About Me

At 12, I knew I wanted to be a foreign correspondent. That summer I started studying Spanish at a language camp. At 16, I enrolled in community college to learn how to type and I reported part-time for local French and English language weekly newspapers and radio stations. I had a dream, and I reverse engineered my path to turn it into reality. 

After earning my Masters from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism I began a 20 year career that started in Montréal covering one of the worst mass murders in Canada's history at Université de Montréal, then across Canada covering various city halls and provincial legislatures, before Reuters hired me to open a new Western Canada bureau from where I reported on general news, commodities, and agriculture. Later, I was transferred to Toronto to first cover the stock market and then set up and manage Reuters' French-language service. My first foreign posting was to Argentina where I covered the biggest sovereign debt default in world history and the ensuing civil uprising that killed scores, saw an elected president flee by helicopter from the presidential palace rooftop, and the subsequent six-week shut down of nearly all banking services - plunging a nation of 40 million into a barter economy. From there, I reported on national governments, and multilateral institutions in another 14 countries from Latin America, Western Europe, the Middle East, Singapore, and Australia before I found myself on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, (see picture) when Thomson acquired Reuters in 2007. 

Since then, I returned to Canada and I have written speeches for two Canadian Prime Ministers and in my roles as a public communicator I give advice on national security, public safety, and foreign relations to the PM's staff, three-star generals and admirals, and senior intelligence officials. I also worked on the federal budget at Finance, and other economic files at the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, and Industry Canada. 

In my "off" hours, I have published seven books (nonfiction, children's stories, and historical fiction), I write blogs and review other writers' manuscripts, and I volunteer as a career coach and treasurer of my condominium community.

Respect everyone, learn as much as you can wherever you go, and read widely: We grow by learning and we are most alive when creating. I have been fortunate to work with, interview, and debate truly remarkable people.

Writing - in multiple forms - about what I have seen, learned, and anticipate is one of my ways of giving back and hopefully leaving my community a bit better.

I approach every day with the principles of Stoic philosophy, I strive to live up to the Golden Rule, and I consider a good life to be one of service to others and for the betterment of others, in part through the improvement of myself.

My most recent book is about our COVID puppy and I co-authored it with my son while my wife drew the illustrations and drafted the recipes - and it's one step in our journey of giving back: I want to harness my talents to do what I can to leave my community better off. Now, I am working on a manuscript on transformational leadership and a collection of short ficitional stories.

Be it a whimsical story about an English bulldog's adventures to lift quarantined people's spirits or research a charitable fund my wife and I would oversee in awarding budgets to low-income families help their children with literacy, I want to move those yardsticks forward at least a little bit every day.