Global College

Patrick Martin Bio

Comment Editor, The Globe and Mail

Patrick Martin first visited the Middle East in 1971 as a 20-year-old, when he motorcycled across North Africa. His trips to the region as a journalist began in 1982, just days after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. Several other assignments followed after he joined The Globe and Mail in 1984; culminating in his appointment as Middle East Correspondent from 1991-95. Though based at that time in Jerusalem, where he reported mostly on Israeli and Palestinian affairs, his assignments took him throughout the region, with extensive travel to Algeria, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey and Saudi Arabia.

Appointed The Globe’s Foreign Editor in 1995 (responsible for the paper’s world coverage and its eight foreign bureaus), he returned to Israel in 1988 to prepare a special report on Israel’s 50th anniversary. In 2004, he returned to Iraq to cover its handover to civilian authorities and its prospects for a peaceful future. Most recently, he returned to Lebanon in July and August last summer to cover the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

Patrick has covered several Israeli elections, beginning in 1988; was on hand when Yasser Arafat returned to the Gaza Strip in 1994 (Patrick postponed his own wedding to be there on that occasion), and has spent several days living both in an occupied Palestinian town and in an Israeli West Bank settlement.  He was in Gaza the day the Oslo peace agreement was signed, witnessing both the joy and fury that was triggered; in Algiers when a military junta overthrew the country’s first freely elected (Islamic) government; in Baghdad the day Saddam Hussein went on trial, and in Syria when that country first offered “full peace” with Israel in exchange for “full withdrawal” from the Golan Heights. 

As Comment Editor since 1999, Patrick is responsible for The Globe and Mail’s op-ed and editorial pages, including many Globe columnists and outside contributors, as well as the weekend Books section. He and his staff are in frequent contact with members of the public and various communities and interest groups in their dealings with the paper.

Highlights:

-         Comment Editor of The Globe and Mail (since 1999)

-         Foreign Editor (1995-99)

-         Middle East correspondent (1991-95)

-         Host of CBC Radio’s Sunday Morning program (1979-81), winning the 1981 ACTRA award for best host-interviewer in Canada.

-         Co-author of Contenders: The Tory Quest for Power (1983 bestseller)

-         Law degree from the University of Western Ontario (1979 dean’s list, law review editor)

-         Thomson Fellow, at the University of Toronto (1989-90) studying modern Arab history and Islam.