Why do we deliver charity through government? The habit has become so ingrained of late that the question is rarely raised. But if it is raised, I submit, the answer is much less obvious than the left-wing shouters would have you believe. It seems to me that there are four possible justifications, all debatable. I leave aside for now a fifth ugly possibility, namely that the welfare state is not about charity at all but about the middle class voting itself a big heap of boodle. This possibility is so real and so serious as to require separate treatment. But I ask you to put it aside for the moment because it is not relevant to the question of whether, assuming we regard it as our moral duty to look after those temporarily or permanently unable to care for themselves, we are well-advised to use government as the principal vehicle for furnishing food, clothing, shelter, medical care and such to the poor.

One possible answer is yes because government is more efficient. Now you laugh. But the fact is that some people on the left actually do claim that at least in health care a single provider has lower administrative costs. I concede that it does not face the administrative burdens associated with satisfying customers at reasonable cost. But I also note that even the most vociferous defenders of the Canada Health Act do not advocate a Canada Food Act or a Canada Car Act incorporating the same five pillars. As is surely obvious, were we to do so we should soon go both hungry and on foot.

There is another, more subtle, ground for disputing that government is efficient when it comes to charity. It is part of our fundamental constitutional order that everyone shall be equal before the law. And rightly so. As a result, public charity cannot and should not attempt to be flexible on individual cases. Private charities, by contrast, can, do and should distinguish between those who cannot be self-supporting due to infirmity and those whose principal need is to learn better life habits. Both should be helped, but not in the same way. And the latter require a level of discretion the state should not have.

One might accept such arguments about the inefficiency of public relief and still favour it, on three grounds that I can see. First, one might vote for tax-funded charity to make sure one is generous. It might sound silly, but don't we all know the will is not merely weak but fluctuating? Sometimes the only way to avoid lighting a cigarette at one o'clock in the morning is to avoid buying one at noon. Likewise, one might wish to put the temptation to be mean to the poor out of reach by summoning enough willpower to cast a vote for a pro-welfare-state party. (At present you can't do otherwise if you vote because all our parties favour it, but in principle one might face a choice and settle it in this way.)

Second, and more probably, concern about the generosity of others could lead someone to vote for public welfare programs, by which I mean not just welfare and EI but also health care and old age pensions for the poor. It is not immediately clear why, if too few Canadians are generous enough to give to private charity, a majority would be willing to vote to fund the public kind through their own taxes. But it is possible that a majority is willing to give if and only if they know others will not be allowed to "free ride.'' And public welfare could be a way of expressing that determination.

On the other hand, the history of private charity, before government elbowed it aside, is a great deal more encouraging on how generous most people usually are than you might be led to expect by contemporary rhetoric. And since I do not think those who are forced to give are themselves morally improved by the experience, I say that if government is sufficiently inefficient more is lost than gained by using it to rope in the free riders.

The last possibility, and to me the least attractive (other than the one noted above that the welfare state is really about the middle class helping themselves to the contents of the treasury), is that people may vote for the welfare state so someone else will pay instead of them.

We hear a lot about making "the rich'' pay, although anyone who's actually seen even a modest paycheque after deductions knows it's not true, to say nothing of sales taxes, gas taxes, property taxes, etc. In any event, giving away other people's money is not generosity, and if it's also not an effective way of helping the poor, it's not a good idea.

One might support public welfare for any of the four reasons I mentioned or some combination thereof. But I wonder whether any of them is nearly as firmly grounded in logic or fact as they are generally taken to be by their defenders.

Who, I note, don't seem as keen on a calm and dispassionate discussion of the matter as people securely persuaded of the merits of their argument might be expected to be.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Oh, here's good news. There's a one-in-eight chance that if you go into a hospital some bad thing, or in technical terms an "adverse event," will happen to you there. What? You don't want to be told that? Would you rather it just quietly happened? I'm not being cynical. I'm delighted to read of this new study at The Ottawa Hospital of a small sample of patients. Obviously in the short run any publicity for medical errors is simply bad for the profession and I commend researchers and hospital administrators for letting it happen anyway. (As these terms are becoming more important, let me note that as far as I understand "iatrogenic" means all medically caused illness and "nosocomial" means specifically illness caused by hospitals.)

Remember that hospitals are dangerous places primarily because of why people go to them in the first place. The medical profession has long been mocked with terms like "sawbones" and "leech" by people well aware that not every visit to the doctor results in a cure. And I treasure the matter-of-fact tone of a 17th-century account ending: "they committed him to the Surgions to cure, in whose hands hee dyed a fewe dayes after." But in fact we should regard the successful rather than unsuccessful outcomes as remarkable. You're dying of pneumonia, you're absolutely toast, your relatives are quarrelling over your stuff, then the doctor gives you some pills and in a couple of weeks you're back on your feet wondering who swiped your CDs. Some people would be grateful for that.

When you go into a hospital, chances are you have something wrong with you that, if not treated, will cause short-term problems, long-term problems or possibly death-related issues. Sometimes even excellent treatment can't prevent such problems. Moreover, in going to a hospital you place yourself, of necessity, in close proximity to a lot of other people who also have things wrong with them, including infections. It is no reflection on the skill or dedication of medical professionals that sometimes these infections spread. But there are ways to make it less likely, not all of which are followed as thoroughly as they might be.

You might even have the impression from reading the papers that things are getting worse in this regard. Two stories about Montreal hospitals recalling patients for HIV tests (not what you're hoping for when you open the mail or answer the phone) followed nine stories in two months about Ontario hospitals reporting lapses in cleaning medical equipment. Does it seem that they didn't have stories like that when you were a child?

Do not delude yourself. They had the incidents. What's different is the stories, so let us be grateful for increasing attention to medical error.

It's partly due to the profession's continuous urge to improve. David Ropeik and George Gray's fascinating Risk: A Practical Guide notes that in the U.S. "a growing national movement is trying to create safer systems, based on the model of the aviation industry, which has demonstrated that such things as standardization, simplification, and use of protocols and checklists markedly reduce errors." I suspect Canadian hospitals are discovering weaknesses in their sterilization procedures precisely because they're developing such standardization and in the process finding gaps.

It's also because of growing awareness that in the face of antibiotic-resistant illnesses and emergent diseases science cannot be relied upon to produce a pill for every ill in a timely fashion. Instead, medicine must rediscover and is rediscovering old-fashioned barrier techniques. And some new-fangled barrier techniques, like a New York firm's device that uses fluorescent light to check whether people have washed their hands thoroughly. As the Citizen noted in reporting it, "Medical literature is full of studies showing that simple handwashing is one of the best ways to stop infection from spreading, yet many doctors and nurses don't wash enough." I suspect there will soon be similar-looking ultraviolet sterilization devices because, and only because, doctors are discovering the lapses.

Of course one of the thrills, and hazards, of research is that you never know what you will find until you look. For instance, that the recent Ottawa Hospital study found a rate of "adverse events" comparable to the apparent British rate of 10.8 and the Australian rate of 16.6, but way above the U.S. figure of between 2.5 and 3.7 per cent (Ropeik and Gray say between three and four per cent). Perhaps the American figures are too low, ours are too high or both. Or perhaps socialism is sloppy. More research is needed.

Of course the results might be unwelcome, even scary. But hey, better to know about it if it's happening. As with all forms of medical error. So hats off to the brave medical professionals who are helping us discover it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

By now we've all had a good laugh at the National Geographic Society for making Kim Campbell one of the 50 greatest political leaders of all time. And honestly, she wouldn't be among Canada's 50 greatest prime ministers if we'd had 51. So now let's pause, take a deep breath, and use it to laugh at most of the rest of the list. We should not grant undue importance to the lists and indexes churned out by various organizations. Our press and politicians, for instance, got very excited about Canada being No. 1 on the United Nations Human Development Index then sliding ignominiously to eighth, when the index was itself a crude and useless measurement. I even have serious reservations about Gross Domestic Product. Not everything can be quantified. But we should also not dismiss all lists of, say, great political leaders just because there are inevitably quarrels about what the criteria should be and who really meets them.

Far from it. It is very useful to reflect on what constitutes historical importance and who had it. Canadians have every right to howl at National Geographic for including Avril Phaeda "Kim'' Campbell in its Almanac of World History top 50 political leaders of all time. But we shouldn't then run out of things to say about the other good, bad and ugly choices.

For instance, she isn't the only preposterous Canadian on the list. William Lyon Mackenzie King cannot in good conscience be described as of world-historical importance. Nor is she the only preposterous woman. What's Eva Peron doing there? Or Benazir Bhutto? For that matter, why is Chiang Kai-shek on the list, or Charles de Gaulle? Hitler, sure; it's a list of people who had a big impact on history, not a good one. But Mussolini? He was a second-rate tyrant. And while I admire Margaret Thatcher, she would have trouble qualifying among the 50 most important leaders since the Second World War.

Thus while the list's most obvious, typically modern defect is its evident affirmative action regarding both gender and nationality, it is also dreadfully biased toward the recent past. Of its 50 key political leaders of all time, 21 are from the 20th century. It also has a secular bias: conspicuously missing are Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. True, Jesus was not, directly, a political leader. But then where's Constantine, who made the Roman Empire Christian? For that matter, where's Augustus, who made it an empire? The only emperor on the list is Nero. Is he the only one they'd heard of?

I don't mean to be a snob here. The list contains names I don't recognize but probably should (not including Shanakdakhete), and others I recognize but don't know enough about. And I had an extensive education in history, despite which I struggle to remember key Roman emperors. But just because something is difficult doesn't mean it's not worthwhile.

For instance, we should know enough to debate whether Hannibal should be on the list. He was a great military leader but would history be much different if he'd never existed? Rome won anyway. Alexander the Great's political ambitions fared little better, but he spread Hellenistic civilization in way that did matter. Meanwhile, Montezuma I may have been inept, but between technology and disease I don't see the Spanish-Aztec clash turning out differently without him. As for John Kennedy, it has been suggested that he belongs on such lists because he decided to send a man to the moon which, as we all know, history will eventually record as the start of a giant leap for mankind. Not much could be more characteristically modern than to list people who will be important in the future and call it a list of historical greats.

In The Globe and Mail on Monday, its quintessentially modern former editor, William Thorsell, wrote "I used to say quite naively to history students at the University of Alberta that we studied history to get rid of it.'' I sympathize with his desire that people should not adopt attitudes without examining their origin, and his horror that some students taught about old historical grievances promptly adopted them as their own. But I insist that we can and should learn from history rather than either repeating it mindlessly or discarding it mindlessly.

I much prefer Plutarch's explanation for his extensive set of comparative biographies of great Greeks and Romans: "It was for the sake of others that I first commenced writing biographies; but I find myself proceeding and attaching myself to it for my own; the virtues of these great men serving me as a sort of looking-glass, in which I may see how to adjust and adorn my own life.'' We may also learn a great deal, it seems to me, about what has worked in the past and what has not, and what is therefore likely to work now and what apparently exciting novelty is in fact an old idiocy.

Regrettably it seems we did get rid of history. And wound up instead with Kim Campbell as one of the all-time great leaders. Hoo hah.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

So it's agreed. "Iraq,'' Senator Edward Kennedy said Monday, "is George Bush's Vietnam.'' On Wednesday, radical Iraqi cleric Muqtada al-Sadr drew the same parallel. Worse, both seem happy. There are some similarities. For instance, on Wednesday night the CBC called Mr. al-Sadr a leader of Iraqi "nationalism.'' It is hard to believe the CBC does not know that his claim to authority, valid or not, is as a religious leader. But then, in the 1960s much of the western press insisted that Ho Chi Minh and his colleagues were nationalists even though they insisted they were communists. Those zany rebels. After 1975, notes Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor at the U.S. Naval War College who served with the Marines in Vietnam, there were "a minimum of 100,000 summary executions at the hands of the communist liberators, about a million 'boat people,' and a like number of individuals sentenced to 're-education camps'.'' Let's hope reporters aren't setting us up for a similar surprise if Mr. al-Sadr wins in Iraq.

Also, if the bad guys stage a failed uprising, let's hope much of the western media doesn't claim the good guys staged a successful one. Especially now, it's important to recall that the consensus is that the 1968 Tet offensive in Vietnam was a stunning defeat from which the insurgency in the south never recovered. But by calling it a stunning defeat for the U.S. at the time, journalists made it one.

Worse, the elite western press did not report communist atrocities during Tet, particularly the very evident mass slaughter at Hue. On the other hand, they gleefully reported American atrocities with or without evidence. Does it not give Senator Kennedy pause that the most famous "atrocity,'' in which Americans supposedly destroyed a village in order to save it, was an uncorroborated story by the same "Baghdad Pete'' Arnett fired in 2003 for being too pro-Saddam?

Another thing about Vietnam is that after it fell to the communists, dominoes fell around the world. As late as 1980 prestigious American historian Stephen Ambrose wrote "Nixon's dire predictions about all the dominoes that were going to fall to monolithic communism proved to be wrong.'' (In the same book he conceded that "any doves who believed that the communists of Southeast Asia were democrats and agrarian reformers ... were in for a great shock...'') In fact, however, between the fall of Saigon in 1975 and the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, more countries were taken over by ostensible communists than in the previous history of the world.

So dreadful did communist rule prove that leading dove Senator George McGovern was calling within three years for the marines to invade Southeast Asia to stop communist atrocities. Talk about a classic liberal failure to ensure that your means are adequate to your ends. Yet UN Secretary General Kofi Annan just threatened military force against the ostensibly Islamic government of Sudan if it didn't stop committing atrocities. Do humanitarians like Senator Kennedy think that if the UN helps drive the U.S. from Iraq battered and humiliated, it improves the prospects for making good on this threat?

One final parallel should worry the angry left. According to historian Victor Davis Hanson in 2001, "The great, unsung tragedy of the anti-war movement was that its own lack of credibility, fairness, and fondness for hyperbole did as much to tarnish the hallowed Western tradition of open dissent and careful audit of military operations as did the worst excesses of the American military in Vietnam.'' And it happened even though the Vietnam debacle handed a huge geopolitical victory to a Soviet Union too clapped-out to use it effectively and a People's Republic of China not yet ready to try. A catastrophic American defeat in Iraq that hands an equally huge victory to a considerably more vigorous militant Islam risks doing the same again but worse.

Vietnam taught some useful lessons to the right on subjects from a volunteer military to exit strategies to the difficulties of nation-building. Not to mention Nixon's pithy retrospective observation that "'No more Vietnams' can mean that we will not try again. It should mean that we will not fail again.''

The left doesn't seem to have grasped a lesson that the bad guys abroad certainly did: You don't have to defeat the U.S. on the battlefield. You just need to give the masochistic left an excuse to defeat it from within. As the head of Hezbollah in Lebanon says "We may be unable to drive the Americans out of Iraq. But we can drive George W. Bush out of the White House."

- - -

In Wednesday's column, I misstated David Ropeik's position with Harvard's Center for Risk Analysis. He is its Director of Risk Communication.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Once I managed to one-up David Suzuki on environmental matters. Chatting before a panel discussion, he said his kids reproached him for having a TV at his cottage. Man, I said, my parents' cottage didn't even have electricity. And I liked it that way. I bring it up not to taunt Dr. Suzuki (OK, maybe a bit) but to underline that almost all of us are environmentalists now. I credit the greens, though I wonder if they now want to help us do something practical. So I've been reading the recent David Suzuki Foundation report everyone's not talking about, "Sustainability within a Generation: A New Vision For Canada," by David R. Boyd.

Sure, the sponsorship scandal is more current. But one thing I detest about bad government, and will remember on election day, is that it distracts us from important stuff. Environment Minister David Anderson recently said "in the long term, climate change will outweigh terrorism as an issue for the international community." It's no reason to neglect terrorism, or Adscam, but if he's right that man is boiling the earth, we should discuss it. (And his government should produce a Kyoto Plan.)

Mr. Boyd's report has some encouragingly practical insights. For instance, one of his "potential policies" is to "encourage provinces and territories to phase in full-cost pricing (including environmental costs) for all water users -- industrial, commercial, agricultural, and municipal, along with water metering." In the same enlightened vein, he declares that: "The basic premise behind ecological tax shifting is that society should stop taxing activities it wants to encourage and start taxing activities it wants to discourage." And that "Perverse subsidies occur when governments subsidize environmentally destructive behaviour ... Canadians are penalized twice. First, Canadians pay for subsidies ... Second, Canadians bear the direct and indirect costs of ecological damage ..."

So far, so good. The whole idea behind free speech was, as John Stuart Mill put it, that "as mankind improve, the number of doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly on the increase..." We don't seem to be doing very well: On most subjects the yelling is louder now than a hundred years ago. But it's nice to see that while the greens taught us to love nature, we taught them some economics.

Unfortunately, some things in the report give less cause for hope. I've been reading an apparently unrelated book, Risk: A Practical Guide for What's Really Safe and What's Really Dangerous in the World Around You, by Harvard University toxicologist George Gray and David Ropeik, who runs Harvard's Center for Risk Analysis. The authors have no right-wing axe to grind, but in discussing what you should really worry about, they stress that air quality in the U.S. has improved dramatically since the days when environmentalists were weirdos. Yet Mr. Boyd says "Canadian government data estimates that between 5,000 and 16,000 Canadians die prematurely each year because of air pollution." If so, the number should have been far higher 30 years ago and the statistics don't bear it out. Can we please agree not to do bad science? Or to ignore what's gone right and why?

Could we also deep-six the "precautionary principle" that you should never do anything that hasn't been proven absolutely safe? It's dealing off the bottom of the deck since everyone knows you can't definitively prove a negative. Besides, under the precautionary principle we would certainly refuse to adopt the precautionary principle, since it's impossible to prove it won't prevent some technological improvement that, on balance, is good for the environment.

Finally, let's lose the utopian tone. It's bad enough that Mr. Boyd wants us to "improve our quality of life while reducing energy and material use by 75 to 90 per cent from today's levels" within, one assumes, a generation. Such efficiency gains are just not possible: If they were, someone would have made them and got rich.

Mr. Boyd also quotes then-finance minister Paul Martin saying in 2000 that "We need to abandon the very concept of waste." Fine. You first. Start with government.

Mr. Boyd's flyleaf quotes former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency director William Ruckelshaus that moving "nations and people in the direction of sustainability... would be a modification of society comparable in scale to only two other changes: the Agricultural Revolution of the late Neolithic, and the Industrial Revolution ... This one will have to be a fully conscious operation, guided by the best foresight that science can provide." Which falls into the "And after lunch, world peace" category of preposterously ambitious, insanely control-freak sentiments that do not help our mission one bit.

So there's still lots of room for bickering. But I hope we can agree on full-cost pricing of water, electricity and all our other utilities. Oh, and that when we do head out into the woods, we shouldn't take a TV.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Great. Another appalling report on our national security, this one by a Senate committee. I've put it on top of last month's horrifying account from the auditor general. They should make a good pillow for MPs. Actually they should be keeping MPs awake. Chapter 3 of the auditor general's March 2004 report is laced with warnings about "deficiencies in the way intelligence is managed across the government ... gaps and inconsistencies in the watch lists used to screen visa applicants, refugee claimants and travellers ... There is no overall quality control in this vital function ...'' and "an alert to a potential threat was sent using the government's top-secret messaging system but was addressed incorrectly. After waiting a month for a response, the sending agency followed up and found that the message had not been received.'' When the auditor's office tried to figure out why CSIS and the Department of Immigration had such different terrorist watch lists, "Immigration's records were in such disarray that we were unable to complete a full reconciliation ...'' It's also classic that the government deactivates stolen passports but "the information system used on the primary inspection line cannot distinguish between active and deactivated passports.''

In short, when it comes to national security, our government isn't even misguided. It's just silly. After 9/11 an interdepartmental committee suggested the heads of various agencies meet to discuss it, and a four-page discussion paper was prepared, "the only government-wide post-mortem analysis conducted. The heads of the RCMP, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, and Finance Canada were not present at the dinner meeting held to discuss the paper. No record of the discussion was kept and no follow-up or action plan resulted.'' But they did have dinner. They are good at that.

Hold on, some people may say. It's not about national security. Our government is silly, period. Keeping a $1-billion gun registry that can't register guns: How silly is that? At HRDC, another $1 billion goes whoosh and the minister doesn't resign. Absurd. In Adscam, $100 million went away and neither the former public works minister nor the public service admit to running the department. All true, but I still think being silly on national security is worse because if you get it wrong nothing else matters. Yet it didn't get their attention last fall when an independent report said our armed forces will essentially vanish within five years. If Osama bin Laden set Parliament on fire perhaps a message would be sent via the ultra-secure communications system to the wrong address and, a month later, someone would saunter down to see how the flames were doing.

Unfair? Well, how about this Senate report? Possibly you haven't read it. Possibly you have a job and a life. OK, then, has your MP read it? I may seem naive, but I thought we elected MPs to look out for this kind of thing. Much as I appreciate the auditor general trying to stop bad people from blowing us up, I thought an accountant's job was to make sure all the money was spent the way the budget said it should be. Which is a big enough job in our government to keep a lot of clever people busy full-time.

I also thought senators were supposed to be sleepy hacks. Instead, last week MPs snoozed while a $50-billion appropriation bill roared past them in half an hour. It didn't break the slumber of government MPs eager for more independence and influence. It didn't disturb the sleep of opposition members focused on prudent use of taxpayers' money. It took Senator Lowell Murray to stand up and say excuse me but isn't $50 billion a lot of money to pass in such a weird and casual way? And now the standing Senate committee on national security and defence has produced a lengthy report cataloguing how unready we are for emergencies and suggesting we should maybe do something before it's too late. Those wacky senators.

I suggest it's time to lift our gaze from the burning trees of policy and ask whether the whole forest of our democracy is on fire. Vital functions of our government are being performed by auxiliary parts of it because the main body, the House of Commons, is barely functioning. And we elect it. Which surely raises questions about us. Something has gone badly wrong with those who are meant to wield power in our democracy (MPs) and with those who have snuck off with much of it (judges). Only peripheral, essentially powerless figures like senators and the auditor general are still behaving responsibly.

My guess is that too many voters have lost interest in anything beyond voting themselves the contents of the public treasury. If you want to prove me wrong, you could start by going and waking up the MPs sleeping with their heads resting on these scary reports.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Sleep? I barely remember it. Mud, on the other hand, is very familiar. I'm lying in it. It's 4:30 a.m. I've been up since 1:00 (yes, a.m.). I know if I close my eyes I will pass out. And there's nowhere I'd rather be. The same thing, oddly, is true of the 30 or so Canadian army reservists sharing my cold, foggy field very late Saturday night or, arguably, very early Sunday morning in Fort Drum, New York.

You see, I'd been given an extraordinary opportunity to join the Brockville Rifles and other army reserve regiments in an urban warfare exercise at a special facility on the home base of the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division.

If you're wondering what I was doing there, which I think the Brocks were at first, I had insinuated myself into the exercise in the role of CMD ("Clueless Media Dork").

Embedded journalists have become, like mud and mosquitoes, a part of war that soldiers must learn to deal with because there's no way of making them go away. But I was also wondering what the men and women in the reserves were doing there.

When I was first invited, I think the general idea was that I would hang around the administration building and get the big picture. The big picture is very important. Did you know the reserves have contributed a fifth of our soldiers in the former Yugoslavia for years? They also fill vacancies in staff positions in Canada. Our regular forces are hanging on by their toenails, and the reserves are helping them do it.

Also, there are 133 militia units in 125 communities in Canada. If disaster strikes, natural or man-made, they'll get to a lot of places in this vast country a lot faster than the regular forces. It's one reason they're trained to the same standard as the regulars, though on a part-time basis: If terrorists carry out a chemical, biological or nuclear attack, the reservists will need to know what to do about it.

Should the worst occur, at home or abroad, a lot of people will be very glad to discover the reserves even exist. As in, say, 1939. It seems there are perhaps 15,000 reservists today, possibly fewer (top DND brass and politicians have every incentive to inflate the numbers to disguise how disgracefully neglected every aspect of national security is in this country). It's around 0.0005 per cent of our population, as against 0.0067 per cent in the U.S. and 0.0054 in Britain.

There was probably a time when most Canadians had some understanding and appreciation for the militia as for the military generally. Today far too many of us have fallen into the trap C.S. Lewis described, of thinking we can obtain peace and security by reading the newspapers and jeering at colonels.

It's one thing to argue, as I've tried to do in my newspaper column, for more defence spending and to remind Canadians the world is a dangerous place. But it's quite another to do something about it. And that's the main thing, other than mud, that I acquired over the weekend.

Sure, reservists get paid. But even if it's why some of them join it's not what keeps them there.

Nor are they playing silly games. Yes, it was a simulation; instead of live ammunition, the C7 rifles, C9 light machine guns and C6 machine guns fired blanks whose impact caused a box on the barrel to fire a laser pulse. But it's not laser tag (nor is their paint-based simulation system paintball, not least because paint pellets fired by cartridges raise, I am told, painful welts).

They're doing it because they want to serve, and if they take pride and pleasure in it so much the better.

When Canada sends troops abroad, as we regularly do, some of them are reservists. And though I didn't have a sensor vest and so couldn't be "killed" (the militia aren't given enough even of simulation gear), I can tell you urban warfare is ugly, difficult and confusing even by the standards of war.

But if we're going to protect civilians from armed maniacs in the slums of Haiti, and boast about how humanitarian we are, it's some of these folks who will actually go do it, not me and probably not you. We owe them better equipment, better training opportunities and more colleagues. But above all we owe them recognition. Even if they are having fun.

At some point in an hour-long ride in the back of a cold lumpy truck on a bad dirt road early Sunday morning, I told the sergeant as he bounced off me that I had at least figured out they didn't do it for the perks. He laughed and said the job had lots of perks. "It's just that most people wouldn't consider them perks."

Like lying in cold mud at 4:30 a.m. exhausted and damp. And knowing there's nowhere you'd rather be.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Someone is finally trying to do something about plane speech. I should hope so. On my last flight the ticket said "Dinner'' and all I got was a bag of pretzels. Also I ... oh, sorry, plain speech. P-l-a-i-n. Once again we're being told to avoid cliches like leprosy. (Gotcha!) It's about time. Literally. At the top of the Plain English Campaign's poll of annoying cliches was "At the end of the day.''

And tied for second was "at this moment in time.'' Good. Members of my family have been campaigning for years to replace "at this point in time'' with the possibly obscure but certainly concise term "now.''

According to the PEC (they did not inveigh against acronyms) press release, second place was shared by "the constant use of 'like' as if it were a form of punctuation.'' Hey guys, don't think small. What about its constant use as if it were like whatever, as in I'm like "Stop saying like'' and they're like "Like man I ...''. Even repetitive obscenity is eloquent by comparison.

I'm not convinced all misuse of language is bad. For instance, "With all due respect'' was their fourth-least-favourite phrase, but as Jim Hacker of Yes Minister says, at least it warns you you're about to be insulted.

For the same reason, I'm not happy with their attempted ban on all variants of "to be honest with you,'' because I consider it a dead giveaway that someone, let's call him William Jefferson Clinton, is about to tell a whopper. The phrase "I hear what you're saying'' seems trite, since if I believed you were unable to hear me I would move closer, speak more loudly, write you a note or engage a sign language translator. But (shades of "Je vous ai entendus'') it tells the alert listener they're about to be ignored and patronized. I favour such verbiage for the same reason I'm glad rattlesnakes have rattles. (Likewise, their targeted "thinking outside the box" braces you for some tired old novelty.)

PEC spokesman John Lister said "George Orwell's advice from 1946 is still worth following: 'Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print'."

I think that's pushing it too far, if I may use that familiar expression. The bottom line, to address the issue in a basically awesome way, going forward, is that a very good way to find out what people think is to listen to what they say. When academic researchers study The Simpsons for many long dusty hours and conclude "Television offers numerous opportunities to learn but can contribute to a variety of public health concerns for youth,'' you know they didn't grasp that kids find it funny that Homer's a pig.

When a cliche becomes annoying it's because it reflects an idea that is both common and harmfully trite. There's nothing wrong with a metaphor as familiar and comfortable as an old pair of slippers, provided it accurately describes something that happens a lot but still requires comment. For instance "Liberal slush fund.''

Which is why despite such quibbles I'm very much in favour of plain speech. Imagine if it infiltrated politics. Suppose instead of "Proposal: That Treasury Board approve inclusion of an item ... for funding to support the communications priorities of the government of Canada" they'd just said "We're gonna give a bunch of boodle to our buds." The public would have objected in singularly plain language; they'd have nixed the idea and we'd all be better off now.

If that's too much to ask, how about "Yup, we did it" or "OK, we're busted" or, in British parlance, "It's a fair cop"? And could people in government please stop using the passive voice? You know: mistakes were made, money was wasted, windows were jumped out of. Of course it doesn't help if newspapers tell readers of "a bloody weekend that claimed the lives of an Israeli couple and their young son, an Israeli soldier and a 14-year-old Palestinian girl, shot dead at her home." What's this? People don't kill people, weekends kill people? The real problem isn't the wording, it's the underlying idea, that humans are not responsible for their actions. I even think "at the end of the day" reveals, unintentionally, a short-sighted tendency not to consider how things will be tomorrow morning.

Plain speech means plain thought; convoluted speech full of trite metaphors the opposite. Please do not use your tongue to twist your mind into a pretzel.

- - -

After seven years on the Citizen's editorial board I'm now writing for the paper on a freelance basis. I hope you'll keep reading, and tune in to my new radio show starting next week on AM 580 CFRA, weeknights 8 to 10 PM.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]