Parenting
One of the best aspects of homeschooling, other than freedom and flexibility to explore what interests your kids and the opportunity to take breaks when it’s nice outside or go on trips with your kids and a better sense of how they are progressing and plenty of other cool
Gender
Any time someone is dumb enough to get into an argument with me about gender-affirming care it ends in stunned silence when I point out that if we are to ban it we’ll have to start with boob jobs, penile implants and Viagra. Oh yes, it totally is the
Parenting
In my Ottawa Citizen column this week I tee up the Canadian Ultimate Championships, which start Sunday in Ottawa. It’s giving me a great excuse to talk your ears off about why frisbee is so cool. But since not everyone is as obsessed as I am with this one
Politics
For the Ottawa Citizen this week I wrote about making commencement ceremonies more inclusive and you can read that column here. Mais là j'ai besoin de péter une coche. Jeudi la ministre québécoise de l'Habitation, l'inénarrable France-Élaine Duranceau, s'est plainte de ce
Parenting
OK, so I snorted pretty hard when I saw the headline on that story. Telling kids to go ahead and break an arm is not my idea of parenting, and I sure was not, am not and have no intention of ever resembling a helicopter mama. ‘Break an arm, we’
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
Gender
My very good friend called this morning in relation to my recent Pride column and asked how I would solve the problem of a young kid who says they feel they’re a boy even though they were assigned female at birth. “This is not a problem,” I said. “I
Politics
Stephen Lecce, who is inexplicably Ontario’s minister of education, is currently fronting another one of those asinine “common sense” education reforms aimed at getting back to basics, because this government doesn’t want to be explicit about its desire to crush those pesky teachers’ unions that think they know
Travel
You travel enough along the 401 in Ontario and you start to see patterns. For instance, you notice the clothes worn by people who patronize the OnRoute rest stops along the way all appear to come from the same bins of faux athletic garments from Costco. Except for the truckers
Parenting
People often ask how they could become a ninja like me. That’s easy, I say. You could train like a maniac for 20 years. Or you could carry a cooler up the hill to your island cottage and walk nose-first into a spider web. Nothing sharpens your reflexes like
Culture
Si vous avez déjà dépassé un autobus scolaire vous serez familier avec la façon dont les enfants s’expriment devant des adultes qu’ils ne connaissent pas. Ce n’est pas toujours poli. C’est bien normal et sain pour les enfants de tester les limites de leur monde. Leurs
Culture
There are school plays that one only likes, sort of, because one’s personal offspring is in them. Many of us have, er, enjoyed a few of those performances over the years. It can be hard for me, especially when it comes to musical theatre. I’m a musician and