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The banner at the top of my website says I am a “scholar, writer, computer geek.” As a good little scholar, when I write something based on other sources, especially if I quote them, I must give as close to a scholarly citation as I can. The point is that you’re not supposed to have to take my word for anything. You can go to the original sources and check things out for yourself.

There are rules for conventional scholarly sources like journal articles, technical reports, books and book chapters, and even “private communication,” such as what you heard from a friend over coffee break. But for more recent forms of writing, we have to come up with new conventions.

I’ve been citing websites for quite a while, which typically involves just giving page title, author and publication date if known, and a link to the web page. That is sometimes problematic, because some sites don’t provide absolute URLs, but require that you navigate from a homepage down through links that keep modifying your browser cookies to keep track of various things, such as whether you have climbed over their paywall. Fortunately, I haven’t had to deal with those yet, but I could probably justify not bothering to cite them, or using “private communication.” Perhaps one really needs to describe the navigation path, but life is too short.

Some website links, such as Wikipedia, take you to pages that will change over time. So for a web link, I ought to include the date on which I read the page, so you could use the internet archive (the Wayback Machine) to find the version that I was talking about. So far on this site I haven’t been especially careful, but most of my links in articles about writing are to blog posts that don’t change, at least not much.

I have now reached the point where for the first time I want to cite quotations in an e-book. For quotations from a conventional book, you put the prose in quotes and immediately cite the book and the page number. The trouble is, on my Kobo reader, the page numbers depend on the font size you are using. So far the best I can think of is to refer to a citation as “page 18 of 387” and force you to do the math to figure out where it will be with your favorite font size where your last page is 517.

If anyone has a better idea, let me know.

Yesterday was September 11, the anniversary of the inciting incident for Canada to join a war for the first time in five and a half decades. I’ve been reflecting on what that decision meant for my country, especially since that war ultimately proved futile.

In the view of many of my fellow Canadians, that decision compromised our post-1956 commitment to peacekeeping. We have a proud history as warfighters, but we don’t celebrate that as much as some other countries do.

At the time, we didn’t really have much of a choice. After the terrorist attack, the USA invoked Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty (the only time in history to this point where anyone used it). That article obligates all member nations to come to the aid of any member who suffered an armed attack. We perhaps could have “aided” without armed force, but the political pressure at the time was enormous.

It made more sense at the start: the Taliban refused to turn over Bin Laden, and an invasion might have seemed like the only way to get him quickly, before he could carry out another attack. Ultimately, though, he was taken out by a small elite team after being found by years of application of conventional spy craft. And the Taliban wound up back in charge.

I started thinking about all of this last week. It wasn’t that the 9/11 anniversary was imminent. Coincidentally, we had started a rewatch of Flashpoint, a CTV series about a fictional Toronto SWAT team somewhat based on a real segment of the local police.  Sam, the team rookie, had been a member of Canada’s elite special ops group, JTF2, and the side story was about an army buddy who had just committed suicide overseas. A teammate asked him if he was “going up to the Highway.”

Just about any Canadian paying attention to the news in that decade would know what she meant: the Highway of Heroes, a segment of the 401 between the exit nearest to the Trenton air force base and the one for the Toronto coroner’s office, along which most of our Afghanistan war dead made their last journey home. Long before the Powers That Be put up highway signs, ordinary people would crowd every overpass to honour our fallen as the processions drove slowly underneath. There was no fanfare, no ceremony, no big expression of the grief we felt. Just people quietly gathering.

At the time, in proportion to the size of our respective militaries, Canadian and Dutch soldiers were doing most of the dying. Those deaths were few in absolute numbers, but that meant that every one was noticed and deeply felt by many who never knew those who made the ultimate sacrifice.

The USA has massive memorials to their soldiers, out in public view. Our equivalent is much quieter, out of sight. In a very tall annex, front and centre in any picture of the Parliament Buildings, there is a small ground-level chamber. Its walls are lined with several large tomes, protected by glass covers, listing every identifiable member of the Canadian Forces killed in any of our few wars. Staff turn a page in each book every day, and inform any known descendants when their loved one’s name will soon appear.

It seems to me very Canadian that the annex is called the Peace Tower.

Last Wednesday (June 18, 2025) I finished clearing out my filing cabinets in my old office in Goodwin Hall, which means I have fulfilled my last obligation to Queen’s University. The School of Computing staff has graciously offered to move the few things I want to keep over to a retirement office in Sutherland Hall.

I am not sure how long I will keep active, technically, in retirement; many retirees drift (or run screaming) away after a short while. But I still have several projects that might be fun to work on, and access to the University library system can serve to support some things that I rarely worked on while subject to Publish or Perish pressure.

I had quite a few regrets when I retired at the end of 2023, but those have mostly faded. The remaining one is that, though I have been academically inclined for my entire life (since before even Kindergarten), I was never so narrowly focused that the “inquire into interesting ideas” part of my mindset matched what is needed to thrive on the research side of the job.

Apparently, according to some people, I turned into a fantastic undergraduate chair and curriculum coordinator, which was a lot more helpful to a lot more people than any research I would ever have done.

I have long thought that it could be useful to young academics if I were to capture my experiences in a short book, called something like Academic Life: A Survival Guide, about what being an academic is really like. The value, in my opinion, is that I would write from the perspective of someone who survived, but didn’t feel like he thrived. It could be helpful if that made it more realistic than some of what I have read about university life over the years.

I do wonder how long it would be useful, since I have heard some people (including a board member of a different university) opine that classic universities can’t survive much longer in their current form. But in retirement, all that really matters is whether I would enjoy writing it.

I would just hope that at least one person gets something out of reading it.

There’s a federal election in Canada on Monday, April 28, 2025. Back on January 6, when Justin Trudeau announced his eventual resignation as Prime Minister, my American-born wife asked me to explain how transitions of power worked in Canada. We quickly realized thing were more complicated and, to an American, confusing, than I initially thought. I wrote up some explanations, to which she responded “my head hurts!” So here I am again, trying to explain things to Americans who might know little or nothing about civics in Canada.

If you want a conventional explanation there are plenty of sites that lack my feeble attempts at humour:

• The Elections Canada website is the ultimate source, by the people who actually run the elections. It’s bilingual, so your first choice is the English or the French version.
• Wikipedia explains things in its usual mostly coherent and boring style, with links to a lot of related stuff.

Selecting a Prime Minister

The Prime Minister (PM) is the Head of Government, which is sort of like a combination of the top people in the American Executive branch (president, vice president, and cabinet members) and a subset of the legislative branch (Congress, specifically the House of Representatives), because that’s the way parliamentary systems based on the British model work. The prime minister and cabinet members in Canada are members of parliament (the House of Commons) as well as having executive responsibilities.

The American president is both head of state and somewhat equivalent to a head of government in the British sense. Other countries generally completely separate the head of state and head of government. In Britain, at the moment the head of state is King Charles, and the head of government (prime minister) is Keir Starmer of the Labour party. In many other countries the two positions are president and prime minister.

Canadians don’t directly elect a prime minister, much as they might want to. He or she is appointed by the Governor General (GG) to whom the Head of State, the current monarch of Canada (currently always the same as the monarch of England) delegates their power to select a Prime Minister. The whole system has a very long history, evolving over hundreds of years from the time when there were (nearly) absolute monarchs deriving their legitimacy (such as it was) from the divine right of kings.

The Governor General selects a new prime minister within a few days after one of two things happens:

• An election is held.
• The governing party selects a new leader.

The GG always picks the leader of the plurality party: the one with the most seats in the House of Commons in Parliament (I don’t know what happens if there is a tie). Theoretically, he or she can pick anybody, but at the federal level, since the constitutional crisis of 1926 (the King-Byng Affair), it’s always been the leader of the plurality party. There was a minor hiccup in Ontario a few decades ago but that’s irrelevant at the moment.

So, on March 9, Mark Carney was selected as leader of the then-governing Liberal Party. He did not become prime minister immediately; that happened on March 14, when Mary Simon, the current Governor General, called on him to form a government. In the meantime, Justin Trudeau (or, Trudeau II, since his father was also PM) was still prime minister.

As of this writing, Carney does not have a seat in the Commons (see above: the GG can pick anyone) and isn’t guaranteed to win one in the election. But he’s still prime minister, if the Liberals win, until he resigns in embarrassment and his party selects yet another leader. He just can’t participate in debates in Parliament – he has to watch from the gallery overlooking the House of Commons.

The Election Campaign

The Governor General decides when there will be an election, more or less, but there are constraints. The Constitution calls for an election at least every 5 years, but the GG can call one earlier. There’s a “fixed election date” law, but it’s a law, not a constitutional requirement, and the GG can ignore it. And she just did, since our next fixed election date was supposed to be October 27, 2025, but she had an excellent excuse: the Prime Minister requested one. The GG pretty much always does what the PM asks (about which, more in a hypothetical future post).

Unlike the American system, in theory people don’t obviously campaign constantly, starting immediately after the previous election. You can’t campaign until the Governor General “drops the writ” (a popular but completely inaccurate phrase). What happens is:

• On the advice of the Prime Minister, the Governor General issues a proclamation of an election date (what people generally mean when they say the GG “drops the writ”), which must take place 36-50 days after the proclamation. That’s now April 28.
• Elections Canada issues the actual writs, plural, one to the returning officer of each riding (our equivalent of an American congressional district). I’m not going to look up how returning officers are selected.
• There are limits on how much political parties, and even third parties, can spend on campaigning. In theory there isn’t any of this Citizens United, billionares-have-the-right-to-buy-elections stuff; I’m sure rich people have ways around this, but maybe I’m too cynical in my old age (70.5 and counting).

But, really, every obnoxious speech in Question Period should probably be considered to be campaigning, as well as every interview with a party leader, and every political editorial in a newspaper, and those can happen at any time.

How Voting Works

You get to vote if you are a citizen and Elections Canada knows who you are. Elections Canada is an independent agency that is not (or at least less) susceptible to political pressure. They set riding boundaries (subject to constitutional constraints) and run the actual elections. Gerrymandering and voter suppression are really hard in Canada.

They send you a card via snail mail; you take it to your polling station, show it and one piece of government-issued ID, and you can vote. You can claim the right to vote at the polling place, but I’ve never needed to learn that part of the process.

By American standards the process is very fast! You walk into an almost-empty school gym or apartment lobby, present your elector card (see above), get handed a ballot with maybe six names, walk over to a table with a cardboard shield for privacy, carefully make an X with a pencil, and go back to hand your ballot to someone who puts it in a box. When we had our first election after my wife and I moved to Kingston, she thought I must have forgotten my ID or something when I came home within about fifteen minutes. Cities larger than my hometown, Kingston, might have longer waiting lines in some ridings, but I have never heard of multi-hour lineups like in many voter-suppressed American congressional districts. Toronto residents: is it different where you are?

Or, you could loudly Decline Your Ballot, handing it back to the bewildered person who expects to collect ballots normally. This sort of means “none of the above” and is a form of protest a little more brazen than spoiling your ballot; they have to count and report how many people do this. I sometimes dream of None of The Above being able to win, meaning “try again with a different bunch of choices; none of these dudes can run again for 5 years.” My dear departed American father-in-law would have loved to have this option.

Who Do We Vote For

Yes, I know, that whole thing about the Excited States of America electing dogcatchers is a joke other countries make. But, depending on the state, they elect sheriffs, judges, district attorneys, and a bunch of other officers. In Canada, the equivalents are all appointed. All we vote for are members of the federal and provincial parliaments, mayors, city councillors, and members of school boards – the latter of whom have a lot less power than in the USA. In Ontario, school funding is set by, and mostly supplied by, the province, so there is less of an issue of disparity between rich and poor districts.

Is this better or worse? There are trade-offs. In Canada the people don’t have a say in who takes on these roles that can have a profound effect on their lives. On the other hand, those office-holders don’t have to play politics to stay in their jobs, which means they don’t have to bow to political pressure. If they’re dedicated to their jobs, and not corrupted by other factors, they can make unpopular decisions that might actually be the right thing to do.

But they might not.

More Confusion Deferred

There is a lot more Americans probably don’t know about Canadian civics, and I might write about them someday. For example,

• How Parliament works, particularly how the Executive (the Cabinet) overlaps with the Legislature (the Commons and Senate).
• What the PM’s actual powers are (probably too many).
• Political parties (by American standards, most of us are left-wing crazies, even, at times, some people in the most right-wing parties).
• Minority governments.
• Anything my foreign friends ask about when they read this.

For Potential Immigrants

Some of my American friends are seriously considering moving to Canada because of What Is Going On Right Now. Getting to the point of citizenship and ability to elect people is beyond the scope of this post. What is relevant: If you’re 55 or over, you no longer need to pass a civics test to become a citizen. Yay! Sorry to all of you under 55.

My website and social media bios identify me as “scholar, writer, computer geek.” Now that I’m slowly becoming more active on BlueSky (https://bsky.app/profile/davidalexlamb.bsky.social) and Mastodon (@davidalexlamb@universeodon.com), I figured I should say a bit more about what all of that means, so people have enough information to decide if they want to follow me.

Computer geek is pretty straightforward. I’ve been programming computers (both professionally and for fun) since the fall of 1970 and have advanced degrees in Computer Science, including the PhD that got me a job as a professor. I play video games as one of my major recreational activities.

Scholar used to be straightforward: it goes with the “publish or perish” side of being an academic. If you look for things I’ve written, you’ll find professional publications from my time as a professor: a textbook and relatively few journal papers (hence my retirement at the end of 2023 at a lower rank than Full Professor). I doubt I’ll ever publish in a journal again. Am I still a scholar?

Writer requires more thought. I’ve definitely written things, but you won’t find much recently except blog posts. I’ve been writing fiction since 2006, when I wanted something to exercise my brain while on disability leave for chronic depression. It’s all in the form of partly-completed NaNoWriMo projects, plus a couple of rejected short stories. So you won’t find any of my fiction. Am I still a writer?

Mary Robinette Kowal says “you’re a writer if you write” even if you aren’t published. She discourages her students from calling themselves “beginning writers” or even “unpublished writers.” J. Michael Strazynski, on the other hand, wouldn’t have considered me one, even at the height of my professional career; he apparently has said “You’re not a writer if you write; you’re a writer if it’s the only thing you can do.” So, deciding whether I am or have ever been a writer depends on where in that spectrum you sit.

The reason I list both scholar and writer in my bio is that I am still exercising my scholarly skills, and applying them to writing. Over the years I’ve written several blog posts that amount to short scholarly essays. When I learn enough about something, I

• find a lot of sources on the subject and read them;
• make notes on what I have read;
• organize them into a survey on the topic;
• include links to all my sources so you can read them yourself and decide if my summary is reasonable; and
• try to provide some original insight to the topic (which is what makes it “original research” rather than “a list of stuff”).

These are pretty much the instructions I always gave my students when assigning a term paper. So I’m still a scholar (aside from not having to go through peer review, which is a whole complicated Thing to evaluate).

You can find most of these on my website, such as (in reverse chronological order):

• What I’ve Learned About Mastodon This Month
• Unifying Three Story Structures
• First Acts, Chapters, Pages, and Lines
• Character Wounds and Lies
• Writing Engaging Characters
• What is a Bridging Conflict?
• Two posts about writing mysteries.
• Quirks for Characters

There may be others, and they’ll be easier to find when I get tag search implemented so you can look for “survey.” There are other posts about writing, but I don’t count them as scholarly unless they summarize and link to sources; opinion pieces don’t count.

Scholar, writer, computer geek: that’s me. I hope you find my blogs and social media posts worth reading.