Rose's Cantina

Excerpt from Distressed Pavement coming in July.  Katrina Lemieux twirled around in her ergonomic chair to look out at the spectacular view from her Gatineau office, which overlooked the Ottawa River. At thirty-eight, she was the youngest Deputy Minister that Climate Change Canada had ever had. She had all the credentials: a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Studies from Simon Fraser University, an MBA from McGill, and a certificate in digital marketing from Ottawa University.  She was regarded as a both an expert on environmental policy and a communications guru who had more than a million Instagram followers. But she was also a human lightning rod, adored by the left and abhorred by the right.  Her head was on the block now that the Tories had taken over the reins of power, and she knew it. Soon this office would be inhabited by some oil-loving, environment-gouging creep from Alberta. She had heard that her job was being shopped around at the Petroleum Club in...

Second excerpt from my book Distressed Pavement, To Ottawa With Love, due out this fall. The Saturday after the Earth swallowed Madawaska Joe whole, his fellow musicians and friends gathered at Irene’s for a celebration of his life and legend.    The Mayor was there to accept good wishes after the city quietly paid for his funeral and paid out a tidy sum that would take care of Joe’s ex-wife who had threatened to sue. Manon Giroux hadn’t laid eyes on her husband of thirty years in more than a decade, not since they buried Joe’s eldest son after he succumbed to a heroin habit. But here she was, not shy to come forward to claim the $100,000.   “I deserve that money for what he put me through,” she told Irene as she dug into a feed of hot wings at Joe’s wake. “He was a son-of-a-bitch, and I don’t care he’s gone.”   Many in the crowd were not aware that Joe was even married. He wasn’t of course,  married , except on paper. Joe had been a terrible husband who often l...

Excerpt from my new book Distressed Pavement: To Ottawa With Love, which will be published in Fall 2021.  Lester Swell started at the  Ottawa Journal  as a copyboy which was the vernacular of the day for gopher. It was the copy boy’s job to run stories typed on pieces of paper from reporters to editors. Often at deadline, reporters would still be writing their stories page by page, giving the copy boys a pretty good workout.   They also managed the various wires in the backroom pulling copy from reporters and wire services around the world.    Just as often, copyboys were sent off for beer, cigarettes, dry cleaning and food. It was a thankless job but a great way to get started in the highly competitive news business. Great reporters and photographers often credited their time as copyboys for getting a foot in the door. If a kid was bright enough, he was soon elevated to reporter status.    Lester was a coddled, spoiled brat and quickly grew bored...

Embed from Getty Images For the past year, I've been busy trying to find a good, well paying job. It's been challenging because I'm an older worker, and I am frequently not even considered once the resume readers realize I remember Richard Nixon. A few years ago, I went back to school to finish my degree, and that has helped tremendously because the resume readers see that I graduated in 2019 not 1978 when I first went to journalism school.  Despite all efforts -- upgrading my education, getting a secret security clearance, and rehabilitating my credit destroyed by years of working for sketchy clients who I had to chase to get paid -- I couldn't get to third base with recruiters.  Bottom line: I simply couldn't get didn't any job interviews.  Then I remembered my training as a correspondence assistant in the Prime Minister's Office where I worked when the current Prime Minister was still in short pants. The valuable training I received has served me we...

  On April 2, 2017, a family friend of Ashley Simpson opened her Facebook Messenger and got the surprise of her life.  Cathy MacLeod had been trying to correspond with Ashley's boyfriend, Derek Favell, who was the last person to see the St. Catharines native before she disappeared from her home in Salmon Arm, B.C. a year before. She wanted to know more about what happened to Ashley, and why Favell had refused to take a polygraph test when many others close to the missing woman agreed to do so. "I wanted to poke the bear," she said, and sent several messages to Favell pleading with him to talk to her.  " Please help us," she wrote. "It's been 10 months of pure hell. A lie detector would help if you have nothing to hide. I beg of you, help us, take the test to clear your name if there’s nothing to hide." Many, including members of the Simpson family, found Derek's behaviour, at least, curious. Ashley had disappeared on April 27, 2016. Yet it took...

On the 5th anniversary of Ashley Simpson's disappearance, I stand with my cousins Sindal Simpson , Cindy Mcgean Simpson , Amanda Langlois , Amy Simpson , Tara Simpson , her grandmother Elsa Halden , her aunts and uncles, cousins, nieces and nephews. On this Day of Action for Ashley we demand justice, more transparency from law enforcement, and better and more dedicated efforts to find her remains, and her killer(s). The federal government should allocate more funds for search and rescue in rural and remote communities and to the RCMP who are overburdened with their case loads (particularly in B.C. and Alberta) to ensure a rapid and thorough responses to calls about missing women, men and children. SAR often goes home in a day or two leaving grieving and distraught loved ones to pay for their own searches. It's not enough to assume that the person "took off" on their own when family members know better. No parent should have to bury a child. And in the unfortunate circ...

  Five years ago, Deanna Wertz and Ashley Simpson lived a stone's throw from each other on Yankee Flats Road in the community of Salmon Arm in British Columbia. They disappeared within a week of each other, and neither has been found. And they weren't the only ones who vanished from the picturesque logging and tourism community. Caitlin Potts and Nicole Bell also disappeared that year. Traci Genereaux, 18, was found dead during a police search along the Salmon Road River in 2017. This, in a community of 17,100 residents.  British Columbia has a terrible track record when it comes to missing and murdered women, particularly Aboriginal women and girls. According to a fact sheet from the Native Women's Association , almost one third of all of the reported cases in their database involved women and girls in British Columbia. To date, the number of cases in BC is substantially higher than any other province or territory in Canada (Alberta follows with 16 percent of the cases). B...