John Ibbitson

John Ibbitson, co-author of Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, is one of Canada’s best known and most respected journalists and authors. Since arriving in 1999 at The Globe and Mail, Canada's national newspaper, he has served as Washington bureau chief, Ottawa bureau chief, chief political writer and, since 2015, writer at large.

He is the author of numerous books, including the national bestseller The Big Shift, which he also co-wrote with Darrell Bricker, and Stephen Harper, Ibbitson’s award-winning biography of Canada’s 22nd prime minister.

He is also a writer of plays and of novels, including The Landing, which won the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature. In March 2018, on its tenth anniversary, the book was republished by Kids Can Press.

For Empty Planet, Ibbitson and Bricker travelled to six continents, talking with specialists and a wide assortment of women and men--from university students in Seoul to slum-dwellers in Delhi--as they explored the conviction held by a growing body of demographers that global population decline, rather than rapid growth, will define this century. The book is published by The Crown Publishing Group in the United States; Little, Brown in Great Britain and McClelland & Stewart in Canada. The work is also available around the world in English through Little, Brown, and is being published in Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.