Just Zone Out (PDF). From Fraser Forum.

With the Middle East in flames and opposition parties accusing the Tories of an insufficiently nuanced approach to attempts to slaughter Jews, we can see clearly the wisdom of Ariel Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza. Yes, wisdom. Right before his incapacitating stroke last summer, in another brilliant gamble, the war hero of 1973 and erstwhile champion of settlers in lands captured in 1967 pulled Israel’s settlements out of Gaza unilaterally. I was in Israel last July and saw how it divided people. On street corners youngsters handed out blue (go) or orange (stay) ribbons; people wore T-shirts; they argued from checkpoints to kitchens to Knesset. But much of the debate, especially abroad, missed the essential point.

Israeli governments had long sought to exchange some land for complete peace. The Egyptian government took the deal, fearing revolution if it lost one more war against the despised Jews. So did Jordan, whose government secretly fears its Arab neighbours more than Israel and despises them at least as much. And people mistook Sharon’s withdrawal for a bold attempt to restart peace talks with the Palestinian Authority on the same basis: a dramatic concession to establish good will and break down barriers of misunderstanding and the whole psychobabble lexicon.

It was nothing of the sort. It was the product of reluctant but widespread recognition that there was no one to talk to on the other side. Liberal leader Bill Graham may prate about Canada’s capacity to work with “moderates,” but most Israelis share Tel Aviv professor Barry Rubin’s weary verdict that “a Palestinian moderate … can usually be defined as someone who apologizes for terrorism in good English.”

Some Israelis hoped the Palestinians would settle down. But the brilliance of Sharon’s gambit was precisely that it didn’t matter. Instead it was based on three main assumptions. First, nothing Israel could do would affect its neighbours’ propensity for incompetent attempts at genocide, so there was no more risk of encouraging radicals than hope of engaging moderates. Second, the material and psychological cost of having soldiers police Gaza was far higher than the rewards of maintaining the settlements there. And third, it’s easier to invade a place than occupy it.

All three seem to have been vindicated. And a fourth benefit is now increasingly apparent: clarity. Withdrawal showed the Israeli left, and the world, two key things. First, those who shape policy in Israel no longer seek all the Biblical land from Jordan to the sea. Second, Hamas and Hezbollah still do. So what first divided Israelis now unites them, as even prominent peace activists like Amos Oz defend the current military campaign. And reasonable non-Israelis see the true face of Palestinian political culture: death to Jews morning, noon and night.

Given their own state in Gaza, admittedly a feeble shadow of what they wanted (all of Israel), did the Palestinians settle down to build their economy, educate their children and live in peace with their neighbour? No. They elected Hamas, uttered deluded threats and shot at civilians. (Exactly, minus settlements and elections, as when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 and Hezbollah took over.)

The editor-at-large of Beirut’s Daily Star just wrote a “Dream Palace” piece in the Globe and Mail claiming the U.S. and Israel “find themselves in the bizarre position of repeating policies that have consistently failed for the past 40 years…. a diplomatic solution should be sought seriously for the first time.” Rubbish. Just shy of the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War, 30 years after Jimmy Carter’s Camp David, a decade after Yasser Arafat’s bogus Nobel Peace prize, it is Arab leaders who are boxed in by their long history of foolish words and deeds, and it is Israel that has rejected 40-yearold failed policies for the first time. And it is working.

Ignore Western politicians’ reflexive babble about disproportionate responses or putting another peacekeeping force beside the UN’s UNIFIL that has, the Globe notes, been in southern Lebanon watching Hezbollah shoot rockets at Israeli civilians since Zimbabwe was Rhodesia, or the European Union monitors watching Hamas smuggle terror cash into Gaza. A key Israeli demand is that the Lebanese army occupy all of Lebanon. Think France will send 20,000 troops either to make it happen or to prevent it?

Reasonable people can no longer even urge Israel to withdraw from much of the West Bank to break the “cycle of violence.” Not after what came blazing out of Gaza. Is it meant to withdraw from Tel Aviv? Should the Jews throw themselves into the sea? It’s very clear now where the trouble is coming from. That’s why just about every sensible person hopes Israel flattens Hezbollah and Hamas and maybe blows up some Syrian tanks as well so we can all stop listening for hoof beats at Megiddo.

Game, set and match to Ariel Sharon.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Man, I feel like moving. It’s the Forearm Forklift that did it. It’s not that I’m unhappy where I am. My house is neither falling down especially fast nor haunted, except by the ghost of bad renovations past, like the ghostly word “Up” next to the arrow pointing down on the old bathroom cup-holder. And the rowdiest thing my neighbours do is celebrate “Talk Like A Pirate” day (Sept. 19) in style.

No, I feel like moving because I recently rented a vehicle for a mundane in-town chore and they had such cool accessories I wanted some. Forget Magic Marker. We’re talking colour-coded strapping tape with names of various rooms printed on it, plus olde-tyme “Ugly Moving Tape” in the standard dirty yellow for traditionalists. And “Forearm Forklift,” which turns out to be orange fabric straps you wrap around your forearms to lift stubborn chests of drawers and awkward chairs without bending down, heaving, and getting Ugly Moving Back.

Also, they had not just generic “organizer bags” but computer plastic bag kits, chair bags, comforter bags, mattress bags (in every size) and rug storage bags, plus rolls of mover’s wrap in two sizes, custom hitches, furniture pads, tarps, locks and straps.

It’s like when you go into a tool store and they have such great stuff that you’re about to put a router in the cart when it hits you that you don’t know what a router even is.

Being a nerd, I left instead with a lesson about the free market. I’ve moved a few times and always appreciated the ready availability of complex, durable, no-frills, affordable rental vehicles. But my goodness, the accessories have improved. It’s part of a consumer-goods revolution based partly on design and partly on materials, and while man does not live by bread alone, the variety and flavour certainly do enhance our existence.

I’m keen on design. I even admire a hotel tap that’s easy to use. The technical term for a control device whose operation is intuitively obvious is an “affordance,” and we need more of them.

I admire anything that does what it does well, is easy to use, and works elegantly. Years ago when I disgraced the rock-climbing fraternity with my feeble antics, I remember how cool the outdoor gear had become while I was indoors doing a PhD. Gone were the gruesome canvas knapsacks and tents of yore; things had instead become strong, light, simple and reliable.

I’ve since been impressed by how the same imaginative design with new materials migrated to golf courses, then offices. My current briefcase could climb Mount Everest (without me). It’s light, strong, rugged, washable, with straps and carabiners and water-bottle-holder and pockets and pouches and webbing. And those little straps through zipper heads that started outdoors, because they’re easy to grasp in cold fingers, then people thought hey, why shouldn’t all zippers be easy to grasp?

Plus the zipper straps on my briefcase are rubber, and if you pull too hard they slip out of the metal bit so that something more expensive or awkward doesn’t break. That’s called a “physical fuse,” and we need more of those too.

Still, while the staggering amount of bad design that still exists makes me treasure good design and beg for more, the great thing is I don’t have to beg. It is said that if you invent a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door. Actually entrepreneurs will, so it only happens in market economies.

We take it for granted that products and product selection will keep improving. But it wasn’t just outdoorspeople and designers who created the marvels we now enjoy. It was merchants, including ostensibly anticapitalist co-ops. Soviet machinery was not both lousy and hard to operate because their engineers were dumb, but because crucial market feedback mechanisms didn’t exist.

Let me bore you with Nalgene water bottles. Early models had caps that screwed off and fell down the cliff. The next generation had caps with straps round the neck of the bottle but cap and strap were one piece, so the strap got twisted every time you took the lid off, and quickly broke. On the third generation the strap was a separate piece that rotated freely over a knob on the cap.

This process of refinement didn’t just happen because campers had a problem that designers could solve, but because some clever, motivated third party took the news of the problem from customer to designer and news of the solution from designer to customer. It’s the miracle of markets.

We take it for granted, but we’d sure miss it if it weren’t there. We’d be queuing for Ladas instead of buying briefcases more rugged than Daniel Boone, baby strollers with coffee-cup holders and, down at the old truck rental, Forearm Forklift.

I tell you, it was a moving experience.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The greatest Canadian of all time said we should sterilize mental defectives. Wait. Before you report me to your province’s human rights commission for attempting to glorify some neo-Nazi bigot, you should know this: We’re talking about Tommy Douglas. The Tommy Douglas. The socialist icon. The father of our vaunted medicare system. The man recently voted the Greatest Canadian of all time by CBC viewers. His 1933 master’s thesis in sociology — The Problems of the Subnormal Family — staunchly advocated eugenics in the most merciless terms. And almost nobody dares mention anything about it.

That Tommy Douglas holds a venerated place in Canadian mythology is beyond dispute. He’s not just a hero to leftwing nationalists or CBC viewers. When the Reform party created a portrait gallery of “bridge builders” in their caucus room in 1996, Douglas was there. What’s especially disquieting about his flirtation with eugenics is that — as with Max and Monique Nemni’s recent book detailing Pierre Trudeau’s youthful anti-Semitism, reactionary clerico-political views and blindness to Nazi aggression — these are not things that were actively hidden from Canadians. It’s just that we chose to ignore them.

The Wikipedia online encyclopedia entry tells us Douglas “is warmly remembered for his folksy wit and oratory with which he expressed his steadfast idealism, exemplified by his fable of Mouseland .... In 2004, he was voted ‘The Greatest Canadian’ of all time in a nationally televised contest organized by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.” Then the entry states baldly that he “completed his Master’s degree (MA) in Sociology from McMaster University in 1933. His thesis was on eugenics as a solution for Canada’s economic problems.”

One cannot simply dismiss these views as youthful folly; when Douglas wrote them, he was nearly 30 years old.

From the point of view of the modern left, much is — or should be — profoundly troubling in Douglas’s thesis. He flings about terms like “subnormal,” “defective” and “moron” and condemns unwed motherhood in harshly judgmental terms. He speaks of women “guilty” of abortion and grouses about tax money as well as morals, noting that one “mental defective” let out of an asylum “lived as a prostitute” and produced two “mentally defective” children who were also institutionalized. His conclusion: “The initial cost to the taxpayer has been tripled in this case.”

And far from sympathizing with what we’re now meant to call “sex-trade workers” — whom we should view as exploited women — Douglas denounces prostitutes for “accosting” men from “fairly good homes” and giving them venereal diseases.

Douglas’s attitudes and vocabulary are troubling. But it is his recommendations that are most alarming. First, he advocates compulsory certificates of “mental and physical fitness” and seven days’ public notice before marrying. He goes on to say that since “Society does not hesitate to segregate criminals, lepers or any others that threaten the wellbeing of society,” it should put defectives “on a state farm, or in a colony where decisions could be made for them by a competent supervisor.” He discusses segregating the sexes within such colonies, but says it “would be very difficult to enforce, and would be an unnatural mode of life. It should only be tried if the next suggestion were rejected, namely sterilization.”

Thus we come to Douglas’s most appalling proposal: “Sterilization of the mentally and physically defective.” To meet anticipated criticism, he adds: “medical science declares that it is possible to be sterilized and yet have sexual intercourse. In the main, this is all the defective asks.”

He concedes “that sterilization might be abused ... There are possibilities of abuse in any forward step ... The matter would have to be handled carefully. Only those mentally defective and those incurably diseased should be sterilized.” The subnormal, he suggests, should simply be discreetly given “contraceptive knowledge ... when the family had reached a set figure.” Douglas never defines the difference between a “defective” and someone who’s merely “subnormal.” (He also advocates special classes for subnormal children rather than what is now called “mainstreaming.”)

If all these views do not cause advocates of political correctness to blanch, the Baptist minister also sees a large role for Christian churches in helping subnormal types to imitate conventional middle-class life, to “have teas,” “form clubs” and “learn the useful art of housekeeping.”

He adds that “When education and legislation have failed, there is still One, who can take the broken earthenware from life’s garbage heaps and make them vessels of honor in His temple of love.”

Contrary to occasional allegations, Douglas’s 38-page master’s thesis actually makes no reference to race, direct or indirect. It is almost important to note that, while Douglas never seems formally to have repudiated the views expressed in it, he does seem to have abandoned them. Thomas H. and Ian McLeod’s valuable 1987 biography, Tommy Douglas: The Road to Jerusalem, notes that he repeated these ideas once, publicly, in a 1934 article for the Research Review, a journal put out by the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). But after becoming Saskatchewan premier in 1944 (while the Nazis were implementing their own mass eugenics program in Europe), Douglas rejected proposals for eugenic sterilization legislation of the sort his progressive colleagues in the United Farmers of Alberta had passed in 1928. Professor emeritus Meyer Brownstone of the University of Toronto adds that, while in power, Douglas worked hard to improve conditions in Saskatchewan mental asylums.

Moreover, while in 1934 Douglas was expressing conventional pacifist views, in 1936 — as the Nazis were working toward purifying the German race through “racial hygiene” laws and the forced sterilization of those deemed physically and mentally “unfit,” culminating in forced euthanasia programs and ultimately the death camps — Douglas paid a personal and apparently eye-opening visit to Nazi Germany. He returned calling Hitler a “mad dog.” In 1938, Douglas denounced the Munich Pact, telling Parliament that “Yielding to dictators does not buy peace; it merely brings about demands for further concessions.”

While CCF founder and party leader J. S. Woodsworth was the man who cast the sole vote against war with Hitler in 1939, Douglas not only helped bring his party around to supporting the declaration of war, but volunteered for active service. The same childhood leg problem that famously made him a public healthcare advocate probably kept him from being sent with the Winnipeg Grenadiers to face death in the fall of Hong Kong or slow torment and probable death as a POW. Instead, Douglas returned to Parliament and helped Mackenzie King’s government escape its anti-conscription pledge.

Arguably, one could oppose Hitler’s military aggression and still be a bigot. But Douglas’s horror at the militarized apparatus of repression that he witnessed in Germany might have had something to do with his reconsideration of the idea of interning “defectives” in camps, where coercive eugenic medical procedures were performed.

What is peculiar is that this part of Douglas’s life should have disappeared entirely from the official Canadian narrative. The CBC biographical film aired in March, Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, which admits at the outset that “characters, locations and events have been composited, condensed or fictionalized for dramatic purposes” — and which the CBC pulled in June because it had treated Douglas’s political rival James Gardiner unfairly — omits any reference to the nature of his graduate studies. And the Canadian Encyclopedia’s online entry takes us from Douglas’s “further academic studies in Christian ethics” straight to his respectable political activism.

Tim Woods, executive director of Vancouver’s health care-oriented Tommy Douglas Institute, says simply “that’s not a master’s dissertation I’ve read.” Nor does the institute’s Web site profile of Douglas’s “achievements and his beliefs” mention it. Mel Watkins, professor emeritus of economics and political science at the University of Toronto and cofounder of the federal NDP’s renegade “Waffle” faction, says he’s aware of Douglas’s dissertation, but doesn’t know enough about it to discuss it in detail. Still, Watkins argues that eugenics “was very much in the air at the time, which doesn’t excuse Douglas, but does explain. [It] goes to sentencing, as one of my lawyer friends likes to say.”

Fair enough. But why, then, was there no trial?

Possibly because Douglas was not actually the greatest Canadian ever. Actor Michael Therriault, who played him in Prairie Giant, admitted to a reporter in March that he’d never heard of Douglas before auditioning for the film. “Most of my friends didn’t know who he was either,” he said. Standard historical texts, such as Kenneth McNaught’s 1982 revised The Pelican History of Canada, mention Douglas only briefly. McNaught gives him three index entries; Desmond Morton’s 2001 revised Short History of Canada, just five.

And socialized medicine is not working as well as the CBC hagiography implies, not least because, as Douglas himself admitted in 1982, he and his colleagues got rid of market pricing, but never got around to figuring out how to make central planning work — not exactly a minor oversight.

But such considerations are beside the point; before anointing T. C. Douglas a secular saint, Canadians might have at least been thorough enough to let the devil’s advocate mention eugenics. Instead, The Problems of the Subnormal Family went down the memory hole and didn’t come back up. The McLeods’ favourable biography deals with it frankly, and references to it crop up here and there on the Internet — but you won’t even find the actual text online. And McMaster University library has, all these years, been sitting on Tommy Douglas’s own handwritten notes about the subjects of his dissertation. Were such a personal artifact to emerge about the intellectual development of truly important American historical figures — say, Abraham Lincoln or George Washington — it would attract enormous attention, even if it was in some ways embarrassing.

Since Canadian nationalists reproach Americans for their tendency to uncritically mythologize their past, shouldn’t we be willing to examine our own a bit more closely? Americans know — and mention often — that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, and historians have publicly aired suspicions that his slave Sally Hemings was also his concubine. Why can’t we discuss Douglas’s blunder?

Maybe it’s because, in the words of George Stroumboulopoulos, Douglas’s “advocate” in the CBC’s Greatest Canadian contest: “This is what it all boils down to — the 49th parallel. It’s the dividing line between our way and their way. And did you know that on that side every 30 seconds somebody declares bankruptcy because of medical bills? What I’m saying is, Americans go broke because of being sick. I just can’t tell you how glad I am that we don’t live that way. It’s all thanks to Tommy.” A morality play this simple has no place for subtle shading of character or historical cause and effect.

Douglas is famous for such bons mots as, “The trouble with socialists is that they let their bleeding hearts go to their bloody heads,” and “The left in Canada is more gauche than sinister.” Even his flirtation with eugenics was mostly gauche, especially when we remember that it took place just before the horrors of Nazism, an ideology against which he was literally willing to take up arms. What seems truly sinister is the silence that now reigns on this imperfection in a revered national figure.

A longer version of this story appeared in the July 3 edition of The Western Standard.

[First published in the National Post]

Well, I told you so. On what topic? Let me see: Kyoto, homelessness, federal involvement in social programs. No, I’m not trying to inflate my ego. If it got any larger I’d need a bigger house. I’m trying to make a point about political philosophy. I realize Canada is overrun with pragmatists, not ideologues, people who are neither right nor left, socially liberal but fiscally conservative outside-the-box yip yip yip buzzword bingo artists. But the whole point of our ongoing conversation about public policy is to find out what consistently works and what doesn’t. Or at least it should be. I don’t care if you call it a philosophy, an ideology, a worldview or Plan 9 from Outer Space. The purpose of opinion writing is not an endless string of soothing, socially acceptable bromides that will be forgotten before they are exposed as trite, but surprising statements that turn out to be correct.

For instance, my Oct. 27, 1999, column complained that journalists cited a wide variety of incompatible numbers for the homeless without any apparent interest in where they came from or how reliable they were. One 1996 estimate put 50,000 people on the streets of Toronto; a 1999 guess had 10,000 to 12,000 homeless kids there. But a major attempt to count them just came up with, um, 5,042. Almost every one, I concede, is a tragic story. But before denouncing society as this giant evil callous bourgeois thing because it doesn’t find each of them a bed, note John Geiger’s comment last week in the National Post that Toronto has 4,500 shelter spots and its municipal government spends $31,000 a year on each homeless person. So we may not be short of will. We may be short of way.

Now take Kyoto … please. In September 2002, after Jean Chrétien announced that Canada would ratify the treaty, I wrote that while others huffed about how grand it was or puffed about how it would level the economy, I didn’t care because the science was so shaky that, for better or worse, our government would never produce an implementation plan. And by golly it never did. (Former Liberal environment minister Stéphane Dion just said that if he becomes prime minister “in 2008, I will be part of Kyoto, but I will say to the world I don’t think I will make it.” Fine, you’re a splendid caring chap, do you have anything useful to suggest?)

Finally I confess to taking grim satisfaction in attending the June 6 dinner launch of Volume 3 of Preston Manning and Mike Harris’s A Canada Strong and Free series for the Fraser Institute. Some of their ideas are better than others, but I applaud their attempt to start a conversation on governance in Canada, which must (another prediction here) be a key element of the progressive agenda all the pragmatists now desperately seek. But 12 long years ago I was briefly social-policy researcher for the Reform party. Briefly, because my big idea for the federal government to get out of social programs as unaffordable, counterproductive and jurisdictionally messy didn’t sit well with the pragmatist heading the party, Mr. Manning. And didn’t the man who would shortly become premier of Ontario, Mr. Harris, want more federal money (whatever that is) for health care? Where are they now? Yoo hoo!

Note that the issue in all three cases was not what sounds or feels good, but what works. Any number of politicians and commentators will tell you that all you need is political will, including Brian Mulroney, who, in being named greener than the colour green itself, just said “Where political will prevails, solutions will follow.” Really? Then why couldn’t you balance the budget?

What we need in this country isn’t political will, it’s political won’t. We need politicians willing to tell constituents and interest groups: “That’s a sad story, now move along.” For (as I have also said before) the good thing about being a conservative is you are eventually proved right. The bad thing is you are eventually proved right. Conservatism is not on the whole very jolly. It’s about tradeoffs and practical obstacles and the need to reform your own character instead of saving the world by turning your personal problems into public catastrophes. But no one ever promised the job would be easy.

Canada needs less social science and more common sense; less ethics and more virtue; less cleverness and more wisdom. And since, as author Richard Weaver said, “ideas have consequences,” let’s first toss the pragmatism, with its aggressively self-satisfied claim to have no ideas, and get more idealism. Of the good kind. The kind that generates successful predictions, not warm fuzzies.

And yes, I can quote me on that.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The greatest Canadian of all time said we should sterilize mental defectives. Wait. Before you report this magazine to the human rights commission, or press hate crime charges for attempting to glorify some neo-Nazi or antiquated bigot, you should know this: we’re talking about Tommy Douglas. The Tommy Douglas. The New Democrat pioneer. The socialist icon. The father of our vaunted medicare system. The man voted the Greatest Canadian of all time by CBC viewers. His 1933 master’s thesis in sociology – ‘The Problems of the Subnormal Family’ – staunchly advocated eugenics in the most merciless terms. And almost nobody dares mention anything about it. That Tommy Douglas holds a venerated place in Canadian mythology is beyond dispute. He’s not just a hero to left-wing nationalists like Mel Hurtig or CBC television viewers. When the Reform party created a portrait gallery of “bridge builders” in their caucus room in 1996, Douglas was there (along with Louis Riel and three of the Famous Five). What’s especially disquieting about Douglas’s flirtation with eugenics is that, like recent revelations about Pierre Trudeau’s youthful anti-Semitism, reactionary clerico-political views and blindness to Nazi aggression, these are not things we did not know. We just chose not to think about them.

The Wikipedia online encyclopedia entry tells us Douglas “is warmly remembered for his folksy wit and oratory with which he expressed his steadfast idealism, exemplified by his fable of Mouseland... In 2004, he was voted ‘The Greatest Canadian’ of all time in a nationally televised contest organized by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.” Then the entry states baldly that he “completed his Master’s degree (MA) in Sociology from McMaster University in 1933. His thesis was on eugenics as a solution for Canada’s economic problems.” One cannot simply dismiss these views as youthful folly; when he wrote it, he was nearly 30 years old.

From the point of view of the modern left, much is--or should be--profoundly troubling in Douglas’s thesis (you can view a PDF of the original document at www.westernstandard.ca/douglas). He flings about terms like “subnormal,” “defective” and “moron” and condemns unwed motherhood in harshly judgmental terms. He speaks of women “guilty” of abortion and grouses about tax money as well as morals, noting that one “mental defective” let out of an asylum “lived as a prostitute” and produced two “mentally defective” children who were also institutionalized. His conclusion: “Thus the initial cost to the taxpayer has been tripled in this case.” And far from sympathizing with what we’re now meant to call “sex-trade workers”--whom we should view as exploited women--Douglas denounces prostitutes for “accosting” men from “fairly good homes” and giving them venereal diseases.

Douglas’s attitudes and vocabulary are troubling. But it is his recommendations that are truly alarming. First, he advocates compulsory certificates of “mental and physical fitness” and seven days’ public notice before marrying. He goes on that since “Society does not hesitate to segregate criminals, lepers or any others that threaten the well-being of society” it should put defectives “on a state farm, or in a colony where decisions could be made for them by a competent supervisor.” He discusses segregating the sexes within such colonies, but says it “would be very difficult to enforce, and would be an unnatural mode of life. It should only be tried if the next suggestion were rejected, namely sterilization.”

Thus we come to Douglas’s most appalling proposal: “Sterilization of the mentally and physically defective.” To meet anticipated criticism he adds, “medical science declares that it is possible to be sterilized and yet have sexual intercourse. In the main this is all the defective asks.” He concedes “that sterilization might be abused... There are possibilities of abuse in any forward step... The matter would have to be handled carefully. Only those mentally defective and those incurably diseased should be sterilized.” The subnormal, he suggests, should simply be discreetly given “contraceptive knowledge... when the family had reached a set figure.” Douglas never defines the difference between a “defective” and someone who’s merely “subnormal.” (After all this, it is surely a trivial offence against contemporary progressivism that he also advocates special classes for subnormal children rather than what is now called “mainstreaming.”)

If all these views do not cause advocates of political correctness to blanch, the Baptist minister also sees a large role for Christian churches in helping subnormal types to imitate conventional middle-class life, to “have teas,” “form clubs” and “learn the useful art of housekeeping.” He adds, “When education and legislation have failed, there is still One, who can take the broken earthenware from life’s garbage heaps and make them vessels of honor in His temple of love.” Such religiously inspired rhetoric is rare on the Canadian left today (a lonely exception being NDP MP and ordained minister Bill Blaikie), but for Douglas it was common. In 1954, he told the Saskatchewan legislature he considered public health, like public education, “an inalienable right of being a citizen of a Christian country.” He was also known to urge his followers to build the New Jerusalem in Canada--which may be bad theology, but is unmistakably theology, nonetheless. Yet, today, the conventional wisdom is that religion has no place in politics.

Contrary to occasional allegations, Douglas’s 38-page master’s thesis actually makes no reference to race, direct or indirect. It is even more important that, while he never seems formally to have repudiated those views, he does seem to have abandoned them fairly quickly and very completely. Thomas H. and Ian McLeod’s valuable 1987 biography Tommy Douglas : The Road to Jerusalem (published by Hurtig) notes that he repeated them once, publicly, in a 1934 article for the Research Review, a journal put out by the Saskatchewan Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF). But after becoming Saskatchewan premier in 1944 (while the Nazis were implementing their own mass eugenics program in Europe), Douglas rejected proposals for eugenic sterilization legislation of the sort his progressive colleagues in the United Farmers of Alberta had passed in 1928. Professor emeritus Meyer Brownstone of the University of Toronto adds that, while in power, Douglas worked hard to improve conditions in Saskatchewan mental asylums.

Since eugenics was thoroughly discredited by its hideous eruption in Nazi Germany, it is also important to underline that Tommy Douglas never held Pierre Trudeau’s idiotic views on war and peace (as Max and Monique Nemni’s recently released book, Young Trudeau: Son of Quebec, Father of Canada, 1919-1944, details, Trudeau blamed Britain for the Second World War and didn’t support the idea of Canada fighting Nazi aggression). In 1934, Douglas was expressing conventional pacifist views. But in 1936--as the Nazis were working toward purifying the German race through “racial hygiene” laws and the forced sterilization of those deemed physically and mentally “unfit,” culminating in forced euthanasia programs and ultimately, the death camps--Douglas paid a personal and apparently eye-opening visit to Nazi Germany. He returned calling Hitler a “mad dog.” In 1938, Douglas denounced the Munich Pact--Britain’s attempt to appease Hitler by allowing him to annex Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland--telling Parliament that “Yielding to dictators does not buy peace; it merely brings about demands for further concessions.”

Arguably, one could both oppose Hitler’s military aggression and still be a bigot. But Douglas’s horror at the militarized apparatus of repression that he witnessed in Germany might have had something to do with his reconsideration of the idea of interning “defectives” in camps, where coercive eugenic medical procedures were performed (just as the youthful Trudeau’s short play about the perfidious Jew swindling the naive French Canadian might bear some relationship to his own rather different approach to the war). For while CCF founder and party leader J. S. Woodsworth was the man who cast the sole vote against war with Hitler in 1939, Tommy Douglas not only helped bring his party around to supporting the declaration of war, but volunteered for active service. In one of history’s ironic quirks, only the same childhood leg problem that famously made him a public health care advocate kept him from probably being sent with the Winnipeg Grenadiers to face death in the fall of Hong Kong or slow torment and probable death as a POW. Instead, Douglas returned to Parliament and helped Mackenzie King’s government escape its anti-conscription pledge (in part because, he confessed in a 1942 letter to his associate Clarence Fines, “we are so close to losing the war right now that it makes me shudder every time I look at a map.”).

There is no particular reason that an otherwise good man cannot have also held some repellent views, especially briefly. What is peculiar is that this part of Douglas’s life should so entirely have disappeared from the official Canadian narrative. The CBC biographical film aired in March, Prairie Giant: The Tommy Douglas Story, which admits at the outset to making stuff up (“characters, locations and events have been composited, condensed or fictionalized for dramatic purposes”)--and which the CBC pulled in June because it had unfairly treated Douglas’s political rival James Gardiner--also omits any reference to the nature of his graduate studies. And while Wikipedia knows about it, the Canadian Encyclopedia (which began its life as yet another Hurtig production) seems not to. Its online entry takes us from Douglas’s “further academic studies in Christian ethics” straight to his respectable political activism.

Tim Woods, executive director of Vancouver’s health care-oriented Tommy Douglas Institute, says simply “that’s not a master’s dissertation I’ve read,” though he admits that he hasn’t read any other dissertations, either. Nor does the institute’s website profile of Douglas’s “achievements and his beliefs” mention it. Mel Watkins, professor emeritus of economics and political science at the University of Toronto and co-founder of the federal NDP’s renegade “Waffle” faction, says he’s aware of Douglas’s dissertation, but doesn’t know enough about it to discuss it in detail. Still, Watkins argues that eugenics “was very much in the air at the time, which doesn’t excuse Douglas, but does explain--goes to sentencing as one of my lawyer friends likes to say.” Fair enough. But why, then, was there no trial?

Possibly because Tommy Douglas was not actually the greatest Canadian ever. Actor Michael Therriault, who played him in Prairie Giant, admitted to a reporter in March that he’d never heard of Douglas before auditioning for the film. “Most of my friends didn’t know who he was either,” he said. Standard histories of Canada, such as Kenneth McNaught’s 1982 revised The Pelican History of Canada, mention Douglas only briefly; McNaught gives him three index entries, Desmond Morton’s 2001 revised A Short History of Canada, just five. And socialized medicine is not working as well as the CBC hagiography implies, not least because, as Douglas himself admitted in 1982, he and his colleagues got rid of market pricing, but never got around to figuring out how to make central planning work--not exactly a minor oversight.

But such considerations are beside the point; before anointing T. C. Douglas a secular saint, Canadians might have at least been thorough enough to let the devil’s advocate mention eugenics. Instead, “The Problems of the Subnormal Family” went down the memory hole and didn’t come back up. The McLeods’ favourable biography deals with it frankly, and references to it crop up here and there on the web--but you won’t even find the actual text on the Internet. And in researching this article, Western Standard discovered that the McMaster University library has, all these years, been sitting on Tommy Douglas’s own handwritten notes about the subjects of his dissertation. Were such a personal artifact to emerge about the intellectual development of truly important American historical figures--say, Abraham Lincoln or George Washington--it would attract enormous attention, even if it was in some ways embarrassing.

Since Canadian nationalists reproach Americans for their uncritical tendency to mythologize their past, shouldn’t we be willing to examine our own a bit more closely? Americans know--and mention often--that Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, and historians have publicly aired suspicions that his slave Sally Hemings was also his concubine. Why can’t we discuss Douglas’s blunder?

Is it because, in the words of then Much Music VJ George Stroumboulopoulos, Tommy Douglas’s “advocate” in the CBC’s Greatest Canadian contest, “this is what it all boils down to--the 49th parallel. It’s the dividing line between our way and their way. And did you know that on that side every 30 seconds somebody declares bankruptcy because of medical bills? What I’m saying is, Americans go broke because of being sick. I just can’t tell you how glad I am that we don’t live that way. It’s all thanks to Tommy.” A morality play this simple has no place for subtle shading of character or historical cause and effect.

To discuss such complexity could teach us about youthful folly. For, as we have seen, Douglas was not a child when he wrote his thesis, but his flirtation with eugenics passed--unlike Trudeau’s weakness for foreign tyrants. It was one thing for Trudeau to give a fiery anti-war speech in November 1942. It is quite another for him to write in his 1993 memoirs that, “At the time, Canada was in the grip of a real war hysteria. Is it true that the Gulf of St. Lawrence was swarming with enemy submarines? I have no idea.” To his credit, Douglas had, by 1983, ceased musing about forced sterilization.

Another potential lesson from Douglas’s thesis is that even a great man or woman may have significant flaws. That’s something that might teach us forgiveness. Regrettably, the modern temperament is not as given to forgiveness as, say, a Baptist preacher from Weyburn, Sask., might be.

The lesson that everyone is partly a product of their times could teach us humility about contemporary enthusiasms. But it is highly uncongenial to the progressive temperament to consider that posterity might look askance at, say, unlimited abortion--which seems to fall particularly heavy on the handicapped. Especially given the tendency of progressives to see history, like politics, as a necessarily uncomplicated morality play. The appalling racist episodes and beliefs in our societal past are alleged completely and necessarily to discredit every traditional institution from heterosexual marriage to military prowess to good manners. As Stroumboulopoulos also said, “Tommy Douglas led the rebellion against an older, uglier version of Canada.... Tommy’s values are now Canada’s values.” To admire him despite failings, especially regarding anything that even reminds us of racism, requires discarding the blanket condemnation of western civilization that drives the modern left. That’s why they’ve elected to go with option four: ignore the question altogether.

Douglas is famous for his Mouseland parable (you can find it at www.westernstandard.ca/douglas) and for such bons mots as, “The trouble with socialists is that they let their bleeding hearts go to their bloody heads,” and “The left in Canada is more gauche than sinister.” Even his flirtation with eugenics is mostly gauche, especially when we remember that it took place just before the horrors of Nazism, an ideology against which he was literally willing to take up arms. What seems truly sinister is the silence that now reigns on this imperfection in a revered national figure.

[First published in Western Standard]

Happy Canada Day everybody. Despite that no-good low-down murdering rat Henry VII. No, really. Thanks to Robert Fulford’s The Triumph of Narrative, I’ve been pondering Canada’s story for the last year. And now I’m grinding my teeth because I finally read Josephine Tey’s 1951 The Daughter of Time, in which a bedridden policeman investigates whether England’s vilified King Richard III really murdered his nephews, and concludes it was an outrageous Tudor frame-up abetted by Will Shakespeare.

It matters because Canada’s story includes Britain’s long struggle for liberty. If we even have a story any more. Trendy post-moderns deny the very possibility of coherent narratives. But as Mr. Fulford says, woe betide the individual or the nation that loses the thread of its own. I fear we have.

In Tey’s book, protagonist Alan Grant borrows his nurse’s old child’s Historical Reader, in which “Canute rebuked his courtiers on the shore, Alfred burned the cakes, Raleigh spread his cloak for Elizabeth, Nelson took leave of Hardy in his cabin on the Victory, all in nice clear large print and one-sentence paragraphs” with full-page illustrations. Delighted, Grant muses: “This, after all, was the history that every adult remembered.” Not any more, in Britain or here. I don’t think there’s anything we all remember.

Americans don’t have this problem. As Andrew Coyne just wrote, they “are a nation because they believe themselves to be, a belief rooted not in … blood or native tongue, but in the willingness of each to enlist in a common historic mission — to be the light of liberty unto the world — and to the political creed from which it is derived.”

It is not a shallow story. Parson Weems’s Historical Reader of George Washington and the cherry tree is cloying. But imagine a nation conceived in liberty, grown rich and mighty, yet wracked by the “original sin” of racial slavery. Its key illustrations involve not just Washington crossing the Delaware or Jefferson drafting the Declaration of Independence, but Lincoln getting shot and Martin Luther King Jr. saying “I have a dream” as well as Valley Forge and Gettysburg and Omaha Beach and, yes, Khe Sanh too. It has Edison and Ford and Gates, and Neil Armstrong. And a national anthem that ends with a question about freedom’s flag.

Now imagine a Canadian Historical Reader. Single-page, large-print, naively illustrated stories of, I suppose, both Wolfe and Montcalm dying on the Plains of Abraham. Rowdies hurling William Lyon Mackenzie’s printing press into Lake Ontario. The Fathers of Confederation playing leapfrog on the lawn having finally made a nation. Alexander Graham Bell saying “Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.” It being a child’s reader, the illustration will gloss over the battery acid he’d just spilled in his lap.

Perhaps an aging Sir John saying “A British subject I was born, a British subject I will die.” Gallant lads riding off to the South African War. The Newfoundland Regiment going over the top at the Somme. Vimy. Tommy Douglas telling the legislature a Christian nation should have socialized medicine. Corvettes. Dieppe. Juno Beach …

At this point someone will start ripping the illustrations out as fast as I can scrawl them. Too much war. Or post-moderns will hurl the whole thing into the fire. But they are ironic people and will stealthily substitute the plot of Reese Witherspoon’s 1998 movie Pleasantville, where Canada is grim and repressed and black and white and nobody has fun or authenticity until the 1960s when we get naked and socialized medicine and everyone is fulfilled. Illustrations not suitable for children. Except the ugly tyrant Uncle Sam murdering medicare in the Tower before siphoning off all our water.

The advantage of this narrative, beyond legitimizing self-indulgence, is that it avoids the Wolfe-and-Montcalm business. Unlike, say, English Canada telling itself an anglosphere story of American energy plus British decency while in a corner Quebec mumbles Lionel Groulx fables about the revenge of the cradle and being more Catholic than the pope. The disadvantage is, the Pleasantville narrative is neither inspiring nor true and lies cannot bind people.

There is much that is glorious in our true story provided we tell it properly, and much that is tragic as well. But that’s fine; no story moves us unless it turns on one of the three classic themes of man against nature, man against man and especially man against self. (Lately the epic struggle of man against refrigerator has also become topical.) We’re not just a bunch of hosers drinking beer, not being American, and thumbing through the Kinsey report. Nor are we mindless progressives who think newer is always better including in politics.

So a toast, on Canada Day, to that sunny son of York, noble handsome Richard III.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

What’s left of our Parliament will probably recess for the summer before passing bills setting fixed election dates for the House of Commons and eight-year terms for senators. But don’t pass out on me yet. Messing up our Constitution remains a lousy idea. It might seem silly as well as boring to fuss over the details of Bills C-16 and S-4 when the House just passed a $227-billion budget in its sleep. MPs’ control of the public purse is the cornerstone of parliamentary self-government, yet the opposition parties forgot to vote against a budget a year after the Tories forgot they even were the opposition and deliberately didn’t. But our system is a coherent, if elaborate, structure, so watching Conservatives who are meant to revere tradition digging away at any part of its foundations instead is disquieting.

Let’s not start with “fixed” election dates. A law requiring an election every four years wouldn’t work. What’s to stop a prime minister, with a majority or without, manoeuvring to lose a major Commons vote at a convenient moment, or fiddling the legislative calendar to bring up key legislation just before the four-year mark? D’oh. Then we’re told citizens would recognize and punish such deviousness although they’re currently too dim to notice an early election call at all.

This newspaper editorialized that, with fixed election dates, “Potential candidates, especially women, of whom there are not enough in federal politics, will be able to plan their lives to include a run for office.” Parliament ends; women and minorities hardest hit! But punch “9:00 Ashley hockey. 11:00 Billy violin. 13:00 Get elected” into your PDA and avoid collapsing from career/family stress. Ditto the Citizen’s notion that “fixed election dates could be part of a larger project to revitalize interest in voting.” As we’re typing “Oct. 19, 2009: Vote” we’ll be reminded to add “Oct. 9, 2009: Take interest in voting.” Or not, since the U.S. has truly fixed election dates but low turnouts.

It gets worse. Under what’s left of our real Constitution, the prime minister is the leader who enjoys the confidence of the House. But we need periodic elections to make sure MPs enjoy public confidence so we already have fixed election dates: every five years unless something intervenes. A change to four may not cause milk and honey to gush forth.

As for “fixing” them so nothing can intervene, suppose a prime minister tells a governor general an issue has arisen so important that, though he controls the House, it would be improper to push legislation through on it without ensuring the House reflects prevailing opinion. If, say, a free-trade agreement emerges from negotiations not synchronized with our election cycle. Or Finance boffins finish drafting major tax changes. Or a war starts.

The Americans handle such problems totally differently. But our constitutional system, “similar in Principle to the United Kingdom,” is already finely tuned to deal with them. Hammering a square republican peg of fixed election dates into the round parliamentary hole of dissolving the House at suitable moments isn’t reform, it’s ignorant vandalism. Which is why Bill C-16 actually says: “Nothing in this section affects the powers of the Governor General, including the power to dissolve Parliament at the Governor General’s discretion.” Promising fixed dates is, um, disingenuous.

Now take the proposal to limit senators to eight-year terms … please. Its sugary coating of nonsense is that it could be enacted at all. Constitutional changes affecting provincial interests require an amending process that, deliberately or not, is unworkable. And a more effective Senate with current seat distribution would harm under-represented provinces such as B.C., while changing that distribution would harm overrepresented ones such as P.E.I. and, oh, what’s that one where they speak French that’s occasionally a constitutional issue?

Its bitter core is the Senate’s function as a chamber of sober second thought that can delay rash initiatives and improve technically faulty legislation but not obstruct the House. If various reforms give it democratic legitimacy, how shall we break a Senate-Commons deadlock? With fixed election dates we couldn’t even dissolve the House to give a new one the moral force of a fresh mandate. And you can’t dissolve the Senate, period.

The National Post editorially praised eight-year terms primarily as “a signal that more fundamental reforms may be in store.” If you want to send a signal use semaphore. Violating constitutional principles to show you care is a recipe for disaster. Like Tony Blair reforming the House of Lords right into a cash-for-peerage scandal. Or compromising Canadian senators’ independence by urging them, before voting, to consider what lobbying or patronage job they might need in eight years.

Shredding the Constitution is boring. But it’s still vandalism.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]