Ted Byfield, 1928-2021 (Photo: Facebook/Ted Byfield).

Ted Byfield, publisher of the influential Alberta Report Magazine and similar hard-right spinoffs, died Thursday at 93. 

Edward Bartlett Byfield was born in Toronto on Bastille Day in 1928.

He was a talented rhetorician and prominent influencer of the Harper-Manning-Kenney axis of paleoconservatism – and by inevitable extension, of Canadian journalism. 

Byfield never hesitated to mount his metaphorical charger and ride to the rescue of Alberta’s perpetually beleaguered “moral minority.”

A devoted propagandist for social conservative causes and a proselytizer of a highly politicized interpretation of the Christian message — which was not the message found in the Gospels — Byfield was a skilled and entertaining writer who knew how to compose a column that would be noticed. 

His columns, while often tendentious and wrongheaded, were strongly worded, coherently argued, and had three qualities that every good column requires: An attention-grabbing beginning, a clearly stated middle, and a forceful end.

A latter-day Jeremiah, his style was to report facts, but spin them hard to suit his worldview, and then leave the impression that the targets of his ire were up to no good. An occasional shot of sarcasm lent astringency to the mix.

While his politics were at times abhorrent, the way he pursued them through his journalism was worthy of admiration. 

And he kept at it through tough times into old age: he lost a daughter in 2007, his wife Virginia in 2014, and his son Link in 2015. Virginia and Link were both right-wing writers and activists as well.

He founded his weekly Alberta-based newsmagazine in 1979. It was never a financial success, folding in 2003, but it was a journalistic tour de force, not to mention an incubator for a generation of far-right journalists including Ezra Levant, Lorne Gunter, Colby Cosh, and Paul Bunner who have been enormously influential turning Canadian media into the propaganda wing of modern neoliberalism that it is today. Their name is Legion, for they are many.

In addition to his periodicals, he published a multi-volume illustrated history of Alberta and a 12-volume magnum opus called The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years. 

As a paleoconservative activist, Byfield was there at the start of the Reform Party in 1987, standing with founder Preston Manning, son of Social Credit premier Ernest Manning, which for a time split the Canadian conservative movement asunder.

Throughout his long career, Byfield never had much difficulty spotting sinister progressives lurking and working like rust to destroy civilization as we know it.

As a journalist with a strong interest in education — in the 1960s he was one of the founders the justly controversial St. John’s School for boys — he saw classrooms as a likely venue for socialistic subversion.

Among the many bees in Byfield’s bonnet over the years were women’s reproductive rights, feminism generally, new-fangled ideas about how to teach arithmetic, and Gay-Straight Alliances, which he dubbed “school sex clubs.” He was against them all.

If readers note that many of these ideas are also obsessions of Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, that should be no surprise. One of the last big crusades in Byfield’s life was the elevation of Kenney to the premiership of Alberta.

When the NDP was in power in this province, he argued that the solutions to all of Alberta’s troubles could be summed up in two words: Jason and Kenney. 

David J. Climenhaga

David J. Climenhaga

David Climenhaga is a journalist and trade union communicator who has worked in senior writing and editing positions with the Globe and Mail and the Calgary Herald. He left journalism after the strike...