Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. And you don’t have to go all the way back to the Danegeld to get the experience. Try this Monday’s release of the latest report by the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy. At the risk of seeming weird, I should explain that on the weekend while clearing atrocious junk out of my attic, I wound up digitizing some old cassette tapes including, it turned out, a 2002 Citizen editorial board meeting with the NRTEE. On that occasion, they told us global warming was a crisis, urgent action was needed, there was substantial scientific and corporate consensus and market mechanisms were needed but they hadn’t yet worked out the details.

Fast forward six years. Monday, January 7th, 11:00 a.m., the National Press Theatre. Key members of the NRTEE told us global warming was a crisis, urgent action was needed, there was substantial scientific and corporate consensus and market mechanisms were needed but they hadn’t yet worked out the details. I recognize that I personally may, when in my cups, repeat anecdotes. And I know environmentalists favour recycling. But this is ridiculous.

If you’re a climate skeptic, then you have horns and a tail. No, sorry, I mean you’re happy enough to sit through this presentation every six years. But what if you really believe we have one decade to solve the climate change crisis, which has been the orthodox position for the last 15 years? Does it not disturb you that we just spent six years running in place?

Of course you’d have to know about it first, and it wasn’t prominently featured either in the NRTEE presentation or in subsequent coverage of same. Jeffrey Simpson in the Globe and Mail did observe that “the NRTEE’s message repeated the obvious, since even the Harper government and the Canadian Council of Chief Executives accept the need for a carbon-emission trading market.” But why say “even the Harper government?” I remember when it was a distinguishing mark of the right-wing lunatic to think market methods had something to contribute on environmental problems.

It was in the early 1990s, when I worked at the Fraser Institute. In a familiar pattern, the idea provoked ridicule, then hostility, then agreement, at which point its origins were quietly forgotten. (See also “let’s measure health care waiting lists.”) Indeed, that incentives matter, in environmental and other areas, is now so broadly accepted that it’s hard to believe it was once routinely denied in principle or that it’s still so widely ignored in practice. In intellectual matters one does see movement in this country. Policy is another matter.

Here I would also like to remind you that in 2002 (Sept. 4, to be exact), in this newspaper, I dismissed environmental hopes and economic fears about the Chrétien government’s decision to ratify the Kyoto Accord. I said there would never be a plan, that the government “will never even try to implement the treaty.” I also said tradable emissions permits were theoretically sensible, but stressed how difficult it would be to work out the details.

I don’t want to rehash the scientific arguments about global warming, or more precisely the refusal of its advocates to argue the science. Been there, done that. But I do want to rehash the serious problem of governance in Canada in which a lot of high-flown rhetoric about consensus and compassion and crisis accompanies failure to come to grips with practical details, on issues from the gun registry to rebuilding the military to reforming health care to Kyoto.

The NRTEE (you can find them, and their latest report, online at www.nrtee-trnee.ca) are clearly not fools. But something is seriously out of whack when all that energy and intelligence goes into a cycle of planning to have a plan (see especially page 47 of their latest report). At Monday’s press conference Brian Lilley of CFRB radio pointed out that the price of oil tripled in the last decade without causing consumers to conserve energy and asked whether a carbon tax wouldn’t have to be pretty onerous to make a difference. The answer he got was that a computer model says it would all be OK.

If true, the NRTEE, or their computer, must know what could be done, in detail, and what would then happen. So why doesn’t somebody do it? Six years ago I was recording on environmentally unfriendly, energy- and resource-intensive microcassettes. Today I’m clean, green and digital. But in 2002 the government was planning to have a plan and in 2008 it apparently still is. Six long years out of the only decade we then had left.

Oh well. See you all in 2014 for the NRTEE press conference where … you know.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Will there be an election in 2008? Gosh, it’s so exciting. We journalists hope not because if one is called we’ll have to stop writing about whether it might be, which is more fun than dull stuff like health care policy. Mind you, we can cover an election like a horse race, then start speculating about the next one, so we’re probably OK. Unlike you. For speaking of health care, here’s a boring story to make your hair stand on end, turn grey in that position and then fall out. In Britain, the National Health Service is planning to make people do their own health care to save money.

OK, not appendectomies. But, the Daily Telegraph reported Wednesday: “Millions of people with arthritis, asthma and even heart failure will be urged to treat themselves as part of a government plan to save billions of pounds from the NHS budget …”

The report says patients will find themselves: “Monitoring their own heart activity, blood pressure and lung capacity using equipment installed in the home; reporting medical information to doctors remotely by telephone or computer; administering their own drugs and other treatment to ‘manage pain’ and assessing the significance of changes in their condition; using relaxation techniques to relieve stress and avoid ‘panic’ visits to emergency wards.”

New prime minister Gordon Brown naturally spun it as giving “all of those with long-term or chronic conditions the choice of greater support, information and advice, allowing them to play a far more active role in managing their own condition.” But a document obtained by the Daily Telegraph indicates that while the public rhetoric is about empowerment, the private incentive is to save money.

It would be. It’s curious that people attack private markets because providers think about money, but never admit that it’s bad when governments don’t and often worse when they do. A company that cuts costs so much it can’t provide decent service goes out of business. Governments face no such incentives, and it matters.

Indeed, just one day earlier the Telegraph noted that “patients could be required to stop smoking, take exercise or lose weight before they can be treated on the National Health Service, Gordon Brown has suggested.” Offering a startling new definition of universal, he told NHS staff the government would “examine how all these changes can be enshrined in a new constitution of the NHS, setting out for the first time the rights and responsibilities associated with an entitlement to NHS care.”

Bored yet? Britain may seem like just this place where Lord Durham might have been from if he’d had the gall to exist. But actually it has one of those Parliament thingies and is the big powerful country whose cultural influence we used to resent bitterly before moving on to hating the United States. It even pioneered many policy initiatives we later invented, most notably socialized medicine. It is thus highly instructive that their health system, unlike ours, includes dentists and, unlike ours, has a shortage of dentists. Almost as if … nah, can’t be.

My point is, back of the corridor, you boozy, disgusting tobacco-stained fatties. Our governments must reduce medical costs too, whether you like it or not. Mark Steyn boasts of being a demography bore. Amateur! I’m a health provider demography bore. So here I quote Nadeem Esmail in the latest Fraser Forum. “In 2006, 19.2 per cent of Canada’s physicians were 60 or older, and 47.3 per cent were 50 or older.” And older physicians work less, then retire or die.

Just hire more, you say? From where, and with what money? Another Fraser Institute study just warned: “Six of Canada’s 10 provinces will be spending 50 per cent of all revenues on health care by 2035 if current spending trends continue …” You’ll be 28 years older then, and a distinct drag on the system. And how about the C.D. Howe Institute study (by my brother) last month saying “Canadian governments are unprepared for the fiscal impact of demographic change as baby-boomers move closer to retirement, and face a net liability of $1.4 trillion to pay for the current package of public programs …,” of which a provincial liability on health of $1.9 trillion dwarfs expected federal surpluses.

The actual C.D. Howe never did say “what’s a million?” and I hope no one out there now wants to say “what’s a trillion?” But just in case, it’s one of these: 1,000,000,000,000. What a big dull number.

Saaaaaay. Think there’ll be an election?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Last year I suggested a jolly family-destroying New Year’s game, Robson’s Kith and Kin Kleanser, where you make resolutions for those close to you instead of for yourself. If you followed that advice, those close to you are a lot farther away now, leaving you ample free time to join me in another variant on the antiquated notion of self-improvement. This year let’s all play my fun new game Political Promiser, in which we make a New Year’s resolution for politicians. Good heavens! May I remind you this is still a family newspaper even though you disencumbered yourself of your own family 12 months ago using my patented method? Wash your word processor out with soap and try again.

Hard, isn’t it? There are so many attractive choices it boggles the mind. “No behaving in ways that embarrass schoolchildren in Question Period ... no envelopes full of cash ... refraining from saying exactly what we all knew you were going to say. ...” Well, I don’t want to spoil the fun by turning over all the cards in the Suggestion Stack at once. But while you’re weighing your options I’ll put forward my own, courtesy of the poet Robbie Burns.

No, not “eat more haggis.” In fact the parliamentary cafeteria is making a determined effort to serve more wholesome food, which should help some MPs make a resolution beneficial to us as well as them: In 2008 I will live healthier. I do not jest here. The time pressure, stresses, and lack of opportunities for a balanced diet, exercise or quiet reflection in political life would raise eyebrows at a law school and do not contribute to thoughtful legislation or dignified conduct.

It would not be amiss for MPs and provincial legislators, in the interest of being less overwhelmed and underinformed, to resolve to appropriate more money for office staff in the coming year so that each could employ, for instance, an expert on health care, and for that matter a lawyer and a forensic accountant as well.

As I said, there’s a lot to choose from (and the great thing about this game, as opposed to my once-off Kith and Kin Kleanser, is that we can probably play Political Promiser again next year with exactly the same tokens, cards and board position). But my choice was, and still is, from Robbie Burns.

“Oh would some Power the giftie gie us,/Tae see ourselves as others see us,” he wrote. And while poets are thinking “Oh would some Power to us permit/The dropping of letters so rhymes will fit,” I’m thinking politicians should make a serious, private pledge that in the coming year, before doing or saying anything, they will ask themselves how it would look to the typical non-politician. That braying display of disrespect in QP, so amusing to one’s caucus-mates, for instance: How would it be received in an office, a saw-mill or a living room?

To be fair, politicians may privately consider the reactions of some of their constituents difficult to fathom. If so, let them instead simply think back to their own youthful, idealistic selves, before they went into politics. (That this step is impossible for those who were reading Hansard in their early teens is one more reason not to elect such people.) I spoke fairly recently to someone who may well become an MP next time around, who said one of her ambitions was to bring a more civil tone to Question Period. Good plan. So I asked whether it did not seem likely that 90 per cent of those now in the Commons had not had exactly the same goal before they were elected, and what she thought had gone wrong in each and every wellintentioned previous case. It turned out she had not thought about it but felt she should. Me too. Especially if she gets elected.

So, Mr. and Ms. Legislator, please resolve that in the coming year, before you utter some fatuous defence of a partisan position, excuse some egregious piece of rule-bending or simply engage in the chronic bad manners of political debate, you will consult your younger self, the person you were before you knocked on your first door, when your pamphlets and slogans were but a twinkle in some consultant’s eye. How would this thing have struck you then, especially if done by someone from a party you did not support? Perhaps you will then decide to do it anyway. I realize the requirements and rhythms of politics are not those of other professions. But please make a habit of thinking about it.

Is everyone with me? Good. I thought so. Let’s just hope politicians aren’t playing some silly reversed version of this game where they resolve that voters will earnestly contemplate how they themselves look from Parliament Hill. That wouldn’t be any fun at all, now would it?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Dear Santa: This year I have been pretty good except for when I was awake and stuff so I’m hoping you can grant a few modest requests.

I should mention that I’ve spent a lot of time in parliamentary committee hearings, which explains why I’ve been so unpleasant to children and little old ladies lately. You know how it is.

You don’t? Listen, Mr. Red Suit and Black Boots, forget sitting in a mall while kids ply you with avaricious requests for flashy electronic devices (though while I’m on the subject, when I was a boy all we had to play with was bits of cardboard and wood so we put a brave face on it and called it "chess"). You try sitting in a committee room while politicians demand stuff and see how long you can keep the Ho ho ho flowing. But I digress.

I have compiled a list, not of who’s naughty and nice (and I hope on yours my name is misspelled or something so we can proceed) but of what I think would be reasonable. Given, you know, the committee business. So enough chit-chat, beard dude. Here’s what I want for Christmas.

1. $300,000 in cash. Or $225,000. After all, who’s counting? Not Revenue Canada, that’s for sure. It’s in a safe- deposit box in New York. Or not. You’ll never know. Oh, and no need to bring it down our chimney where it might get, um, dirty. I’ll meet you in a hotel room. I presume Rudolph can keep a secret. Or a retainer. We can talk about all that in six years. If absolutely necessary.

2. I’d also like the ability to promise clients no fee increase, then break the news that actually, heh heh, the tab has gone up 4.9 per cent, and they just pay. Every year.

3. And a trip to Bali because I really, really care about the environment, which I gather has something to do with scenery.

4. Speaking of scenery, I’d like a laptop whose screen is not visible to people behind me.

5. And a huge advance for memoirs I pay someone else to write.

6. Or for memoirs I write myself that include everything but the kitchen sink and the bit about the envelopes in hotel rooms but say I was right all along and why oh why don’t people like me more.

7. A plan for health care that works for the long term, by which I mean until several weeks after the election is over.

8. Lucrative appointments and consulting work later on.

9. A Harvard teaching post when I get bored with Canada.

10. Heck, a Harvard teaching post, then a lucrative appointment. Or some corporate directorships.

11. The ability to blame other people when I don’t look after things that, on paper, I’m responsible for. It’s only paper. And not that nice coloured kind with pictures of people and security features.

12. A job where I can yell, call people names and jab my finger at them without being thought uncivilized, make barnyard noises for 45 minutes every weekday afternoon except Fridays and only visiting schoolchildren object, yell "resign" and be thought witty and ask "Will the minister resign?" and be regarded as public-spirited.

13. A free pass on how prepositions work in English.

14. A mayor who doesn’t uncannily resemble a space alien.

15. City councillors who don’t uncannily resemble mediocrities from the planet Taxon.

16. Nine lords a-leaping. No, wait. Scratch that. Wrong list. Plus they always leave the place such a mess, especially if they do their thing near the geese a-laying and the maids a-milking. I don’t know what interdepartmental committee set that up.

17. Enough snow for a snow job. My, that was fast. Now how about enough money for snow clearance in a $2-billion city budget in a cold place?

18. Or how about global warming that makes things warmer? I don’t want you to have to hitch Donner and Comet to a wagon or a kayak or anything. I just like names that mean something.

19. A health care premium ... uh ... tax.

20. A $2.6-billion revenue windfall.

21. Make that a health care tax and a $2.6-billion revenue windfall. Oh, and voters with short memories, low standards or both.

22. La langue français vibrant in Saskatchewan. Sorry, should that be française? François? I’m not sure. But I would like a grant du théâtre.

23. A Senate appointment.

24. A reputation for generosity because I give away other people’s money.

25. Oh, and did I mention the envelopes full of cash? Twenties, 50s, 100s, I’m not fussy.

If I get all that stuff I promise not to go into politics. Heck, I won’t have to.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

What can I say about hate speech investigations into Maclean’s magazine? I mean that literally. This used to be a free country where we had the hard-won right to speak our minds without fear. But now the Canadian Islamic Congress has complained about a Mark Steyn piece in Maclean’s to the B.C. Human Rights Tribunal and to the Canadian and Ontario Human Rights Commissions and, according to Maclean’s National Editor Andrew Coyne, the first two have agreed to “launch inquiries” into the complaints while the third is dithering. The CHRC, incidentally, won’t confirm or deny this claim. Something about open government, I believe.

Now what? If I write about censorship will the censors censor that? If I were to defend someone’s right in principle to be rude about radical Islam, it might constitute my being rude in practice about radical Islam which might be misunderstood by hypersensitive types as rudeness toward Islam generally which might be misunderstood as hate speech rather than just bad manners. Who knows?

All in all it’s much safer to write about daisies. Such pretty flowers. They are members of the Asteraceae family, the second-largest family of flowering plants after Orchidaceae. You may be thinking the common daisy, white with a yellow centre, is nice but bland. But my goodness, get into African daisies and painted daisies (a.k.a. “tansies”) and the ox-eye and the spectacular Glebionis carinata and what a feast for the eye. None of them file hate speech complaints with aggressive paralegal tribunals either. What’s not to like?

The issue here is not whether I want to say, for instance, that contrary to some ignorant stereotypes the Prophet Mohammed was a really nice guy, a teddy bear in fact. It is whether if I say such a thing I may be hauled before some tribunal to answer for the fact that in Sudan I would have a mob howling for my blood, or because I didn’t say Peace Be Upon Him.

So I refuse to be drawn into any sort of debate about what might be causing image problems for the Islamic faith. Not that it has any. My lips are sealed on such questions as dishonour killings. I’m sticking to flowers. Or favicons, you know, those cute little icons that appear next to some of the items in your browser “Favourites” list. How, I ask you, can a business in this day and age not have a favicon? A nice blue one with white letters, or a flag, or a tiny building or something. You can even have your own picture. Unless your faith forbids depictions of the human face.

Gaaack! I didn’t say that. Nor would I dare suggest that these human rights tribunals, at once prosecutor and judge, are alien to our constitutional order and should be abolished. You see, section 48 (1) (2) of the Canadian Human Rights Act stipulates, respecting the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal (to which the CHRC may refer obstinate defendants), that “Persons appointed as members of the Tribunal must have experience, expertise and interest in, and sensitivity to, human rights.” If you think that means sensitivity to ancient rights like free speech, you’re about ready for some “sensitivity” training. Not for me, thanks. I’m doing daisies.

Besides self-preservation, I’m skipping this issue because Maclean’s is a large, established organization with lots of money. Some of my media colleagues are startled that not even the big guys are immune which does, I suppose, show how the appetite grows with the eating. But I say thank goodness the Star Chambers have gone after a wealthy organization that can fight back.

No, sorry, I don’t say that. Nor would I dream of claiming it is not against the law to be rude, that it is illegal to incite violence or engage in conspiracies but it is not a crime to be impolite nor should it be. If I weren’t such a coward I might find myself hollering three once-familiar arguments about freedom of speech at legislators, judges and everyone else who supports this latter-day censorship. First, sunlight destroys evil; that is, open debate reveals which beliefs are false or odious. Second, by debating things instead of just reciting them we come to a more vigorous appreciation of those beliefs we decide are true. Third, if people are neither good nor wise enough to be entrusted with sorting out truth from falsehood (and frankness from rudeness) they cannot possibly be permitted to elect governments to do it for them.

Luckily I’m too smart to say anything of the sort. The essential point here, the legal crux of the matter, is that Canadian Islamic Congress National President Mohamed Elmasry’s feelings are hurt. Egad.

Daisies. White, purple, yellow, pink. So pretty. And freedom of speech may soon be pushing them up in this country.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With everyone off in Bali dealing with the urgent menace of global warming or panting over Karlheinz Schreiber’s semi-revelations, might I interest you in some malaria?

No thanks? Lacks glamour? OK, malaria doesn’t hand you $100,000 in cash and not ask for a receipt. It doesn’t excite Hollywood celebrities or in a pinch make you one. But it is the No. 1 killer of children in Africa. Plus I found something new and encouraging to say about it in an unexpected venue: a Senlis Council press conference on Afghanistan.

I confess to going in with vague suspicions that the council were among the usual suspects on foreign policy. They seemed to be calling the Afghan mission a disaster and most people who do so are engaged in wishful thinking like, of course, most of those calling it a success.

One of the weird and wearying things about issues like Iraq or Afghanistan is the way people’s assessment of what is happening so often reflects what they wish was happening. Like the Wednesday New York Times headline, “A Calmer Iraq: Fragile, and Possibly Fleeting.” Who knew they’d say that?

I started reading the Senlis handouts about Afghanistan unravelling and the Taliban taking over and I’m thinking “Yeah, yeah.” And then suddenly they’re demanding that NATO double its expeditionary force and the Euro-slackers send more troops into the dangerous south and into parts of Pakistan. Then Senlis warned that setting a timetable for Canadian withdrawal was a recipe for another Rwanda or Srebernica.

I already knew the Senlis Council thought paying Afghan farmers to cultivate poppies for medical purposes instead of heroin is far better than U.S.-backed crop eradication that alienates Afghans without staunching the flow of illegal drugs. And I suppose ideas make strange bedfellows because I already agreed. But I was pleasantly surprised when council president Norine MacDonald told the press conference CIDA was doing such a wretched job of delivering aid in southern Afghanistan that the Canadian Forces should take over.

When questioned later about the impression it would create if we militarized aid, she said it would create the impression starving people were getting food and she wasn’t going to heed “theological” objections from the “aid and development community” who didn’t have a better plan or any plan at all. Cool. She also reminded us how horribly the Taliban treated women last time. Are you listening, Mr. Dion and Mr. Layton?

Then she handed the microphone to Amir Attaran, Canada Research Chair in Law, Population Health and Global Development Policy at the University of Ottawa, to discuss the link between Afghanistan and fighting malaria. Yes, he’s also the guy in a dispute with DND over treatment of Afghan prisoners and Access to Information. Which again made me skeptical because while I dislike government secrecy, I’m not inclined to fuss unduly about the fate of irregular combatants in hideous guerrilla wars, nor to reproach the Afghan government for the quality of its paperwork when it can’t even pay its police.

Anyway, the good professor turned out to be a malaria enthusiast. Uh, let me rephrase that. He’s a passionately committed expert who wants the “international community” to do more about malaria.

There is no “international community” (fortunately) but let me recommend the rest of his plan. I had somehow acquired the impression malaria was manageable, not curable, that retired Indian army majors tended to start shaking every few months for the rest of their lives and downing quinine cocktails (a.k.a. gin and tonic) to suppress symptoms. It turns out one type of malaria does recur but not the lethal Plasmodium falciparum variety ravaging Africa. And that one, falciparum, is curable. Dr. Attaran says a simple course of pills, usually for three days for about a dollar, does the trick.

Here’s the punch-line: The medicine he advocates (Artemisinin Combination Therapy or ACT) is in short supply but is principally derived from a hardy plant called Artemisia, or “sweet wormwood,” easy to grow in Afghanistan. So his idea is to raise charitable funds to pay Afghan farmers to grow sweet wormwood, pay other Afghans to extract the key ingredient, then donate it to the World Health Organization to process into medicine.

I don’t think this idea, alone or combined with the medical poppy plan, would completely stop the flow of illegal drug money to the Taliban. But it would contribute to the success of the Afghan mission while saving hundreds of thousands of lives a year cheaply.

When the muckamucks get back from their Bali yak-fest and finish shovelling their snow maybe they should look into it. Or we could just go ahead without them.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Wait a minute. What’s this? While everyone’s been standing on guard against two-tier health care it turns out we’ve got two-tier education. I want an expensive, restrictive, dysfunctional federal law and I want it now. Now now now.

We cannot delay, for we face a crisis. The Canadian Council on Learning’s 2007 Survey of Canadian Attitudes Toward Learning reports that almost one in three Canadian parents has hired a tutor for their children. And it’s not a matter of helping kids overcome disadvantages. The study says “Families with annual household incomes greater than $100,000 are almost three times more likely (2.9 times more likely) to hire tutors than families making less than $40,000.” Even worse, if anything could be worse than the rich having money, “most parents who hire tutors (73 per cent) estimate that their children’s overall academic performance is in the A or B range.”

How does that cheery Leonard Cohen song go again? “The poor stay poor, the rich get rich/ That’s how it goes/ Everybody knows.” But this is Canada. Here we have universal health care and nobody gets better treatment than anyone else unless they live in a big city, know somebody, are a politician or journalist, can afford to go to the U.S. or buy private catastrophic illness insurance, get to jump the queue thanks to a workers’ compensation board or some such irritating detail. Everybody else gets to wait in the same dingy corridors for the same exhausted ER nurses and doctors, wondering if there’s much C. difficile in this place and when that floor was last mopped.

That’s how it goes. Everybody knows. But what’s the deal with education? I ask, indignantly, because apparently everybody also knows, at least everybody who’s anybody, that we need Early Childhood Development because socioeconomic status is a far stronger predictor of lifetime health than medical care, and success in life depends on the state getting between you and your parents early on. (See for instance the chapter by Robert Evans, Clyde Hertzman and Steve Morgan in the IRPP book A Canadian Priorities Agenda that I wrote about two weeks ago.)

Happily, Ontario’s new old government campaigned on making ours the first province with full-day kindergarten for everyone. And having gotten re-elected, Dalton McGuinty has now even appointed a professor to spend a year trying to figure out how on earth you do that. The premier pontificated to the press that “I’m of the view this is no longer a luxury in a society that lays claim to being progressive and availing itself of all the best pedagogical advice that we can get our hands on.”

I’m personally of the view that it is no longer a luxury to figure out how to do things before promising you’ll do them and winding up scrambling desperately for usable advice. Especially after a newspaper told me the learned professor admits “designing a full-day kindergarten system will require consultations with a ‘huge number of doers and thinkers,’ but declined to discuss many details” except he doubts the half a billion bucks put aside thus far would be enough. On which point Mr. McGuinty confessed fatuously that he “would be surprised” if it were.

In short the premium, I mean the premier, made yet another promise he has no idea how to keep. At least this time he knows it will cost more than he said, which actually is an improvement on his habit of making promises he has no idea how to keep and doesn’t realize are hugely expensive. I guess watching himself in action he detected a pattern. He’s no fool, unlike those who re-elected him. But I digress.

The point is, it may well be that the government can no more give us all good education from cradle to grave than it can give us all good health care over the same period. But if not, it can at least give us all the same bad education and call it happiness. And isn’t that the Canadian way?

Sure, taxing people so heavily that most can’t afford private school, while stifling choice within the public system, is a good start. But it’s not enough. A veritable crisis of private tutoring is upon us. The dream of equality recedes. I demand a federal Canada Education Act that imposes the same rigid, wretched requirements on teachers and schools as the Canada Health Act does on doctors and hospitals.

Oh, and did you know wealthy people are flagrantly buying their kids nicer food, too, and taking them to fancy restaurants? Food matters more even than education, let alone medicine. It’s no longer a luxury in a society that lays claim to being progressive that everyone should eat in a state cafeteria where George Smitherman dumps slop on our trays.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Cassandra was my kind of gal. Unfortunately I can’t find her statue anywhere on Parliament Hill.

In case you attended a progressive, fact-free school, she’s the unfortunate Trojan princess granted the gift of foresight by Apollo but then, when she did not return his love, cursed so that no one would believe her. “There’s something fishy about that wooden horse,” she said, but …

I thought of her after grousing last Friday about a “general breakdown of public institutions” in Canada. Such talk can get you pegged as an alarmist crank. But three days later the Citizen reported that “Retiring baby boomers have sparked an unprecedented churn of workers within the federal government, starting at the top where nearly 60 per cent of executives spend less than a year in their jobs.”

Did somebody say breakdown? The obvious problem here is that policy is being administered, interpreted and in significant measure made by people who haven’t been on the job long enough to master its details, let alone the historical background. But it’s even more alarming that this obviously dysfunctional situation was either tolerated by the senior bureaucratic and political figures whose job it is to ensure that the public service works properly, or else they didn’t know about it.

It’s not clear which. Monday’s Citizen went on: “Such rapid turnover has long been suspected, but the Public Service Commission highlighted the problem in its latest annual report with a study of pay records that showed 40 per cent of Canada’s public servants started and ended the year in different jobs. That jumped to more than 75 per cent for some occupations.” But the paper didn’t say who had long suspected it or how strongly. And I’m not sure which would be worse: people knew but didn’t care, or it came as a complete surprise to half of cabinet, the Opposition and the Privy Council Office. I distinctly recall a big public service revitalization exercise under the Liberals. Did they know it ended this way? Did the Tories? Did senior public servants? Did anybody?

In any event, the people responsible for managing the public service apparently only just now got around to verifying that they are presiding over demoralizing, ill-informed chaos. If that isn’t a general breakdown of public institutions it surely fulfills its key functions. We face a problematic staffing situation no one intended to create, knew had been created or has any idea how to fix. And please do not be cynical. It’s not just the same old government inefficiency. It’s getting worse and it matters. You may think a functioning bureaucracy is exasperating … until you try dealing with a crumbling one.

Speaking of crumbling, a major new study just catalogued the disastrous condition of Canada’s municipal infrastructure. Its author, McGill engineering professor Saeed Mirza, gets an honorary Cassandra award because he’s been warning about this problem for ages. Yet Prime Minister Stephen Harper promptly blew his study off, telling Parliament Tuesday: “Since coming to office, this government has announced record amounts of spending, and record new programs into dealing with infrastructure in Canada. They amount to an additional $33 billion over the next seven years. This covers everything from national down to certain types of municipal and local infrastructure.”

It’s bad enough that our bridges, sewers and roads are disintegrating. But the institutional catastrophe is the contemptuous reception given to warnings. I wish I could assure you the PM was simply wrapping himself in protective partisan rhetorical fog while preparing to move decisively behind the scenes. But I cannot be sure the bureaucrats managing this file have been on the job long enough to master it and communicate their alarm upward, or that cabinet could absorb the message if they were. This purple-turning and finger-jabbing may well be all our politicians have. (British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s pompously clueless response to a recent massive breach of data privacy evokes equally disquieting reflections.)

There is no quick fix here. We have a systemic institutional problem driven by an intellectual one. Our Trojan horse is the idea that politics is about compassion, best measured by how abusively someone denounces the wretches across the aisle, and questions of detail, historical analysis of our institutions, fundamental philosophical questions are fit only for geeks and losers. Let this into your city, I wail, and disaster will ensue.

If MPs had to pass a statue of Cassandra on their way into Parliament every day, they might smile a bit less patronizingly and listen a bit more carefully. I know it sounds hysterical, but I swear someone’s talking inside that pretty wooden horsie.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]