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I'm going to be a pain in the bum here and speak candidly about my experience in both Canadian and American universities regarding composition. I first became interested in composition and pedagogy when I perceived (early in my undergraduate career at U of T), a conspicuous lack in these areas. This was a naive untutored response, mind you. I actually asked my professors where they got their pedagogical training and was summarily dismissed as an idiot. Later, even though I was considered to be a good writer, I took a composition course wanting to become a better, more confident writer, but finally had to drop it--it was a sixth course which didn't count toward my English major or my other degree requirements and which I was actively discouraged from completing. Personal circumstances took me to Southern California some years later, where I found kindred spirits in an MA program that was considered a premiere training ground for two-year college instructors in the region. The "general academic standards" were lower than I had experienced at Toronto, but the fact that thinking about teaching and writing was not only accepted but encouraged won me over. I'm now a PhD candidate at Penn State which has both high academic standards and a sense of responsibility to teach writing and teach teaching, and am more perplexed and dismayed than ever to find that many Canadian universities and/or departments continue to ignore these responsibilities. I also think (not without prejudice perhaps), that writing centers and writing in and across the disciplines programs *should* be viewed as a supplemental to rather than a substitute for an academic and professional writing curriculum. The argument that Canadian universities are generally more advanced in rhetoric and composition because they've invested in writing centers or WAC/WID programs *rather than* composition courses is frankly unpersuasive. I think that rhetoric and compositionists regardless of nationality should be working seriously toward optimal pedagogical conditions. The best universities--wherever--have universal curricular writing requirements, well-developed writing centers, *and* writing across the disciplines programs. The "either or" argument is simply a cop out in my mind. Call me a brain-washed, Americanized Canadian, but I'm not advocating the "American system," I'm just trying to fight for what I see and experienced as a distinctly *Canadian* academic and ethical problem/challenge. This is not to say that Canadians don't have a hell of a lot to offer at the 4 C's or to the international rhet/comp community. I just don't think we should base our ethos on "we don't do freshman comp and we're proud of it" and accept the status quo into the bargain. Instead we could talk, for example, about how we are trying to change these circumstances (if we are) and how the need for and/or value of teaching composition can be articulated in the new millenium, which should interest anyone in a university under economic contraint (a pretty universal condition these days I should guess).