A growing number of Canadians identify as Autistic yet media organizations still default to erasure, a case study of SJC
Julianna Maggrah was in their thirties when they finally found the language to describe themself. A chance encounter led Maggrah to Jolene Stockman, a Māori neurodiversity advocate. Maggrah met her virtually, shortly after they were diagnosed with ADHD and had begun to pursue Autism spectrum disorder diagnosis.
Te reo Māori, like most Indigenous languages, does not have words for the clinical conditions pathologized by Western medicine. As Maggrah listened to Stockman discuss how Māori people see Autism as a spiritual gift, they became curious about whether or not Cree language could reveal anything about their feelings regarding their diagnosis.
Growing up, Maggrah had always felt like an outsider. They vividly remember being eight years old and following in their grandmother’s footsteps on a hunting trip. They recall looking at the forest surrounding her: tall grasses, fragrant coniferous trees, and rushing streams cascading toward Lac La Ronge in Saskatchewan. They felt at home, away from the noise of life in town and the people they could never seem to understand. But they weren’t just there to enjoy nature.
They come from a long line of hunters, and on this day, they were being inducted into the family tradition. Gingerly, Maggrah’s grandmother showed them how to set a snare meant to trap a rabbit.
“So it struggles until it dies? But I don’t want it to struggle,” Maggrah asked their grandmother, stepping back from the snare that they set together. They wanted to cry, but this is how their family has fed themselves for generations.
After trapping a rabbit, Maggrah and their grandmother walked further through the woods to where their family has a cabin. The cabin has no running water or electricity, so Maggrah sat in silence and watched as their grandmother skinned the rabbit and cut the meat from its bones. When the rabbit stew was ready, Maggrah stared down at the bowl. As they do so often, words failed Maggrah and they couldn’t explain why they felt so deeply for the rabbit. There was nothing else to eat at the cabin, though, so they ate the rabbit.
Maggrah comes from a family of Cree residential school survivors who lost their language and much of the traditional knowledge embedded within it. Maggrah spent much of their young adult life trying to understand the sense of alienation they felt from society and within their family. It wasn’t until they started reconnecting with the Cree language that they started to find words to describe this ineffable outsider status they’d been confined to.
With Stockman’s help, Maggrah found it: pîtoteyihtam. A Cree word meaning “he/she thinks differently.” Maggrah had found themselves in the language sent down to them from thousands of years ago.
***
It is an abject failure of Canadian media that it took Maggrah 30 years to find the language to describe themself. Even though two percent of the Canadian population has been diagnosed with Autism — more than Canada’s Jewish population, more than the Latine population, more than transgender people — mainstream Canadian media has neglected to cover this community fairly and accurately, consistently flubbing stories about Autism, if it even publishes them at all.
“It seems to be believed that it’s young boys that have Autism and/or ADHD,” Maggrah says, noting they rarely see journalism about Autistic people like themselves. “[Being] fully employed as an Autistic person is actually kind of rare. I’m in the minority in that sense. Or, to be an Indigenous, female-born person who’s been diagnosed, for one thing, and then speaks openly about it and doesn’t have shame about it. I feel like I’m in the minority.”
A myriad of academic studies on news media throughout Canada, Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom have concluded that media often perpetuates outdated and ableist stereotypes about Autism. These stories almost exclusively focus on cisgender, straight, white boys, a demographic that is still considered the default for many western publications. As a Two-Spirit Cree person, Maggrah — like other people from marginalized groups — falls outside of that target audience.
Beyond focusing almost exclusively on young white boys, stereotypical portrayals of Autistic individuals are the norm in news media. Violent meltdowns, savant syndrome, and the dreaded vaccination conversation are all regularly featured in headlines at outlets like BBC, Forbes, Bloomberg, NBC, and many more. Too many people accept the ableist rhetoric pushed in these headlines. For community advocates like prominent Autistic journalist Eric Garcia and Carleton University professor Miranda Brady, these predictable narratives represent an outdated, medical model view of Autism. These stereotypes lead readers to view Autistic people as only as valuable as their use to the neurotypical public.
Television and film have begun to pick up the slack with popular shows such as Love on the Spectrum, As We See It, and Everything’s Gonna Be Okay presenting more nuanced portrayals of Autism. But fiction and reality TV does not absolve Canadian media of its responsibility to report day-to-day on communities in an authentic, reflexive manner.
Canada has a very insular news media space with a handful of powerful corporations governing all of the nation’s mainstream outlets. Independent publications like The Maple and Jacobin have referred to Canada’s journalistic spaces as rife with “corporate oligopolies” and “in the hands of predatory capitalists.” While not as prosperous as Bell Media — which owns CTV and CP24 among others, and whose parent company’s 2024 operating revenue was $24 billion — St. Joseph Communications (SJC) is one of Canada’s most powerful organizations within magazine publishing, owning some of the most widely-known and well-respected titles in Canada.
SJC owns Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Toronto Life, Today’s Parent, Hello!, Fashion, and Canadian Business. These titles’ collective readership is in the millions, according to SJC’s website. Nowadays, most Canadians read their news online, but that doesn’t necessarily mean Canadians have abandoned magazine journalism. Canadians still place the most amount of trust in mainstream news sources. What’s more, Gen Z is more likely than their millennial counterparts to consume print media.
Beyond the numbers, though, the way SJC markets its “brands” clearly communicates the role it sees itself fitting into in the wider industry. Maclean’s bills itself as “Canada’s most important general interest publication.” Meanwhile, Chatelaine and Today’s Parent have long-standing reputations as historic and trusted resources for women and parents, respectively.
“To be an Indigenous, female born person who’s been diagnosed, for one thing, and then speaks openly about it and doesn’t have shame about it, I feel like I’m in the minority.”
As a privately-owned company, SJC is not required to share its financial statements publicly. We do know, however, that when Rogers Communications Inc. sold Maclean’s, Chatelaine, Today’s Parent, Flare, Canadian Business, and Hello! to SJC in 2019, following mass layoffs. The sale of the titles amounted to a combined estimated revenue of $38.6 million for Rogers. When SJC stepped in, the company quickly made these recognizable, trusted magazines the public-facing brands of its company. The SJC website boasts reaching “the largest millennial and Gen Z audience in Canada” and a collection of National Magazine Awards on its landing page, all thanks to this purchase.
According to Marta Tsimicalis, SJC’s director of marketing and communications, SJC has “general editorial guidelines around fair and inclusive reporting that apply across our brands; however, each brand operates with editorial independence. Editorial decisions, including coverage and language, are made by each brand’s editorial team.”
Tsimicalis did not respond to a further inquiry. An email directly to head of print, John Gagliano, did not receive an answer. 10 former editors from Maclean’s, Flare, Chatelaine, and Today’s Parent also declined or didn’t respond to requests for interviews from the Review.
***
Mainstream journalism’s silence on covering neu-rodivergent and Disabled communities feels all too familiar to journalist Terry Bursey. Bursey is a self-taught journalist and was the first of his immediate family to graduate from high school. He grew up in a small, conservative town in Newfoundland and was primed from a young age to work in a blue collar field like his father, and his father before him. Bursey always had a passion for creative writing, but his grades fell short of garnering him an acceptance letter from college.
“I ended up going to school to become a cook, and it was around that time that I was like, ‘I don’t want to keep doing this forever. I’m overwhelmed by strong smells and I’m in an environment where I can’t really work alone,’” says Bursey on his early professional life. “I just decided to pursue [it] while working to sustain myself as much as I could on my own. I volunteered in newsrooms. I had mentors that I had pretty much sought out and begged for any kind of assistance or any kind of guidance. I ended up landing a food column by accident and that ended up getting pretty popular.”
Like Maggrah, he was never given the words to describe himself growing up and didn’t receive an Autism diagnosis until adulthood.
“If you think that homosexuality or autism is rare, and these people are weird, then you don’t necessarily feel compelled to become part of a movement to recognize their autonomy and their civil rights.”
One of Bursey’s most high-profile pieces is an essay he wrote for CBC Arts’ Emerging Queer Voices series. It was an essay discussing how Autistic writers have been and always will be part of media and literary landscapes. Bursey champions intersectionality in understanding his sense of self. He is not just neurodivergent, but also a Queer person.
“Sexuality and gender identity are concepts that I didn’t have the luxury of safely exploring until just a few years ago,” writes Bursey in his essay. “I’d experienced a lifetime of being punished for my differences, so discovering even more unique aspects of my identity required tentative, terrifying baby steps.”
People on the Autism spectrum are more likely to identify as Queer or gender non-conforming, according to the most recent research, but intersectional reporting on Autism is rare precisely because of the overwhelming focus on young,
white men.
“I guess a lot of [journalists] look at it as a minefield,” says Bursey on Autism coverage. “I find, too, that it could also be that people feel unequipped to speak about it. They don’t want to offend, they don’t want to accidentally approach it with an angle that’s going to make it seem like it’s worse than what it is or better than what it is. There’s bound to be so much backlash after just about any story that covers Autism, so some may consider it not even worth it.”
***
Under Rogers’ ownership, Maclean’s, Chatelaine, and Today’s Parent reported regularly on Autism — with headlines like “Jacob Barnett, Boy Genius,” “Why Do People With Autism Avoid Hugs?” “Siblings of Autistic Kids Face Greater Risk,” and “Scientists Develop Vaccine That May Help Control Autism Symptoms” published by Maclean’s. These articles play into negative or reductive portrayals of people with Autism: that they are savants, that they are calculating and impersonal, that they are a burden on those who care for them, and that they can be cured (that last headline is very misleading — it’s about treating diarrhea in Autistic children).
Still, amidst these headlines, there are instances of compassionate disability reporting. There are stories about what goes into making custom fidget toys, an MP trying to create a better world for his Autistic son, and a mother’s quest to bring resources to her small town in Newfoundland. These stories aren’t perfect, and none were written by journalists who publicly identified as Autistic, but at least they were talking about Autism and engaging in critical discourse about it. Following the acquisition, however, there was a stark decrease in any mention of Autism across every single one of SJC’s recently-acquired publications, save Today’s Parent.
Between 2008–2019, Maclean’s published on average four stories per year with a main editorial focus on Autism on their website. After the acquisition, that number shrank to zero. Between 2012–2019, Chatelaine published an average of two and a half, which again, shrank to one-half following the SJC acquisition. Today’s Parent is the outlier, publishing an average of 25 stories per year between 2013–2019 and maintaining an average of 11 stories per year since the merger — the best output of any SJC publication. Toronto Life, Fashion, Canadian Business, and Hello! have never maintained a consistent output of stories focused on Autism, pre- or post-acquisition.
For Maclean’s in particular, this is strange. The magazine claims to be “Canada’s most important general interest publication,” yet it’s demonstrably missed several opportunities to call out ableist rhetoric that fuels some of today’s most prominent conversations. Articles were released that addressed the measles outbreak in Alberta stemming from vaccine hesitancy, though there was nothing on Health Canada’s response to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s false claims about Autism being caused by Tylenol, or his desire to create a registry of Autistic Americans.
***
Journalist Melissa Jones* witnessed the shift at SJC publications firsthand. Jones has worked as a freelance journalist for decades including at both Today’s Parent and Chatelaine. Over the course of several years, she wrote about her experiences with motherhood for both publications and her late-in-life Autism diagnosis for Chatelaine. Her work accounted for some of the few pieces written for SJC by a journalist who has openly disclosed their Autism diagnosis.
Women, like Jones, are routinely underdiagnosed with Autism. Most statistics indicate that Autistic boys and men outnumber girls and women four to one, but women are routinely overlooked in medical fields. Autistic women as well may have more advanced masking abilities than their peers who are men, further camouflaging their Autism symptoms from doctors. For Jones, it was only logical that women’s and parenting magazines report on these matters relating to the health of women and girls.
However, that rarely happened according to Lianne George, who was editor-in-chief of Chatelaine from 2014–2018.
“We covered so many things in my time at Chatelaine, but to be honest, I have no memory of ever covering autism or neurodivergence,” George says via email. “This was in the days before the recent surge of diagnoses of ADHD and Autism among women in mid-life (which is the magazine’s target demo — all of our coverage really focused on that [demographic]).”
Jones has not been published in any SJC title since 2023. Her piece for Chatelaine was one of the last published by them on the subject of Autism.
Current editor-in-chief of Chatelaine, Maureen Halushak, was contacted for comment regarding the publication’s gap in Autism coverage but declined an interview.
***
The men behind SJC are brothers John and Tony Gagliano, who inherited the company from their father, Gaetano. Outside of SJC, the Gagliano family patriarch, Gaetano, started another media company, a religious TV broadcaster called Salt + Light Media.
Salt + Light Media does not appear on SJC’s list of publications. It is its own separate entity. It operates out of the same building as the rest of the SJC publications, 15 Benton Road in Toronto, as stated publicly on both companies’ websites.
Reporter Luc Rinaldi spent eight years at SJC, holding editorial positions at Toronto Life and Pivot. The latter is one of SJC’s many trade publications, and is aimed at chartered professional accountants. Rinaldi’s first foray into the journalism profession, though, came in the form of a high school internship at the Catholic Register. That summer, Rinaldi and his fellow interns (including future Rebel News reporter Faith Goldy) visited Salt + Light Media’s headquarters at the former SJC office on Queen Street.
Rinaldi never encountered Salt + Light Media during his time at SJC.
Salt + Light Media reports sparingly on Autism, but when it does it reflects similar tropes of dominant news media narratives around Autism. Since its founding in 2003, keyword searches on Salt + Light Media’s website reveal it has only posted four stories on Autism.
For instance, its most recent story, written by the mother of an Autistic child, discusses how her son’s sensory processing differences are an example of the Holy Spirit working through him. The religious content of this story is not necessarily problematic, but it does delve into well-worn tropes of parents speaking for or over their children with Autism.
Other more outdated articles do have more pronounced issues, such as an article from 2011 that quotes a source who suggests that defunding abortion in Canada could guarantee “urgent therapy to an additional 500 autistic children each year.”
This recurring narrative around curing or pathologizing Autism is problematic, according to Miranda Brady, a professor at Carleton University who focuses on how identity is constructed in cultural institutions.
“The treatment of Autism as this kind of problem for which a solution must be sought or a cure, as some people might say. We know that Autism is lifelong. It’s not something for which you can find a cure and for a lot of people – I don’t think – they really wouldn’t want to do that because it’s part of who they are, their identity,” Brady says.
Brady is also the parent of an Autistic child.
“Unfortunately, we hear a lot in coverage from parents, primarily, instead of actually asking Autistic people how they can best be supported,” says Brady on the prevalence of parents in all manner of stories on Autism. “What kinds of things would make life easier for them, how they would feel better supported in their everyday environments, all of the cool social connections they’ve made with other Autistic people or other neurodivergent people, how that has also shaped them in terms of their identity.”
***
SJC’s business practices seem significantly tied to increasing revenue and following dominant cultural priorities. In general, this includes practices like Maclean’s high concentration of Black Lives Matter and Stop Asian Hate reporting throughout 2020 and 2021, before dropping those topics when the hashtags stopped trending. Neither of those subjects’ tags on the Maclean’s website have been updated since 2022.
Nowadays, the content that seems to be prioritized is all about Canada’s new nationalist values; “True North Strong Free,” “Think Bigger Canada,” and “Canada’s not for sale. Maclean’s is” emblazoned on their website header.
“The Rogers quote-unquote women’s brands, particularly Flare, Chatelaine, and Today’s Parent were very focused on trying to be as progressive as possible in the way they covered certain topics,” says the former editor. “And just anecdotally that didn’t feel like that was ever a priority for [SJC leadership].”
SJC operates with all the signs of a fiscally conservative organization. The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives points to the consolidation of media companies, reduced print circulation, and other cost-cutting measures like staff layoffs as signs of austerity in a media organization. SJC merged the more expressly feminist Flare into Fashion; it never restored Maclean’s or Chatelaine’s number of annual print issues after Rogers halved them. SJC also maintains small mastheads, having eliminated Maclean’s Ottawa bureau and staff writer positions.
Going back to the initial sale of Rogers’ publications to SJC, the former editor heard rumours of the sale before it occurred but never took them seriously precisely because of SJC’s alleged stinginess with the publications it already owned. After the sale, the former editor says that they relied heavily on the labour of freelancers.
“They expected us to continue to produce the same amount, if not more, with fewer and fewer resources and it just became untenable,” says the former editor.
Recently SJC has invested in artificial intelligence (AI) models including a platform called Content Factori which aims to help marketing teams reproduce and scale their advertising faster. It has also advertised another model called AI Worx which can generate three-dimensional models and backgrounds for products. The enthusiasm for AI doesn’t stop at advertising, though, as the former editor alleges.
“Some of the feedback I got from Tony was that we could use AI to create images instead of hiring someone,” they say.
Beyond AI, SJC frequently collaborates with brands to make commercial flyers and magazines for them; SJC produces “Experience” for Longo’s grocery stores, “PC Insiders Report” for Loblaws and the “Wish Book” for Mastermind Toys. Both Rinaldi and the former editor agreed that there was a potential for brand deals to encroach on the editorial integrity of SJC publications. In one specific instance, a story was turned down to ensure that this situation didn’t arise.
“What that reflects is not necessarily a lack of interest, but maybe a lack of knowledge about autism or lack of experience with it.”
“There was overlap between real estate advertisement and real estate coverage, so it would be difficult for the magazine to objectively cover developers who were actively advertising [in] the magazine,” says Rinaldi on Toronto Life. “If you see an ad for developer ‘X’ on left-hand page and then on right-hand page there’s a piece about developer ‘X,’ I think the reader is left to wonder, ‘Is this piece not drilling down hard enough because they need to appease this advertiser?’”
***
As far as Rinaldi can remember, only one story about Autism was published during his time at Toronto Life. This was 2016’s “The Autism Wars” by Nicholas Hune-Brown. The story is a riveting and empathetic court drama that flags prevailing issues in public schools and the abuse that they have inflicted against students with Autism. Toronto Life subsequently released a story about a neurodivergent-friendly restaurant in 2023.
“What that reflects is not necessarily a lack of interest, but maybe a lack of knowledge about autism or lack of experience with it,” says Rinaldi. “Not necessarily deeming it not important, but not really thinking of it very much until it becomes something that is in the news because something has gone wrong, or there’s some kind of debate, or there’s some kind of lawsuit.”
The former editor can only recall one story about ADHD crossing their desk. Nothing about Autism, though.
It’s an increasingly developing journalistic practice that ignoring populations until they become an “issue” is not an acceptable newsroom approach — Queer and racialized journalists have been saying this for years. And it’s not that this population is easily overlooked. According to the Canadian Department of Justice, 80 percent of people with Autism or other intellectual disabilities are unemployed. This number includes Autistic people who graduated from high school. Canadians with disabilities are more likely to live in poverty because of pervasive employment discrimination.
To only report on communities in times of crisis is disingenuous and neglectful, according to Steve Silberman, as quoted in Eric Garcia’s book We’re Not Broken: Changing the Autism Conversation.
“If you think that homosexuality or autism is rare, and these people are weird, then you don’t necessarily feel compelled to become part of a movement to recognize their autonomy and their civil rights,” writes Garcia, quoting Silberman.
***
Still, there are examples of more frequent, fair coverage of Autism in Canadian media. Other mainstream outlets like The Walrus and CBC continue to provide coverage of the topic. This includes articles that go beyond savants and ‘problem’ children. Maggrah, Jones, and Bursey have all written personal essays for CBC and are happily not the only Autistic journalists writing there. CBC Vancouver radio show host Justin McElroy works full-time and is open about his Autism. CBC also recently aired an interview series, The Assembly, wherein a panel of Autistic and neurodivergent people interview celebrities.
Meanwhile, the Walrus hires a Disabled writer as a fellow every year, including neurodivergent journalists. Smaller newsrooms, too, like Canadian Affairs, also employ Disabled journalists like Meagan Gillmore.
These outlets fulfill different niches than SJC’s magazines, though. CBC is often regarded as a news outlet and doesn’t pen the thousand-word investigative and narrative features that magazines like Toronto Life and Maclean’s are known for. The Walrus reaches considerably fewer people than SJC, according to the circulation data presented on its website — 785,000 page views per month compared to the millions across SJC’s magazines.
For journalist and consultant Dennis Tran, small and independent is the way to go even if writers’ work has a narrower audience. Tran works for the British Columbia–based Cold Tea Collective, where he has written numerous articles about his own experiences with Autism, as well as his identity as a Queer Vietnamese-American immigrant.
“For so long I kind of associated myself with the model minority myth, not because I knew any better at the time, but because of how the model minority myth is racialized and tries to segregate one race as superior or the other, but also lumps all Asians into one category and deem them as successful, hardworking, and professional doctors, lawyers, and higher social status people,” says Tran. “But it actually diminishes the intersectionality aspect of Asian-American experiences and how diverse we are. We’re not monoliths. That also applies to being Disabled, being Autistic, being neurodivergent. Just because you met one neurodivergent person, just because you met one Asian person, you’ve only met one person.”
In addition to writing, Tran has worked as a consultant on matters of diversity and inclusion in media for other organizations. In these jobs, he doesn’t feel like he has to compromise any part of his identity to do his work. He is valued and supported. Tran is living the kind of professional life that should be afforded to all Autistic people who so desire it; Tran is treated like a human being.
***
Julianna Maggrah is continuing to learn Cree — a language that reminds them of the sounds woodpeckers make in the bush — on their own terms. They are currently studying Cree language literacy at First Nations University and eventually hope to surprise their great aunts by speaking fluently one day.
Until then, Maggrah has found their place as a medicine picker, a duty that doesn’t require them to hurt any animals. Occasionally, they still get messages about the personal essay they wrote for CBC about pîtoteyihtam.
“After that article came out, I was getting messages from people on Facebook and Instagram thanking me for writing that article — [saying] that they always felt that way as well: being connected to nature and animals more,” says Maggrah. “There’s other people in my life who just listened to me and the way I talk about myself and what I found about myself that relates to Autism who are thinking that they also might be Autistic because they think differently.
“It’s interesting to be that person and to have people tell me that because I’m not used to it,” says Maggrah. “I always thought I was the weird kid that people tolerated, and now people are telling me good things and I’m like, ‘okay this is different.’”
——
*The name of this source was changed to protect her identity.
About the author
