David Long is a Partner in Oxford Petroleum Research Associates (Opra) and specialises in the operation and development of oil and gas markets. He is a regular contributor to newsletters published by Petroleum Argus Ltd, and research reports published by the Centre for Global Energy Studies (CGES) in London. His interests include the development and application of new trading techniques in the oil and gas industries and he has been involved in the preparation of training material on swaps and options and development of computer software for analysing oil price behaviour. David began his career with BP in 1977, where he worked in Corporate Planning and Supply Departments. He spent two years… on secondment at the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, studying the development of forward paper markets in oil, before joining the institute as a Research Fellow from 1986 to 1989.
When I first met Canadian history, as a student in a convent school in the outskirts of Winnipeg, it was generally accepted that Canada was a large new country with little history. In the words of William Lyon Mackenzie King in 1936, when he was Liberal Prime Minister, "if some countries have too much history, we have too much geography." History was perceived as a written discipine, which in the case of Canada meant that it began with the arrival of writing---i.e, Europeans. It wasn't until I discovered that I had Metis ancestry that I began to wonder about Canada before Europeans. As I learned more about that distant and too-often ignored past, my country took on a whole new aspect.… Exploring its history became a personal quest, all the more focussed because the heritage of my mixed ancestry had been reinforced during my adolescent years by living on the land in Manitoba's north, hunting and trapping. It was through a series of lucky breaks that I was able to go to university, at Father Athol Murray's Notre Dame College in Wilcox, SK, from there to become a journalist and finally, after being blessed with more good fortune, a professor of history at the University of Alberta. Although now retired, I am still passionate about researching and writing the Aboriginal aspect of Canadian history.