I did it. It was unintentional, but I did it. It was stupid and shoddy.

My last column contained questions for the Pope that quoted passages mostly from Leviticus.

The slight acknowledgement I gave for the source of the column was not enough: some readers have believed that I wrote the questions myself when I did not. Some readers knew that I had not written them and some have accused me of plagiarism.

I had no idea the questions had been floating around the Internet for months or years; I saw them only once, in an email that gave no source, no Internet address for them. When I wrote last week that they had come from the Internet I had no idea where they came from. I did no search or research; it seemed like a good idea to pass them on.

It was not my intent to fool anyone into thinking I had written the questions; of course, most people are connected to the web and many are much better traveled on it than I; in my haste and glee to pass on something I thought funny and timely, I did not stop to give enough attention to letting people know I was passing something along.

I don’t want to believe I am a plagiarist. I was plagiarized once. I gave a speech in a high school on the first anniversary of the killings in 1989 at Ã0/00cole Polytechnique in Montreal. A teacher asked me for a copy of the text, and a few months later huge chunks of it were printed under his name in a magazine. I went to him and asked why he had done it, and he told me the writing was so good he couldn’t help himself. I felt badly then; this is worse.

My columns have been published in Halifax’s Sunday Daily News for four and a half years. In Halifax, concerns similar to those on rabble.ca have been raised about this last column.

I spoke with my editor yesterday. He agreed that the slight acknowledgement as to the source of the questions was nowhere near enough.

I asked him, “Am I a plagiarist?” and he told me yes. He added that The Daily News of course cannot be seen to at all condone plagiarism and so regretfully he would no longer carry my columns.

It is a very sad thing when a semi-smart person like me slips up and does something so incredibly stupid and wrong. I am in shock as the magnitude of my error becomes more and more clear. I am trying to feel better by convincing myself this is better than running someone over or flicking a cigarette butt into a dry forest, but “plagiarist” is a new label I find terrible to have to pin on.