Steve Burgess has been writing columns for The Tyee since we started up nearly 10 years ago. Along the way he's made his share of puns, some crappier than others. But one of his latest has drawn what we think just might be the best letter to the editor The Tyee has received. Here it is in its entirety:

"On Sept. 19, Steve Burgess called the new Quebec charter a veritable 'Origin of Feces'. As the author of The Origin of Feces: What Excrement Tells Us about Evolution, Ecology and a Sustainable Society (ECW, 2013), I resent that. My book is progressivism at its most exalted, and the comparison gives the charter a high status it does not deserve. -- David Waltner-Toews"

We went to Waltner-Toews' website and discovered he's quite a guy:

"David, a veterinarian, epidemiologist, scientist, and popular author, specializes in diseases other animals share with people, international development, and ecosystem approaches to health. He is the author or coauthor of 17 books of poetry, fiction, nonfiction and recipes, including The Chickens Fight Back: Pandemic Panics and Deadly Diseases That Jump from Animals to People (Greystone Books, 2007), Food, Sex and Salmonella: Why Our Food Is Making Us Sick (Greystone Books, 2008) and The Origin of Feces: What Excrement Tells Us About Evolution, Ecology, and a Sustainable Society (ECW Press, May 2013). As "Tante Tina", he has also been known to don a dress and kerchief and to pontificate on the trials of being a Mennonite farm woman in a men's world gone mad.

"A University Professor Emeritus at University of Guelph, he was founding president of Veterinarians without Borders/ Vétérinaires sans Frontières – Canada and of the Network for Ecosystem Sustainability and Health, and a founding member of Communities of Practice for Ecosystem Approaches to Health in Canada. He is the recipient of the inaugural award for contributions to ecosystem approaches to health from The International Association for Ecology and Health."

We took the professor's protest to Burgess, who responded:

"I wasted no time in apologizing to Dr. Waltner-Toews for my execrable oversight. I only hope that my passing joke will act as fertilizer on his sales figures."

David Beers is editor of The Tyee.