This: Did you meet McCartney?

Dexter: I did. It was quite a highlight. When you were a kid if someone tells you that you’re going to meet one of the Beatles you probably wouldn’t believe them. My wife and I took a poster from his Venus and Mars album. We asked if he would sign it, which he very graciously did.

This: Are you a music guy?

Dexter: Absolutely. I like a very broad range. I am not a person who is stuck in one genre or another, although my wife will accuse me frequently of having the radio welded on the ’70s station. The other night I went to see Willie Nile, sometimes referred to as the troubadour of New York. He was fabulous. I also went to KISS [recently]; and one of my favourite things to do is to see John Prine.

This: Are you an avid reader?

Dexter: Oh, yes. Right now I am reading The Maple Leaf and the White Cross, which is the history of St. John Ambulance. It might not sound like an exciting book, but is extraordinarily interesting and follows its development in Canada. For quite a while, I was diligently working through all the Agatha Christie books. They are easy to read and I would pack two or three of them if I had a week off.

This: Now I assume you’re reading a lot of briefing books.

Dexter: Yes, I am. This job is like trying to take a drink out of a firehose. It’s a lot of stuff, a lot of material in a short period of time. But I enjoy it.

This: Is there a concise way of telling Canadians what your government’s vision encapsulates?

Dexter: I always find the vision question somewhat trite. Everybody has the same overarching view that you want your province to be a place where people can live in relative comfort and security. [We need to] encourage young people to put down roots and stay. We are going to reach a point in about 15 years when a quarter of our population is going to be over 65. We are already experiencing shortages in some skills groups. We have a tremendous university and community college sector here. I am trying to find ways not only to keep our own young people here, but the [thousands of] young minds coming to our institutions should be a wellspring we can draw from.

This: How would you describe yourself politically?

Dexter: I have always said I am a quality-seeking individual who operates in a very pragmatic and practical fashion. There is a little something we tell our friends around here. For a long time [in Nova Scotia] we had progressive conservatives and now what Nova Scotia wants are conservative progressives. I think people tend to see me in that light.

This: I wonder if there are days when you wake up and think, “I’m the premier, I can’t believe this.”

Dexter: I won’t pretend that I don’t reflect on that. I grew up in a very rural community, a little place called Milton. It’s been a very long journey. My father passed away a number of years ago. I am sure if he was around he would find it unbelievable I have made my way from there to here. Fortunately, my mother, who will be 91 in October, was able to be at my swearing-in. My family knows, all of them, that I couldn’t have made it here without their love and support.

Nova Scotia NDP Premier Darrell Dexter has a lot of reading to do, including This Magazine. Illustration by David Anderson.

The September-October 2009  issue of This Magazine should now be in subscribers’ mailboxes (subscribers always get the magazine early, and you can too), and will be for sale on your local newsstand coast-to-coast this week. All the articles in the issue will be made available online in the weeks ahead, though, so keep checking back for more. We suggest subscribing to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss a new article going online, following us on Twitter or becoming a fan on Facebook for updates, new articles and other tasty links.

On the cover of the September-October issue is Anthony Fenton‘s special investigation into the world of Canadian private security firms, armoured-car manufacturers and oil companies that are profiting from the chaos in Iraq. While Canadians are justly proud of the fact that we declined to join the misbegotten “coalition of the willing” that occupied Iraq in 2003, Fenton finds that in many ways — politically, economically, militarily — Canada’s involvement in Iraq today is deeper than ever. Three years after the legalization of same-sex marriage in Canada, Paul Gallant surveys the terrain of LGBT activism and finds it increasingly deserted. Marriage certificates in hand, middle-class gays and lesbians have drifted away from the movement, he finds, while the underfunded and burnt-out activists left behind say there’s still plenty of work to do. And reporting from Israel, Grant Shilling meets the beach bums, peace activists, and former soldiers who believe that the region’s world-class surfing could be one way to bring Israelis and Palestinians together—if only he can deliver a load of wetsuits to Gaza.

There’s plenty more, including Paul McLaughlin‘s interview with new Nova Scotia NDP premier Darrell Dexter; Sienna Anstis profiles the remarkable long-distance relationship between the University of Manitoba’s microbiology lab and a sex-worker clinic in Nairobi, Kenya; Andrew Webster meets the  independent videogame designers who make Canada an increasingly important player in an emerging art form; Hicham Safieddine says that during the election uproar over the summer, Western mainstream media got it wrong about Iran—again; Soraya Roberts finds that, in choosing Veronica over Betty, freckle-faced comic-book icon Archie Andrews has subverted seven decades of cultural expectations; RM Vaughan tests the limits of his solidarity during Toronto’s great municipal strike of summer 2009 as the litterbox threatens his sanity; Laura Kusisto digs into the real numbers behind Saskatchewan’s plan to pay $20,000 to recent graduates who choose to settle there; Souvankham Thammavongsa sends a postcard about the strange nighttime happenings in Marfa, Texas; and Darryl Whetter asks why, when 80 percent of Canadians live in cities, so much of our fiction takes place down on the farm.

PLUS: Chris Jai Centeno on University of Toronto budget cuts; Emily Hunter on overfishing and the seafood industry; Jenn Hardy on the DivaCup; Milton Kiang on better ways to recycle e-waste; Navneet Alang on microblogging service Tumblr; Jason Anderson on the Toronto International Film Festival; Sarah Colgrove on Len Dobbin, the Montreal jazz scene’s most important audience member; Kelli Korducki reviews Who’s Your Daddy?: And other writings on queer parenting; and Graham F. Scott on net neutrality and the CRTC.

With new poetry by Sandra Ridley and Lillian Nećakov, and a new short story by Kathy Friedman.