Do not, please, allow this column to come into the hands of children, for it contains, nay must contain, a confession of the most appalling and sordid nature. That young people must be warned against a fate such as mine I do not deny. But let me speak frankly to you, dear readers, that you may later pass on my message in a delicate way. For the simple fact is that I metabolize. Constantly. I cannot help it. I dare not even try. Before getting out of bed, each and every day, I do it. Oxygen in, carbon dioxide out. There, in black and white, you have the hellish rhythm that dominates my existence. I breathe. Can you forgive me?

To grasp the full horror of my habit, consult a minister. Not of the church; no one listens to those duffers any more. Of the crown. Specifically federal Environment Minister Stephane Dion, who proposes to classify carbon dioxide among those substances formerly known as toxic under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Stern is his attitude, yet what price is not justified to keep others from sinking into my subhuman condition?

Some may dismiss my confession as melodramatic scrupulosity. Many people metabolize, they may say. Others, hardened to the vices of the world, might even dismiss my agonizing pangs of conscience on the trite grounds that metabolizing is a victimless crime unless you're a sandwich. But no. I shall not take the easy way out. I am a menace to mankind. Unsuspected, unobserved, I prowl among them spewing poison.

Carbon dioxide, journalists assure us scientists assure us, is setting the Earth on fire. Like that of a dragon but worse, my breath ignites not individual maidens or castles but the entire planet. I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds. It's worse when I exercise.

To the addict, of course, rationalization is second nature. Some prate that plants absorb CO2 and emit oxygen and animals do the reverse and call it all some gigantic "cycle of life." Meanwhile fiends in the pay of the oil industry claim CO2 is not really that big a deal, there's a lot of it around, our own contributions are minor and, in any event, it can't have much to do with global warming because it absorbs energy on much the same wavelength as water vapour.

Water vapour! Aaaaaugh! My agony is increased. For, dear reader, I not only breathe carbon dioxide. No. Ha ha. So low have I sunk that with every breath I expel H2O as well. I have seen it on the mirrors. I have seen it on the windows. With my finger I have traced the outline of my depravity.

Shun, I pray you, the siren song of those who deny that water is bad. Listen to the wise. For instance, in Parliament on Oct. 8, 2002, Liberal MP Julian Reed said "I would like to challenge any member of the opposition to ... sit for an hour in a room filled with carbon dioxide. If they come out of it alive, I will give them a month's salary. They know very well that if they are faced with high levels of carbon dioxide in the air they will die. This is one of the manifestations of climate change which we are witnessing." Indeed. And need I point out the consequences of spending an hour in a room filled with water? Or maple syrup? Warn your children.

On Oct. 24 of that same year, NDP MP Joe Comartin assured his colleagues: "The reality is that carbon dioxide is part of smog." It's not, but never mind. The point on which to remain focused is we're all gonna die yaaaaaaaaaa! CO2 threatens mankind at least in law. And I'm spewing it out. I cannot lie. I did it after writing that last sentence and, how well I know myself, I will do it again before the end of the next paragraph.

How then did I fall into this habit? How did the bright promise of my innocent youth end in such depravity? Ah, there's the horror. Metabolizing, whatever you may have been told, does not at first induce torpor and intoxication. No, it sharpens the perceptions, bestows energy, leads a man forth into the world, to climb mountains (well, very small ones), attend the theatre, pursue academic distinction. How little I then suspected I would become an object of horror to others and even more to myself, unable to bear to regard myself in the mirror and, as I trace out its ravages on my face, see that telltale mist appear on the glass once again?

Be warned. Metabolize not. The facts are shocking, but you must know them. You must in due season and with due delicacy warn tender youth not to tread the path I have trodden. Failing this, the next tragedy may be that of your daughter's ... or your son's ... or yours ... or yours ... or yours!

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

"(I)n what's being described as the most ambitious international publishing venture ever -- the modern rewriting of dozens of ancient myths by the world's leading novelists ... (Margaret) Atwood is reinterpreting the epic Trojan War-era tale of Odysseus and Penelope. She intends to turn the telling of the 2,500-year-old Greek classic upside down with a heroine-centred narrative called The Penelopiad." - Ottawa Citizen, March 15 It's about time. Our ancestors may have revered Homer but we know better. We know he would have been a great author if only he'd written Crash or Naked Lunch instead of that stupid ship thing. And at last someone (other than James Joyce) is going to fix his crass blunder. But why her? Why not me?

John Robson: OK, so the story starts with Odysseus finally going home, having cleverly helped win the Trojan war.

The editors: War? Isn't that a bit, well, militaristic? Why did there have to be a war?

JR: It started with the abduction of Helen by Paris.

Eds: Say what? Is this sexual harassment?

JR: No, see, there was this beauty contest among the gods and ...

Eds: Aaaaack, sexual harassment and patriarchal religion.

JR: Look, it's just the background. Helen's was the face that launched a thousand ships, right?

Eds: A thousand lawsuits is more like it. Can we move along?

JR: Well, a fierce wind blows them to the land of the lotus-eaters where Odysseus has to tear his men away from the stupefying narcotic ...

Eds: I think they decriminalized lotuses. Leave that bit out.

JR: Uh, well, then they wind up trapped by this dreadful man-eating Cyclops called Polyphemus, but Odysseus puts his eye out and then does the "Noman" trick ...

Eds: His eye? In the singular?

JR: Yes, the Cyclops has only one eye and ...

Eds: So now we're brutally assaulting the handicapped?

JR: But Polyphemus was a monster who ate human flesh.

Eds: No. We're not having any of this colonialist narrative depicting non-Westerners as savages. Besides which, who are we to judge the vibrant anthropophagic customs of other cultures? Bottom line: Turn Polyphemus into Polymorphous and make him a heroic transgressor of restrictive boundaries concerning body image and diet. And sex.

JR: How did unusual sex get in here?

Eds: This is modern art.

JR: Oh. Right. Say, speaking of sex, afterward there's this bit where the beautiful sorceress Circe turns all Odysseus' men into pigs and ...

Eds: Hang on. Men don't need to be turned into pigs. And isn't it typically patriarchal to blame the victim? Like they see a pretty girl (sorry, woman) and can't control themselves so it's her fault. Forget it. Circe is out.

JR: Um, OK. Well there's a really exciting bit with Scylla and Charybdis.

Eds: Huh?

JR: Charybdis is this monster who sucks in ships and Scylla has all these heads on long necks and snatches sailors and somehow you have to steer right between them. It's a classic metaphor about avoiding two opposite perils at once.

Eds: Oh ho ho, so now you're doing that patriarchal privileged bit with the canon. How are underprivileged youth going to pronounce Charybdis?

JR: No, see, it's really exciting, with this dove that gets its tail feathers smashed and then they get through but about six of the crew get messily devoured and ...

Eds: I see. Ordinary workers killed on the job. It's a classist tale as well. And what's with the mistreatment of an avian companion? Forget it. No Scylla, no Charybdis and no dove.

JR: Look, I agree there are some odd bits in the Odyssey. The framework is troublingly pre-moral. But it's survived for thousands of years as an unforgettable story of loss, longing, perseverance and ultimately justice and reunion. Why are we even messing with it?

Eds: Aha. So you're saying after all this other poisonous rubbish it ends in a bloody slaughter instead of non-violent, win-win conflict resolution. Get this guy out of here. And find me an author who will dump all this loathsome superstition, blood-lust and patriarchy and maybe turn it into, you know, a metaphor about the oppression of women. Say, who's the one who did that thing about women being reduced to sexually submissive adjuncts to men forced to wear big shapeless garments, then had the creative vision to look right through the Taliban and see it realized in George Bush's America? I bet if we hired her she'd have the story sung by 12 murdered women or something. Yeah. Call her up.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The state of our democracy is not encouraging. The Liberal "natural governing party" looked so tired at its convention that even its friends could wish we had an alternative government in waiting. Yet the Conservative Party is quite evidently unready to govern in practice. What is less appreciated is that bad ideas are at the root of its problems. The Tories' practical troubles were glaringly on display in the kerfuffle this week over the draft resolution (P-90) for their upcoming convention that would let MPs vote freely on moral issues. Some people, mostly within the party, think Stephen Harper has a cunning plan to make the party pro-abortion and pro-gay-marriage. Others, mostly in the media, think he has a cunning plan to shackle women barefoot and pregnant in the heteronormative kitchen.

He can hardly have both. But he could certainly have neither. And on the accumulated evidence of the last dozen years, wouldn't rational observers hesitate to attribute to this party any capacity for cunning plans? (Remember: The Tories had to abandon their plan to have only some MPs abstain on the budget because it was "too complicated.")

The Globe and Mail's editorial board sees a cunning plan to stifle divisive debate, hectoring on Thursday that: "The Conservatives are divided on these issues between moderates from its Progressive Conservative wing and conservatives from the old Canadian Alliance. Rather than paper over these differences, the party needs to hash them out and come up with some kind of consensus that it can present to voters at the next election." But why couldn't free votes on matters of conscience be precisely such a consensus? I would call it most unwise. But it's hardly impossible.

So let's drop our cynical obsession with tactics and weigh the possibility that there's a sincere and important, if confused, intellectual basis for this suddenly infamous resolution P-90. For instance, the party's loudly and incessantly proclaimed devotion to direct democracy. I don't care how many mainstream journalists can't understand "free vote" after 12 years covering the party. The point of P-90 is exactly what it seems to be: to establish that MPs may vote their consciences on moral issues.

I agree that it looks odd, because in one sense the proposition is trivially true: Nothing can legally constrain the votes of members of a Parliament, even on a confidence vote. And in a more restricted sense, MPs always have enormous freedom on anything but a money bill because the government can't threaten its backbenchers with defeat followed by an election in which they might lose their seats, and Opposition leaders can't threaten theirs with much of anything. And since "moral issues" normally means things that aren't money bills (improperly, in my view, since there are many wrong ways to spend half a billion dollars a day) P-90 is, operationally speaking, trivial. So why are the Tories so keen on it?

Well, look at their superficially bizarre, and quite unprecedented, decision to abstain on the budget. Its practical impact is to give the Liberal government power without accountability, reducing Parliament to a hollow shell. It seems an odd stance from a party that, in other contexts, deplores judicial encroachment on self-government. And it has made them a laughing stock, so if it was a cunning plan, it didn't work very well. But again, there's another possibility. Examine, if you will, the reasons they give.

They say "the Canadian public" doesn't want an election. They say "Canadians" want this Parliament to work. They say it is therefore the duty of all the parties to co-operate to make it work. And they say this stuff because they are populists who believe the job of all politicians is to represent "the people." Not to represent the particular people who voted for them (and who, in the case of the Tories, may safely be assumed to be appalled by this Liberal spending megablast). Nor to offer an alternative government to any particular people who may become unhappy with the current administration. So they don't. They don't act like a parliamentary opposition in practice because they don't think they should in theory. Exactly as if the way to know what they thought was to listen to what they said.

I find the concept of politicians seeking to embody the popular will a false and dangerous one. At the very least it further undermines the operations of a parliamentary system in ways I think we should be debating. But we can't.

Not until more people stop babbling about plans and plots and manoeuvres and start caring about ideas. The health of our democracy depends on it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Legions of authors have felled vast forests in pursuit of literary distinction. Most get sawdust, some receive gold, and a far smaller band find lasting fame. But only one got "Venerable." And not just as an occasional or even frequent compliment: The father of English history, author of 731's hot read A History of the English Church and People, is invariably the Venerable Bede. One feels guilty for not knowing why. Such was his impact that King Alfred was reputed personally to have translated some of his history into English, one imagines with one hand while hacking away at Danish raiders with the other before onlookers startled that a king could read. But it has since faded to the status of something you're pretty sure the authors of 1066 and All That were satirizing and um, wasn't he a monk or something?

Yes. And finally making his venerable acquaintance brings a variety of surprises, mostly pleasant. For instance, his initial description of the land and people of England seems weirdly inaccurate ... until it hits one that he was writing closer to the Roman abandonment of Britain than the Norman Conquest, when many tumultuous changes now lost in the mists of time lay in the thicker mist of future time.

Further surprises await. Bede writes soon after the Christian evangelization of Britain, which modern minds may regard as overlay of crudely ignorant superstition on a lower layer of even grosser credulity. Yet Benedict Biscop, who founded and ruled the monasteries where Bede spent his life, was a Greek and Latin scholar who helped import new styles of stonework, glasswork and music to the British Isles. And his travelling companion to England, Theodore, fluent in Greek and Latin and a distinguished Archbishop of Canterbury from age 66 until his death at 88, hailed from Tarsus in Asia Minor. It was a globalized era.

Bede lacks some of the apparatus of modern scholarship,* so one cannot be sure his extensive citations from the letters of Pope Gregory the Great are copied verbatim from documents before him nor, if so, of the nature and provenance of those documents. But their distinctive voice suggests Bede was drawing on more than mere monastic folklore, let alone invention. And they show a surprisingly sophisticated mind.

Gregory tells Augustine, his successful chief missionary to England, pagan temples "should on no account be destroyed." Instead, convert them into churches so "the people ... may abandon idolatry and resort to these places as before, and may come to know and adore the true God. And since they have a custom of sacrificing many oxen to devils, let some other solemnity be substituted ... They are no longer to sacrifice beasts to the Devil, but they may kill them for food to the praise of God ... " Without, one presumes, too many pointed questions. But Gregory is practical, not cynical, let alone foolishly rigid and ignorant.

When Augustine asked, "Since we hold the same Faith, why do customs vary in different Churches?" Gregory replied, "you are familiar with the usage of the Roman Church ... But if you have found customs, whether in the Roman, Gallican, or any other Churches that may be more acceptable to God ... teach ... the English ... For things should not be loved for the sake of places, but places for the sake of good things." As many a modern chauvinist could usefully learn.

One also values Gregory telling missionaries with cold feet: "It is better never to undertake any high enterprise than to abandon it when once begun." But just as one is drawing a deep breath of fine old English air, one chokes on dust capable of miracles because it comes from the spot in a graveyard where water was dumped after being used to wash the bones of saintly King Oswald. The book contains many equally grotesque superstitions repellent to an age that prefers fables about Lee Harvey Oswald. Bede even dwells on the triumph of English Christianity and dismisses 1066 and All That's Egg-kings and their Egg-deaths as though political history were but a footnote to social history.

In short, he's disconcertingly modern, once we blow away the dust from Oswald's bones.

---------------------

* For instance, tedious footnotes.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Suppose I told you Canada had too many doctors. You'd think we urgently needed at least one more psychiatrist, right? Well, we might as well get our heads shrunk if we're not going to use them a bit more on crucial public policy questions, including health. This melancholy reflection was prompted by a bit of spring cleaning. Things are just as dismal under the couch (or, if not, credit my wife). But I finally got around to my computer. And amid the dust bunnies on my hard drive, I found the horrible, dried-up husk of the conventional wisdom on health care: We have too many doctors in our cities.

Don't laugh so hard it hurts, now that a million people in Ontario already don't have family doctors and, nationwide, one in five doctors is between 55 and 64 and another 11 per cent are over 65. But the front page of the Nov. 2, 1996 Globe and Mail said "large urban areas" were "oversupplied with doctors" and specifically identified "Toronto, Ottawa, London and Kingston."

The Toronto Star that same day said parts of Ontario had "too many doctors" having referred to "over-serviced regions" on Oct. 27 and "over-serviced areas, like Metro" on the 26th.

What, other than organic brain disease, could have led to this conclusion? Well, the Star explained it all in a sage editorial on Oct. 30, 1996: "It is generally accepted that there are too many doctors in Metro and other large urban centres in Ontario, while there are too few practising in the North. But unlike other services ... there's almost no chance that the interplay of supply and demand for physicians will produce the desired exodus from the south to the north. That's because a doctor is not just a supplier or producer of medical services. He or she is also an agent of the consumer, with the power to generate demand. As a result, doctors in the south can protect their incomes by 'over-servicing' patients who are not required to pay for the treatment they receive. Under the current fee-for-service system, the provincial government's only role is to just keep paying the doctors' bills. But as the ultimate purchaser of doctors' services, Queen's Park should have the power to match its payments to more objective criteria of actual need."

As Kenny Stabler might say, "Easy to call, hard to run." Getting power is easy. It's using it wisely that's difficult. Abolish market prices and it's not at all clear where you're even going to look for "objective criteria" to help you reconcile the competing demands of quality and price. Yet on Oct. 31st, 1996, the Globe said "the only real gain" the Ontario government had made in three weeks' bargaining with MDs was "the power to keep doctors from setting up shop in over-crowded areas and to get them to where they are needed."

So for the last nine years, Queen's Park has been able to drive doctors away from Ottawa on purpose as well as by mistake. Feel better now?

I understand why people who once thought "over-serviced areas" was a groovy phrase now hide it in the back of the cupboard with the bellbottoms and leg warmers. (Of course some papers are under new management since then, including this one). But isn't it a bit worrying that something so totally lunatic could have become the conventional wisdom?

Remember: every trendy blunder does lasting harm without impairing the credibility of our chattering classes.

Back in 1992, the feds and every single provincial government agreed to cut medical school enrolment by 10 per cent to combat the national infestation of doctors. Now I think they're all saying group practices are the thing that will for sure prove socialism works in health care and if not you die.

Uh, leave out that last bit. Why alarm the patients?

The herd of independent minds escaped disgrace despite babbling about too many doctors a decade ago because everyone was doing it. And conformity keeps them safe today. It's like when a bunch of zebra all get moving in roughly the same direction, jostling and twitching so the stripes form a dazzling, blinding pattern in which no individual stands out. You end up standing in a dusty, empty field wondering where everybody went.

Just as you probably will if you go looking for a family doctor today. It all makes me very anxious. But I don't need a psychiatrist. Though I would like more doctors generally, along with more free-market economists and more free thinkers. If, that is, we're going to shrink our waiting lists, not our heads.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

John Kenneth Galbraith is a big subject in every sense: 96 years old; occupant of prestigious academic and public positions from an early age; bestselling author of more than 40 books; six-foot-eight. And Richard Parker's John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics is a big book. With, like its subject, much superficial appeal but too little substance. Given his fame and influence (I myself assigned his American Capitalism as a university text), Galbraith deserves a sympathetic biography. From humble birth in 1908 in Iona Station, Ontario, he rose to Harvard economics professor and public official (including running the U.S. Office of Price Administration from 1941 to 1943 and being John Kennedy's ambassador to India). Parker also shows his deep involvement in politics as frequent Democratic National Convention delegate and senior adviser to Democratic losers from Adlai Stevenson to George McGovern to Edward Kennedy, with ample, occasionally excessive detail on matters from the New Deal to the New Frontier. And he rightly dismisses, as sour grapes, the frequent academic attacks on Galbraith's lively writing. Truly, one wishes more scholars had his wit and clarity.

The biography is not uncritical. Parker notes that Galbraith's accounts of his life include not just considerable reticence on personal matters but more than a few inaccuracies on his career. He had a long, busy life and one forgets things, but his lapses too often burnish his self-image as courageous outsider cold-shouldered by smug establishment. And here one encounters a significant problem to which this biography gives insufficient attention.

From the start, Galbraith's books were warmly reviewed by economists and the popular press. Business titans from the Rockefellers to Time publisher Henry Luce sought his services, as did presidents from FDR to Gerald Ford; he got tenure at Harvard and is one of only two Americans to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom twice and the only person ever elected president of both the American Economic Association and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. And there is no reason why not. Unless you believe his own theories.

Suffused with scorn

Galbraith's radical economic vision is suffused with scorn for what he dubbed the "conventional wisdom." He repeatedly denounces his intellectual adversaries as paid lackeys of established interests. It is an ugly slur, and it smacks of the very hypocrisy he professed to despise. One might repay it by accusing Galbraith of reaping the significant psychic rewards of courageous dissent while avoiding any of its customary social or professional risks. For the awkward truth is that he, not his adversaries, enjoyed spectacular success, including financially, while telling the elite things they wanted to hear that have not stood the test of time.

For instance, his central claim that giant corporations had acquired so much economic power they could now shape consumers' desires instead of having to respond to them and thus were no longer vulnerable to competitive challenges. In discussing the passing of what he calls Big Unit America, Michael Barone says, "Like many prophets, Galbraith did a better job of describing the recent past than of forecasting the near future." (To say Wal-Mart and Microsoft prove Galbraith right, as Parker does, is fatuous: They became big by succeeding, not the other way around.) Woe betide the CEO, or politician, who complacently accepted Galbraith's conventional wisdom about the unassailable position of the corporate "technostructure."

Tried and failed remedies

For that reason he cannot escape some blame for the conspicuous failure of political liberalism in late 20th-century America. His remedies were tried and failed. That is why they were supplanted not by some newer and even trendier vision but by the return of the Gods of the Copybook Headings in the form of distinctly pre-Keynesian economics that had indeed told him so.

Shortly after his famous complaint about "private affluence and public squalor" a critic shot back, "His solution: extend public squalor." And it was adopted; in the mid-1960s Galbraith said there was "nothing wrong with New York that doubling the city budget wouldn't solve" but by 1990, when the city's budget had tripled, its public spaces were unbearably squalid.

Galbraith never dealt properly with the classical explanation of why "everybody's business is nobody's business" and for a man notoriously skeptical of existing uses of power, he was remarkably sanguine about the benign uses to which the state would put the even greater power he wanted to give it. He, and Parker, have nothing useful to say about recent "public choice" analysis of government failure. Yet the failure of big government to function as liberals expected is a major part of the story of our times.

An even bigger part is the perceived failure of American liberalism to deal sensibly with national security. And here Galbraith presents a sympathetic reviewer with real problems; he visited Nazi Germany in 1938 and discussed land reform, a topic Parker calls "odd to say the least," adding "One might imagine that Galbraith was filled with repugnance and horror at what he saw. But in fact he had no outspoken reaction at the time." Visiting Red China during the Cultural Revolution's mad massacres, Galbraith wrote: "Dissidents are brought firmly into line in China but one suspects with great politeness." And he famously said in 1984: "Partly, the Russian system succeeds because, in contrast with the western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower." Galbraith, to put it bluntly, was soft on tyranny. And any analytic framework that calls the Soviet economy a success in the 1980s and the American economy a failure deserves more skepticism than Parker musters.

Richard Parker has given Galbraith a suitably sympathetic if slightly over-long biography. Regrettably, both subject and biography are obtuse on what went wrong with modern American liberalism, and on the extent to which its faults are John Kenneth Galbraith's writ even larger.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It is good to hear that Canadians are wise and selfless while Americans are dumb jerks. Especially watching U.S. politics move from one large issue to another, such as structural repairs to Social Security to forestall catastrophe in 2037, while we bicker endlessly about how every province can get more money from the federal government than it contributes. Or our Kyoto Plan, which was due Wednesday but it seems the dog ate our homework. Don't worry. The Jan. 17 Maclean's informed me that "New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell is one of North America's most influential hipster-intellectuals" then quoted him that Canadians and Americans are "profoundly and unalterably different" in the way they think: "Americans can't make a distinction between a larger sense of what's right and their own personal feelings."

I see his point. For instance, our own government has deftly separated its own feelings of smugness over its Kyoto plan from any larger sense of whether it's right to claim it has one. Of course the American plan is simpler (don't ratify, don't implement) but at least they're pulling it off. Whereas here we, um, yes, well, a plan you say. How about hosting a big United Nations conference nine months from now and talk about how great we all are instead?

Here I get to do another "I told you so" dance. Back when the government announced it would ratify Kyoto, I emitted a mighty yawn ("Ratifying Kyoto makes me yawn," Sept. 4, 2002) because "Kyoto won't have any effects, economic or political, until you find a way to try to implement it" and it never would because the government didn't even know how much of each greenhouse gas Canada was emitting. News stories blithely tell us India emits 5.5 per cent of world GHGs, Britain 2.3 and Australia 1.4. Those decimal points give a lovely sense of precision. But might I ask who measured India's output and, more importantly, how? And how does our government know how much methane is burbling out of hydro dams, how much CO2 badly tuned lawnmowers emit and so on? It doesn't; newspaper estimates of Canada's current emissions routinely vary by tens of millions of tons.

To be fair, there's a lot else our government doesn't know about global warming. Including the inescapable fact that governing is about "how" as well as "what." And here our Kyoto face-plant is part of a far larger crisis of governance.

For instance, how does the government spend money? Some people were bored by the Gomery hearings, except for the golf-ball act. But a detailed examination of how government spends is crucial to understanding how it went wrong. Or consider the auditor general's unhappiness about allocating billions of dollars to arms-length foundations to spend in future years. Paul Martin gave a classic liberal response, that their intentions were good so their methods must be above reproach morally and practically. Wrong: All spending must be authorized by Parliament each year if it is to function as guardian of the public purse.

(As for the argument by politicians that arms-length entities take the politics out of public affairs, I think you'd be worried if doctors proposed to take health care out of medical affairs or if politicians did it by accident. But that's a subject for another day).

Like a certain portly theologian, I'd feel much better if the people currently disregarding established procedures were a bit clearer about why they existed in the first place. Instead, International Trade Minister Jim Peterson just grandly waved aside Parliament's refusal to authorize the division of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade into two separate departments as meaning "absolutely nothing in the way we continue our work."

Never mind that silly old Parliament, then. But such an attitude is almost inevitable given our failure to understand how it works. To repeat: A minority government exists when no one party commands a majority of votes in the Commons but a coalition does. The coalition may be internally unstable but, as long as it holds together, it can pass bills and the business of government can continue.

When no such coalition exists, the business of government grinds to a halt and, as a bonus, the public doesn't know who to praise for policies it likes, blame for policies it doesn't, or turn to for alternatives. On spending, or health care or on Kyoto.

Mind you, these dreary "how" questions are the sort of thing those silly Americans would worry about. We're too busy saving the planet.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Oh oh. The summons has come. You have to testify before a commission of inquiry. You have done nothing wrong, of course. At least, nothing worth mentioning. Well, nothing anyone was so foolish as to write down. So you're completely innocent or, failing that, innocent enough for government work. Still, in view of pitfalls dug for you by people insufficiently appreciative of your long years of devoted public service, you deserve a few hints on how to avoid them. No need to thank me. In public, I mean. On an unrelated matter, my consulting firm offers first-rate oral briefings on various matters relating to public relations for, well, what price good advice when the national interest is at stake? First, let's talk about memory. The moon has none, and neither should you. It might seem odd that people could enjoy such success in public service with an entirely feeble grasp of detail, but don't worry. SMIA (Sudden Microphone-Induced Amnesia) is such a well-recognized phenomenon in public life by now that yours will not attract attention. Remember what happened to Bill Clinton, long famous for his capacity to recall a face and a name decades after briefly meeting a person, when that dreaded little red light went on? No, you don't. You don't remember any Bill Clinton.

A word to the wise here. In addition to these hints, we have provided a handy little laminated card of the five things you must not say in the course of your testimony. The first is "I do not know the individual currently testifying." You will shortly find yourself unable to remember an enormous number of individuals, I assure you. During these inquiries, people who recently held important jobs suddenly become such nonentities it's a mystery how they ever even got into the building. But don't get too eager because, if you deny that you know yourself, it could tend to undermine your credibility on similar assertions subsequently. (Parenthetically, if you find yourself in such a tight spot that denying your identity really starts looking like your best option, we recommend instead our insightful travel guide: Paraguay: Big AND Remote, plus a set of those convenient travel documents readily available on the Internet.)

Second, be dull. Government is impenetrably, incomprehensibly dull. Why shouldn't your testimony be? But not because of a mass of details: nasty things, details, with sharp bits protruding from the fog. What we're after here is context or, better yet, contextualization. Process. Bore them into submission. It works in meetings. It's the basis of government. You know it's your friend, and today you need a friend. Use it to your advantage.

Third, let's talk grammar. Notoriously tedious to generations gone by (and all but forgotten in the modern skule sistum) but dull is your friend here and, in this case, all those old schoolmarms with their hair scraped back in iron-grey buns were right: Grammar matters. Especially the active voice. It should be inactive. In government, mistakes are made, money is wasted and windows are jumped out of. But no one makes them, no one wastes it and, as long as they remember these rules, no one needs to break the third in the interest of bringing their testimony to a sudden halt.

Fourth, good intentions are all that count. Of course you did nothing wrong, but if wrongness was done, the best of motives were had by people with whom meetings were never held and, if memos were sent by them and initialed by you, no recollection is had of discussions of background issues held with or by them. Whoever they were.

Fifth, that good old lawyer's standby, pleading in the alternative. As in, my client didn't commit the murder, but if he did, he was insane. This being politics, our version is more ornate. Remember Bart Simpson right after all the occupants escaped from the dog-catcher's wagon: I didn't do it nobody saw me do it you can't prove a thing. In normal life, that's three separate assertions. In government, it's just one, and a good one. But dull it up: Speak of the responsible discharge of duties, the inevitability of delegation and the irresponsibility of unsubstantiated allegation.

Finally, your handy list of Things Not To Say When Testifying Before a Commission:

"I do not know the individual currently testifying."

"You know, what the heck?"

"What's a million?"

"Eeeh, who wants to know?"

And, above all, do not shout

"You can't handle the truth!"

There. Don't you feel better? Here's an invoice for my services ... actually here are three invoices for my services. Heh heh. How weird is that?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]