Rex Murphy became one of Canada’s best-known media figures, through his work on television, radio and in print, but he was a man so intensely private that few people knew the real Rex Murphy. He was a complex man, loved by conservatives for his attacks on the Liberal Party, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and what he saw as climate-change alarmism that hurt oil workers in his native Newfoundland and Alberta.
As a student at Memorial University of Newfoundland, in St. John’s, Mr. Murphy criticized Joey Smallwood, the premier of the province and the man who brought Newfoundland into Confederation in 1949, two years after Mr. Murphy was born. The threat from Mr. Smallwood so upset Rex’s mother, Marie, that she retreated to the bedroom in their home in Freshwater, Nfld., worried her son might never come home.
After a few years Mr. Murphy became co-host of the main CBC Television newscast in St. John’s. There he made his name in an on-air campaign against Mr. Smallwood. He and his co-host, Jennifer Davis, detailed what they saw as the corrupt ways in which Mr. Smallwood ran the province, from the province’s rotten deal with Quebec over the Churchill Falls hydroelectric site to a failed linerboard mill run by a man who became a fugitive.