Nothing to do with my fiction writing, but I want to mark the passing of my old boss, Len Marchand, who died today. He was a trail-blazer, the first "status Indian" elected to the Canadian House of Commons who became a cabinet minister in the Pierre Trudeau government and then a senator. I was his speechwriter from 1976 to 1978 and later helped him prepare his memoirs: Breaking Trail.

The son of illiterate parents, raised on a small reserve in the BC Interior, Len managed to go to high school when it was illegal for First Nations people to attend public schools. He earned a BSc from UBC and a Masters from the University of Idaho and would have gone for his PhD if his friends hadn't persuaded him to spend a couple of years in Ottawa as a minister's assistant. When he'd done that, they urged him to run as a sacrificial-lamb candidate against the most powerful Conservative MP in BC, just to be the first of his kind to run for Parliament.

But it was 1968, the year of Trudeaumania, and Len found himself the new Liberal MP for Kamloops. He never did get the PhD, but he broke trail for all the other aboriginal people who followed his lead into politics.

He was a brave and intelligent man and I am proud to have known him.