and now Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations, wrote of meeting Murphy on television in 1978: “He stole the show.”

“We disagreed about many things, but I never lost my affection and admiration for him,” Rae wrote on X.

In a video posted Thursday evening, which had been recorded for an award Murphy received prior to his death, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre praised Murphy’s “verbal ninja moves.”

“You are a national treasure. You are a voice of reason. You are a champion of all things that are great in our country,” Poilievre said.

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Murphy’s writing, which appeared for more than a decade in National Post, was always fierce, often controversial, and liberally peppered with the sort of language that has the feel of an age gone by.

In countless TV appearances, radio interviews, podcasts and YouTube videos over the years, he spoke in full, occasionally meandering, paragraphs.

“Rex once asked me a question on Cross Country Checkup when my remote phone died,” recalled National Post columnist John Ivison in an X post. “I ran downstairs and picked up the landline. Rex was still asking the question, having taken five minutes to meander and ox-bow his way to his point. He was unique.”

A distinctly Newfoundland voice — so obviously different from the “standard CBC smiles and central Canadian dialects,” as the Ryerson Review of Journalism once put it — Murphy’s death has been mourned especially in his home province.

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“Newfoundlanders and Labradorians are mourning one of our own tonight, and sending condolences to his family and friends,” wrote Premier Andrew Furey. “Rex Murphy’s quick wit and mastery of words were unmatched, and his presence was significant — whether or not everyone always agreed.”

Born in Carbonear, N.L., in 1947, Murphy had humble beginnings. His sister, Hyacinth White, recalled how their mother fell ill when they were children, and so, for a year-and-a-half, the family teamed up to bake bread. It was Rex’s job, she recalled, to wrap the bread in wax paper when it came out of the ovens.

“We never lacked anything … but we did not by any means have an outlandish rich lifestyle,” White said.

Their father, Harry Murphy, was a self-educated man. But both parents instilled a great respect for education in their children. Harry used to pull out a dictionary at the dinner table and give the kids words so they could guess the meaning.

“All of us learned to respect the English language,” White said. “Rex had an affinity for language from very, very, very young.”

His extensive vocabulary, his great passion for reading and writing, doubtless began at home. So, too, did his love for music. His mother played piano, violin and the accordion. Along with his father, Rex taught himself to play the piano, and improved over the years.

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White shared one final anecdote, shedding light on the warmth of the Murphy home. They used to play checkers and when Rex was in Grade 8 or 9 he was set to play his father.

Harry did his research, looking at the Brittanica. “He learned some fabulous (checkers) moves,” White said, laughing at the memory. “Obviously, Rex lost. He never played checkers again.”

For more than 21 years, Murphy was the voice of CBC Radio’s Cross Country Checkup, before he switched off the microphone in 2015. Althia Raj, a Toronto Star columnist and no ideological ally of Murphy’s, said on X that she’ll remember him “as the voice that tied our country together (in English Canada) through CBC radio’s Cross Country Checkup. As host, he helped us understand each other through respectful dialogue.”

Murphy also appeared on the CBC’s flagship nightly news program The National until 2017, leaving the same year as long-time host Peter Mansbridge, who awoke in Scotland Friday morning to news of Murphy’s death. “He was such a special character unlike anyone else in journalism. I will always remember Thursday nights with At Issue and Rex as some of my favourite moments in Canadian television,” wrote Mansbridge.

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In his regular Point of View segment, Murphy, a Rhodes Scholar, revealed the scope of his polymathic learning. He once called Bob Dylan, in a segment defending Dylan’s receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the “God-king of the boomers,” while simultaneously noting that the “guileful magician Leonard Cohen” was perhaps a better writer.

“Whenever he would speak and write, as sharp and witty as he was, you could always tell it came from a place of genuine love for Canada and its people. This nation is poorer without him,” said Kevin Libin, Postmedia’s executive editor, politics, and a longtime editor of Murphy’s.

Murphy did not just write on matters of politics and culture. Forced to cook during the pandemic, he wrote of finding himself “Kraft Dinner intolerant” after eating it one too many times. He memorably took Tim Hortons to task for selling lattes and cappuccinos, a trend, he warned that “will, over time, inevitably lead to selling and playing Michael Bublé croonings, or offering little animated tofu statuettes of Celine Dion yodelling about the Titanic going down.”

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Murphy’s ire was not driven by partisanship; he ran as a provincial Liberal candidate in Newfoundland and Labrador and worked for the provincial conservatives. Rather, wrote Carson Jerema, Murphy’s last editor at the National Post, he was “driven by being a man who no longer recognized his country.”

In his columns, Murphy inveighed against green activism — Swedish activist Greta Thunberg was a semi-regular target — and the politics of the modern left.

Both earned him considerable enmity, and, at times, considerable controversy, though Murphy understood that no opinion writer is doing their job if everyone likes them. In a 2006 column about Salman Rushdie, author of The Satanic Verses, and the publication of satirical Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, he wrote, “Everything written, if it has anything in it, will offend someone.”

After a career with CBC that stretched back to the 1970s, Murphy became one of the most caustic critics of the public broadcaster.

In recent years, Murphy found fresh ideological allies, such as Jordan Peterson, the self-help guru, political commentator and occasional National Post writer. “One of our best is gone,” wrote Peterson on X. His wife, Tammy Peterson, posted a photo of her husband “cracking up” at some quip or another Murphy made while the couple visited Newfoundland with him. “Rex was our Nations great Canadian journalist, a poet and a friend,” she wrote.

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Though firmly a Newfoundland patriot, Murphy was also an ardent booster of Canada and, in particular, western Canada, often squaring off against critics of resource industries. “Rex Murphy, born in Newfoundland before it even entered Confederation, was a strong advocate for western Canada. That’s because he was a fiercely proud Canadian who believed every part of Canada should be treated fairly because every part of Canada makes our nation stronger,” Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe wrote on X.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith, herself a former radio host and newspaper columnist, called him “a good and true friend to Alberta.”

Even as he battled cancer, Murphy was still writing, albeit at a less furious pace. “Banning Christmas and all its wonderful trappings — particularly the Christmas tree — falls under the ever-dropping guillotine of inclusion,” he wrote in December 2023.

So much of his writing and speaking reached the homes of ordinary Canadians, whether via CBC radio and television or in the pages of National Post.

Ontario Premier Doug Ford recalled the kind words Murphy had for his brother, former Toronto mayor Rob Ford, when he died. “The common man lost a buddy yesterday,” Murphy said on CBC at the time. “Mr. Ford was one of the most remarkable ordinary people Toronto ever produced.”

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“Throughout his life and career, he never lost touch with everyday people. He was their voice and champion,” Premier Doug Ford wrote on X.

It was with regards to the conservative movement that, at least in the past decade, Murphy’s words arguably had their greatest influence, although the occasional Liberal popped up to praise him.

“Rex Murphy didn’t like my politics and I didn’t like his but he was a character and he will be missed a lot,” said former Ontario premier Kathleen Wynne. She was joined by Ken Hardie, a Liberal parliamentarian from Surrey, B.C., who said “his turn of phrase and delivery — backed up with a formidable intellect — made him an icon and a Canadian treasure.”

Jerema, in his remembrance of Murphy, suggested Canadian conservatism might not have survived at all if not for Murphy’s work, instead becoming an ever-more droopy progressive conservatism, fighting progressives for the share of the vote.

Rex Murphy “was one of the most intelligent and fiercely free-thinking journalists this country has ever known,” former prime minister Stephen Harper wrote on X.

Funeral arrangements have not yet been announced.

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