To: Bill Morneau, House of Commons, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1A 0A6
Re: Prime Minister Trudeau praising Castro
I voted for the present government. I voted for you. I had viscerally despised Harper, and I fell for your party’s hokum about “sunny days” and restoring Canada’s democratic values after the grim repressiveness of the Conservative administration. Naive me.
It’s been an average year of reading. 160 books and about 500 academic papers, articles, short stories and other short items. History and anthropology dominated the book reading, as usual, with an emphasis on Australia, the Pacific, the Canadian North and West, and the ideas of 19th century Canadian democratic reformers. I became particularly fascinated by the 19th century convict colonies of Australia and the French Pacific possessions, and I amplified previous readings (such as Robert Hughes venerable The Fatal Shore, and the eye-opening but little known Australia’s Birthstain, by Babette Smith). Thomas Keneally, giving Hughes a run for his money in A Commonwealth of Thieves, covers the general subject with extraordinarily vivid prose, and Siân Rees makes a closer case study in The Floating Brothel — The Extraordinary True Story of an Eighteenth- century Ship and Its Cargo of Female Convicts. Read more »