Barack Obama has done the right thing in the right way by dumping America-hating Rev. Jeremiah Wright. True, he did it at the wrong time, but in politics you take what you can get. When I read about Rev. Wright's self-immolating performance at Washington's National Press Club on Monday, my immediate reaction was that, whatever else might be said about this man, his theology is fatally flawed because he peddles hate. And Barack Obama singled out precisely that failing the next day. He didn't just call himself "outraged" and "saddened." He described Rev. Wright's comments as "giving comfort to those who prey on hate."

Exactly right. But years, even decades too late. So what is left of Barack Obama's political appeal as a healer, especially of racial divisions? (Which, parenthetically, he'd better be after his outburst of snobbery about God, gays and guns left him an extremely dubious healer of cultural ones.) Here I would caution against the unreasonable expectations habitually raised in politics by partisans, commentators and candidates including Mr. Obama himself.

When people said he could heal racial divisions, were they expecting a miraculous laying on of hands and an instant, complete national cure? For some of his more star-struck supporters the answer seems to have been yes. But it was, and is, fatuous to think anyone could heal America's racial divisions with a couple of soaring speeches and an inspiring book. On such a serious problem we should have reasonable expectations.

Indeed, Rev. Wright is correct on one key point: The depth of bitterness among black Americans about historical injustices and their lingering effects is extremely deep. But he is dangerously wrong on another key point, namely that it is the appropriate role of leaders in the black community to foster and nurture that bitterness. It does no good to anyone, least of all his congregation.

If there's a worse sin for a pastor than peddling hate, it's peddling despair. So let me cite another black preacher in response to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright: "We must not," wrote Martin Luther King Jr. in 1958, "let the fact that we are the victims of injustice lull us into abrogating responsibility for our own lives." It would be weird and tone-deaf to ignore the ongoing impact of that ghastly injustice. But to tell black Americans in 2008 they are still the victims of a giant conspiracy, where the CIA unleashes AIDS on them in a country run by the KKK, is to encourage lethal feelings of helplessness.

Rev. Wright is stepping down anyway and one hopes we've pretty much heard the last of him. But the larger issue will not go away nearly so easily. What is most troubling and important about the Obama/Wright affair is that for decades the politician heard this kind of thing from the pastor and, as far as we know, didn't find it odd.

Possibly Sen. Obama sat stone-faced through the weirder bits; possibly he rolled his eyes; possibly he objected; possibly he nodded politely; possibly he nodded enthusiastically. We cannot now tell. Anything anyone suddenly "recalls" about any man who is odds-on favourite to win not just a major party nomination but the presidency of the United States must be treated with profound skepticism. But we can be sure he heard the weirder bits. Just weeks ago Sen. Obama said Rev. Wright was "like family" and the reverend is not a man shy about his opinions.

So we also know, unfortunately, that whatever reaction Sen. Obama had to what he now calls "appalling" and "ridiculous," he didn't find it walk-out-of-the-room outrageous. He may have found it plausible or implausible, true or false, right or wrong, but he didn't think it lunatic-fringe rubbish. And in this he was far from alone. Millions of black Americans routinely listen to this kind of thing from professors, activists, even spiritual leaders, and while some may disagree, far too few find it nutty. Indeed, one measure of the depth of the two American solitudes is that Rev. Wright seems to have had no idea what impact his National Press Club performance would have on his own credibility.

It is against this backdrop that one must judge Barack Obama's conduct now and in the future. Of course his sudden emergency deep-sixing of Rev. Wright was both long overdue and transparently political. But remember: He is a politician. So remember also Henry Kissinger's memorable assessment of his colleague Melvin Laird, Richard Nixon's defence secretary, as "a devious man but, when cornered, a patriot."

Right now Sen. Obama is looking like a devious man but, when cornered, a healer. I'll take it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

In the battle pitting the federal Conservatives against Elections Canada, the opposition and the press, a typical Ottawa competition to see who can perform most discreditably, my money was on the Tories. Until I made a crucial blunder: I did research. The key issue is whether the Conservative party, in the last election, could donate money to riding associations to purchase advertisements very similar to national ones without those ads being counted against national campaign spending and putting the party over the national legal spending limit. It was, at least to begin with, a dispute not about facts but about how to interpret the law.

At this point I foolishly read what I hope were all the relevant sections of the 500-plus page Canada Elections Act. Here, in unavoidable legalese, is what I found.

The Act does set separate spending limits for registered parties (clause 422.1) and for their candidates (clauses 440 and 441). But Clause 422 (2) lets parties give money to local candidates and not count it as "an election expense..." So the key question is whether those candidates can spend that or any other money, up to their local limit, on what is essentially national advertising. And the crucial Clause 407 (1) defines an "election expense" as "any cost incurred, or non-monetary contribution received, by a registered party or a candidate, to the extent that the property or service for which the cost was incurred, or the nonmonetary contribution received, is used to directly promote or oppose a registered party, its leader or a candidate during an election period." What in there says local spending must happen locally or concern local issues? I see nothing.

Of course the courts might not agree with my interpretation. Or they may say the Tories did a legal thing but in a carelessly illegal way; one Liberal staffer suggested to me that the central problem was that local candidates did not technically "incur" the costs in question. Even if true, that claim hardly justifies Liberal MP Dominic LeBlanc's reference to "an Enron-style accounting practice" at a Thursday press conference.

If recent allegations of document-tampering are substantiated, it's a whole different matter. But my legal opinion, worth what you paid for it less the cost of this newspaper, is that the Tories are right, even if too clever by half, on the initial issue.

It has been suggested that this dispute reflects hostility between Elections Canada and the prime minister going back to his former life as libertarian head of the National Citizens' Coalition, waging court battles against what the coalition (rightly, in my view) called election "gag laws."

But if so, it doesn't prove the primary fault lies with the Tories. I want a court to rule whether the dramatic police raid on Conservative party headquarters was necessary. And I'd certainly like to know how not only journalists but Liberal staffers heard of it in time to film it.

Especially because former Chief Electoral Officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley took a strangely vocal role in policy debates for the head of an organization that, as part of the executive not the legislative branch of government, is supposed to enforce laws not create them. Liberal MP Ken Dryden wrote in the Toronto Star on Wednesday that the Tory financing scheme "isn't what Elections Canada intended" and that "Elections Canada set national and local limits" because it "intended that national spending be for national purposes, and local spending for local purposes..." as if it, not Parliament, had created the Canada Elections Act. Then Mr. Dryden waved away the Tory position because "Elections Canada has ruled that for advertising to be considered local, it must directly promote that local candidate or oppose his or her opponent...," as if the centuries-old struggle to keep the executive branch from creating law and acting as judge in its own case had recently been quietly and benignly settled in favour of Charles I.

Mr. Dryden in his article and Mr. LeBlanc in his press conference both cited the Canada Elections Act provision that you cannot do indirectly what is expressly prohibited directly. OK. But it cannot be read as a Phantom of the Paradise style "All clauses that are excluded shall be deemed to be included" provision. If the Act does not directly forbid local candidates buying national ads, it does not indirectly forbid it either.

The Tories responded to this ruckus in a manner at once paranoid and juvenile and it worked about as well as you'd expect. But it doesn't mean there's anything scandalous in their challenging a technical Elections Canada ruling in court, even if they ultimately lose.

Besides, on my reading of the law, they might win.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

My colleague Randall Denley wrote this weekend that if we consider municipal amalgamation in Ottawa a failure we should undo it. What a splendid heresy. Not his sentiment that the megacity is not working out as promised, which others have also noticed. In any case, he isn't ready to give up on it entirely. No, I single out for praise his remarkable assertion that if a piece of public policy proves to be a mistake we should undo it, and his even more startling underlying premise that we can.

Trivial, you say? OK, when is the last time a government introduced a measure, then admitted it was a mistake and simply repealed it? When, for that matter, is the last time a government admitted something its predecessor had done was a mistake and simply repealed it, even after campaigning on precisely such repeal?

When you suggest getting rid of some flagrant error, people are prone to chirp that you can't turn the clock back, a remarkable triple fatuity in just six words. In the first place, we turn the clock back every fall when we go off daylight savings time. In the second, we turn the clock back whenever we notice that it is fast (unless it is the technologically advanced clock on some modern convenience we can't operate). In the third, and most fundamentally, it incorporates the mistaken notion of society as engaged in desirable linear progress through a set of predictable homogenous stages. This 19th-century mechanistic vision of society, most famously expressed in Marx's schema of an inevitable primitive-slave-feudal-capitalist-socialist-communist progression, is itself so outdated that to espouse it is, ironically, to turn the clock back.

Despite its complete historical inaccuracy, this notion manages to confer an air of inevitability on various schemes with no other apparent virtues. For instance, municipal amalgamation, which I warned against before it happened (on Dec. 1, 1999 in this very newspaper). Unfortunately I argued on the basis of economic and political principles and everybody who was anybody knew the megacity was going to happen and you can't fight the clock.

Or something. How, for instance, would this tiresome clock metaphor categorize my own desire to strengthen federalism by dramatically increasing the number of provinces, essentially dividing existing ones up by telephone area code? I also think we have too few politicians and should double the size of both the federal Commons and our provincial legislatures, giving us far more legislators who either do not seek or do not anticipate ministerial office and the perks it brings, and devote themselves instead to making the legislature work as a check on the executive including by strengthening the committee system.

The latter suggestion is driven by a desire to return to past practice. But the mechanism I propose is unfamiliar in this country though the British House of Commons exceeds 600 members. However you could start by repealing the Harris Tories' fatuous "Fewer Politicians Act." Am I then an advocate of turning the clock sideways?

When I also say Parliament should, and could, repeal the 1982 Constitution Act, are we to conclude that I'm so reactionary I use a sundial not a clock, but want to turn it forward? And why do you never hear arguments about the operation of a clock when someone tries to force progress? Why did no one say when the Supreme Court bestowed gay marriage upon us that you can't turn the clock forward, so be patient?

We should turn this metaphor down, and with it any notion that every piece of policy innovation is like Jacques Parizeau's infamous lobster pot, into which once lured we have no hope of escape. You can remove the lid and sometimes you should.

A simple solution, and not only to our metaphorical difficulties, is to suggest we navigate with a compass rather than a timepiece. For instance, I can show you coherent and principled defences of the constitution of liberty going back not merely to the Federalist Papers or William Blackstone but to mid-12th century England. Yet where, in the debate over our Constitution Act of 1982, was there even a failed attempt at reasoning from first principles or long experience? At best you'd get one of those silly claims that Canada only works until you start trying to understand why. Mankind has seen no shortage of confused politicians over the ages but it is a rare and obnoxious innovation for them to make it a point of pride.

There is no need for us to join them, in our rhetoric or the ideas it expresses. We can undo our policy mistakes. I say let's start with ditching the megacity.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The sputtering Olympic torch seems to be leaving quite a trail of soot on its way to Beijing. But by far the largest smudge will be deposited on the host country, whose Politburo will one day rue its decision to draw the world's attention by hosting the Games. Meanwhile I applaud recent protesters' recognition that China is a grotesque tyranny and we really should say something. But I think they besmirched themselves by violently disrupting the progress of the torch through France.

I ask you: Is the government of France legitimate? By which I mean not "Is everything it does sublimely wise and just?" but "Does it follow the rule of law, conduct fair elections and enjoy broad popular acceptance?" Since the answer is obviously yes, by what right do people with a grievance against a particular policy of that government, even a justified grievance, take the law into their own hands? The appropriate remedy in a democracy is to give a speech, cast a vote or seek an injunction, not punch a cop.

These torch-snuffing antics were not based on populism, for the protesters' supposed mandate rested on the strength not of their numbers but of their moral indignation. Yet they are not anarchists, who would let everyone do their own thing. Instead they seek to impose their own preferences by force, albeit feebly.

It is also pitiful because of the play-acting component. It is one thing to scream abuse and shove French, British or American police; quite another to take effective action against China in Tibet, Africa or the straits of Taiwan. As Henry Kissinger just wrote, Europeans seem increasingly unwilling to take military action in defence of their security. I detect an element of bad conscience in substituting street theatre within the safe boundaries of democratic states.

I wasn't even impressed when the speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrat Nancy Pelosi, met the Dalai Lama then said, "If freedom-loving people throughout the world do not speak out against Chinese oppression in China and Tibet, we have lost all moral authority to speak on behalf of human rights anywhere in the world." Her whole plan is to talk now so she can talk later. But it is the geopolitics of the windbag to reverse Theodore Roosevelt's "Speak softly and carry a big stick," and it is neither practical nor dignified.

What do the protesters hope to accomplish? If it is to address the Chinese people, they will largely fail because the Chinese government has tight control over the flow of information. If it is to influence their own governments they have a better chance, especially after provoking the revelation that the torch is being protected by some pretty sinister agents of the Chinese government. But the democratic right to protest peacefully does not include the right to protest non-peacefully, and violence just brings your cause into disrepute.

Which is a pity since it is disgraceful to see democratic governments assisting the procession of the torch via bleeding Tibet to Beijing as if it were some glorious tribute to the higher aspirations of mankind. The Chinese government has no acquaintance with those aspirations and, if it did, would have no sympathy for them.

It is disingenuous, or worse, for the International Olympic Committee to deplore politicization of the Games while simultaneously calling the torch relay "a symbol of international peace and friendship" (as Richard Pound did in this newspaper yesterday). Yet the IOC may accidentally have accomplished something useful, by drawing the eyes of the world to the harm being done by this year's hosts to human dignity, environmental quality and international harmony.

Especially given the tragicomic prose with which that regime now attempts to defend itself. The self-imposed isolation of tyrannies is a source of great weakness, and when they emerge from the fishbowl, they tend to flop around in a revealingly inept way. Hence a Beijing Olympic Committee member dismissed the London and Paris protesters as a "handful of Tibetan separatists" and the Chinese premier fulminated against the "Dalai clique" and its "hidden agenda." They've been talking to co-conspirators, flunkies and useful idiots so long they've lost all perspective on themselves. The resulting performance is one the free world should see.

Thus I oppose a boycott of the Games. Let the world go to Beijing but with its eyes as wide open as the smog permits. Let journalists ask tough questions and report frankly on what they see. Let spectators speak bluntly to their hosts, and athletes puncture totalitarian pretensions.

If the sputtering torch dumps a sufficiently public heap of soot on the Communist tyrants in China it will have done some good after all.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Do you know what I think every time I get into my car? "Hands up everyone who's on tranquilizers." I'm not saying people need drugs to drive badly. But it must help. Especially since literally millions of people are taking these things. Monday's Citizen said 30.2 million prescriptions for antidepressants were filled at retail drugstores in the 12 months ending last Nov. 30, and 8.5 million for antipsychotics. I realize there are people with severe problems for whom these drugs are a Godsend, and I know the typical prescription runs for considerably less than a year, so 38.7 million of them doesn't mean everyone's got one. Still, when there are more prescriptions for happy pills than there are people in a country I say something is very wrong.

Especially as some researchers say that most of these drugs do nothing for most of the people taking them except make them fat. Like Dr. David Lau of the University of Calgary, president of Obesity Canada, who calls psychiatric-drug-related weight gain "a huge problem," although he says scientists aren't quite sure how it happens.

My first thought was that while other factors contribute, from rising incomes to TV and video games, surely pills that take the edge off our worry contribute to obesity by making us less concerned that we are fat and out of shape. If not, aren't we being ripped off given that the point of these pills is to relieve anxiety?

Apparently so, since recent research suggests that, except for those with really serious problems, these pills do no more good than a placebo. In which case they must be inducing obesity through some indirect route and with no compensating benefits. At least alcohol, which science now suggests can be medically beneficial in moderate doses, really does induce the mental effects for which it has long been famous. Maybe it's time to empty the medicine cabinet into the trash and have a beer. After working out, I mean. And driving home sober to eat dinner with the kids.

I know such blunt talk is considered antisocial in some circles. But euphemisms don't solve problems and in this column, the court of common sense is in session. And it asks: If modern society with its loose morals and lavish state subsidies is the last word in human fulfilment, how is it possible that so many people cannot, or think they cannot, get through their day without a little yellow pill? Especially as it's not as though other more traditional intoxicants have disappeared. If literally millions of people need anti-depressants every year maybe there's something wrong with our society.

Theodore Dalrymple, a British commentator and psychiatrist, wrote in August 2003, "I very rarely see a patient who is in a dreadful personal situation, in which it is inconceivable that he or she should be happy, who has not been prescribed these drugs ... If I had $100 for every female patient of mine who had been prescribed these drugs who was embroiled with an abusive, violent, jealous, possessive, drunken or drug-taking man, I should be able to retire tomorrow." He even suggested that "By actively discouraging other, more constructive approaches to life's problems, without producing any benefit other than the avoidance of painful choices, it is very possible that (popular antidepressants) actually add to, rather than reduce, the sum of human misery."

It's a pretty obvious conclusion if you believe people are moral actors. If, on the other hand, you think they are just animate bags of chemicals it makes sense to redefine happiness as "suitably medicated" and call it a day. As Dr. Dalrymple also wrote, nowadays "we have a right not to the pursuit of happiness, but to the thing itself: and if our way of life leads us to misery, then a pill will, indeed ought and must, put everything right." But of course it can't, and doesn't. These things are a long way from the "soma" in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and that novel was, you'll recall, a warning not an advertisement.

Speaking of which, is it not also curious that we do not permit the marketing of alcoholic beverages on the premise that they will make you happy or, failing that, induce a mental state where you care a lot less that you're miserable? Yet they are far more likely to keep such a promise than the mother's little helpers millions of people out there are taking.

I don't even understand why, when we rightly devote so much attention to drunk driving, and wish we had tests for driving under the influence of marijuana, no one wonders whether all these antidepressants aren't rendering people dangerously mellow behind the wheel.

So I ask again: Who's driving on drugs? Maybe you shouldn't be.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The new Ontario budget is a highly instructive document. And I don't mean that in a good way. The first thing it illustrated was the risible level of contemporary partisan shrillness. Let me single out provincial Conservative leader John Tory accusing the McGuinty Liberals of being "addicted to spending," as if he'd be any different, and federal Tory MP Pierre Poilievre following his finance minister's undignified pre-emptive criticism with an instant response that plumbed new depths of brazen implausibility by saying "We came today in a spirit of partnership to ask (Premier Dalton McGuinty) to reduce the job-killing taxes he's imposed on Ontarians".

The second thing the provincial budget illustrated is that contemporary budgets aren't accounting documents at all and no one seems to expect them to be. I was 12 pages into my third newspaper Wednesday morning before anyone bothered mentioning total projected spending for the coming year (a surely noteworthy $96.2 billion). Meanwhile, the top "News" item on the Ontario government website that day was "McGuinty government invests in skills" which sounds like good news until you realize it's ours, not theirs, they're talking about.

Despite the demise some years ago of Keynesian economics, finance ministers and their critics spar over budgets as if their main purpose were to secure prosperity, not safeguard the public purse. Even when forced to admit that the economy has recently performed in ways as disappointing as they were unexpected, finance ministers routinely insist that this year they know all and see all when it comes to stimulating the economy.

The subtitle of Ontario Finance Minister Dwight Duncan's 2008 budget speech was "Growing a Stronger Ontario," not "What we're spending and where we hope to get it" or words to that effect. And in the speech, I found only one instance of the word "spend" (on page 11) but 29 of "invest" or some variant (referring to the government; there were also seven references to private investment which gives you a pretty clear idea of the relative importance they attach to the two). As for the government's plan to raise $96.9 billion and spend $96.2 billion, it appears nowhere in the budget speech.

Indeed, you have to reach page 93 of the quasi-detailed Budget Papers for the first figure and page 107 for the second. Even there they don't commit the ugly word "spend" to paper. Instead "Total expense over the medium term is projected to increase from $96.2 billion in 2008-09 to $102.6 billion in 2010-11, reflecting investments to promote economic growth and job creation through the government's five-point economic plan."

At least it sounds like a moderate increase. But wait. In its 2005 Budget Papers this government projected both revenue and expense three years out (that is, for this fiscal year, 2007/08) at $88.5 billion and they were actually $96.6 and 96.0. Should the Liberals be equally wrong this time, the real 2010-11 expense figure will be $111.3 billion. Exactly the sort of thing that, if this were an accounting document, would attract sustained attention. As would health spending hitting $40 billion. If we were doing "value for money" audits we might ask what we were getting for all these billions, and even on purely actuarial grounds there's room for sober discussion of trend lines.

Instead we get a weird mix of vaguely defensive economic projections and vainglorious political rhetoric about vital improvements to key social programs and the spending restraint that is to come, without any mention of why the 64 percent surge in program spending since 2001 underlined by Terence Corcoran in the National Post didn't do the trick but this time for sure it will work.

Imagine if, in 2003, Ontario's finance minister had told us we're raising health spending to $28.1 billion and education spending to $14.1 billion but these figures are so pitifully insufficient that by 2008/09 they'll be $40.4 billion and $19.3 billion and it still won't be nearly enough, so trust us, we know what we're doing.

No, I don't think they're withholding information. I fear that what you see is what you get when it comes to politicians' understanding and attention spans. That's why budget documents are primarily campaign boasts about how much more money your wise and prudent government is pouring into key programs because the incredible sums they already spent didn't work.

Considered as an accounting statement, that's pretty scary. From a policy perspective it's not much better. On the bright side, you can download the government's budget "Highlights brochure" from the finance ministry website in 16 different languages.

As I said, most instructive.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It’s Easter and time for the annual journalistic display of baffled hostility to Christianity. On cue the Roman Catholic archbishop of Ottawa, Terrence Prendergast, pops up with the suggestion that adherents to his church who don’t actually observe its rules should not expect to enjoy all the benefits of membership. A predictable chorus of howls erupted. The archbishop might be forgiven for wondering why. No one would think themselves entitled to join a chess club but refuse to move bits of plastic around an 8x8 square board. If they insisted on denouncing the game as a colossal waste of time for losers who couldn’t get a date using the Benoni counter-gambit (purely hypothetically, you understand), or showed up and played trumpet instead of chess, club officials would try to reason with them but, if that failed, would insist that they depart. And no one would think it odd. What, then, is so hard to grasp about the Catholic Church being a voluntary organization with rules that are meant to be enforced?

Remember, people who say they are Roman Catholics necessarily claim to believe the Pope is the heir of St. Peter to whom Christ gave the keys of the kingdom. This belief may be false or even foolish. But it’s no secret. And Canada is a free country so you are free to reject it. The one thing you can’t do is reject the authority of the Bishop of Rome yet remain in his Church, any more than you can go to a chess club and deny that its bishops move diagonally.

It is especially pitiful to hear politicians say they are obliged to represent their constituents, not their faith. They wouldn’t say that about their economic beliefs, and you’d think salvation mattered more than stagflation. An honest and lucid man would surely tell voters he holds certain fundamental beliefs that entail certain policy positions, and he’d invite only those who share most or all of those positions to vote for him.

Roman Catholics would then say they oppose abortion on religious grounds and welcome the votes of anyone who, for whatever reason, is also prolife. Atheists or agnostics would say they don’t know what God wants, if anything, but here are their policies; members of some faiths could say they think God is cool with abortion and so are they. In each case there would be no taint of hypocrisy. But anyone who says they know what God wants, they just don’t care, is acting like an idiot and should be denied political power on that basis alone.

Especially as Easter seems a particularly propitious time to ask whether your soul is not more important than your seat in Parliament. Certainly it’s a lot more permanent. Only if the result of this soul-searching is negative, if you conclude that winning an election is more important than standing up for things you claim to believe are the will of God almighty, creator of heaven and earth and our judge when time itself has ended, is it appropriate to say although I am Catholic I will govern as an atheist. In which case you’re in a pretty feeble position to object if sternly excommunicated.

There is nothing oppressive about this statement. The Inquisition put away the thumbscrews years ago. No one is suggesting introducing theocracy, making it mandatory to join the Roman Catholic Church, or illegal to oppose its teachings in print or on the stump, provided you have a willing audience. They’re simply saying you have no more right to make those arguments within the Church, physically or metaphysically, than to insist on playing jazz in a chess club.

Why would you even want to? I can understand a politician lying about religion to deceive the public, but that can hardly be the motive today. I don’t imagine that one voter in five knows Stephen Harper’s religion (Protestant), let alone cares. And in any event, if politicians were pretending to be Catholic to win votes, they’d presumably feign adherence to Church teachings. Something else is going on, and it’s not pretty.

What scandalizes moderns about the church, I think, is not what it believes but simply that it believes. We are perfectly at ease with Christian clergy who deny the divinity of Christ or the resurrection, don druid suits and praise shariah law, or claim they can be at the same time priests and imams. Just as we are happy to give tenure to academics who proclaim that there is no truth, and give large fees to artists who insist that their works do not communicate or uplift and are not meant to. But we are baffled that the Pope is Catholic and if you don’t like it you need to find, or found, another church.

So get all those bishops out of my way, and rooks. I’m gonna sing, loud and flat.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Apparently it’s time to stick a fork in our system of parliamentary self-government. MPs just passed an Opposition money bill and no one cares that there’s no such thing. Last week the three Opposition parties teamed up to pass Dan McTeague’s private members’ Bill C-253, letting parents contribute $5,000 per child per year to a Registered Education Savings Plan and deduct it from taxable income. It flatly contradicts Section 54 of our Constitution: “It shall not be lawful for the House of Commons to adopt or pass any Vote, Resolution, Address or Bill for the Appropriation of any Part of the Public Revenue, or of any Tax or Impost, to any Purpose that has not been first recommended to that House by Message of the Governor General in the Session in which such Vote, Resolution, Address or Bill is proposed.”

Is there anything unclear about this wording, repeated essentially verbatim in Standing Order 79 (1) of the House of Commons? Apparently so, if you’re an MP or the Speaker of the House. Soon after being introduced in 2006, C-253 was challenged because of 79 (1), but that Nov. 1 the Speaker ruled, “It is permissible for a private member’s bill to introduce a tax exemption, or to propose a delay in the reporting of income. Therefore, I find that Bill C-253 is properly before the House.”

How can this be? The annotated Standing Orders of the House of Commons, published under the same Speaker’s authority in 2005, begin their explanation of 79 (1) with “In our system of parliamentary government, the Sovereign, as represented by the Governor General, and acting on the advice of His or Her responsible ministers, is charged with the management of all revenues of the State and the payment of all public expenditures.”

Individual tax relief is one thing. But a measure that for reasons of broad public policy reallocates what could well be billions of dollars a year is definitely “management of all revenues of the State.” If private members’ bills can do what Mr. McTeague’s does, what can they not do under 79 (1) and Section 54?

Especially as C-253 is not really a tax bill. When the tax code is fiddled to convey specific benefits to people who do specific things at the expense of the overall balance sheet, it constitutes spending no matter how it is disguised. For years Canadian governments pretended otherwise, not least so they could report considerably lower total taxation and spending in their budgets than were recorded in the definitive Public Accounts. But finally in 2003 the government gave in to pressure from Auditors General and others and started correctly treating so-called tax expenditures as expenditures, not taxation.

Mr. McTeague’s bill clearly fits that category. So even given the Speaker’s ruling on taxation, C-253 remains profoundly constitutionally obnoxious.

The resulting debate has been too obnoxious to quote, from squabbles over who was giving the middle class more money to bizarre jibes about ethnicity to the Liberal finance critic saying his party would not topple the government over C-253 because it wasn’t yet Easter. But I will cite Mr. McTeague’s outburst that Tory opposition to his bill “really lays bare for all to see what kind of government we’re dealing with. Can you imagine if they had a majority?”

Utter bosh. The whole problem here is that the three “opposition” social democratic parties do have a majority, and are willing to use it to spend public money in large amounts, but won’t take responsibility for keeping spending in line with revenue. What do any of them think the “responsible” in “responsible government” used to mean?

History confirms that, as you’d expect, the problem of government is not getting it to spend. It is keeping it from spending too much, or spending a reasonable amount so foolishly that it nevertheless neglects its core duties. Thus Parliament evolved not to force cheapskate monarchs to loosen the purse strings, but to prevent them from having to pawn the crown (Edward III once did). And here the purpose of Section 54 becomes as clear as its wording: a parliamentary legislature exists not to govern but to scrutinize government. It can’t do both, and if it tries it will end up doing neither.

The Tory government seems to be killing C-253 with a counter-measure attached to a confidence vote. But Mr. Flaherty told the Commons: “We are presented with a private member’s bill that risks plunging the federal government back into deficit” when the real objection is that C-253 abdicates the key role of Parliament, usurps that of the Crown and smashes the Constitution to do it.

If no one knows or cares, it’s done, folks. Carve it up.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]