Mr. Speaker, last Saturday night, Orillia's literary community gathered at the Geneva Park Conference Centre to award the 2013 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. As members may know, Leacock, Canada's most famous author of humour, made his summer home on Lake Couchiching near Orillia, the fictional town he called Mariposa.
This year, the Leacock Associates have awarded the medal for humour to Cassie Stocks of Edmonton for her novel Dance, Gladys, Dance. She joins a distinguished group of Leacock medal winners, including W. O. Mitchell, Farley Mowat, Mordecai Richler and Stuart McLean, but even more remarkable is that this is Cassie's first novel.
I would like to thank the Leacock Associates and TD Financial Group for recognizing these outstanding contributions to Canadian literature each year. I invite all hon. members to join me in congratulating the 2013 winner of the Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, Cassie Stocks.