With the economy slumping and the war in Iraq booming, the Democrats face the Nov. 2 elections with only two significant disadvantages: foreign and domestic policy. It's enough. On foreign policy, not since JFK has the electorate dared entrust the White House to a Democrat in troubled times, as the last Democrat not to see the world situation deteriorate badly on his watch was Grover Cleveland. Thus, paradoxically, John Kerry's attempt to win votes by saying things look bad abroad can only succeed if it fails.

Conventional wisdom says domestic issues favour Democrats. So Wednesday night's third debate was meant to be Senator Kerry's big moment. Unfortunately, in the U.S. there are other domestic issues than "give me a dollar" and they do not help his party.

Wags have said America's two domestic issues are sex and taxes, with one party in favour and the other against. It's not quite fair; surveys suggest married people have more and better sex than singles. A recent study even said Amish bedrooms get especially steamy. (Who knew?) But in any event sex, and moral issues more generally, do not favour the Democrats.

It may be an article of faith among politically correct commentators that the monolithic voting bloc known as "women" prefer the Democrats because women are nicer than men and Democrats are nicer than Republicans Q.E.D. But actually, married American women lean Republican, especially those with children in the house; it is single women hoping to marry Mr. State who vote Democrat. And the Democrats' supposed trump card, abortion, is not a winning issue at all.

Democrats for Life of America says in 1977-78 42 per cent of their party's 292-member majority in the House of Representatives voted pro-life while today just 15 per cent of their 204-member minority does. If so, I calculate 169 pro-choice Democrats in 1977-78 and 173 now, meaning abortion alone cost them their three-generation majority status, at least in the House. It is also driving once firmly Democratic Roman Catholics to the GOP, and they number over 60 million. Finally, the million abortions a year since Roe v. Wade in 1973 have cost electoral college votes in Democrat-leaning states, probably enough to lose Al Gore the 2000 election even if the growing ranks of missing voters were not primarily from Democratic demographics.

So the Democrats' only hope is voters' desire for public largesse. But even there the United States is increasingly out of step with other developed countries. For one thing, its populace remains actively religious and does not vote by bread alone. In 2000, about 63 per cent of those who attended church at least once a week voted for George W. Bush, while Al Gore took the votes of 61 per cent of those who never went. As the invaluable Almanac of American Politics observes, in that year, "if the only thing you knew about a person was his income and from that guessed how he would vote, you would have been wrong almost half the time." But if you knew his views on religion, abortion and gun control, "you would have been right almost always."

Moreover, Almanac authors Michael Barone and Richard E. Cohen argue, even on straightforward economic issues American politics has changed. Until recently, most voters had few assets to fall back on, so in hard times they looked to the party that stood for immediate assistance regardless of long-term consequences. But now "something like 70 per cent of Americans age 55 to 64 have wealth, mostly in the form of housing equity and financial investments, totaling $300,000 or more" and about half of all voters own stocks, usually in small private retirement accounts. When times are tough, they increasingly turn to the party of long-term growth, not immediate relief. So the Democrats have even less chance of capturing either House of Congress than the House of White.

If you have been reading in the newspapers about a country south of us where a big-eared belligerent rich moron from Texas is about to be trounced by a wise, sensitive yet strong New England megamillionaire, I can only plead that I did not write those stories. There are three big issues in American politics: sex, taxes and terrorism. And they all favour the Republicans.

So long, John Kerry. And the party you rode in on.

- - -

The Bank of Canada clarifies that it cost nine cents per note to print the new $20s over and above about $12 million in startup costs for all the new notes. As most of those costs would have arisen to redesign only one new note, it affects my detailed calculations, but not my general point last Wednesday.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Man, somebody better prescribe some sedatives here. No sooner did the Ontario government offer an extra $50 million in physician service payments if doctors cut the cost of the Ontario Drug Benefit Program by $200 million than it was denounced as "despicable" and "immoral." But how can people swear undying allegiance to the notion that governments should set incentives in health care, then hit the hospital roof when governments set incentives in health care? NDP health critic Shelley Martel fumed about "a bribe" and Tory health critic John Baird about a "kickback." Health Minister George Smitherman defensively insisted that "There is no bribe here," that he was just taking "an opportunity to influence policy" by providing incentives for "appropriate behaviour." I'm no fan of the McGuinty Liberals. But please, before we go any further with the hair-pulling, would someone clarify for me the difference in a central-planning system between incentives for appropriate behaviour and bribes?

One can hardly deny that there's an over-prescription problem. Canadians, and Ontarians, down an average of nearly 10 a year each, and since I don't someone out there must have 20. I expect some of you should just have a beer instead. I'm very sure some people who would benefit from any single one of their dozens of mysterious coloured pills are worse off for gobbling them all, often in combinations their doctor doesn't know about. (Just as you might lower your stress by having a couple of beers, two glasses of wine or two mixed drinks in an evening, but not all of the above.)

There's too much prescription going on. And since government runs the health system, government has to do something about it. True, prescription drugs aren't covered by the Canada Health Act because they aren't considered medically necessary (which makes me wonder why we're eating them like Smarties). But half of drug purchases are publicly funded -- for seniors and the poor. Besides, while Ontario doctors are not paid to write prescriptions, they are paid to see patients, which encourages quick turnaround. Of course doctors' conduct in the office depends on a wide range of factors, from technical knowledge to individual philosophy to their mood that day. But all else being equal, if you reward them for getting patients in and out of the office fast, they will speed things up a bit. And since too many people think they've been well cared for once they get a prescription and not before, doctors too often write one.

A number of critics claim the government is motivated at least partly by a desire to save money. What, suddenly you're in favour of government waste? Of course the authorities should try to save money, and of course they should try to do it by reducing unnecessary or less necessary procedures.

A more pertinent objection is that this measure does not precisely target the least useful prescriptions. But how could it, when the existing system doesn't know which they are? Surely it's better to pressure doctors to reduce prescriptions overall and let them choose which than to substitute the judgment of bureaucrats for that of MDs as to which Rx to dispense with instead of dispensing. And it will not do to blame schemes to reform central planning for pre-existing problems inherent in central planning.

John Baird said, "I have no objection with going after the legitimate problem with over-prescription of drugs, but why would you focus just on the disabled? Why focus just on seniors?" OK, what's his alternative? Radically restructure OHIP's fee schedule so doctors see fewer patients for more time, when too many people already can't find a doctor? Besides, as the largest consumers of pills, seniors and the disabled are most likely to suffer ill-effects from mixing drugs. If doctors think twice about writing them one more prescription and ask a bit more carefully what they're already taking, it could well save lives as well as money.

I think the reform won't work because planning doesn't work (and file Ontario's new regional health authorities under "Kosygin Reforms"). But the details make as much sense as the setting permits, which makes the shrillness of the outcry a bit weird.

At bottom, I don't think it's about the details. I think it's about using incentives to influence behaviour. Which is absurd: why else would OHIP have a fee schedule? But it's also the logical reductio ad absurdum of central planning, which both accepts and rejects the fundamental truth that people respond to incentives and thus finds itself at war with human nature in general and thrashing about wasting resources in crises.

It's an ugly spectacle. And it's bad medicine.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

You've gotta love the new $20 bills. I for one would happily accumulate an unlimited supply of these beauties. But even from a distance they offer an instructive lesson in security. And I don't just mean financial. It's a bit weird seeing a newspaper ad for money. "Get some today." Uh, I think we're all sold on the concept already. (They don't use cars to sell pretty girls.) But last week's glossy adverts of the new $20's holographs and holograms got my attention because counterfeiting has been on my mind ever since I got my first desktop scanner. No, wait, officer. I just mean I realized immediately that any hacker with a colour printer could now reproduce banknotes. Since then I've feared a return to big, bulky coins, perhaps with a goodbye-financial-anonymity chip in them. Of course you could make a bill so complicated it can't really be counterfeited, but if it costs more than it's worth it rather defeats the purpose, doesn't it?

Actually, no. Looking at last week's ads I realized a $20 bill that costs more than $20 to produce puts counterfeiters out of business, but not government. Counterfeiters only get to spend it once (minus a substantial cut to the people who take the risk of passing all those too-crisp, too-new $20s). But government, unless you live somewhere like Zimbabwe, doesn't print money to pay its bills. It does it to lubricate the wheels of commerce. A $20 bill that circulates for years, changing hands dozens of times in transactions totalling thousands of dollars, is a bargain at $25. Hey, they got one right.

Unlike me. I phoned the Bank of Canada and found I was slightly off in my estimate of the cost per bill. It's actually nine cents. Oh oh. Doesn't that mean if you can fake them for, say, three times the legitimate cost you can still run off convincing $20s for 27 cents? Well, no, because the Bank enjoys rather considerable economies of scale. For security reasons they won't say how many notes of each denomination they issue a year, but senior analyst Ginette Crow told me they printed 200 million of the new $20s prior to the launch (to last on average three years, but there's no way of knowing how often they change hands).

At nine cents each, 200 million of these babies would cost $18 million. But if we assume that just over half the cost was overhead (design, machinery etc.), it's $10 million up front, then four cents per note for paper, ink, wages and so on. And obviously a counterfeiter can't run off $4 billion in fake notes to reduce average cost. People get suspicious if you're living in a rooming house with holes in your socks, one night there's all this whirring and clanking and then you're flashing billions in new notes with consecutive serial numbers. But if you invest $10 million and run off even 100,000 notes, you're not only liable to attract attention, but you've spent $10,027,000 for $2,000,000 minus the passer's cut and are an ink-stained chump.

So far so good. Some would say don't carp, it's government. Quit while you're ahead. But there was something else weird about those ads. Here they've gone to all the trouble of devising a really secure banknote and then they give away all the secrets. One columnist asked, "Is this smart?" Yes. It's the smartest part.

Some security features only work, or work far better, if your adversaries don't know about them, like the combination of your safe or where they put the Secret Service guys in the White House. But others, like refusing to negotiate with kidnappers or Mutual Assured Destruction, only work if your adversaries do know (remember Dr. Strangelove's anguished "Why didn't you tell us?" about the Soviet doomsday machine?).

A third, problematic category in an open society is things you're not sure whether to discuss, like genetic research that could be used for bioterror or security flaws at nuclear power plants. But anti-counterfeiting falls into yet another category: Measures that only work if the public knows about them.

It's like those old Wild West "Wanted" posters. True, they alerted John Q. Varmint that the authorities were after him, knew what he looked like and had a pretty good idea where he was. But the benefits far outweighed these costs because the sheriff needed assistance from John Q. Public to spot him before he got away, not technical help identifying his corpse if he finally turned up dead.

Likewise, money may talk, but it never says where it's from. So it's no good making bills hard to fake unless the first innocent person who gets passed a false note spots it. The Bank of Canada got that part right, too.

Wow! These new $20s are an idea so good you can take it from the Bank.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It seems you can now get a carrot in the team colour of Texas A&M University, namely maroon. It doesn't concern me directly because I'm a University of Texas man and as our colour was orange we always had carrots that matched. But if the lack of purple carrots had become a major quality-of-life issue, it surely raises the old question of whether too much money can be bad for you. Old, and hence forgotten. In their second debate next week, John Kerry and George Bush probably will squabble about how they can make America richer. I'd rather listen to George Washington who, before there even was Internet pornography, wrote, "It has long been a speculated question among Philosophers and wise men, whether foreign Commerce is of real advantage to any Country; that is, whether the luxury, effeminacy, and corruptions which are introduced along with it; are counterbalanced by the convenience and wealth which it brings with it." A practical man, he added that as the colonies were certainly going to trade, they should have a government that would ensure it was carried out justly.

Whereas in these sophisticated times we argue about whether trade increases wealth. The Canadian Labour Congress briefly confessed that it did before reverting to industrial strategies and autarky. Hey, it worked for North Korea. Uh, except for the mass starvation. My dusty old Plato's Republic includes this dialogue: "Socrates: 'And in the community all mutual exchanges are made on the assumption that the parties to them stand to gain?' Adeimantus 'Certainly.' CLC President Ken Georgetti: 'Huh?'" No, sorry, that last bit's a typo. But how far we've progressed since that Yankee yokel Benjamin Franklin said "No nation was ever ruined by trade." Ha ha. Hey buddy, why don't you go fly a kite?

Of course, Franklin didn't have pears whose labels change colour when they're ripe. (The 2005 Old Farmer's Almanac says "Watch for smart sensors to appear next on kiwis, avocados, mangoes, and melons.") It sure beats all that tedious handling of fresh ingredients. Plus it frees up time to drive to our therapists to complain that we feel alienated despite having fires with on/off switches.

Don't even get me started on the butt-kicking machine (no, really). But in my notes I keep a file called "Gadgets We Don't Need," with subheadings like "Toys we don't need," "Food we don't need" and even "Gadgets We Can't Survive" (a rice-cooker that altered pacemaker settings). At least picture messaging from camera phones doesn't seem to have caught on, and you rarely see one of those Internet toasters that print the weather forecast on bread (we're looking at some butter, and later a wave of marmalade ...). But we still have automated Santas and robot fox hunters and scents just for tweens and ...

I do not wish to be regarded as a mindless technophobe. My file also contains "Gadgets We Did Need" (for instance the screen door), and the other day I managed to put my cellphone on call-forward all by myself. I haven't yet figured out how it downloads pictures, but I got far enough to know by the file names that people are not, how shall I put it, using this feature primarily to increase their exposure to great art.

Nor do I seek legal action. In Saudi Arabia they banned cellphones with built-in cameras but it didn't work. It's the old paradox of too much law and too little order. Only we can prevent pornography files: Political self-government depends on personal self-government. Which is why the impact of growing wealth on self-control worried wise men back when food was cooked with fire.

In one sense we have literally gone soft, in an epidemic of obesity. But I am more worried that the American government's vast Medicare program is considering paying for weight-loss surgery.

Can citizens who can't resist the contents of the refrigerator possibly resist those of the public treasury? Assuming they can still work the door handle. The Globe and Mail says when Yahoo! got 13 U.S. families to give up the Internet for a fortnight, some had forgotten how to use a phone book. One guy had to call a friend's wife to ask how to boil an egg. Money may not be able to buy happiness, but helpless ignorance is clearly for sale. Plus social science to boost our self-esteem.

So we still have smugness, in purple if you want. And the guy who bred it claims the A&M carrot is sweeter and more nutritious than the orange kind. I still think people staring helplessly at eggs in the colours of their home team that they have no clue how to cook would not have impressed George Washington.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Admit it, our cities are hideous. Our homes may be nice, along with the occasional building and some of the parks. But generally speaking, the roads, buildings and parking lots are horrible. And you know, cities didn't have to look like this. The other day I happened to glimpse Parliament Hill from across the river, through glorious autumn trees, with the Peace Tower floating above the trees like a medieval church spire greeting a weary traveller. Only an ugly utilitarian concrete bridge spoiled the view. But get up close and, with a few exceptions, the buildings are bad and the roads are worse. Brutal cement everywhere. Millions of people flock to medieval Italian sites every year. But no one would visit the ruins of modern Ottawa. So why do we put up with it?

I confess that for a long time I didn't give it much thought. Years ago, Tom Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House left me with an allergic reaction to the aggressively featureless glass-and-steel "Yale Box." But by and large I simply assumed that what you see in the modern urban landscape is, regrettably, what buildings and roads look like.

In one sense of course, it is true; they do look like that. Aside from a few exceptional, mostly older landmarks like New York's Chrysler Building or Columbus, Ohio's Levesque Building (both in Ghostbusters Art Deco style) most buildings in most cities aren't worth looking at. But remember, our cities have taken their present form in less than a century, and our suburbs half a century, during a period of unlovely but economical standardization and also of deliberately offensive modernism in art, including architecture and design.

We tolerate it partly because we're so used to it. Also, it is a curious fact that, although architecture profoundly shapes our lives, people generally don't have much of an opinion on it, beyond knowing what type of house they'd live in if they could afford it. Folks react, not always favourably, to "If you want to play in Texas, you've got to have a fiddle in the band." But how many people have views on cornices? Or avenues? I was an adult before I learned that what distinguishes an avenue from a mere road or street is that it is lined with majestic trees.

At least, it once did. Carling Avenue is just another ugly city street. But wait a minute. Roman roads weren't horrible. True, 18th-century English roads were frequently so bad you'd be hurled from your carriage and drowned by the same pothole. But even then they weren't ugly and, as a rule, the better they worked the better they looked. Whereas our highways and parking lots look as if they were designed by Saruman on a bad day.

It didn't have to be this way. And rereading Wolfe recently got me thinking: OK, what should a building look like? And then, more fundamentally: What could a building look like? Architects may insist that the "Yale Box" is the only affordable way to build a big building, but I kept wondering how much of what I see around me is really dictated by structural or cost constraints, and how much by the fact that for three generations schools of architecture have resolutely closed their minds and doors to anyone who thinks buildings should look nice.

Then in last week's Citizen Sarah Jennings quoted Christopher Alexander's The Phenomenon of Life that "The ugliness which has been created in the cities of the world ... the banality of 20th-century buildings, streets and parking lots have overwhelmed the earth." And now I see it everywhere.

For instance, a newspaper account of the federal government's plan to sell off real estate to pay for the new health-care deal (not that there's a funding crisis) quoted award-winning architect Ron Keenberg dismissing most federal-government buildings as "common drivel ... the beige fabric of our cities."

Or consider the condominium complex going up at Sussex and Rideau. It's a key piece of downtown real estate, right next to several of Ottawa's few true heritage buildings, all in some sense medievally inspired (Parliament most successfully; I find the Château Laurier a bit Disney). So what do these surroundings inspire? Right. Nothing anyone would photograph.

Perhaps we have more pressing problems, like the fact that the next generation will take for granted weeds sprouting on the meridians and in the curbs. (Remember when grass growing in the streets was a sign of decay, not progress?) But a society as wealthy as ours could afford nice architecture as well as lawn mowers.

There are a thousand aspects to making urban areas livable, from mixing urban and rural to green roofs to making bridges more decorative. But it all starts with discarding the assumption that it is necessary to live in cities that look horrible. It didn't have to be this way, and it doesn't have to go on this way.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The 2004 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced Oct. 8. With what forgettable twit will the committee poke George W. Bush in the eye? Who should follow in the footsteps of Albert Gobat, Carl von Ossietsky, Lord Boyd Orr? Perhaps a search party. Don't get me wrong. I prefer peace to war. But I still think, as in 1997, that it would be nice if the prize went to someone who'd actually contributed to peace. Back then I suggested Ronald McDonald because no two nations with a McDonald's restaurant had ever fought a war. Instead the prize went to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. (In 1999, Bill Clinton and Jean Chretien attacked Serbia without UN approval, blowing up the McDonald's theory.) And while I'm generally opposed to people having their legs blown off, I make an exception for, say, Nazi soldiers attacking Canadian troops in Normandy. I'm not convinced disarming the good guys has a good track record. Which raises the surely pertinent question of what causes war and what, therefore, helps prevent it.

The Nobel Peace Prize site fudges it: "The ways and means to achieve peace are as diverse as the individuals and organizations rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize." But as John Maynard Keynes famously observed, "the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else." Some Nobel Peace Prize awards are just bizarre. (For instance 1969's to the International Labour Organization; could an archeologist now tell us what that was about? As for 1910's Permanent International Peace Bureau, could a paleontologist find its shin bone today?) But, generally speaking, explanations of the root causes of war fall into three categories: the nature of the international system, the nature of particular regimes, or the nature of human beings. And so do the awards.

The Prize has often gone to people concerned with a flawed international order. It even went to Theodore Roosevelt for trying to make the current balance of power less unstable, though far more often to people who created weak transnational institutions to fret that invasions are naughty, from Woodrow Wilson to the UN and Kofi Annan in 2001. What has the UN done since to justify any other verdict than that it meant well feebly? (Putting Sudan on the Human Rights Commission called the "meaning well" into question but not the "feebly.") Feeble doesn't stop wars.

The Prize has also gone surprisingly often to human rights advocates, from Andrei Sakharov and Desmond Tutu to 2003's Shirin Ebadi. Often it's in the rather mushy left-wing spirit that all good things are one, man. For instance, 1970's winner, Norman Borlaug, probably saved more lives than anyone else who ever lived. But he did it by boosting agricultural productivity, and famine rides a horse of a different colour. I think you have to help unseat the guy on the red horse to get a peace prize. Still, it can be argued that human rights advocates do. In Portland, Oregon, last month I saw a slogan from 1964's winner carved on a public building: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. -- Martin Luther King Jr." If so, fighting repression in foreign lands is self-defence. (Which explains Paul Martin hectoring the UN to blast its way into Sudan, but not our refusal to help President Bush in Iraq.)

With other winners, possibly including Dr. King and the Dalai Lama and certainly Mother Teresa, the theory seems to be that war comes from turmoil in the human heart. But in these and all the other cases, I have to ask: Have their efforts actually had a positive result? I hate to seem all right-wing and practical, but Neville Chamberlain wanted peace. I don't think you get marks for effort in international affairs. And certainly the amazing obscurity of so many winners of this prize (and the notoriety of others like Yasser Arafat) suggests insufficient attention to this point.

I realize that the committee doesn't share this view, and if they're in as anti-American a mood as when they made 2002's appalling award to Jimmy Carter, my guess is they'll pass over Michael Moore and give it to Hans Blix. But hope springs eternal. So, if they're going on human rights, how about Zimbabwe's Archbishop Pius Ncube as a pleasant surprise? Otherwise, since they already gave it to the guy who accidentally destroyed communism and since, despite the headlines, the world is less violent now that the Soviets aren't arming every lunatic they can find, how about a posthumous award to the guy who destroyed communism on purpose, enduring much abuse in the process as a primitive warmonger who would get us all killed?

Give one to the Gipper. Ronald Reagan: Man of Peace.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It's Bud the Spud, from the bright red mud, goin' down the highway smiling. Actually it's not. Bud was from P.E.I., while Potato World's spokes-spud is from New Brunswick. But both bring a welcome, earthy reality to SimCity or whatever virtual community you inhabit. Potato World, in case you missed the story, is a giant $1.5-million museum and science and technology centre just outside Florenceville, New Brunswick. Its executive director calls it "the Disney World" of spuds: a claim easy to ridicule if you're one of them urban sophisticates who think a real museum should contain unmade beds and pickled sharks rather than a Potato World Hall of Recognition it hopes will draw in some of the tourists already visiting Hartland's famous covered bridge nearby.

The executive director of Potatoes New Brunswick, a growers' association, says "I've been to potato museums all over North America, but this one is by far the best. The one in Blackfoot, Idaho, has always been considered the big deal, but this one is really something." Pride in surpassing the previous Yukon Gold standard could make some folks think Dukes of Hazzard. Not me.

I haven't visited Potato World. But evidently it's not cheesy; it eschewed the enormous potato out front as old tractor cap; why, they even have one of those at the P.E.I. Potato Museum down O'Leary way. And it's not your grandfather's potato technology centre. "Prepare to be surprised," an animated potato says as you enter. Whaddaya mean, prepare?

Potatoes are fascinating. They provide balanced nutrition (just add fresh milk) on a tiny amount of land. But they can't be stored like grain because they're too moist and will sprout on you, or rot, within months, so they did not support the basic deal of early Old World civilization: military protection in return for a share of the harvest. No bandit dreams of whacking the peasant, then digging up a field of potatoes by hand; might as well get an honest job. Except in the South American antiplano where cold night air essentially freeze-dried them, sustaining first the Inca Empire, then Spain's rapacious mining.

On the other hand, once it crossed the ocean, the potato changed European demography, including the potato famine and resulting Irish diaspora. Then it came back to the New World, including Canada, with dramatic results. (And while I'm digging up my notes here, if you ever get a partly green potato chip, don't panic, companies try to weed them out as consumers disrelish them, but in fact they're harmless; occasionally a potato sticks out of the ground and sunlight activates the chlorophyll. Mind you, if it's green and furry, your potato chip has gone mouldy.)

In case, like some modern Gollum, you're still asking "What's Tater World, precious?" let me add, based on careful research (reading a Citizen story), that Potato World has historical exhibits from 19th-century horse-team farming to modern potato processing, displays of tools ancient and modern, and interactive history lessons with talking potatoes Trevor and Pirouette. "How many museums have talking potatoes?" asks founder Bill Black. Indeed.

I regret that both the New Brunswick and federal governments (the latter via ACOA) chipped in half a mil, with the rest raised privately. But the whole thing grew from a grassroots desire to save old farm equipment rusting in fields in New Brunswick's potato belt. (No, that's just an expression, not an article for sale in the gift shop, though they have one filled with spudstuffs, plus a cafe that sells potato bread, biscuits, candy and fudge. Better yet, kids who think food comes from a computer can visit a live potato field out back, pick out their own and watch the cafe make it into french fries.)

This is real Canadian culture, like Stompin' Tom and quite unlike John Ralston Spud. It shows how Canadians lived before grief counselling, the Charter or modern art, even before St. Tommy and St. Pierre gave us the Canada Health Act. It's also contemporary Canadian culture: imaginative, high-tech, irreverent and fun. Plus Florenceville is the home of McCain Foods Ltd., the largest producer of french fries on the planet.

Our politicians are always saying they're going to make us the greatest this or the biggest that in the world or claiming the UN already said we were (was that before or after putting Sudan back on its Human Rights Commission?). But here we are, genuine world-beaters at one of the world's great foods and you can hear the cognoscenti sneering all the way from Queen Street. Not me.

"I like reality," said French screenwriter Jean Anouilh. "It tastes of bread." Yeah, and potatoes. Plus I'd rather enjoy strolling into some Toronto salon in dirt-covered overalls and bursting out with "The spuds are big, on the back of Bud's rig ..."

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

In August, I predicted the televised first ministers' health summit would be a vacuous exercise in feel-good rhetoric. I was wrong. It was highly revealing. These guys even do fake badly. In 1934, economist John Maynard Keynes famously visited U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to urge him to tackle the Great Depression through deficit spending, and emerged muttering that frankly he'd "supposed the president was more literate, economically speaking." I suffered no similar disappointment this week. I knew our politicians were, in economist William Watson's words, "amateur clinicians ... gathering every few years to make their best guess -- governed ... by fad" on health.

H.L. Mencken once called government "a gang of men exactly like you and me" with "no special talent for the business of government ... only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device ... is to seek out groups who pant and pine for something they can't get and promise to give it to them. Nine times out of 10, that promise is worth nothing." For instance, last year's National Health Council, or 2002's Integrated Pan-Canadian Healthy Living Strategy.

Only amateurs would discover every few years that if only people didn't get sick so much, health care would cost less. Yeah. And if winters weren't so cold, we'd save on heating. Is that a plan? Can we go home now? But Mencken is wrong on one point. Politicians are quite unlike normal humans in their unshakable conviction that they should hold high public office even if their public relations specialists can't figure out why. Consider Paul Martin's promise in May to "fix medicare for a generation." Obviously if he'd had a plan then he'd have campaigned on it. So what made him think he'd have one by September? Only that he is the great Himself, the Man who would be PM.

Which we knew already. But we didn't know these guys can't even spin well. Of course we got the usual rolling thunder about "important" and "historic" and, given seven minutes for opening remarks, Mr. Martin droned on for 35 and Jean Charest droned back for 24. But when the time came to fake substantive, it all came unglued.

Monday's public meeting started with bickering about what had been said privately on Sunday night. Later they admitted that Tuesday night they'd squabbled privately while gobbling, the Citizen reported, "roasted B.C. sturgeon, parsnip puree with baby spinach and an entre-mets of grapefruit beurre blanc ... Rankin Inlet caribou tenderloin with juniper berry crust on a warm salad ... lentils, Outaouais chanterelles with Micha goat cheese and smoky bacon ... a Yukon low-bush cranberry compote, micro greens on an aged Gouda crouton and butterscotch pudding ... with a trio of Ontario wines." Man, that's living. But the meeting ran to 3 a.m., (complete with a classic dorm-room pizza run I'd have staged for the cameras, saving the caribou on warm salad for later). The next day, a C-minus essay was cobbled together by officials scurrying between meeting rooms while fatigue clouded men's minds and TV cameras gazed upon an empty hall. Amateurs.

Of course Paul Martin then strode to a microphone to hail a "10-year plan, a deal for a decade that will lead to better health care for all Canadians ... People around this table stood up for health care and Canadians. There was determination to secure a long-term deal that will stop the annual ritual of federal-provincial disputes and start the process of renewal." In fact, he wrote a hot blank cheque with fake strings attached ("evidence-based benchmarks," the current fad, without enforcement mechanisms, from which Quebec is exempt) to premiers who already said they'll be back Oct. 26 for more equalization money.

At times, I wish our politicians were smarter than they look; as Alexandre Dumas said, at least rogues take vacations. Dalton McGuinty and, before he wandered off to a Quebec casino, Ralph Klein, demanded more money from the feds. I hope they know that, for every dollar the federal government transfers to our two remaining "have" provinces, it takes more than a dollar from their taxpayers, but that they have a cunning plan to get credit for the spending and duck blame for the taxes. I can't shake that Keynesian feeling that what you see is all they've got. It is certainly suggestive that no first minister ever looked into a camera and explained how much more money would be enough or how they knew, let alone how they'd spend it better, even though it would have been a PR coup.

They don't know anything. They never did know anything. But now we know that they don't know, all at a health care summit. So I was wrong: The cameras were useful. Unfortunately.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]