We must abolish vacuous political rhetoric. The success of Canada demands no less. Or something. At least you can argue with lurid exaggerations like Paul Martin telling the Liberal leadership convention "We stand together on the edge of historic possibility, at a moment that comes rarely in the life of a country. It is a time when destiny is ours to hold." (Bosh. Things are pretty quiet right now, except in the war on terror which we're ducking.) But what can I do with utter gibberish like the throne speech's, "The future of our children is, quite literally, Canada's future"?

It's not wrong, it's nonsense, because no one could conceivably retort "No, the past of our uncles is." Likewise Stephen Harper's statement, launching his bid to lead the Conservative Party, that "If I were prime minister, my priority would be clear: to secure a future for our children." As opposed to the guy who wants to secure a present for our grandparents?

Malcolm Muggeridge, a left-wing journalist until he came to his senses, furnished me with a pungent metaphor I can't print here for sententious nonsense like a column starting, "The Canadian people want answers in the Arar case." Really? All of them? If not, why do you say it? Or a Treasury Board president saying "These measures will help us build the Canada we want through investments in Canadians' priorities ..." (No, don't try to remember who said it, when, or which priorities built the Canada we want.) Or the Mulroney Tories' 1992 Steering Group on Prosperity report Inventing our Future: An Action Plan for Canada's Prosperity claiming "there is remarkable agreement on the challenges that confront our country ... Canadians everywhere share a similar vision of a prosperous Canada."

As Jeffrey Simpson once wrote, "Beware politicians - or journalists - who start any sentence with, 'Canadians want.' Invariably, what 'Canadians want' usually reflects what the speaker or writer wants." Indeed. So why not admit it?

I'm not shy about telling you what I want, or saying you should want it too. The crucial difference is that I'm not blind to, or offended by, the fact that plenty of intelligent, well-informed people will disagree with me until the Trump of Doom, to say nothing of the wacko recluse down the street who thinks gypsies with rubber-tipped mallets are breaking into his basement at night and installing second-hand equipment from Montreal.

What does offend me is a kind of upbeat malice that seeks to smother dissent with a non-optional hug. Consider "unacceptable" and the drumbeat of related absolutes. To say "should," "might consider" or "if ... then" invites discussion of real possibilities and consequences, and by extension the limits of the possible. A breathless "must," by contrast, invites the shaming of dissenters. As Inventing our Future ended its first chapter, "The time for further discussion and study is over. The time for action is now. Let's get going! Allons-y!" And when Martin Cauchon says gay marriage "reflects what we are as a society" you know where it leaves opponents. As Susan Riley says, "The Canadian public has no appetite for meddling moralists..." Canada: Love it or leave it. Thus Scott Brison didn't run for the leadership of the new CPC because of "a great sense of doubt that this new Conservative Party will, in fact, reflect the values of Canadians." So I guess we all have the same values. Except that guy with the gypsy issue. And the one-third of English Canadians who voted for the Alliance last time. But as Maude Barlow tells us, "in Canada there are elite think-tanks, business leaders and right-wing politicians who see medicare as an anachronism incompatible with the rules of a global economy. That's not what the people of Canada think. We know that because of what they told the Romanow Commission." As for those non-people who aren't with the program, well, they weren't invited to talk to the Romanow Commission. It might cause dissonance.

At least the McCarthy-era U.S. had a House Un-American Activities Committee you could see, and protest. Here we brand things un-Canadian to dispose of them through social, rather than intellectual, means. It's reflexive by now; Mr. Cauchon also urged marijuana decriminalization because "it's about time we do something as a country." I favour marijuana legalization because I don't think we all need to do the same thing as individuals. But that position acknowledges diversity, which could cause chaos. So if the country lights a big stogie, you will inhale.

Alternatively, we could set a new, though hardly demanding, standard for political utterances. First, it should be possible to understand them, meaning we can imagine a comprehensible dissenting statement. Second, and related, they should not deny the complexity of life by squeezing out, with an unnaturally tight smile, the very possibility of dissent.

Is it what "Canadians" want? I dare not say so. But I want it, and I think you should too.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

While we're on the subject of intelligence inquiries, I have an inquiry about intelligence. Is it possible that, as a rule, it is limited? I don't mean human intelligence, though even a cursory read of the newspapers would support that conclusion as well. I mean we should not expect, on Iraq, a level of clarity not previously attained by mortals. For instance, to this day we aren't sure whether Germany used biological weapons against humans during the First World War, as they feebly did against draft animals. And how about Pearl Harbor? The U.S. intelligence failure there was so spectacular that conspiracy theories persist to this day. But as my dissertation adviser noted, if the Japanese had struck the Panama Canal on Dec. 7, 1941, a retrospective combing through the raw intelligence data would have pointed strongly in that direction too.

Then there's Stalin's legendary failure to believe Hitler was about to attack him in 1941 despite many warnings. But it's only a legend; Stalin actually told the Red Army Academy graduation banquet on May 5, 1941, "There will be war, and the enemy will be Germany." I think attempts to hide his precise knowledge from Hitler, such as having a German communist who warned of the invasion shot, have confused analysts. (The unfortunate defector was actually shot after the invasion began, but that's bureaucracy for you.) Stalin had been preparing for years. He didn't need spies to tell him Hitler was treacherous and militaristic.

Consider, too, a famous Soviet intelligence success in 1941: Stalin's top agent in Tokyo saying Japan did not plan to attack the U.S.S.R., just in time to transfer troops from Siberia to stop the Nazis at the gates of Moscow. But of course the spy could not in principle know the Japanese wouldn't change their minds. All he could do was help confirm Stalin's hunch that the gamble made sense.

Doubtless there are intelligence successes we don't know about precisely because they succeeded. Far more often, analysts help confirm what was in any event probable. Even when it's not true. For instance, Stalin knew of western atomic research. On the other hand, the KGB spent years trying to locate the small group of capitalists who were the U.S. equivalent of the Politburo. Worse, they may have thought they'd succeeded.

Meanwhile, for decades the CIA drastically overestimated the Soviet economy, and underestimated their weapons programs. But not because they were unenlightened. Rather, like John Kenneth Galbraith, they had discarded their silly anti-communist prejudices. The CIA also didn't foresee the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, partly due to excessive Congressional restrictions on intelligence in the 1970s but also partly because it was such a foolish thing to do. Which the KGB also apparently didn't notice.

Then there's the intelligence failure of the 20th century: Nobody foresaw the collapse of the Soviet Union even a year in advance. I don't just mean the CIA. The KGB missed it too. Which is unfortunate as you'd think it would be a matter of some concern to the Politburo.

I do not wish to suggest that spies and analysts are fools. Their best efforts can still fail if "clients" refuse to listen to what they are being told, though we already know that's not what happened regarding Iraq. It's also hard to know whether key sources are really double agents (or insane) because any attempt to confirm their best stuff risks exposing them. But the fundamental problem is that life itself is highly unpredictable and therefore they can't predict it.

At least two people I respect, my colleague David Warren and the Mackenzie Institute's John Thompson, fear that the inquiries into intelligence about Iraq will become witch hunts. But I doubt people who believe in witches will be asked to serve on them. And as liberal commentators routinely utter absurdities about, say, the Kay Report quite unrelated to its text, why worry about them?

I do worry that the inquiries may succumb to the urge to recommend centralization of intelligence gathering when what we really need is robust diversity, even bureaucratic turf wars. If so, they will be driven in part by illusions about what intelligence can do. So remember: It wasn't just George Bush and Wesley Clark who didn't realize Iraq had no usable WMDs; neither did Saddam Hussein. Not even James Bond could have discovered it. A sound training in market economics was worth more than all the files in KGB headquarters in predicting the demise of the Soviet Union. And if you had read Mein Kampf you'd have know Hitler was a warmonger.

So I hope any intelligent intelligence panel will quickly see the limits of intelligence.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The inquiries into Iraq's lack of weapons of mass destruction are good news for the hawks. What a pity the doves will have nothing to contribute. The main focus of any inquiry must be how the intelligence could have been so wrong. As virtually every advocate of war with Iraq including me now concedes, Saddam Hussein did not have a working arsenal of WMDs. But virtually every Western intelligence agency was convinced he did. Not even opponents of military action like France's President Chirac denied it. They just disagreed about how to respond.

Here the left is letting itself, and us, down badly. Their jeering refrain has been that George Bush LIED! Not was mistaken, gullible or closed-minded. LIED! In November Jeffrey Simpson wrote in The Globe and Mail "We now all know what the majority of people outside the United States suspected before the invasion: that it rested on two large lies. There were no weapons of mass destruction ... There were no threatening links between ... Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda ... It's been fascinating to watch the evolution of U.S. discourse on Iraq once the two big lies became evident."

"Big lie" is not a phrase I myself would toss around lightly. Regardless, if Mr. Bush and Tony Blair were lying, they must have known the truth, which means there was no failure of intelligence to be investigated. The only question is why the president chose to lie that Saddam Hussein had huge stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons and if not disarmed "some day, some way, I guarantee you, he'll use the arsenal." Especially as that was President Bill Clinton in 1998.

If Mr. Bush or Mr. Blair had lied we would have a political scandal of the first order (and a puzzle as to their motives, since any such lie would be bound to be found out). If they were merely mistaken, but the press insisted they had lied, we might have a media scandal of the first order (as in Britain). On the intelligence side we would merely have a puzzle. How could everybody be so wrong?

The inquiries will rapidly eliminate the possibility that the intelligence was flawed because analysts are always paranoid. Even as it emerged that Iraq was mostly bluffing about WMDs, it became fairly clear that Iran is not. And Libya just revealed to the U.S. a nuclear program the UN admits it badly underestimated. Analysts frequently, even today, underestimate danger; what is odd about Iraq is that they uncharacteristically overestimated it. But the angry left has nothing at all to say here, let alone anything useful.

Part of the serious answer may lie in tacit reliance on past experience, especially of Nazi Germany and the U.S.S.R., that enemies of the West always have more and worse weapons than they seem to. But don't put too much weight on a different culture in the Middle East: In Iraq, too, UN inspectors were shocked by how much they'd missed prior to 1991 and, as key defections revealed, again between 1991 and 1995.

So another part of the answer is probably that after 1998 the Iraqi regime sank into a morass of deception and fantasy. There was deception; it is no service to us, or them, that most opponents of the war deny David Kay's discovery of ongoing clandestine, largely ineffective and sometimes delusional research on WMDs and missiles, all in violation of relevant UN resolutions. But there was also fantasy. And if we did not reason out Iraq's strategy it may be because the leader had gone insane. A cartoon in National Review in October 2003 had Saddam telling a meeting "I know ... Let's just pretend to have weapons of mass destruction and refuse to give unrestricted access to UN inspectors so we can forfeit billions of dollars in revenue and quite possibly get ourselves killed." Incredibly, it apparently was the plan. It certainly worked. And while it may be possible to improve our capacity to detect bluffs, if you're dealing with the international equivalent of suicide by cop, there may be little you can do.

Or should. You obviously can't have a rule that you don't attack regimes that fool you into thinking they have WMDs, only ones you correctly think have them. I say if rogue regimes learn they can neither have, nor pretend to have, such weapons, it not only justifies the war but does so in terms of the original rationale. So I'm happy.

Except for one thing. I am persuaded by historian Victor Davis Hanson that the vigorous self-criticism of the West on military matters is a key to its 2,500-year lethal dominance of non-Western societies (Tuesday's New York Times even reports a harsh self-criticism by the U.S. Army of its logistics in the brilliantly successful Iraq war). So when those who should be asking probing questions from the left sink into shrill conspiracy theories, it hurts us as well as them.

The doves need to hold informal inquiries of their own, into why they can't make a rational assessment of an honest mistake by their partisan foes. I'm truly sorry they won't.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The February 2nd issue of Maclean's pours scorn on the concept of forcing students to write the same thing over and over again as a punishment. So, while its editors are writing "We will not put fictitious future dates on our publication" 100 times, allow me to explain why they are wrong. Maclean's "ScoreCard" praised "Donald Lucas: Gutsy Stirling, Ont. Grade 8er rebels at teacher's order to write lines for not doing homework. Says tedious task 'puts the mind into neutral.' Instead, negotiates right to pen essay on the folly of writing lines. Smart kid, sure. Smart teacher, too." And this very newspaper called his punishment "a mindless activity of repetition ... not something a learning institution should be encouraging. A school, and a teacher, for that matter, should strive for knowledge." They should. But knowledge comes in many forms and in many ways.

So let me tell you a tale. There was once this kid who spent years in a kind, nurturing school where they never made him do anything he didn't want to do lest, say, correcting his spelling were to give him a low "self of steam." If he disobeyed instructions he was rewarded with a really interesting assignment involving yet more impudence, and praised by the press. One day he graduated and got a job as an intern at a newspaper. But he was assigned a story he didn't feel like doing. It would involve tedious phone calls and slogging around in bad weather talking to dull people with no post-graduate degrees at all. So he blew it off and, when reproached, sassed his editor.

Now, how do you think my fable ends? Is our hero praised and told to write a big long feature on the virtues of non-conformity, taking as long as he wants, as much space as he wants and being assured the piece won't be edited once he's done? I don't want to spoil the surprise, but if you want to ask him directly, you can probably find him flipping burgers somewhere. Which, oddly, is a mindless activity of repetition that puts the mind into neutral. Why didn't somebody warn him?

People who encourage you to drift down the lost highway are not your friends. In the real world, if you have intelligence you don't learn to control, if instead of being grateful for your gifts you are obnoxious, self-willed and self-satisfied, your fellows will detest you. They will not go out of their way to ensure you rewarding experiences. They will go out of their way to avoid you.

The philosophy of the modern educationist seems to be that rather than risking a series of little dents and cracks in a student's overweening sense of self-worth, they should be encouraged to develop enormous, elaborate but fragile egos that can be shattered dramatically in a single blow. For instance, Simon Fraser University is now considering literacy tests even for students with good marks because, explains the head of their Undergraduate Curriculum Task Force, "a significant number of students arrive here unprepared to undertake university study. It's problematic, and it's not just something that is happening at our university. It's happening everywhere." I don't imagine most students will go back and thank their high school when told that despite an impressive average year after year they're too illiterate to go to a good university and gosh, yes, you squandered those youthful years when learning language is easiest but hey, we didn't want to say anything in case it upset you.

If there were nothing more to say about education it would, I admit, be a bit grim. But there is. That SFU task force recommended that students whose first language is not English and who have been here less than two years be exempted from the testing. You see, the university is confident that such students will not as a rule quit when they find that their English isn't yet good enough. If knocked down by a strong verb, they'll pick themselves up, dust themselves off and try again. And one day, they'll not only have a degree and be fluent in English, but they'll be really prepared for adult life because they'll know they did something worthwhile even though it was difficult. And it will make them feel good about themselves.

Writing lines was not in ye olde days primarily a punishment. Rather, "copybooks" whose every blank, lined page was headed by a useful, elegant maxim let students learn penpersonship and memorable wisdom simultaneously. Maybe they still should.

Self-esteem isn't given, it's earned. That one small sentence is the key to a life not of frustration and boredom but of joy and fulfilment. If need be, it's even worth making someone write it on the blackboard 100 times.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It's funny how Belinda Stronach's entry into the Conservative Party of Canada leadership race fell flat. What's wrong with a 314? Huh? you say. Surely you know the one about the guy who visits his friend's joke-lovers' club and the members keep shouting out numbers and then everyone cracks up. His friend explains that they all know every joke so it's more convenient just to number them. "Mind if I tell one?" he asks. His friend says "Sure," so he shouts "314" but there's dead silence. Then his friend explains "You didn't tell it right."

So there's poor Ms. Stronach, fiscally conservative but socially liberal, relentlessly on-message, a personable outsider, and people accuse her of being shallow and clichéd. She's also been accused of resorting to the gimmick of being a female kind of girl, so let's deal with that one before baking a bigger pie of clichés.

Before she decided to enter the race the newspapers were full of columns on how great it would be if she did, none of which as far as I could tell had anything to do with enthusiasm for her policies since she didn't have any yet. It was all about having a fresh face or, between the lines, how much more fun this party would be if a rich pretty blond entered the room. Then she did, and everyone started saying Hey, you're just here because you're a rich pretty blond. If so, it's not her fault, it's ours. But people, if the race is full of unprepossessing men with policies not merely as vacuous as hers, but vacuous in the same way, you can't ascribe hers to age, sex or appearance.

Paul Martin, for instance, can hardly plead the folly of youth. But there he is, seeking desperately for some way to make the cities $1 billion richer without making the feds $1 billion poorer. Maybe if we gave them $1 billion of our gas tax ... no, that won't work, we'd be out the $1 billion. What if we didn't collect $1 billion in GST from them ... no, that won't work, we'd be out the $1 billion. Maybe if we ...

More broadly, Ms. Stronach seems to be jeered at because she's socially liberal but fiscally conservative. Oh, that's original. No one has said that since Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Stephen Harper, Ernie Eves, and Tony Clement were in politics. Except maybe Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Scott Brison, Peter MacKay, Gordon Campbell, Lorne Calvert and a few tens of thousands of others. But why should the commentators nod sagely as candidate after candidate trots out this tired cliché and then whirl snarling on Belinda Stronach for doing the exact same thing?

She was subjected to a good deal of ridicule for her vague promise to cut taxes, raise social-program spending especially on health, and hope like heck the economy grows fast enough to cover the gap. Why? When Stephen Harper announced his bid for the Conservative party leadership, his first specific policy pronouncement was "I wouldn't have slashed the health-care system to balance the budget." It doesn't commit him to anything, since it concerns the past not the future. It certainly doesn't commit him to anything conservative.

The only candidate I can think of who doesn't offer exactly this tired old novelty, now that the Yogic Fliers have bailed on us, is Jack Layton. Sure, the NDP leader wants to spend more, especially on health, but he doesn't want to cut taxes. However, as he frequently notes, he got his practical political training at the municipal level where you can't spend money you ain't got and hope it's all right in the morning. Just possibly he (or Jean Chrétien) is the most fiscally conservative of them all. As for social liberalism, does anyone seriously think the CPC, if elected, would invoke the notwithstanding clause and vote against gay marriage? No, it's just rhetoric to keep the rubes happy.

More than a decade ago, Ted Byfield wrote that: "The 'economic conservative' demands that the cost of government be cut, the deficit reduced and the debts paid. But he does not face the fact that it was the pursuit of social liberalism that caused the deficit, the debt and the growth of government to begin with." We should be debating whether constant demands that the state do for us the things we should do, but can no longer be bothered to do, for ourselves is not necessarily unaffordable. I for one say there's nothing government can't do half as well for twice the cost. But regrettably pundits are almost all (wait for it) economically conservative but socially liberal. So we mostly get catty remarks about Belinda's shoes.

As far as I can see, Ms. Stronach's platform is let's be nice to everyone, hope there aren't tough choices, give the middle class more boodle, and gosh I wish it weren't so expensive but let's keep spending anyway. Which is unquestionably ridiculous. But why blame her for telling it wrong?

The real problem is that it's a stupid joke.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

You've got to hate it when 10 cops show up at your front door first thing in the morning and start rifling through your unmentionables looking for threats to national security. But it's not going to happen to me, folks, 'cause I'm writing about daisies. Yes, daisies. Aren't they pretty? Bright yellow centres and nice white petals, unless the RCMP or CSIS have information to the contrary. I have no desire to discuss the subject with the Syrian government's ministry of agriculture, department of horticulture and agonizing torment.

OK, there are a few things I probably should clarify. Looking back, I find that on Nov. 26 one of my columns inexplicably contained the words "the need for an inquiry into the Maher Arar case," which in all honesty looks to me like a typo or perhaps a production error or something. I certainly did not intend as a result of any such remarks that I may have made that there should be an inquiry into me.

So although I did not say it, let me clarify that if I had I would have meant, and for that matter do now mean, that we need a thorough inquiry into just how brilliantly, and virtuously, the government has handled the whole thing. Not that I've ever heard of Maher Arar, you understand. Or the Auberge Grand-Mère. Nope. Not me. I have heard of the Senate, though. Can I also note, before getting back to the real topic of today's column, that Paul Martin bestrides the world like a colossus, intellectually and morally as well as politically, officer? There is no need whatsoever for you to be taking that filing cabinet.

Now, revenons à nos daisies. Such nice flowers. I think I'll plant some. Hyacinths are nice too, and fragrant. We have a splendid pink one that ... sorry, not pink. It's red. Liberal red. In fact I think it's a party member. A nice man from the Dear Leader's campaign filled out the form for me and even paid the $10. I mean, where's a plant going to get $10? (Yes, obviously the Business Development Bank of Canada is a possibility, but my hyacinth doesn't own a golf course.)

Lose my nerve as a journalist? Never. It's just that I don't know anything. I never did know anything. But now you know that I don't know, all on a cold January morning with a horde of big scary cops right outside the front door.

Perhaps my enemies will be running to the RCMP to tattle on me, based on another small typographical error in that same Nov. 26 column. I refer of course to the transposition of letters, right after the bit that I quoted above, which produced this astonishing sequence of what is quite evidently meaningless gibberish: "The outcome will likely be painful, exposing either confidential information or, as seems increasingly likely, embarrassing incompetence by authorities in at least one country and probably several. But letting those in power conceal their own errors is a brittle strategy, encouraging carelessness, arrogance and abuse. Ensuring that mistakes get found out is ductile. It doesn't just help you seem honest. It helps you be honest. It forces the authorities to face what they did wrong and fix it." Ha ha. Absurd.

I've gone back to my notes (journalists should always keep notes; it gives the cops something to seize other than, say, a can of pepper spray or a handy soft bit of your anatomy) and here's what that passage was supposed to say: "daisy, name for several common wild flowers of the COMPOSITE family. The true, or English, daisy (Bellis perennis) is cultivated in the U.S.; its white, pink or red flowers close at night. Other species include the purple Western daisy (Astranthum or B. integrifolium); and the common, white, or oxeye daisy of the U.S. (Chrysanthemum leucanthemum). Other plants called daisy include the yellow daisy, or BLACK-EYED SUSAN; the Michaelmas daisy, an ASTER; the Paris daisy, one of the plants also called marguerite; and the seaside daisy and daisy fleabane, which are fleabane species (genus Erigeron)." (The Concise Columbia Encyclopedia, 3rd edition, p. 223). Long live Paul Martin!

There. Nothing will deter us fearless journalists from digging up the dirt on such vital questions as why, when the true daisy has white, pink or red flowers, we should so often hear the one I described above, with the yellow centre and white petals, called a "daisy." Long live Paul Martin!

Oh yeah, one more important thing about daisies: I don't want to be sent to Syria, spend some time hanging around with their version of a government-run cable company, and then end up pushing them up.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It is time the government did something about health care. No, not that. It should attend to the real field of public health. Canada finally does have a minister of public health, Dr. Carolyn Bennett. Regrettably, she just told this newspaper: "I think, as governments, it is our moral responsibility to do whatever we can to help people stay healthy." I do not know what political philosophy would justify such a dangerously open-ended statement. But even on the charitable assumption that it was mere bombast, it suggests a troubling lack of focus.

The proper concern of public health, a clear core responsibility of government, is diseases and conditions that pose health risks bystanders cannot control. I don't want to get sidetracked here by the arguments about second-hand smoke that underlay her remarks; all that shouting about consensus, questioning of motives and proposals to meddle in the lives of vulgar persons is too characteristic of politics not science.

Nor do I want Dr. Bennett to get sidetracked. And in the face of SARS, flu and "mad cow," I worry as much about what such rhetoric might distract her from doing as what it might excuse her doing. It's an old rule that "he who guards everything guards nothing" and she must prioritize. Start with Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) and its horrifying human equivalent Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD).

Safety experts are right that the public often misjudges risk. For instance, pigs kill more people a year than sharks. And they are right that a rational person should estimate both how likely a pig is to assail you and how bad it will be if one does. But for that reason they should not mock the strong popular aversion to unknown risks. If you know something is bad but not whether it is likely, or that it is likely but not whether it is bad, you can't do the math. Which is truly scary.

It is not rational as a general rule to test every bite of food before consuming it. But when we know we face a risk whose dimensions we do not know, it makes sense to undertake a meticulous inspection of our beef supply to understand not just the incidence but also the epidemiology of BSE and CJD. Andrew Nikiforuk just warned of a few small-scale studies that found some "Alzheimers" patients actually died of CJD, so just possibly BSE is far more widespread than we think. I doubt it, and I'm not in the business of peddling panic. But I certainly want to check it out. Later, less exhaustive sampling will suffice once the problem's outlines are understood.

Next, Dr. Bennett could usefully concentrate on influenza. Here we know a few things including that another pandemic is overdue and that most flu pandemics are not like the dreaded Spanish flu, with its puzzling tendency to kill healthy young adults. Unfortunately we also know this year's vaccine targeted the wrong strain and it's too late to fix it now. So it's troubling to read in Tuesday's Citizen that "Health Canada is working with the provinces and territories on a national influenza response plan" but can't get suitable vaccine in time and isn't stockpiling antiviral drugs. There may be little we can do, but at least let's have drugs, and whatever useful vaccine can be manufactured quickly, available to key emergency response workers before the next big one hits.

Third, "iatrogenics," that is, the ways in which health care inadvertently causes illness. A recent spate of disquieting stories about improper hospital sterilization processes may be just the tip of the probe here. So as with BSE, the first priority should be getting a grasp on how widespread such problems are, including the breeding of "superbugs" in hospitals.

Fourth, indeed, is the proliferation of drug-resistant diseases. It's partly bad medical practices, from overprescribing antibiotics (to patients who then don't follow the regimen properly) to poor hospital sterilization. But as evolution is not our friend here, our options may again be limited. Since we already know part of the answer must be a return to old-fashioned barrier medicine, let's do it.

Fifth, emergent diseases. Some environmentalists claim things like Ebola are Mother Nature's revenge for our messing up ecosystems and unless we stop, the Red Death will come for us. Perhaps. Or we may have poked our noses into almost every swamp by now so few such surprises await us. Either way, jet travel favours viruses, so be as ready as we can to track and contain them, especially those we cannot cure.

Dr. Bennett, forget doing "whatever we can to help people stay healthy." Identify key health risks we can't mitigate for ourselves, study their scope, and make what plans you can to deal with them, ideally before they hit page one.

It is a logical requirement of political philosophy. It is your legal duty. And it is very much your moral duty.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

We're off to see the Lakebed, the wonderful Lakebed of Mars. It will grant us wealth, culture, scientific insight and ... Sorry, wrong movie. On Mars we will find an evil conspiracy to deprive the inhabitants of air, or a fabulous ancient canal-building civilization, or mudmen. Or, just possibly, yet another dull pile of rocks. NASA gloated that the Spirit rover's first pictures looked precisely the way scientists had expected a dry rock-strewn lakebed on Mars to look. Unfortunately, as Daily Show host Jon Stewart noted, they also looked precisely the way anyone else would have expected a dry rock-strewn lakebed on Mars to look. Indeed, he said, the Red Planet "practically reaches out to bore you."

When I say such things my starry-eyed colleagues claim that had my timid views prevailed, Columbus would never have set sail and mankind would still be living in grass huts in eastern Africa. But wouldn't the same argument apply to going to, say, Jupiter? Sure, it's a giant ball of poisonous corrosive gases that doesn't even have a "surface," though if it did and you landed on it gravity would crush you. But hey, where's your sense of adventure? I still I say if a caveman had looked out of his grass hut and seen that in the next valley it was raining concentrated, 900-degree Celsius sulphuric acid, beyond which lay a huge vacuum, it is prudence and not timidity that would have deterred him from an exploratory stroll.

Look, there's a reason space is called "space." It's basically full of empty. No matter.

Enthusiasts promise us fabulous resources. Such as what? Things not even on the periodic table? Getting oil back from Mars would take more fuel than it was worth. And forget launching giant space fleets from the moon. You'd still have to get the raw material, factories and workers up there. Or, just possibly, we could mine the moon, disturb its orbit and destroy the Earth. Hey, we've set rivers on fire. Besides, if Earth's fabulous resources aren't enough to satisfy our appetites, it means we eat too much.

As to the alleged scientific benefits, do we really need another flavour of Tang? And spare me the post hoc fallacy that because certain inventions were made while man was exploring nearby bits of space they would not have been made otherwise. Science got us to Mars, not the reverse.

I grant that it would be interesting to find evidence of life on Mars. But not very. Given the sheer number of planets out there, the really interesting question remains the one physicist Enrico Fermi asked about intelligent life in 1950: "Where is everybody?" Even if space travel takes too much energy and time, why aren't there radio signals? Dead bacteria on Mars won't tell us that.

The funny thing is that I still say go for it. As my wife regards even the Caribbean as a hostile environment notable for biting insects and even more biting sharks, I regretfully inform NASA that I am no longer available for such a mission. But a trip to Mars beats sitting on the couch. I certainly favour continued work on near-Earth satellites. But spare me "To infinity and beyond."

The Citizen just ran a gung-ho piece by a scientist who wants to terraform Mars, albeit sensitively because "Mars does not belong to America, nor to Earth, nor to human beings" but to life itself. But he also said "Once we become a multi-planet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward." Right. Let's go to Mars so when you're lying dead on the smoking remains of the Earth, someone somewhere can still be watching Friends reruns.

That same author confessed to a teenage fascination with 2001: A Space Odyssey which, as the Citizen's Bruce Ward observed on Saturday, is "Considered the best sci-fi movie ever made" though fans can't understand it. Indeed. It was about the connection between our fear of our own mortality and our quest to press ever onward even though, as Buckaroo Banzai eventually told us, "No matter where you go, there you are." At the end Dave encounters the ancient mystery that man is born, lives, grows old and then dies.

Space travel might help you fast-forward to the death bit without all that tedious growing old first. But we cannot dump our problems, from death to confusing movies, into the vacuum of space. It would be cool to send a man to Mars, but he will not come back with the deep wisdom of an ancient civilization for us to grok.

Folks, Mars is a rock and space is mostly space. It is not rock-it science.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]