LONDON, England - The symptoms of parliamentary decline are by now unpleasantly familiar. I don’t just mean the way Question Period, regardless of the subject or authenticity of the outrage, often prompts the reflection that brawling alley cats do have a certain dignity. Consider this list of symptoms from a recent report: the rise of parties and partisanship, the concentration of power in the PMO and the way government business has taken over the Commons, the rise of special interest groups, sensationalist media hungry for sound bites not substance, constitutional changes that sideline Parliament and a habit of entrusting important issues to non-political arms’-length bodies instead of elected MPs. Depressing. But what can you do?

Well, you can start by raising an eyebrow or two on hearing that my list is from a July, 2000, report on the British Parliament by a panel chaired by Lord Norton of Louth. Possibly it does not encourage you to hear your neighbour’s ornate and venerable roof seems to be caving in as well. But if we have these problems in common, it offers a way to get some perspective on their causes and possible cures.

I say problems rather than crisis in deference to those who say parliamentary self-government has caromed from one difficulty to another for centuries, so “there is room for improvement” is not, and need not prompt, a call to man the barricades. But that there are problems would be fatuous to deny.

There are also solutions. Trust me. I could drop a very large pile of them on your desk if I weren’t obsessively taking notes from the various British studies that contain them. Incidentally, while here in England I have learned a charming term for those with weird hobbies, “anoraks,” taken from the garments habitually worn by those obsessed with train-spotting rather than the repair of governmental institutions. Arguably I qualify. But I cling to sufficient normalcy to insist that when proposing remedies, ingenuity is no substitute for practicality.

Until you are clear on what government is meant to be doing, and why it is having trouble doing it, your solutions are liable to be eccentric rather than sensible. For instance, those in Britain tempted by a written constitution ought certainly, in my view, to study our own recent Canadian history to grasp the dangers of rushing into such a thing with more zeal than understanding, and with more self-conceit than either.

Thus, in an attempt to exchange my anorak for one of the togas or frock coats habitually worn by the statues that surround me as I write, in a pub just west of Westminster Palace, I declare that government is meant to protect the lives and liberties of citizens from other threats without itself menacing them. I further insist that the best way ever found of approximating that outcome, indeed the only way, is to have a strong executive held firmly in check by a strong elected legislature.

Our system is manifestly in disrepair in this regard. Our executive seems strong in a clumsy kind of way, although there is some question whether it can really achieve much beyond securing re-election by spending irresponsible quantities of money on programs of dubious merit. But our legislature is clearly not strong; whatever the reason, it does not exert an effective check on the executive. These days, on the crucial budget vote, the Official Opposition seems to abstain as a matter of course. You would have trouble explaining why to William Gladstone or Pitt the Elder.

Of course you might protest that you have no intention of attempting to explain the matter to either of these august gentlemen, who are not merely dead, but dead foreigners. What have they to do with me?

Well, go back to my list from the Norton Report. If the problems painfully familiar to us are also painfully familiar to anoraks in Britain, it suggests that we should not focus unduly on those things that supposedly make Canada distinctive. A similar institutional structure and history, including the recent dramatic expansion of government’s expenditures and its ambitions, have given us not merely architecturally similar parliament buildings but similar symptoms of decay behind the beautiful neo-Gothic facades. It stands to reason for the most part the causes of our problems are likely to lie in those things we share. Thus to find solutions we should take a broad and comparative view, geographically and historically, rather than a narrow and parochial one.

Plus I’d rather talk to a dead William Pitt than watch a live modern Question Period that some British observers have told me is, even to them, positively shocking.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Can someone explain to me why Fidel Castro has been succeeded by his brother? Since when does communism equal hereditary monarchy? Ask Kim Jong-il. It’s instructive to contrast Cuba with Pakistan, where a lot of people are trying under very difficult circumstances to manage a legitimate transfer of political power. It is, unfortunately, far too late to do it peacefully this time. But if they can get the legitimacy right, the violence should subside. I wish Pakistan some of the luck we already had over many centuries.

Sorry, make that millennia. I am regarded in some circles as eccentric because on mild provocation I start explaining about King Alfred and the cakes, and how the descendants of Edmund Ironside married into first the Scottish then the post-Conquest English royal families. But that history is of compelling interest not only for its often ghastly details but because, in the end, the slaughter stopped. Britain basically solved the problem of political legitimacy, and passed that solution on to Anglosphere countries like Canada. Few others have been so fortunate.

The orderly transfers of power we enjoy, which tragically elude so much of the world, are a revealing test of such legitimacy. All rulers assert some sort of claim not just to hold but to deserve power, whether as sun god incarnate, vanguard of the proletariat or person whose budget measures command majority support in an elected legislature. But while the latter is easy to test, tyrants are obliged to maintain the illusion of consent through fear.

It usually works pretty well, at least for them, in the normal course of events. But when the leader is dead or dying and no potential heir emits visible light or the sound of history’s marching feet, when no one yet controls the machinery of repression, it invites swordplay in the temple or machine-gun fire in the cabinet room.

Passing on power to one’s relatives is a kind of desperate default position under such circumstances. That blood is thicker than water tends to make all sorts of families cling together in times of chaos. Besides, a political tyrant is liable also to be a domestic one, and expect his relatives to remain under his thumb from beyond the grave. As they well may; when a legacy of brutal injustice is your only claim to power, the slightest hint of scruples invites violent overthrow. If Fidel Castro’s claim to power was illegitimate, Raul’s is ludicrous. Thus while undemocratic regimes formally based on heredity tend to depart from that principle in times of crisis, more advanced tyrannies have the paradoxical opposite tendency, to revert to it, from Cromwell’s son to Mao’s widow to Saddam Hussein’s family.

Even in fragile democracies effective political power is often dynastic, from India to Kenya; if nothing else, when your political allies are also your relatives you have a good idea where trouble will come from. Of course mature democracies also have families in which political interest and talent run strongly. But you don’t see Robert Kennedy becoming president when JFK is assassinated. And even the British crown became reliably hereditary only once compliance with the will of Parliament replaced accident of birth as the measure of legitimacy.

It is not coincidence that no sane individual has the slightest expectation that Britain or North America will witness a violent transfer of power. Take the bitterly disputed 2000 American election: Did one person even get punched in the nose? And how likely is a coup in Ontario?

In public affairs, as in life generally, we should remember to count our blessings. I yield to no one when it comes to discontent with the inadequacies of governance in Canada. But I am so irascible on this point because I worry that we hold the precious gift of ordered liberty in too slight regard when, indeed, we bother to regard it at all.

The cultural habits of self-government, the ability to depend on your fellows to share your outrage at the right things in the right way at the right time in sufficient numbers, are hard-won and precious and it is no mere pedantry to recall how it happened. Nor is it culturally insensitive to balance sympathy for people seeking peaceful transitions of power outside the Anglosphere with a realistic appraisal of the enormous difficulties they face.

A statue of Alfred the Great on Parliament Hill would remind us that many good people died, often horribly, to give us decent government. And it would help us spare a thought for those people in Pakistan struggling against long odds to achieve what we inherited, and those in Cuba and North Korea still denied even the chance to try.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Start practising the phrase “President Barack Obama.” It’s not so bad. Except as in “President Barack Obama denied today that his naive and spineless foreign policy has encouraged terrorism.” It’s annoying when pundits intone that it’s come down to Obama v McCain as they easily could have predicted. But I did predict it, on CFRA radio in December. Possibly I hedged my bets, but I said both parties would take their least unattractive option, and both have. Republicans don’t nominate pro-abortion candidates, which only left the Mormon, the creationist, the asleep guy and the obnoxious hyperactive maverick whom they chose. Meanwhile the Democrats are rationally opting for inexperienced over horrible.

Trust me, folks. It’s over. The collapse of Hillary Rodham Clinton has surprised many people including her. But if revenge is a dish best served cold, I’m having ice cream here. Democrats who applauded Bill Clinton’s filthy tactics against Republicans were repulsed when he turned them on his own party in South Carolina, and she’s lost nine straight primaries since. Yum yum.

I certainly worry that Senator Clinton is way further left than she admits, on foreign and domestic policy. But my primary concern is character. Whatever the Clintons were caught doing, however sordid, they always dismissed with “We’ve moved on” or words to that effect. It won’t do. The human mind, like the life of a nation, organizes itself around stories or sinks into chaos. The fundamental truth of our mortal existence, bounded by time, is that it hinges on choices and consequences. Persistently to excuse villainy, even as you pocket the benefits, just because “that was then” is to deny any possibility of moral coherence. That Ms. Clinton should belatedly sit down to a banquet of devastating consequences is delicious irony.

For some of my friends the taste is spoiled by fears that Barack Obama is a far-left babe in the foreign policy woods. He may be. Almost no Democratic presidential candidate since Harry Truman has been fit to serve as commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful free nation. But it is intellectual partisanship to declare any Democrat ipso facto unworthy of office (or any Republican, I remind colleagues on both sides of the border). Besides, many conservatives are too concerned with how the Republicans might win in November and not enough about why we want them to.

I do not consider George W. Bush a total disaster. Journalists and academics tend to describe any incumbent Republican as among the worst presidents ever, from Reagan to Coolidge and beyond. Even Lincoln got some horrible press in his day. Later, commentators tend to give them some credit if only to draw invidious comparisons with their successors, and I suspect this president’s foreign policy will be praised in retrospect, like Truman’s, for its resolve and clarity on basic issues. But not his domestic policy. In early 2000 I asked then-candidate George Bush if there was any area from which government should simply withdraw. In response, I wrote in an April 21, 2000 Citizen column, “he stared at me as though he’d never heard such an idea before, pressed his hand to his temple in perplexity and eventually stammered that he’d have to get back to me. (He didn’t.)” Still hasn’t. And as there’s no reason to suppose John McCain would be better domestically, surely we could live with Barack Obama as an alternative.

Especially since he seems to be an honest, decent man. Oh, and he’s um uh you know ... black. And while I don’t care what colour you are, race can have political consequences and does here. If Barack Obama’s skin tone helped undermine Hillary Clinton’s gender-based appeal to Democrats, well, those who live by identity politics cannot complain if they perish by it. But a black U.S. president would draw positive attention abroad to the marvellous openness of American society. Even more important, his political success with all sorts of voters, as a candidate who is black rather than a “black candidate,” not only symbolizes but actively contributes to healing America’s ancient racial wounds. You could do a lot worse in a Democrat. So why not send the GOP to the minors for a bit?

The answer may hinge on whether you’d elect a president who can’t comb his own hair. John McCain can’t, because he was so brutally tortured by communists as a POW in Vietnam. When Barack Obama debates such a man on national security, a couple of careless cheap shots or conspicuously daffy policy statements would lose him an election that is, at this point, his to lose.

So say after me “President Barack Obama.” And while you’re at it, practice “Carteresque.”

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Rowan Williams should be fired as Archbishop of Canterbury for calling the arrival of aspects of Shariah law in Britain “inevitable” and desirable. But for once this silly man has actually done us a favour. Consider the harrumphing he provoked from the British government. According to the Daily Telegraph, the chairman of the ominously-named Equality and Human Rights Commission said, “Raising this idea in this way will give fuel to anti-Muslim extremism” while Home Secretary Jacqui Smith babbled, “‘I think there is one law in this country and it’s the democratically determined law. That’s the law that I will uphold and that’s the law that is at the heart actually of the values that we share across all communities in this country.”

It is babble, or worse, because just five days earlier the same newspaper revealed that “Husbands with multiple wives have been given the go-ahead to claim extra welfare benefits following a year-long Government review. ... Even though bigamy is a crime in Britain, the decision by ministers means that polygamous marriages can now be recognised formally by the state, so long as the weddings took place in countries where the arrangement is legal. The outcome will chiefly benefit Muslim men with more than one wife. ... Ministers estimate that up to a thousand polygamous partnerships exist in Britain, although they admit there is no exact record.”

If that’s not an aspect of Shariah law, it will do until one comes along.

As for the tidbit that “Income support for all of the wives may be paid directly into the husband’s bank account, if the family so chooses,” I trust feminists will remind us how a power imbalance makes true consent impossible.

They can do it from here, since newspapers this week also reported claims by the president of the Canadian Society of Muslims that hundreds of Toronto-area Muslims draw welfare and social benefits for multiple wives. “Polygamy is a regular part of life for many Muslims,” he was quoted as saying. “Ontario recognizes religious marriages for Muslims and others.”

The Ontario minister of community and social services predictably huffed and puffed that, “Not knowing the law is not an excuse. They should know that in Canada there is no polygamy and that only one wife is covered.” And possibly the extra wives are claiming welfare not as spouses but as individuals who just happen to live in the same house as him, her and her, and his kids by all three. But the preamble to the Ontario Family Law Act explicitly says: “In the definition of ‘spouse,’ a reference to marriage includes a marriage that is actually or potentially polygamous, if it was celebrated in a jurisdiction whose system of law recognizes it as valid.”

It’s certainly a Shariah-like object. Why weren’t we told? And how dare you now deny it?

To be sure, the law in question mostly concerns divorce. But the B.C. government has long feared a Charter challenge from polygamous breakaway Mormon sects. Surely a man could now plausibly argue in an Ontario court that if the law imposes many of the obligations of marriage on him with respect to more than one wife, fairness requires that it also grant him the benefits and, as advocates of gay marriage successfully argued, validate the quality of his love into the bargain. As I warned in the Western Standard three years ago, “Guess who’s coming to dinner? Looks like Bob and Carol and Alice, but not Ted.”

I do not say that it is easy to avoid these consequences. Leaving aside any religious or Charter considerations, if a man lives with more than one woman and has children with them, and things go wrong, could any court award support only to the children of the woman who was first to move in or, alternatively, the first to get pregnant? Yet who among us today would dare argue for a legal ban on fornication or cohabitation?

In this respect there is a curious alliance between those who think anything goes and those who think only one thing goes. Both stand in opposition to the western tradition of ordered liberty, the first because they oppose order and the second because they oppose liberty. How can we stand up for our traditions if we dare not name them?

Don’t ask Rowan Williams, a self-described “hairy lefty” who donned a druid suit after being chosen archbishop and recently told the Daily Telegraph’s Rachel Sylvester that Britain is a “secular state” despite being a very senior cleric in its established church. But on Shariah he blurted out a truth politicians deny in vain.

Stick a thank-you note in with his pink slip.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

A lot of bad things have been said about the Harper Conservatives’ grimly sour approach to communications. And rightly so. But why shouldn’t they do it that way? The obvious response, that it’s not good for our democracy, has considerable merit. But those not hopelessly naive about politics (most cynics are) ought to understand that the question “why shouldn’t they do it?” has two very different meanings.

One is “Why don’t we want them to do it?” which is answered above. But the other is “How might we try to discourage them from doing it?” And on that subject I wish you could have been at Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn and Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s Monday press conference on job protection for reservists called to active duty.

For what it’s worth, I support the government on this one. The reserves are extremely important to Canada’s military preparedness and always have been, despite some legitimate concerns about their training standards in years gone by. As the ministers noted, the national government can only legislate such job protection for people in federally regulated industries and the federal public service (and post-secondary students), though a number of provinces have taken similar steps while others are expected to. But I was delighted to hear Mr. MacKay say the things I’ve long wanted to hear a senior minister say about the reserves, and back his words with appropriate deeds.

Of course I realize that holding the press conference at the Cartier Square Drill Hall standing in front of a bunch of reservists was a photo op. I’d go further and say the only real reason for this press conference was TV visuals. For all other purposes they could just have sent us a press release. But that’s OK. If the government thinks it has an important story to tell, they try to frame it in a compelling way. It’s neither incompetent nor unreasonably calculating.

Alas, after that things went wrong. When Mr. MacKay and Mr. Blackburn finished their prepared remarks, the first question was not about reservists generally or the new law in particular but prisoners in Afghanistan. The second was about helicopters. The third concerned the upcoming NATO meeting in Vilnius on Feb. 7 and 8. The fourth returned to helicopters. The fifth was whether Mr. MacKay expected acrimony in Vilnius.

What on Earth did the journalist think or hope the defence minister would say in reply? “Yeah, I’m betting we slap one another’s glasses off and throw cutlery?” Instead he was smooth, dull, unmemorable, and therefore unharmed.

The sixth question also concerned detainees, as did the seventh. Finally the guy in charge of the question queue asked wearily if anyone had anything to ask about the reserves. Yes. What was the government doing about thousands of reservists not covered by the new legislation? Mr. Blackburn patiently explained the division of powers under the Constitution, again. Then I asked how many of the roughly 350 reservists now in Afghanistan would come under the new policy, which they couldn’t answer, and time ran out.

Why ask the other questions in this setting? Acrimony at NATO is an interesting and important story, but best pursued by speaking to experts after obtaining and comparing the considered positions of various NATO allies. As for questions about detainees, helicopters and so forth, the best hope for a genuinely informative response is to submit them in writing or by telephone to Mr. MacKay’s office.

To be sure, his reply might be evasive, tendentious or both. But to ask them with the cameras running, when the ostensible topic is something different, is to abandon any pretence at seeking enlightenment and lunge for a “Gotcha!” TV shot of the minister red-faced and incoherent as his bullying right-wing incompetence is exposed.

Mr. MacKay’s polished responses made it evident that he and his communication team saw it coming. Which speaks better of him than of us. In the end, the Tories didn’t really get their story out, but at least they avoided embarrassment. I’m not convinced the journalists did. Instead of setting traps as futile as they were crass, why not interview one of the 36 Cameron Highlanders or 14 Governor General’s Foot Guards headed to Afghanistan in the next rotation in August 2008? Or at least ask something genuinely tough about the new legislation?

I cannot guarantee this or any other government would be more forthcoming if asked better questions under more appropriate circumstances. But neither the press nor citizens benefit from doing things this way.

So I ask again: Why shouldn’t the Tories stonewall? It may be bad for democracy but it’s not bad for them. And for that you cannot entirely blame them.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has effectively endorsed the destruction of Israel. Which tells you all you really need to know. It tells you all you need to know about the UN, that's for sure. From "Zionism is Racism" to the Durban conference in 2001 to the upcoming Durban II, this body is viciously, unalterably hostile to Israel. Any interested person can find countless examples like the UN team investigating the fake massacre in Jenin in 2002, which included a guy who'd compared the Star of David to the Swastika. Or the UN Development Program in 2005 paying for T-shirts saying "Today Gaza and Tomorrow the West Bank and Jerusalem." Or Secretary-General Kofi Annan and other UN officials that same year celebrating the "International Day Of Solidarity With The Palestinian People" by sitting in front of a map from which Israel had been eliminated.

Lots of well-meaning folks keep giving the UN extra chances, figuring it's a wonderful institution dedicated to peace, justice and world government that by some regrettable misunderstanding keeps acting ineptly vicious. Don't. You should have no truck with this body not because it goes out of its way to call for the destruction of Israel but because in its day-to-day actions it takes that goal for granted.

On those grounds this episode also tells you all you need to know about the High Commissioner for Human Rights who kicked away a seat on Canada's Supreme Court to take that job. Namely, "Good riddance." Let there be no misunderstanding here. In a statement on January 24, Ms. Arbour called the new Arab Charter on Human Rights, which comes into effect this March, "an important step forward" toward strengthening "the enjoyment of human rights." Yet that Charter, the Citizen reports, says "all forms of racism, Zionism and foreign occupation and domination" should be "condemned and efforts must be deployed for their elimination."

Taken literally, that statement seems to oblige one to work for the elimination of those Arab governments whose officially sanctioned media treat the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as legitimate, call Jews the sons of pigs and monkeys or peddle the "blood libel." At the very least, they aren't a group whose declarations one would wish to endorse.

In the face of sharp criticism, Ms. Arbour this Wednesday issued a further statement including: "Throughout the development of the Arab Charter, my office shared concerns with the drafters about the incompatibility of some of its provisions with international norms and standards. These concerns included the approach to death penalty for children and the rights of women and non-citizens. Moreover, to the extent that it equates Zionism with racism, we reiterated that the Arab Charter is not in conformity with General Assembly Resolution 46/86 ..."

It sounds reasonable, albeit feebly, until you realize that it evades the key issue, which is not the condemnation but the "elimination" of Zionism. I could also take issue with the dishonest phrase "to the extent that it equates Zionism with racism" as if doubt existed on that score. But the real problem here is not the equation of Zionism with racism, it's that word "elimination".

It will not do to claim that Ms. Arbour is too naive to grasp the context. Especially since the new UN Human Rights Council was created in 2006 largely because the old Human Rights Commission was so anti-Semitic it had become a public relations problem instead of just a moral one. She knows what these governments say at the UN, and what they applaud.

Those who seek "dialogue" with the merchants of hate sometimes claim that if we show reasonableness and flexibility it will start to break down the barriers of misunderstanding and presently they too will show moderation. But the historical record does not confirm this notion. Instead it shows starkly that you may compromise with evil, but evil will not compromise with you. You move toward it but it doesn't budge; you move again, and again; and finally the purely semantic difference between your ultimate position and its initial one serves only to camouflage its real nature.

Most of the governments that surround Israel openly seek to drive the Jews into the sea. Not the Zionists. The Jews. And not because there will be boats waiting for them. I say most such governments, but I wouldn't gamble a second Holocaust on those that don't say it out loud.

There can be no compromise with such a position, and no nuanced, backfilled, endorsement of the "elimination" of Zionism.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

John Manley’s report on the Afghan mission does a service to Canada. Which must be the primary criterion for judging it regardless of the difficulties it creates for various politicians or, for that matter, columnists. Yes, columnists. If Mr. Manley’s Independent Panel on Canada’s Future Role in Afghanistan had produced a comically feeble result, I’d have had a field day with, say, a report on Canada’s Future Role in the European War, where Jack Layton proposes negotiating with the Nazis while Stéphane Dion wants to withdraw from Germany but invade the Soviet Union.

Instead, the panel’s tough-minded, mostly sensible document also forces me to scrap plans for a Robson Report stating various frightfully obvious facts about Afghanistan. I’m not entirely sure why MPs needed the Manley panel to do so, although it probably has something to do with a lack of strategic culture in Canada. But state them it did, in a climate where doing so was a definite public service.

It thereby creates problems for a number of politicians, primarily Messrs. Dion and Layton. Gilles Duceppe’s position on Afghanistan exists in a parallel universe and won’t be much affected. But other people who say foolish things will now run a substantial risk of being swatted with this report, or pointedly reminded of Mr. Manley’s accompanying remarks about the real Liberal foreign policy tradition.

There seems to be some dispute about who really said British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain viewed foreign affairs through the wrong end of a municipal drain pipe. But Canadian politicians with the equivalent contemporary failing, of viewing them through the wrong end of focus groups in swing ridings in Quebec and the Toronto suburbs, will find this report highly inconvenient. So let me again praise Mr. Manley for being willing to take on the job despite the clear risk of exactly that result.

Some commentators have emphasized the difficulties the report supposedly also creates for Stephen Harper, with its bluntness about conditions on the ground, our troops’ equipment and the need to extract more help from our NATO allies other than Uncle Sam. I think they are mistaken for several reasons.

First, if the report had looked like a whitewash, it would have done the Tories no good. Second, the Conservative message, despite some cheerfully daft spin of which the report itself is not entirely innocent, has always been that the Afghan mission is a tough one and we must be resolute. (And if our weasely European allies don’t send more troops by 2009, well, what did anyone expect?) Third, the call for more focus on humanitarian and technical aid offers a superb opportunity for what they called triangulation when Bill Clinton did it.

The Tories can now be seen to be making a reasonable accommodation with reality and finding a path between blind belligerence and craven surrender. Without even changing their policies. For I must underline here the problem of “missionaries and redcoats” that I have written about before. It is not our military but our humanitarian actions in Afghanistan that cause us the most trouble there.

If all we wanted was to safeguard our national security interests by keeping the Taliban out, we could just back local “warlords” with deep roots in the community, an attachment to the old ways and a casual attitude toward brutality. It would cost less money and fewer Canadian lives. Since we are not prepared to do so, we must recognize frankly that women’s rights, democracy and economic modernization represent a far more dramatic threat to Afghan traditions, and the ideals of the Taliban, than sleazy deals with strongmen. We cannot relax our security efforts if we don’t want to see teachers beheaded in front of their students for teaching girls to read. (See also my colleague Dan Gardner’s remarks on trying to make Afghans stop growing opium poppies.)

It would have been foolish to talk of reconstructing the French economy and democratic system in 1944 without destroying our military foes. It is even more foolish in Afghanistan, where our aim is not to “reconstruct” but to transform, making it very different than it ever was before 1979, let alone 2001.

The Manley panel downplays this problem. But it does stress the need to walk the talk on our vaunted human security agenda, and its vigorous message of perseverance in the face of difficulties is good for Canada. If it also helps the Harper Tories, blame the other parties for taking silly positions on a serious topic.

The panel deserves our thanks, whatever difficulties it might have created for politicians … or satirists.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It’s opera. My wife is listening to opera while jogging. The heroine will, one assumes, come to a tragic end. But the batteries won’t, because she’s using a digital player. On which, I trust, I can record the sound of environmentalists applauding the technological advances capitalism brings. Strange. I hear nothing. But I’ll keep trying. For like most journalists, I tape things a lot. That once meant a “tape recorder,” huge wobbling inconvenient piles of cassettes or microcassettes and a pile of batteries to warm the heart of any pink mechanical bunny. Not any more. Now my digital devices record MP3 files I store on my computer, and their batteries recharge right through the USB cable while I download.

Searching an MP3 file for a clip is much faster than rewinding a squealing microcassette. MP3s don’t snap at bad moments and are way, way easier to make backup copies of, with no loss of sound quality. It’s also way easier to search one CD or DVD than three dusty (my wife’s word) desk drawers full of cryptically labelled tapes. And because they don’t have to drive a tape around a spool, digital recorders use a lot less power so you don’t have to lug 10 extra batteries up, say, the Golan Heights so your tape deck won’t die at a bad moment.

They’re also cheaper for much the same reasons. You don’t have to keep buying batteries, tapes and furniture to store the tapes in. Did I say cheap? I just bought an external sound card for about 70 bucks that lets me digitize all my old tapes and chuck them. And an inexpensive scanner lets me preserve documents I accumulated in half a lifetime of pack-rattery before, in a similar process, going digital with my letters and file storage. The stuff I keep may still be rubbish, but it won’t fill a dump. PDFs, like MP3s, should bring a smile to the face of any environmentalist.

Permit me, then, to wipe it off deftly by pointing out that self-interest is what’s driving this greener technology. Most of us value the environmental benefits to some extent. But for all of us, digital technology means going green without suffering. Which will displease some in the organic-hair-shirt crowd.

It will upset others that companies are succeeding where governments often fail. The European Union’s environment commissioner just admitted that biofuels promote rainforest destruction. Legally mandated efficient light bulbs may give some people skin problems. The failure of governments to build nuclear plants has contributed massively to greenhouse-gas production. But over there in the private sector, it’s just progress progress progress. Wretched, isn’t it?

The progress is enormous. That digital dictaphones use less power not only means fewer dead batteries full of weird metals chucked into landfills, it also means fewer new batteries manufactured then schlepped about using fossil fuels. The DVDs we store MP3s on require far fewer resources to manufacture, and generate far less trash when they’re history, than LPs, spools or the aforementioned three drawers’ worth of microcassettes. (And just wait until I discover external hard drives.) Fourth, a subtle refinement, early digital dictaphones required proprietary software CDs and connection cables that also had to be manufactured, transported and, one day, discarded; newer ones send standard files through standard USB ports or wireless. Fifth, we e-mail, FTP and stream this stuff instead of couriering or mailing physical copies.

If you’ve ever been in a darkroom while “film” was being “developed” (Google it, kids) the stench of sodium thiosulphate tells you instantly that digital photos convey at least equal benefits. (And how, incidentally, do you dispose of old photos you no longer want? Landfill? Burn? Yuck. Whereas now it’s right-click, delete, empty recycle bin, goodbye ex-mother-in-law.)

Some greens advocate going back to a time when the human “footprint” on the environment was smaller. But we actually have to go forward, technologically speaking. The “footprint” of a portable cassette device was far larger than that of a digital player, while a medieval monk would have had to lug some nit with a lute on his back to enjoy Greensleeves while he jogged, to say nothing of plucking geese, skinning sheep and mixing who knows what gunk to write down the sheet music.

True, he would have heard something less appalling than opera or rap; technology can’t make moral or aesthetic choices. My wife is, as I noted, listening to opera and I can’t fix that.

Oh wait. I can. Press one little button and it’s all erased, leaving lots of room to record the stormy applause for capitalism I expect to erupt among environmentalists. My finger’s hovering over the record button. Yup, any moment now …

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]