McCall, Christina

Christina McCall was a prominent Canadian political journalist and writer, best known for her analytical work on the Liberal Party of Canada and her biographical studies of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. McCall was born on January 29, 1935, in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. She attended the University of Toronto, studying English at Victoria College, and graduated in 1956. After school, McCall worked at Maclean’s, where she initially conducted secretarial-type work. However, by 1957, McCall had her article on the female mining pioneer, Viola MacMillan, published as her first feature for the magazine. After the acknowledgment of her writing abilities, she continued to receive important projects in journalism. During her early career, McCall met the notable journalist Peter C. Newman, whom she married in 1959 and later divorced in 1977.

McCall then went to work for Chatelaine from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. She then worked in 1967 as the Ottawa editor for Saturday Night magazine. Within this same year, McCall’s first book, The Man from Oxbow, was published. In the early 1970s, McCall returned to Maclean’s as an associate editor. From 1974 to 1976, McCall worked as a national reporter for The Globe and Mail. McCall later worked as the executive editor at Saturday Night in 1976 and then became contributing editor in 1980.

In the 1980s, McCall became focused primarily on political writing in the form of books rather than articles. Her book, Grits: An Intimate Portrait of the Liberal Party, was published in 1982 and focused on Pierre Trudeau and the environment of the inner workings of the Liberal Party under his leadership. This book was called, at the time, one of the most important Canadian books of the 1980s. McCall continued to write books even after Pierre Trudeau’s retirement from politics, and she later co-wrote a two-volume biography of Trudeau in 1990 and 1994 entitled Trudeau and Our Times, with her second husband, Stephen Clarkson, who was a political economy professor at the University of Toronto. In 1990, the first volume won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and in 1995, the second volume won the John Dafoe Prize for Distinguished Writing.

Even though McCall was primarily focused in her writing on the topic of the Canadian Liberal Party, she was also interested in a variety of other topics. These issues and topics included feminism, urban planning, and Canadian nationalism.

McCall died in 2005 in Toronto, and she left behind her partially written autobiography. Clarkson collected a selection of McCall’s writing, which he compiled and edited, and it was later published in 2008 as her autobiography entitled My Life as a Dame: The Personal and Political Writings of Christina McCall.

References:

CBC/Radio Canada. (2005, April 28). Political writer Christina McCall dies | CBC News: https://www.cbc.ca/news/entertainment/political-writer-christina-mccall-dies-1.550455
Encyclopedia.com. (2025, June 3). "contemporary authors.encyclopedia.com. 6 may. 2025. Encyclopedia.com. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/mccall-christina-1935-2005
Moore, O., & Martin, S. (2005, April 28). Christina McCall. The Globe and Mail: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/christina-mccall/article1117996/
Rose, J. (2021, October 5). Christina McCall: “feminist in arms.” rabble.ca https://rabble.ca/books/christina-mccall-feminist-arms/