Hold onto your seats. This is the first of an occasional series of posts tracing the backstory to one of the primary reasons for me getting back into blogging: the scheduled June 2007 publication of Under Arrest - Canadian Laws You Won't Believe, brought to you by the good folks at Dundurn Press. Set aside reading time now! Buy lots of copies! Feel the love! Woooo!
The story begins with one condition, two sources of inspiration and some cartoons. (Since this entire series of posts is an exercise in unrestrained self-adulation, you'll forgive the fact that they may be staggeringly indulgent.)
The condition is compulsive writing. Always wanted to write. Can't explain it. Need to write. I'm not afflicted by any sort of retrograde Vedder-esque I'm an artist, maaan hang-ups, and thus am completely unconflicted about the notion of making money from writing - but I've also been virtually incapable of actually making money from the endeavor. Happily, that changed a couple of years ago when I was able to leverage the miniscule attention paid to my blogging efforts into a couple of paid articles. I said above that we would be dealing with one condition; I'll need to amend that to two conditions. Editors, like the rest of us, generally prefer to keep aggravations in their environment to a minimum, so once they're relatively satisfied that you can (a) come up with a decent idea on which to hang an article or column and deliver it on deadline, and (b) string sentences together in a fashion which puts you somewhere above the average monkey with a keyboard, you can often count on them to be at least open to hearing about new ideas with which you may come up. Let's call this the "Fool me once..." condition of the editing universe.
Before I get to the sources of inspiration, we'll need to deal with the cartoons. You may recall them. If you need a refresher, this CTV news story and this National Post story should bring you up to speed. Back in January and February of 2006, Canada's Western Standard newsmagazine decided to publish eight of twelve cartoons which had originally been published in Denmark, and which were argued by some to be offensive to Muslims. All kinds of brouhaha erupted: Indigo refused to stock the magazine, Air Canada refused to place the issue in their lounges and histrionic crank Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress thundered that he was going to seek to lay "hate crimes" charges against the magazine's publishers.
All of which led me to ponder, Fine, but how can I get some action out of this?
The way the brain works is funny. Every once in a while, a long-forgotten tidbit of information burbles to the surface, sometimes for no discernible reason, sometimes because relevant circumstances prompt it. This was one of those times. You're certainly not taught this in law school, and I can't say that I open the Criminal Code with any regularity during my practice, but at some point during one of those Criminal Law lectures or while passing time searching desperately for anything but what I was supposed to be studying, I came across Section 296 of the Criminal Code - which makes it a crime to publish a "blasphemous libel". This, I thought, this would make an interesting column. I'll leave it to you to decide whether that was an accurate assessment [note: link is to .pdf document; also available in .pdf at the articles page].
So I emailed the editor of the National Post and pitched the idea. He had published some of my stuff previously, the "Fool me once..." condition operated as it should, and he, bless him, fell for it. The piece was published on February 13, 2006.
[Next time: the sources of inspiration, the (purportedly) on-going series and the sweating begins]
