John Ibbitson

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John Ibbitson (born 1955 in Gravenhurst, Ontario) is a Canadian writer and journalist. He currently writes on American politics and society for The Globe and Mail. He has written three books on Ontario and Canadian politics, Promised Land: Inside the Mike Harris Revolution (1997), Loyal No More: Ontario's Struggle for a Separate Destiny, and The Polite Revolution: Perfecting the Canadian Dream (McClelland & Stewart, 2005).

He graduated from the University of Toronto in 1979 with a B.A. in English. After college, he pursued a career as a playwright, his most notable play being Mayonnaise, which debuted in December 1980 at the Phoenix Theater in Toronto. The play went on to national production and was adapted to a TV broadcast in 1983. In the mid-1980s, Ibbitson switched over to writing young-adult fiction, including the short YA science-fiction novel, Starcrosser (1990). He also wrote two full-length novels, 1812: Jeremy's War and The Night Hazel Came to Town. Ibbitson was nominated for several awards for his works, including a Governor General's Award nomination for 1812. Hazel received a nomination for the Trillium Book Award and the City of Toronto Book Award. His next young-adult novel, Water Music, will be published in 2008.

Ibbitson entered the University of Western Ontario in 1987, graduating with an M.A. in journalism one year later, and joined the Ottawa Citizen, where he worked as a city reporter and columnist. He covered Ontario politics from 1995 to 2001, working for The Ottawa Citizen, Southam News, The National Post and the Globe and Mail. In August of 2001, Ibbitson accepted the post as Washington bureau chief at The Globe and Mail, returning to Canada one year later to take up the post of political affairs columnist. He moved back to Washington as a columnist in May 2007.