The 2005-06 election features the curious sight of the major parties running hard with the usual partisan fervour, but without platforms. Each knows its policies are best. It just doesn’t know what they are. Except the Bloc. Yet voters can still get some sense of their programs from the early days of the campaign. The New Democratic Party and the Conservatives evidently have platforms. (So, presumably, do the Liberals, who did not respond to inquiries on this point.) They just insist on unveiling them in a carefully staged manner--lest voters react inappropriately to suddenly seeing the whole truth. Only the Bloc posted on its website a detailed platform for its election and its 2004 program (including an English summary). True, the BQ had little hope or reason to hide what it believes (Canada stinks) and believed last election (Canada stinks). Still, it’s nice to be treated like adults.

What about the others? Each ran 18 months ago on a platform they endorsed passionately. But NDP spokesman Jamey Heath says the 2004 platform “may not necessarily reflect the current approach. For example, we are not proposing an inheritance tax,” something that earned the party nearly unanimous bad reviews last spring. Recent statements by NDP MPs in Parliament give us some clues, and Heath promises the whole platform by campaign’s end. Tory MP Rona Ambrose (Edmonton- Spruce Grove) explains that her party’s 2004 platform is no longer operative, while its March 2005 convention resolutions guided policy formulation but didn’t determine it. As for timing, “We want to lay out our policies at a time when people can really take a look at them instead of in the middle of a heated election... In January we expect the Liberals to be quite vicious in their campaigning and this gives us a chance to lay things out and have a debate on some of these substantive issues.” Ambrose says most of the platform will probably be out by Christmas.

The parties’ political equivalent of a striptease is nevertheless suggestive, not only for what they have said but what they have chosen to speak about early. The Tories started with change, accountability and quality candidates, detoured through gay marriage (promising a free vote they must know they will lose) to crime: leader Stephen Harper promised an independent prosecutor for Adscam-type offences--or maybe not if it’s provincial jurisdiction (deputy leader Peter MacKay awkwardly contradicted him on the details despite, one assumes, having seen the platform).

Then came a promise to cut the GST from seven to six per cent immediately and to five per cent within five years. Then on health care, a vow never ever to allow two-tier health care, an accelerated schedule for wait-time guarantees and a promise to punish provinces that fail to treat patients promptly or pay for their treatment elsewhere. Then a crackdown on crack, marijuana and other drugs, and a promise of a “$1,200 per year Choice in Child Care Allowance for children under the age of six,” which, the party boasted, “is part of a larger Conservative plan to allocate $10.9 billion to child care over the next five years, compared to $6.2 billion for the Liberal plan.” Also, they would cut the small business tax rate from 12 to 11 per cent over five years.

The NDP, says Heath, started with “new funding for postsecondary education, a new auto policy, fairness for Saskatchewan on equalization, a response to softwood lumber, that we will not raise taxes and will reduce the lowest income tax rate and increase basic personal exemptions.” They also want child care to be way more public than the Liberals. NDP Leader Jack Layton promised to fix global warming and other environmental ills for a price not yet known but somehow promised to be low. He rejected proposed Liberal corporate tax cuts, but promised relief for low-income earners. Health care should apparently run just as is, only better. And the party again promises a balanced budget.

Of course, both the Tories and the NDP are in substantial measure running against the Liberal record. And the Liberals are, in some ways, commendably, running on it, too. For instance, the recent economic and fiscal update and last fall’s fix for health care for a generation. Elsewhere, reacting to Tory child-care policy, Liberal national director Steven MacKinnon said his party stood for “quality, universality, accessibility and the development of the child,” while Harper’s was a mere “tax break” and Paul Martin proclaimed public day care “a lasting addition to our... social foundation [and] a right for our children.” The instinctive flinching at private child raising has at least the virtue of philosophic clarity.

For the Liberals are implicitly running as the party of really big government. Never mind dozens of spending promises exceeding $20 billion right before the election. The 2004 budget projected 2004-05 spending of $183.3 billion, but the actual figure in the November 2005 update was $196.8 billion. It is part of a frightening and almost undebated recent tendency for spending to gallop way ahead of the estimates and grow faster than since the worst Trudeau years. In that sense it does not matter what platform the party unveils in January. This spending blast wasn’t in any previous platform but was consistently the result of the Liberals’ approach to governing. We must assume it is what they will do again if re-elected. Regrettably, the other parties aren’t addressing this problem.

More policy will follow on the politicians’ schedule, not ours. But it’s big government, bigger government or biggest government for Canada unless, of course, you’d prefer really big but separate government for an independent Quebec. Stay tuned out.

LIBERAL:

The Liberal Party may win another election, or at least a minority, but it is in peril. It doesn’t know what it stands for, and eventually such parties stop winning. Its impressive rhetorical and organizational talents once served an intellectual agenda. Now they mostly deceive the party as well as voters about the extent of the rot.

The Liberals used to be deliberately centrist in every way. Even former PM Pierre Trudeau shouted “Viva Castro” while letting the Americans test cruise missiles here. Today’s Liberals have run down our military and increased our anti-Americanism long past the point of diminishing diplomatic influence.

On economics, the Liberal party has not been classically liberal since it adopted former U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s philosophy that “necessitous men are not free men.” But it once understood the need to spend only what the economy could sustain. Now it only knows how to take enough in taxes to cover runaway spending during a boom. And booms always end.

On social change, the Liberals used to seem cautiously humane. Today, they are wildly radical on gay marriage and abortion. And the cheesy outrage of Prime Minister Paul Martin or Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan at Tory Leader Stephen Harper’s alleged plan to dismantle health care cannot conceal that the 2004 “fix for a generation” was unintelligent and useless.

True, the party has won three-and-a-half straight elections. But in quick succession, against weak opposition, unimpressively. After John Diefenbaker’s coalition of Ontario Red Tories, Western conservative populists and Quebec soft nationalists exploded, the Grits revived in the West (27 of 68 seats in 1968) and especially Quebec (as late as 1980, 74 of 75). After Brian Mulroney’s same coalition exploded, the Grits managed 27 of 86 in the West in 1993 but just 14 of 92 by 2004 (and 21 of Quebec’s 75). Should social radicalism or overspending weaken them in Greater Toronto, they will find they no longer have any way to win.

The Liberal problem is not that they have abandoned their ideas. It is where their ideas led them. Post-modern liberals do not believe in truth and thus rely on power and spin. Even their radicalism is reactive; Trudeau led public opinion in decriminalizing homosexuality; Martin followed the Supreme Court in legalizing gay marriage.

Many thoughtful Liberals see in Toronto star candidate and Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff a second Trudeau. He supports the Iraq war and hectored the March Liberal convention about leaders’ ability to say “no.” His parachute drop into Etobicoke-Lakeshore hit politically correct turbulence, but those who love the Liberal party must hope he lands safely and takes command. If not, the rot within will cause the facade to crumble.

CONSERVATIVE:

It says “conservative” on the package, but sometimes a product says “new and improved” even when the change is trivial. So conservative voters should read the ingredient list and worry how much free-market economics, traditional social values and strong, realistic foreign policy it actually contains.

The Tories’ cranky anti-crime anti-drug policy is properly conservative. It may distress libertarians but in this area, traditional social values very often trump free markets in conservative politics and philosophy. But the party’s health policy is an anti-market catastrophe: no two-tier, no market forces, no common sense. Having Manitoba send people languishing on waiting lists to Ontario while Ontario sends its waiting list languishers to Manitoba is good for airlines but absurd for patients. And penalizing provinces financially if they can’t afford timely treatment is counterproductive. Implicitly this policy relies on the semi-market-based U.S. system, but only disingenuously.

The Conservatives’ gay-marriage policy is also disingenuous. It was clever of leader Stephen Harper to raise it pre-emptively, but the plan seems to be a free vote they know they’ll lose, placating the rubes with a knowing wink to urban sophisticates. And the refusal to address the notwithstanding issue squarely, and with it the sovereignty of Parliament, is distressingly anti-traditionalist on constitutional matters.

On taxes, the proposal to cut the GST fulfills the first requirement of conservatism--lower taxes--but the justification does not. Harper said, “It is fair and it is more effective in stimulating consumption than anything the government is doing.” Real conservatives try to raise the revenues needed for government operations in a way that doesn’t affect citizens’ behaviour; neo-conservatives in a way that encourages investment and growth. Only liberal Keynesians want to stimulate consumption. So this policy is politically clever but not conservative--especially as there are no announced spending cuts.

Instead, there are large spending increases, especially on child care. Tory policy here manages to qualify as conservative in some sense. A deep- blue or libertarian conservative wouldn’t have a family policy. But aiming to assist stay-at-home parents and enhance choice while offering a relatively small subsidy for company day care to help working families counts. Shake this package, though, and it contains a surprising amount of empty space.

As the campaign unfolds, watch for practical policy to stop judicial activism, a forthright endorsement of the western alliance against terror and something, anything, to reduce the role of government significantly in an area that matters. If not, anyone who buys this product believing it conservative should demand their money back.

NDP:

The NDP is in trouble. The party’s main problem is not tactical, although there is a real risk that, as in 1974, cohabitating with the Liberals will push swing voters from the NDP to the Grits, not the reverse, especially given the difficulty of hammering on Adscam with Svend Robinson back onstage. The real danger is that, having failed to absorb the Green party, the NDP may find itself absorbed by it instead.

With 4.3 per cent of the vote in 2004, the Greens are poised for a breakthrough despite having no MPs and, therefore, no spot in the televised leaders’ debates. Green party deputy leader and Ottawa Centre candidate David Chernushenko explains, “We have said many times and believe... that we’re attracting progressive Canadians from any side of the spectrum and that there isn’t any particular advantage to targeting one party and their supporters.” But if you want youth, idealism relevant to today’s big challenges, and an integrated radical world view in which the personal is the political, you’re likely to weigh green against orange in 2006--and favourably.

Consider the Green party promise to “reduce the GST on products that cut pollution and improve the health of Canadians, while comparably raising it on products that do the opposite.” It’s interventionism with an economic face, because as with other taxes, the party’s goal is consistently to bring the consumer’s cost for a product closer to its real cost including environmental impact. Moreover, Chernushenko says, “We can’t start having a whole range of different types of taxes for every kind of product,” so they’ll need clear, manageable priorities. It’s environmentally sensitive, economically reasonable and politically original. Why isn’t it coming from the NDP? Come to think of it, what is?

Metal-bashing isn’t the economic future and leader Jack Layton never seemed to fit in with the steelworker crowd anyway. But while his party may have the political equivalent of “new and improved” in its name, when Layton extracted $4.6 billion in concessions from the Liberals, it was for the same old NDP stuff. The party seems to have placed itself into the curious position of disliking the way things are going while being petrified of change. For a progressive party it seems bereft of progressive ideas.

Not the Greens. It’s odd that the NDP’s centre of intellectual gravity hasn’t shifted from big-government, mechanistic thinking to a holistic vision. It’s also politically dangerous. The party will be absorbed by its smaller progressive rival if it doesn’t smarten up.

[First published in Western Standard]

Recently a South African bandit decided a good place to hide from security guards was the Bengal tiger’s enclosure in the zoo. I wish my friend and colleague Dan Gardner had been there to see it before homo economicus, the rational individual of economic analysis, wandered into his cubicle and was equally messily devoured. On Jan. 13 on these pages, Dan explained how to fight crime. Or rather, how not to. He scorned Stephen Harper and “the dustier economics faculties” as well as “policy wonks in neo-conservative think tanks” for “clinging” to the theory that you can deter crime by making it riskier. You see, “only old-fashioned economists still believe in the myth of homo economicus. For many decades, psychologists and other researchers have been exploring how human brains really work.” And they say while we are capable of slow, careful reasoning, “a whole lot of people’s thinking is done with the intuitive system” which, Dan tells us, “can be very useful... But it is irrational.”

I could write volumes on the exploded superstition of substituting social science for common sense. I could remind you experts are more help in understanding the reasoning behind a given point of view than at deciding between points of view, that they do not all say one thing and when most of them do it is time to beware. They told us deficit spending was good for the economy and we should dissolve the family in the interest of the children. Instead, let us return to the mortal remains of that thief.

(Yes, I know there’s an election on. It doesn’t mean we can’t discuss issues. I say give the Tories 133 seats, the Liberals 89, the Bloc 52, the NDP 33 and one Independent. I’ll tell you how I knew and what it means afterward; if it doesn’t happen, that was a typo. Meanwhile, please vote.)

I concede that we might despair of reasoning with someone who would flee from humans toward tigers. But his grisly fate should not obscure an even more fundamental point. By trying to evade capture he proved he was deterred by negative consequences. He judged them badly. But homo economicus stupidus is a branch of homo economicus. Moreover to suggest that intuition is “irrational” is far too strong, as a summary of economists’ work or a description of everyday life. Our intuition is not infallible; but neither is our digestion and it doesn’t prove we don’t eat.

Indeed, our intuition often works better than our formal reason. When a woman won’t date a guy because he creeps her out, shall we say laboratory tests negate the validity of this character-evaluation process? Perhaps. But not to her over dinner. And if we are to reject the notion of people as rationally self-interested, what model of human nature can we put in its place? Even kinder, gentler crime-fighting schemes like community drop-in centres rely on the notion that if you offer criminals something better to do than burglary, they will rationally choose it.

Sociologists must say people respond predictably to incentives or there would be no science of sociology. (Quiet in the cheap seats.) But predictably need not mean rationally. Perhaps people are automatons, who respond unreflectively to stimuli like plants growing toward sunlight. Hence the social scientists’ project of perfecting man by boosting his self-esteem. Give us a sufficient source of psychological warmth and we will not only flourish but automatically grow toward it, wherever it is placed. It didn’t work. Speaking only of crime, those who exaggerate their own cleverness chronically underestimate the chance of being caught, which is bad for them and for us.

Most recent Nobel Prize winners in economics would be astounded to hear funeral obsequies pronounced over homo economicus. Especially given how crime rises once the people in charge become too sophisticated for deterrence theory. Like Canada’s Liberals or Britain’s New Labour. As OpinionJournal’s James Taranto has chronicled, sophisticated commentators call it ironic that in the U.S. the prison population is up yet crime is down, almost as if stiff sentences deter some crimes and physically prevent others.

I don’t deny that criminals are frequently appalling boobs. But being dumb doesn’t make them irrational. It just means deterring them requires making the negative consequences of crime easier, not harder, to understand. The exact opposite of “enlightened” policy.

At the end of his urbane fulminations, Dan suddenly declares that “Criminologists... have reached a rough consensus.... criminals can be deterred by increasing the risk of getting caught. But they cannot be deterred by making punishments tougher.” Deterred by risk? Gad, is that homo economicus glaring at me through the bars? I do concede Dan’s point that it’s hard to increase the risk of getting caught. But no one said the job was going to be easy. And you won’t scare criminals by convincing them they’ll be caught, then let off. You need to convince them they’ll probably be caught and punished. Just like we rubes thought all along.

The simple truth is crooks are short-sighted. They respond to incentives badly, but they do respond to them. Even the ones so dumb they’d hide in a tiger’s belly.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Right after the second English leader’s debate I watched the end of Boris Karloff’s 1932 The Mummy. The stilted speech, the atmosphere of gloom … it was a relief to get away from that to some classic cinema. OK, you saw that coming. But I saw a lot of things coming in the debate too, and they were horrible without being well done. Sort of Plan Nine from Outer War Room. For instance when Mr. Martin said his first act on being re-elected would be to amend the Constitution to eliminate the notwithstanding clause. How? And if it’s so important, why didn’t he do it before? Or ever even mention it until then? His justification, in essence, is no matter what fool thing the courts do, your elected representatives should be powerless to stop them. I’d like to hear him defend that position. For that matter, I’d like to hear the other leaders attack it. But of course I didn’t.

When confronted directly with the Supreme Court’s latest larky ruling, allowing swingers’ clubs because we secretly have a libertarian Constitution not even the court noticed before, all the leaders seemed to agree that some Canadian values should be upheld if challenged by judges. So they want a mechanism for overruling court Charter decisions just like the notwithstanding clause but that isn’t the notwithstanding clause because … um … uh … Meanwhile back in 1932, Karloff’s Imhotep got himself all wrapped up and smothered. And it was just the start of his misadventures.

Another chilling moment in the debate came when they lurched awkwardly around the subject of health care. For speaking of ancient terror, last year Dr. Charles Shaver wrote in the Citizen that almost one in five of Canada’s 60,859 doctors is between 55 and 64, and just over one in 10 is over 65 (in Ontario nearly one in eight). How old will you be in 15 years? Because by then three in 10 of our current doctors will be past 70 and medical schools graduate fewer than 1,800 new ones a year to replace them. The situation with nurses is at least as grim. And a million people in Ontario already don’t have a family doctor.

Did you notice that stalking ominously across the stage? It moved ve-e-ery quietly. But if Imhotep, a.k.a. “the father of medicine,” did return from the grave he’d probably get lots of offers from hospitals, despite his disquieting bedside manner. For absent the scroll of Thoth, it is hard to imagine where our leaders think they’re going to find the personnel to revive our mouldering medical system. Especially after hearing them discuss the matter.

When the mummy first comes to life, one of the archaeologists succumbs to hysterical laughter because it’s so dreadful. I know how he felt. Our health-care system is a government classic like deteriorating infrastructure. Because it gets quietly worse year after year, it can be smugly ignored until it quietly becomes a catastrophe impossible to cope with. By the way, the mummy eventually crumbled suddenly.

As may our economy. Stephen Harper, in a moment of comparative lucidity, mentioned that Canadians’ after-tax income has been stagnant over the past decade even though, as Paul Martin never fails to mention, we’ve had a roaring economy. Now there’s a fiscal imbalance for you: No matter how hard we work, the government swipes the entire gain. It’s also ominous because the economy may not boom forever and the underlying spending dynamics of the huge social programs will mostly get worse as the population ages. (Unless, of course, the unavailability of doctors to treat your ailments also cuts down on all that vexatious billing. At which point the state may, like Imhotep, develop an unwholesome urge to hustle you toward the embalming vat.)

Scary mysteries confront us here. If our social programs are efficient, how can they also be so voracious? If poverty causes crime and social programs cure poverty, why is there still so much crime? And so much poverty? And why is Mr. Martin so determined to launch universal day care as the first major social program of this generation, and so uncurious about how the last batch worked? But of course Mr. Harper didn’t get to the specifics of these points, because his party is promising way more spending and a magic solution to our health-care problems that would be cut from a horror flick script as too implausible.

Instead of staying where they belong, therefore, all these issues went for a little walk, leaving only ominous traces of big trouble to come. At least Imhotep’s victims could plead that his eyes had peculiar hypnotic power. Whereas Paul Martin can say “the fact of the matter is” for 3,700 years and all I’d feel is irritation. Gilles Duceppe can invoke collective rights, Jack Layton can invoke working families and Stephen Harper can invoke the delicate balance between the notwithstanding clause existing and him not using it until the pyramids fall and we still won’t have the scroll that raises meaningful discussion from its dusty tomb.

By the way, the end of Karloff’s classic is totally unexpected. Just when things look really grim the mummy’s self-absorption and presumption bring him down. As I say, a great relief.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Dalton McGuinty as Byronic hero? I don’t know if I’m bad or dangerous to know, but news stories like this make me strongly suspect I’m going mad. I refer to Donna Jacobs’ “Monday Morning” in the Jan. 2 Citizen, saying the Ontario premier spends 18 hours a day doing politics, then crams in five to 15 minutes’ of poetry before crashing. That’s some kind of inner life. Especially as his favourites are the Romantic poets; the article even recounts that, unprompted, he gave “a slow, cadenced recital” of his all-time favourite, Shelley’s Love’s Philosophy. I imagine it was an experience not easily forgotten.

The premier then opined that “Poetry kind of reconnects you with your emotions.” I treasure the “kind of” regarding Romantic poets famously given to extremes rather than to cautiously equivocal reluctant partial embrace of what might vaguely be their emotions unless polls said otherwise. Especially as Mr. McGuinty went on to explain that Shelley’s thesis in that poem, “Nothing in the world is single,” informs his political philosophy. “I believe that politics and government are still the best way that we can come together as a people,” he told Ms. Jacobs, “and overcome challenges that are too big to overcome on our own. They’re still the best means by which we can actually do great things.”

Could anyone not currently confined to a mental hospital or actively engaged in politics think this a plausible description of the McGuinty administration? Or, for that matter, the Chrétien, Rae, Bush or Mulroney governments? What, other than the sublime experience of personally attaining power, caused Mr. McGuinty to form this opinion? Did seven years contemplating Mike Harris’s regime in helpless frustration provoke a rapturous cry of “this is the best way we can come together as a people?”

I’m not against politics. Even bad government is better than anarchy and political competition is a safeguard against really awful government. I’m mystified by all the hostile rhetoric about partisanship, as if we’d be better off with politicians harmoniously colluding against us rather than seeking to oust one another by pleasing us. But I’m also in favour of dentistry without waxing implausibly lyrical about it.

Besides, I don’t mean to seem cultured here, but is Mr. McGuinty’s favourite poet the same Shelley who after being expelled from Oxford for militant atheism eloped with a 16-year-old, endorsed William Godwin’s radical political philosophy, vegetarianism and free love, abandoned his wife and two children to elope with Godwin’s 16-year-old daughter (and Frankenstein author) Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, marry her shortly after his abandoned first wife committed suicide, then drown at sea, all by age 30?

Is the implication here that Dalton McGuinty models himself on such a person or would encourage others to do so? To elope with one 16-year-old may be regarded as a misfortune; two looks like carelessness. Is Shelley his model for “at-risk” youth in Toronto? Are we to believe that demonic fire rages in the premier’s soul? Personally, I don’t recommend such a thing. If I found a demonic fire so much as smouldering in my soul I would seek means to extinguish it without delay. I wouldn’t boast about it.

In fact, the premier married his high-school sweetheart and faithfully raised four children with her, which is exactly the sort of thing I admire. But I don’t contend that Byron or Shelley would applaud him for it. Which is among the reasons I don’t advocate attempts to remake our political order along lines either of them would approve either. So what is Mr. McGuinty talking about? There’s a Monty Python sketch in which a baffled merchant banker searches the dictionary in vain for the phrase “inner life.” At least he looked.

Some may object that politicians talk nonsense all the time and that poetry, like art galleries, is full of pretty pictures you’re not supposed to think about afterwards, so it is absurd to expect the former to hold meaningful opinions on the latter. I don’t buy it. I grant that we are governed by people who routinely spout gibberish, but I believe I am still within my rights to resent it. And if poetry’s images don’t mean anything, then reading it would be as pointless and dull as listening to a language we don’t speak. No, I stubbornly assume all those politicians droning on about education want kids not only to read books and poems and such stuff, but also to understand them.

So I’m not saying don’t read Shelley. I’m just saying it’s like medicine: Know what you’re taking. A work of art can be valuable because it’s horrifying. But only if you recognize that it’s horrifying. Otherwise it’s either dangerous or absurd, as when, for instance, a commentator loves “imagery” without caring what it is or can’t tell H.P. Lovecraft from J.R.R. Tolkien, or when a quintessentially conventional politician declares himself possessed of a Byronic soul. I’ll retire to Bedlam ... and write doggerel.

There once was a premier pedantic Who crowed about poets Romantic What heights did he seek? He strikes me as meek But his nonsense has rendered me frantic.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Another year has passed and you and I are lucky to be alive. I mean that in both senses. It’s amazing that so many of us made it through 365 more days of the horrifying human condition, and it’s a tremendous privilege to have done so. I’m pleased to note that we now know where the days go. In Wednesday’s Citizen comics section, Lucky Eddie told Hagar the Horrible they “turn into nights.” As for the years, well, they turn into old-movie special effects of calendar pages flipping, or broken resolutions, or enthusiasms acutely embarrassing in retrospect, like bellbottoms or government-subsidized canals.

A few years back everyone had millennium fever and was listing the great this and the outstanding that of the millennium. Including me. For instance I thought the best spelling of “millennium” was with two “n”s and William the Conqueror was the most significant individual.

Trying to compile a “best books of the millennium” list was a bit much because “of making many books there is no end” and my reading list is full of holes. Movies seemed a better bet because before about 1896, what is there to say? But modern video stores seemed to stock neither most classic films nor clerks who’d heard of them.

Then I got another idea: Great busts of the millennium. You know, things that were terrifically hyped and, in some cases, are remembered, but just didn’t live up to their apparent promise.

It’s not that I’m so pitiful that I take pleasure in taunting dusty artifacts. Rather, I thought it would be worthwhile to combat the tendency to regard history as largely inevitable, an attitude that worships strength and lacks imagination.

What if Jean Chrétien had woken up Montcalm? What if the French had linked up Quebec and Louisiana via the Mississippi? History is not so fantastically unpredictable that studying the past is pointless. But do you really think Hitler couldn’t have won? Also, watching replays of past fads crumbling helps protect you against contemporary trendy thinking.

My list of “busts of the millennium” included the crossbow, a remarkably powerful weapon capable of penetrating armour, knight and the wall behind him. Yet unlike the humble longbow it did not decide a single battle, let alone a major war. Also the Holy Roman Empire. What was that about?

Artificial languages are a bit of a post-Enlightenment thing but also a major flop. So, possibly, was the Enlightenment. Becoming as Gods hasn’t quite worked out, whether you’re thinking about directing the economy or remaking the Moral Law so it’s not hard.

Socialism was a really major instance of “product may not be exactly as shown.” If history had a returns counter you’d sure take it back. Of course, socialism isn’t big on returns counters and other alienating sources of consumer satisfaction. Another reason to dislike it. Unelected leaders with moustaches also proved a grave disappointment. So did high tariffs, industrial policy and modern art.

Mind you, anyone can look back and say French absolutism didn’t work out. (Not everyone does; see Chrétien and Montcalm above. Strangely, there are also still people who think socialism would be a great idea. Guys, the crossbow stands a better chance of ultimate vindication. I assure you.)

The trick is to look forward and see flops coming. So by golly, with New Year’s Eve in sight, here I go with a list of some things that are worse than is generally supposed, and some that are better, to gird us for battle in 2006.

Overrated: China’s economy. Underrated: America’s economy.

Overrated: China’s foreign policy. Underrated: America’s foreign policy. Seriously overrated: Canada’s foreign policy.

Overrated: “Thinking outside the box.” Underrated: Dogma.

Overrated: Finally having a sexual revolution. Underrated: Finally having a sexual counterrevolution.

Overrated: The Charter. Underrated: Parliamentary democracy.

Overrated: Politics. Underrated: Political philosophy.

Overrated: Judges with vision. Underrated: Judges with humility.

Overrated: Peacekeeping. Underrated: Just war.

Overrated: Treaties with tyrants. Underrated: Preemptive strikes on tyrants.

Overrated: The voice of youth. Underrated: The voice of experience.

Overrated: Noise. Underrated: Quiet.

Overrated: Dieting. Underrated: Eating less.

Overrated: Culture. Underrated: Civility.

Overrated: Self-expression. Underrated: Self-control.

Overrated: Lists. Underrated: This list.

Overrated: Euthanasia. Underrated: Not dying yet.

Overrated: Life. Underrated: Life.

Definitely not overrated: Quoting G.K. Chesterton. So, on the last point, I leave you with this thought from him for the coming year: “The more truly we can see life as a fairytale, the more clearly the tale resolves itself into war with the Dragon who is wasting fairyland.”

A rampaging dragon? Personally, I can’t wait. Now where did I put that crossbow?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Ahhhh. It’s Christmas time. Gather round the fire, kids, and listen to Uncle John drone on about the good old days. And plan some more. For instance, what ever happened to the Christmas tradition of the kid who can’t wait to get his big present out of the box and play with the box? Nowadays the cool stuff is smaller not bigger so you couldn’t fit into the package to play even if you could get the space-age armoured plastic open without pliers, hacksaw and blowtorch that leave lethal sharp edges.

It may be traditional to deplore the decline of tradition. But I also find myself puzzled at how to keep sacrificing meaning to materialism now that kids have so much stuff. Back before I was a boy you had nothing and clung to it. Then on that magic day, Dec. 25, you got another sock and both feet were warm for months. Wow! There’s still some room to thrill even a modern child by finding something they didn’t realize they wanted until they saw it. But less and less just because they have everything. Does anyone out there really anticipate 30 or 40, or 300 more years of new must-have toys that are faster, fancier, smaller and cheaper? Will we all end up laughing at the X-Box in our total-body simul-suits? Let’s stop that thought right there.

Let’s stop it with a treasured Yuletide memory. Years ago for Christmas my brother got a Major Matt Mason battery-powered moon rover and I got a crummy old desktop hockey game. I was crushed, at least until lunchtime. After that, we played table hockey for years while the moon rover gathered moon dust. And while I can’t go into an arcade any more (the noise noise noise noise), table hockey seems unchanged except there aren’t dead spots behind the net any more and the L.A. Kings figurines don’t have that gold and purple haze uniform. You still use real arms, fingers, eyes and reflexes to play it. Cool.

I don’t want to be crankier than is strictly necessary. Not all change is bad. For instance I like those LED lights. Not just environmentally friendly and cheaper, they also look cooler. In fact, I’m eagerly anticipating further change, because the Christmas ones are still a bit bright. Once manufacturers tone them down a bit we’re talking truly eldritch. Oh yeah. I love an old-tyme winter evening walk with those things about.

Tradition is a funny thing. For, in keeping with my tradition of quoting G. K. Chesterton constantly, “A tradition is a live thing, not a dead one.... The tradition is not kept up because it is old. It is kept up because it is nice; it was only by persistently being nice, generation after generation, that it managed to get old.” Or so you hope.

The Canadian Reader’s Digest recently quoted a reader who “was recently talking with a friend who bemoaned her family’s lack of holiday rituals. ‘My family doesn’t have any traditions,’ she complained. ‘We just do the same thing year after year after year’.” As Lemony Snicket reminds us, “Just because something is traditional is no reason to do it ... Piracy, for example, is a tradition that has been carried on for hundreds of years, but that doesn’t mean we should all attack ships and steal their gold.” And I was charmed by National Review’s John Derbyshire being “raised in a rustic English county where nothing much had happened for a millennium or so. The nearby prominence that official maps showed as Hunsbury Hill was known to us as Danes’ Camp, a name it must have acquired in King Alfred’s time...” But I like calling it Danes’ Camp much more than I would like it actually being Danes’ Camp.

Also Christmas pudding. Setting it on fire, fine. But eating it? This isn’t Merrie England. We aren’t up to our hip-waders in Danes and down to our last handful of walnuts, some things that if they aren’t raisins don’t look any closer, and was this flour brown when we harvested it? No sir. Our tradition is rich chocolate Christmas cake with red and green sparkles and icing sugar. It dates back nearly half a decade.

So I have another idea. I want to go forward by going backward, to before even playing in a cardboard box, back to when an orange in your stocking was a treasure and even the pecan was sort of OK. In many ways Charles Dickens invented the traditional Christmas we enjoy today, with an assist from Prince Albert on the tree (evergreen in house: good change; black plastic tree: bad change) and the Coca Cola company on Santa’s suit. So my idea is to read Dickens, preferably aloud. And not just A Christmas Carol, though the 1951 film remains a timeless classic. This year I’m thinking Pickwick Papers, especially if I can in time-honoured fashion trap and bore the young folks.

Kids, I’ll say, we may beep and hum and glow and have plastic surgery but we are still human, if barely. There comes a time when the neon, or post-neon, doesn’t do it for us not because it’s technically inadequate but because it’s technical. At which point let’s draw our chairs close around the fake fire, pour a glass of George Washington’s eggnog and read aloud.

It stimulates the imagination, and there’s an old tradition worth making new again. Say, does Dickens podcast?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

From Fraser Forum.

Oh boy. It's the leaders' debate. Time for beer and popcorn. Uh, make that pablum. And a hanky. What has me on the edge of tears is that politics in this country is an unskilled profession. Our politicians, though desperately keen to govern, aren't just bad at it; they seem uncurious about how it's done. Like Paul Martin trying to repair relations with the United States through abuse. You could argue with the goal; the NDP and Bloc did. But what rational person could expect to achieve it this way? Or to cure Western alienation (another top priority) without setting foot in Alberta in this election. Or to stop global warming by not doing anything.

We suffer a silent plague of such stuff. Remember how Dalton McGuinty spent 13 years in opposition, seven as leader of the Opposition, campaigned on neither cutting nor raising taxes, won, said golly I didn't know the budget looked like that and raised taxes. The power of the purse (backed by the sword) is the essence of government. For 13 years his whole job was to pay attention to it. And he didn't. Nor did he check electricity generating capacity against projected demand before promising to shut down Ontario's coal-fired reactors. What was he doing all those years? His own party's website boasts he's too politically hyperactive to pursue hobbies.

I also refer you to Randall Denley's Thursday column on Ottawa city council's budgetary process. Or my wife Brigitte Pellerin's on the mayor of Montreal who got re-elected in November on a promise to fix the roads without new taxes and immediately tried to raise taxes, saying he didn't realize how bad things were. After four years of his own budgets. (Voters successfully stared him down.)

I don't bring this up only to ridicule politicians in quest of a cheap laugh. But it may be all the relief we get. On the key issue of health care, I, and you, have suffered through endless debates about what should happen without any attention to how. Or any progress, intellectual or medical. The two are not unconnected.

Our politicians appear to have no model of the state. They seem to have no opinion on what, in natural law or our written Constitution, permits government to undertake a thing. (Paul Martin calls child care "a right," for instance: Where's that in the Charter?) Or on how the mechanics of government would permit it to be carried out, from Parliament's unanimous vote to end child poverty by 2000 to Dalton McGuinty going off to persuade Americans the Ontario driver's licence is a secure document for border crossings without first checking on the issuing process (riddled with security flaws).

There are those who say things like the Liberals' 1993 promise to eliminate the GST are just cynical lies. In some ways that would be reassuring. After all, unlike fools, rogues take vacations and, knowing their promises are hollow, return with backup plans. But I'm not happy with this theory, first because it explains everything after the fact without predicting it beforehand, and second because politicians seem generally caught off-guard by the fallout from their silly promises. And if you say they are both cynical and short-sighted, I say that qualifies as not trying to understand government.

When Ontario's auditor general said 99 per cent of phone calls to the provincial office that registers births, marriages and deaths don't get through because they'd hastily installed a costly new computer system and brought in some strange new level of management, the Citizen quoted then-minister Jim Watson as saying: "I'm satisfied with the work that I did as minister." I don't doubt it. I wish I did. And what's with Stephen Harper promising a special prosecutor for Adscam only to have his own deputy promptly note that such prosecutions are provincial? Or his claim that he can undo same-sex marriage without invoking the notwithstanding clause: One can debate the merits of using it for this purpose, but not the necessity. Why doesn't he know that?

Jack Layton is also making promises he knows won't be expensive though he can't say what they'd cost because ... Well, why? Then there's Mike Harris and Ralph Klein shadow-boxing with critics over spending cuts that never happened because none of them figured out what governments spend or why.

Now take the handgun ban ... please. Some say Paul Martin's plan to forbid murdering people with illegal handguns is obviously silly but plays well with key demographics. If that's the defence, what's the indictment? I'm glad you asked. It's presiding over the long-gun registry schmozzle and then setting up another one without any visible sign of attempting to learn lessons from the first. Of course, like some of Stephen Harper's tax promises, if it's deliberately bad policy but good politics it's shabby but at least it's not raging ineptitude. If only we could be certain they were lying.

If that strikes you as unworthy, listen for any talk in the debate about methods, any discussion of how some proposed thing might be done rather than whether anyone opposing it is just a big meany.

If not, keep the beer and popcorn but change the channel.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]