Shakespeare & the hypocrisy of sex laws

I have a piece up on the Ottawa page of Xtra.ca today. This was originally supposed to be in the print edition of Capital Xtra, but it got bumped for a variety of reasons, and has thus appeared online. I had fun writing the piece, and did my homework before hand, reading "Measure For Measure" the night before my interview to ensure that I had my grasp on the play and why it is considered problematic, as well as to see how it could be grounded in a contemporary context. It's also given me the desire to go and see the play being performed, but the likelihood of my making it out to Prescott is a little more uncertain. Nevertheless, it was a fun little piece.

Michael Ignatieff bashful about platform planks

I have one new piece in the current print issue of Capital Xtra, which is an analysis piece of the current Liberal policy directions. In many ways, this was a fairly frustrating piece to write because of the unavailability of the critics I was trying to speak to. While it did reinforce the narrative that emerged, I was doing my best not to create an unfair depiction. Nevertheless, I was able to use some of the few leftover bits from my interview with Michael Igantieff for Outlooks, so that was good.

There was a second piece that was supposed to be in the issue, but for various reasons it got bumped and will show up online by the weekend. Meanwhile, the piece I did on Divers/Cité for the website last week was reprinted as the headline news piece for the print edition, so I'm glad it's making the rounds.

NDP MP calls on feds to apologize to gay veterans

I have a new piece up on the national page of Xtra.ca today. It was actually meant to go up on Friday, but events got in the way, my editor got swamped, and it got bumped to today. But no matter.

It was an interesting piece to write, and I'm glad I had the space latitudes the website offered because I'm not sure how much more I could have really cut from this piece as it is. In fact, the genesis of this story was a very brief piece that showed up in a Sun Media piece a month ago that my editor asked me to take a look into. When I did, there was just so much more to the story than just a blurb. But then, I guess that's why I'm doing what I'm doing.

Let me also add that after the frustrations of being unable to get in touch with a couple of Liberal critics for one of the pieces I have in the upcoming print issue of Capital Xtra, having Judy Sgro get back to me in twenty minutes was a godsend. Similarly, for Stoffer to have been immediately reachable when I called his office was a nice change from the previous week.

Divers/cité scales back after being denied federal funds; Black and Blue worried

I have a new piece on the national page of Xtra.ca today, and it was a bit of a doozy. My day started with a press conference at 10 am, in a local restaurant that was so muggy and humid I thought I was going to melt. And from there, it was going flat-out until I filed the piece, around 6.30.

It was definitely one of those stories that many of my Press Gallery colleagues were hot on the trail of, and I'd like to think that I dug a lot deeper than many of them, especially with respect to what the impacts are for Divers/cité and potentially Black and Blue, though I will say that I was able to play off some of the ongoing coverage throughout the day. I also have some fairly unique figures that none of the other outlets looked at (for example, the per capita funding) so I think I provided a bit of a unique angle to the coverage. Nevertheless, as exhausting as the day ultimately was, it was very fulfilling and worthwhile.

What you should know about Tory MP Brad Trost

There's a new piece on the Xtra.ca national page today that I have a co-writing credit on, though my role was primarily research. I also authored the sidebar at the bottom of the piece, which looked at the per capita funding of the various festivals that got funded by the programme Trost railed about, and found that Pride got the second lowest per capita funding of all festivals to date. And while the piece is an interesting bit of background, there really isn't a whole lot to it. As a couple of staffers told me during my research, Trost is a "nobody" on the Hill, which this piece does end up reflecting.

Election tantra & the art of delay

I have two pieces in the current print edition of Capital Xtra - a reprint of my online story about Réal Ménard's resignation, as well as a large analysis piece about the latest bout of election speculation. (The online title, currently on the Xtra.ca national page, is different, but I went with the print title here).

I really enjoyed the process of writing this piece, really being able to plunge into the entrails of what happened during the last week of the Commons spring sitting, and to get to engage with a few other people about it. I had a really great and long conversation with Dr. Catherine Côté from the University of Ottawa, a lot about how politics and the media intersect (which is her field of study), but unfortunately, most of it didn't make it into this particular piece. I'm hoping, however, to return to that particular topic soon enough.

During the editing process, it was decided to make more of a focus on the current Conservative law-and-order agenda push, which I'd explored in previous pieces as blatant electioneering, and to that end, we added a sidebar full of law-and-order bills that have all been introduced (something I ended up writing last-minute, late night during my vacation in Toronto). In all, I think it gave the piece a bit more focus, and I'm pleased with the results.

Michael Ignatieff on Equality in Canada and the World + Queeroes

I've been waiting a while to talk about this, but in the July/August issue of Outlooks (now a glossy, might I remind you), I have a two-page interview with Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff. It was a pretty great interview, and he's certainly a pretty great person to do an interview with, who gives thoughtful and personable answers (though he politely declined to give substantive answers to a couple of policy questions).

The interview did take a few weeks to set up, between Parliamentary business and his hectic travel schedule, and in order to make deadline, we only managed a twenty minute phone call, but I ended up meeting him two days later at the caucus and media garden party at Stornoway, so we still got to put faces to names there.

Also in this issue is my review of the book Queeroes, along with an interview with author Steven Bereznai. This was initially a case of pitching a story to one editor, having it assigned, writing it, and then finding out that another editor in the same chain had assigned the same piece to someone else, and well, mine got cut (with a kill fee, mind you). Outlooks was happy to pick it up, especially as we interviewed Bereznai two years ago after his first book came out, so it all worked out in the end.

(Curiously, however, it appears that the summer edition of my Thoughts From the Hill panel got bumped).

The interview with Michael Ignatieff is on pages 28 and 29, while the Queeroes piece is on page 45. You can download the full issue in .pdf format here.

Conservative MP blasts decision to fund Pride Toronto

This piece, now on the Xtra.ca national page, was a very interesting piece to write. It began as a quick brief early in the afternoon, and then expanded later on as interviews rolled in, and thus we come to the final product here.

It was also one of the first pieces that I wrote where I also spent time on the phone trading information with other journalists - which was pretty cool. I even contributed to the piece put out by The Canadian Press (here) - that was my interview with the unnamed caucus member, who I couldn't use in my piece for certain reasons, but I was happy to see that it got out there. (Now, if I had been given more credit in the article, with a "with files from Dale Smith" mention or something, that would also have been nice...) I'm also really glad that I've built up enough contacts that getting interviews for this piece was fairly easy, and that it made the turnaround time fairly quick, all things considered.