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Howdy Russ, A minor note: your reply came in my box before my original message! You might guess as to my motivation in the first point: I sometimes think that Canadians too often take on the concerns of American public life unthinkingly. We too often talk about American problems and preoccupations as if they are ours. We've got enough problems in Canada without taking on our neighbour's. That's all. As to the second point, I think a reasonable person can be opposed to affirmative action -- mnay reasonable people are. Part of me is. I don't have black and white views on this, but my experience in Canada and Nigeria tells me that well-meaning positive discrimination measures come with a cost, or rather two kinds of cost: there's a cost to members of the non-preferred group (e.g., a Christian male applying for medicine in Nigeria) and there's a cost to the notion of human rights (e.g., colour-blind, gender-blind, religion-blind rights). Whenever we give preferred treatment to someone because they are a member of a group, we are chipping away at an important idea. The idea is that people have rights not because of their genes or skin colour, but by dint of being human. It's a lot more complext than this, but a reasonable person can be opposed to "affirmative action." Eric's assumption that CASLL members would march to the cause makes me think that he thinks of his audience as homogenous and sharing his values, values that are clearly contentious. Cheers, Jamie