Some delicious and very undiplomatic excerpts from a farewell report to the British Foreign Office from retiring British High Commissioner to Canada, Lord Moran, back in 1984.

It's titled "Last Impressions of Canada" and much of it remains relevant today.

• Prime Minister Trudeau treated provincial premiers with contempt and provincial governments as if they were town councils.

• Main reason for Canadians joining political parties is to acquire power or a lucrative job. So political patronage flourishes. Politics runs on “jobs for the boys.”

• Level of debate in the House of Commons is low: the majority of Canadian ministers are unimpressive and a few we have found frankly bizarre.

 • The Canadian public expects very little from politicians and tends to shrug its shoulders when the press or television report yet another scandal.

• Canadians are a moderate, comfortable, people … very sensitive, especially to any expressed or implied British sneers about Canada as “boring", and perhaps somewhat lacking in self-confidence.

• Anyone who stands out at all from the crowd tends to be praised to the skies and given the Order of Canada at once.

• Canadians have squandered some of their resources. Clearly they have regarded them, in this vast country, as limitless. But they are wrong.

• Inuit are mere pensioners of the state. Canadians are filled with feeling of guilt about the Indian people. Canadian policy has been to give them a special privileged status and pay them vast subsidies which often cause them to give up working.

However, Lord Moran was generous enough to add "We shall miss in their different ways, the cry of the loon, as characteristic of Canada as the fish eagle's is of Africa, and the cheerful shopgirls and waitresses…who send us on our way with 'Take care' or 'Have a nice day'."

His Lordship's report ends:

I am Sir,
Yours faithfully,
Moran


(Samantha Jones is the nom de plume of a Canadian TV journalist whose erotic memoir, "My Life In The Great Sexual Window", can be downloaded from www.lulu.com or Amazon.)