If you watched the federal party leaders debates you may have felt as though you were subjected to "a bunch of rhetoric." If only. Rhetoric nowadays implies "city talk:" slick, plausible and either dishonest or a desperate attempt to cover one's own confused ignorance. As Neil Postman put it in his 1985 Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, "we are accustomed to thinking of rhetoric as an ornament of speech -- most often pretentious, superficial and unnecessary. But to the people who invented it ... rhetoric was not merely an opportunity for dramatic performance but a near indispensable means of organizing evidence and proofs, and therefore of communicating truth." From Demosthenes to Aquinas, it enjoyed, and deserved, a glowing reputation.

If rhetoric were mere trickery, I would still defend its study; every card player should notice when someone slips an ace up a sleeve. But even honest persons assured of never falling in with rogues will find it helpful when exchanging ideas in pursuit of truth.

For rhetoric is the art and science of clear communication. Because it is an art, someone with no natural gift for expression will not profit much from studying it. But, as is so often the case, you must be able to walk before you can run. Thus even someone with abundant natural talent should approach communication methodically. Otherwise, what Cicero, mute, inglorious, stands babbling here?

My father, who taught rhetoric, frequently said that when we evaluate communications, including our own, we should ask four key questions: What is the author trying to do? How does the author try to do it? How well is it done? Is it worth doing? And to help make these judgments he urged attention to nine key elements of rhetoric.

1. Author. What does the audience know of the speaker (or writer, sender of Morse code or singer) and how does that affect their willingness to believe the message? Misjudge this point and you risk either patronizing or baffling them.

2. Purpose. What is the author's aim in making his argument? In ancient times, we are told, when Cicero spoke men said "How well he spoke" but when Demosthenes spoke they said "Let us march." The latter is not always better; raising untimely rabbles is bad.

3. Subject. What is the author talking about?

4. Thesis. Of what is the author trying to convince the audience on that subject? The most common weakness in communication is having no thesis or, what amounts to much the same thing in practice, having too many of them.

5. Audience. A candidate might prefer to address the undecided but find a hall filled with the faithful. If so, a different speech is called for. And sometimes the real hope is to be overheard; as, for instance, I think in the French-language debate Stephen Harper was largely aiming to impress Ontario voters with his Quebec-friendliness.

6. Genre. What sort of communication is it, with what advantages and disadvantages? Music has more direct emotional power than writing, but less precision. The modern political debate format is cramped compared to, say, Lincoln-Douglas, but until it is changed candidates must adapt to it. And rap can make you look hip if you pull it off, but excruciatingly dorky if you don't.

7. Occasion. A dirty joke under the wrong circumstances can be disastrous.

8. Resistance. Many things can interfere with an audience receiving a message, from jackhammers outside the concert hall to the Tory party leader staring at the floor while speaking the audience's native language badly to key audience beliefs hostile to the thesis.

9. Argument. After identifying and weighing all these aspects the author must seek a way to minimize the obstacles and exploit the opportunities they create. A good argument is well-organized and includes the vital Refutatio that acknowledges the best argument against the thesis and deals with it; failure to do so will persuade a sophisticated audience that the author is ignorantly unaware of the contrary case or dishonestly evading it.

There are further refinements. Among my favourites is the curiously named obligatio, in which you say you won't say something in order to slip it in, from "There is no need to mention my opponent's criminal record" to "I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him." Sly? Perhaps. Witty? Often. But the result is anything but trickery.

For years I had on my office wall this quotation from Hugh Blair, a 19th-century student of rhetoric: "We may rest assured that, whenever we express ourselves ill, there is, besides the mismanagement of language, for the most part some mistake in our manner of conceiving the subject. Embarrassed, obscure and feeble sentences are generally, if not always, the result of embarrassed, obscure and feeble thought."

So let's hear it for rhetoric. Indeed, let's hear some.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Apparently we're not supposed to discuss moral issues during an election campaign. Which only leaves immoral ones, I suppose. Or perhaps amoral. Would it be wrong to ask why? Once, politicians feared the taint of immorality. Now they fear the taint of morality. It's not completely clear to me whether they're trying to persuade us that they don't know right from wrong or just that they don't care. But they do seem determined to convey that in any event it's not going to matter; when politicians in any party are caught holding moral views they hasten to assure us they wouldn't dream of acting on them.

It's not completely clear what a moral issue is either. A headline in Monday's Citizen said "'Moral' issues blow Liberals, Tories off track," and the scare quotation marks suggest the headline writer wasn't sure. At first I thought it meant sex, since the story started with the topics of abortion and gay marriage. But then it threw in the death penalty, so we had the end as well as the beginning of life. And when it added bilingualism into the mix, I became completely confused.

Then I derived inspiration from marijuana. Indirectly, I hasten to add: I read a news story about a Fraser Institute study by economist Steve Easton arguing that if marijuana were legalized governments could rake in a cool $2 billion a year in taxes. As indeed they might. But I'd rather see the issue discussed primarily in terms of whether, first, the community is morally justified in using force to protect people from harming themselves and, second, if it is, whether marijuana meets the threshold test for sufficient harm to trigger intervention.

My opinion is no and no, so I would legalize it. You need two yesses for a principled ban on the stuff. Yet Anne McLellan, who opposes legalization, recently said the suggestion of counselling women on abortion "as if we are children, as if we are not able to make our own decisions about our health and our bodies, is to me, at the beginning of the 21st century, profoundly disturbing and, dare I say it, very frightening."

Let those women seek to inhale pot smoke into their own personal lungs, or just agree to work where there's second-hand tobacco smoke, and see how much Ms. McLellan respects their right to make decisions about their health and their bodies at the beginning of the 21st century. How do you reason with such people?

Then it struck me that the Fraser Institute study was speaking precisely the government's native language by putting aside principle and dangling a sack of cash in front of it. At which point I saw that what unites the banned "moral" issues is negative: None allows politicians to attract support from a broad spectrum of likely voters by promising boodle from the treasury. They require debate on what's right or wrong rather than what's lucrative. Not fun.

Even the Conservative Party is campaigning on spending promises even more lavish than those of the Liberals, claiming they've detected a huge bag of money in Ottawa that the Liberals are dishonestly hiding because they're meanies who don't want to spend. Which frankly insults my intelligence as well as my morals. But this campaign is not about me, it's about directing the last available tax dollar to the last available suburban swing voter.

Please don't think I'm one of those dolts who considers wealth immoral. When people talk about mere money or mere things I wonder how long they think they'd last without mere food, mere water or mere air, a material mixture of some 78 per cent nitrogen, 21 per cent oxygen, nearly one per cent argon and traces of other chemical elements made of shabby protons, neutrons and electrons. Jesus said man did not live by bread alone, not that he did not live by bread. If you think combining material substance and moral purpose was a silly way to design the universe, you'll have to take it up with a far higher authority than me.

My concern is whether the material things will be put to good use or bad. And so I'm all for people being paid what they have earned. (I wish everyone who doesn't think it should happen to doctors could be forced to earn their own living exactly as they would require medical professionals to earn theirs.) But I'm against people taking money they haven't earned, whether through armed robbery or through politics. You see, I think it's wrong.

Evidently that's the sort of question we're not allowed to discuss. Which suggests an uneasy conscience about how the discussion would go if we were.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Paul Martin says we will remember D-Day long after the participants have passed on. Perhaps. But let's practise on an easy one: Let's try to remember, four full days after his death, what Ronald Reagan did and didn't do. He drastically reduced the Soviet government, but not the American one. Mr. Reagan inspired strong passions during his presidency, not all positive. But when he died his hapless 1984 electoral foe, Walter Mondale, said "Although we were political adversaries, I always liked the guy. I think he had this ability to create a sense of optimism in our country, and I think that was a very valuable contribution." He was saluted as a "statesman" by Mikhail Gorbachev and Jacques Chirac. And Democratic presidential contender John Kerry said, "Now, his own journey has ended - a long and storied trip that spanned most of the American century - and shaped one of the greatest victories of freedom. Today, in the face of new challenges, his example reminds us that we must move forward with optimism and resolve. He was our oldest president, but he made America young again." It sure beats Paul Martin's "There is just no doubt that the United States would be a very different country if it hadn't been for Ronald Reagan. It may well be that the Cold War would have been very different if it hadn't been for Ronald Reagan." (As vague as Inspector Dreyfuss's verdict on Jacques Clouseau, "he's an extraordinary man," but without the deliberate double entendre.)

Mr. Reagan's wit could lampoon others. He once said a protester looked like Tarzan, walked like Jane and smelled like Cheetah, and carried a sign saying "Make love not war," but didn't look capable of either. But it was also self-deprecating. Signing a photo of himself with Bonzo the chimpanzee, he explained, "I'm the one with the watch." And, attacked in 1984 as a senile old fool who fell asleep in cabinet meetings, he told some exhausted campaign workers he wished he could have scheduled a cabinet meeting "so we could all get some sleep." Compare that to today's grim political correctness.

His greatest and most improbable triumph was winning the Cold War. Not alone, to be sure. He was aided by a remarkable cast of characters from Igor Gouzenko to Margaret Thatcher to Pope John Paul II, many doing harder work from a less promising position. But to those who say he was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time, well, luck happens when preparation meets opportunity. Besides, they might have shared, before the event, their insight that Soviet Communism was a rusting hulk waiting for a superannuated B-movie actor to give it a final shove, not a mighty, prosperous force for world peace. Instead, as the Citizen noted, "As early as June 1982, sounding a bit delusional, he had declared that 'the march of freedom and democracy' would 'leave Marxist-Leninism on the ash heap of history.' Five years later ... in West Berlin, he made a demand that seemed equally untouched by reality. 'Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!'... Pundits were appalled and yet, within months of his leaving office, the great unravelling began. The 'Evil Empire,' as Mr. Reagan famously called it, fell with astonishing speed." Talk about winning one for the Gipper.

The Citizen's lengthy appreciation also said "He said he would turn the American economy around - and he did. He said he would reduce the size of the federal government - and he did." Not true. His policies, and personality, helped launch a long, dynamic high-tech boom including the PC revolution. But as The Wall St. Journal's online OpinionJournal noted, "he failed to reduce the size and scope of the federal government." Contrary to the predictions and, shamefully, retrospective analyses of most pundits, his tax cuts produced not an empty treasury but five per cent real growth in tax revenue from 1983 to 1989. He ran deficits because spending grew even faster, especially Social Security and the public health-care programs for the poor and elderly whose very existence otherwise well-informed Canadian commentators persist in denying. And the regulatory and judicial reach of the state grew even more.

The Citizen deprecated Mr. Reagan as "a most improbable president - an actor with little interest in ideas, a visionary whose connection with reality was often tenuous, by some accounts a shallow man ..." But his declaration that "Government does not solve problems; it subsidizes them" is one any Canadian leader would be hard-pressed to match for profundity of thought or felicity of expression. Even so, the financial and electoral dynamics of the welfare state were more than a match for him, unlike the Soviet Union or the spirit of "malaise" in America that Jimmy Carter both diagnosed and helped inspire.

Lessons worth pondering. If we can first manage to remember them.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Isn't it strange that we're not discussing sex-change operations? No, really. A week ago the Citizen reported that the Ontario government was denying plans to reinstate public medical coverage of them. And you can see why it might be a bit embarrassing to resume paying for a procedure that is, frankly, a little on the exotic side right after walloping the populace with a big tax hike you lied about during the election and delisting mainstream procedures such as physiotherapy and eye exams.

This being Canada, an ex-democracy, the predictable next step was for the relevant minister to deny having a policy on the subject, an opinion on it or, heaven forbid, jurisdiction over it. By day's end, CFRA reported, "Health Minister George Smitherman says the province's courts and human-rights tribunal" would settle the issue. When exactly did the people's representatives lose even the ambition to control the public purse?

It's not as if the Ontario government just delisted this procedure because they are homophobic meanies. Rather, like everyone else, they must constantly decide how to allocate scarce resources among competing ends. As they have: Sex changes are covered in Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan, and Newfoundland.

Nor is it immediately clear why human-rights law is not something made by legislatures and subject to amendment or override by them. Yet the Supreme Court of Canada will on June 9 and 10 hear a case regarding micromanagement of the B.C. health budget, specifically whether the province must fund a particular childhood autism treatment. And on June 8, the Court will hear arguments about the Canada Health Act itself.

Courts? Under the parliamentary system, as A.V. Dicey noted in The Law of the Constitution in 1885, the legislature is legally sovereign, though in the long run its decisions must reflect, or at least not blatantly contravene, the public's wishes. It is the system in Britain and, until recently, here.

Until recently. For Dicey gives a three-fold test of parliamentary sovereignty. "First, there is no law which Parliament cannot change ... fundamental or so-called constitutional laws are ... changed by the same body and in the same manner as other laws .... Secondly, there is ... no marked or clear distinction between laws which are not fundamental or constitutional and laws which are fundamental or constitutional. ... Thirdly, there does not exist ... any person or body of persons, executive, legislative or judicial, which can pronounce void any enactment passed by the British Parliament on the ground of such enactment being opposed to the constitution, or on any ground whatever, except, of course, its being repealed by Parliament."

Our situation before 1982 was anomalous; the British North America Act was an ordinary piece of legislation that Parliament could amend at will, but that was the British Parliament, not our own. That is why courts could strike down Canadian federal legislation that, for instance, intruded on provincial jurisdiction. Such a thing never happened in Britain. And there were significant difficulties in severing the links with Britain while preserving our parliamentary system intact, especially safeguarding provincial powers.

If the task was insurmountable, there was an alternative, adopted in the United States when it separated from Great Britain. Make the people legally as well as politically sovereign and let them, through delegates, establish a constitution that the legislature cannot alter without submitting such changes to the people for ratification. In that system, the courts may strike down laws as unconstitutional.

What we now have here is neither. Pierre Trudeau gave us a Constitution that was not a compact established by the people and amendable by them nor, though it was passed by Parliament, is it really amendable by Parliament. Instead, an Unidentified Constitutional Object hovers in mid-air, giving effective sovereignty to unelected bodies. For Dicey also notes that a body is not legally sovereign if there are "laws affecting its constitution" that it "must obey and cannot change ... a marked distinction between ordinary laws and fundamental laws" and "some person or persons" with "authority to pronounce upon the validity or constitutionality" of what it does. By such tests sovereignty rests not with our legislatures but our Supreme Court and, arguably, our human-rights commissions.

What exotic operation transformed "the power of the purse" into "What me minister"?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Allow me to interrupt the glowing promises of politicians and wall-to-wall coverage of polls with an actual issue. As a public service, to insomniacs and voters alike, I'd like to suggest that cities should get to raise more taxes. More taxes?!? Yes. Paul Martin was actually right in a recent bloviation: "our municipalities are the most underfunded of the three levels of government, and they have the least amount of say, when the policies of other governments have an impact on them." Or, in English, cities need more money and power.

At Confederation, our five biggest cities held just one-in-14 Canadians, and infrastructure was mostly railways, canals and really bumpy roads between places where people lived. The cities' limited taxing powers were sufficient to their limited responsibilities especially as, in those benighted days, citizens were thought capable of such prodigies as managing local school boards all by themselves.

Today, almost four-in-five of us live in cities and nearly two-thirds in the 27 largest ones. Infrastructure is mostly stuff like streets and sewers in places where people live, and the property tax is not efficient, fair or lucrative enough to fund what cities must do, let alone what they take it upon themselves to do. Thus, last Friday, Mr. Martin unveiled a plan-like object, promising to do a thing at a time in a way: "a Liberal government will, beginning in 2005, set aside for the benefit of municipalities a share of the federal gas tax -- a share that will be ramped up to five cents a litre, or at least $2 billion a year, as soon as we can within the next five years. The precise formula we'll use to get to five cents will be the subject of an agreement."

While we await the details, let me lay out four main options to give cities enough money to remove snow, maintain roads, cut the grass and, if they must, provide social services. The federal government or provincial governments, or both, could provide money to cities with tight controls on how to spend it. They could provide money to be spent in ways mutually agreed. They could provide money with no strings attached. Or the provinces (who have constitutional responsibility for cities) could give cities power to levy sales or income taxes.

Which is best? As so often, it depends on what you're trying to do. I agree with G.K. Chesterton that the true notion of self-government is that ordinary citizens "are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives." By that he meant they should have power over "the moulding of the landscape, the creation of a mode of life..."

On that basis I say we nix Option 1. If municipal funding decisions are made federally, you the happy taxpayer become just one of 30 million citizens and perhaps 22 million eligible voters casting ballots on national issues from defence to corruption to health care. Federal elections are not about municipal transit or trash collection. And between elections, you are just one of about 100,000 constituents of an MP who must, in caucus, reach accommodations with colleagues from P.E.I. to Baie Comeau to Comox.

If municipal decisions are made at Queen's Park, the numbers are only slightly better: 11 million citizens and eight million eligible voters; issues from health to education; MPPs with about 115,000 constituents and colleagues from Brockville to Niagara Falls.

Having higher levels of government provide funding based on agreements with cities might sound better because city councillors get some input. But from a voter's point of view, it's worse. You get politicians from all three levels of government scrambling for credit, and no information even about good decisions, let alone weird or bad ones. (My wife wrote a book, Down the Road Never Travelled, about Canada's giant hideous 1993 experiment with this approach.)

The third option, money from above with no strings attached, is far better. You still get little control over the federal or provincial taxes you pay to fund municipal activities. But when spending decisions for Ottawa are made in Ottawa, and for Thunder Bay in Thunder Bay, residents of both have far better control of their local landscape and mode of life.

Even our megacity has under a million citizens and perhaps 700,000 eligible voters and most councillors fewer than 50,000 constituents. (I said far better, not ideal; perfection is not to be found in human affairs and if it were government would definitely still be the wrong place to look.)

So the fourth option is best. Provinces should tax less and give cities the power to tax more so local residents can vote on local taxes and local spending. I know, I know, there's an election on. But we're still allowed to discuss how we might best govern ourselves.

I say let my cities tax.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

One curiosity about this election is that none of the parties seems much interested in governing. They are fixated on winning power. Like a compulsive seducer obsessed with getting the lady into bed but unwilling to take out the trash, they are fascinated with becoming the government but, as far as one can tell, literally uninterested in being it. There's no end of wine and roses about what they'll do in power. But they're frustratingly vague on how. I'm especially distressed by the lack of frank discussion of past failures. Never mind their own parties'; they don't even produce a serious analysis of what went wrong with their adversaries' attempts to govern.

It's not as if they don't know things have gone wrong. Consider this line from Stephen Harper on Paul Martin: "For 10 years, he chose his priorities. First they were cuts and downloading, then they were waste and scandal, then they were dithering and delay. Health care wasn't his priority of two months ago. How do we know it'll be his priority two months from now?"

Cute. But the trouble with such my-adversary-is-mindlessly-evil rhetoric is that quite evidently waste, scandal and dithering were not Mr. Martin's priorities. If they happened anyway, then clearly a politician can behave badly in office without intending to. Which ought to scare all candidates; if you were a plumber and couldn't figure out why the last job left a basement flooded, would you be confident you could stop it from happening again?

Jack Layton just said, "The Liberals promised in 1997 to bring in pharmacare. They looked at us and very seriously said, 'trust us.' And then they didn't do it. In 1993, they looked at us very seriously and said 'trust us, we're gong to increase health-care funding.' Paul Martin cut health-care funding more than anyone would have imagined." OK. But unless you subscribe to the mindlessly-evil explanation, you'd logically want to tell voters why, having intended these things, the Liberals found themselves unable to deliver at an acceptable cost. Then you could explain why, making the same promises with the same sincerity, you wouldn't wind up disappointing them, too.

In an ideal world, the Liberals would explain why, having run against the GST in 1993, they found they couldn't afford to abolish it. Hadn't they figured out the basic dynamics of the federal budget during nine years in opposition? The Tories would explain why under Brian Mulroney, despite their genuine and valid contempt for the fiscal irresponsibility of the Trudeau Liberals, they were serving up $30-billion deficits, not balanced budgets, even in their second term. Hadn't they figured out the basic dynamics of the federal budget during nine years in power?

And after telling us how he'd tax the rich to pay for his vast spending increases, Jack Layton would explain why Bob Rae and Glen Clark sounded equally plausible before being elected. Instead, one has the impression he does not know those two gentlemen.

In an imperfect world, I'd settle for any of them discussing the C.D. Howe Institute study this spring by Finn Poschmann and William Robson (my brother). It found that over the past six years federal budgets projected a spending increase of $21 billion but the real figure was over $40 billion. If they don't know why it happened, or that it did, I submit that they are interested in campaigning, not governing. Romance is fun; housework tedious.

Likewise, as the Citizen's Randall Denley just noted, Ontario government revenues are very close to what the McGuinty Liberals estimated before the election. It's their own spending that's $5 billion higher. Which makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that they truly didn't understand how government works after over a decade watching it, criticizing it and wanting to be it. Which suggests the subject never really interested them much anyway.

Some people might say the parties know far more than they are saying because they are determined never to give voters any bad news. I realize we're not exactly in "blood, toil, tears and sweat" territory but, given the catastrophes that everyone now knows overtake unprepared governments, I think if they saw tough sledding ahead they'd warn us. Since they don't discuss difficulties other than the inept vileness of their partisan opponents, I say that they don't believe in them.

The assurance by Liberal campaign co-chair David Herle right before the election that Paul Martin was "in a fabulous mental place," and his belief that we would care, suggests a level of self-absorption that creates impatience with tedious practical details.

Which one also finds in Don Juans, oddly enough.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Evidently we're meant to be excited about this election. The Citizen's Susan Riley just confessed, or boasted, that "Frankly, I find this game more exciting than playoff hockey" as she set off to do a campaign blog updated several times a day on exactly what the candidates zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Look, I don't like cynicism, but I am a realist. I don't like cynicism because it's the cheap way out. I don't sympathize with the character in Frank Capra's 1941 film Meet John Doe who says "I don't read no papers and I don't listen to radios either. I know the world's been shaved by a drunken barber, and I don't have to read it!" It's one of those repellent little logical circles that, by rejecting all potential evidence as necessarily unhelpful, never weighs any potential evidence.

I also oppose cynicism in politics because when people expect nothing from government they tend to receive it in abundance. I don't want us to give up. I want us to take our politics back. The first step is to take back the underlying philosophy, to understand that we weren't always governed this way, so we don't have to be in future. I also very much liked the line from a caller to Thinking Aloud (which my wife and I host on CFRA) that "If you can't pay anything else, then at least pay attention."

The problem is that, while I'm not in favour of cynicism, I'm also not in favour of wishful thinking. As the 18th-century Bishop of Durham, Joseph Butler, put it, "Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we desire to be deceived?"

Those who are better informed have long been less cynical about public affairs. But if the argument between those who reject political participation as pointless and those who insist that it is an unpleasant but useful duty is being won by the former on the facts, let's try to change the facts, not wish them away. First we have to face them.

So I ask you, what is there about any of the parties to fire our imagination? The Liberals are led by a hollow drum booming sententiously from both sides. Paul Martin declares himself the candidate of changely changehoodship, slams Stephen Harper's judgment and even patriotism because he wants to change things in Canada, then promises total transformation of whatever he's currently talking about, from federal-provincial relations to health care, after being a senior member of the government for most of the past decade, and taking credit for its achievements.

He promises to repair our damaged relations with the United States, slams Stephen Harper for wanting to drag us into the fetid swamp of American-style whatever he's currently talking about, then says "I love the United States but I love far greater that we are different." (Yes, for one thing their leader mangles his syntax.) He declares this the most important election in the history of his ego. But what he won't discuss, while peddling recycled spending promises and defending Dalton McGuinty, is the reasons for the growing feeling that the Liberals are too slick.

On the Conservative side, a man who once headed an organization devoted to "More Freedom Through Less Government" now offers a vast expansion of socialized medicine in the form of federally run pharmacare (along with respect for provincial jurisdiction), plus billions more for regular health care, billions more for defence, billions more for cities, billions more for debt repayment and billions more in tax cuts, all paid for by a ruthless war on waste. They're the party of "Less Government Through More Government." No thanks.

As for the NDP, I think it's unfair to pummel Jack Layton for his flashiness after pummelling his two predecessors for their dullness. On the other hand, as Robert Fulford aptly noted, "In Layton's dreams, workers ride bikes to their jobs at the auto plant." For organizational and intellectual reasons, his party is torn between metal-bashing and tree-hugging in ways that harm its electoral prospects.

Worse, voters would doubt the NDP's competence to ensure a steady stream of boodle to the middle class even if it weren't torn between wishing to govern responsibly and considering responsibility a bourgeois plot.

As for the Bloc Quebecois, what good are lukewarm separatists?

The politicians might reply, in an improbably unguarded moment, that voters can't expect anything else until the majority abandons its implicit political slogan: "What's in it for me?" Fine. Let's. I'm not suggesting we become resigned to or cynical about cynicism in politics especially including our own motives. But let's not delude ourselves that, whatever the underlying cause, politics today is capable of inspiring a normal person.

On the other hand, how 'bout them Flames?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

There's an election coming up. How grand. I share P.J. O'Rourke's view, in the April Atlantic Monthly, that "I'm fascinated by political enthusiasm. To me, selecting my democratic representative is a lugubrious duty, more like making a will than cheering the Bruins." But when he added that he finds enthusiasm "a slightly creepy word, with its Greek root meaning 'the fact of being possessed by a God','' I thought count your blessings. I'm about to be possessed by Jean-Pierre Kingsley.

I'm not sure how it happened. The chief electoral officer once had the humble if important duty of ensuring the smooth administrative functioning of our electoral system including, say, the new voters' list. But Mr. Kingsley somehow acquired much larger fish to fry. (And a bigger pan; his administrative budget, $3.5 million in 1999, hit $17.9 million by 2003.) Sunday's Citizen said as soon as the writ is dropped, Mr. Kingsley will hold a press conference to urge us all to vote. He has often voiced "very serious concerns" about low turnout because, he told a Carleton University symposium last year, "To give true meaning to democracy, the engagement of all citizens is required." (All?) His particular worry is young people; in 2000, just over 61 per cent of eligible voters turned out, but only 25.4 per cent of those 18 to 24.

I could congratulate youth for renouncing political power until they acquire greater maturity. Or make the wacky suggestion that low turnout is hardly surprising given the mendacious incompetence of recent politics. Maybe we who keep on voting are like folks who lived through the Depression and can't stop saving bits of string lest the lean years return. As an editorial in Thursday's Citizen noted, before McSwindle we had Peter MacKay promising in writing not to merge the Tories with the Alliance; most of Ottawa city council promising to "hold the line" on taxes and Paul Martin swearing he'd get to the bottom of the sponsorship scandal. To say nothing of "Zap, you're frozen," "pink slips and running shoes," or axing the GST and NAFTA. But such a suggestion implies that it is the place of voters to pass judgment on politicians.

Our political class clearly holds the opposite view. Understandably, given our opinion of them. A snap survey right after the McSwindle budget found majority opposition to the health premium and service cutbacks even among Liberal supporters but, the Citizen added, "The good news for the Liberals is that 66 per cent of people polled believe they are no better or worse than any other party when it comes to breaking promises."

If that's the good news, I have an even wackier thought. If citizens don't believe a word politicians say, but you want to re-engage them in politics, it would be a perfect time to throw public debate wide open. Instead, the Supreme Court just threw it wide shut by upholding an election gag law enthusiastically supported by one J.-P. Kingsley.

I know, I know, it's touted as a way of keeping the rich from hijacking democracy. There is, the court admitted, no evidence that such a thing happens. Besides, if we're talking rich, how about the federal government, with annual revenues of $180 billion and the largest advertising budget in the country in election years? Oh no no no no no no. Absent what the court admits is censorship, Leviathan will be outshouted by the sinister plutocrats at the National Citizens' Coalition with their $1.5-million annual budget.

It reflects something worse as well. According to A.V. Dicey's magisterial late 19th century The Law of the Constitution, "In England the doctrine has since 1700 in substance prevailed that the government has nothing to do with the guidance of opinion ... Hence the government has (speaking generally) exercised no special control over literature, and the law of the press ... has been nothing else than a branch or an application of the law of libel. In France, literature has for centuries been considered as the particular concern of the state. The prevailing doctrine ... has been, and still to a certain extent is, that it is the function of the administration not only to punish defamation, slander, or blasphemy, but to guide the course of opinion or, at any rate, to adopt preventive measures for guarding against the propagation in print of unsound or dangerous doctrines." We seem to have switched philosophies here in Canada.

So in the next election we will be guided into voting despite our apathy and sloth. But we shall be forbidden to prattle among ourselves, above a whisper, about the issues on which we might cast an informed ballot.

Incredible, under the circumstances, that our enthusiasm for the process is waning.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]