On the surface Bytown's a friendly, peaceful, normal kind of place. The sort of burg where you'd settle down, raise a couple of taxes, keep your dog away from the water and license your cat. But behind the facade of white picket fences, language squabbles and carefully maintained balls of red tape there's a dark underside of corruption and decay, where self-indulgence is a way of life, respect for the law a bad joke, and the smell of mulch all too familiar. That's my world. I'm Leif Branch, twig detective. I work for the Surface Operations branch, or SOP. Most folks don't give us a second thought as they go about their business. But without us their placid suburban lives would become a hell of dandelion stalks, loose branches and grass clippings. Especially grass clippings.

Yeah, grass is bigger in this town than at Woodstock. And not just hippies. You see these suburbanites gathered round their barbecues picking grubs out of their pesticide-free lawns while discussing LeBreton Flats and you'd never in a million years guess, but half the time they're reeling from the sensuous fumes of newly-mown grass. They're hauling sacks of the stuff around in their Volvo station wagons.

Like the other night I'm on a stakeout with my partner Chip. Real tough guy: MBA and a degree in urban planning. A Brit who used to work for Scotland Yardwaste. Now he's down here on transfer from Collection Operations, Solid Waste Services Branch, PWS (Public Works and Services). We're in a war here and everyone pitches in.

So we see this perp cruising along, middle aged, balding, looks like a regular Joe. He's got one of them flashy SUVs that was never closer to nature than a cul-de-sac with no curb in Tanaka. Most folks probably wouldn't give him a second look. But down here in the SOP you get a sixth sense. You have to. Otherwise you wind up with your feet sticking out of a pile of fresh wood chips. And the thing is, he's going exactly the speed limit and it just don't seem right. He's acting super-casual. But out of the corner of his eye he's watching the speedometer real close. He doesn't want to attract attention. And that's what gives him away.

So we let him pass then we ease out onto Clunt Hub, real casual ourselves. And sure enough, about 10 klicks later he turns off into Fred Pit. We cruise on by, just round the bend, then I pull over and Chip's already out of the car and working his way back along the fringe of trees. I catch up with him and we see the guy standing by his car, gazing around like nothing's going on, like maybe he's a bird watcher who forgot his binoculars. But once he thinks the coast is clear, suddenly he's round at the back and got it open and out come two big sacks.

We're on him right away and there's this panicky look in his eyes cuz he knows we can smell that unmistakable sharp odour. "Guess you're into it pretty heavy, huh, pal? Got a pretty big load to dump here." And he was. About forty-four pounds (sorry, 20 kilos). And not just grass. Thorns, goldenrod. He's into the hard stuff. Gotta feel sorry for his wife and kids, though. Bet they never noticed a thing.

See, lots of folks think it can't happen to them. Their neighbours are straight. They raised their kids right. It's all somebody else's problem. Maybe some place with an accent in its name. Not Barbecuehaven, right? Nope. Believe me. Folks start small, think they can control it. Pull up one weed, drop it in the gutter. Then it's a dandelion stalk here, a twig there, a handful of ragweed stems.

Next thing you know, they're hanging around in parks, stinking of cheap overseed, hauling their stash in a paper bag. The lucky ones, we bust 'em early. The real sad cases fall into the hands of the mulch mafia. Like you got a neighbour, seems kinda normal, a bit of a slob, house nicer than you figure he could afford. Then one day you're looking at his fancy car and you suddenly think, "Just how many wood chips has he got on that driveway?" Yup. He's laundering it for the big boys.

So do yourselves and us a favour, friend. If the guy next door is always out there mowing but his garage isn't full of slimy decaying grass waiting for fall (they're not idiots at City Hall, they know hauling it off during the growing season would just encourage shameless public gardening), remember: It's not a victimless crime. He's dumping plant material in a park where kids play, or sneaking it into the regular trash so it ends up contaminating a landfill and ruining the fish heads, old newspapers and stray rubber boots. Don't let it happen. Be a good Stalinist citizen. Call our snitch line.

Call Leif Branch, twig detective. Before the wood chips get you.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Across a misty Avalon lake a barge glides gently over dark waters though no wind stirs its sails. Within, in shimmering armour, lies King Arthur, fatally wounded by a movie camera. On shore, three knights discuss his fate. "Gad, 'tis passing sad the great Arthur should have come to this," observed Sir Prisde. "And passing strange."

"That it is. There, almost unrecognizable, lies the greatest and most moving figure in all of British folklore, the once and future king," responded Sir Perceiving.

"Of course in reality he was but a Celtic chieftain leading a small band through the murk of the Dark Ages," observed Lord Quibble. "The tale grew in the telling. The real Arthur, methinks, won a small futile rearguard battle against Saxon invaders in the chaos following the withdrawal of Rome."

"Aye," agreed Sir Perceiving. "But his legend expanded into the shape of universal human truths. No normal person can be unmoved by it, however badly certain authors, and I don't just mean T.H. White, have mangled the story."

"Is there not always an element of romance in a noble lost cause?" asked Sir Prisde. "Isn't part of the appeal Arthur's determination to fight for what's right, knowing the cause to be lost and him with it?"

"Indeed," said Sir Perceiving. "But there's more, much more. Something mighty was salvaged from the ruins against the odds. It is a tale of hope triumphing over human weakness and catastrophic failure and a promise that it always will.

"What exactly the real Arthur did we will never know, but some sort of melding of Celt and Saxon rather than destruction and genocide seems to have resulted, and a preservation of the rule of law even in the darkest years in a way much of the world still had not seen 15 centuries later.

"And did not Britons always, to their benefit, compare their existing government with Camelot? Something made their habit of self-government overcome the Norman invaders, not the other way around. And if I were a superstitious man, I would even ask whether the promise of Arthur's return in England's hour of greatest peril was not fulfilled in 1940."

"Gad, sir, you bring a tear to my eye. 'Tis a mighty, moving tale. And now look at it. There lies the king, shorn of his majesty."

"I wonder what caused this fate?"

"Perchance the decision to make him the second-century Roman cavalry commander Lucius Artorius Castus. Or possibly turning the Knights of the Round Table into Ukrainian mercenaries. Oh, and was it possibly a mistake to make Guinevere into a leather-strap-clad flirt who, ye critic Roger of Ebert says, 'fits right into the current appetite for women action heroes who are essentially honorary men, all except for the squishy parts'? Something of the 'White Phantom' was definitely lost here -- uh, even before they also discarded her pivotal love affair with Lancelot."

"But surely your cherished legend is itself the product of total artistic licence," replied Lord Quibble. "Scholars tell us the origins of the mystical elements grafted onto this obscure Celtic chieftain lie in pagan fertility myths. All that business about the Fisher King, the lance streaming blood. Even Excalibur is a bit, well, phallic. Plus Arthur's a classic Ur-myth hero. The Christian elements were added later."

"True," agreed Sir Perceiving. "But not unsuitably. It grew as it did, and endured as it has, not phantastically but because it spoke to something deep in our souls. It became a tale of the redemption of human nature, not its abolition, a universal tale of longing, loss and recovery; of the impossibility of human perfection transcended by the possibility of human hope. It's Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere we identify with, and all the other knights stumbling through wild adventures never getting a step nearer the Grail, failing, being humiliated, but somehow getting up again and getting back on the horse. Not that prig Galahad, even though he gets to see the Grail. You couldn't have a beer with that guy. It's a perfect story about the human condition. Why mess with it?"

"But the thing is, modern Hollywood must question, transvalue, subvert."

"Oh. I thought that was Mordred's job."

A long silence ensued.

"It really is a bit of a mess," said Sir Prisde at last. "Who shall bring this sad news to the mighty keep of Boxe Offyce?"

"How about Sir Losealot?"

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

In The Maltese Falcon, Kaspar "the Fat Man" Gutman tells Humphrey Bogart's detective Sam Spade, "By Gad, sir, you are a character. There's never any telling what you'll say or do next, except that it's bound to be something astonishing." I feel the same way about our Supreme Court, whose recent ruling on religion conveys a freedom at once dangerously unbounded and utterly unreliable.

Syndicat Northcrest v. Amselem concerned Orthodox Jews in a Montreal luxury condominium complex. In purchasing their units, they had agreed not to make certain uses of their balconies, but subsequently claimed the right to erect temporary "succah" huts on them anyway. They apparently hadn't read the purchase agreement, but in any event felt they shouldn't be bound by it because they really didn't want to be. And the court agreed.

I have no quarrel with Orthodox Judaism: I simply encourage its adherents to refuse to purchase or rent any property where there is a legal obstacle to its observance. Instead, five justices expressly endorsed "a personal or subjective understanding of freedom of religion" in which "it is inappropriate to require expert opinions" about what a religion actually requires and "(b)ecause of the vacillating nature of religious belief, a court's inquiry into sincerity, if anything, should focus not on past practice or past belief but on a person's belief at the time of the alleged interference with his or her religious freedom."

Excuse me? What possible belief or practice would not qualify under that definition? And if such an open-ended "religious freedom" lets one disregard otherwise legally binding obligations, what freedom or security can any of us count on having?

In Northcrest the court said "The State is in no position to be, nor should it become, the arbiter of religious dogma." But it must, now that it has assumed the task of deciding which beliefs are good enough to override what contracts. I much preferred the old system in which the court only had to decide whether property was being legally used. It safeguarded our liberties well in principle, if not always in practice (humans are fallible). And it could not set us at one another's throats by conferring conflicting "rights."

Under the old English constitution, free speech, free assembly, freedom of religion and so on. were not glorious abstract entities bestowed in toto by a benevolent state that then administered them. Rather, as A. V. Dicey explained in The Law of the Constitution in 1885, they arose from specific legal prohibitions on anyone, private or public, messing with us. You could walk down the street and enter a building provided you owned it or had the consent of the owner. So could I. So could she. In consequence, we could in fact assemble, not because the law gave us "freedom of assembly" but because it let us sue or lay charges against anyone who tried to stop us doing it.

Once inside, we could discuss politics, worship God or eat boiled turnips. But we could not, say, emit toxic smoke into the neighbourhood, regardless of whether we did it to honour God, amuse ourselves or get rid of old tires. What was decisive was our neighbour's right not to be poisoned, not the intensity or direction of our motives. End of story.

The distinction here is not between written and unwritten constitutions. The U.S. Constitution, for instance, is quite unlike the French, Soviet and any number of other written ones. It is essentially an attempt to strengthen the British system by codifying it.

Despite loose talk about "freedom of religion," the U.S. Bill of Rights declares not that citizens may do certain abstract things but that the government may not do certain specific ones. The U.S. First Amendment actually says "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

Our own Constitution, lamentably, leans the other way. Our Charter grants everyone "fundamental freedoms" including "freedom of conscience and religion." It might be superfluous to add, "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society," since it already says what government should give us, not what it may not take from us.

It's not the Supreme Court's fault, I know. But if our jurists read the Charter with Dicey at their elbows, they could have tried to give us rights we could understand, because they were not unbounded, and could depend on because they did not conflict.

Instead we get the stuff that dreams are made of. Astonishing.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

When the Athenian statesman Phocion gave a speech that the public applauded, Plutarch claims, he turned to some friends and asked, "Have I inadvertently said something foolish?" How many politicians would ever have such a reaction today? Yet how many should? I sure missed Plutarch during this election. For one thing, I treasure his anecdote of Cato the Elder who, told it was odd that there was no monument to him in Rome, said he would far rather have people ask why he didn't have a statue than why he did. What a useful standard by which to judge the personal qualities of politicians. When Bill Clinton claims in his memoirs that "in politics, if you don't toot your own horn, it usually stays untooted" you might reasonably conclude that, in Cato's situation, he would have put one up himself.

Some readers may be puzzled by my periodic tendency to enthuse about some author who wrote long before Jennifer Lopez's first marriage; if so I reply that it is not a boast to find nothing interesting in books. (Or quote American commentator Florence King that in high school "the girls who recited Mickey Rooney's wives in the cafeteria made fun of me for reciting Henry VIII's wives in history class ...")

All argument is in some sense argument by analogy: This thing is like that thing, it is not like that other thing, it is more like this thing than like that, and so on. But if we do not carry around with us a supply of material suitable for the drawing of analogies, what sort of reasoning is likely to result? That's why Plutarch wrote The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans.

A person without knowledge of the past is liable to react to a promise of free money the same way Homer Simpson reacts to the word "doughnut." Would it not be better instead to flinch as George Washington would have at any political program reminiscent of Rome's "bread and circuses" for the urban mob? Or recall another Plutarch story about Cato the Elder: "Being once desirous to dissuade the common people of Rome from their unseasonable and impetuous clamour for largesses and distributions of corn, he began thus to harangue them: 'It is a difficult task, O citizens, to make speeches to the belly, which has no ears.'" Paul Martin would have been well-advised a year ago to ponder Plutarch's report that Pompey the Great once had the chance "to lead Tigranes, King of Armenia, in triumph," but "chose rather to make him a confederate of the Romans, saying that a single day was worth less than all future time."

My admiration for Plutarch is not uncritical. He likes the Spartans too much, and unfairly casts Marc Antony as too besotted with Cleopatra to attend to affairs of the state. But it's interesting to see him praise Cleopatra's personality and intellect over her raw physical beauty, and slam Julius Caesar, who "looking upon all changes and commotions in the state as materials useful for his own purposes, desired rather to increase than extinguish them ..." Perhaps his correspondingly high opinion of Caesar's assassin Brutus is overdone. But it would be nice to have some sort of opinion on Brutus that doesn't also involve Popeye the sailor man.

Lest you smell dust here, I promise that Plutarch is also full of intrigue, illicit sex and gruesome violence. For instance, the orator Cicero, who backed Brutus, was assassinated and, on the orders of Marc Antony, his head and hands were severed, brought to Rome, and "fastened up over the rostra, where the orators spoke; a sight which the Roman people shuddered to behold, and they believed they saw there, not the face of Cicero, but the image of Antony's own soul." A useful anecdote to have handy whenever someone triumphantly waves an enemy's head in public.

Plutarch also records that Phocion once "answered King Antipater, who sought his approbation of some unworthy action, 'I cannot be your flatterer, and your friend.'" And he advises the politically ambitious likewise to "answer the people, 'I cannot govern and obey you.'" Of course anyone who did so might not win, but hey, most candidates lose anyway. (Besides, Cato the Younger once lost an election for consul, declined to run again because the people obviously didn't want him, and happily went on with his life.) And it would surely raise the level of debate to go about dismissing people as "another Lepidus" or hailing them as "a second Brutus" instead of wracking our brains trying to remember who was in Joe Clark's cabinet.

Speaking of people who should certainly have spent more time asking friends if they'd inadvertently said something foolish.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Now it's time to govern. Oh dear. I'm not against minority governments in principle. The late Senator Eugene Forsey, a constitutional expert though a man of the left, thought they had many merits. As his daughter Helen reminded Citizen readers a week ago, he thought they could restore influence to ordinary MPs, generate real debates in Parliament, and were less able than majorities to head recklessly in a bad direction. In the past, Canada has had several left-Liberal minority governments that were, in those terms, highly successful: first William Lyon Mackenzie King with the Progressives in the 1920s, then Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau with the NDP from 1963 to '68 and 1972 to '74. But have we chosen one this time?

In one sense, "we" have not done anything. The final tally shows Liberal support at roughly 37 per cent, Tories at 30, NDP at 16, Bloc at 13 and Greens at four. Yet not one single voter, let alone all of us, cast 37 per cent of our ballot for the Liberals, 30 per cent for the Tories, etc. If we were one gigantic but not very intelligent entity, a sort of political stegosaurus, we could be accused of rejecting the Liberals' combination of arrogance and corruption with fiscal prudence by jettisoning the fiscal prudence. Yet even that may well overstate the Parliament that just resulted from the cumulative effects of our individual voting decisions.

I would certainly be worried on policy grounds if I thought the three social-democratic parties, who among them now hold more than two-thirds of the 308 seats in Parliament, could govern, however badly. But I don't. The Liberals and NDP went to bed on election night with a slim combined majority of MPs and woke up without it; 135 for the Liberals and 19 for the NDP leaves them one short of the 155 they need even before electing a speaker. And they say Mr. Martin does not get along with Mr. Layton (the debates will not have helped). But even if he did, what would they pass?

Much of the election featured a sort of comedy seduction scene, with Paul moving closer to Jack on the bench with a bouquet of progressive values, while Jack strove to get farther and farther away without falling off the left edge. And Bloc MPs may want to destroy Canada but are in other respects impeccable social democrats who favour massive social spending, gnawing at the Americans' ankles, gay marriage, abortion on demand, the Kyoto accord, gun control and everything else that makes Ed Broadbent go round. Come to think of it, how does the NDP platform differ from that of the Liberals, except on windmills and laser beams?

Paul Martin spent election night giving pompous pledges of vague marvels to come. And I grant that Mr. Duceppe and Mr. Layton are equally, in Monty Python's apt phrase, "pro-humanity and anti-bad-things." But what actual policies might such a coalition pursue? In Tuesday's Citizen, Charles Gordon noted that "some would say that the two successive minorities of Lester Pearson (1963-1968) produced some of the best government the country has seen. There are others, not many of them in Alberta, who liked the 1972-74 period, in which Pierre Trudeau brought in the Foreign Investment Review Act and the National Energy Program with the help of the NDP." But is this model now available?

Governments in Canada take 35 per cent of the GDP in taxes and another nine percent in fees, charges and sundry other sneaky raids on your wallet. There's no way it's going to get a lot bigger. So what are these progressive parties going to do, while they're not busy deferring to the courts on the radical social agenda? Clean up the tax code? Invest in boring infrastructure? Squabble colourfully and bring down the government so we can do it all again? (And please don't say "Implement the Kyoto Accord''; the science behind it is far too shaky to support even a bad implementation plan.)

Granted, the NDP could torpedo two of Paul Martin's top priorities. What could the prime minister do, or say, to repair relations with the United States or reduce western alienation while relying on Jack Layton or Gilles Duceppe to prop up his regime? Join the war on terror? Abolish the long-gun registry? Buy "aircraft carriers" (sorry, multi-purpose supply ships capable of carrying helicopters)?

It's hard to believe another election appeals to any of the parties. The Bloc just did as well as it possibly could while the others, exhausted and demoralized, can hardly think their platforms will taste better reheated than they did fresh from the oven. But a Parliament that can't conduct public business must dissolve.

Oh dear.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The 2004 election definitely calls for strategic voting. Not because it's this election but because it's an election. All voting is strategic. The question is whether your strategy is good, bad or ugly. For instance, what could be more strategic than trying to vote someone into office? Admittedly, there are many ways such a strategy could fail. But it is important to distinguish between a strategy that is unlikely to succeed because your situation is difficult (pulling your goalie in the last minute of a Stanley Cup Game 7 when you are down a goal) and one that is unlikely to succeed because it is stupid (voting for Bob Rae).

Even not voting is a strategy. It relies on the calculation that you are unlikely to receive sufficient benefits from it to justify the energy required. I think it's a mistake. For one thing, it's hard enough to control politicians when they know we do care enough to vote. For another, anyone in the habit of making such a calculation is likely to benefit simply from the exercise involved in transferring his or her bulk from the couch to the voting booth and back again. But a bad plan is still a plan. (Even the calculation, as an economist might phrase it, that habitual heavy consumption of adult beverages will yield sufficient utility to offset any costs incurred by not realizing an election is even going on.)

What people normally mean by "strategic voting'' is the behaviour of citizens sufficiently engaged to vote who think the candidate they prefer in their own riding, or the party they prefer overall, can't win. They exist in large numbers in any election, and they face a complex calculation, especially with Canada's new election-finance law.

Their first consideration always was, and still is, whether their riding faces a close race at all. If so, are they determined, if they can't elect their guy or gal, to at least throw the bums out or to keep them out? Such people incensed by the Liberals may vote NDP even if their first choice would be Tory or vice versa (or, in Quebec, Bloc). Others might hold their noses and vote Liberal to keep the Tories or Bloc out.

Alternatively, if the race is not close or they're not strongly motivated to throw bums in any direction, they can cast a ballot to "show the flag.'' They could vote to signal to some mainstream party, and their fellow citizens, that it enjoys some support even in a comparative political desert. Or they could vote Rhinoceros to tell their fellows they care but are dismayed by the allegedly serious choices.

All these calculations have been rendered more complex by our new election law that limits private donations to parties while giving them lavish public funding. I do not like this law: for one thing, I say free people can spend or give away their money as they see fit (and anyone concerned about a party's financial backing is free not to vote for it). For another, restrictive election laws passed by incumbent politicians generally favour incumbents. Self-interest is not only found in markets, folks.

The new campaign law gives each party a subsidy of $1.75 per year for every vote it got in the last election, provided it gets at least two per cent support nationally or five per cent in those ridings where it runs candidates. It works strongly against new parties and fringe ones. If you vote for the Marijuana Party, or spoil or refuse your ballot, it now costs your favoured mainstream party, if any, $1.75 a year or about $7 by the next election. Of course you can then give them the seven bucks but, in effect, a non-mainstream vote now costs $7. And among fringe parties, the law strongly favours the Greens. If you want to cast a gadfly ballot, they are the only smaller party likely to clear the two-per-cent hurdle and hence benefit financially from your vote, and since they are not certain to clear that hurdle, they and only they might desperately need it.

Regrettably, riding-by-riding polls do not seem to be available to tell you if you are, in fact, voting in a close race. And Quebec is pretty volatile. But in Ontario in the last decade, the Liberals have done about 11 per cent better than nationally, and despite their 98, 101 and 100 seats here in the last three elections, it's a safe bet the older history of your riding, and its provincial record, will now reassert themselves. These factors should tell you what the national and provincial polls probably mean locally.

Looking it all up could take an hour or so. If it doesn't seem worth it, see adult beverages above.

But remember: Even apathy is a strategy. Just not a good one.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

There was a time when no one would call satisfactory any political philosophy that could not answer Juvenal's classic question Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Unfortunately, we have since had so much progress that we have trouble just understanding it, even if it is asked in English: "Who shall guard the guardians?" In any political system someone must have ultimate authority. But since it is a fundamental principle of justice that nemo judex in causa sua ("no one shall be a judge in his own case"), there is a seemingly insoluble difficulty in establishing a just political system. People like Saddam Hussein don't encourage discussion of such issues. But even Hitler and Stalin believed, at least ostensibly, that history would be their judge. And I suppose it was. But given the cost in human life and misery, one naturally prefers a more immediate mechanism. Which is why, in democracies, ordinary people get to decide if their government stinks.

Proper democracy is based on majority rule. But not untrammeled. The people can veto policy but not initiate it. Democracy's answer to Juvenal is: The government guards the public good, and the public guards the government.

It is not perfect for, as the ancients knew too well, it collapses if (or, in Cicero's view, when) the government becomes merely an instrument of the popular will. Which puts me in a rather peculiar position. For years I was concerned largely with reminding people why we need checks on the popular will, especially while Preston Manning was going about suggesting we solve this problem by ignoring it. When the Citizen's Susan Riley took some heat for worrying that if the Tories won, "the rights of gays and lesbians to marry would be decided by the mob, in the form of a free vote in Parliament," I was not entirely unsympathetic.

The problem is that where Mr. Manning ignored the tyranny, she seems to want to ignore the majority. Which strikes me as throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Surely the solution to the tyranny of the majority is to avoid the tyranny, not the majority. If not, any number of other tyrants stand waiting in the wings. Maclean's Mary Janigan just wrote: "when the Tory platform declares that 'Parliament, not unelected judges, should have the final say on contentious social issues like the definition of marriage,' it is a jarring disruption in a tradition of delicate, mutually cautious respect. This is about far more than gay marriage: when parties declare that parliamentarians will function as the final interpreters of basic rights, they may unleash forces they cannot control." Such as mob rule? Perhaps. But if parliamentarians are not to have that function, who is? What forces are then unleashed, and how are we to control them, if at all?

We should be told. Instead, deputy Tory leader Peter MacKay recently said he couldn't imagine "any circumstances" in which he would support the notwithstanding clause because "it's the legislative equivalent of a nuclear bomb, it basically wipes out the law and preserves the status quo for five years." Actually, it reinstates a law a court has wiped out (or protects one against future Charter challenges). If he doesn't know that, one wonders what else he doesn't know.

Ms. Riley more recently wrote: "Human rights charters exist to protect minorities, because the majority cannot always be relied upon to do so." Then who can? If not only the establishment but also the maintenance of restraints on the majority are ultimately in the hands of the majority, then their effect is to prevent that majority from acting in haste; if not, then their effect is to prevent it from acting at all. These are quite different matters, and if opponents of the notwithstanding clause favour the latter, then I should desire them to lay their political philosophy before the public in considerably more detail than they have done.

Retiring Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci just gave a parting interview in which he called the top court's rulings so far only "beginnings" and conceded the legality of the notwithstanding clause but questioned its legitimacy: "I find it difficult to believe that in our democracy that we would want to amend the Constitution to deny rights." Which misses the point. Regardless of the excellence of institutions, there is always the problem, when interpretations clash, of whose shall ultimately prevail. He said "Courts can't give many of those decisions too quickly. The rest of society have to, in some ways, catch up." Jolly patient of him. But what happens if we never do, in his "new democracy based on constitutionalism and individual human rights?"

I preferred the old one based on the people. For if not even the majority may be judges in their own case, how can judges be trusted with this power? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Huh?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

If you ask me, the leaders debates would have been greatly improved by the presence of a large orange cauliflower at one of the podiums. Cynics might say they would have been greatly improved by almost anything, including a sudden loss of electrical power in the hall. But I am in earnest. And no, it's not science fiction. Of course a large orange cauliflower would not have interrupted constantly, espoused a philosophy directly contrary to its old one, urged the destruction of the country, or persistently accused its opponent of wanting to buy "aircraft carriers'' it knew were the same multi-purpose helicopter-capable supply ships it had promised to purchase in a speech at CFB Gagetown in mid-April. But nor would any number of other inanimate objects.

Large orange cauliflowers offer far more direct merits. You see, after a mutant orange cauliflower appeared on a farm north of Toronto in 1970, food scientists set about breeding ones that didn't taste worse than the standard white kind (surely not that big a challenge) and now they are all the rage in chic New York restaurants. Whereas, in 1970 the federal government was paying half the cost of medicare and now... Compare and contrast, as they say on college exams.

The story of orange cauliflower, discovered by accident, improved by science and mass-produced by free enterprise, was just one such in the Citizen this week. That same article, quoting a plant scientist, noted that "Twenty years ago you would probably find only 20 or 30 types of produce in a supermarket. Now you find 20 or 30 types of peppers."

And a health feature on Wednesday noted that through changes in chicken feed and breeding, eggs now have two-thirds less cholesterol than 10 years ago. Possibly just in time for us to discover the giant government scare campaign against cholesterol had the same value as its advice to eat tons of carbs.

Markets are not perfect. No human institution is. But their fast and flexible response to our desires lets us try various solutions to our problems. If anything markets are too fast; with a baffling range of high-tech basketball shoes affordable to the average feckless teen, another Citizen story noted, marketers can barely keep up as trends change so fast things get dismissed half-ironically as "so five seconds ago.''

Did you get even a hint during the debate that the private market economy was fulfilling its promise so well we may drown in fat-free soy latte? (Or that a recent survey on what was "most priceless'' about Canada got "freedom'' most often, at 24 per cent, with tolerance a distant second at six percent, though as 28 per cent of us tell pollsters we will give blood but only 3.7 per cent do it, we may be readier to praise freedom in theory than to shoulder its burdens in practice.)

Or were the leaders droning on as if only government mattered and the entire private sphere of human existence were a sad and sordid activity carried out by losers in dingy alleys between the glorious skyscrapers of state enterprise?

Did even Stephen Harper make favourable passing reference to free enterprise? As for the other three, the explanation cannot be that of course they didn't praise markets because they are social democrats. Such a philosophy should be the result, not the cause, of a failure to see the merits of markets, and subject to revision in the face of overwhelming evidence. So did Mr. Martin, Mr. Layton and Mr. Duceppe fail to notice that markets keep their promises and politicians do not, or are they just hoping to hush it up?

To me the implications of the wildly different experience you will have in any supermarket than any government department are obvious: When possible rely on markets, and incorporate into governments as many features of markets as possible. (It's much harder than some people think and I have no time for public-private partnerships, but I'll take decentralization over megacities.)

Markets cannot solve all our problems, and can even mislead searchers for meaning down futile hedonistic paths. Or sell them an eggplant. But they do solve the problems they set themselves including some very important ones. As for apparent frivolities like orange cauliflower, it turns out to be less work for farmers than the white kind, whose leaves must be tied shut lest the sun deprive it of the pallid hue that suits its ghastly flavour. And healthier for consumers, because what makes it orange in sunlight is wholesome beta-carotene which we convert to vitamin A.

So forget those debates and watch Attack of the Mutant Orange Cauliflowers.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]