Heather Mallick

Life and career

Mallick was born in Norway House, Manitoba, to an Indian father from Calcutta and a Scottish mother. She was raised in the northern Ontario town of Kapuskasing, and in other remote communities where her father worked as a physician. Mallick attended the University of Toronto where she received a bachelor's and Master of Arts degrees in English Literature. She also earned a bachelor's degree in Journalism from Ryerson University.

After graduation, she was employed at the Canadian financial daily newspaper Financial Post where she first worked as a copy editor and later became a news editor.

She first came to public notice in Canada during the 1990s as the book review editor and writer for the Sunday edition of the Toronto Sun, where she won two Canadian Newspaper Association National Newspaper Awards for critical writing in 1994 and feature writing in 1996. Mallick later wrote for The Globe and Mail where her left-of-centre political opinion column "As If" was a regular part of the paper's Saturday edition until December 2005. She also wrote major and minor pieces for the newspaper on lifestyle and other issues. She joined the Toronto Star in August 2010.

Mallick's first book, Pearls in Vinegar, was published in September, 2004 in Canada. She published a collection of new essays for Knopf Canada in April, 2007 entitled Cake or Death: The Excruciating Choices of Everyday Life.

Mallick is married to Stephen Petherbridge, a senior British/Canadian journalist.

In October 2007, Mallick gave the 2nd annual Mel Hurtig Lecture on the Future of Canada, at the University of Alberta.

On 10 March 2014, in the midst of the 2014 Crimean crisis that shook Canada because of its 1.2 million Ukrainian-Canadian citizens, Mallick noted in her column for the Toronto Star that "When the crisis in Crimea erupted, everyone waited for the first wildly unjustified Hitler reference to pop up. It didn't take long. It’s raining Hitlers and somehow one knew it would." She remarked that Stephen Harper, John Baird, Jason Kenney and Hillary Clinton had likened Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler.

Controversies

In 2008, after Sarah Palin was selected as the U.S. Republican party's Vice-Presidential candidate, Mallick, among other things, labelled Palin as "white trash" and an "Alaskan hillbilly" and likened her to a "toned-down ... porn actress" in a column for the CBC. The column aroused fierce criticism. Jonathan Kay, writing in the National Post, accused Mallick of "childish vulgarity" and "hypocrisy" and said that her writing "is haunted by hateful hang-ups about Americans, country-dwellers and the political right. Some of her obsessions are downright weird — such as her prurient insistence that male conservatives embrace bad policy because they are impotent and horny." An investigation by the CBC ombudsman found that "many of her most savage assertions lack a basis in fact", and that her aspersions on the sexual inadequacy of Republican men "would easily be seen as, at best, puerile" if "applied to any other group". The publisher of CBC news, John Cruickshank, apologized for publishing Mallick's column, which he called "viciously personal, grossly hyperbolic and intensely partisan".

On July 28, 2011, the Toronto Star published a column by Mallick entitled "What to do when a monster likes your work". A British journalist mentioned in the column, Melanie Phillips, promptly commenced legal action. The Star printed an apology, stating in part, "The column made reference to Ms. Phillips’ writings in an entirely misleading and inappropriate manner." The paper also removed the column from their website, and settled with Phillips for full legal costs, plus a donation to a charity of her choice in lieu of damages.

Works