I‘VE PUBLISHED academic articles and personal essays and poetry, but a genre into which some of my best effort has gone is the Air Canada Epistolary Vituperation. Last week, in an exercise of covering one’s bases, federal Minister of Labour Lisa Raitt asked the Canada Industrial Relations Board to deliberate the question, Does Air Canada provide an essential service? Anyone who has endured Canadian air travel in the past ten years knows the answer to that one: Air Canada barely provides any services at all, and provides them poorly at that. Hence my letters of complaint at their evident indifference and inattention to customers. (I once received a boilerplate response which proved my point in the first sentence — it began, “Dear Mrs. Spear … .” )

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