Kevin Potvin, who was acclaimed last month as the federal Green candidate in Vancouver-Kingsway, made a "revolting confession" - in his own words - on November 28, 2002. That's when Mr. Potvin published an editorial in The Republic of East Vancouver - the alternative newspaper he founded - discussing his immediate reaction to the 9-11 tragedy.

"When I saw the first tower cascade down into that enormous plume of dust and paper, there was a little voice inside me that said, "Yeah!" When the second tower came down the same way, that little voice said, "Beautiful!" When the visage of the Pentagon appeared on the TV with a gaping and smoking hole in its side, that little voice had nearly taken me over, and I felt an urge to pump my fist in the air," wrote Mr. Potvin.

"This is a revollting confession," he admitted in the editorial. "But it's what happened."

Mr. Potvin went onto add, "I know lots of people were killed. But then again, I see lots of people getting killed whenever I turn the TV news on, and frankly, it doesn't really get to me anymore...Let's face facts. If the news on the morning of September 11 was that 3,000 Tanzanians or Burmese had been killed, they wouldn't have broken in on regularly scheduled programming, or cancelled football games, and there'd be no conversation about it the next day. No one would say the world changed. It's been a long time since lots of people getting killed is, in itself, news, and we all know this, and we all live comfortably with it."

"The only reason September 11 merits so much attention is because the targets were so supremely symbolic. Corporatism and militarism were struck that morning, and that's why it's such big news...I recognized these facts on that fateful day and so did a lot of other people, and I know I wasn't alone when I heard that little voice inside me say, 'Yeah, beautiful!'"

Asked for his reaction to the four-year-old editorial, Mr. Potvin told Public Eye, "There's a lot of sentences there that could be stripped of their context and be pretty damning. I guess I could do the slippery thing and say I'll go home and read it. Or I could also give you a wishy-washy answer. But, listen man, I've got to be honest with you. I totally endorse that. I want to caution you though, I endorse it in its totality. I know what I write. I write controversially all the time. And you can go anywhere online and find in my archives a sentence that is pretty condemning. And this one certainly has a whole bunch of them that are pretty bad sounding on their own...But the concept (of the editorial) is people get killed all the time and we don't get bothered by that."

Public Eye was first alerted to Mr. Potvin's controversial editorial by one of our astute readers. Earlier, we reported Mr. Potvin was encouraging would-be supporters to come meet him and talk "about 9-11 truth and implications for Canadian foreign policy, at Beans Cafe, 3365 Cambie Street, Friday April 13 at 1 PM."