Another radio play which premiered in 2004 has also made the leap to stage -Al Purdy at the Quinte Hotel was performed and recorded in front of a live audience at Toronto's Glenn Gould Studio, and then given a further performance at the Regent Theatre in Picton, in July. Gordon Pinsent starred in the radio version (Damiano Pietropaolo directing) and Robert Collins at the Regent (Jonathon Rooke and Layne Coleman directing.) Most recently, C. David Johnson played the role of Al Purdy at the Westben Festival, in Campbellford. Dave directed that one himself. A TV version of the Purdy piece, entitled Yours, Al, was filmed in summer of 2005 and once again starred Gordon Pinsent. The hour-long show was featured on CBC's Opening Night program, and was nominated and won a number of awards, including the Yorkton festival Golden Sheaf Award for best actor for Gordon Pinsent. Bill Spahic co-wrote Yours, Al with Dave, and also directed the Reel to Real production.

In 2005 two major changes in Dave's life took place -his agent Patricia Ney retired, after a productive 15 year partnership that began with Midnight Madness. Dave is now represented by Pam Winter, of Gary Goddard Agency in Toronto. And, also after a 15 year association, Dave's position as script editor for radio drama at CBC disappeared into the ether, along with most of the radio drama programming on the network. Dave still does occasional script editing for the Mother Corp.

The Last Liberal was produced with great success at Ottawa's Great Canadian Theatre Company in spring, 2006. Charles McFarland had been with the project from the beginning, as dramaturge and director.

Dave saw a lot of theatre that year; he was on the Dora jury in the General Category and saw over 80 plays and musicals. It turned out to be less of a chore than expected and, very often, proved a fairly pleasant duty. The beauty of being a juror is that you have to go and see shows that you might not normally plan to see - and often these are exactly the shows that surprise and delight. As expected, the work of Soulpepper and Tarragon theatres was of a consistently high quality, but there was an incredible array of other work of exceptional worth, with particularly strong offerings from the Obsidian and Fu-Gen companies.

In between the serial theatre-going and getting The Last Liberal to stage, Dave managed to continue his draining of the Canadian medical system in 2006 with two more sessions at St. Michael's - one to have a painful gallbladder removed and, later, an angioplasty to fix everything the 2003 bypass had missed.

Dave is currently working on a number of projects and, in fact, has never felt a greater rush of creativity than now; perhaps it's all that extra blood flowing impeded about his body. Some of it might even be reaching his brain. A political sex-farce, Conservatives in Love, has recently delighted Toronto Fringe audiences. A short opera entitled Piece of My Heart, based on Dave's time under the knife at St. Mike's, is now set for production by Tapestry New Opera early in 2008. The final installment in the quartet of plays that began with Sister Jude and continued with Midnight Madness and Two Ships Passing is nearly ready for production. Lucky is the story of Jason, Anna's son - who has literally grown up through the previous plays and is now a young adult, with some serious problems.

And then there is Kaj Munk. Dave is working on a new drama which focuses on the last hours of Munk's life. The Danish pastor/playwright was assassinated by the Nazis in early 1944; he had become a too-great thorn in the side of the Third Reich and his play Niels Ebbesen was seen as giving moral sustenance to the Danish resistence. This new play, called simply Kaj Munk, includes excerpts from the Niels Ebbesen play, in a new translation that Dave has completed with Munk's granddaughter, Arense Lund.

Over the years, Dave's work has been presented in every Canadian province, two of the three territories, at least 25 states south of the border and a dozen countries on four continents. Dave's manuscripts and papers are the property of the Trent University Archives in Peterborough, Ontario.