Gender
There are few areas of law where victims get revictimized so routinely as those that involve sexual abuse or intimate partner violence. Or both. Where else do we make victims relive, repeatedly and in painful detail, all aspects of what happened to them and question them until they get some
Politics
Many long moons ago I was employed as a talking head (“personality,” we used to say) on talk radio. My job was to report on, analyze and comment on the news, mostly political since that’s what our audience wanted to obsess about. In February 2005 then-finance minister Ralph Goodale
Urbanism
In my Ottawa Citizen column this week I answered the question asked by the National Capital Commission and the City of Ottawa about what the Rideau Canal means to me. It is quintessentially Ottawa-esque in that it can be beautiful but is mostly under-utilized, and not in a good way.
Gender
** Content warning ** This article discusses sexual violence and its long-term impacts. ** Avertissement ** Cet article discute de la violence sexuelle et de ses effets à long terme. This is a topic that is very close to my heart. It is also deeply personal. What is below are my stories (in the
Urbanism
I’m not much of a bible reader but I do enjoy a great horror story so the one about the plagues of Egypt was always kind of attractive that way. I wondered this week what, in modern-day Ottawa, could count as plagues and I found a few things. Since
Travel
I had not seen a truck with the full Confederate flag treatment in this town before, I thought as I jogged past the jacked-up white Dodge wearing the gayest rainbow-pride Apple Watch and nothing but virtue-signalling Lululemon high-performance running attire. I was naive enough to hope that the displeasure of
Urbanism
In my Ottawa Citizen column this week I allow myself a little bit of mild woot-wootingon housing. No, we’re nowhere near getting close to attempting to solve the crisis. But it’s important to acknowledge small crumbs of good news. In my legal writing for National Magazine I have
Politics
Jean Chrétien is famous for having won three consecutive majority elections. That was in 1993, 1997 and 2000. He is the first prime minister to do that since Wilfrid Laurier, who started winning in the 19th century. Actually Laurier won four consecutive elections, as Macdonald had done before him. After
Politics
My column for the Ottawa Citizen this week discusses the recent spike in anti-semitic incidents and how we should at the very least let our Jewish neighbours know we’re there and we care. In my legal writing for National Magazine I have a piece on the impact of the
Urbanism
In my Ottawa Citizen column this week I blow a gasket at the extreme speeding and general lack of driving skills found on too many streets in Ottawa. In my legal writing for National Magazine I have a review of Ben Perrin’s most excellent book, Indictment: The Criminal Justice
Gender
This morning my almost-17-year-old came downstairs, iPhone in hand and glee in heart, to show me that she’d added pronouns to my contact info. It turns out that after a long time of people requesting support for pronouns, Apple finally introduced it with iOS 17: iOS 17 introduces a
Français
In my Ottawa Citizen column this week I tried to shed light, instead of just blasting heat, on the tuition hike that you may have heard about. The short version: It’s perfectly defensible for Quebec to have a policy that favours Quebec students in post-secondary education. Provided it works.