Canada's Parliament just reconvened. It might seem a singularly inauspicious time to discuss proper self-government. But I must protest the growing conviction that it is not only wrong but offensive to think the majority should set the ground rules for our political life. I am pleased Justice John Gomery has decided to remain at the helm of his inquiry. But why has it become the focus of efforts to uphold public ethics while Parliament is again reduced to a carnival sideshow with partisan points for the lucky winner? How did the representatives of the people cease to be the principal guardians of the public purse or any other public interest?

Unless you make your habitation beneath a singularly large and heavy rock, you will have noticed that the debate on gay marriage has made the very notion of majority rule distasteful to the chattering classes. Gilles Marchildon, of EGALE Canada, just said, "To subject minority rights to a popularity contest, I don't think that's a way to lead a country." The minister of state for public health, Carolyn Bennett, recently opined that "minority rights isn't a place where majority rules." Buzz Hargrove in Monday's Financial Post wrote, "it never occurred to me to call an election in my union over same-sex rights ... a referendum on minority rights ... makes no sense at all ...." He went on, "Protecting the Charter of Rights takes leadership. Martin will need to continue to stay strong on this issue."

There's some discrepancy here. From where does Ms. Bennett think she derives her authority if not from the principle of majority rule? And please desist from vain chatter about its imperfect reflection in our electoral practice. From where else would Paul Martin derive authority to uphold the Charter than as representative of the closest thing to a majority in the last election? Or to appoint judges to interpret it? Where, indeed, did the Constitution and Charter came from? It's majorities all the way down. As Andrew Coyne, though he opposes any use of the notwithstanding clause, notes with exemplary clarity, "Rights may exist in the abstract as a matter of natural law, but they exist here on Earth because majorities decide they should."

Federal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler was quoted in Wednesday's Citizen that "You can't have a referendum to override the Constitution of this country." Well then, how do you override it? In the United States, they use Article V of their Constitution. As the locus of their self-government, it has primacy over legislatures, but the people have primacy over it. It is a device, famously, for ensuring on key questions an appeal from the people drunk to the people sober, not from the people to some unspecified but less disgusting entity.

Our system is different. The locus of Canadian self-government is Parliament. It had primacy over any written document (hence the ancient rule that no Parliament can bind its successor), but the people had primacy over it. If that's no longer true, please tell me what took its place, when and why.

The answer appears to be: the Charter itself. Like God, it is self-grounding. It created itself, and interprets itself. Mr. Cotler calls it "the expression and entrenchment of our rights and freedoms, the codification of the best of Canadian values and aspirations. It defines us as to who we are as a people and what we aspire to be." Bow down, O ye people! And Paul Martin thundered on about the Charter and his refusal to use the notwithstanding clause at such tedious length that L. Ian Macdonald in the Montreal Gazette retorted, "Ah, Paul Martin, fearless champion of the Charter. Apparently, he doesn't understand the charter. Not only is the notwithstanding clause part of it, there would be no charter without it."

Some may grant this point only in the sense that a cockroach that falls into your soup becomes part of it. The Globe and Mail sneered editorially about "a little-used instrument that enables Parliament to trample on an equality right ..." To others, one fears, its inclusion was necessary, but only to conceal from the rubes the abolition of self-government. Wiser heads might maintain, even in parliamentary debate in the twilight of our democracy, that it was included to prevent such a development. They might call it the most important clause in the Charter, the guarantee of self-rule through Parliament, of an appeal not from the people but from the people drunk to the people sober.

True, one's first thought on entering question period is unlikely to be, "Here, at last, is true sobriety." Perhaps if we heard more political philosophy and fewer monkey noises ...

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

In case you were busy this week counting your wives or playing "Where's Adrienne" (hint: don't look in Alberta), I'd like to draw your attention to a story in last Sunday's Citizen saying the federal government spent a cool $25.4 million on opinion polls last year. I think they're up to something. Cynics may respond, "Of course they are. They're up to preparing for an election." I wouldn't put it past this (or any) incumbent government to spend public money polishing its own political fortunes. But I fear the cynics are taking, as so often, far too optimistic a view. I think misguided idealism is on the rampage again.

Please note first that last year's spending, the second-highest ever after 2001's $26.2 million, is no blip: It's the fifth straight year the federal opinion-research tab has exceeded $20 million. And while government can blow hundreds of millions of dollars without breaking a sweat, it's still a lot of polling (593 polls in the past fiscal year alone, or more than two every working day, although to be fair, like other members of the 1-800 crowd, they sometimes call on weekends, too). It's far more, on far more issues, than can be explained by the seediest of electoral concerns. And besides, this may be a pre-election year, but 2001 wasn't. Why on earth is the government gauging our moods so obsessively?

According to Jeffrey Simpson in last week's Globe and Mail, one thing that fascinates the government is testing the effectiveness of its own advertising, which he says accounts for over a quarter (28 per cent) of all government research spending. Granted, if you're selling a product, you want to know if your ads worked. And if you're the government, your budget for polling, advertising and anything else you feel like is not subject to the same constraints as in the private sector. Still, it seems like a lot, given that, like everyone else, you have only 24 hours in a day.

So what is it that people in government think they're doing that requires them to measure our moods relentlessly twice a day and, especially, to see how successfully they're altering those moods? What, in fact, is their product? At the risk of seeming simple-minded, it sounds to me as though the government is not merely engaging in propaganda, partisan or otherwise. I think it has donned a white coat and horn-rimmed glasses and is subjecting us to relentless conditioning, including, as any good social scientist would, systematic checks on how well it's working.

I don't want 62 per cent of readers to think I'm paranoid, plus or minus 3 per cent 19 times out of 20 unless it snows on a Tuesday. I don't believe there is the slightest danger of governments' taking possession of our minds. These are the people who brought us the gun registry, and apparently spent $17 million in 2003 promoting something called the "one-tonne challenge" that, their own polling says, didn't have an ounce (sorry, a gram) of impact. To say government overestimates its capacity to effect positive social change is like saying the Atlantic is a bit damp or Jean Chrétien can be annoying.

I do not fear some invasion of the bureaucratic body snatchers here. But I am a firm believer in Somary's Law that the more governments do things they should not do, the less they do things they should. Ours certainly seem to be falling down badly on defending the realm, enforcing clear, comprehensible laws impartially, cutting the grass on the medians and, if time permits, maintaining a decent standard of honesty in the conduct of public business. And I worry that it's partly because their limited powers of concentration are overtaxed almost as badly as their citizens.

Once upon a time, government's task was to defend the Queen's peace and combat fraud. Later, it got into managing the economy through deficit spending where, you may have noticed, it manifested its usual reverse-Midas touch. But far from learning humility, when it got bored with mere prosperity it found a new and even more fascinating hobby.

Our political class now considers itself the conscience and brain of society, which it views as an amorphous and sluggish but not totally unpromising entity it must lead and shape through anti-tobacco strategies and fitness campaigns and polls on our attitudes toward marijuana and weather forecasting and an on-line atlas.

We are in the grip of social science and must be poked, prodded and scientifically measured until we get the right cheese at the right time in the right way. And if we don't like their cheese, well, they're working on it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Thank goodness for the United States. At his second inauguration yesterday, George W. Bush might seem to have gazed out at a world alienated by his unapologetic use of U.S. power. Certainly on his recent visit to Ottawa, jeering protesters tried to suggest he and the country he rode in on are uniformly despised here. But they aren't and shouldn't be. For without America we would truly be in the soup. Or die Suppe. In Oregon last August, a registered Democrat passionate about local self-government suggested to me that if the U.S. had split up during the 19th century, its national government(s) might be far less unwieldy and impersonal than Washington has become. Perhaps. But my immediate and enduring reaction is that no possible benefits could compensate for the horrors of a 20th century without the overwhelming, if sometimes tardy, power of the United States, and I expect the same will be true of the 21st. She declared it a welcome change from habitual America-bashing by foreigners, including Canadians.

This fall, newspapers worldwide highlighted polls saying people from Spain to South Korea far preferred John Kerry to George Bush. It seemed a bit odd, since most also claimed not to see much difference between Democrats and Republicans. But it's a proxy for resenting American exceptionalism, as is majorities everywhere liking Americans though majorities in Canada, Britain, Mexico and South Korea said American culture threatened their own (Canada's 60 to 38 took paranoid gold here). In at least four countries, people massively told pollsters the U.S. exercises too much influence in the world - in Canada 86-11 - while a majority in Canada, Japan and South Korea denied America was respected in the world or helped maintain peace.

Here lies the crucial inconsistency. For when asked is it important for your country to maintain good relations with the U.S., 90 per cent or more said yes in Canada, France, Japan, Australia, Mexico and South Korea. If menaced by a tyranny, they would run to Uncle Sam, confidently expecting help. Knee-jerk anti-Americans throughout the West, including here, are as aware of their dependence on the U.S. as I am. The difference is I don't resent it.

Of course some aspects of America bother me intensely. But I never expected to get through life without irritation, nor do I see how a person, place or thing could be complex enough to be interesting without having some annoying qualities. From Wall Street to Harvard to Hollywood, the U.S. has something to irritate, and delight, everyone. And this dynamic diversity accounts for its overwhelming power and its crucial impact, not just on what happens in the world, but on what conceivably might happen. Sure, America makes mistakes in foreign policy; so does Canada. But it is strong enough to crush those who wage war on freedom anyway, and that's what matters.

I wish I could share widely the most important book Osama bin Laden didn't read: Victor Davis Hanson's Carnage and Culture. It argues that the West has hammered its foes on the battlefield for 2,500 years because free men eventually outthink unfree men, that for 2,500 years the West has known its foes and they have not known us and don't even realize it, that it is not we but they who are boastful and brittle. If a U.S. divided internally and at odds with some major allies could flick the Taliban and Saddam Hussein from their dingy thrones at will, the last thing terrorists should want is to frighten the West into concerted, sustained action against them. Size matters. But free citizens matter more, which makes the free world one large, if often chaotic, endeavour. Cives Romani sumus; in that sense we are all Americans now.

The U.S. is an enormous reservoir of strength for liberty under law. The colossus may suffer major defeats from the Teutobergwald to the American Revolution to Vietnam. But new legions arise and George III loses at Yorktown not York as long as that star-spangled banner yet waves. That is how deep the well is from which one can draw Bible Belt revivalism and political correctness, Michael Moore and Mel Gibson, Starbucks and McDonald's.

So I'm not bitter about being protected by the U.S., envious of its cultural vitality or ignorant of the connection. If Americans make me look bad, I should pull my socks up, not criticize the cut, fabric and design of theirs. The U.S. proves right makes might, which helps me sleep peacefully in both senses.

So I welcome a second term for President Bush. And I say thank goodness for America.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

One nice thing about being conservative is that you get to rely on established, unchanging truths. In liberalism, by contrast, notions dismissed as absurd in one generation have a disquieting tendency to become grim orthodoxy in another. Take equality ... please. Crusty old John Adams, America's second president, proved politicians from Massachusetts were unpopular long before they became wild-eyed liberals; he served one term as the last Federalist president ever (then his son John Quincy Adams served one as the last National Republican, after which parties tended to shun the Adams family as a horror story). But as Russell Kirk notes in The Conservative Mind, first published in 1953, he remains very readable, if little read.

In a letter to his colleague John Taylor, Adams insisted "That all men are born to equal rights is clear. Every being has a right to his own, as moral, as sacred, as any other has." But regarding the egalitarian fantasies of the French philosophes, he wrote "what are we to understand here by equality? Are the citizens to be all of the same age, sex, size, strength, stature, activity, courage, hardiness, industry, patience, ingenuity, wealth, knowledge, fame, wit, temperance, constancy, and wisdom?" Liberals at the time would have dismissed it as an absurd caricature of their views. But that was then.

Now Saint Mary's University in Halifax has told a student to stop selling his "Girls of Saint Mary's" calendar on campus because it is no longer a project for an entrepreneurship course (he got an A, and made over $10,000). If I were a college president, I would not have permitted its sale at any point, because I would have a conduct code requiring students to conduct themselves like ladies and gentlemen. It would discourage ladies from posing half-dressed and forbid gentlemen selling the resulting pictures on campus if they did. But such reasoning is dreadfully passé in the age of Charlotte Simmons.

As some way should nevertheless be found to protect young women from men's more predatory sexual impulses, listen instead to the complaint quoted in the National Post from "Sally Whitman, co-ordinator of the Saint Mary's Women's Centre ... one of the students who complained to the school's administration" with, one may assume, more than average influence. "I didn't think it was appropriate, not because we have a problem with using sexy images to turn people on. My problem comes down to the fact that it's promoting this narrow view of what women are supposed to look like to be beautiful and sexy."

The entrepreneur featured athletes as well as cheerleaders and stressed his presentation of the "diverse student body." But harpies are not so easily deflected, and they swooped. All have won the beauty contest, and all must have prizes.

To give it credit, political correctness does not assert that everyone is the same age, sex, size, ingenuity etc. But it's only partial credit. For in denouncing "ageism," it does insist that everyone shall be treated as if they were the same, indeterminate age. (A law professor wrote in the Citizen Tuesday: "The Supreme Court of Canada missed a golden opportunity last week to affirm that children under 18 are full members of Canadian society." Right. Shall eight-year-olds drive and four-year-olds sign contracts?)

In denouncing sizeism and lookism, political correctness insists not that everyone is, technically, the same size, but everyone shall be treated as if they were the same indeterminate size; under "fat rights," the medical profession is even told not to stigmatize obesity as unhealthy. Many universities now forbid discrimination in hiring based on mental ability (evidently, cynics might say); everyone shall be treated as if they possessed the same ingenuity. And don't even get me started on the unisex agenda.

Only in academia, you say? Regrettably not. During the great topless controversy of 1997, the Toronto Star editorialized that "a chest is just a chest, hairy or not." (As I asked at the time, "have you ever had sex?") Which makes girlie calendars hard to understand, if easy to ban.

In that letter saying all men had equal rights, John Adams went on, "to teach that all men are born with equal powers and faculties, to equal influence in society, to equal property and advantages through life, is as gross a fraud, as glaring an imposition on the credulity of the people, as ever was practiced..." and concluded "For honor's sake, Mr. Taylor, for truth and virtue's sake, let American philosophers and politicians despise it."

Ha ha. As if liberals would ever laugh at honour, truth and virtue.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

My first reaction to the Asian tsunami was that it's not the sort of thing to have opinions on. When a giant wave suddenly sweeps some 150,000 people to their deaths you're horrified, you make a donation to the relief effort, and you contemplate your own mortality. But there aren't really two sides to it, are there? After a decent interval various observations suggest themselves. First, the relief effort now enters its critical phase. In most natural disasters the first couple of days are crucial as people search for survivors. In this case, a huge number of "survivors" escaped the first killing impact, but are now menaced by hunger, disease and smashed infrastructure.

Second, though the attention and sympathy of the world are rightly engaged by this calamity, it should not divert all our efforts from others in need of help elsewhere in the world, including a place called "Canada." Charities have seen an increase in the targeting of donations in recent years. But let's trust their judgment and give at least some money unconditionally.

Third, we need less political symbolism and a little more emphasis on action. Who cares that Paul Martin (or Tony Blair) did not cut short his vacation? What did you want him to do? Fly to Jakarta for an official visit, further straining Indonesia's overburdened infrastructure? Go to Sri Lanka and huck sandbags? A brief statement of concern would have been fine, then a call to the relevant minister saying get DART in the air now.

Fourth, in the longer run, we will have to deal intelligently with why natural disasters cause more harm in poorer countries. Just four days after the tsunami, Lawrence Martin wrote in The Globe and Mail: "If there were any justice, it would be the wealthiest countries that bore the brunt of nature's tragedies. Instead, it is always the other way around." I cannot grasp his claim that justice would be advanced by the drowning of 140,000 people in a wealthy country like, say, New Zealand or France. But since he raises the point, bad economic policy perpetuates poverty and poverty kills people, so bad economic policy kills people. No matter how good it makes its wealthy western advocates feel.

Fifth, those who say government must dispense charity at home and abroad because citizens aren't sufficiently generous are quite evidently wrong. There may be other justifications, but not that one.

Sixth, what's gone wrong with our understanding of deeper issues? The normally sensible Robert Fulford wrote in the National Post that "There's not a theologian on Earth who could give a persuasive explanation of this tragedy. But if there's no way of explaining what it means in religious terms, is there a way we can give it geopolitical meaning? Can we seize upon it as an opportunity to shape the future?" No. If God is dead, there's no point in our auditioning for the post. Meanwhile, the not normally sensible Archbishop of Canterbury responded as though it was the first he had heard of evil and suffering afflicting innocent people. Who is this "Job"?

The most important question to ask about any religious doctrine, including atheism, is not whether it is comforting or meets my needs, but whether it is true. And as it is plainly obvious that terrible things often happen to people who do not deserve them, any religion worth 10 minutes' consideration has an explanation of it. Hence that large branch of theology called "theodicy."

The standard non-atheist explanation, and I think the only plausible one, is that if good were automatically and immediately rewarded like popping money into a vending machine and getting a chocolate bar back, the world would lack depth, there would be no drama of salvation and the whole thing would not have been worth creating. It may strike you as absurd or even deranged: John Stuart Mill rejected it indignantly. But it has persuaded many kind and intelligent people including, as a letter noted in yesterday's Citizen, St. Augustine. Either way, it's not a new argument, and if it got you through the Black Death, the Holocaust, rape, torture and famine, it shouldn't suddenly crumble now. For as Chesterton wrote of war, "if it is terrible that two million men should die together in a campaign, it is also terrible that all men without exception must die separately elsewhere." The real issue isn't this death or that death but death itself.

So let's do what we can to help those afflicted by the tsunami, and everyone else in need, and remember that one day we too must die. That's still pretty much it, isn't it?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Well, you can wrap 2004 up. But you can't take it with you. Instead, it's going where all the years go when they cease to be this year, the dusty heap called history. I wonder what history will make of it. Winston Churchill once said he knew what history would say because he intended to write it. Regrettably, I have less authority and fewer volumes at my disposal. But I do have David Warren's recent observation in Western Standard that "the people in the past didn't think of themselves as living there. Like us, they thought they were living in the present." It reminds me that if we attempt to comprehend our own times as the final destination of history's long voyage, not part of it, we are likely to step blithely from the coach and be hurled at speed into a tree.

So, through a glass darkly, I'm trying to see 2004 in light of the chapter titles in the perhaps too many history books I have read, especially the long surveys. Things like "The Development of Responsible Government" or "Edward III and the Executive," but not "Paul Martin: Man of Destiny, a Bit". The Canadian Press and Broadcast News annual survey just voted Mr. Martin newsmaker of the year for the second time running. Oh please. It should be someone who had a surprisingly large impact on our public life (which, parenthetically, involves slightly more than just government policy) especially in a surprising direction.

Of course, a historical perspective deals more in dominant trends (Late 19th Century America: Industrialization, Urbanization, Immigration) than turning points, which are both fewer and less obvious at the time. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle entry for 787 says: "And in his (King Bertric's) days came first three ships of the Northmen from the land of robbers ... the first ships of the Danish men that sought the land of the English nation." At the time, I expect Bertric looked like the story. But surely Paul Martin is neither trend nor turning point.

What is? Despite vainglorious rhetoric about a "duty to protect" and "this next nine months as a critical time where Canada has an opportunity to play a leadership role in pulling together networks and coalitions of countries to ... move everyone forward in a meaningful way," one of our chapters must be "Canada Abdicates a Foreign Role." Discarding the traditional alliance with the United States while neglecting hard power assets left the nation without constructive diplomatic alternatives, it will say. As for the United Nations, look in the history books under League of Nations after 1936 for a general sense of the probable tone.

Presumably Canada in the 21st Century: From Sea to Shining C Minus will give a chapter to gay marriage. But what will it say? I'm led to believe by the one-storey intellects that gay marriage is here, "the debate is over" and now it stops. The ship of history has docked. Woo hoo. Party. But I am also told we are a land of changely changehoodship. So this is presumably just one more step in the evolution of the family. Into what?

Well, I imagine a chapter here like "The Rise of Parliament" or "Civil War and Parliamentary Triumph," except much faster in these accelerated times. Call it "The Rise of Judicial Supremacy." With precedent playing a far larger role in human affairs than is generally appreciated by those who think it's all about them, history may well view the transformation of heterosexual marriage from everybody knows in 1999 to are you insane in 2004 mainly as the most telling example of the courts' wresting of final authority away from Parliament. (Oh, and the next chapter is "The Collapse of Central Planning in Health Care.")

If I had my druthers, one chapter would be "The End of Social Science." But it could be the least of our worries. For speaking of accelerated times, 2004 saw many portents of the technology that is yet to come, especially cybernetics and genetic engineering. Compare the Wright brothers' comical contraption to a modern fighter plane and ask whether our appliances and even our desks won't become smarter than we are and put us out to pasture. Perhaps "The Rise of the Cyborgs" will be written by one. Sometimes social changes matter more than first ministers' conferences.

History has a bigger eraser than I do a pen, and as the Asterix comic Le Devin reminds us, soothsayers generally babble. But it helps to try to evaluate our own time, and our own small contribution to it, with some thought to what the chapter titles might look like a hundred years hence. At which point Paul Martin will be lucky to be a trivia question.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Well, Merry Christmas, everyone. May all your Rudolphs be red-nosed and may you have as much eggnog as you desire. Though not one drop more. I also see that European scientists have bred a sweeter brussels sprout, so if your background mandates these foul green spheroids at this festive season (who said British cooking was lousy? -- other than the recipients, who so dread this aspect of Christmas that Thomas Cook Travel used a photo of a plate of them to induce Britons to flee the country in December) I hope yours, too, have that special sugary quality.

As for those Swedish-Canadians whose Christmas anchovies have been impounded by the authorities for having the weight indicated on the bottom of the can rather than the side (with such ponderous threats to our well-being are our betters preoccupied while we Cratchits celebrate even on a clerk's salary), I can only recommend purchasing some of the conventional salty type, rinsing them, patting them dry and giving yourselves over to the exuberantly cheerful celebration for which Scandinavians are renowned.

Enough biting wit about holiday traditions or anything else. This being Christmas Eve, I have dipped my pen in acid and left it to marinade for the new year while I dispense kindly sentiments like cookies for Santa and, if you please, a few carrots for the reindeer. If you live in Bryan, Texas, you can leave the reindeer some of the new maroon jobs, but for the rest of us, orange will do just fine.

It's too close to Christmas to disguise sardonic suggestions about public policy as a wish list for Santa, or to offer a pointed retelling of the Scrooge story. On top of which, earlier this week I actually had a dream in which I was reminded of the advice to live every day as though it were your last. Like any good thing, it should be taken in moderation: It is not an approach I recommend with respect to financial matters and, if taken too literally on the subject of risk, it could turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But shortly after I woke up that morning, I was tempted to say something crabby to my wife, then reflected that if it did turn out to be my last day, as one of them certainly will, I didn't want to bow out with that remark on my lips. Instead, I thought, I should put aside what I want, both sincere and sarcastic, and think instead about what I've got.

Including, this year, the scent of spelt flour baking. You see, on the radio this fall I happened to disparage Cato the Elder's recipe for sheep's-milk cheese and honey pie, which I argued he planned not to eat but to sacrifice to Roman gods easy to please, not worth pleasing, or fond of Brussels sprouts (which Cato also recommended for hangovers, possibly as a deterrent). But a caller challenged me to try it and, as I come in part from that hardy folk whose national cuisine, as actor Mike Myers notes, was based on a dare and who deep-fry Mars bars with abandon, I could not resist.

We cheated a bit, using flour from the prescribed ancient grain "spelt," but adding decadent butter and sugar a la Martha Stewart, instead of sticking to stern virtuous Roman flour and water dried into nasty hard strips. Then we got the best sheep's milk cheese we could find (also the only one), added honey and baked it up. The verdict? Spelt flour is pretty good.

It's not just food. It's existence. I treasure the remark of French screenwriter Jean Anouilh that, "I like reality. It tastes of bread." I'm grateful for crock pots and slow cooking from scratch that fills the house with wholesome smells. Hold the cheese and honey guck. But I do appreciate good company and music and the scent of pine in midwinter. And, for that matter, winter itself.

There's a special beauty to weather too cold for clouds or precipitation and, after a brisk, short walk in it, a special charm to a warm room and a hot cup of tea. Arguably we've had a bit too much of a good thing recently, but I wouldn't give up the rotation of the seasons. I especially like the way warmth and light cycle through the year slightly out of phase, so that while it's still getting colder, it's already getting lighter. And in August, I love the way the light starts to go, but the warmth lingers. Is this a great reality or what?

There is one thing I want, Santa: that people like the gifts I gave them. Oh, and that George Washington's four-kinds-of-booze eggnog recipe comes out all right, and if we have too much of it, the Brussels sprouts the next morning aren't too ghastly.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

One very strange thing about Canadian politics is how many people are so keen to govern yet have so little interest in how government works. You would be surprised, and offended, if your car mechanic spent years seeking his job, then popped your hood and went "Whoa Nelly, there's a lot of wires in here." So why do we take it in stride from our politicians? Last May, I complained that the federal parties were campaigning on wine and roses about what they'd do if elected, and skunk juice and cabbage about their opponents' characters and intentions, but had almost nothing to say about how they would do things right and how their opponents would not or had not. As usual, the good thing about being a conservative is you're eventually proved right; the bad thing is you're eventually proved right.

Consider the admission last week by the vice-chief of the defence staff, that the military have not tried to recruit the 5,000 new regular-force members and 3,000 reservists Paul Martin promised in the June election. His explanation was perfectly sensible: DND has no money to train or house them, so it's not signing them up. But what about the people around Mr. Martin or the great man himself? Didn't they think about such things before making the promise? Or after?

Well, David Collenette, Jean Chretien's first defence minister, just told the Commons defence committee that yes, his government had cut military spending too much. But, he explained, "We had some tough discussions with the minister of finance, who is the current prime minister. You have to use your political judgment as to whether or not Canadians would have accepted to lay out that kind of money and make that kind of commitment in 1995 when the health-care system was being cut." Of course policies need explanations. But you should not devise the explanation before making the policy, let alone instead of it.

Wednesday's National Post reports a new government pledge to do everything necessary to protect Arctic sovereignty except act. But maybe Liberals just aren't interested in national security. So what about global warming? Three months ago, the deputy minister of natural resources told a conference in Australia that Canada wouldn't get two-thirds of the way to its Kyoto commitments and "there is even a question of how we are going to move forward on this plan." Some people might think it matters. Why not the ones in office?

Equally baffling is Dalton McGuinty's campaign pledge to shut down Ontario's coal-fired power plants by 2007. How did he expect to replace the lost generating capacity? What about construction costs and lead times? Are policy details for losers? And when the prime minister and premiers saved health care for a decade this fall, I wanted to ask them: "How? How are you going to do that? Don't you understand that this question matters?" But evidently they had no interest in mucking about with all that petty nonsense about stethoscopes and nurses and scalpels.

The Liberals are conspicuous because they hold power. But look at the Conservatives on gay marriage. Stephen Harper claims governments can pass laws incompatible with court rulings without invoking the notwithstanding clause, a position Jeffrey Simpson rightly calls "unsettling." But not compared to Mr. Harper's proposal to give homosexuals an institution legally identical to marriage except with a different name. You can't get much less substantial than that.

Mind you, Justice Minister Irwin Cotler tried, saying the proposed gay-marriage legislation should let public officials refuse to marry gays if they don't want to. If he doesn't know what a law is, what else doesn't he know? Oh, yeah. What rights are. He just dismissed criticism of the government's anti-terror legislation with: "One cannot consider rights or limitations on rights in the abstract, only in the context in which they arise." As in, we don't feel like letting you see a lawyer so you can't? King Charles I would say yes. But some people thought, pretty much on those grounds, that he was a very bad king.

Having read Thomas Sowell, I think there's far more vacuity than cynicism at work here. I fear that our politicians despise chatter about methods because they think only good intentions matter and they pride themselves on possessing those in unlimited quantity. In that sense, they are interested in government, I suppose, but in a very Land of Oz way quite unlike your mechanic's fixation on alternators and transmissions and stuff.

I notice that your car works.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]