President Trump slapped a 20 percent tariff on softwood imports from Canada Tuesday, and John Cruickshank’s phone started ringing.
Tht’s because before he was a Canadian diplomat, Cruickshank was a newspaperman.
As for Trump, he speaks generously of him back in the day—when Trump came to Chicago in the early 2000s and bought the Sun-Times site along the Chicago River where Trump Tower now stands.
After Radler was booted out Cruickshank became publisher. He quickly realized the Sun-Times‘s way of dealing with its sagging circulation had been to persistently lie about the size of it. In 2005 the Chicago Headline Club gave Cruickshank its ethics award for going public with his discovery. “Under his leadership,” said the citation, “parent company Hollinger International disclosed the overstated circulation figures and set aside $27 million to reimburse advertisers.”
But now Chicago is beset with economic woes, I remind him. He responds obliquely:
