One of the joys of writing opinion columns is imagining that every Friday, in countless government offices, keen analytical minds share my ideas with colleagues and suggest that I may be the most preposterous lunatic ever to chew through the straps and stagger to a keyboard. It makes me feel less alone.

So did this Tuesday’s launch of the Institute for Public Policy Research’s new book A Canadian Priorities Agenda. I especially enjoyed their fascinating explanation of how they assembled their agenda by running the priorities of 12 experts past eight analysts before six judges chose five proposals each from the resulting …

Uh, maybe this would be easier if I could show you the explanatory tables they handed out at the luncheon. But I’m not kidding. It really was a fascinating way to generate proposals visionary enough to be worth trying, yet technically sound and relevant enough that someone might actually try them.

I certainly don’t agree with everything in the book. I don’t even endorse the editors’ contention that the result is non-ideological. But I’m not against ideology, I just say be careful which one you choose. And I’m not being pejorative in suggesting that this project’s ideology is essentially neoliberal: interventionist, somewhat trendy, but with a clear and helpful appreciation of incentives. I don’t share that approach, but it’s not absurd or scandalous. And it certainly is timely.

The book’s “Policy Challenges” are Human Capital, Climate Change, Natural Capital, Population Aging, Economic Security, Health Outcomes, Productivity, and Trade and Globalization (security issues were beyond the scope of the project). Is that not precisely the list of social and economic topics on which the average intelligent contemporary politician or public servant should welcome a discussion explicitly framed in terms of “scarcity of resources” and “tough choices,” costs, benefits and “limited means” available to governments?

I was sorry to see that the challenge of controlling public health care costs, though raised, was eliminated early in the project. Health outcomes are fashionable and I hope mine are favourable but let’s be frank: Canada’s governments could afford me dying in a hospital corridor; they cannot afford another decade of cost increases like the last one. And even people who know that incentives matter sometimes don’t grasp the extent of the problem, including some of these authors. I think. I haven’t read the book yet; I am a journalist. But I intend to; I am not a politician. How many MPs do you suppose will read it? Or their policy advisors, if they had big enough office budgets to afford any, which they don’t?

The IRPP is more likely to make suggestions agreeable to governments than I am. But it troubles me that they are almost equally unlikely to influence the policy agenda, and incentives are an important reason why. In the introduction, the editors concede that “governments are understandably drawn to what is expedient and popular, but they should also consider the overall costs, benefits and distributional effects of various policies. Policies that offer genuine net benefits to society, even if they are somewhat complex, can be clearly explained to the electorate by a government that is prepared to expend sufficient effort.” True, as far as it goes. But how far is that?

Sometimes voters understand perfectly well that a program that gives them a subsidy is not beneficial to society as a whole. But they don’t care; they just want the cash. And politicians do not assemble their platforms in ignorance of this fact. Participants in this project are surely also aware of it, some from academic study and others from experience (for instance, IRPP President and CEO Mel Cappe is a former Clerk of the Privy Council). But knowing about a problem isn’t the same as solving it.

This “public choice” difficulty of what political behaviour is rewarded by voters is compounded by a more general breakdown of public institutions. Even those ideas that governments like have little chance of becoming policy these days, and making sensible suggestions increasingly resembles bonsai gardening: an absorbing hobby but unlikely to produce edible fruit.

Since the proposals in this book are a good deal more congenial to Canadian governments of all partisan stripes than most of my ideas, it will be interesting to see whether they have any greater chance of getting close enough to the political decision-making process to be explicitly rejected rather than simply ignored.

If not, there’ll be more of us having leather for breakfast. Which will make it more sociable, but not more palatable.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

So now we learn that “Radical Jack” was actually “Reactionary Jerk” and swiftly airbrush another page out of our national history. Take that, you dead white anglo male.

The background here is quite embarrassing. The National Capital Commission, in its Sparks Street exhibit celebrating the 150th anniversary of Ottawa being chosen Canada’s capital, included a picture of someone they thought was Lord Durham, author of the 1839 report instrumental in securing self-government for the political train wreck formerly known as the Dominion of Canada. But he turned out to be some bigoted British ponce who thought constant bickering over language was a recipe for disaster. Ha, ha, ha, what an idiot. As if …

Confronted with their blunder, the NCC put out a press release in which CEO Micheline Dubé stammered: “The NCC acknowledges that the recommendations put forth by Lord Durham at the time are considered inappropriate for many and certainly controversial. We in no way intended to offend anyone and have subsequently removed the panel in question.”

It must be cool and pleasant under their rock if they didn’t realize that the cultural elements of Durham’s report might generate lingering controversy. Today anything and everything brings huffy cries of “I’m offended” from some group of annoying activists, so if you have the slightest desire to talk frankly about the history of anything more controversial than yogurt you’d better be ready to deal with controversy.

The NCC press release went on to quote its communications VP Guy Laflamme: “We certainly did not intend to profile Lord Durham as a ‘Capital Builder.’ We understand how the francophone community in particular might interpret our inclusion of Lord Durham in our exhibit as offensive and we apologize for this.”

I don’t see why the NCC should apologize for how “the francophone community in particular” might interpret something. If your exhibit was offensive, fine, say sorry. But why is it your fault if someone else is unreasonably thin-skinned?

Which they weren’t anyway. The NCC admits the exhibit was up for half a year without a single complaint and even people living under singularly commodious rocks must know the occasional francophone enters the Sparks Street Mall. Perhaps they weren’t offended because they had no clue who Durham was; these days he’s about as familiar a figure as, say, Lionel Groulx (aaaack shtum!). Even usually colourful Tory MP Myron Thompson was unable to give the Citizen an inflammatory endorsement of Ol’ Jack because, he said, “I had no idea about this individual.” Well, yes, why would a mere elected MP know or care about the man the Citizen identified on Tuesday as “the British colonial governor who recommended the union of Upper and Lower Canada and representative democracy”? Borrrring.

The Citizen was able to find an activist willing to demand that the federal government and NCC apologize to French-speakers for displaying the portrait because, brandishing the classic PC term “unacceptable,” he claimed, “the recommendations of Lord Durham are still in effect in Canada because of the continued assimilation of francophones and because immigration continues to favour the English language.”

Oh yeah. Crush the frogs. That’s our motto. You got us, buddy. I guess that’s why MPs enter the Commons chamber beneath a carved portrait of Louis XIV. Incidentally I find that unacceptable and want a personal apology from the Queen while Michaëlle Jean publicly smashes the image with a hammer. (François I, next to him, can stay; I don’t know enough French history to figure out why he offends me too. Oh wait; didn’t he ally with the Ottoman Turks against his European rivals?)

If it is of any interest to the NCC I find blank panels reflecting our erased history offensive. Take them down. Meanwhile, I’m thinking of making T-shirts with Durham’s picture and the slogan “Radical Jack proposed self-government and all I got was this lousy political correctness.” But I’m obviously such a dinosaur I consider the Cretaceous a dangerous innovation, so tear down my portrait and put up this plaque.

“Canada’s History: We apologize if anyone is offended. No further details as events don’t warrant.”

Now everybody sing … or else.

Oh Canada We changed the words again! Founded badly, by Eurocentric men

Plains of Abraham We would wake Montcalm And don’t mention Durham.

From far and wide O Canada, we stand on guard PC.

God keep away, scholastically! O Canada, we stand on guard PC. O Canada, we stand on guard PC.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The auditor general’s report on how government money is being misspent was trumped on Tuesday by the Finance Minister throwing a bunch of it in your face. Welcome to modern democracy. But it’s no way to run a railroad.

Some journalists showed up for the AG’s lockup under the impression that if the government was suddenly dropping a mislabeled mini-budget on top of her report there must be something they wanted to bury. Not so. The timing simply indicates that Mr. Harper’s respect for Parliament is as high as ever. It was contempt, not cunning.

In any case, we weren’t distracted. The auditor general’s reports can’t all be Adscam and there was nothing here especially embarrassing to the current administration. But if you read the Citizen (and if not what are you holding now?) you’ll know all of Wednesday’s page A3 was taken up with her findings, mostly troubling national security issues from poor medical care for military personnel to egregious lapses in border security to failure to follow contracting policies.

At the risk of appearing controversial or archaic I’m a bit concerned about lack of focus here. When you think auditor, you probably think of rows of numbers in small sans-serif print. (If by contrast you think Canada Revenue Agency, and what nations don’t we have extradition treaties with, I won’t detain you although the RCMP might want to.) And in the old days, the auditor general’s report on a far smaller government was a far larger document, perhaps 2,000 pages in the late 19th century, listing every pencil and envelope. But since 1977 the AG has been charged with doing “value-for-money” audits that ask questions about efficiency and sound management. And although I agree that someone needs to do such things I can’t help thinking it’s mostly Parliament’s job to decide whether programs make sense.

I grant that there’s a grey area here. An auditor can rightly ask not only whether the budget for pencils was spent on pencils but whether the pencils worked. And a number of MPs have told me that the AG’s reports are invaluable to them in knowing where to start questioning government officials and agencies. But note also that her office has about 600 staff whereas each MP has about four and parliamentary committees are woefully short-handed. If they had better staff support the AG could focus a bit more on old-time auditing.

Mind you, when the federal government spends more than $7,000 a second it’s a lot of pencils to count. And neither the auditor general nor anyone else needs to count them all. It’s perfectly sound economics that people’s propensity to be careless or dishonest is determined by the risk of getting caught times the pain if they do. If the AG’s office has fairly dependable ways of finding egregious wrongdoing, as it does, then as with the old British practice of hanging the occasional admiral it will certainly encourager les autres.

Here I can even insert a brief defence of journalists’ preference for the lurid. Yes, we tend to read (or skim) such documents looking for scandal. But people in government offices across the land know it, and try reasonably hard to avoid appearing in the auditor general’s report in that sort of setting. Sometimes, of course, they fail, and we get to read about their antics.

Curiously, this brings me to my biggest worry about the whole process. In her 2007 Main Points summary, the AG describes some behaviour ranging from sloppy to downright appalling, then declares that every department or agency in question agrees with every criticism and suggestion her office made.

It’s hardly surprising. When the AG comes calling, what’s your strategy? Argue, deny, bluster and get a nasty writeup in the report and then in the press, or nod, grin and promise? But now turn to the report by the Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development, bundled with the AG’s this year. His main complaint is that for a decade departments have been nodding, grinning and not doing anything useful. And why would they? Who’s going to make them?

There’s where the wheel hits the steel. And where we should be careful not to expect more of the auditor general and her department than they can reasonably do. Modern governments are very good at promising but rather feeble at delivering, and I wouldn’t want MPs, or citizens, to get a false sense of security about who’s keeping things on track. It’s Parliament, or nobody.

We could certainly have waited a week for the executive to distract citizens and legislators from how public money is disbursed by flinging heaps of it at us. At that speed it’s easy to derail.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Hey. I finally found a public policy problem I can solve. Let’s tell Miloon Kothari to buzz off.

Not high on your list? Perhaps you missed the Tuesday Citizen story that after a quick tour of Canada this month, this international man of meddling pronounced himself “disturbed” by the lack of adequate housing in Canada. As opposed to where he’s from, namely India?

Mr. Kothari is the UN Human Rights Council special rapporteur on adequate housing. Which pretty much lets you guess what he’d say about housing in an advanced western democracy after a whirlwind tour talking to the usual advocates and activists. He’d say it isn’t up to international standards because we have a wretched exploitive market economy. And he did.

What I want to know is why the official reaction wasn’t “Ah shaddap!” Canada is a wealthy democratic country with lively debate on public policy and megabillion dollar social programs to solve every imaginable crisis including some we made up ourselves. If we haven’t solved the housing problem it’s not because some nit failed to do a fly-by and recommend socialism.

Mr. Kothari even had the gall to accuse us of not obeying international law, specifically the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. OK, we did sign it. So let’s withdraw from it, pronto. Where did we ever get the idea that a superior method of creating fundamental law was an international body full of supercilious bureaucrats, scaly dictators and failed states instead of a parliament full of people we elected?

Does anyone out there honestly suppose we’ll give better attention to social issues because some representative of a body composed of nations like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Gabon tells us we don’t measure up to their high standards? Tell me: What’s the housing situation in Gabon?

The funny thing is, there are people who suppose exactly that. Mr. Kothari’s verdict was greeted with predictable enthusiasm by the Ottawa-based Alliance to End Homelessness. But it also prompted a spokesperson for Human Resources and Social Development Minister Monte Solberg to say the minister will review the recommendations, and whine that federal spending on housing is at an all-time high. CTV gave Mr. Kothari favourable coverage half-way through his tour and suggested that one in 100 Canadians are homeless. And when he was done the federal NDP aboriginal affairs critic chimed in that regrettably the Tories do indeed favour a market-based approach to housing. Uh, except on aboriginal reserves. Where the housing situation is, um, yes well …

When we’re handing Mr. Koothari his hat I suggest he make his next stop China, where the government has displaced over a million people to flood the reservoir behind the wobbly, environmentally disastrous Three Gorges Dam and plans to remove four million more. Lovely house. A bit damp, though. Is having running water in your house a right? What if it extends dozens of meters above your roof?

China is not just an egregious human rights violator. It is also, of course, a member of the UN Human Rights Council. So what’s the UN doing about repression there, including deliberately erasing the culture of Tibet? Sort that one out and a few other things like Darfur then get back to us about housing in Edmonton.

If Canada has a homeless problem it’s because homelessness is complicated, not because some high-falutin’ bureaucrat from the other side of the world didn’t drop in to hector us about bad economics. As for Mr. Kothari telling us to use a national housing strategy instead of markets, isn’t India, after wasted decades of Soviet-style planning, finally enjoying real economic growth because its government decided to let markets work?

Oh, and how’s everything in Mali? Also a member of the Human Rights Council. Would you like to try to explain why Mali is sending someone to criticize housing in Canada? Or why we let them? Of course in one sense these bureaucrats aren’t from Mali, Bangladesh or Djibouti (also HRC members) but from an international jet set elite, accountable to no one and contemptuous of ordinary people. But that doesn’t answer the key question. What on Earth prompts us to accept lectures from such people?

Obviously Mr. Kothari’s report is mostly harmless in the sense that it won’t produce anything besides headlines. But it’s discouraging that it doesn’t prompt bracing, common-sense, pro-democratic statements of contempt for him and the organization he flew in on.

There’s one problem I can solve. Shoo.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Lately I’ve been enjoying Blackstone’s thoughts on a mixed constitution. Oh sorry. Did I just blow a big cloud of antiquarian dust in your face? I was aiming for Dalton McGuinty. Blackstone’s mid-18th century Commentaries on the Laws of England were once the indispensable adjunct to any thoughts about self-government. The American Declaration of Independence, for instance, echoes his view that God wants man to “pursue his happiness.” But Blackstone’s main subject was the British Constitution, to which ours is, or was, expressly similar in principle. So when he calls England: “A land, perhaps the only one in the universe, in which political or civil liberty is the very end and scope of the constitution” it should be food for thought in Canada. Instead to some, it is dust and ashes.

Mr. McGuinty is not the only one such thoughts would leave coughing today. Blackstone’s Commentaries lay out 10 rules whereby judges should interpret statutes which, if introduced into the Supreme Court building, would swiftly prompt them to open a window to let air in and the offending volume out. Especially Blackstone’s point that while judges may construe laws to exclude absurd consequences the legislature apparently did not foresee “there is no court that has power to defeat the intent of the legislature, when couched in such evident and express words, as leave no doubt whether it was the intent of the legislature or no.”

The language is undoubtedly quaint. It is comical that at one point he praises a previous famed legal commentator, Edward Coke, as “a man of infinite learning in his profession, though not a little infected with the pedantry and quaintness of the times he lived in ...” especially as I’m reading a facsimile of the original document manuscript complete with archaic lettering. But there are worse things than quaint. For instance, vacuous.

Consider this odd-sounding passage from Blackstone: “In aristocracies there is more wisdom to be found, than in the other frames of government... but there is less honesty than in a republic, and less strength than in a monarchy... Thus these three species of government have, all of them, their several perfections and imperfections.”

Praising the strength of monarchy may seem as uninteresting as it is bizarre. But his fundamental subject, unchecked executive power, remains highly pertinent. For while the form has changed, today’s prime ministers and premiers possess discretionary authority not seen in these parts since James II. One need hardly labour to convince, say, Stephen Harper that it’s easier to get things done without meddling by pesky legislators. But is it unredeemably quaint to inquire whether this system possesses the wisdom or virtue one would ideally also seek in a state?

Don’t ask Stéphane Dion, who just said his party would abstain on the throne speech because Canadians “want Parliament to do its job.” Having the Official Opposition abstain on yet another confidence vote certainly doesn’t constitute Parliament doing its job, which is to keep a sharp eye on the executive. Put aside such blither and reach for Blackstone.

He has much of interest to say, including that legislation ought either to restate or refine the common law’s traditional rules, not go haring off in rash and ill-considered directions. But let me here focus on his quoting first Cicero that a constitution that somehow combined monarchy, aristocracy and democracy would be best, then Tacitus’ reply that such a thing could hardly exist and would never last, before retorting, “happily for us of this island, the British constitution has long remained, and I trust will long continue, a standing exception to the truth of this observation.”

It did last quite a while. But the strong-executive types got us in the end, around the same time Pierre Trudeau’s “Just Society” and new constitution seem to have made some form of cosmic justice “the very end and scope of the constitution.” Surveying the results, maybe we needed more discussion of reliable sources of strength, wisdom, fairness or durability in our new system of government.

It won’t be easy. Given how Dalton McGuinty recently brushed aside questions of principle as quaint, pedantic “academic discussions in a rarefied atmosphere,” there might seem little point in blowing academical dust in his face, or that of almost any other current politician. But remember that in The Scarlet Pimpernel the hero escapes an ominous trap by offering his adversary snuff from a box he has surreptitiously filled with pepper.

Let’s try the same trick with Blackstone and other dusty but pungent authors, shall we.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It is a melancholy reflection that we had to wait for the Ontario provincial election to lurch to a dismal end before we could turn to urgent questions of policy. Melancholy turns to depression at the urgency of health care reform. And tears begin to flow at the thought that the major parties’ positions on that topic contrived to be at once irrelevant and profoundly inimical to any sensible solution.

The diagnosis here is grim. On Saturday the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson wrote, “The Liberals boast they have jacked up health-care spending by 29 per cent over four years, to $37-billion, a staggering eight per cent a year.” Strange for a government to boast of its profligacy. Especially as, Mr. Simpson went on to note, the Liberals also promised to reduce the rate of spending increases to five per cent a year, which suggests there was something wrong with their previous behaviour. The Conservatives said they’d do the same, which suggests there was nothing wrong with the Liberals’ new promise. Uh, unless you count Mr. Simpson’s pointed observation that, “No Ontario government has been able to keep annual increases to five per cent.”

Thus we may swiftly conclude that neither party had a plan for doing what they promised, and move on to the next problem. Namely, that if the party leaders did somehow keep their word it is not obvious what advantages would accrue. For one thing, increasing spending faster than revenue generally causes trouble, especially on an item that already devours nearly half of program spending. For another, laying aside the calculator for a stethoscope, how will a health care system that couldn’t cope with existing demand while gobbling down eight per cent annual increases deal with the growing needs of aging boomers on just five per cent? Sadly we were not favoured with a discussion of such alarming matters.

Alarming is not too strong a word. Mainstream politicians generally dismiss as “ideological” those of us who saw trouble coming and urged preventive action years ago. But Mr. Simpson is hardly the excitable sort of columnist prone to the print equivalent of leaping about hollering, so you might think his observations would worry the people who run the system. Apparently they don’t worry easy.

Most politicians didn’t break a sweat when Health Canada warned that Canada will be short 5,800 doctors by 2010. Nor at last week’s Citizen report of one Ottawa doctor who predicts that with middle-aged doctors working so hard they’re burning themselves out and younger doctors working less in pursuit of a more rational work-life balance, the real shortage might be as large as 10,400. Politicians also shrugged off the Canadian Nurses’ Association warning that nationally we’ll be short 78,000 nurses by 2011 and 113,000 by 2016 and this week’s Citizen story saying we’re even short of nursing school faculty to train replacements. People with weaker nerves would be especially bothered by the demographics that make these problems so hard to fix. Not only are the patients aging, so are doctors, nurses and even the remaining nursing school faculty; the Canadian Nurses’ Association says more than half of the latter were over age 50 in 2005.

The one thing I’ve noticed recently that might make politicians panic is the increasing tendency, noted in Wednesday’s National Post, for doctors to bill for various services not covered by socialized medicine, from telephone advice to faxing prescriptions, that most provided free before provincial governments got so tight-fisted with their fee schedules. Apparently, the harder the government throttles the goose that lays the golden eggs, the harder the wretched bird fights for air. But our statesmen’s fingers are as strong as their minds are weak.

I do not exaggerate either the seriousness of the crisis or the feebleness of their understanding. From time to time I may inflict upon readers obscure quotations or arcane research. But you’ll notice that all the examples in this column are from very recent newspaper stories. You don’t have to be smart to uncover this stuff. But you have to be singularly dim to ignore it. And politicians are.

Faced with such atrocious mismanagement of such a key policy issue, I occasionally fantasize about entrusting affairs of state to persons selected by citizens in a competitive process designed to oblige candidates for public office to offer detailed, practical, intelligent solutions on matters of particular import.

Wait a minute. We just did that. * Sob * Could someone please pass me a large, absorbent handkerchief?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With less than a week to go I’m wracking my brains for something constructive to say about this wretched zombie of an Ontario election. A dry, choking sound from within the voting booth doesn’t seem to qualify.

It remains tempting for several reasons. Let’s start with Dalton McGuinty and get it over with. My colleague Randall Denley just underlined his “proven record of mendacity.” (As Captain Barbossa might say, “means: he lies a lot”.) Plus Mr. McGuinty actually rewarded George Smitherman’s smugly obtuse belligerence as health minister by making him deputy premier. Re-elect that bunch and you’ll deserve what you get. Unfortunately, I’ll get it too.

Then there’s John Tory. We did not need another demonstration that a sophisticatedly amorphous Red Tory approach is as futile in political as in policy terms. We got one anyway. Then he crumpled on his only principle-like position. Thanks for coming out. Now go away.

As for Howard Hampton, is he still campaigning? I cannot understand how the NDP could achieve so little traction against such off-putting adversaries. But Mr. Hampton found a way. The last straw was his pledge to subsidize any municipal transit system that freezes fares for two years. The NDP poses as a “progressive” party keen to sweep away obsolete institutions, and our system of municipal funding really is obsolete. But if that’s their idea of vision, I’ll pass. It sounds too much like a meddlesome quick fix.

Faced with this dismal slate, I say in the short run, if there’s a fringe party running in your riding, please vote for it. Signal willingness to participate coupled with contempt for your main options.

I also say please vote because of the wretched electoral reform referendum. For reasons I discussed in April (see my “Flashback Column” at www.thejohnrobson.com), I still think MMP is a terrible idea. I’m hoping it will perish from lack of interest but, just in case, go hammer a stake into it. I suspect it will rise repeatedly from the grave, but before we can attend to the long run we have to get through October 10.

What, though, of other days? What if we’d rather not want to vote every time with paper bags on our heads (which, parenthetically, you apparently can do in Ontario elections)? What advice can I give about this election that might give us some better choice than to greet the next one with Dorothy Parker’s reaction to a ringing telephone: “What fresh hell is this?”

It seems to me that we need to broaden our horizons. There must be something wrong with the questions we habitually ask in politics if we keep getting answers as offensively silly as Re-Elect Dalton McGuinty or Vote for John Tory. We take a certain type of public discussion for granted even though we hate the results and, what’s more, we permit and even encourage it by the way we react to public affairs.

While pursuing this line of thought I stumbled across a prescient warning in an old book about a common but “distressing” type of soulless orators who “walk and talk, and do not know that they are dead. Neither, of course, are they alive to the deadness of their own creation … Hence … the inanimate speeches, cumbered with the carcasses of worn-out metaphor and flower of rhetoric trampled to death; hence the movement into urgent battle of the embalmed mummies of sentiment, horsed like the dead Cid, and rigid in their grave-bands beneath the imposing panoply.”

Gosh, I thought. That’s strangely familiar. Yet it’s from mystery writer Dorothy Sayers’ 1941 meditation The Mind of the Maker so it has, ostensibly, nothing to do with Ontario politics in the 21st century. Moreover, her explanation of this bizarre phenomenon is, to put it mildly, uncongenial to the modern temperament. But that’s what makes the resonance of this passage so dashed resonant. How can her analysis be so pertinent to contemporary problems on which Naomi Klein has so little to say, at such length? Does she not eerily foretell Stéphane Dion insisting that “I have to fight with a Stéphane Dion who doesn’t exist. I’ve never been this cool, distant person.” He walks and talks, and doesn’t know he doesn’t exist.

So by all means vote next week, indignantly, for the lesser of various evils. But afterwards let us guard constantly against dead prose and its hollow purveyors. We must not let every vivid observation be labelled a gaffe, every controversial statement be pilloried as “divisive.” It is up to us to make politics congenial to politicians who really talk to us in living language about living issues.

The alternative is the awkward, disgusting and frustrating task of fighting mummies right inside the voting booth.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Today’s column was going to lampoon the presumptuous incompetence of governments simultaneously micromanaging our affairs and bungling their own. But while diligently procrastinating, I discovered in the pages of a rival newspaper the hot new trend of online alibi retailer. Apparently I can e-purchase fake plane tickets, a real reel and a dead fish to prove I was angling for trout, not a deadline extension.

Hang on. A fake fishing trip wouldn’t be any better than a real one for filing a column late. But then, I’m an amateur. Doubtless the pros would get me some fake surgery or a dead relative or a large-scale cataclysm. No, wait, scratch that last one too. My editor’s in the news business. He’d know. Better go with the medical emergency.

Especially because I was all set to write a health-related column ridiculing Dalton McGuinty’s recent promise to the Women’s Executive Network in Toronto that, as such women face more challenges than ever, he will make fertility monitoring tests available to women over 28 as part of their annual physical. Or over 29; newspaper accounts differ. I was going to look up his speech. Honestly. And check the fine print in the Liberals’ “Strong Women for a Strong Ontario 2007” document (subtitle: gosh, no, we didn’t focus group that name to bits) which offers women fertility screening “earlier in life as part of their annual check-up” unless, of course, they have no family doctor, in which case George Smitherman will yell at anyone who says our health care system isn’t perfect and a sublime confirmation of how great he is.

Or not. Maybe it doesn’t say exactly that. I was going to check. And verify that Mr. McGuinty has firmly intended to do something about this pressing problem for the past four years, but was too busy closing coal-fired reactors and avoiding tax increases; he can’t just have realized suburban career women are a key demographic. I was going to wrap up with a clever way of asking whether anyone out there, like his partisan adversaries, thinks maybe taking this one on now is an overstretch.

I think that would have made for a darn good column. But it would also have meant hard work. Which I didn’t get around to, so now I need a cover story. Quiiiiick. How fortunate that I can get one online. One tailored to my specific circumstances, at that. Thus the fishing trip is out because it’s to help you cheat on your spouse. All the sites I checked are pretty explicit about that aspect of what they do.

It sounds pretty brazen. But it turns out these people do have scruples. One of the online alibi sites specifically promises to help you conceal “an extramarital relationship” (in three different languages), but its founder told a journalist she had refused to help a student skip his exams. That would be cheating, whereas adultery is self-actualization. O tempora o mores. We shall die in the spirit and be born again in the flesh ... online. And to think Osama bin Laden considered us decadent.

I’m not saying there didn’t used to be dishonesty. Yes, Pharaoh, we intended for the pyramid sides to bend half-way up all along. Sire, I have no idea how your armada ended up on the bottom of that channel. But I miss the old days when a lie was both personalized and hand-crafted. In Kay Nolte Smith’s short story Caveat Emptor, the devil refuses to bargain with a man because all his worst desires are so unoriginal that Satan concludes he has no soul to sell. What kind of world is it where a man tells you a generic lie he bought off a website? Doesn’t anybody care any more? We’ve got scanners and fancy printers. What kind of people are we that we can’t even fake our own receipts?

Which reminds me. While I’m here online with you, I need a convincing excuse for being a hollow, amoral replica of a human being. “Everybody else was doing it” strikes me as overdone. You’ll sell me something convincing, right?

At this point I start to get uneasy. If I purchase one of these guaranteed excuses and it misfires, it may be hard to get a frank admission of responsibility and a refund from the retailer. After all, they’re in the excuse business. What if they’re not just the president, but also a client?

Frankly, I’m sunk if my editor discovers my slick forged documents are as phony as a Dalton McGuinty campaign promise. (Parenthetically, maybe he should have considered using one of these services.) If more than a few of our grannies have the same emergency gall-bladder surgery on the same day, he may detect something fishy. About our excuses, ourselves and the whole modern world.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]