Martin O'Malley

Martin Joseph O'Malley (February 22, 1939 – February 22, 2025) was a highly respected Canadian journalist, sports writer, and award-winning non-fiction author whose prolific, elegant prose left an indelible mark on the country's national media and political landscape. Born and raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba, he moved to Toronto to build a distinguished four-decade career as a national correspondent, investigative reporter, and columnist for The Globe and Mail and CBC News. He earned legendary status in Canadian political history for an unsigned 1967 Globe and Mail editorial in which he famously coined the phrase regarding laws criminalizing private homosexual behaviour later popularized by Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau: "There’s no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation." Beyond his political journalism, O'Malley was a gifted long-form essayist who authored several critically acclaimed books tackling Canadian infrastructure, medicine, and social science, including The Past and Future Land, Doctors, Hospital, and his 1989 true-crime biography Gross Misconduct: The Life of Spinner Spencer, which won him Author of the Year from the Foundation for the Advancement of Canadian Letters and was adapted into a television film directed by Atom Egoyan. A passionate baseball aficionado, he funneled his deep love for the sport into the 1994 sports documentary book, Game Day: The Blue Jays at SkyDome, co-authored with his son Sean O'Malley, which provided a meticulously detailed, behind-the-scenes portrait of a single home game in Toronto during the franchise's back-to-back World Series championship era.