OTTAWA -- The elderly man sat in front of me, his rheumy eyes and round, ruddy face giving me no inkling of what he was thinking. His hands were neatly folded in his lap. I had been told he was a home boy and I, a kid reporter at the Winnipeg Tribune, was supposed to interview him.

I'd been given half an hour to look up home children in the Tribune's library. Apparently, they were orphans and other children brought over by charities to stay with Canadian families and work as domestics or on farms. Some of them were as young as five.

I only learned later that Alex, the home boy I was supposed to interview, had been harshly treated in various homes; that he had been told endlessly to sit quietly with his hands folded; that his keepers -- all devoted Christians, I'm sure -- had drained most of the joy and vitality out of him.

I asked some questions; he answered quietly in monosyllables. The interview was a failure because I wasn't prepared.

Decent people should be offended by the fact that a national agency will permit the reading of a terrorist manifesto next weekend at the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City as part of a series of readings to commemorate the 1759 battle that altered the course of Canadian history.

The manifesto in question was issued in October 1970 by the Front de Liberation du Quebec following the kidnapping of British diplomat James Cross and Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte, who was subsequently murdered. The FLQ was responsible for more than 200 bombings in Quebec during the 1960s, causing the deaths of at least five people. It was all done in the name of creating an independent Marxist Quebec.

The National Battlefields Commission, the same group that cancelled plans for a major re-enactment of the battle because of fears of a violent backlash, a decision for which it should be ashamed, has said it will allow the reading of the FLQ Manifesto, but was quick to point out that it does not endorse the document. That kind of courage is admirable, although it's unfortunate it was not in evidence when the commission backed down from plans for the historical re-enactment.

Decent people should be offended that the manifesto will get a public airing at the commemorative event -- Montreal singer and sovereigntist Luck Mervil has even been asked to perform the reading -- but it would be a violation of Canadian values to ban it from the stage.