Sometimes events in the nation's capital can take a while to penetrate the consciousness of those of us living on the margins so I was a little slow to pick up on the controversy in Ottawa about the Harper government's imposition of a giant new monument dedicated to "the victims of communism."

The project has many strikes against it: the location of the monument, its design, its rationale. But of course it has one big thing going for it; it conforms to the government's...

I am going to be at the YWCA in downtown Vancouver on Wednesday evening (March 18) taking part in a panel at the regular meeting of the Editors Association of Canada.

The title of the event is An Evening of Eavesdropping. I am sharing the spotlight with Jenny Lee and Margo Bates. The idea is that the editors in the audience will find out what we three writers really think about editors and the editing process. (Me? Some of my best friends are editors.)

It is a free...

When I lived in Ottawa back in the day I used to take my kids to visit the old Victoria Memorial Museum on Metcalfe Street. In those days (the early '80s) the museum shared its castle-like building with the Museum of Natural History but we were mainly interested in the First Nations exhibits in the history section. (Subsequently the museum moved to its impressive Douglas Cardinal-designed home in Gatineau and is now called the Canadian Museum of History.)

At the entrance to one of the...

I can't allow my pal Brian Busby to walk off into the sunset without an acknowledgement.

Six years ago Brian launched his website, The Dusty Bookcase, dedicated to what I think of as Canadian pulplit but what he calls "the suppressed, ignored and forgotten in Canadian literature." Always entertaining and witty, sometimes surprising, Brian's blog brought to light hundreds of books, mainly pulp fiction, that had been lost to posterity until...

Wierd. The CBC on its website recommends 10 books to read for Black History Month, yet as far as I can tell all of the titles are novels, not history.

So let me add to the list a few books that are actually Black history.

First of all, a couple of old chestnuts:

The Blacks in Canada, by Robin Winks: first published in 1971, this classic has a...