It wasn’t really my preference to see Elizabeth May defeat David Chernushenko as Green party leader. I’m not sure she has the right stuff. But as a deepish ecologist, I hope my fears prove unfounded. I mean it. I’ve dined out on one-upping David Suzuki, when he confessed to having a TV at his cottage, by haughtily saying that ours has no electricity. To me the saddest scene in The Lord of the Rings is when the hobbits return to the Shire and find the trees cut down, the river polluted and factories spewing filth. I could vote for a real Green party with a real Green philosophy.

That means a radically different “small-is-beautiful” way of looking at the world. It has more in common with freemarket economics than most supporters of either like to think about. For instance, in principle neither likes huge impersonal systems that treat society like a machine and humans like cogs. But then both should loathe central planning.

My fear for Canada’s Green party is perfectly encapsulated in the jibe about “watermelons,” green outside and red inside. Too often concern for the environment is simply a cover for wanting control, an orc-like impulse to seize, regiment and crush. Too many Greens are green because they hate people, not because they love nature.

Let me give three ugly examples. First, foreign policy. Can one rationally doubt that the Green party will favour the enemies of the West? During the Cold War environmentalists made a huge fuss, not unreasonably, about the environment in their own societies. But they tended to link capitalism and “bourgeois” democracy to ecological catastrophe while Marxism turned the Soviet Union into a toxic waste dump 12 time zones wide. China today is an environmental disaster. Saddam Hussein drained Iraq’s vast ancient marshes. A rational Green party should embrace freedom because man loves nature but those who would dominate and stomp on man do not.

Next, socialized medicine. Can one rationally doubt that the Green party supports it? But it’s a vast, impersonal engine, processing human units, treating diseases not patients, denying doctors the time, resources or institutional freedom to know those in their care as complete, real individuals. If small is beautiful, the Canada Health Act is hideous.

Finally, abortion. Can one rationally doubt that the Green party will be staunchly pro-choice and pro-contraception? Yet the first is technologically violent and the second fills a woman’s body with chemicals to disrupt her natural cycles so a man can take his pleasure of her at will. What sort of Earth Mother Goddess favours scalpels, swingers and sterility?

I’d love to be wrong here. A pro-nature party that was also pro-life might shake up politics in a truly interesting way. One that grinds its teeth and snarls about patriarchy will just annoy from the fringes. Which would be bad for everybody.

We still have major environmental problems, like light pollution. At our cottage, nine kilometres from the nearest road, you still brush your teeth by candlelight and see the Milky Way. But lately the southern night sky has been invaded by man-made light, chasing away the stars. I think it’s from Barrie, 60 km away. I can’t even believe Barrie is nicer for blasting out this many lumens, let alone that the gains justify the cost. For this and many other reasons including cancerous urban sprawl, cities must be made more humane. But we need remedies, not nagging.

In Wednesday’s Citizen Andrew Potter heckled the Chrétien/Martin Liberals for ignoring incentives in trying to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. And while I’m a skeptic on the greenhouse effect, especially since now it apparently causes glaciers to grow as well as shrink, those who believe in it should seek practical responses. A real Green philosophy would understand that in markets, as in ecosystems, available resources draw creatures into niches and require them to adapt. It would insist on full-cost pricing of all resources, not drivel about commodification.

I have met Elizabeth May and found her not immune to the temptations of sanctimony. I do not know whether she can perform effectively in politics, supplanting the sterile NDP on the left and forcing Liberals and Conservatives to think more philosophically and more nobly about policy. But I hope so.

A revitalized, philosophical Green party would contribute more than just environmental sanity. It would help combat the overarching modern tendency to treat humans as bits of a machine. And it would force other parties to sharpen their thinking instead of their tongues. Slapping a coat of pale green paint on the rusting hulk of big-government, mechanistic socialism will provide no such benefits.

I can’t vote for that.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Ten years ago, Tony Blair’s triumph looked world-historic. He seemed like a real-life Jed Bartlet, TV’s West Wing dream liberal Democrat with a social conscience, a Nobel Prize in economics and a backbone in foreign policy. And, philosophically, Blair’s “third way” offered what progressives had long sought: anti-conservative politics that didn’t spell immediate economic, social and diplomatic catastrophe. A decade on, Blair is in horrible political trouble (his press secretary has made it clear that Blair will resign sometime next year, at the latest) and his third way looks like the biggest bust since Y2K. John O’Sullivan, the Liverpool-born former adviser to Margaret Thatcher and National Review editor-at-large, concedes that Blair rescued the Labour party from antediluvian Marxism. But, he says, it was politically necessary to accept “the Thatcher legacy... or they would never have got back into power.” In his famous 1999 “Forces of Conservatism” speech, Blair told Labour’s Bournemouth conference: “The class war is over,” and rejected accusations of mimicking Tory economic policy by puckishly boasting he’d gone further, cutting deficits and “at long last reforming welfare, making work pay more than benefit for hard-working families.” But he wasn’t a conservative; he promised “A New Britain” because “New Labour, confident at having modernised itself . . . can modernise the nation, sweep away those forces of conservatism to set the people free.” A key passage: “The Third Way is not a new way between progressive and conservative politics. It is progressive politics distinguishing itself from conservatism of left or right.”

It sure sounded good. Progressive governance summits were irresistible to trendy people like the U.S.’s Bill Clinton and Canada’s Paul Martin. And while Blair warned in 1999 that Labour had never won two straight elections, he has won three and his foes are still in disarray. But so now is his government.

Britain, and Labour, were already starting to find him smarmy and hyper rather than charming and energetic when, this March, the “cash-for-peerages” scandal erupted. Labour “modernized” the House of Lords by abolishing hereditary peers as lawmakers and was soon caught apparently trading upper house seats for “loans” that violated campaign finance laws. On July 11, the theatrical arrest of a top Blair fundraiser, Lord Levy, brought the mess to 10 Downing Street. But politicians come and go. The bigger crisis is ideological.

There are three key aspects of governance: national security, social policy and the economy. Pre-Blair Labour was hideously weak on all three. But New Labour has proved no better. First, taxes are skyrocketing. In 2003, local government minister Nick Raynsford admitted that year’s 13 per cent increase in local taxes in Britain had reached the “limit of acceptability” for many. But they kept rising, and have almost doubled since Labour took over. Inflation-adjusted public spending is also up, from £361 billion in 1997 to £516 billion by 2007 (from 37 to over 40 per cent of GDP), yet the pension system approaches insolvency.

Disaster has also struck public health care. New Labourites read Adam Smith and were determined to bring market mechanisms into public monopolies. But their reforms have gone wrong. Spending is up from £55.8 billion in 2002-2003 to a projected £90.2 billion in 2007-2008. Yet hospitals cancel non-urgent surgery to hit budget targets and turn away high-risk patients to protect quality “ratings,” while harried doctors whisk patients through quick “assessments,” then park them in corridors for long secondary waits because the state penalizes hospitals who don’t see 98 per cent of ER cases within four hours. Labour’s wonks turn out not to have grasped that market planning is all plan and no market.

Blair has also been beaten on school reform, even though the system spends four times as much per student as in 1950 to leave a quarter functionally illiterate after 11 years’ compulsory schooling, while a quarter who make it to university think 1066 is when the Romans invaded Britain. Yet the government plans to run schools from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. as a daycare system, impose a national curriculum on kids under three, weigh primary school kids and possibly give them compulsory sex-ed too.

Socially, the third way has been an even bigger bust. Britain is awash in antisocial behaviour; satirical police pamphlets advise women to shave their legs so they’ll look good when they pass out drunk and disheveled, while posh London districts stink of urine. Blair feels people’s pain, but you can’t stop binge drinking, rioting and littering when you are so viscerally hostile to stuffy old stiff-upper-lip/just-isn’t-done Britain that you squander dwindling political capital attacking fox hunting.

Worse, with violent crime way up since 1950, the director of Britain’s Civitas think-tank wrote this June, “We are a high-crime society with a complacent government.” Famously, after Labour confiscated handguns, Tony Martin, a farmer who’d been robbed dozens of times, shot and killed a burglar with 29 prior convictions and got a life sentence (later reduced to five years), and the crook’s relatives tried to sue him. A press release this July 20 started, “Home Secretary John Reid today set out plans to make sure the law is on the side of the decent, law-abiding majority.” But after 10 years it’s no longer credible. Especially after the Home Office admitted it accidentally freed over a thousand foreign criminals, including murderers, rapists and pedophiles, it was meant to consider deporting instead, and has no idea where they went.

Conservatives think one bright spot is foreign policy. The left generally agrees, calling Blair “Bush’s poodle.” His response to 9/11 was magnificent; he’s been there in Afghanistan and Iraq. But he has failed in five significant ways. First, he has not persuaded Britons to share his enthusiasm for the “special relationship” with America. Second, he’s under-funded the military and just abolished the oldest active unit in the world, the Royal Scots. Third, his politically correct instincts expose combat soldiers to the hazards of rampant human rights law; Col. Tim Collins, whose inspirational speech to his Royal Irish Regiment battalion before the second Iraq war reportedly hangs in the White House (“We go to liberate, not to conquer” ), was harassed over unsubstantiated allegations of pistol-whipping a Baath party official. Cleared, promoted and honoured, Collins quit in disgust. Fourth, John O’Sullivan notes, Blair has quietly pushed British doctrine and procurement away from compatibility with the U.S. military toward the European Defence Force. Fifth, he never attempts to explain or justify policy with reference to Britain’s national interest.

Like most postmoderns, Blair is not a loyal man. His Cool Britannia campaign was driven by visceral embarrassment at the parochial traditions that made Britain great. “When did he ever praise Britain?” O’Sullivan asks. “He doesn’t like the country.” He adds that Blair balanced economical moderation with radicalism in other areas, including creating “a real dog’s breakfast” constitutionally that inflamed Scottish/English antagonism. Meanwhile, Blair sneakily persists in submerging British sovereignty in the EU, despite occasional outrage when Eurodirectives ban New Zealand’s famous Anchor butter from British tables or London’s double-deckers are phased out to meet an EU deadline for wheelchair-accessible buses by 2016. And through a snobbish, rather than intellectual, persuasion that whatever offends old insular John Bull must be good, while fighting terror abroad, New Labour pursued multicultural policies that created “Londonistan” at home.

Distressing to conservatives, the third way is simply uninteresting to the left. Canadian Auto Workers president Buzz Hargrove says it means “forgetting about the values and the principles that the Labour party was built on” and instead “just seek power for the sake of power and float with the opinion polls,” including that Blair “hasn’t rolled back any of the anti-union laws that Maggie Thatcher brought in.” To his dismay, Hargrove thinks this approach has tainted progressive politics here: “The NDP in Canada has followed that route since Blair got elected, moving more and more to watch the polls and respond to whatever the centre of the political spectrum is,” instead of trying to move voters left. For instance, he says, in the last election, Jack Layton endorsed mandatory minimum sentences “in response to what people around Jack were saying the polls were showing,” instead of arguing for “support and mentoring” alternatives because jail turns vulnerable young people into hardened criminals. Meanwhile the recent Euston Manifesto (eustonmanifesto.org) signed in London by an international group of democratic progressives makes no mention of Blair or his philosophy.

There is, in short, no third way. Blair managed to destroy much that was valuable, but put nothing in its place. The Blair years were as fictional as the West Wing, and when he goes, it goes.

[First published in Western Standard]

William Levitt, the American founder of prefab suburbia, once said “no man who owns his own house and lot can be a communist. He has too much to do.” Perhaps. On the other hand, by the time he’s finished doing it all he’ll certainly be poor enough to become one. And possibly bitter enough as well. Take me, for instance. I recently put a new roof on my shed. It’s so lovely that if you ever come to my house and fail spontaneously to praise it I will throw you out. The previous owners apparently felt that if they ignored moisture it would ignore them, so the stench of decay and the steady pitter-patter inside the shed of little bits of dirt that was probably once wood couldn’t mean anything. Surprisingly, this approach proved flawed.

About 300 screws and 900 nails later, the roof looked as good as my arms and legs looked bad. Did you know ladders can bruise? Homeowners do. If you come over for dinner I will serve it in the shed. It’s very dry now. And you will notice that, of course, the new roof is so splendid it throws the rest of the structure into hideous relief. We need to replace the doors which we can’t do until we replace the decaying doorframe into which we would have to screw the new hinges if the relevant bits hadn’t fallen off last November. So first we have to do something about the posts to which the frame is attached. And the walls, parts of which might soon fall onto the busted-up cement floor. Unless they smash what’s left of the windows. Oh the door bone’s connected to the frame bone, and the frame bone’s connected to the wall bone, now shout the name of the Lord.

Water. There’s a problem to hand off to a landlord. Instead it’s dripping on me like the Chinese water torture. (Note: ask editor if this phrase is politically incorrect; if so substitute “Oriental hydrating experience.”) The previous owners were as insouciant about water in the house as in the shed, especially the downstairs bathroom with plain, moisture-absorbent drywall. Between seepage from outside, from the shower and from a toilet they felt should leak gently on the floor for a decade just because, we ended up with mould that would have made H.P. Lovecraft blanch. Several weeks of hammering, crowbarring, hauling, chucking and (I kid you not) shovelling out what was left of the old underfloor, plus an exquisite encounter with the ruins of a toilet wax ring, and all I have to do is remove a cabinet, the tile ceiling, a mess of wires and a few cubic feet of cement so we can redo our rubble walls (only homeowners know what those are). And just like that, I’ll have a perfect bathroom as soon as I pay a contractor to install it, for little more than all the money I saved doing the shed myself, everything I haven’t been saving for my vacation and the stuff I’ll get from robbing a bank.

Instead I stuck my head up the chimney and fixed the cracks in the fireplace bricks and mortar. Rumour has it seeping fire is even worse than seeping water. What could go wrong? I bought specialty goop that said on the label “designed to seal fire rated service penetrations” though some larky store employee added a sticker on top saying “ATTENTION! THIS SEALANT IS DESIGNED FOR NON FIRE RATED…” Seriously. That’s how it ends. Along, possibly, with my house.

Before setting it on fire by fixing the fireplace, though, I had to set it on fire by repairing the stove. Have you ever seen a stove element turn bright yellow in one spot and flare up? I have. Homeowners get to see such visions. So, having fixed the stove, I now only need to replace it. The dishwasher I’ll probably just replace without fixing.

I could escape these troubles up a tall ladder to try to empty the gutters of a decade of loathsome junk, and plunge to my death. But if I do, my wife insists I take great care not to hit the back porch on the way down as it is creaking ominously and probably could not withstand the high-velocity impact of a plummeting homeowner due to an amusing renovation involving fewer, thinner supports.

Luckily I won’t be dealing with any of that soon, because I’m pretty sure whatever lives in the front porch roof has done enough damage (something’s seeping and it ain’t water, if you get my drift) that several boards are about to fall off, dropping startled starlings, a rowdy raccoon, a bewildered badger or possibly six skunks onto the heads of visitors. If I were you, I’d head right round the back to the shed, whose roof is solid. I think.

We’ll be hosting a meeting of the Communist League. Oh, and bring a trowel if you have one, to help patch holes in the wall left by the electrician so we can paint the upstairs.

P.S. Know anything about removing wallpaper?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Former Chinese Communist premier Chou En-lai’s famous statement that it was too soon to evaluate the French Revolution never impressed me. Surely it is obvious that everybody lost. And while it really is still too early to evaluate the Lebanese war of 2006, it’s clearly heading in the same direction. The conflicting claims of the warring parties are superficially uninstructive. Of course Hezbollah and its backers claim a glorious victory. They always do. Mideast radicals think they’ve won every war with Israel, first in 1948 by confining it to a small contiguous area, then in 1967 by pushing it to the banks of the Jordan and the southern tip of Gaza and finally in 1973 by forcing some Israeli units clear across the Suez canal.

Israeli deputy prime minister Shimon Peres’ assessment that the IDF killed or wounded roughly half of Hezbollah’s hardcore members is probably fairly accurate while Hezbollah’s claim to have lost only 80 fighters is an obvious typical lie. But Peres’ further claim that Hezbollah must now lick its wounds doesn’t exactly amount to a shout of triumph.

You should also ignore most of what the press is saying. The New York Times, for instance, led off its e-mail bulletin Wednesday with “Hezbollah Leads Work to Rebuild, Gaining Stature.” Right. First in war, first in peace and first in the hearts of countrymen. (The day before, a Times “News Analysis” told us: “For the moment, Hezbollah is bathed in a heroic light, not just in Lebanon but throughout the Muslim world.” And you thought Alexandre Trudeau’s Castro embarrassment in Sunday’s Toronto Star was Radio Moscow’s last broadcast.) A Tuesday National Post “Analysis” piece told us “Hezbollah has arguably emerged from the war stronger and more influential.”

If a quarter of the IDF were dead and another quarter wounded I doubt we’d be hearing how Israel had kicked butt. But the conflicting claims point to a deeper truth. In clashes between West and Rest, the latter typically yell about glorious God-given victories to the last kamikaze while the former ponder what went wrong as they straddle the vanquished foe. I remember my PhD advisor commenting that there’d been more scholarly battles after the Second World War than military ones during it and adding with a chuckle that by the time you read all the revisionism you wondered if we even won. If Hezbollah and its backers want to do it all again because they think they won, and Israel wants to do it all again because they think they didn’t, both will probably get their wish. But only one will improve its performance.

That the world acted decisively to impose a ceasefire once Israel got good and ready for a ground war suggests Hezbollah was already starting to take a pounding. But it is all too probable that most people in the region really do think Hezbollah won a great victory. That Arab governments, and the “Arab street,” seem as unable as the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail to carry out elementary strategic analysis, to recognize when they are going to lose a war or even that they just lost one, is a source of profound misery to Arabs. But what is anyone else meant to do about it?

Not what they just did. The “international community” looks like the big loser again. Israel was strong-armed into accepting UN ceasefire resolution 1701, including a commitment to disarm Hezbollah. But Hezbollah immediately refused to comply. The Lebanese defence minister said Tuesday his job was to “ensure the security of the (Islamic) Resistance and citizens, to protect the victory of the resistance.” And, as I wrote a month ago, France is not going to send soldiers to shoot Hezbollah or watch it shoot Israel. So the “international community” promised Israel if it stopped its invasion it would disarm Hezbollah. Israel did, and now it’s “Sorry, we lied, death to Jews.”

It looks like the characteristic alliance between the weak and the evil founded, as G.K. Chesterton said, on agreement between the militarist and the pacifist that aggression should not be resisted. (To be fair, some of the governments involved are both weak and evil.) This alliance, it is not premature to say, historically benefits the evil far more than the weak. So barring sudden spine growth, the West will have sacrificed moral principle for geopolitical disadvantage, which, if it’s not a defeat, will do until a defeat comes along. If nothing else it will convince the “Israeli street” there is no one to talk to among Palestinians, Arabs or Europeans. If 1701 is a cheap trick to save Hezbollah to fight another day, it won’t work twice. And why would you want it to?

In short, if Hezbollah keeps its weapons we’ll know everybody lost. Which, this being the Middle East, is a conclusion you rarely have to wait long to reach.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Oh, here’s a cheerful summertime story. You can buy your kid a T-shirt with “Sugar Free Baby” on it. If you’re what the National Post’s Body & Health section calls “a vigilant yet playful” parent. It also works if you’re a sanctimonious hovering killjoy. The Post article said to “Call it radical parenting.” I’m willing to call slapping polemical slogans on your kid radical, but I’m not so sure about the parenting bit. The source of this sartorial equivalent of cod liver oil is a Toronto mom who says if her two-year-old has cake at a birthday party “he becomes kind of aggressive and just not the [name withheld to avoid mortifying the infant] we’re used to.” So when he is “around other kids and with other parents or child-care providers, they just need to know he can’t have three cookies and he can’t have two Popsicles because he might get unruly.”

Right. And an unruly little boy at a birthday party would be: (a) fun; (b) the end of western civilization; (c) not very feminist; (d) something a hypersensitive parent might not want so never mind the kid. Wait a minute. How did option (d) get in there?

Well, this organic helicopter mom says when her kid wears his modern equivalent of a hair shirt, other parents “understand how much it’s a sensitivity for him and they respect that.” But it’s not a sensitivity for him. It’s a sensitivity for her. As she admits, “He doesn’t really have a concept of his sensitivity to sugar,” adding “We’ve had to cleanse the house of sugar on our own account as well because it was pretty duplicitous of us to have sugar when he couldn’t.”

Why? Does sugar make you aggressive too? Isn’t that why you deprive your child of this pleasure? Or is there something darker going on here? Is pleasure (gasp) a sin? Nowadays we make great mock of the Puritans for being killjoys, then an actor playing Churchill in Edinburgh is forbidden to light a cigar the script requires him to smoke. Not, I dare say, the England Winston was fighting to keep … what’s that word … free. And when we’re forbidden to smoke on covered outdoor patios I can’t help recalling H.L. Mencken’s jibe about Puritans’ “haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

G.K. Chesterton, who made the sign of the cross over every withdrawn cigar band, once said “A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.” Like a kid getting all happy at a party while eating a bit of cake. I say if you’re going to mount a tireless crusade against sin the very least you can do is admit it exists. A perilous step, to be sure, because you might happen to glance in a mirror and …

Chesterton also spent a lifetime arguing against errors in pairs, like either raising your kid on junk food or primly forbidding them chocolate cake at some other kid’s birthday. There is a golden mean. I expect that excess in moderation actually prolongs life, and do you really want a long dismal one anyway? Isn’t 95 years without cake a bit like always winter and never Christmas?

The whole thing is also stupid because there’s sugar in fruit. And tomatoes (technically a fruit but let’s not get pedantic). Heck, there’s probably sugar in broccoli.

Yup, there is. I checked. One medium (148 g) stalk of green death contains three massive sinister grams, enough to turn your passive little angel into Genghis Party. So how about “Broccoli-Free Baby” shirts? But no, the kid might actually want that.

In the Citizen on July 30, Deirdre McMurdy denounced interactive DVDs that let you change how movies end, rightly worrying about children who don’t learn early that life contains its share of disappointments (I expect kids who have to watch everyone else eat the birthday cake won’t have that problem). But, denying she’s a complete Luddite, she made the marvellous observation, “Show me a child without a Gameboy, cellphone or Tamagotchi, and I’ll show you someone who’s got a lunch you’d never want to trade.” So maybe I’ll sell shirts saying “I’m not allowed to trade my lunch … not that you’d want it” or “I’m with hysterical” and an arrow pointing over and up. If you find my criticisms absurd, you can swaddle your little bundle of non-sweetness in anti-fun garments purchased on-line at Pleasedontfeedmykidsugar.com. Meanwhile I might call mine Grimanduptight.arg.

Chesterton also said “the Puritans killed St. George but carefully preserved the Dragon.” Today they might think twice because by killing it St. George stopped the dragon from smoking. But since the politically correct do seem infested with dragons and devoid of heroes maybe I’ll sell T-shirts with St. George standing over the beast quaffing a guilt-free beer.

If you can’t swallow my slogans and images, I invite you to consume the garments instead. High fibre, no fat or sugar, enriched with sanctimony.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Dreamland. It’s a bad name for the Middle East. Dreamland, though, is a very good title for Roy Rempel’s 2006 book about “Canada’s pretend foreign policy.” (Disclaimer: I helped edit it and have an ongoing relationship with the publishers, while Roy now works for Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day.) On reading it I added a “dreamland” category to my files and it gets bigger each day.

Dreamland is a place where the enemies of the West cannot be defeated militarily or politically and Canada is a neutral nation that speaks with a voice like thunder. Where something called “pressure” is forever building on right-wing politicians to do what left-wing journalists want and we trust news stories filed under the watchful eye of Hezbollah guys with guns. And Michael Ignatieff, a certified Deep Thinker, just hurled a thick sheaf of nonsense into my file with his Aug. 1 statement on the Middle East.

One cannot even take seriously his initial warning that “Hezbollah’s strategy is to lure Israel into an escalation of violence that will radicalize the Arab world and cause Israel to lose its remaining international support.” Would that be the Arab world where the grand mufti of Jerusalem spent the Second World War in Berlin urging Hitler to bomb Tel Aviv? Where the secretary-general of the Arab League in 1948 predicted “a war of extermination and a momentous massacre”? Where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is widely available, government newspapers explain how Jews put the blood of gentile children in Purim pastries, and the answer to any problem from corruption to poverty is a public chant of “Death to Israel, Death to America”? Shall we take policy advice from a man who fears the consequences if these people now get “radicalized”? Phooey.

Mr. Ignatieff predictably continues: “In this terrible struggle, Israel cannot win, Hezbollah cannot lose and Lebanon perishes.” Why can’t Israel win? It’s won every war so far. But our new leading public intellectual blithers on: “In the 1990s, the Clinton administration managed to keep all parties focused on a peace process leading to a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” Say, didn’t that process end at Camp David in 2000 with Yassir Arafat rejecting a two-state solution, denying the Temple of Solomon ever stood on the Temple Mount and launching the second intefadeh?

Next we get Mr. Ignatieff’s own “solution” that, improbably, manages to be even more absurd: “Canada … should call for an immediate ceasefire, authorized by the Security Council. It should line up with the Europeans and moderate Arab states … Israeli forces would withdraw, aerial bombardment would cease and Hezbollah would stop rocket attacks and incursions into Israeli territory. Once a cease-fire has taken hold, Canada should propose the deployment of an international naval, air and land force to prevent the movement of missiles and other military technology into Lebanon…. authorized by the UN Security Council to seize any weapons destined for Hezbollah or any non-state actor … Such a force would not engage in direct confrontation with Hezbollah or with the Israelis but patrol a buffer zone between them.” We’re lost in the “woulds” of dreamland here. Hezbollah won’t stop trying to kill Jews until someone does “engage in direct confrontation” with them. It’s the whole reason we’re in this mess.

Mr. Ignatieff winds up (or down): “As a nation of immigrants from the zones of war, we have a special vocation for peace, and it is by exercising this vocation that we maintain our unity as a people. We have a voice that other countries listen to. Let us use it.” I didn’t even know most of us came from war zones, and if other countries listen to our voice, how come Cuba got more votes for the new UN Human Rights Council than we did? But see, it doesn’t matter. It’s not about the Middle East. It’s about us. We maintain our unity as a people by yelling into our own navels in response to foreign crises. It’s both goofy and repellent.

Anyway, our House of Commons foreign affairs committee just voted not to endorse the European Union call for a “sustainable ceasefire.” The word “sustainable” was excluded because, said NDP foreign affairs critic Alexa McDonough, “The whole point is to stop the killing now.” The whole point? People in politics often disregard the long run, but outside dreamland they generally don’t boast about it.

In Reality World, Israel’s prime minister says he’ll accept a ceasefire once the international force deploys. Which will be when it’s ready to confront Hezbollah directly or after Israel finishes doing so.

Sorry, Mr. Ignatieff. There’s no snooze button here. You have to wake up.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Against Judicial Activism: The Decline of Freedom and Democracy in Canadaby Rory Leishman McGill-Queens University Press $44.95

Do our courts and human rights tribunals now threaten our freedom? This careful book by veteran journalist Rory Leishman soberly lays out the reasons for thinking they do.

Leishman, a long-time London Free Press columnist, starts by confessing that in 1981 he vocally supported the proposed Charter of Rights and Freedoms and human rights codes. Then he carefully frames the questions that led him to change his mind: Have these legal instruments allowed courts and tribunals to usurp the legislative function, depriving us of democracy, and subjected us to arbitrary rulings, depriving us of freedom? And he marshals impressive evidence that they have.

The result is anything but lurid. Indeed, it requires patience from the reader, not because it is badly written but because jurisprudence is inherently dry and technical. But those who object to shouting and bumper-sticker arguments should welcome his methodical approach regardless of their stand on the issue.

Which need not be conservative. Leishman grants Canadian Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin’s complaint that the dispute “often reduces itself to a debate about whether one likes or does not like a particular judicial decision.” But he cites the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal ordering the Vancouver Lesbian Connection to let a man join, as well as other cases — like that of expelled teacher Delwin Vriend who lost his job because he was homosexual — to support his claim that, facing a bewildering series of conflicting rulings with no evident basis in written law, common law or the manifest intentions of legislators, no one now knows where they stand. Not citizens and not “experts” like then Justice Minister Irwin Cotler who, in December 2004, erroneously assured Parliament that secular marriage commissioners would not have to marry same-sex couples.

Leishman also underlines a curious feature of the debate, namely that defenders of judicial activism do not defend it. Instead they deny it exists. Judges may read the Charter reference to “the supremacy of God” as establishing “the essential secular nature of Canadian society” or cheerfully say a ruling “does not involve the strict application of legal rules or the interpretation of law.” But former Supreme Court Justice Bertha Wilson expressly warned, “There would be something deeply illegitimate about our forays into judicial review of legislation if all there was to them was a desire to substitute our own personal values for those of our duly elected representatives,” less than three months after helping strike down abortion in the 1988 Henry Morgentaler case, in which seven judges split four ways. A decade later, Antonio Lamer gave an account of his reasoning that flatly contradicted his written judgment at the time.

Likewise, a week after the Ontario Court of Appeal found a right to homosexual marriage in the Charter in its Halpern ruling, Chief Justice McLachlin told the Canadian Club, “Unlike politicians, judges do not have agendas.” Yet that same month, two of the three Halpern judges attended a Pride Week party where gay activists congratulated them. To deny the obvious suggests an uneasy conscience.

One part of Leishman’s case is not convincing. He puts too much blame on Canadian judges and too little on the accidental constitutional revolution brought on by passage of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. He calls the Supreme Court inconsistent for refusing to strike down Canada’s abortion laws in 1976, under the Bill of Rights, then doing so under a superficially similar Charter clause in 1988. But he is wrong to reject former Chief Justice Brian Dickson’s claim that the 1960 Bill of Rights explicitly recognized existing rights whereas “The language of the Charter is imperative. It avoids any reference to existing or continuing rights” in favour of a “ringing” proclamation of “fundamental freedoms.”

One might hesitate to exempt from checks and balances anyone who, like Chief Justice McLachlin, publicly says she and her colleagues “embody the most valuable qualities of impartiality, empathy and wisdom.” But the Constitution may not give us any choice. In 1982, the prime minister, premiers and Parliament abolished parliamentary sovereignty of the British sort without creating popular sovereignty of the American sort. By mistake, but unmistakably, they vested supreme power in a non-elected conception of the public good, a constitutional disorder not unknown in human affairs but never before seen in a democracy.

As a result, judicial activism in Canada is even harder to stop than Leishman thinks. Which is unfortunate, because his careful book makes it very hard to deny that it’s a major problem.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Aaaaah, summer. Time to lie back in a hammock with a cold drink and contemplate blood, devastation, death, war and horror with the aid of a few good books. Like Edward Luttwak’s 1976 The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. I stumbled upon it in a used-book store and bought it, intrigued that an acute observer of Soviet affairs should have tackled this subject. Like Luttwak, I happen to think Rome is cool. It offers many insights into good government (the Empire was surprisingly successful for surprisingly long) and bad (power-mad emperors and the simply mad kind) and the larger cultural benefits, and temptations, of wealth and leisure. But Rome, and Luttwak’s book, are especially interesting because they are removed from contemporary polemics but clearly related to current problems.

Rome’s rulers had to wage an essentially indefinite war against forces of chaos that could be defeated in detail but not en masse. There would always be new barbarians appearing out of the mist on the other side of the Danube and, Luttwak notes, watching and learning dangerous lessons from Rome. The American political class is prone to the delusion that wars are either won quickly and overwhelmingly or else botched (our own political class suffers the even worse delusion that they have only to say “Hey everybody, play nice” and all that mean old war will stop and they will win another Nobel Peace Prize). We could usefully imitate the Romans’ strategic and tactical patience, especially given the chronic problems of unrest that they faced in the Tigris-Euphrates region and in and around Judea. But there’s more to life than statecraft … provided you don’t bungle the latter too badly.

So I’ve also been rereading C.S. Lewis’s “science fiction” trilogy whose first two volumes feature, respectively, a visit to the old world of Malacandra (Mars) where the Fall of Man (actually of Alien) never happened then a new one (Perelandra, or Venus) where it hasn’t yet. Lewis’s beautifully creative geography of his alien worlds somehow distracted some people (including me as a teen) from the essentially theological topic: First, what a culture might be like if there were no original sin, and second, how sin might be explained to, and imagined by, someone who had never felt it.

I do not recommend these books as “escapism” in the pejorative sense. I’m not suggesting you avoid engagement in public affairs. Nor am I trying to pose as well-rounded; I was but exercise and diet fixed it. I’m suggesting that good books cast light surprisingly far beyond their ostensible topics. For instance, the point of Lewis’s fictional devices in the Perelandra series is to help you, if you dare, to compare your own actions and thoughts to a profoundly naïve, and naively profound, standard. Including what side you take in the Middle East and what you then do about it.

You may object that neither you nor I am in a position to do much of anything about the Middle East. But what could any one person do in the Second World War? You still have to try. I’ve warned before about living through history and thinking it’s current events. An additional virtue of the second book in Lewis’s trilogy, Perelandra, is its portrayal of a hero obliged to undertake a task for which he is preposterously illsuited and under-sized. Isn’t private as well as public life full of them?

Turning from my books to the newspapers, I see where Condoleezza Rice just said we need a new Middle East. To paraphrase Marvin the Paranoid Android, “Oh no, not another one.” Wasn’t the first bad enough? Besides, a new Jerusalem I’ve heard of, but I seem to have mislaid my “New Regions for Dummies” where it says how you make those. On the other hand, there are lots of good books on the Middle East, from Bernard Lewis’s The Middle East to Paul Johnson’s A History of the Jews to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s surprisingly strong history of Israel, The Siege. (You can also read the Hamas Charter if you have a strong stomach). But my last Middle East in Flames book club selection is Raymond Chandler.

His heroes, such as Philip Marlowe, would know how to handle Hezbollah terrorists. Two slugs for himself (whiskey) and three more for them (lead). And in his 1944 essay “The Simple Art of Murder” Chandler wrote: “But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid.” Chandler was personally a bit tarnished by booze. But it’s still very good advice.

Including in the Middle East.

•

In my last column I misstated the time between Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, completed in September 2005, and Ariel Sharon’s incapacitating stroke, in January 2006.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]