According to The New York Times, Donald Trump's transition team wanted to know: "Why should we spend funds on Africa when we are suffering here in the U.S.?" Curiously enough, most Americans probably would have agreed with Mr. Trump that this was a real question. But they all share an entirely false premise.

America and the rest of the rich world have actually been ripping off Africa for the past 700 years, ever since the Portuguese began the slave trade, all the while insisting that Africa has been the beneficiary of this relentless exploitation. It's been one of the great hoaxes of the past millennium.

Few of us could have been surprised by Romeo Dallaire's moving article in The Globe this weekend commenting on the tragedy of Lionel Desmond, the former soldier with PTSD who murdered his family then took his own life. Lt.-Gen. Dallaire, now retired, is surely among Canada's most admired citizens, if not the most admired. I include myself among his ardent fans, and I hope that 2017 might be the time he finally escapes from the demons that have haunted him for the past 23 years. Lionel Desmond's ghastly case only stirs up those ghosts.

God gets even in her own sly way. How else could it be that exactly a three-minute saunter from gaudy Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue, just along 57th street, two different Manhattan art exhibits stand as a rebuke to all the malice Donald Trump represents?

One, called Nelson Mandela: The Artist, includes some of the art created by Mr. Mandela after he retired as South Africa's president, along with his ruminations about life. The other is called You Say You Want a Revolution: American Artists and the Communist Party, and is dedicated to the progressive American artists who were moved by the great social causes that roiled the world during the Great Depression and the Second World War.

The Prime Minister dispatched Governor General David Johnston to the Middle East recently on a mission that largely wasted everybody's time.

The GG was instructed to articulate the government's position favouring the creation of an independent Palestine living in peace next to Israel: "a two-state solution and a just, long-standing and comprehensive peace."

The GG's tour, so the media were informed, is part of the Liberal government's effort to "recalibrate" Canada's policy in the Middle East. Justin Trudeau promises a more "balanced" position after a decade of Pavlovian Conservative support for Israel in any and all circumstances.

Parliament's Special Committee on Electoral Reform has concluded that a referendum is the best way to determine Canadian public opinion about electoral reform. But the proposition raises many questions that have so far resulted in few answers. Supporters of a referendum have an obligation to show that it can realistically deliver a clear consensus.

Suddenly, though it's news to me, moving from First Past the Post to a different voting system is a really, really fundamental value question for Canadians. Suddenly the House of Commons, entrusted to make decisions about life and death, war and peace, can't be trusted with the largely technical question of how votes are cast and counted.

Fidel Castro stands in a long line of great socialist leaders who betrayed socialism. The list pretty well includes all of them, from Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin, to Mao Zedong and Chou En-lai, to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, to Mengistu in Ethiopia.

In the name of the beloved masses, these revolutionaries became the greatest mass murderers in history, responsible for genocide, famine, incalculable suffering, widespread torture and the deaths of tens of millions of workers for the crime of somehow displeasing their great leader.

Castro was not a mass murderer of the same order, though hundreds, maybe thousands, of opponents were executed in the early years. He also broke the hearts of the millions of Cubans who welcomed his revolution.

Canada ratified the United Nations Convention against Torture in 1987, yet a good number of Canadians have been tortured with the complicity of public officials. To be more precise: Torture -- physical, psychological or both -- has been inflicted by our prisons and our security and intelligence services on many Canadians -- a disproportionate number of them indigenous or people with a Middle Eastern background -- as well as on foreign citizens.

When examples of such incidents are exposed, Canadians are outraged. But only rarely are they revealed.

The reward of being a congenital pessimist is that one is rarely disappointed. Bad news is always around the next corner, just wait. But at least anticipating the worst often softens the blow when the worst arrives, as it so often does.

Attentive readers of this space may recall that in column after lugubrious column, I kept warning that Donald Trump could still pull it off. This was long after most pundits and pollsters were complacently counting him out. How desperately I wish I'd been wrong.

Along with countless others around the world, I wept when his victory was announced eight years ago, when he and his wife and the two girls walked out on that huge Chicago stage before hundreds of thousands of boisterous, ecstatic Americans.

But we too easily ignored what the results told us about his country. Despite being 72 years old with health issues and with the oblivious Sarah Palin as his running mate, Republican John McCain swept the white vote 55 to 43 per cent.

It's not just Trump. It's the entire Republican Party. Yet, almost half of all Americans support Trump, the Republicans, or both. What does this tell us about the state of the States? If we weren't all having a conniption about a Trump presidency, we'd be worried sick about whoever the Republican nominee had been.

Remember: 17 people originally ran for the Republican nomination. And as we are not often enough reminded, while none was quite as destructive and uniquely deplorable as Trump, all could boast peddling truly extreme and often ludicrous ideas. With only a few anxious days to go before the election, it's useful if we frighten ourselves even more with reminders of one of the reasons Trump won -- his opponents.