Page 13 - Toronto North Lifestyle March 2021

they have. Either [they’re reaching out to] raise issues that they’re seeing in their personal lives, as a result of the government response or just the pandemic itself, or they’re involved with listening to the micro-details of the government’s response. I really have never seen [people] so engaged. But that speaks to the fact that the decisions have a very direct result on their lives and so once that ceases to exist I don’t know that people will be as focused [on provincial politics].
What has your experience been like as the President of the Queen’s Park Press Gallery? (Laughs) It’s been challenging but incredibly rewarding. As the
decompress at the end of the day?
The initial stages of the pandemic were very difficult for me. I was at home, working under an enormous amount of pressure and I was also with my two young children who demand a lot of attention. One of the best decisions we decided to do was, in the summer last year — when things were wide open again, to take every Friday off. We would take these long weekends and drive to Niagara Falls or drive to a beach in the province and just hangout as a family. It was great — it gave us a lot of sunshine and vitamin-d and everything we needed to feel normal again.
the legislature and we get to question them on some of the most important topics of the day. For those many months between March and September — that was missing. We didn’t have engagement with any of those politicians. A lot of our focus has been on how we get those scrums back. And that was creating these infection prevention controls in the media studio.
Your career, thus far, has been marked by covering impactful moments in Canadian history — where does your work over the past year rank amongst your personal accomplishments?
This is, by far, the biggest story that I and many of my colleagues will ever cover in our lives. For a lot of Canadian reporters, the big touchstone stories have been things like 9/11, the mission in Afghanistan and of course, now. The pandemic is on that level. It is the singular event that everyone is talking about, it touches everyone’s life in a very personal way — from health to the economy. This is the first time, for a lot of journalists, where the story we are covering day-in and day-out, we are also living. That’s why it’s that much more impactful to us.
president of the gallery, my primary focus has been on the health and safety protocols during the pandemic. The speaker is the ultimate authority in Queen’s Park so we had to work, as the Gallery — and me as the president, with the speaker’s office and with the legislature to come up with infection prevention protocols. There’s a dedicated space within Queen’s Park called the media studio granted to us by the speaker’s office. This is a space where politicians can come and engage with the media. That space is incredibly important. Every day, after the legislature, there is something called scrums where politicians come out of gruelling time to be a journalist. How do you
There’s no question that this has been a particularly
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TORONTO NORTH MARCH 2021 Page 13