Oh boy. I can't wait. No, not for another bronze medal. In less than a month, Paul Martin sits down with the premiers and reveals in front of the TV cameras his sure-fire secret plan to fix medicare for a generation. I do hope it's not just "Think happy thoughts." Recent portents in the newspapers are not encouraging. First, a story in Monday's Citizen said a study presented at this week's Canadian Medical Association annual meeting called for a "culture of safety" to cut down on the thousands of medical errors that injure or kill patients every year. Well, it's either that or incentives. I congratulate the medical profession for tackling a topic that, especially at first, can only bring them bad publicity. But now that it's on the operating table, let's think of ways to reward people who correct mistakes and punish those who conceal them. You know, the way private firms that acquire a reputation for sneakily putting people's health at risk lose customers and go broke. Whereas in a state monopoly they, um, yes, well, gee this could be tricky. Hey. Let's urge doctors to really, really care about people's health. Yeah. That's the ticket.

Another story in Monday's Citizen started: "A major public education program is needed to encourage Canadians to donate their eggs or sperm to those requiring help creating a family now that payments are outlawed, say the authors of a Health Canada-commissioned study." Well, it's either that or incentives. Much as I hate to talk sense in the middle of a Canadian public policy discussion, if you were, say, urging people to recycle for the good of the planet and also paying them a nickel a pound for old glass, then you stopped paying them, would you get more glass, the same amount or less? Right. Everybody knows. Except the people in charge, like Dalton McGuinty.

For Tuesday's Citizen said Ontario's premier just admitted a national pharmacare program would involve "significant costs," but the feds managed to cut taxes four years ago and "Today, the federal government is now telling us that health care is their No. 1 priority. It seems to me if there's a will, there's a way." Yeah. Think happy thoughts.

Of course it's important to stay positive in a crisis. If you think you're going to fail you very probably will. But staying positive means making a determined search for a good way forward, not ignoring the need for same. And since Mr. McGuinty has been in provincial politics for 14 years now, studying, one assumes, the main item in the provincial budget with intelligence and determination for much of that period, it's high time he stopped issuing petulant demands that someone else come up with a workable plan. Only toddlers, teens and liberals do that.

In fact, I am sorry to report, his strategy might resonate with many voters. The CMA recently commissioned a poll in which nearly four in five Canadians (78 per cent) said health care should get only a fixed share of total provincial revenue. Mind you, they probably also think it should be funded properly. Yeah. And I think I should be six foot three (sorry, 190 cm) with $10 million in the bank. The difference is I know wishing won't make it so.

Practical problems with Canadian health care are so common that it is becoming trite to draw attention to things like hospitals reusing what are meant to be disposable devices. But it is important to stress our politicians' habit of taking a "floggings will continue until morale improves" approach to such problems, and the largely unexamined underlying assumption that all that's ever really wrong is people's narrow, nasty refusal to think happy thoughts. Of course a private firm also seeks employees with a can-do attitude. But if it doesn't give them sufficient resources so they actually can do, it perishes. Tragically, socialist planners and their wishful-thinking allies face no such challenge, and it shows.

Look: Doctors don't reuse disposable devices because they are evil. They do it because the planning system isn't giving them enough resources to do things right. And if Health Canada does, as threatened, introduce more rules about not breaking existing rules, it will either have no effect or else make hospitals throw out disposables after one use despite having no replacement device for the next patient which might, in turn, have some negative repercussions that can't be wished away. But they will try.

Canada is mostly run by people on the wrong side of the long public policy debate between those who think practical methods are what matters and those who place their faith in good intentions, especially their own. You know, the sort who promise to fix medicare for a generation not because they've actually thought of a way of doing it but just because they care so darn much.

Less than a month, folks.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

And they're off. The Athens Olympics begin today (except soccer, which started earlier but doesn't count as it's so dull). Can I offer anyone a big old helping of wild celery? I should like the Olympics more than I do. As a traditionalist I'm delighted that someone revived an old event after more than 1,500 years, instead of starting a new one that we have kept going for over a century since. I'm a bit sorry they dropped the parallel artistic competition that ran from 1906 to 1948 (I bet I could write a truly bad "Ode to a Shot put") but glad they dropped my beloved golf.

You see, I fear the Olympics may be losing their way by not knowing what they are. I'm a bit worried about logistics, pollution and terrorism in Athens. But my larger concern is that the Games could get so hugely successful they topple over, leaving behind only the weathered legs of the Colossus of Lausanne. I think they should exist, and would flourish, if they held to one overriding purpose: a world championship for sports too obscure to have significant leagues of their own. Thus I would dump tennis, basketball and hockey. But I might add surfing. And I'd certainly bring back the tug-of-war.

I am a sports fan because I admire excellence. The three great stories are man against nature, man against man and man against self. But the greatest is man against self; the struggle against nature or other men is only morally interesting if the hero can prevail by drawing fully upon his or her inner strengths but not otherwise. Canadian Encyclopedia editor James Marsh wrote in the Citizen that Aesop, an early critic of the Olympics, "asked a boastful wrestler, 'what have you earned if you beat a weaker man?'" Not much. Thus sometimes our hearts go out to the defeated underdog whose great triumph was getting there at all (archetypally the Jamaican bobsled team). But in other events two athletes, or teams, are so evenly matched that whichever first wins the inner battle then wins the prize and, with it, our justified admiration.

I also admire triumphs of the human spirit against the odds. For instance, achieving excellence in a sport without mega-salaries, endorsement fees or lurid celebrity trials. Years ago a relative sent a clipping from the Highland Games about a guy who set "a blistering pace" by throwing a 25-pound hammer 99 feet. I remain amazed, first that anyone could with practice perform such a feat, and second that they practised enough despite its uselessness just because it's cool. I could happily marvel, every four years, at the distance some people can throw cannonballs with their necks.

The original Olympic sports were, in their day, practically popular: first outrunning an enemy, and later hitting him with a pointed stick or metal disc, then leaping on him from a surprising distance and punching his lights out. But they aren't now. There's a weird, enduring glory in people mastering them anyway.

The Olympics are finally free of the totalitarian fixation with politicizing everything and proving the superiority of some obscene form of socialism by cheating (shades of Nero falling out of his chariot and winning the race anyway). But they still face a more general sort of restless modernism, compelled to move ever forward lest inner collapse occur.

The argument that the Olympics are an engine of prosperity, if they're big enough, reminds me of the old huckster's joke about losing money on every sale but making it up on volume. It didn't work in Mexico City, Moscow or Montreal, and wasn't necessary in Munich, Los Angeles, Sydney or Atlanta. Nor should it matter. Some things are worth spending money on, including a proper Olympics.

I also dislike the kind of civic boosterism that thinks if a city holds a sufficiently grand Olympics it will wind up with walls of jasper, gates of pearl and streets of pure gold. And you could avoid both by settling the Games permanently in the place they conveniently now occupy. But lest they drift into mediocrity and prove impossible to get moving again, I would rather try to harness the municipal desire to excel by telling each host city, politely but firmly, that it isn't about you, it's about the Games. And by excluding every sport with a major league of its own, even baseball, in which Canada is a contender.

In the original Olympics, the prize wasn't a precious metal worthy of Gollum or Scrooge. It was a wreath of wild celery you couldn't eat that was bound to wither. But it wasn't given in the depressing spirit of go ahead and run, you'll die anyway. Rather, it was: You'll die anyway but go ahead and run. Like throwing a shot put just because you can. And setting a blistering pace in the process.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

While I was away for the weekend (you can't leave some people unsupervised), Canada's best and brightest gathered to ponder this weird "religion" thing for the first time in the Couchiching Conference's 73 years. They even invited an adviser to U.S. President George W. Bush. Then they heckled him. How embarrassing is that? Well, suppose a notable Canadian were invited to a gathering of right-wing American intellectuals (now you laugh), offered culturally radical views and were booed. Oh the fun we'd have calling Americans knuckle-dragging morons who can't handle complexity or truth. But now the shoe's on the other foot. Or hand.

I wasn't at Couchiching; my invitation seems unaccountably to have been lost in the mail yet again. But evidently Richard Land, a senior official of the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, was asked to advise President Bush to drop "this ridiculous idea" of amending the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as between one man and one woman. He replied, "If the compelling reason for same-sex marriage is you have a caring, loving relationship, how are you going to stop polygamy? If it is a caring, loving relationship, how are you going to stop consensual incest, between adults, brothers and sisters, if it is a consensual relationship?" And the crowd jeered.

Evidently the intellectuals at Couchiching dispute either his premise as to the main justification for gay marriage, or else his reasoning about where that premise logically leads. And presumably they believe they could do so with persuasive clarity. (Ideally something better than "Well, you can't have three people because that would be more than two.") But I'm still waiting. It suggests to me that something about their position, or the spectacular suddenness of its triumph, secretly makes them uneasy.

As First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus recently wrote, "Although nobody in all of human history suggested the idea until about five years ago, the major media are letting us know that they are getting more than a mite impatient with the bigots and reactionaries who are resisting the self-evident good that is same-sex marriage." So are the courts; according to former Ontario premier David Peterson in the Globe and Mail, in upholding gay marriage the Yukon Supreme Court just "ruled that the discrimination is so obvious and so well-established, governments ought to have known better" and took the unusual step of ordering the federal and Yukon governments to pay the appellants' full legal costs. And now the intellectuals are in full sneer.

Yet on June 8, 1999, just five years ago, then-justice minister Anne McLellan suggested the Commons was wasting its time even debating "a motion, on which, I suspect, there will be no fundamental disagreement inside or outside the House," but said "Let me state again for the record that the government has no intention of changing the definition of marriage or of legislating same-sex marriages," and "I support the motion for maintaining the clear legal definition of marriage in Canada as the union of one man and one woman ..." Does the current deputy prime minister now admit to ever having met this person? Does she consider her honest?

It is not inconceivable to change one's mind on a major issue. Nor is it necessarily discreditable: open-mindedness is good provided, as G.K. Chesterton said, the ultimate purpose is, as with an open mouth, to close it again on something solid. But normally in such cases one is more than happy to give a reasoned explanation. So why the barnyard noises at Couchiching instead?

Of course, outbreaks of boorishness can occur anywhere and some in the audience deplored the jeering. Couchiching Institute president David McGown admitted it's the first he's seen in a decade at what he calls "Canada's annual gathering of the great and the good" (which is surely, like "sexy," the sort of thing you may hope people will say of you, and even privately think they should say, but is vain and vulgar to say of yourself). But he denied the booing was "anti-American." Rather, it was "very pro-Canadian," and "I think what we heard last night was that stark social, cultural difference that Michael Adams talked about."

Actually, what you heard was a Bronx cheer. Which is strange since popular mythology has it that Canadians are so polite they apologize if you step on their foot, while Americans are loud boors in even louder clothes.

Worse, experience and experiment alike suggest that educated people become angry when given only one side of an issue, whereas the uneducated become angry when given both. So this shameful display could plausibly lead U.S. Republicans to consider Canadian intellectuals mindless knuckle-draggers. How embarrassing is that?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Is Paul Martin the prime minister? The question might seem absurd; it says he is on government websites and if you pick up the newspaper it will say "Prime Minister Paul Martin" (or, in the National Post, "Paul Martin, the Prime Minister"). And I have no doubt he was prime minister prior to June 28 and for some time thereafter. But it is increasingly in doubt. It may seem that the purpose of modern Canadian elections is to give supreme executive power in the form of the prime ministership to a particular individual and that Parliament has atrophied into a functional equivalent of the U.S. electoral college. But it is not so. The prime minister is not whoever got the most votes in the last election, or the leader of the party that elected the most MPs. It is whoever can reliably control Parliament. If anyone can.

A country must have a government; hence the medieval cry ,"The king is dead. Long live the king." But our constitution knows nothing of the post of prime minister. Formal executive power resides in the Crown; the Privy Council is Her Majesty's, not Mr. Martin's. And our democracy was achieved not by the drastic American choice to elect the head of state but by the subtle development of a requirement that the Queen select as her "first minister" whoever dependably commands the allegiance of the Commons, that is, can routinely bring money bills to a vote and get them passed.

In a moment of grave crisis, with the cabinet dead or otherwise unable to act, the Governor General would unquestionably possess moral as well as legal authority to direct the defence of the nation and the restoration of order, but only with the clear purpose of returning effective control of public affairs to the people's representatives as quickly as possible. And in settled times, we must always have a prime minister. So when a Parliament is dissolved we retain whoever commanded a majority in that Parliament not only until an election is held but until a new cabinet is sworn in. In this caretaking capacity, he or she would obviously possess full legal and moral authority to act decisively if, say, the nation were suddenly attacked, but not to act of his or her own accord to undertake major initiatives. That right depends upon demonstrated control of Parliament.

Which brings me to Mr. Martin. Liberals do not possess a divine right to rule that the populace are gracefully permitted to endorse pro forma. Rather, he was prime minister prior to June 28 because he did command a majority in Parliament and afterwards as a caretaker until the new cabinet was sworn in. He was then the new prime minister but, given the complexion of Parliament, only provisionally. He seemed most likely to be able to command a majority in the new Parliament on money bills. But he has to do so, and the longer he waits the less authority he holds.

On routine matters it diminishes slowly. But regarding new initiatives, from missile defence to appointing Supreme Court justices with the consent of a parliamentary committee (or on the basis of aboriginal or for that matter Scottish ancestry) or indeed filling the two existing vacancies the old way, he has no authority unless and until he successfully meets the House. Sir John A. Macdonald waited a record 264 days in 1882, but as he had a comfortable majority there was no question of his ability to do so and he governed with full legal and moral authority. It was quite a different matter when Charles J. Clark waited 127 days to meet a House he then proved ignominiously unable to master.

An advantage of our apparently somewhat baroque political system is that, should Mr. Martin attempt to govern as if he had met the House when he has not, the legally formidable but morally and practically limited power of the Crown would suddenly become formidable in these dimensions as well. As early as 1784, A.V. Dicey noted, the English king was able to dismiss a prime minister who did enjoy the confidence of the House because, but only because, he disputed that the House itself commanded the confidence of the nation. (An election vindicated his judgment in 1784, but not in 1834, in both cases conclusively.) But it is a potential weakness of our system that nowadays, in practice, the prime minister appoints the Governor General and the Governor General appoints the prime minister. And lately, as political philosophy and public morality decay in Canada, many potential weaknesses in our system have become real.

So we face an important test here. Unless Mr. Martin can win money votes in the Commons he is not prime minister and the Governor General should not let him act like one.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

On the 100th anniversary of the World's Fair in St. Louis in 1904 you will, I trust, forgive me for devouring a hot dog right in your face. Sorry, did you find it (b-r-a-a-p) rude of me to eat in front of you? Next I suppose you'll be joining the Campaign for Courtesy. Gobble gluck munch. (Toss wrapper in street.) I am reluctant to attack fast food because it has all the wrong enemies, from demagogic politicians to humourless academics to predatory lawyers. (I somehow misplaced a cartoon of a guy blaming tobacco companies for his cancer, liquor companies for his alcoholism, fast-food companies for his obesity, then sighing: "If only I'd been there to stop me.") As for the documentary Supersize Me, I'd like to see someone eat three meals a day for a month in a fine French restaurant, say yes every time they offered dessert, and fit out the door at the end. Plus I enjoy a fat, juicy burger-and-fries combo every now and then. Still, let me tell you a tale.

When I was a teenager I thought I was cool partly because I wasn't fussy about when or where I ate. Any illusion that I was cool melted decades ago, and any desire to be cool shortly thereafter, but somehow I retained a sneaky, persistent, unexamined admiration for my hardy, adaptable willingness to eat anywhere.

Then, last November, I read an article by British commentator and psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple, who said in "discussing self-restraint with a group of students a couple of years ago ... intelligent and decent young people ... I mentioned that it was once regarded in Britain as rather degraded to eat on the street: that people were expected, and expected others, to control themselves until they reached a more suitable place to eat. My students regarded this refusal to eat on the street as a weird inhibition, an utterly alien and quite unnecessary custom, bizarre and even offensive to human rights .... I'm hungry, therefore I eat; I want, therefore I have; I'm inclined, therefore I do ..."

He added that much of the litter in Britain comes from fast food (I gather Montreal has the same problem), and that "a large proportion of young Britons never eat in the company of others, except possibly in feral packs."

Suddenly I saw myself eating lunch alone at my desk, superimposed on Tumak in One Million Years B.C. scarfing his food in paranoid isolation until taught by more advanced cavemen to share his meals in both senses. You've got to hate it when you get lessons in civility from that kind of source. But the image came unbidden, and I couldn't get rid of it.

There are three main reasons why eating alone in public is rude.

First, especially in days of yore, you risked tormenting someone who was hungry but unable to afford food. (Today I suppose the politically correct might harangue you if, by not eating in public, you risked tormenting someone who was obese but unable to resist eating.)

Second, the growing popularity of fast food is a clear symptom of family breakdown, especially within, rather than of, the family structure. As Dr. Dalrymple also observes: "In Britain, the second-fattest country in the world after the United States, about half of households do not have a dining table." Eating alone in public makes you look a smug part of this mess, happy to have nowhere to call home.

Third and worst, it betokens shameless inability to resist an impulse, culinary or familial, implying overt contempt for those with whom one shares public spaces.

Which takes me back a century exactly, to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, a spectacular expression of the spirit of the emerging age. Including sliced bread, popcorn, cotton candy and peanut butter. And three junk-food giants: Whatever their origin, it was this fair that popularized putting a hamburger patty into a bun, a wiener into a bun and ice cream into a cone.

The really distinctive thing about all three is not that they are unhealthy (though Lord only knows what went into a 1904 wiener). It's that all can be eaten without dishes or utensils; that is, while walking around. As visitors to St. Louis were encouraged to do. As the Globe and Mail quoted a food historian last winter, it was revolutionary: "Until that time, to walk around and eat away from a dining table would have been considered quite rude."

Maybe it still should be. Thomas Carlyle once told a young would-be reformer "Reform yourself. That way there will be one less rascal in the world." So my contribution to the Campaign for Courtesy founded by the late 11th Earl of Devonshire is to recognize that solitary eating in public is so rude it would offend a Hollywood Cro-Magnon. From this point forward I shall endeavour to consume hot dogs discreetly.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Oh great. Here's an idea for school reform so bad it's bound to prevail. Get rid of summer vacation. Yup. There's a winner in the anti-fun, make-life-dismal sweepstakes. Coming soon to a faculty of education near you. Monday's Globe and Mail says more than two million U.S. students already attend schools with a year-round calendar, a.k.a. "balanced" or "modified," in which instead of getting most of their vacation in one big happy summery chunk, they get it in monotonous dribs and drabs throughout the year. Thus far it's only been adopted in a few schools in B.C., Alberta and Ontario. But just you wait. The Globe quoted the head of the department of educational studies (a bad start, folks) at UBC, "I always say, 'We've got a 150-year-old compromise.' Everything else in society has changed. Maybe it's time to change the school calendar. People are nervous because they don't know anything else." Well, I always say, "I don't fear change; I fear stupidity." If we had real school choice there wouldn't be just one calendar but since we don't, we should fight this idea.

The esteemed educationist is right about the compromise; the reason we have long summer vacations is the government wanted to put kids in school all the time and parents wanted them around to help on the farm and they split the difference. And it's true that most people no longer need their kids pitching hay into the barn on a July day (although seeing pale rickety kids lurking endlessly in the basement playing video games, I could hand them a pitchfork). But "everything else in society" hasn't changed; Aristotle's advice to "Bring your desires down to your present means; increase them only when your increased means permit" has paradoxically become more true as we have grown richer and more indebted. (And money still can't buy happiness, but people won't stop trying.)

Much has changed, of course. Foul language is now routine, crime is common, we get most of our public policy from Laputa but have forgotten its location. What say we change some of it back, not change the rest then dance around the flames?

For instance, when I read that some U.S. universities now use software to grade essays, including, the Citizen says, "real-time feedback about grammar, style and organization," I was reminded that Malcolm Muggeridge wanted to live to see the last sociologist fed into the last computer. I feel the same way about abolishing summer vacation.

It's not that I'm in favour of laziness. At least not to excess. But I'm much in favour of variety. Rest homes are apparently realizing that giving Alzheimer's patients monotonous surroundings is a good way to process human units but not a sympathetic way to treat our fellows. It's time to apply the same insight to education.

Have you ever lived in a place without seasons? They're nice to visit in, say, February. But for the long haul, give me spring, summer, autumn and winter every year. Their changing texture, with varied drawbacks as well as advantages, adds richness to life. So does a year with nine months of school and three of vacation. It's better to spend a few months occasionally hanging around on lazy days, to be sure, but also pursuing hobbies with time to explore them thoroughly, getting out of the city regularly, devoting entire days to reading or sports, than spend 14 straight years in a school that looks like an insecticide factory whirling round in an endless series of modules, PDAs and allotted vacation units in between classes that start at 11 minutes after the hour because a computer said they should.

An unbalanced school year emphasizes a key point about the mysterious fourth dimension in which we spend our lives immersed but, like fish in water, rarely observe. In a physics lab, every second is like every other (they're all "9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium-133 atom"). But psychologically, time expands and dilates in dramatic ways; we all know time flies when you're having fun (and in fact I'm still trying to figure out what they did with 1987) whereas in my ninth-grade history class it was frequently an open question whether the clock was working at all.

I don't endorse Dunbar in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, who actively sought boredom so his life would seem longer. Rather, experiencing life at different paces, intense during the school year, contemplative during the summer, tends to infuse even intense moments with a contemplative quality and even contemplative ones with a certain intensity, to the enhancement of both and of our humanity. If we still have one.

So of course the schools will try to get rid of it. I give the idea an F but only because, as I was occasionally frustrated to observe when grading essays using the antiquated person method, they don't let you give an H.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Our government is weighing its options with regard to Iran. Against a feather, I suspect. It's not necessarily an indictment of our foreign policy. There are some 200 nations in the world and they can't all be important. Besides, Iran is heavily armed and far away, so even if we had maintained a more robust military capability and a more assertive role in the western alliance we might not be able to do anything in this case anyway. But we did not. Instead, we threw away our guns and pushed away our allies.

Worse, we didn't do it knowing it meant becoming geopolitical bystanders. Instead we, and by we I mean they, that elitist, well-connected group of academics, public servants and politicians the press calls the "foreign policy community," convinced themselves that in the last decade our influence in the world increased enormously, from middle power to moral superpower. Not, it appears, if you measure influence by capacity to achieve results. Rudyard Kipling said if you go into the jungle you must know what size beast you are. And David Warren wrote recently, "Canada's own 'angry gerbil' response to the insulting handling of the (Zahra) Kazemi trial is, obviously, not going to influence Iranian behaviour." Perhaps nothing would. But why were we so unprepared?

I am not lashing the Canadian government for failing to take more vigorous action. I am lashing it for failing to see that soft power is all soft and no power. Of course I deplore the Iranian government's behaviour. But I never expected my indignant stare to burn holes in its armour.

Our government, by contrast, has forcefully sprung into committee with its habitual, tragicomic rhetorical rolling thunder. An aide to new Foreign Minister Pierre Pettigrew said he "understands the need for quick and decisive action in this matter." Perhaps. But did he understand its impossibility? Not judging by his written statement of "dissatisfaction" at the Iranian court's decision (oooooh; that'll cause sleepless nights in Tehran) which then plumbed the depths of fatuity with "I hope that the Iranian judiciary will have the courage to act." He got his wish: It acquitted the accused, then a prosecutor closed down two Iranian newspapers that dared report on the trial. A Canadian government source said Mr. Pettigrew hadn't ruled out any options. Indeed. First he'd have to have some.

The Globe and Mail ran a "foreign policy community" headline -- "Pettigrew puts Iran on notice" -- and quoted rolling thunder from "an official close to the minister" ("We're looking at different options") and "a senior Canadian Foreign Affairs Ministry official" ("The Canadian government is reviewing its options, but the general view is that one way or another, Iran should be sanctioned") and added editorially that perhaps "Canada should downgrade its permanent relations with the Islamic republic. The next step would be to curtail trade relations. At the same time, Canada should bring the case to other international bodies, from the United Nations Human Rights Commission to the European Union." Yeah. Stop or my sissy friends will shout stop again.

The editorial made one valid point, that European nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency as well as the United States are very worried about Iran's increasingly blatant nuclear weapons program. The Europeans made a deal with Iran in October that it would stop working on nukes and another in February that it would really stop. But when they foolishly insisted the deal be honoured, Iran repudiated it instead. How weird is it when European appeasers make solemn compacts with dictators who don't honour them? Oh, right. Not weird at all. Canada's not the only one holding a busted flush. The Europeans' sophisticated alternative to America's cowboy ways has, um, yes, well ...

The mullahs in Tehran are not frightened of effete liberals throwing hissy fits. They consider us decadent perverts and, as David Warren also recently noted, make no secret of preparing our demise. Like the Soviets, the reason they claim repeatedly not to share our values and act repeatedly as if they did not is ... But no. It cannot be. No one could disagree with sophisticated postmodern liberals, so it must all be George Bush's fault. And since we all scorn and despise Mr. Bush, a few frown beams from us and they'll be begging for mercy.

If arrogance were a source of leverage in diplomacy we would be a colossus. Instead, a nuclear-armed Iran would be stronger than Canada. Yes, stronger. Despite our shining armour of fatuous self-satisfaction. Our only real hope is that the United States will think it mean of Iran to beat up unarmed nerdy Canada. So having weakened America's foreign policy at crucial moments, we are now down to a policy of "Morons. Bastards. Help!"

Call it the gerbil's last squeak. But why is anyone surprised?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

He's not a politician solving Canada's health-care crisis, but he's going to play one on TV. Yes, that's right. It's Paul Martin, whose latest brain wave is to summon Canada's premiers to a historic health summit starting Sept. 13 and televise the proceedings to discourage posturing and spin and encourage frank discussion of the real situation and of the possible need for hard choices. It dices, it slices, it ... Sorry. Mr. Martin apparently can't tell public relations from public policy but thinks he has a divine right to be prime minister whether or not he can command a majority in that silly old Parliament because he is a Liberal. And he doesn't seem to realize health care is constitutionally a provincial responsibility. If he can nevertheless play doctor on TV, it seems to me that you and I can play Hollywood scriptwriter even if our day jobs involve the hospitality industry. So let's try to conjure up some of the dialogue likely to result as the politicians gaze earnestly into the camera and hold a "frank" discussion of what's wrong with the health-care system, who caused it and how to fix it.

The PM: Gosh, fellows, I'm so glad you were all able to come here to work with us to devise a historic, co-operative, forward-looking, win-win solution to the health-care problem that will indeed be historic.

Ann Theriault: Hey, Paul, thanks so much for asking us to come along. You know how devoted we all are to what's right for Canadians regardless of the political implications.

Kay Beck: Gosh yes. There's nowhere I'd rather be than right here putting Canadians' priorities first while of course safeguarding the interests of the Quebec nation-thing-unit.

Albert (through gritted teeth): I feel the same way, guys. There's nothing I'd rather spend money on than health care, not even debt repayment and certainly not equalization. Did I mention that my jurisdiction is debt-free, Paul? How's yours?

The PM: Health care is the No. 1 priority of Canadians and it's my top No. 1 priority too.

Prairie Pete: Fellows, I'd like to propose that we put the interests of Canadians first. It's nothing to do with getting re-elected. We just care so darn much.

Lefty: You know, guys, I feel exactly the same way. I'm going to save health care and I don't care what anyone says.

Manny Toper: I would like to say how much I share that sentiment.

Edwards: I too want only what Canadians want, gentlemen.

Scotty: My sentiments exactly. All that concerns me is the wishes and well-being of Canadians. It is fine to be here.

U. Kahn: Quite so. What harmony reigns.

Kay Beck: So it does.

Terry Tory: I am absolutely for saving health care and against letting it collapse.

Ann Theriault: I wish to say that I too feel that way, precisely.

Mary Thyme: And I.

The Minister: Long live communism.

The PM: Now, chaps, what shall we do to safeguard the interests of Canadians whose priorities are always and necessarily our priorities by golly yes you can count on that?

Prairie Pete: Let's save health care.

U. Kahn: A splendid suggestion.

Lefty: Yes, let's.

Albert: By all means.

Manny Toper: I concur.

(A general chorus of agreement ensues.)

The Minister: Long live communism.

The PM: How does this sound, guys? What if we spend more money, but not an irresponsible amount, and make sure we target key areas that are priorities for Canadians, reducing waiting lists for children, seniors, working families, singles, women, minorities, rural folks, hard-working city people, immigrants, the elderly, youth and the disadvantaged? What if we devise innovative mechanisms that increase efficiency within the public sector? Shall we be bold, compassionate, progressive in our values and unflinchingly honest and authentic with the public?

All together: Let's.

The PM: You know, there are people who would cut spending, restrict the supply of doctors, encourage nurses to retire and after making a horrible mess of things turn around and blame it all on sinister corporate interests and hope it somehow fixes itself after the election. We could botch the planning, spin the result frantically, call each other names and then put on phoney smiles for the camera.

Ann Theriault: It's true, we could.

All together: But that would be wrong.

The Minister: Long live communism.

Fade to waiting list.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]