As a reader, I’m often curious about the personal lives of my favourite writers. I like being aware of Guy Gavriel Kay’s taste for Negronis and other cocktails, or following the progress of John Scalzi’s renovation of a church, or knowing about Time magazine naming Kim Stanley Robinson a “Hero of the Environment“. So although I originally posted some biographical information here as part of my campaign to be elected to Canada’s House of Commons in 2025 (spoiler alert: I didn’t win!), I’m leaving it here in the expectation that other people might feel the same way, and that someone who buys one of my books might want to know something about me.
I was born in Quebec City to parents who had moved to Canada to escape ethnic discrimination and find better opportunities than existed in postwar Britain. Our family gradually moved westward, ending up on Salt Spring Island when I was ten years old and where I lived until graduating from high school. Since then, I’ve resided for many years in each of Victoria and North Vancouver. I was a litigation lawyer for 35 years before leaving the profession for my unsuccessful run for Parliament as a candidate for the Green Party of Canada in 2025. About half of my working life was spent working for public interest organizations (the Sierra Club, BC Public Interest Advocacy Centre, Ecojustice) and half spent working for the Attorneys General of Canada and of British Columbia. Along the way, I earned a number of university degrees (B.A., LL.B. (U. of Victoria), M.A. (Carleton), M.Jur. (Dunelm), Ph.D. (Aberdeen)) plus my rokudan and several qualifications from the Japan Karate Association.
For anyone interested in my online presence, on social media, I have both Instagram and Twitter (“X”) accounts. Like many other people, I’ve largely abandoned Twitter following its change of ownership, but have almost 4,000 posts going back as far as 2012. My Instagram posts only go back to 2019 and there are only about 400 of them, but they’re more fun to look at! Also, I’ve got a YouTube channel that mostly consists of short videos about political issues.
I’ve done a lot of hiking, backpacking, canoeing, and kayaking over the years, and if anyone would like to see some recent evidence of that, look at the YouTube account (“Hike’n RV”) of my friends Gordon and Miki to see Gord and I hiking to Cape Scott or watch us on one of our snowshoeing trips to Manning Park.
During the pandemic, when I couldn’t teach karate classes in person any more, I recorded a series of short videos for the members of my old club. You can find them on its website, though the sound quality isn’t very good (the pandemic forced us to figure out new technologies in a hurry!), and they’re probably only of interest to people who do karate.
They don’t make for light reading, but you can find all of my graduate theses online by searching for them on the library websites of Carleton University (my M.A.), Durham University (my M.Jur.), and the University of Aberdeen (my Ph.D.). Happy reading!
