A Pearl Anniversary

When I finished my PhD, I had absolutely no prospects of finding employment in academia, because everything I was turned out to be an obstacle: a French Canadian male specializing in Canadian political history — at the very bottom on anyone’s hiring list. So when I was offered a decent job in government, I seized it.

I joined the Ministry of Intergovernmental Affairs as a policy adviser not long after the Meech Lake Accord. And even as I was learning innumerable lessons about the policy process, the nature of bureaucratic leadership, and tricks of statecraft, I was grumpy. Here I was writing memoranda, responding to correspondence, scanning articles for tidbits of intelligence on above-the-fold topics such as constitutional change, free trade, and the emerging issues of environmental protection, and I saw nothing of the richness of these many debates in Canadian newspapers and magazines.

I was and still am a voracious reader of periodicals. I swallowed...