July/August 2004

John Beamish
via e-mail

Since reading Paul Wilson’s short article, I have read Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. My Australian husband points out that in his youth the example was “eats, roots and leaves,” “rooting” being an activity engaged in by consenting adults. This accounts for why official Canadian Olympic Team gear achieved instant collectibility during the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, having been designed by and bearing the logo of a popular Canadian sports-wear company.
Kaaren Brown
Kingston, Ontario

Cold Comfort
I am not sure what Michael Adams was driving at in his article “Continental Divide” (April/May). Why should our current prime minister “draw strength” from some bland platitudes about Canadian autonomy delivered by Richard M. Nixon three decades ago – and probably, in any event, ghosted by William Safire or some other speech writer? Why should Canadians take much comfort in Adams’s not-so-surprising finding that, despite the astonishing level of economic integration since that time, we’ve kept our socially progressive values intact? This is as absurd as saying that rape isn’t so bad as long as you don’t enjoy it. Given that our two major federal parties are led, respectively, by (1) the former self-appointed leader of a taxpayer revolt whose policies are virtually indistinguishable from those of the U.S. Republicans, and (2) our country’s most notorious tax evader, who starved social programs for nearly a decade, I’m wondering if the coming federal election will prove that Canadians actually do enjoy it.
David Berry
Victoria

Correction: Houshang Bouzari (Larry Krotz, “Houshang’s Promise,” June) was offered the ambassadorship to Venezuela, but did not serve, and he occupied the same cell that once held Iran’s present spiritual leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, not the Ayatollah Khomeini. We regret the errors.