Accreditation

We interrupt this blog for a bit of news on the personal front. Really, just a quick note to say that as of today, I now have my actual Parliamentary Press Gallery accreditation as a freelancer. No more assignment letters and day passes for this reporter! For those of you following my Hill Queeries blog, this means that I'll be up on the Hill for Question Period pretty much daily now (well, maybe not Fridays). It also means better access to MPs for stories that I'm working on, and hopefully access to more stories to be working on.

PMO shuffle puts evangelical Christians in top political jobs

I have a piece on Xtra.ca today, regarding some recent changes in the PMO. The title pretty much speaks for itself, and this is an issue that the Xtra family is pretty passionate about. One thing that I noted when I took on the piece - and which I noted in the piece - was the way the mainstream outlets were simply concerning themselves with the fact that Paul Wilson is far less overtly partisan than most other PMO staffers, but didn't at all talk about his ideological background.

Justice committee to look at hate speech law

I had a piece go up on the Xtra.ca national page yesterday regarding the issue of Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, and a motion before the Commons Justice committee about examining that section. This is an issue that I will be doing a lot more coverage on, once the committee's investigation starts getting underway a little more.

As part of writing this piece, I attended a sitting of the Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights for the first time, earlier in the week, and most of these interviews were done in the Commons foyer post-Question Period the following day.

I was also interested to note the that my editor chose to link to a column written by one of the Pink Triangle Press (Xtra's publishers) board members, which should give you a sense of the editorial viewpoint that they're taking on the issue (even though I am writing about the issue as impartially as possible).

Looking back on issue #1 of Capital Xtra + Ottawa bars fighting new booze infraction rules

I have two pieces in the current issue of Capital Xtra, which just happens to be the magazine's 200th issue.

The first of the two pieces is a retrospective of Capital Xtra's first issue, back in September of 1993. I really enjoyed writing this piece because I not only got to look at how the paper came about, but I also took the opportunity to ask everyone involved of what Ottawa as like fifteen years ago. I haven't been here five years yet, and I do have a bit of interest in the city's queer history - especially because I think that many gays and lesbians have little understanding or appreciation of their own history. So this piece was a bit of my way of bringing some of that perspective forward. Fifteen years ago may not seem like a long time, but for our community, it has seen some tremendous leaps and bounds in terms of rights and acceptance.

The second piece is a follow-up to the one I did last issue about the bar closures in the city, this time taking a closer look at some of the broader alcohol licensing issues in Ontario. This has been an issue raised in some of the mainstream press (the Citizen had a column on it in early January, when there was that spate of closures, and one of the national columnists at the National Post has made this a bit of an issue as well). I decided to take a bit of a deeper look at some of the issues, and while I didn't get a hold of quite as many community bar owners or managers as I had initially hoped to, the interviews I did get put this piece in good stead.

Senator Mike Duffy won't apologize for 'offensive' remarks

What was originally going to be a post on my Xtra.ca blog wound up being a full-blown story on the site's national page. Of course, being a more serious piece, I had to tone down some of the tongue-in-cheek elements that I had originally thought about including, such as a possible post title of "Apparently Danny Williams is a top" or other such references, though I did still manage to retain a bit of fun with it. A blog post would also have relied a lot more on actual excerpts from the Senate Hansard, but I'm quite pleased with the way the story wound up nevertheless. I'm especially glad that I was able to include mention of my conversation with Senator Nancy Ruth yesterday in the piece (though I didn't include the bit were she seemed rather pleased that Duffy got bawled out the way he did).

As always, you can check out my Xtra.ca blog, Hill Queeries, here.

Thoughts From the Hill - February Edition

In this month's edition of Outlooks, we mixed things up a little bit for the usual Thoughts From the Hill panel. Given that Brison was the party's finance critic at a time when the budget was - and still is - the biggest issue on the table, we decided to take advantage of that fact and focus solely on his input. After all, there would be a lot to say and there are few enough column inches that we didn't feel it would be doing our readers any favours to have each party give a talking point when Brison had been touring the country, listening to the concerns of Canadians at a series of town hall meetings.

Of course, days after the column was submitted and as it was going to print, the Liberal leader shuffled the shadow cabinet, and Brison was no longer the finance critic. Nevertheless, he was named the head of the party's Advisory Committee on Economic Strategy (essentially trading jobs with MP John McCallum), so he is still one of the party's key spokespeople on economic issues. Brison's official critic portfolio is now international trade.

You can read this month's panel in Outlooks' print edition, or in the online edition, which you can download in .pdf format here. (The panel can be found on page 11).