Happy trails. Those two words, sincerely expressed, marked my e-mailed departure from The Gazette’s op-ed page early last month, days after the third time my weekly column had been spiked in recent months.

And I meant it in a relatively lighthearted way. Except for the two local thought police in the CanWest ministry of truth — those being editor-in-chief Peter Stockland and recently appointed editorial page editor Brian Kappler — I bear no rancor toward the people who continue to toil under exceedingly difficult circumstances at the paper.

Most journalists there are professionals whose interest is in bringing original stories and new perspectives to their readers — exactly what you would expect of a cosmopolitan big-city daily – but one that is increasingly impossible under the paranoid command economy of CanWest Global’s Southam newspaper chain.

The irony, if you can call it that, was that none of the censored columns were on the taboo topics that generally get writers, editors and publishers demoted or fired from Asper-owned papers these days.

Despite e-mail invitations from readers to do so, I issued no pleas to recognize Palestinians and other adherents to Islam as something more than subhuman; I made no calls for Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chretien’s resignation; above all, I failed to utter a single criticism of the Southam editorial-cum-untouchable party line.

Those failures were borne of the foregone conclusion that those pieces would never get published. Call it self-censorship. That’s exactly what it was.

No, the third strike came over an interview with the internationally recognized activist Vandana Shiva, hooked to her appearance last month at an anti-GM foods conference in Toronto. In my own mind, getting an interview with Shiva was something of a coup. And I’m pretty certain she’s never before been quoted in the pages of The Gazette.

Shiva’s ground-breaking work in her native India consists of travelling the subcontinent to gather and archive naturally developed crop seeds; Indian agriculture is now almost completely under the thumb of Monsanto and its monoculture of patented, genetically modified crops.

The genetic diversity of traditional Indian crops is being lost. And in the face of corporate domination of India’s desperately poor farmers, Shiva is performing a heroic service to India, and humankind in general.

This was the kind of story I was hired to bring to The Gazette’soverwhelmingly right-wing op-ed page two-and-a-half years ago. My mission was to provide an explicitly progressive perspective on the issues of the day, and to touch on topics that never see the light of a mainstream newspaper’s day.

I knew my status at the paper was strictly one of a progressive fig leaf (a tiny one at that, being limited to 700 words per week). But I viewed it as a small way to bring a little editorial diversity on issues I care deeply about, to Montreal readers whose daily fare consisted of a never-changing menu of neo-conservatism.

Kappler, however, had never heard of Shiva, nor did he think her credible. Considering his political biases, that wasn’t a great surprise, but he summarily killed the column before we even had a chance to discuss it. That was that.

As I thought about it, the spiking of the Shiva column provided an aptmetaphor for modern-day journalistic diversity in Canada. Ideas are like seeds. If planted in fertile ground they can grow in wildly diverse and wondrous ways. Under the corporate domination of the Aspers, however, there is a growing monoculture of mainstream ideas in Canada.

A single, patented version of sterile germplasm occupies an ever-greater space in the field of debate. Call it a Terminator seed. I highly doubt there was any direct instruction from Winnipeg to kill thisparticular column. But the atmosphere of censorship and intolerance the Aspers have encouraged throughout the chain has emboldened likeminded people, such as Kappler and Stockland (who pulled my initial post-September 11 column out of an exaggerated concern for American sensitivities).

Coming for the third time, and the second spike from Kappler in as many months, there was no rending of garments on my part. One gets accustomed to this sort of thing. And that’s exactly the sensation that told me it was time to give it up.

A few people have since told me they were disappointed in my decision, that there is more to gain by staying at the front and fighting the good fight. I absolutely agree, and that attitude informed my decision to continue on in the previous two instances. But I knew that my future efforts for the paper would suffer from even more self-censorship and second-guessing. And Montreal readers, a diverse and demanding lot, deserve a lot more than that.