Stephen Lewis

Last week, in honor of Canada Day, I decided to whip off a list of The Top Ten Reasons We Here in The Great White North Should Be Both Proud and Ashamed of Being Canadian.

However, I soon realized that it wasn't something that could simply be whipped off in a few minutes, so I decided to take a few more days to think about it and here, finally, is my official list of the top ten things I love and hate about this country:

How do you solve a problem like Benny
How do you catch an ideologue and pin him down
How do you find a word that means Benny
Small-minded, doctrinaire, a clown?

       - Mr. Rodgers and MC Hammerstein, "Benny"

Ok, Benny The Pontificator is at it again and this time he's pontificating on how it'd be way better to die of AIDS than to ever even consider using a condom. He even went as far as to state that condoms "can actually increase the problem of AIDS". And he said all this on a trip this week to AIDS-ravaged sub-Saharan Africa. Seriously.

Let me ask you something, how often does a person get a chance to meet one of their heroes in person? And I don't mean a hero in the Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Robert DeNiro, Meryl Streep, Wayne Gretzky, or Pele vein either. I mean a real, inspirational, clearly-making-the-world-a-whole-lot-better sort of hero. Someone without whom many more people would be suffering or even dying. I'm talking about a hero like Stephen Lewis.