[1] After university, he pursued a career as a playwright, his most notable play being Mayonnaise,[1] which debuted in December 1980 at the Phoenix Theatre in Toronto, Ontario.
He covered Ontario politics from 1995 to 2001, working for the Ottawa Citizen, Southam News, the National Post and The Globe and Mail.
In 2013, Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker co-authored the book The Big Shift: The Seismic Change in Canadian Politics, Business, and Culture and What It Means for Our Future.
[3] In January 2014 Ibbitson began a one-year leave of absence from the Globe, to serve as a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and to work on a biography of Prime Minister Stephen Harper, which was published in August 2015.
[4] Ibbitson and Bricker co-authored the book "Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline", which was published separately in 2019 in the United States, Great Britain and Canada, and in Chinese, Spanish, Japanese and Korean.