Vogels, an internationally syndicated columnist since 1994, realizes that audiences across the country have varying comfort levels when it comes to sex. “I write the way I speak, but I try to strike a fine balance between using real language and silly innuendo [and I try] not to use language gratuitously, to simply shock,” she says. Her assistant, Karen LaRocca, is in charge of tweaking her columns for their various destinations each week. For the alternative weeklies, it’s just a quick copy edit for length and clarity. But LaRocca made special arrangements for Halifax. “Right from the start, I’d had lengthy conversations with the section editor about what we could get away with in their small, very conservative market,” she says.

Earlier this year, while LaRocca was on vacation, Vogels wrote her columns, fed them into the email list and hit send with no special treatment. That week, in her My Messy Bedroom sex column, Vogels responded to a Globe and Mail “exposé” about teen girls and oral sex. Vogels’s take on teen sex: what’s the big deal? She related some of her own early sexual experiences and chastised the Globe article for being alarmist.

“We’re still not comfortable with girls being the sexual aggressors,” she wrote. “We still rely on girls to be our social sexual barometer. I mean, why aren’t we scolding boys for not refusing oral sex? Were these guys just standing around when girls’ mouths happened to fall on their dicks? Interestingly, not one BJ recipient was interviewed for the article.”

The Daily News received 75 letters in response to that column. “While many readers supported the column, others hated it. They said it was too graphic, the language too frank,” says Marilyn Smulders, editor of the HFX section, where the column appeared. Ultimately, the paper sided with the majority of outraged readers who argued that Vogels’s work was unfit for HFX, which includes entertainment features for kids and is distributed to local schools. It was a hard blow for Vogels, since The Daily News was the first daily to publish My Messy Bedroom and was originally one of the column’s biggest supporters. HFX now runs Dating Girl, Vogels’s tamer relationships column, instead.

Could this dust-up have been avoided if the column had been pre-edited, as was Vogels’s usual habit? She and LaRocca don’t think so. “We were willing to do that little bit of extra work if it meant having a presence in Halifax. All we asked in return is that they consulted us, in advance, if they encountered any problems or required further editing. Clearly, that didn’t happen.”

And although she is disappointed with the decision to pull her column, Vogels isn’t surprised. This isn’t the first time a paper was spooked by the views in My Messy Bedroom. Around 1995, the column was pulled from View magazine in Hamilton, Ontario. The offending column was titled “Cock Tales” and talked about men and their sexual preferences. It sparked outrage not only with readers, but also with advertisers. Since then, View has reinstated the column. “The mainstream media are really uncomfortable with talking about kids having sex,” she says. “It’s automatically assumed that any sexual experience will be traumatic.”

Vogels says she’s prepared to compromise but only to a point. “I’d rather censor myself slightly and still get the message across than have someone shut me up entirely. I don’t want to get too lofty about it, but really, if we shut down every opinion we’re uncomfortable with, we might as well shut down as a free-thinking society.”

For Haligonians and others wishing to peek into Vogels’s Messy Bedroom, her columns appear in all their uncensored glory at www.joseyvogels.com.

Four of the country’s 16 medical schools admitted to accepting research-targeted grants between 1996 and 1999, and three said they accepted donations, which are not tied to specific research projects. The average grant was for more than $160,000, while the average donation came in at $18,000. “It’s not surprising that the tobacco industry gives money to medical schools,” says Joanna Cohen, the study’s principal researcher. “I am disappointed that the medical schools would actually take the money.”

The figures might actually be much higher considering five medical schools refused to disclose financial information.

Cohen can’t name the schools that admitted to accepting the cash because researchers promised respondents they would remain anonymous. “Anonymity is a common research practice as far as individuals are concerned, so we decided to extend this to the universities, to take all precautions to get the best results.”

None of the schools that participated in the study has a policy preventing it from accepting money from the tobacco industry. Cynthia Callard, executive director of Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada, says that’s a huge problem and something medical schools have to change soon. “It was a little bit of a hidden issue,” says Callard. “But now it’s been brought to light and something should be done about it.”

In Australia, 70 percent of medical faculties have policies against accepting tobacco funds. Unfortunately, things do not seem to be moving very quickly here in Canada. Audrey Cheung, director of research grants at U of T, says the school has no policy regarding the acceptance of tobacco funding, nor does the university plan on adopting a ban. “I’m not aware of any move in that direction,” she says, “either at the university or at the faculty level.”

In a marketing campaign based largely on deception, the Progressive Canadian Party ran in 16 ridings, using the PC Party banner on election signs and ballot boxes.

In Richmond Hill, Ontario, Conservative candidate Pete Merrifield took issue with the PC’s Tory-blue signs and its use of the phrase “progressive conservative” instead of Progressive Canadian. He even suggested the rival PC camp was stealing his signs.

Conservative Party spokesperson Carolyn Stewart Olsen, on the other hand, maintains that while individual candidates may have had problems with the PC Party, the Conservatives as a whole did not. “We didn’t have time to pay much attention to fringe parties,” she says.

But Joe Hueglin, national coordinator for the PC Party, thinks Harper’s Conservatives should indeed be worried by the new Tories on the block. And while he acknowledges that Conservative candidates complained about his party’s tactics, he’s making no apologies. “We’re operating within the law,” Hueglin says. Did it cause confusion? “Quite possibly. But many people didn’t know they were voting for Stephen Harper [by voting for the Conservative Party], because they don’t follow politics.”

With only 100 official members, the new PC Party isn’t exactly a force to be reckoned with, but it’s got more than a familiar name on its side. One of its star candidates, Rev. Dorian Baxter (a.k.a. Elvis Priestley), is an Elvis-impersonating Anglican priest who ran against Conservative wonderwoman Belinda Stronach in the Ontario riding of Newmarket-Aurora.

Stronach won. Elvis took 2.11 percent. But according to Hueglin, “the Conservatives are blaming [the PC Party] for Belinda’s poor performance.”

Watch out, Stephen Harper. You could be next.

It’s true in some circles that taking an active interest in one’s finances is considered anathema to being truly left-leaning, that it’s a distasteful, bourgeois hobby. And if you’re making millions off investments in tobacco companies and weapons manufacturers, it probably is. But that isn’t always the case. The flipside of that argument is that taking control of one’s finances is the ultimate expression of self-determination.

Learning about personal finance should be of most interest to those who don’t have much of it—and in that category we can safely include the many people who work for low-paying NGOs, non-profits and charities. After all, do you think Belinda Stronach reads personal finance magazines? Hardly—she can pay someone to manage her money for her, whereas the rest of us need to learn to do it ourselves.

It’s easy to understand why many lefties find personal finance literature so odious, as much of it is written with the same underlying conservative philosophy—that you need to master your finances in order to pay the least amount of tax possible. Most lefties naturally, and rightfully, disagree with such a position. As supporters of a social welfare state, we realize that if we didn’t pay taxes there would be no such thing as universal health care.

My take is a little different: I think you should bone up on personal finance in order to pay the least amount of money possible to the multinational corporations that control your life. According to the latest information from Statistics Canada, the average Canadian family carries a rather astounding $12,300 in credit card and “other” debts, to say nothing of what we owe on mortgages ($82,800), student loans ($10,400), lines of credit ($13,500) and car loans ($11,200). That means big bucks in interest payments for banks and credit card companies. But why are so many of us giving them more money than we have to?

What’s your interest in keeping the big banks profitable, the same ones that shutter small-town branches they deem not profitable enough and charge increasingly higher service fees for fewer services? Or what about credit card companies that charge interest rates that are more than 15 percent higher than the Bank of Canada’s prime lending rate and insist on giving consumers more credit to spend than they can ever hope to pay off? Surely if the money you shell out in unnecessary interest payments stayed in your hands, you could find better ways to spend it than bolstering the bottom line of these multinational money-making machines.

The same thinking applies to investing. Yes, most of the literature you’ll find is couched in terms of making RRSP contributions as a way to reduce your so-called tax burden. But try to look past that. Because if you don’t learn how to invest properly, and simply pour money into an ethical fund, you may end up more philosophically compromised than if you’d just bought a regular mutual fund. The fund manager’s idea of what is ethical may be quite different from yours. If you don’t learn what to look for, you won’t know what your money supports.

Thankfully, things have progressed and young (and not-so-young) girls now have a whole new breed of strong, smart subversive female fighters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Lara Croft, Tomb Raider.

Girls Who Bite Back: Witches, Mutants, Slayers and Freaks (Sumach Press) analyzes these new pop culture superheroines and their popularity, problems and, at times, conflicting messages. Through essays, analysis, fiction, art and comics, this insightful, entertaining and empowering anthology explores the evolution of the female superhero from early characters like The Fantastic Four’s Invisible Woman to today’s fictional fighters like Xena, Warrior Princess.

Along the way, contributors, including editor Emily Pohl-Weary, explore the roles of women as both comic characters and creators, challenging the idea that all -superheroines need be skinny, young, white, heterosexual and able-bodied. Contributors dissect old female superheroes, invent new ones and teach us about the superhero lurking in all of us.

There’s Candra K. Gill’s excellent essay “’Cuz the Black Chick Always Gets It First,” exploring issues of race and diversity in Buffy. Halli Villegas introduces us to Jane Bond, Catherine Stinson takes on her childhood hero Little Orphan Annie, Lisa Rundle slays so-called feminist superheroes on the big screen and Esther Vincent seeks out the elusive female action hero to add to her collection.

And just in case you thought it was easier to leap tall buildings in a single bound than bridge the gap between average everyday gal and superhero, there are enough reminders in this anthology (check out Rose Bianchini’s story “Everyday Superhero”) that it’s the little things we do daily that grant us superpowers. Whether it’s sexism, ageism or depression, we all slay vampires and monsters each day (in whatever form they might take). And if you get hungry from a life of fighting crime there’s even an adventure comic complete with a spring roll recipe. — Lisa Whittington-Hill

LD: Mayor Louis Taylor and the Rise of Vancouver By Daniel Francis (Arsenal Pulp Press)

On the strength of his reputation as “an ordinary man representing ordinary folk,” Louis D. Taylor was elected mayor of Vancouver eight times between 1910 and 1934. But his life was closer to extraordinary: he was, at various times, wanted by the Chicago police, owner of the tallest building in the British Empire and a starving Klondike prospector. As mayor he was ahead of his time, encouraging women’s suffrage and an eight-hour workday, but he was also thoroughly of his time, declaring the need to “preserve British Columbia for the white people.” As a result, LD is both lest-we-forget history and celebration of an unsung visionary, made eminently readable by Francis’s graceful style. —Adam Lewis Schroeder

Borders Matter: Homeland Security and the Search for North America By Daniel Drache (Fernwood Publishing)

The title distills the essence of Drache. The early Canadian nationalist, critic of free trade, eminent globetrotting political economist and, once upon a time, editor and writer for This Magazine, powerfully demonstrates that borders never ceased to matter, free trade agreements notwithstanding, and are now all too much in vogue in all the wrong ways since 9/11. Goods—and so-called intelligence, mostly false—move too easily, while people, particularly those in need of a safe haven, face increasing obstacles. This book is an essential background guide to following the Maher Arar inquiry, arguably one of the most revealing political happenings in Canada in recent history. —Mel Watkins

Catch and Release: Trout Fishing and the Meaning of Life By Mark Kingwell (Viking Canada)

Perhaps his best book, Catch and Release is a memoir of sorts, built around a fishing trip to Kelowna, British Columbia that Kingwell took a few years ago with his father and two brothers. The trip begins with Mark the Skeptic declaring that “I will not fish,” and it ends a few days later with the philosopher soundly converted to the Brotherhood of the Angle. Along the way, Kingwell uses the intersection of writing, fishing and philosophy to work out familiar philosophical problems about the relationship between thought and action. Ultimately, we are left with a sort of Zen koan as written by Izaak Walton:

Q. What is the meaning of life?

A. Let’s go fishing! —Andrew Potter

How big is the internet in Iran?

There are more than three million internet users out of a population of 70 million, which is not bad. They’re mainly students and middle- and upper-class. The access is now much easier than it was six, seven years ago. For the past five years, there are different ISPs, private ISPs, and they have calling cards that they sell. Ten hours of internet access is 10 bucks. It provides people with anonymity, because that’s a big thing for internet users in Iran. And it gives them an option not to stick with one ISP; if the service goes down and anything happens, they can change to another ISP. But recently there have been regulations passed, both in government and the judiciary, that want to limit this anonymous access through these cards. This is a very important development, and it could harm the increasing number of internet users in Iran.

Is it fair to say that the government sees the internet as a threat?

The government is good toward the internet. It’s not controlling it. It’s helped to develop the infrastructure and they’ve allowed private ISPs to operate. But there is another part of the regime, which is more powerful than the government. The leader himself and security organizations have been trying to shut down the internet or, as much as they can, prevent people from accessing the political opposition websites or anti-religious websites.

How bad is web censorship?

Since [May], it’s stepped up very, very heavily. You can say that almost every popular website, whether it’s political or entertainment, has been filtered and has lost almost half of its users. Several years ago, on July 9, there was a student protest. Every year, on the anniversary of that day, [the regime] gets paranoid. They always think that the CIA or [Israel’s intelligence service] Mossad is conspiring against them. On the eve of this day, or one month before that, they start to shut down everything, to effectively disconnect Iranians inside from the outside world.

Does the Iranian regime consider you a public enemy?

Unfortunately, yes. That’s why I can’t go back. I mean, I can go back, but it’s risky. One of my friends was arrested—he was a blogger and journalist—and now he’s in Holland, because he escaped after he was held for 20 days. We have had phone conversations, and he said they were interested to know about his relationship with me, and the part that I’ve been playing in promoting these weblogs, who’s supporting me, what kind of family I come from. It wasn’t good news for [the regime] when they heard that my family was very religious. For example, my uncle was among the top officials. In the beginning of the revolution, he was killed in a bombing. He was very close to the party of the current leader, the hardliners. When they heard that I came from that kind of family, they were disappointed, but still very suspicious. They can’t believe that one person with his laptop can still start this whole thing.

And now that I’m on staff, it is more clear to me than ever why I’m doing what I’m doing. But every day I come to work, check the trap for mice and adjust the tarp that prevents the rain from falling on my desk, I hope that our volunteers, interns and poorly paid writers realize that no one is living large off the money we are not paying them.

Which is why I have so much trouble understanding how so many of Canada’s big-money magazines can justify asking students and new graduates to work for free.

I hope you’ll be inspired to take action against such magazines after reading the inaugural column of our media columnist, Arthur Johnson. As editor of Canadian Business in the 1990s, Johnson created the magazine’s celebrated internship program, which, despite its modest wage, remains one of the country’s highest-paid magazine internships.

The sad fact is that This Magazine cannot afford to pay even modest wages. Our writers make one-tenth the standard industry rate and our summer students make minimum-wage. The money you spend to buy the magazine goes a tremendous way to allow us to pay even that.

But think for a minute what might happen if the money Canadians spent each year to buy big-money magazines that rely on sweatshop labour—we’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars—instead went to support independent titles like This Magazine, which desperately want to pay a living wage, but can’t.

If that happened, small magazines like This might not be so small anymore. We’d be able to invest in our writers, editors and artists, to pay all our interns, rather than just the summer students, who are the only ones to qualify for federal wage subsidies.

Until that happens, though, we will continue to rely largely on volunteer labour, on those writers and artists who contribute to our pages or behind the scenes issue after issue because they love the magazine, believe in the cause or just plain like our company.

We truly wouldn’t exist if it were not for them, which is more than those big-money magazines can say.

Last year, Bill C-24 placed new spending limits on nomination races and new reporting requirements on donations. It also introduced new limits on donations, including a ban on corporate donations to parties, a $1,000 limit on corporate donations to candidates and a $5,000 limit on individuals donating to parties or candidates. But donors are still finding ways to get around the rules.

Re-elected Liberal MP Carolyn Parrish, for example, was offered a cheque for $5,000 from a company in her riding. Knowing this was above the $1,000 limit for businesses, she politely returned the cheque. But almost immediately after she did so, three new $1,000 cheques came in: one from the company that wrote the first cheque, one from the owner of the company and one from another company the owner was involved in. A few weeks later, she got a $2,000 cheque from the owner’s brother. “The first guy would have liked to have given me $5,000, but he couldn’t,” she says.

In the Ottawa Centre race, Liberal Richard Mahoney’s campaign called voters on election day—when campaigning is illegal—leaving an automated message propagating a false rumour that his main opponent, the NDP’s Ed Broadbent, was willing to give up his seat if Jack Layton lost his own election and needed somewhere to run. “The people of Ottawa Centre can elect someone who’s committed for the long term, Richard Mahoney, and prevent Stephen Harper from becoming prime minister,” the message urged.

Mahoney lost by a wide margin, but the incident illustrates how election laws are failing to deal with desperate candidates who pull out the dirty tricks in the dying days of a campaign, confident in the knowledge that an Elections Canada investigation will not be able to stop them until after the election, when the damage is done. Nobody knows when the next election will be, but with any luck, MPs will address ways to prevent these shenanigans before another writ is dropped.

Dutton is a Toronto-based writer whose fiction, poetry and essays have been published in books, periodicals and anthologies all over the world. He has also made his mark (and it’s loud) in Canada and internationally as a leading oral sound artist, performing as a soloist and as a member of the performance/ poetry group The Four Horsemen (1970–1988) and the free-improvisational performance group CCMC (1989–present). Check out Dutton’s Mouth Pieces:Solo Soundsinging and the recent CD Five Men Singing (Paul Dutton, Jaap Blonk, Koichi Makigami, Phil Minton and David Moss).

So, just what is oral sound art?

You could be making it right now and not even know it. In history, there is evidence that preliterate and non-western cultures communicated with sounds and images. Think about any visual cue and respond to it with a sound—sensical or unintelligible. Come on, give me your best baby talk, pent-up anger, hysteria or bleep bleep blop. Oral sound art is a way to hear your voice and to push the boundaries of orality, that is, to manipulate, modulate, and reverse sound sense and semantic sense. This is pure voice with no electronic effects or processing. “In all my areas of artistic activity my principal mode of operation is intuitive, associational and language-driven. I stress “principal” because those are not my exclusive modes. I take language in the broadest sense possible, and clearly much of my oral sound performance goes beyond language, even in the most liberal interpretation of that word.”

Dirty dancing

Several Women Dancing is a tell-all tale of one man’s passionate affair with a stripper. The penetrating effects of this naughty liaison reveal itself in the central character’s turbulent mental and emotional states. “I’ve had a lifelong erotic fascination with women, and, since puberty, an intense attraction to striptease. When I first put pen to paper, I had the notion of turning my incalculable hours of audience experience to an artistic purpose. It soon became obvious that the subject matter was ideal for exploring dimensions of intersecting and overlapping levels of conscious, subconscious, and unconscious experience, and of the spatial and temporal contexts in which they function,” explains Dutton. “Thus the book blends sensory events in the physical world with fantasy, memory, and dream. The dancing of the women is between these realms, and the several women are those to whom the protagonist is attracted, with his two most intense involvements being his mother and his lover.”

Modern lovers need not apply

Sadly, readers looking for answers to questions about modern romance and solutions to problems of the heart won’t find them in Dutton’s novel. “I don’t expect readers to find answers in it, just more questions, and, I would hope, some beauty,” he says.

It is because of cases like this that a group of activists is lobbying Toronto council to adopt a policy that would prevent city workers, including police, from inquiring about the immigration status of people seeking services. It would also prevent them from passing on information about immigration status to any federal or provincial agency. “We felt it was essential for a lot of people we were working with to be able to access services without fear,” says Sima Zerehi, a campaign organizer with No One Is Illegal.

Zerehi says the idea came about in 2003, after organizers heard of a similar policy in New York City and began to realize how many of the non-status people they worked with in immigration detention centres had ended up there as a result of trying to access city services. Non-status persons, sometimes called illegal immigrants, are people who entered the country legally but lost their right to remain here, either because their refugee claim was denied or they overstayed a tourist visa. Until they are ordered deported or granted status, they are stuck in a legal limbo, with no official immigration status. And with an estimated 20,000 to 200,000 non-status persons living in Canada—half of those in the Toronto area—Zerehi says it’s imperative the city make it easier for them to access essential services without fear of being reported to immigration authorities.

Campaign organizers say non-status persons are entitled to services because the Canadian economy benefits from their labour. “Communities without status do contribute in a positive way to our economy. There really isn’t any reason why they shouldn’t be offered adequate services,” says Zerehi.

Police routinely ask about immigration status when investigating unrelated matters, such as domestic violence complaints. “If, through the normal course of an investigation, we find people with various immigration statuses, obviously we communicate that to Immigration Canada,” says Sergeant Jim Muscat of the Toronto Police Service.

That’s precisely the kind of situation organizers would like to change. But they realize that even having a policy might not make a difference immediately. For example, schools in Ontario are required to admit children whose parents are “unlawfully in Canada.” Yet, according to Martha Mackinnon, executive director of the Justice for Children and Youth Legal Clinic, about 100 children were denied access to Toronto schools this past year, even though the school board has a policy of admitting non-status children. “We took action, and to our knowledge, everyone was admitted,” she says. “Unfortunately, I think that we need more work on the implementation of the policy, especially at a local school level,” concedes school board trustee Bruce Davis.

With the campaign still in its early days, organizers are hopeful. Mayor David Miller supports the principle that all city residents should have access to city services: “The general policy in our administration is that, unless legally obliged, city workers do not ask about immigration status.” But despite his tacit endorsement and the fact that a variety of community organizations and three city councillors have come on board, the city’s official position is that non-status persons already have access to some services, such as public health nurses and homeless shelters, and that the city is prevented by provincial legislation from providing other services, such as social housing. Under the Social Housing Reform Act, for example, every person in the household must have legal status in order for the entire family to be placed on the waiting list.

Organizers say their next step is to hold a public forum this fall. The sooner council addresses the issue, the better, says Cindy Cowan, executive director of the women’s shelter Nellie’s, who sees first-hand what happens when women at risk are afraid to call the police and why a policy is necessary. “It would reduce the fear,” she says, “and enable women to get the support and services they need.”