Xavier Mesquita
…is an investigative journalist and feature writer based in Canada and Scotland. His work has been published in outlets such as The Guardian, Toronto Star and Toronto Life.
He can be reached securely via Signal or ProtonMail.
Selected reporting:
Breaking news, investigations + crime
Who killed Patrick Santos? Investigators arrest man in decades-old cold case
She lost $8,000 to a fake rental listing. Toronto is on pace to lose $500 million to fraud this year with the burgeoning threat of AI-generated scams
How the 10-day search for a man accused of murdering his parents came to its end
Police identify victims of Salsa festival shooting that left 2 dead, multiple injured
Gen Z and growing right-wing populism in the UK (The Guardian)
How Canadian leaders are responding to Donald Trump’s tariffs: ‘We’ve had enough’
Feature writing
“Any hope of a peaceful life on Allison Ann Way was shattered when a house across the street was shot at four times in five months. The most recent attack came in early February, as Cameron was leaving for work. Moments after his children had headed out for school, gunfire tore into the neighbour’s garage, and a dark SUV sped off.
Peering out from his garage, Cameron said, “This street is now empty, like a ghost town.” Inside Toronto’s violent tow-truck wars: ‘A well-known secret’ in The Guardian, April 2026
“Whatever Aguiar was doing, it was working. He had hundreds of thousands of followers and claimed to be a millionaire. He billed himself as a dating, relationship and lifestyle coach and offered proof of his success in the form of an endless slideshow, posing with crowds of women, dancing in glitzy clubs, riding in stretch limos, sailing on yachts. Aguiar claimed to have mastered the art of seduction and said that he could teach it to other men—for a price.” ‘Selling Seduction’ in Toronto Life, August 2026
“After the sun had set, a blood orange afterglow hung on the horizon.”
“When longtime friends David Ogle and Kevin Stovall set off down the Kopka River, they were chasing a decades-old dream of wilderness and fishing. Days later, the two canoeists from Texas found themselves near the raging wildfires burning in northwestern Ontario as a “rumbling” wall of fire bore down around them and ashes fell from the sky…
‘Rumbling of flames,’ snow like ash and a helicopter rescue: A Canoeist’s Escape, in Toronto Star, July 2026
