Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to pay our last respects to VHS. Friend, colleague, practical joker, cut down by digitalis. Thanks for the memories. The Citizen obituary said after only 28 years, VHS tapes won't be made as of 2006. In an intimation of mortality, a year ago the Daily Telegraph said Britain's largest electronics chain no longer sold VCRs, because DVD players now outsold them 40:1, adding unkindly "VHS seem as old-fashioned as the eight-track audio player or Betamax" and "Like many consumer technologies... video recorders owed much of their early success to providing easier access to pornography."

Please. Nihil nisi bonum. At a time like this, let us set aside such issues (or dub them onto DVD for later) and remember our friend as an unassuming everyman: easy to use, affordable and rugged. Without the VCR, how could we have enjoyed hours of our uncle, mixing up the on and off buttons, missing all the key bits of his son's wedding but filming his shoes going from room to room? It wouldn't be the same on 8 mm.

I hear rumblings from the back. Lunch will be served shortly. But first, on this solemn occasion, let us also lay to rest an unpleasant rumour VHS could never in his lifetime erase. Nonconformists all claim he bore the mark of Cain, having slain his younger more virtuous sibling Beta. They pillory him as proof of "network effects" through which (hey, get back in your seats, this eulogy ain't over) an inferior product that establishes itself early can keep superior rivals out of a market.

It is a slander on the stiff. Beta, whose picture wasn't better, arrived in North America almost two years earlier. VHS outsold his older sibling within six months of birth, not due to skulduggery or skull-hittery but to longer record/play time which people actually wanted. To some snobs it just meant more tacky images of wedding receptions and suburban back yards. But while Beta cassettes were easier to carry, one hour is a bit short for home feature film viewing.

The "network effects" charge is also a slander on markets. One writer in a theological magazine recently said "the Dvorak keyboard has joined the Betamax video format and the Macintosh computer in the pantheon of counter-examples to the myth that Capitalism produces the best possible product." Some pantheon. The only test showing the "superiority" of Dvorak was done by Mr. Dvorak. (As for the Mac Legion of Doom, you already sent me your worst letters and I'm still using a PC. Ha ha ha ha ha!)

Network effects exist but are minor. Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in The Rebel Sell note that because it takes two to fax, "each individual who buys a fax machine creates a slight positive benefit for all the other fax owners." But then they say: "This is why low-priced fax machines, which became available in 1984, never really took off until 1987," when a million were sold. Three years doesn't sound long to me, and by the time I escaped grad school it was safe to assume everybody had one. But now when people ask if they can send me a fax, I say why would you want to? Just e-mail a PDF. Or if you're going all retro use some nice vellum and a quill. The early dominance of fax machines no more obstructed the Internet than the early dominance of pens obstructed the fax.

Heath and Potter call VHS vs. Beta "the classic example" of network effects. But if Beta had been better we'd be burying it now. Volvos and Macs sell and you can get dark chocolate in corner stores. Markets, like nature, abhor a vacuum. If they also abhor your product, guess what? Can anyone out there honestly say, as they burn 4.7 gigs of digitized embarrassing golf lesson video onto a DVD with an iPod in each ear, that we're stuck in a technological dark age because of VHS? Phooey.

Despite all the obituaries written on it, the market is not currently stretched out in the parlour. It's out providing yet another superior product while saving the environment. DVDs deliver more data for less raw material and waste. Whether every extra feature enriches human existence is another matter, but technology is the servant of morality not its master. One day I'll beam wireless images from my computer (if that word hasn't become as quaint as "LP" or "modesty" in the age of cerebral implants) to my 28-foot plasmodic 3DV and if they're indecent it will be between me, God and the electronic eavesdropping "war driver" hovering nearby in his helicar.

Nothing is perfect; DVDs suffer the drawback that one scratch means years of carefully preserved rubbish is gone. On the plus side, you can easily make six perfect copies. True, small bank safety deposit boxes are now the wrong size because they won't take a CD or DVD; for the considerable expense of refitting their strong-rooms bankers can expect the usual sympathy. But my guess is that network effect won't matter.

For everything there is a time: A time to vinyl, a time to VHS, a time to digital, a time to teleport. In lieu of flowers please e-mail grainy images of your kid's Bar Mitzvah. VHS lived briefly, but gloriously. And left so many fine memories. Please close your eyes briefly while I chuck this pile of tapes in the alley.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The Tories’ latest brainwave, the Citizen reported Wednesday, is “they’ll only topple the government with the NDP’s help.” You’re trying to drive us mad, aren’t you? The background: NDP MP Bev Desjarlais just quit her caucus after being denied renomination because she deviated from the party line on gay marriage. (NDP tolerance doesn’t extend to dissent.) So now the Tories plus the Bloc outnumber the Liberals plus the NDP, and could bring down the government if they get the support of two of the four independents. How might the Conservatives appeal to these independents? If they even wanted to, I mean.

They could offer them machine tools. No, it’s not the joke about surrealists changing a lightbulb. The Tories have a policy of giving tradespersons a $500 tax credit for tools, and a $1,000 grant for new apprentices to buy tools and stuff. And tax breaks for transit passes, fishing gear, and maybe tampons as well. Tory finance critic Monte Solberg says, “It’s true, we are shameless supporters of middle-income Canadians.” And shameless big spenders. He assures us these loophole proposals “are, on one hand, very important tax breaks for certain groups of people. But, because they are for a specific group of people, they’re not that expensive overall and they are really designed to help the economy where the economy needs help.” Or possibly the Tory party. Say, in “vote-rich Ontario.’’

Regrettably, a new poll shows them trailing the Liberals by a growing margin nationally and especially in “seat-rich Ontario.” Apparently pandering like Liberals is not an effective strategy in cliche-rich Ontario.

Maybe the problem is that “Conservatism assumes in theory that everything established should be maintained, but adopts in practice that everything that is established is indefensible. To reconcile this theory and this practice, they produce what they call ‘the best bargain,’ some arrangement which has no principle and no purpose except to obtain a temporary lull of agitation ... Conservatism discards prescription, shrinks from principle, disavows progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future.” Harsh words. From Benjamin Disraeli’s 1844 novel Coningsby. Which frankly is a bit dull. But he later became prime minister of Great Britain, twice.

So listen up as title character Harry Coningsby castigates the Tories of his day as “The first public association of men who have worked for an avowed end without enunciating a single principle.” They weren’t the last. And as the modern Tadpoles and Tapers ponder poll results in dismay and wonder who else they can try to buy with a tax break, let their statespersons, if any, ponder Disraeli’s: “What sympathy could there exist between Coningsby and the ‘great Conservative party’ that for ten years in an age of revolution had never promulgated a principle...?”

I know, books are boring and principles are awkward. But back when he was a libertarian, Stephen Harper presumably read Friedrich Hayek. I wonder what he now thinks of Hayek’s famous essay “Why I am not a conservative”? I don’t accept all his arguments but it is important to confront them. I don’t primarily mean Hayek’s declaration that “the most objectionable feature of the conservative attitude is its propensity to reject well-substantiated new knowledge because it dislikes some of the consequences which seem to follow from it -- or, to put it bluntly, its obscurantism.” For instance that your pandering isn’t working.

I mean Hayek’s “decisive objection to any conservatism which deserves to be called such. It is that by its very nature it cannot offer an alternative to the direction in which we are moving. It may succeed ... in slowing down undesirable developments, but, since it does not indicate another direction, it cannot prevent their continuance.” Hayek even says as a true lover of freedom he “differs much more from the collectivist radical of today than does the conservative.” And now the Tories won’t bring down the Liberals unless the NDP says it’s OK. Brrrrrrrr.

Hayek concluded: “I doubt whether there can be such a thing as a conservative political philosophy. Conservatism may often be a useful practical maxim, but it does not give us any guiding principles which can influence long-range developments.” Coningsby disagreed, saying his party should seek not personal advancement “but to establish great principles which may maintain the realm and secure the happiness of the people. Let me see authority once more honoured; a solemn reverence again the habit of our lives; let me see property acknowledging, as in the old days of faith, that labour is his twin brother, and that the essence of all tenure is the performance of duty...” Can you imagine a modern Conservative even reading that passage, let alone endorsing it?

Our Tories seem to have no theory of how government works, no coherent conception of the national interest, no attachment to traditional wisdom. And no hope of winning the next election. As things stand you’d have to be mad to vote for them.

Which might explain their strategy.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

You know the old gag about how your house is making more money than you are? Well, I can go one better. My house isn’t just making more than I am, it’s making it at my expense. Because my property assessment just went up, so did my taxes, reducing the price a prospective buyer would pay. In short, my house is now worth less because it’s worth more. Government has a special magic all its own. If anyone else said my house was worth more, it would be. If Bill Gates said it. Or Avril Lavigne. Or the guy down at the corner singing the blues. “There is a house near Orleans that’s worth a rising sum...” Especially in his case, the effect would be small. But a few people might wonder if he’d heard something, so if his opinion had any impact at all, it would necessarily be favourable.

Unfortunately it wasn’t some hobo who said it. Instead, the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation (MPAC) declared my house value rose by one-sixth last year. That, incidentally, means it should double in five years. As you will be aware if you read your mail, yours probably did something similar. The average residential increase Ottawa-wide was 11.84 per cent, for a doubling in about seven years. What a boom town. Too bad the rise in property values is pushing house prices down.

Incidentally, MPAC is a classic case of “don’t look at me, I’m just a politician, politicians did this.” On the radio last week, I blamed the City of Ottawa for my assessment and someone promptly phoned to say it’s not us, it’s MPAC. And indeed, Sections 307 and 340 of Ontario’s Municipal Act, 2001 (and Section 37, clause 3 of the Assessment Act of 1990) legally oblige cities to use MPAC valuations. But the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation Act of 1997 says a majority of MPAC’s board members must be chosen from a list provided by the Association of Municipalities of Ontario. So the city didn’t do it, the province did, but the province didn’t, the cities did, but they didn’t the province did so shut up. But I digress.

My first reaction on seeing my valuation was, “Deal. Cut me a cheque.” I would sell it tomorrow for what they say it’s now worth. So, I expect, would half of you.

My second reaction was that the city should be legally obligated to buy it at the MPAC price. Unfortunately, my third reaction was that this solution would not work because it’s lopsided. (As is appealing to the same authority whose unfairness prompted the appeal.) It leaves the government as the sole actor in setting property values. Specifically, if implemented, it would quickly result in the authorities setting property values absurdly low and mill rates absurdly high, creating a system different in detail but just as arbitrary and confiscatory overall.

This realization frustrated me because I knew I was on to something. Then I hit on it: a solution that’s clean, simple and really would work.

A powerfully wholesome tension exists naturally in markets, where prices are set not by buyer or seller, but by both. Only if the price is at least as high as the seller thinks fair yet at least as low as the buyer thinks fair can a sale occur. Despite various exotic theories about consumers not really having minds, market pricing works and works automatically. Often, one genuinely cannot replicate such tension in the public sector. Most constitutional checks and balances are a necessary, but second-best, alternative. But in the case of municipal property taxes, it is not only possible, it’s easy. Here’s how.

Every year, you the property owner and a representative of the city reveal simultaneously before a neutral arbiter what you each think your property is worth. You then pay tax on the average (e.g. if you say $260,000 and they say $250,000, you pay on $255,000). But there’s a scrumptious catch. When you each reveal your estimate, the other has an automatic right of first refusal. As soon as the city names its price for your house, you can say “Sold.” But as soon as you name yours, they can say “Bought.”

It’s cheap and simple to administer, transparent and transparently fair. And note that right now, MPAC puts a price on your house that Donald Trump wouldn’t pay and you respond with one Ebenezer Scrooge would. But under my system, the city would almost invariably place a lower value on it than you do. Which is what happens when the universe is unfolding as it should. What’s unnatural is when someone insists that something you own is worth more than you think but won’t buy it from you.

My proposal does not solve all the problems of the universe or even that part labelled Ottawa Megacity. Not even the city’s chronic lack of money for reasons not entirely under its own control. But it does completely solve one big problem: a tax system unfair to residents and, by this point, a political liability for city officials who face an impotently furious populace prone to electoral volatility and rude letter-writing. It’s worth doing.

On the downside, if my idea is adopted, my house will be worth less. On the upside, I could then sell it for more.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Hoots mon. What’s the story here? It seems the Scots want me back. Och Aye it’s a braw brach moonlicht nacht the ... Maybe I won’t be buying a ticket just yet.

To be honest, they haven’t invited me personally. But Scotland’s chief minister, wee Jock McConnell, is coming soon to persuade Canadians of Scottish descent to return to the auld country. One newspaper said Paul Martin was a prospective candidate, so maybe he’ll take the low road ... but enough about question period. I’m intrigued to know why I shouldn’t go.

It’s not entirely clear why I should. The head of the Americas branch of Scottish Development International says, “Scotland is an ideal place to live, learn and work.” Yet it suffers a mysterious, debilitating brain drain. Maybe stop voting Labour. But dinna tell tales o’ cold and damp and sheep guts and flying telephone polls. A British newspaper says part of McConnell’s pitch is that Scotland is modern and dynamic and “no longer a land of tartan, haggis and Braveheart.”

So apparently we’re meant to reconnect with our heritage so as to return to a land that just tossed all those silly old kilts into Loch Ness. Multiculturalism is complicated. The pitch of “come back to Scotland, it’s nae Scotland any more” doesn’t sound that great to me. Especially after years polishing my biscuit-tin accent and learning to hack out Loch Lomond on the electric organ.

Still, why should I stay here? Again I admit Paul Martin hasn’t called to beg me not to return to bonny Tynedale to scrounge for loose coos. But in principle, if the Scots come a-callin’ with tales o’ jobs and lack o’ heritage, what’s the Canadian reply? In the resulting silence lie the roots of a national tragedy.

Here let me plug Robert Fulford’s wonderful little book The Triumph of Narrative (and my interview with him on Let’s talk on iChannel this Sunday at 7 p.m.). Mr. Fulford argues that stories are vital to our ability to think at all, and that, “To discover we have no story is to acknowledge that our existence is meaningless...” (I once knew a guy who complained that his life had become a soap opera... with a bad script. He wasn’t happy about it.) The tragedy of mental illness is that people lose their stories, or the very possibility of stories. It’s not good for a nation, either.

I can think of a Canadian story that ends with me staying. It’s about emigrants finding opportunity in the New World, and marrying across ancient hatreds (highland and lowland, Scots and English, British and French). I am the offspring of peasants and labourers who became professors and cottage owners and I AM CANADIAN. It’s a heck of a story. And it’s true. But it’s not a Canadian story, at least not today. Today, Canada is a nation that interned the Japanese, interned the Ukrainians, was mean as heck to aboriginals and the French, interned the Japanese -- oh, and fought Hitler a bit but everything was dark and awful until Trudeau gave us the Charter and then we had abortion and gay marriage and ethnic festivals and it was wonderful.

Postmodernism, including multiculturalism, supposedly denies the possibility of a “master narrative.” But as so often, they are being disingenuous. The modern nation-destroyers, the tartan-burners in Scotland and the flag-changing, Royal Mail-abolishing, no-more-Dominion-Day scrubbers here, have a story. It is the pseudo-traditionalists who don’t. The Liberals and NDP peddle tales of dark ages of racismsexismhomophobia until Trudeau said let there be light, and the Conservatives reply yes but we’ll subsidize your bus pass.

As I could have told a certain newspaper running an exhaustive series on the future of conservatism, there’s its real problem. It has no story it is willing to tell. John Diefenbaker may have been barking mad, but he had a high Tory narrative about why we weren’t the United States. Today’s Conservatives have no story about Canada whose logical happy ending is their victory in the next election. Or rather, they lack the necessary combination of wit and courage to tell it, retell it and defend it.

It’s the story of bold pioneers who settled a wilderness but did not destroy it, rose up from their factories and farms to repel aggression and destroy tyranny, and built a free and wealthy society on the basis of Judeo-Christianity and capitalism. Yes, they made mistakes that need fixing. But they will be fixed, because it’s a story of carrying the flame of freedom from Rome to Magna Carta to Elizabeth I to William III to Victoria to you.

I don’t see why they don’t tell this story. Even at the risk of persuading me to stay. For in it, the auld country is something we leave behind, with some regret and bringing, we hope, many of its virtue in our steamer trunks, but decisively. It’s not that I dislike Scotland. But it’s too cramped, including physically. It’s smaller than Lake Superior.

Plus you can get perfectly good haggis here. Mon.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The other day, my wife confessed to someone on a train that she admired George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld. He replied she was in a distinct minority in Canada. Factually, it is undeniable. But as a riposte it implies that in this land of independent thinking everyone wants to be original but no one wants to be weird.

Thus Paul Martin lets it be known he’s been reading Thomas Friedman. It’s meant to make him look deep, but if he were any shallower he’d bulge. Margaret Wente responded, “who hasn’t? Mr. Friedman’s bestselling book, The World is Flat, is on the bedside table of every respectable CEO and politician.” Well, I haven’t. I say, find out which way the herd of independent minds is currently stampeding and go someplace else, to read and think where the buzzwords don’t buzz. Whereas Mr. Friedman believes we’re moving into a fast-paced trans-competitive knowledge-based globalized economy where China is a giant and ... zzzzzzz.

I’ve long treasured the Red Dwarf episode in which Dave Lister, suddenly facing death, declares that among his unrealized ambitions, “I’ve always wanted to read ... a book.” But lately, I’ve realized you have to be more precise. For perspective rather than applause, Mr. Martin could try Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter’s The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can’t be jammed.

Messrs. Heath and Potter are resolutely, even stubbornly, left-wing progressives. But intelligent. And frustrated by some of the dumb things coming from their own ideological camp, especially old errors repackaged as stunning novelties. Like the concept that just by being a weirdo you can shatter the artificial conformity capitalism imposes to sell banal products. Been there, done that, didn’t work. They know the independent thinker is such an icon of western culture, and hence of marketing, that smashing bourgeois convention has become a bourgeois convention. How to respond is not obvious if you wear Nikes to the antiglobalization protest and clutch Naomi Klein’s book to brand you as cool. But ignoring it just makes you stupid.

How can we discuss whether something is a desirable change when it’s not a change? Hey, guys. Let’s diversify trade away from the United States. Let’s ignore aggression by foreign tyrants. Let’s have sexual liberation. Let’s discard the past. Uh, didn’t we already try that? I’m not sure. See, I discarded the past, and...

One columnist just gushed about Michaëlle Jean that “a new Canada seeks to fashion a new kind of freedom, the freedom to renounce ethnic perimeters.” Meltin’ pot ain’t new, boy. Likewise, the most ghastly thing about New Economy prattle is the fatuous air of novelty with which this dusty relic is placed before us. What apostle of lifelong learning declared it “a commonplace” that “education should not cease when one leaves school?’’ Right. John Dewey. In 1916. He added, “The extension in modern times of the area of intercommunication” and “the cheapening of devices ... for recording and distributing information -- genuine and alleged -- have created an immense bulk of communicated subject matter.”

Wait a minute. We already had the information age? Why wasn’t I told?

Globalization is not new. No discussion will get far that overlooks this key point. Yet no discussion is likely to get started that acknowledges it. (Except in this newspaper, and on TV’s iChannel, where I hope you’ll join me this fall.)

Our trendiest thinkers are too conventional. I recently let a copy of The Economist enter my house, despite it being the universally recognized badge of independent thinking. It told me “Politicians must suspend moral judgments if AIDS is to be defeated” and China is a rising economic superpower. I banished it. And In Praise of Slow author Carl Honoré, a recovering “Scrooge with a stopwatch,” notes that World Economic Forum president and founder Klaus Schwab recently warned, “We are moving from a world in which the big eat the small to one in which the fast eat the slow.” Right. In a world where everyone is already rushing about madly, ultra-chic Davos extols ... starting to hustle. And Paul Martin got there slowly. Poor chap, he’s not a hip “early adopter” but one of the marketers’ dreaded “late majority” whose discovery of a trend not only signals but helps cause its loss of coolness.

Like Canadian columnists who endorse separating church and state. Such courage puts my breath back. Especially if they also say it makes us different from Americans or, as one just did, “In its origins, in Greece and Rome, politics did fine without religion.” Um, weren’t Roman emperors through Diocletian officially gods? But no one will notice or care because such opinions are so safe. So bold. So fresh. And so centre-of-the-herd. No sir. No lion’s gonna get me. Whereas praising Rumsfeld, or God, puts you right on the fringe of the tall grass that’s sort of moving by itself.

Mind you, it’s quieter out there.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Guess who’s coming to dinner? It looks like Joe Volpe, Joe Volpe and Joe Volpe. He’ll be having the trouble. But is that us in the kitchen? Critics are feasting on our immigration minister charging taxpayers for two and even three dinners a day. Especially after the appetizer of Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew taking his chauffeur with him on a trip even when he doesn’t take his car.

The latter strikes me as majestic ... as in Louis XVI. On Mr. Volpe I have quite different concerns.

The press punched out headlines like “Volpe blasted over pricey dinners,” and “Critics lambaste Volpe for charging for two dinners in one night.” I dislike the “critics say” headline in all its forms because news should be what happened, not what people think of it, especially when what they think is painfully predictable. That’s what columnists are for. Besides, where Tory Diane Ablonczy complains that taxpayers aren’t eating three dinners a day and the NDP’s Bill Siksay that immigrants aren’t, I’m upset that ministers are. I worry not that Mr. Volpe’s justifications may be false, but that they may be true.

Wisest in her generation, Bloc Quebecois immigration critic Meili Faille laughed, “I probably end up having four breakfasts on Saturday morning” because MPs’ “crazy” schedules make it so hard to meet people that “it is common to see MPs and ministers eat dinner three times.”

I don’t doubt that Mr. Volpe routinely glad-hands from meeting to meeting, professing sincere concern about dozens of matters not one of which he has time to think about and shucks folks glad you could make it gotta go hope I can count on your vote grab me a burger next meeting whooooosh. And I’d rather see taxpayers pick up the tab than, say, people trying to buy access. But what’s with all these meetings?

Is this really how a human being, even a cabinet minister, should spend his life? That his spokesman should call Mr. Volpe “the busiest minister on the planet” partakes of the “reverse bragging” Susan Lightstone deplored in a recent Citizen’s Weekly, and the chronic tone of windy hyperbole set by Mr. Volpe’s boss. But it is also sadly hollow. Couldn’t you at least exaggerate his effectiveness?

To some extent, it’s the familiar problem that politics attracts hollow men and women. Yokels may suppose MPs lie about on tax-funded silk while half-clad maidens feed them grapes, but actually, unless they are very smart or very lazy, MPs spent their days in frenetically pointless activity in vaguely seedy surroundings, a physically and emotionally unhealthy lifestyle that appeals less to the covetous than the self-important.

In what other business can nonentities be the centre of 15 crises a day that only they can resolve?

One frequently sees a horrifying absence of inner life among the keenest and most enduring of politicians. Rush rush rush is a substitute for thinking, especially about really important things. But I also see a troubling reflection of the broader culture in what does and what does not upset us in our politicians. We elect them, and we never vote them out again for being scarily hyperactive. Instead, people complain if Parliament takes a long recess or otherwise shows signs of slackening its pace of work. Even those who think we are over-governed.

Surely it is time to ask instead whether members of Parliament are doing too much, whether they are too busy to do any of it very well, and whether there is not an unwholesome franticness to it all.

Simon Wiesenthal, his Citizen obituary just noted, devoted himself to Nazi hunting because he believed in the next life he would be required to account for how he spent this one. Of course it may not be true. But it very well may and, in any case, it is the ostensible view of many of our politicians. If it happens, are they planning to reply, “You know, Lord, I was in so many meetings I just never got to that question. I mean look, my croissant’s gone soggy, you wouldn’t believe, constituents at 6:30, lobbyists at 7:00, colleagues at 7:30, then a reporter called and actually I have to go now, hope I can count on your vote, I...”

Pending such a scene, we citizens might usefully ask why it appals us that a minister would put five meals a day on the public tab but not why he would work such a schedule as to need them in the first place.

We should ask first what quality of decision is likely to emanate from a cabinet exhausting themselves without even getting big SUVs, flat-screen TVs and kids who can play the violin in three languages to show for it.

Then we should ask what sort of governance we want, and whether we might not usefully elect men and women given to quiet reflection and effective prioritizing.

Finally, we might ask if we ourselves are much given to such things.

Ha ha! Just kidding. Pass me that burger and make it snappy.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Two men fall into the mud. One comes out. I think it’s Brian Mulroney. His tone is unpleasant, but not surprising. But who expected Peter C. Newman to publish such a lurid, uninformative, sin-of-detraction “Gotcha!” book? As too often with Mr. Mulroney, we find ourselves agreeing with much of what he said while shaking our heads at the way he said it. Joe Clark’s vanity is not a well-kept secret; nor is Kim Campbell’s self-pitying political ineptitude. As for calling Pierre Trudeau a “coward,” he was physically brave and, on separatism, had the courage of his convictions. But his chic indifference to the evils of Nazism, then Communism, I do consider moral cowardice.

Mr. Mulroney’s depiction of many of his political contemporaries as egotists invites the response “tu quoque.” But it is not thereby rendered less accurate. Nor is he the first skilful politician to see others more clearly than himself. He just had a particularly repellent way of doing it.

The friends of offputting politicians are prone to say, “ah but if you only knew the private man.” No thanks. It is revealing that, like Richard Nixon, Mr. Mulroney could neither resist the tape recorder nor anticipate how it would make him appear. Why would a man who loathed the press, yet called them “the boys” and pored obsessively over what they wrote, have blundered into this book? His familiar besetting flaw: a lack of comfortable self-awareness that led him to crave approval, yet plunge into discreditable hyperbole.

A classic reflection is his outburst at Jean Chretien’s reversal on free trade. If he’d really been the Ronald Reagan clone his detractors claimed, he’d have smiled and said, “Why, that hasn’t happened since a fellah named Mulroney was running for the Tory leadership in 1983 and said ‘Free trade is terrific until the elephant twitches, and if it ever rolls over, you’ll be a dead man. We’ll have none of it.’ I guess we get smarter in office.” Instead he fired obscenities at Mr. Chretien and the press.

I don’t remember the most uncharitable thing I ever said about Liberal trade policy. But I remember not saying it into Peter C. Newman’s tape recorder.

Early accounts pilloried Mr. Mulroney’s actually quite measured claim that “there was one great prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald ... and then there’s the rest of us. By the time history is done looking at this ... certainly no one will ever be in Sir John A.’s league -- but my nose will be a little ahead of most in terms of achievement.” Arguably, it doesn’t narrow the field much. From Bowell to Bennett to Campbell, our prime ministers are an undistinguished lot. But if not Mulroney, who?

Mackenzie King may confirm the scientific hypothesis that inaction promotes longevity, but my tea leaves say it is shameful to govern so long to so little purpose. Anyway, considering who Mr. Mulroney had in mind, it must be said that Pierre Trudeau was a more important prime minister, but also a far worse one.

On the Mulroney balance sheet, free trade was a visionary triumph backed by a clear electoral mandate. More broadly, he understood the importance of our relationship with the United States. And though his early attempts to revitalize our military fizzled, he conducted foreign policy like a grownup. It was nice while it lasted.

On domestic affairs, his record is more mixed. The GST was superior to the tax it replaced and also, being more visible, helped make Canadians aware of their staggering tax burden. On the other hand, his failure to control spending should have embarrassed fiscal conservatives and did lasting harm to his party and his nation.

His profanity appalls me. I’m sure Sir John A. knew those words, too. But he avoided them while dictating. Moreover, Mr. Mulroney made politics too personal and insufficiently philosophical. But his exaggerated sense of loyalty contrasts favourably with that of many of his “friends,” including the one with the tape machine.

His reaction to the book showed him at his best. “It’s my responsibility, and entirely my fault,” he said. Deploring the “locker-room” tone, he said “I regret any personal allusions that I made. In all cases, I have my own private regard for their talent and their achievements.” He also noted that many of the quotations are years old and “I hope I’ve become more mature and more generous.”

Perhaps he has. Meanwhile, if the gushing handwritten note in Mr. Mulroney’s own copy (“For Brian -- At last Canadians will see you for the warm, funny and human person that you are -- Peter”) does not show Mr. Newman at his worst, he is a man much to be pitied.

Brian Mulroney will one day, despite his own worst efforts, be recognized as one of our better prime ministers. As for Mr. Newman, that guy he’s pinned in the mud is himself.

And you can quote me on that.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

As the floodwaters recede, the first priority is taking care of the displaced; the second is recovering, identifying and burying the dead. Then comes rebuilding New Orleans and, one hopes, retrieving from the slime and debris some common sense about the lessons of this catastrophe. For some people, the matter is already settled: President George W. Bush is a moron. This instant analysis has two virtues: It is immediately available and doesn't require thought. On the downside, it can't withstand thought. Decades of highly public, expert warnings that New Orleans was not ready for an inevitable major hurricane were ignored by authorities at all levels, many of whom weren't even slightly George Bush.

So first, a little perspective. What's with complaints that five entire days after a major American city was submerged beneath the ocean not everything was totally fixed? To some extent, it simply reflects the running headline "Bush reels as [<insert today’s news>]." But it also reflects a peculiarly tenacious modern spirit that expects man's will to dominate reality (including nature) and leads to over- reliance on the politics of outrage.

That is not to say government has not failed. (Celebrities also underperformed, and Sean Penn should probably resign.) Real conservatives are skeptical of government, not just government by the other party. It is foolish either to exonerate Mr. Bush entirely or to blame him for everything. Intelligent people, and the United States Congress, must doubt whether his departure from office in January 2009 will necessarily eliminate every institutional obstacle to proper emergency preparedness.

The political response at all levels was initially feeble. State and local governments are the first responders (and no, the entire National Guard was not in Iraq). Why didn't city officials use school buses to evacuate thousands of citizens? Why weren't state authorities ready with shelter and bottled water? Maybe politicians are bad at reality. In any event, a partisan response is inappropriate.

The engineering response was also feeble. The flood defences of New Orleans were classically "brittle." By that I do not mean they were likely to fail in the face of a predictable threat, though they were. I mean they were likely to fail badly if they did fail. Plan A: The hurricane misses. Plan B: We die. Politicians devised these plans, but did engineers advise them properly?

A city below sea level ought not to be defended by only one layer of dikes. If the main defence is breached, individual neighbourhoods should be individually protected. Of course it's not easy. But you're below sea level. Work hard. And environmentalists and their adversaries should put aside past differences, agree that it is better even for human purposes to work with nature than against her, and restore wetlands and enhance coastal islands to protect the entire Gulf Coast.

Another lesson, I predict, is that reconstruction will not take as long as pessimists say. This is the United States of America, which critics knock at every opportunity for its energetic, dynamic can-do spirit that promptly confounds most of their criticism. I do not deny the tragedy, and lives lost cannot be recovered. But if you think Americans will let the birthplace of jazz die, you don't know Americans.

Many paid commentators apparently don't. Especially those who swiftly declared the breakdown of order in New Orleans was the predictable and unpleasant result of American individualism. Haven't they heard of Alexis de Tocqueville? One might dispute his claim that America proves individualism and co-operation are complementary, or argue that they are eroding there. But one can hardly ignore it.

Especially because of what well-intentioned big government has done recently to American inner cities, including, dramatically, the one in New Orleans. I do not deny that poverty made it hard for many inner-city residents to avoid getting trapped in the hurricane's path, nor do I deny the role of racism in making them poor and hence susceptible to welfare dependency. But whatever combination of historical forces led to their plight, and whatever shadow it casts on America's glory, it is ridiculous to suggest it was classic rugged individualism, and obscene to gloat over it. Besides, Katrina spread death and devastation along the coast, but only in New Orleans did we see a partial lapse into barbarism.

Finally, hailing the violence as a liberating response to poverty or racism is, as G. K. Chesterton said, a slander on the poor. And on blacks, a majority in pre-Katrina New Orleans, most of whom either evacuated in an orderly manner or coped in an heroic one, and neither sought nor seized an opportunity to behave badly.

Partly because the looters were neither numerous nor representative, New Orleans will rise again. So may common sense. After all, this is America.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]