How many events have I endured at the Ottawa Congress Centre? They blur together for various reasons including that it’s a hideous venue. But if you tear it down, please don’t replace it with something worse.

Like the proposed replacement shown on the front page of Tuesday’s Citizen. Architecture is in a glass and steel box nowadays, capable only of endless variations on one building that should never have been built except as a warning. So if you didn’t see that picture, close your eyes and try to imagine it.

Exactly. First floor set back behind those wretched pillars called “pilotis,” steel and blue-green glass, structural members emphasized, minimal decoration, severe inhumane spaces. Horrible to look at and worse to be in. There is another way.

In 1966 Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture bravely defied the triumphant modernist maxim “Less is more,” saying too often “Less is a bore.” Maybe you didn’t read the book. But you live in the city. Besides, the nation’s capital is supposed to be a showcase, yet the people in charge have made a dog’s breakfast of the downtown. So we hicks have a right to be heard demanding better.

The Citizen article quoted Congress Centre board chair Jim Durrell that they’d considered moving out to LeBreton Flats but the current site was just too good. He meant too convenient to the canal, Parliament and the Rideau Centre. But don’t stop there. As the Citizen said, one attraction of the proposed replacement would be a splendid top floor view of the Parliament Buildings.

Great. Not just a famous Ottawa landmark, they are among the most beautiful buildings in all of Canada. So look at them. Really look. Now suppose you were building a major facility nearby. Get any ideas for a suitable style? Hint: The Chateau Laurier has a mediaeval feel. Another hint: The neoclassical White House and Congress are gloriously echoed in the Washington Mall monuments. Heeeeey. We could be onto something here. And I’m in luck redesigning Ottawa because I prefer Gothic even to neoclassical.

I recently suggested this approach to Russ Mills, the National Capital Commission chair. Suppressing sudden headache symptoms, he asked if I really thought the mayor’s office should be in a castle. Yes. Yes I do. I want council meetings in the Great Hall and the mayor in a turret. I want a building suited to Ottawa. The current City Hall has no “Ottawa feel” and could be anywhere. But it shouldn’t.

Robert Venturi rightly scorns “Plop architecture,” where buildings don’t even try to accommodate themselves to their surroundings, geographical or architectural. The design in Tuesday’s Citizen makes one concession to the actual shape of the road access, the curved corner. Other than that, Plop. This trite glass building could as easily be in Toledo, Tokyo or Timmins. Forget the cult of the artist as genius on the purity of whose vision nothing should intrude. A major building should enhance its surroundings and be enhanced by them, not ignore or defile them.

Yes, yes, artistic renditions of the proposed building positively gleamed. Weirdly, in fact, since its western facade reflected the same midday sun busy rising in the pink eastern sky, thanks to a cheesy software effect I replicated in two minutes on an old picture of a beat-up birdhouse. It’s cute, but it doesn’t mean we should put my birdhouse on Colonel By Drive.

Beware also what happens when the shine is off. As American architect Joseph Giovannini recently warned, “Something about modernist buildings keeps them from aging with grace. They do not look better patinated by time, nor more picturesque when barnacled with accretions. Their purity does not accept the accidental event that might add character on a traditional building.” Exactly unlike the Parliament Buildings.

Now let’s take Venturi inside. The current Congress Centre is indeed an awkward venue. But we need to understand what’s wrong so we don’t repeat it. Complexity and Contradiction notes another weakness of modernist architecture, its tendency to over-simplification, to “either-or” not “both-and.” Its spaces, intentionally, only do one thing. That’s bad.

The new centre must, of course, handle large events, such as political conventions, comfortably. But it should also work for smaller events. I don’t have a blueprint in my back pocket. But if we’re paying architects large fees it’s to solve difficult problems of site, function and aesthetics in satisfying ways. Really. I’m not joking.

So ditch the glass and steel and cheap graphical enhancements, and build us a convention castle.

Correction: Last week I misstated the party affiliation of NDP MP Yvon Godin.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It is not entirely clear whether you can vote with a paper bag over your head in Canada. But our MPs should consider it.

Unless you habitually go about with your eyes and ears covered, you’ll know the recent discovery that you can vote federally with your face concealed has caused great upset on Parliament Hill. Amid a flurry of denunciations, the House Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) unanimously urged Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand to reverse this ruling and, when he refused, unanimously summoned him to appear before them. To their shame, as it is their blunder, not his.

As Mr. Mayrand pointed out in a press conference this Monday, his job is to enforce the law not make it. The law as written does not require voters to unveil and, most crucially, as MPs just revised the Canada Elections Act this summer and didn’t incorporate any such requirement, it is not his place to read it in. Veiled voting was a prominent issue in the Quebec provincial election earlier this year and Mr. Mayrand personally drew parliamentarians’ attention to it in May, while the relevant Bill C-31 was before the Senate, and again in a conference call with representatives of the registered parties on July 26. Since MPs failed to act on it, he concludes, the constitutional protection of freedom of religion requires him to interpret the law permissively in this regard.

I found Mr. Mayrand less persuasive on two side issues. First, if MPs clearly indicate a determination to amend the law to forbid veiled voting at their earliest opportunity I think he not only can but must use his emergency powers to ban it in the Monday by-elections. Second, he told the press conference the rest of us could not vote with paper bags on our heads. But the Constitution protects freedom of conscience and speech as well as religion, so if veiled voting is permitted we should be able to wear other types of mask in, for instance, an orderly protest against bad electoral policy. Otherwise he was convincing.

Unlike MPs, who contrived further to disgrace themselves, no easy task in Ottawa nowadays. Tory Joe Preston said Mr. Mayrand should appear before PROC “and explain to us what he doesn’t understand about photo ID.” A Sept. 10 Bloc Québécois press release claimed (my translation) Parliament “has decided that from now on, all voters must identify themselves to vote at the federal level.” And the prime minister called C-31 “a law designed to have the visual identification of voters.” But it is they who do not understand, even after Mr. Mayrand publicly explained it, what the law they just wrote says.

Section 143 of the amended Canada Elections Act, for better or worse, specifies three ways of establishing your identity at the polling station. One is a piece of ID from some Canadian government bearing your name, address and photo, in which case you must show your face. But the second is “two pieces of identification authorized by the Chief Electoral Officer each of which establish the elector’s name and at least one of which establishes the elector’s address” but need not have photos. In which case there’s obviously no identification function served by showing your face. Anyway, the third is simply to be vouched for by someone who has established their own identity one of the first two ways. Plus, you can vote by mail which doesn’t involve photo ID or any other kind.

I do not think MPs should have written the law in this fashion. While Canadians are by and large honest, it is asking for trouble to permit voting with weaker security than you’d tolerate to rent a car. But that’s not the point here. Nor is the widespread and legitimate discomfort among Canadians with people who insist on covering their faces in dealings with strangers.

The point at present is that on an important issue most MPs seem incapable of perceiving their error, which speaks poorly of their intellect, or of admitting it, which speaks poorly of their character. To his credit NDP MP Yvon Godin has confessed that “maybe all parties should be kicking our own butts. We could have fixed it ourselves.” But the reaction of most of his colleagues has far more Bart Simpson than Edmund Burke in it.

One is tempted to ask if they cannot read the relevant statute. It’s not hard to find; Mr. Mayrand handed out copies at his press conference. But in any case the appropriate response is: Read the law? You wrote it.

If it turns out the paper bag is illegal, MPs could vote wearing dunce caps. I expect they’d fit nicely.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With an Ontario election campaign about to start, what I really want to ask the main party leaders is, “Would you please keep your wretched candidates from ringing my doorbell?” Like Ebenezer Scrooge, I do not conduct my affairs in the teeth of inclement weather. And I’m insulted that you think I’d decide how to vote based on a prepackaged porch pitch without clarifications of the sort candidates do not give while cold wind blows through the doorway onto my dinner. I’m interested in “why” questions, not “what” questions. I want to know why you politicians hold the positions you hold (or claim to) and why you think your solutions would actually work, especially if they’re things — like “Target health care funding where it is needed most” — that I’ve heard a dozen times before. So perhaps I can contribute a few more pertinent questions than “Would you please leave me alone?”, which I already know you might possibly do during the campaign if I bar the door and hide under the bed for the next 39 days but most certainly will not do once elected no matter what desperate measures I adopt.

I don’t even insist that your answers persuade me. I just want proof that you’ve thought about this stuff.

On health:

Mr. McGuinty, since health care now takes almost half the provincial budget yet many Ontarians have no family doctor, how high would its share have to go before you concede that the current system is unworkable?

Mr. Tory, your platform speaks of efficiencies, electronic records and healthy lifestyle choices, but if it’s so easy to fix the system, why hasn’t it been done already by governments panicked by escalating costs?

Mr. Hampton, would you like to see anything else important, such as food or cars, produced under the same basic conditions as health care in Ontario? Would you consider a Canada Food Act ridiculous, and why?

On education:

Mr. Tory, how do we keep publicly funded faith-based schools from teaching divisive or even hateful values?

Mr. Hampton, what right does the state have to pre-empt parents when it comes to their children’s moral education?

Mr. McGuinty, why is it divisive for anyone else to have their own publicly funded schools, but not for members of your religion?

On universities:

Mr. Hampton, why should taxpayers subsidize post-secondary tuition for middle-class kids to enjoy lucrative, prestigious careers?

Mr. McGuinty, should public universities restore a structured curriculum in the humanities instead of students choosing “cafeteria-style” from professors’ often exotic offerings?

Mr. Tory, why shouldn’t Ontario’s universities be privatized?

On energy:

Mr. Tory, how much waste does a modern nuclear plant produce in a year and where is it safe to get rid of it, and what kind of conservative would legally require an “energy audit” before a person could sell their house?

Mr. Hampton, how many of those “War of the Worlds” three-bladed windmills would we need to replace the coal-fired plants?

Mr. McGuinty, for years you’ve been promising to shut the coal-fired plants and haven’t pulled it off, so why should we believe anything else you say?

On infrastructure:

Mr. Hampton, if you’re not willing to divert billions from social programs, where would you get the money to pay for urgent road and water system work?

Mr. Tory, the Harris Tories loudly boasted that they had solved Ontario’s infrastructure woes, so what went wrong and why did their good intentions fail?

Mr. McGuinty, what are Ontario’s most pressing $5 billion in infrastructure needs?

On abortion:

Mr. McGuinty, how can you profess to be Roman Catholic yet support abortion?

Mr. Hampton, doesn’t abortion on demand favour the male swinger’s agenda over genuine respect for women?

Mr. Tory, could anything including the threat of immediate deportation to Neptune induce you to speak the word “abortion” in public, even favourably?

On philosophy:

Mr. McGuinty, how does your liberalism relate to that of John Stuart Mill?

Mr. Tory, how does your conservatism relate to that of Edmund Burke?

Mr. Hampton, how does your socialism relate to that of George Bernard Shaw?

One more, if I may, for all the leaders:

A few weeks back I suggested a reading list for aspiring politicians. And yes, I’d like to know if you’d read any of it. But my question here is what you’d recommend to young people interested in public affairs and seeking to educate themselves. What three books do you think they should read first, and why?

If you can answer these questions you won’t need to peddle banalities at my doorstep during dinner. And if you can’t, it won’t help you to try.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

While cement shatters across Quebec, Charlemagne’s late 8th-century chapel in Aachen Cathedral still stands firm. Perhaps we could go there and say a prayer to our Lady of Reinforced Concrete that our bridges, overpasses and underground slabs keeping buildings out of subways will last 1/20th as long. In The Story of Architecture Patrick Nuttgens calls Charlemagne’s chapel “The best example of what is called Carolingian architecture.” I don’t know if there’s much competition in that field. But it is magnificent: massive, sombre yet somehow uplifting, and built to last both physically and morally. Wouldn’t it be weird to be surrounded by stuff like that?

Parts of the main ancient Roman sewer remain in use. And Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza, the tallest building in the world for 40 centuries until eclipsed by the spire of Lincoln cathedral, still radiates mysterious serenity. A modern building is lucky to hold the title of world’s tallest for 40 months or be worth looking at for 40 seconds while it does.

To be fair to our own era we have, in the last 300 years or so, reasonably come to expect a steady stream of improvements in building materials and construction techniques. Why take the time and trouble to build something that will last thousands of years if it’s cheaper to tear it down and put up a better one in 50? It is telling that what urban planner Bill Risebero’s The Story of Western Architecture calls “the first important example in the world of the structural use of cast-iron” was a Severn River bridge in 1779 but within a century wrought iron and then steel had made cast iron bridges obsolete. Charlemagne wasn’t expecting anyone to invent better rock and at least until reinforced concrete in the 19th century no one did. But there’s something depressing about spending your life in throwaway buildings.

Or losing it. That cast-iron bridge still spans the Severn, unlike the notorious cement one in Minneapolis or Laval’s De la Concorde overpass. And many other such structures may be as unsafe as they are ugly. Twenty-two centuries ago Marcus Vitruvius Pollio wrote (in Henry Wotton’s delightful 16th-century translation) “Well-building has three conditions: commodity, firmness, and delight.” So how can constant improvement in materials and techniques have resulted in structures that are inconvenient, hideous and even dangerous?

Bill Risebero praises Frank Lloyd Wright’s innovative Larkin Company office building built in Buffalo in 1906 and demolished in 1950 (it is now a parking lot). Apparently it was nice if you saw it. Or not so much nice as different from older nice buildings in ways that pointed to even more hideous ones yet to come. Like the infamous Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex built in St. Louis in the 1950s. Using every modern theory about exterior design, interior design and the efficient packing of deprived human units, it swiftly became a vandalized den of filth and crime and in 1972 was blown up on national television to the cheers of spectators (it is now a vacant lot).

Or take the office cubicle … please. Ugly, unpleasant to work in and unhealthy, in a “sick” building that recirculates foul air while discouraging physical activity. Want to use the smelly, steep slippery staircase in the typical office building (assuming you can even find it)? I didn’t think so.

There is a profound aesthetic problem in a post-modern society. We no longer believe there is one basically right way to build things and instead dip into a grab bag of past styles at random or, at best, as a deliberate statement of our beliefs (Gothic, say, for Canadian conservatives; restrained neo-classical for Americans). And this problem arises in part because modern materials let us build almost anything in almost any shape, instead of being compelled by the strengths and weaknesses of wood or stone to combine structural and visual elegance. But I also think there’s something necessarily appalling about a morally empty architecture that doesn’t aspire to serve, delight or last.

Beneath it all, a place I try to avoid driving these days, I cannot help thinking that while Charlemagne personally may have needed a bath, his church/mausoleum stayed up in part because the people who build it thought it should be truly nice and nicely true. We, on the other hand, bow down before municipal cement in a landscape whence delight, commodity and even firmness seem to have fled.

Contemplating cities where a stroll is a nightmare and a drive potentially lethal I suggest a pilgrimage to Aachen, where we could learn to build solid, attractive delightful buildings. Or just pray that the ugly junk we’ve thrown together won’t fall down while we’re under it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

While I’m giving advice to politicians (and just try to stop me), might I recommend humility? As a partisan tactic, I mean.

OK, so pride is a deadly sin and humility might be good for the soul, if you have not sold yours or simply misplaced it. And fortunately in my job, I have to worry more about whether my advice is good than whether it’s palatable. Still, with one covetous eye on being listened to, let me sugar-coat this bitter pill by noting that the constant offensive braying in the political fray is turning voters off in ways you could exploit.

Now I quote Chesterton: “What makes the ordinary political partisan spiritually unconvincing is, not so much that he points out that his opponent is spotted, as that he implies that he himself is spotless.” I have never shared the widespread distaste, real or feigned, for negative political ads; as things stand, there is usually more truth in the bad things politicians say about their opponents than in the good things they say about themselves. But candidates could improve our choices, and their chances, by thinking a bit harder about spottiness including their own. We might even get better government.

In Wednesday’s City section, the Citizen editorially lamented the lack of discernable difference between the parties in the looming Ontario election, defying readers to guess from which platform they had plucked certain bromides about health care. The homogeneous paste on offer in campaigns is in part the result of too much focus-group guidance and too little principle. But it also derives from the undetected, rampant sin of pride.

A couple of weeks back, I furnished a reading list to give aspiring politicians some grasp of the issues behind the issues. But they are unlikely to pile such books on the bedside table as long as they genuinely believe the main problem in public life is that their opponents are callous bums and the remedy for almost anything that ails us is to elect their shining selves.

Might I single out Dalton McGuinty for a minute here? Oh good. Imagine if he were still in opposition, campaigning against a premier who’d made exactly the promises he made from not raising taxes to closing coal-fired plants, then broken them with the same smarmy air of rectitude. He’d be outraged. He’d thunder about hypocrisy and public trust. And he’d be right.

The question then becomes, why isn’t he the least bit ashamed now? How does he preserve not merely the facade but, I am persuaded, the sublime inner certitude that he is splendidly spotless?

OK, that’s not the question. I don’t care how he does it. I just want to know how we can stop electing politicians like that. John Tory doesn’t strike me as humbly focused on avoiding political temptation. And Howard Hampton appears to believe that belligerent self-righteousness is the answer to any policy problem (which, given his other resources, might be the safe choice). So how do we get people who acknowledge that there are powerful reasons why governments, of all stripes, tend to make similar bad decisions, and then explain in their campaign speeches and literature what they will do to avoid these errors?

In part the secret is that we must be willing to vote for those who confess to sin, who admit they too would be tempted by what has manifestly long tempted everyone holding the office they seek, from pandering to middle-class voters to seeking short-term gain, glossing over genuine governing difficulties and blithely waving off the laws of economics. But we can’t vote for them unless they run.

So my direct advice to politicians is: Stand up and say you know all problems will not disappear just because you’re the great you. Admit you’ve studied policy and have ideas on how to do things that go beyond preening before the mirror then uttering fatuous banalities while sneering at your wretched and uncaring adversaries.

If you’re not going to rely on superior personal qualities, you may have to fall back on superior understanding of the issues. And for many of you that would be a long drop indeed. But look on the bright side. It would make you more electable.

Cynics have long said sincerity is the key to politics and when you can fake it, you’re golden. The trouble is, everyone’s faking it now. Or worse. Public life is crowded with sincerely sanctimonious prats. But wake up and smell the opportunity. We voters are tired of egomaniacs who substitute imaginary rectitude for genuine policy.

So start faking humility. Who knows, you might develop a taste for it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Now that we’ve discussed the heck out of whether there will be a cabinet shuffle, when, who’s hot, not or forgot, and the optics of what actually did happen, can we talk about something else? Like the cabinet? No, really. I read the speculation (it’s my job). And I read the stories about who went up, down or sideways, plus insider commentary on key issues like Tory prospects in Quebec, their ability to sell the Afghan mission to voters and who introduced the prime minister to his wife. It’s like reality TV we have an excuse for watching. Without, fortunately, having to see Gordon O’Connor throw a fit wrapped in a towel.

Now we’re tired of it and ready to watch a sitcom — say, the zany antics of the New Ministers and their wacky neighbours, the Oppositions. Still, some high-end digital channel might air a nerdy show on the irrelevant question of what, exactly, qualifies various people for their cabinet posts.

Take Peter MacKay. Please. As you know, he was recently our foreign minister because he’d led the pre-merger Progressive Conservatives, remains a potential leadership contender and was not conspicuously prone to public gaffes, unless you count his recent slip on the Arctic ice when he warned Russia the North Pole was Canadian, a ringing declaration sadly not based in fact.

Maybe as defence minister he’ll do something about the Russian bombers now test-firing cruise missiles over this “Canadian” territory. Or not. But I digress. My point is that nothing in his C.V. would, in any other business, justify giving him such important, difficult and specialized posts. How many books on defence or diplomacy has he read in his life? (Not counting The North Pole: Mine Mine Mine by Johnny Canuck.)

The National Post editorial board liked him in defence because: “That ministry needs a high-profile minister who can talk about our Afghan mission in the broader context of its importance to the international community and how Canadians are improving the lives of ordinary Afghans….” I’m more concerned about whether he can run the mission. But I’m the sort of nebbish who thinks a grandmaster should be able to play the Benoni counter-gambit not just spin it, and understand its prospects on the board as well as in Quebec.

To be sure, the guy formally best qualified for his cabinet job was Gordon O’Connor, and he was just dumped from defence into national revenue to avoid conceding the obvious to the juvenile hecklers across the aisle. (The prime minister said of the 68-year-old former brigadier-general and military lobbyist: “It’s time for him to have some other experiences.” Like being fired sardonically.) But if he was not up to defence, what possible reason is there for thinking he’s ready for national revenue? Does the PM value his views on consumption taxes, the Ricardian equivalence theorem or the appropriate deduction for truckers’ lunches? Pshaw.

This being Canada, you might be reluctant to start down a road that leads to asking if this country should have a heritage minister who struggles with English. But this is picking nits. The real question is what qualifications any of these people bring to such jobs in this or any cabinet.

In this week’s “Monday Morning” column, Donna Jacobs profiled incoming Canadian Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Perrin Beatty, in cabinet at 29 and, under Brian Mulroney, minister of national revenue, solicitor general, minister of defence, health and welfare then communications, and Kim Campbell’s secretary of state for external affairs. He’s no fool, and I daresay he’s a quick study. But would even Mr. Beatty claim he was given these jobs because of how much he knew coming in, or that he held any of them long enough to figure out when his bureaucrats were feeding him a line? We wouldn’t hire bricklayers this way.

Let me not seem unkind to the prime minister. Especially with so many Senate vacancies going begging. Our system places severe constraints on his freedom of choice, from regional politics to internal party dynamics to a drastic shortage of MPs capable of doing any cabinet job at all, never mind well. Most ministers, caught between the pincers of the bureaucracy and the Prime Minister’s Office, have little impact on policy or administration, and usually it’s just as well. As Sir John A. Macdonald once responded to criticism of his ministers: “If you want a better cabinet, send me better wood.”

Voters ultimately control timber quality. But the routine failure of our system to produce candidates for ministerial office with anything resembling relevant professional qualifications is, I submit, a subject not yet exhausted by press coverage of this shuffle.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

They say it’s better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness. It’s not as much fun. Still, let me seek to dispel a bit of murk today with a list of 10 books on government that aspiring Canadian politicians should read.

Sixty years ago Joseph Schumpeter called it a “well-known argument” that “the democratic method creates professional politicians whom it then turns into amateur administrators and ‘statesmen.’” I fear that we have since forgotten the argument despite living daily with the result. But to avoid an ill-tempered digression, let me simply note that the vast majority of people who run for office genuinely intend to put public interest ahead of partisanship, raise the tone of debate and make their country a better place. Given the generally pitiful results, it is fair to conclude that there are important things about government most of them don’t even realize they don’t know.

Last Friday, CFRA radio host Stephanie Egan challenged me to offer help on this point. Okay. I can’t make people read and understand this stuff before they go into politics, let alone take time out of their hectic schedules for some reflective reading once elected. On the other hand, with three weeks of summer left, what better use to make of the comparative calm?

To avoid the proverbial drink from a fire hydrant, I determined to list books not on specific issues but on how public affairs work generally, and only ones any person of good will and sound mind could get through quickly, profitably and pleasurably.

1. Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson. Sixty years ago, Hazlitt himself complained that “a mere recital of the economic policies of governments all over the world is calculated to cause any serious student of economics to throw up his hands in despair.” It still is, because people who seek office still haven’t read this wonderfully clear little volume.

2. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World From The Twenties to the Nineties. Theory, my father used to say, is just practice with the hard bits left out. It would be comforting to know that those who aspire to influence the course of events had some knowledge of actual events.

3. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. The classic, and still unsurpassed, defence of free political institutions.

4. Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, eds, The Complete Yes Minister. Government has its own particular rules, rhythms and reasons. While economists drone on about “public choice theory,” this hilarious British satire still explains it better, faster and far more enjoyably.

5. Jack Granatstein, Who Killed the Canadian Military? Defence of the nation is the first duty of any government. Yet in Canada it has been tragically neglected by every government ... and we citizens elected them all.

6. George Orwell, 1984. Government is not a toy. People who dabble in politics need to understand just how badly public affairs can go wrong, and be instinctively averse to the sort of language and thought that take us in that direction.

7. Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics. I want everyone in public life to read a book on science as an adult, if only to prove that they can. But this classic is still the best inoculation against error and flummery with numbers.

8. A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of The Law of the Constitution. Unless you know how parliamentary self-government is meant to work, and why, you’re liable to reduce it to the mess we see today. Read Dicey on Westminster in its heyday and you’ll never look at a parliamentary committee the same way again.

9. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. The Teutonic prose style makes it the most difficult read on the list. But it explains why comprehensive economic planning is not just undesirable but impossible. Do not approach Canadian health care without it.

10. Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. Nothing turns public debate into ill-tempered bickering faster than mistaking a philosophical difference about how the world works for a specific policy disagreement. Sowell’s book can’t make the arguing stop but it can improve its intellectual and rhetorical tone.

It’s best to read the books on this list before entering politics because, as Henry Kissinger once observed, people do not generally “grow in office” (unless by that you mean “become more left wing” or refer to the probable consequences of too little exercise and too much fast food). Lurching from crisis to crisis more often exhausts whatever intellectual capital politicians dragged in with them. But, hey, better late than never.

If these 10 books give off even a faint glow it will, I trust, be worth the candle.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

In a shocking breach of etiquette the Canadian Medical Association just proposed loosening the governmental stranglehold on health care before the patient, having turned blue, becomes completely unresponsive. Much virtuous swooning ensued.

As it spiralled toward the drawing-room floor, the Globe and Mail led off a Tuesday news story, under the headline “MDs launch fresh bid for two-tier care,” by gasping that “Canada’s doctors want to be able to work simultaneously in both the public and private systems, a flexibility that critics say could lead to queue-jumping and further depletion of public health care.”

When “critics say” appears in the first sentence of a story, we old-timers diagnose opinion disguised as news. And before bothering us with trivia like what the CMA actually suggested, the piece continued, “It’s also a proposal that puts the medical community on a collision course with Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who argues that physicians would have an incentive to stream patients into the private portions of their practice.” So there. Even hard-right neo-cons think this is right-wing lunacy. We’re just saying.

On Wednesday, the paper still had the vapours, editorializing (at least it was in an editorial this time) that: “Perhaps the key reason that the Canadian health system costs less than the U.S. system is that governments pay the tab for hospitals and physicians. That monopoly power as a single purchaser has enabled governments to restrain those costs while the bills for privately funded medical products such as prescription drugs have gone through the ceiling.”

Forsooth, my equilibrium is returning. Wave away those rubes who think governments have restrained costs by restricting services through such short-sighted measures as reducing medical school enrolment and underpaying doctors who then leave (one in nine Canadian-trained doctors is practising in the U.S.) or retire. Four million Canadians don’t even have a general practitioner? Mention it not; such vulgar persons are hardly the sort with whom prestigious editorial writers associate.

Instead on Wednesday the Toronto Star chimed in editorially that: “Once again the Canadian Medical Association, the national lobby group for Canada’s doctors, has started beating the drums for two-tier health care.” With the sang-froid of Marie Antoinette, the Star scorned the proposal: “It rests on two flawed assumptions: First, that medicare is broken, and second, that it is too expensive for governments to fix.”

Dismiss the rustic jibe that if medicare looks like this when it isn’t broken, I shudder to think how it will look when it is, and for once I shouldn’t have to wait long to find out, with one in three Canadian doctors already over 55 and one in nine over 65. Instead, Wednesday’s Globe ran a gravely sublime academic opinion that: “The CMA says the public would benefit from shorter waiting lists. But long wait times and suboptimal care are, in large part, a function of doctor and nursing shortages. For-profit clinics would not lead to the training of a single additional doctor or nurse. Indeed, such clinics would suck desperately needed personnel from not-for-profit hospitals and clinics. Physicians practising in public and private settings have a vested interest in keeping waiting lists long in publicly funded facilities.”

‘Twere ill-mannered to quote Henry Hazlitt, 60 years ago, that: “Today is already the tomorrow which the bad economist yesterday urged us to ignore.” Or that “governmental policy almost everywhere today tends to assume that production will go on automatically, no matter what is done to discourage it.” The state may have caused the shortage of doctors but, gad Sir, everybody knows continuing to bleed the patient is the way to restore strength. And who among us, righteously collecting our own salaries, does not resent doctors who dissipate their youth in hard study, disport themselves all day preserving life and health then presume to request a decent reward? Dedicated professionals in despair over their inability to provide proper care within our Soviet-style system? Pshaw. They’re just sinister, self-interested miscreants.

Should vertigo return, focus on the soothing reflection that it must be doctors in private practice who create waiting lists due to their own deplorable self-interest. Resolutely deny admission to any thought that, in mere shabby reality, the state did it and, by happy coincidence, thereby saved itself a big stack of cash on treatments it didn’t provide.

Should some yokel blurt that only public systems have waiting lists, pass, prithee, the smelling salts. They mask not just the displeasing odour of heresy but the far worse stench of ill breeding.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]