On Melanie Joly, Peter Bethlanfalvy and ensuring accuracy with sources anonymous and otherwise...

How are stories built? Here's a bit of how the sausage is made.

Everyone likes to know how the sausage is made, even if they don’t want to look. For me, I literally spent many of my early years in the back of a butcher shop and I watched the sausage be made. As my mother would work the counter, I’d be playing hide and seek with my friend Andrew among the beef and hog carcasses hanging in the fridge.

Opie’s Meats on Concession Street in Hamilton served the British expat community and my “Uncle” Danny meaning he wasn’t really my uncle but we treated him like one was the proprietor. My mother worked there on evenings and weekends and I’d get the front row view to how the sausage, and the black pudding, was made.

Some people get turned off by being this close but I don’t.

I relate this story to you as I prepare to tell you how the political sausage is made. There are so many ways that I could pivot here and tell you different stories, but I’ll tell you how a political story comes together.

One of the things that I hope to do, as a way of saying thank you for being a paid subscriber and to give you a value added experience, is to pull the curtain back a bit on how journalism works and how stories go from idea to a finished product - at least from my perspective.

So about Melanie Joly…

You may have heard that Melanie Joly is denying my reporting that she could soon be exiting politics and be appointed Canada’s Ambassador to France.