Five writers gather in a dimly lit room on a Sunday evening. Black shutters and posters line the deep purple walls of the second floor of The Central, a Toronto bar. Classic rock bounces up from the deserted first floor and a faint smell of urine wafts from the nearby bathroom. Three writers sit around a chipped wooden table, the other two lounge on a grey couch. They all pitch headlines.

Editorial meetings for The Beaverton, a Canadian satirical news site, are about headlines, not story ideas. Editor-in-chief Luke Gordon Field reads from his laptop: “Conservatives unveil last minute attack ad accusing Justin of supporting Kansas City.” The old radiator by the window gurgles to life as the writers snicker.

“Like he was seen wearing a blue hat.”

“And Kansas City has blue uniforms…”

“But it was really a Blue Jays hat.”

Laughter means everyone likes the idea. Field will write the story later that night. The others read headlines they’ve prepared, but the Kansas City story is one of the few that gets the go-ahead. The joke doesn’t really need explaining.

To Field, the perfect headline is equal parts funny and attention-grabbing, sometimes provocative and reveals something true about Canada or society. He echoes what many other satirists believe: fake news can offer something traditional news or commentary can’t, won’t or shouldn’t. While journalists are confined to facts, satirists point out absurdities.

The Beaverton’s founding editor Laurent Noonan loved The Onion, but he couldn’t see a Canadian counterpart. So, in 2010, he decided to create one. He recruited writers, built a website and later created a print edition that he handed out to strangers on the street—while dressed in a beaver costume.

Field, a stand-up comedian, joined the writing team soon after and, in 2012, took over the editorial side when Noonan traveled to teach English in France. In December 2014, Noonan died and Field became the official editor-in-chief and the one in charge.

The Beaverton has gained a steady following over the past five years. In May 2013, a story about astronaut Chris Hadfield’s return from space, “Hadfield comes home to $1.37-million Rogers phone bill,” caught people’s attention and caused a spike in readership. A Hong Kong newspaper even reported the story as real news. By August 2015, the website averaged about 400,000 readers per month. In October, election coverage pushed those numbers up to 750,000.

While in the U.S. The Onion is the authoritative satirical outlet, Canadian outlets run on shoestring budgets and have trouble staying afloat long enough to establish themselves as the publication of record. Halifax’s Frank magazine launched in 1987 and became popular. Another version of the magazine, based in Ottawa, began publishing two years later. It shut down in 2004, reappeared and closed down yet again in 2008 in the face of online competitors. It resurfaced in 2013 using an online subscription model and print editions.

The Lapine and The Syrup Trap are two other fake news publications that began within a few years of The Beaverton. The Trap’s founder and editor-in-chief Nick Zarzycki finds it troubling that Canada doesn’t have a widely-read national humour publication because he believes satire is a vital part of any functioning democracy. Both publications cover politics in their own style, but not as frequently as The Beaverton.

During the federal election, Field’s site created fake platforms for each party and ran articles from the silly (“Justin Trudeau removed by mall security for walking up wrong escalator”) to the skewering (“Globe and Mail heroically defend country’s most vulnerable rich by endorsing Conservatives”). After the election, The Beaverton ran an article titled “50% female cabinet appointments lead to 5000% increase in guys who suddenly care about merit in cabinet.” Many journalists at traditional news outlets made the same point, but The Beaverton captured the argument in a single headline.

Canadian satire and parody researcher James Onusko sees an edge in much of the political coverage. While he acknowledges that some the site’s stories are silly, he appreciates its more hard-hitting material, such as questioning the integrity of political parties. “There were some mainstream sites that didn’t even go there,” he says. To Onusko, fake news websites can be better at commentary because their biases are usually more obvious. “Both are trying to report what’s going on, one is just doing it tongue-in-cheek, but at the same time doing it honestly in many ways.”

Still, some issues may not be suitable for satirical commentary. In August 2015, Ashley Burnham (previously Callingbull) became the first First Nations woman to be named Mrs. Universe. A Beaverton article with the headline “Ashley Burnham crowned Mrs. First Cree Woman to Gain National Coverage if She Disappears” said Burnham “is showing all those aboriginal girls out there, that as long as you look like a supermodel and get on TV, you too can get the same news coverage as a white girl should you ever be abducted.”

The piece caused a backlash on Twitter and The Beaverton apologized and took the piece down. “The point of the article was to call out the Media for their failure to properly cover missing and murdered Aboriginal women,” Field wrote in an apology on The Beaverton’s Facebook page. “We will happily give a quote to any news outlet wishing to write a story on the backlash to this article, provided they agree to also do a week of coverage on missing and murdered Aboriginal women.”

Field wants to make people laugh, and he knows good comedy can cut to the bone, but he admits some ideas might be more difficult to get right than others.

It was mid-May of 1991 and I was fresh off the plane from Vancouver, sitting in a Queen Street West restaurant eating Thai noodles with Globe and Mail editors John Cruickshank and Phil Jackman and explaining the cognitive indignities I had planned for their readers in the coming year. After nearly a year as the Globe’s Friday Fifth Columnist and semiofficial house communist, I was beginning to feel like an institution. And why not? I’d been largely uncensored, and better, I’d been having fun.

Judging from the hate mail, I’d managed to morally offend most of the Canadian right wing with columns suggesting that the stock market is run by irresponsible hooligans betting on the productivity of real participants in the economy. I’d called all those BMW owners who drive around with cellular phones stuck in their ears “dickheads.” I’d invoked the ire of the CanLit industry by suggesting that its most beloved writer (or location for intellectual strip mining) is merely a minor antiquarian miniaturist. I’d attacked the Nike corporation for counselling exercise-induced psychotics to “just do it” and for selling people running shoes filled with air, and I’d been, well, unkind to several other advertisers.

Only once had a column been canned. A reader wrote in to express his consternation that an obscenity like dickhead had been permitted to appear in the august pages of The Globe and Mail, and I responded with a column that used the term 21 times. A dickhead, I explained, is any person whose political character and private behaviour emulates that of Richard M. Nixon. I went on to give a list of eminent dickheads that included Brian Mulroney, Jacques Parizeau, George Bush, Barbara McDougall and people on both sides of the then-current Oka crisis. Noted non-dickheads included Pierre Trudeau, Rene Levesque, Clyde Wells and Elijah Harper. Cruickshank phoned to say, gee, no, that was going too far, and couldn’t I please concentrate a little more closely on media analysis?

I was having far too much fun to quit over a single word, so I said okay, I can live without that column, but really, John, wasn’t everything media? I was, in short, a columnist out of control, and here I was having lunch with my personal wardens proposing to spin out still further.

Somewhere in mid-lunch (and midflight) Cruickshank shot me. He seemed a little embarrassed about being the one to pull the trigger, but with power, as they say down at corporate headquarters, comes unpleasant responsibilities. He discharged his well, although not gleefully.

I didn’t fall off my chair when he did it. I didn’t splatter Thai noodles around, throw a tantrum and I didn’t grovel or threaten to commit suicide. But I’d never been fired before from anything, and I was stung. I managed to squeak out just one interesting question. “Was it,” I asked carefully, “because my columns weren’t as good as the others?” Cruickshank glanced at “Facts & Arguments” page editor Jackman before he answered, also carefully, that, no, that wasn’t the problem. They wanted me to go on to other things-a euphemism, it quickly turned out, for irregular articles on assigned topics. I said I wanted to think about it, and that he should call me in a couple of weeks when I got back to Vancouver. We both knew he was blowing smoke up my ass, that I wasn’t going to write like an Anglican Church deacon, and that he wasn’t going to call.

I did get a phone call a couple of weeks later, but it was from Frank magazine. By then, I’d stopped feeling stung, and was just plain pissed about being fired. Frank asked some questions and I gave some silly answers that the “journalist” on the other end of the line either mis-transcribed or creatively interpreted. One thing he asked me was who I thought was behind it, and I told him I didn’t know. “Thorsell?” he demanded. “I dunno,” I answered. “Maybe.” I went on to relate that I’d heard that an editorial think tank held two weeks before I was fired had decided to move the paper’s news section further to the right, and the arts coverage toward “popular” culture-fewer book and theatre reviews, and more video and gossip. Since I was on the left (in their minds, anyway) and an outsider without Toronto connections or close friends in editorial, I was, my source told me, the easiest to shoot. The item that eventually appeared said that Frank was sad I was gone, but then reported that I’d blamed it entirely on Thorsell, making it sound as if I was the victim of an editorial sweep that had the whole Globe and Mail turning into an agitprop sheet for the Hitler Youth. That, interestingly, was the first-and only-lesson in journalism I received during the whole year.

Am I still pissed off? Not really. I got a year of columns in, which is about six months more than I or anyone who knows me expected I’d last. Losing the column isn’t even a professional blow. I’m not really a journalist, you see, and my interest in daily events and matters of “fact” is marginal. What gets reported in the media as factual verity most often strikes me as a smoke screen to hide whatever it is the business community, the government and whoever else has access to the media are really trying to do to us-and to distract us from the long-term consequences of the horrible things we’re all guilty of doing to one another and to the planet just by living in consumer heaven. A couple of years ago, for instance, the federal government had the whole cultural community tied up in knots over a patently ludicrous censorship bill while cultural funding was quietly being frozen and the cultural elements of the Free Trade Agreement (which froze funding permanently) were negotiated. Now the Mulroneyites are dithering around with a self-inflicted constitutional crisis to hide the increasingly obvious fact that they’ve been consciously and systematically dismantling the country for the past seven years.

As a writer I’m interested in metaphors and in ideas, and at those points where “the facts” interface with metaphors and ideas. Writing the column forced me to develop a whole lot of skills I didn’t really have when I started and generally sharpened my weapons as an anecdotist. The first columns took three to five days each to write, but toward the end, it was down to four to six hours.

After a deadly earnest summer, The Globe and Mail has hired two competent left-of-centre columnists for its arts section, Rick Salutin and Stan Persky. Persky is capable of being at least as funny as I ever was, and Salutin is always interesting to read. Meanwhile, the column that replaced mine is stinking up the page.

As I said, nobody had more fun with that column than I did. It was so much fun, actually, that if someone offered me another gig on the same or similar terms, I’d probably take it. But I’m not holding my breath. …

Brian Fawcett is the author of 14 books. Unusual Circumstances/Interesting Times and Public Eye are his two most recent works. He’s recently moved to Toronto.