Rose's Cantina

When I told the gang at the Press Club I was pregnant, they just looked at me like I had two heads. "You're having a baby?" Ok, I guess I didn't measure up back then as motherhood material. In fact, if I am to be perfectly honest, I didn't ever think I'd be a mother. I didn't really like kids that much. So me being pregnant came as much a surprise to me as anybody else. The pregnancy was a bi-product of a relationship I was having with Mr. Big. I actually wanted to have Mr. Big's baby, and so there I was, nearing 30, unemployed thanks to Brian Mulroney's trashing of all us good Liberals, drifting. A baby seemed like an ok thing to do until I found something else. And so it was I began the three decade journey to where I am today. Startlingly, I am a mother of three and grandmother to one and a half children. (The second one, the Baby Flo will be hatched sometime in April.) Tomorrow marks the birth date of my first spawn, Nichola...

View image | gettyimages.com Yesterday, I asked you all to pray for my friend who was having oral cancer surgery at the Ottawa Hospital. Your prayer must have worked because today she's sitting up in a cushy private room, with all her toys around her: the cell phone, a television delivered immediately to her room, and her iPad. You might say, "Wow, she looks excellent considering she had an eight hour operation which involved resecting her tiny mouse mouth. It's like they did nothing at all to her!" If you were thinking that, you would be half right. You see, she didn't have the surgery after all. That's because minutes before the surgeons were able to get  their mitts into her mouth, she fell. Fainted in the bathroom. Hit her head. I was expecting to hold her hand, look into her eyes, tell her everything was going to be cool, and then retreat to Starbucks for a bun and a cup of cappuccino. Instead, I was rushed to her bedside, as her ...

View image | gettyimages.com The cartoonist Ben Wicks and I worked together for several years on books about a bunch of strange topics: literacy, harassment in the workplace...and mutual funds. When putting together the harassment book, I asked Ben if there was any topic -- death, taxes, war -- that he couldn't take, turn on its ear, and make fun of. He thought for a moment, and then he said, "Cancer, I don't think I could make fun of cancer." A few minutes later, he handed me a bar napkin with a cartoon scribbled on it. It was a man on a bed looking up at the Grim Reaper. The caption read, "Can I get a second opinion?" There is not funny about cancer, but then, everything is funny about cancer. We have to view cancer with a twinkle in our eye, and a spring in our step. Without humor, how would we ever get through cancer? I've realized this over the last few months, as I've shepherded a dear friend through the over-bright hall...

Amidst a groundswell of support for Carol Anne Meehan, the felled anchor of CTV Ottawa's supper hour newscast, sits Graham Richardson, the last anchor standing who must be greatly regretting his decision to leave CTV National News a few years ago. He must be wistful, remembering his time as Los Angeles Bureau Chief and his sweet job working in the Ottawa Bureau. Now he sits alone at the anchor desk engaging in mindless chatter with this guy, the weekend anchor and part-time elf who has the unbelievable moniker Matt Scubie. Graham must be thinking to himself he is one degree away from being asked to do humiliating dress-up gigs himself. Richardson suffered another humiliation yesterday with news that he will do double duty by being forced to rip and read copy at the radio station CFRA every hour in the afternoon in addition to anchoring the supper hour news. Imagine having to walk into CFRA and look the newscasters in the face, the ones who used to be news personalities bu...

View image | gettyimages.com As the voters in the last election demonstrated, hell hath no fury like a Canadian scorned. That is why the Big Giant Heads at Bell Media are getting a snootful of anger over the firing of popular radio and television hosts across Canada. And so they should, the rat bastards. In our neighborhood, what was once called the Ottawa Valley, viewers unleashed a can of whoopass over the Internet yesterday over the firing of Carol Anne Meehan, the long-time anchor of CTV Ottawa's supper hour program. Carol Anne has been at the station once called CJOH-TV for 27 years. She's a survivor who managed to keep going through the shooting death of sportscaster Brian Smith and the tragic death of her own husband Greg Etue. She survived through the terrible deaths of Bill Paterson, Leigh Chapple and CTV stalwart and community booster Max Keeping. She's even survived Graham Richardson, a two-toned sidekick with less personality than Harry Re...

View image | gettyimages.com Who among us remained unmoved watching the images of the French under attack? How could a person not feel anger, and utter cries of revenge? From the terrorists' points of view, this means "mission accomplished". They can explode bombs and fire into crowds within days. Or they can do nothing. Regardless, they have caught our attention. Terrorists train us to be afraid, to look around, to be suspicious of our neighbors. Even if it never happens again, the damage has been done. They have successfully sown their seeds, and thanks to the power of social media, everyone in the world knows their power. There are those among us who are calling for unflinching retaliation against those who commit evil deeds. They want us to close our borders, card everyone, and destroy and obliterate whole communities. Pit one human being against another. Put our needs before those who live in rags and swim in sewers. But there are more of us...

"What's in the box, Mommy?" my six-year-old daughter Marissa asked, presenting me with an aged wooden chest I had brought home from my mother's funeral. "These are letters your grandfather wrote Grandma after the Second World War," I explained. Her eyes grew wide with the exciting prospect that she had found buried treasure under my bed. "Will you read them to me?" she asked. It was a moment I had dreaded ever since I found the packet of official-looking blue and yellow Canadian Forces letters underneath my mother's sweaters in her cedar chest several months earlier. In the 36 years I knew my mother, she had never shown me the letters or revealed the fact they even existed. I opened the box and began to read the letters, nearly 40 years after they had been written. That day, thanks to the curiosity of a six-year-old, I finally met my father. I never knew Russell Sidney Simpson. Never heard his voice. Never saw him smile. Never knew if...

View image | gettyimages.com My father died the result of PTSD when my mother was 34, but it took her 25 years for the system to recognize that she was a war widow. She received her first Veteran's Pension cheque when she was in her late 50s. By that time, she was crippled both mentally and physically. She had already suffered a nervous breakdown, and her body was ravaged from a job working in a textile mill. She could not walk more than a block and had been living on a disability pension which barely covered her rent and the peanut butter sandwiches and coffee that she lived on. We petitioned Veterans Affairs, and finally got them to recognize that my father had indeed died from a war time injury and that my mother was entitled to both financial and legal recognition of that fact. It wasn't the money that mattered to my mother, it was an end to decades of humiliation as she was forced on welfare until we were old enough, and then into a job that few of us could ...

Everyone who reads this space knows I love a good caper. I once asked Reform bon vivant and former Hill radio guy Ron Wood for his best caper story. It was years ago. "What about the time the chauffeurs misplaced three limos during the Gallery dinner?" And with that Ron took his leave. It was only today that Ron revealed to me what happened that fateful night. I'll let him tell it. It was the 1966 Press Gallery Dinner and I was there with another colleague from the Gallery who'd also gone dateless. We'd been to the Club for a few before hitting the cocktail reception and then the dinner. During the dinner, before dessert we went outside for some air and a smoke and there were four limousines parked at the west entrance to the West Block with no drivers in sight. I looked in one and the keys were in the ignition, another one was idling two more had keys in ignition. The drivers were inside being fed a meal in the basement somewhere. The idling car was d...

As one of their final insulting acts involving the Canada's criminal justice system, the Conservative government served notice that it would not be renewing the contract of the prison ombusdman, Howard Sapers.  Now that the Trudeau Liberals have taken power, many of us who are concerned about the rising numbers of women, indigenous people and older Canadians within our prisons are urging the government to reconsider removing Sapers. We are also urging the government to repeal many of the alarming pieces of legislation that affect the rights of Canadians who come into conflict with the law.  I wrote this profile of him two years ago for Simon Fraser University's AQ magazine. Here is an abridged version.  On April 14, 1971, Kingston Penitentiary was rocked by a four-day riot that resulted in the deaths of two inmates and the near physical destruction of the prison. Canadians watched in horror as the inmates held six guards hostage. They held a news conference ...

Like a lot of people, I grew up listening to the bombastic Fred Ennis on the radio. He was loud, he was colorful, he was confident, as evidenced by his tag  line, "And I'm Fred Ennis." (And you're not!) After I came to Ottawa, I was excited to see him ambling around the National Press Club, beer in hand. With his red hair, and burnt complexion, he looked like a Disney character, maybe somebody you would see in a period piece clutching a flagon of mead, eating a turkey drumstick. But he was nice, sweet, charming, always grinning, quick with a joke. My first personal encounter with the guy was in the games room at the club, where he invited me to sit down with another hero of mine, Craig Oliver. I couldn't believe it. I was sitting with a couple of icons, listening to their take on the issues of the day. There I was, a little journalism student, taking it all in. It was one of the great things about the Press Club. I don't miss the drunken after...