This led him to meet with then-Harper's editor Lewis H. Lapham to discuss creating a "Harper's North", which would combine the American magazine with 40 pages of Canadian content.

[3] As Berlin searched for funding to create that content, a mutual friend put him in touch with Ken Alexander, a former high school English and history teacher and then senior producer of CBC Newsworld's CounterSpin.

[5] According to their website, the rationale behind it was "to dissociate this country with the 'log chomping' and 'earnestness' of our national animal (and cliché), the beaver"; the walrus, just as much a Canadian native, is "curmudgeonly but clever, bulky but agile (if only in water).

[7] John Macfarlane, former editor-in-chief of Toronto Life and publisher of Saturday Night, joined The Walrus in July 2008 as editor and co-publisher.

The new Walrus was to be more consistent and current, with a "far more internally driven" process for story selection, and the reworked cover featuring illustrations that correspond to each issue's content.

[14] In March 2014, The Walrus was required to shut down its unpaid internship programme after the Ontario Ministry of Labour declared that its longstanding practice of not paying interns was in contravention of the Employment Standards Act.

[15] The magazine issued a statement justifying its practice of using unpaid labour, saying: We have been training future leaders in media and development for ten years, and we are extremely sorry we are no longer able to provide these opportunities, which have assisted many young Ontarians—and Canadians—in bridging the gap from university to paid work and in, many cases, on to stellar careers.

[25] Though The Walrus was initially pledged $1 million annually by the Chawkers Foundation for its first five years, it was unable to access this money without first being recognized as a charitable organization by the Canada Revenue Agency.

[28] But as Macfarlane reported in 2011, The Walrus's charitable model, similar to that of Harper's, was thus far sustaining it: donations covered about half of the costs of producing the magazine in 2010, with the traditional revenue streams of circulation and advertising providing the rest.