It's right there on the receipt. I just bought an 8 gig memory stick for 29 bucks. Makes you nostalgic for the good new days of unbridled capitalism, doesn't it? It even makes me feel a bit sorry for kids today. What sort of hard-luck stories will they be able to tell when they're old? "When I was a boy a terabyte of memory cost a whole dollar!" "Ah shaddap gramps, I gotta exabyte implanted right in my brain for a nickel last week." Whereas I remember the first time a colleague, whose research involved a significant database, got a one gigabyte hard drive. We literally trooped into her office to gawp at it. This Tuesday on a whim I threw two one-gigabyte USB sticks into the cart for $6.99. OK, $6.99 each, plus tax. Still not 20 bucks total.

Ten years ago I wrote about the technological miracle that every computer I ever bought cost roughly $2,000 despite huge increases in computing power. It turns out those were, in that sense, the bad old days. This week I went on what would once have been an electronics spending spree, helping someone choose both a laptop and a desktop far more powerful than they could ever use, for just $1400. Combined.

As I doddered through the store, boring everyone within hearing --a small group, thanks to earbuds and the pounding music in stores today, which isn't even music but noise -- I realized my parents' first computer, a 1981 Apple IIe with a daisy wheel printer, set them back ten grand, considerably more than a cheap car, whereas the $450 I just paid for a 360-gig-hard-drive desktop is less than a decent bicycle. As for the $29.99 webcam we also threw in, you could spend that on fast food. And while the ability to see my face in all its horrible detail from another continent might not seem the pinnacle of human social evolution, it is technically impressive.

All of which prompts the question: If government is so great, why does it keep getting more expensive? Years ago David Frum made the point that the excuse we often hear for rising health care costs is advancing technology, and yet in every other field but the public sector that same factor keeps lowering costs -- as you'd expect, since technology in the modern sense means an ongoing, even relentless series of improvements in the technique, materials and organization of production.

A modern car, Frum pointed out, costs about as much adjusted for inflation as a Model T. But it offers rather more comfort and performance. Uh, except under communism, where the infamous East German Trabant generated just 18 hp to the Model T's mighty 20.2. Wikipedia says the Model T, produced from 1908 to 1927, boasted a giant 2.9L engine offering a dazzling top speed of 72 km/h, regrettably at some 18.7 litres per 100k (though on the plus side it could burn gasoline or ethanol). All of which I discovered in three minutes online, speaking of technological advances that leave you shaking your head at the government's ongoing incapacity to generate electronic medical records.

In case you want to try the financial comparison at home, the Bank of Canada's online inflation calculator (www.bankofcanada.ca/en/rates/inflation_calc.html) says the 1909 Model T price of $850 would be about $17,000 today and the 1915 price tag of $440 about $8,300. The cheapest new cars I could find in Canada today both list for just under $10,000. Mind you both have 110 hp engines and warm interiors and stuff.

Technology won't get us into heaven, of course. But on its own terms it works. Under capitalism it continually improves everything but morality and taste. Even the lowly sewer.

Earlier this year I got a fascinating explanation, from the good people who manage Ottawa's sewers, about modern techniques including the "trenchless" system that permits relining of sewers through a process not unlike arthroscopic surgery, that sprays a coating so technically fierce that if the old sewer rots away totally the lining will carry on for years. The engineers and tech guys who work for the city know and love their sewers.

But your municipal tax bill just keeps on rising. Wonder why?

While shopping for Canada Day goodies, try comparing the selection in the supermarket with, say, that on display in the latest federal or provincial cabinet shuffle. Because now that I come to think of it, today's gormless youth, in gormless old age, will at least be able to describe life back when George Smitherman's performance as health minister was thought to qualify him to run a super-ministry combining energy and infrastructure.

I'm pretty sure it has something to do with not getting a money-back receipt for Premier McGuinty.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

George Smitherman has again failed to produce his promised glorious 10-Year Plan for saving health care in Ontario. It's like sitting in a fancy restaurant with a mouth-watering menu and great prices but whatever you order you invariably get a long delay and a bunch of excuses -- and then they chuck deep-fried leftovers on your plate and charge you double. While you can change waiters and cooks once every four years, it seems you can never leave. In a speech to the Cato Institute this spring, P.J. O'Rourke explained that while he actually knows and likes many politicians, "The problem isn't the cook. The problem is the cookbook. The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society's ills can be cured politically. It's like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried. The soup is fried. The salad is fried. So is the ice cream and cake. And your pinot noir is rolled in breadcrumbs and dunked in the deep fat fryer."

Because government is force, it can do the things that need to be done through force, often very effectively: fight crime, beat Hitler, make people pay taxes -- just as a fast-food restaurant can often make a great burger and fries when that's what you want. Unfortunately at Chez Gouvernement, where they don't just insist on frying everything including the ice cream but they promise they can also bake, roast, sautée and serve raw, you don't simply get an unhealthy diet, you get deceived.

The latest sizzling empty plate was Stéphane Dion's carbon tax. I gave him some credit when he first suggested it because clearly it didn't come from focus groups. I would even say it came from conviction except, as so often, it didn't come at all.

It was proudly listed as delicious nutritious greens, price zero. Yes, zero, by shifting taxes from desirable activities to environmentally destructive ones. But when he put it on the menu he didn't have a recipe or ingredients, and he still doesn't.

Last week I asked Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which also favours a carbon tax, how such a tax would work in practice when carbon dioxide and methane both have one carbon atom but methane is said to be 23 or 30 times as bad for the environment. He replied, and I quote, "We believe the enemy is carbon and we believe carbon is the one that has to be priced and taxed."

This reply is unfit for human consumption. Diamonds are pure carbon, but if geologists announced that Greenland had unexpectedly turned out to be one giant diamond, no one would be concerned about the implications for global warming. If it then caught fire they would, because it would start releasing greenhouse gases.

As former Natural Resources Stewardship Project executive director Tom Harris recently observed, calling a tax on carbon dioxide a "carbon tax" is like calling your water bill a "hydrogen tax". To work, a carbon tax must fall on things that worry global warming alarmists, roughly in proportion to how much worry they cause. But Mr. Dion's "plan," larded with offsetting tax breaks, has as its sole nutrient a wholesale tax on fuels based on how much carbon dioxide they release, starting at $10 per tonne, rising to $40 in four years.

Or not. In his press conference yesterday, Mr. Dion talked about "carbon dioxide," as did the press release, but the bit on pricing in the "Handbook" (see thegreenshift.ca) only says "carbon emissions" and "greenhouse gas emissions." The handbook doesn't mention methane and neither did Mr. Dion, like chefs who don't know butter from margarine. But both stress that gasoline gets a free pass because there's already an excise tax on it that exceeds the proposed final $40-per-tonne-of-CO2 price.

The whole plan is absurd if the point is to change behaviour significantly by changing incentives dramatically. But the plan is logical if you suddenly realize all you can do is fry up a politically attractive mess of empty calories. I don't know if this meal will really be free, but it sure won't be nourishing.

Nor does it help to change waiters. No one has a more substantive carbon plan than Mr. Dion.

And while Ontario Tory health critic Elizabeth Witmer berated Mr. Smitherman over his missing 10-year plan, in her press release she quoted herself that "Ontario requires a long term vision .... How much longer must we wait for this government to take action and develop a long overdue plan?" As if she had one either. Like Mr. Smitherman, she's happy to list it on the menu but let her take your order and it's, um, uh -- oh, look here's some batter, fry some excuses for me quiiiick I've got hungry rowdies at table 42.

I hate this restaurant. Is there no way we could eat somewhere else?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It is too easy to apologize for history. Sometimes it is necessary. But "sorry" doesn't make the past go away or let us substitute our imaginings for fact. The first problem with historical apologies is that they are about what someone else did. Pride can easily masquerade as humility when we make an elaborate show of repenting other people's sins. Tony Blair was singularly fond of smarmy "apologies" whose main purpose seemed to be not to fix historical wrongs but to admire himself in Clio's mirror for being so much better than people in the dark pre-New-Labour days. It is a dubious proposition and in any case was not for him to say. A second, related hazard is that such apologies are generally driven by the exigencies of the present, which creates a strong temptation to twist the past for political reasons.

These hazards cannot be avoided by refusing to make such apologies. Corporate entities inherit the glories and disgraces of their past. And if amends have not been made for the latter, it is a moral duty of those now in office to state that they were wrong, express regret and contrition on behalf of the organization and try to set things right insofar as possible.

So, did the Canadian government have something to apologize for concerning residential schools and, if so, what was it?

The answers are "Uncontrovertibly yes" and "Not what many people think." The residential schools policy was very wrong because the state forcibly took children from their families to subject them to highly intrusive indoctrination. An additional evil was that, having declared their own parents unfit to raise them, the state put far too many children in the claws of emotional, physical and sexual abusers.

On a third, very important point no apology was due. Whatever heartbreak and lingering harm the residential schools caused, they were not responsible for the catastrophic collision between traditional aboriginal culture and European modernity. Nor was the Canadian government as a whole. As individuals we may, and should, feel grief at the colossal disruption caused by the clash of civilizations over the past 500 years. But we should be both clear and honest about what happened and why.

By 1500, Europeans had developed not merely astounding military prowess but a culture of individualism, free inquiry and free action that sustained that military prowess. And the terrible paradox that has convulsed the globe since the time of Columbus is that people from China to Chile found that they must match the military power of the West to resist its cultural and political intrusion, but could not match its military power without adopting much of its culture and political institutions. So even if they won, they lost. No way has been found to cut this Gordian knot, and the most aggressive attempts, like Marxism, only turned trouble into catastrophe.

If residential schools had not sought, among other things, to teach aboriginal children English, does anyone suppose they would have been able to avoid modernity or cope with it better? It doesn't excuse the policy, but it does illustrate the limits of its responsibility for the present.

It is also important to reject the notion that the tragedy that resulted from the collision of cultures, including European diseases decimating the Americas, was a simple case of the serpent invading Eden. Traditional cultures had strengths but also weaknesses. None were characterised exclusively by peace, plenty, or sublime moral wisdom. And institutions from Parliament to hospitals to newspapers are, uniquely, products of European civilization for which no apology is due.

Like most non-aboriginal Canadians I am acutely aware of the horrific conditions on many reserves and bitterly regret the legacy of bad government policy and racist attitudes. But I utterly reject any suggestion that Canadian aboriginals were dwelling in Eden until the Europeans came and expelled them. Especially if, as too often, it is linked to a project that is not merely unreasonable but impossible: that through some policy action by the Canadian government the past shall be not just acknowledged but undone and in consequence aboriginals, untainted by everyone else's original sin, shall finally manage to leave the modern world for this imaginary paradise.

Apologies cannot undo the past. Sometimes they are necessary anyway, and this one was. But they are too easy to give and too easy to rely on. It is the future, not the past, that we can try to improve. Let us not instead oblige posterity to apologize because we, in our day, continued to base aboriginal policy on invidious racial distinctions driven by historical fantasies.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

One problem with living in Ottawa is that if you go away you might miss something important. Especially these days. By "important" I don't just mean so awful it's also funny. The word usually carries a quite different meaning here. And I can prove it.

You see, one of the peculiar pleasures of my job is to be inundated with press releases that routinely plumb new depths of banality, hypocrisy and vanity, often simultaneously. Like one from Foreign Affairs on May 20 that said "Minister Bernier Concludes Successful Visit to Croatia".

At the time I wondered what it would take for them to categorize a visit as unsuccessful. Would he have to fall down the steps of the plane, call publicly for the resignation of a senior official, dispatch planes we didn't have or show up with a "spouse" to whom he isn't married who'd forgotten her shirt? Obviously it has since become clear that when it comes to foreign ministers the bar had been dramatically lowered, raised or otherwise placed somewhere unexpected. But let us not dwell on spilled confidential documents. My topic is important things in Ottawa and you cannot imagine how many of them there are unless you, too, get these press releases.

In case you don't because you have a life, allow me to explain. As an important journalist I am informed on an almost daily basis that some minister or other will make an "important announcement" on, say, infrastructure in Hampton, New Brunswick (April 24), the transfer of the federal gas tax to Saint-Elzéar, Quebec (May 20) or some other thing I might otherwise have overlooked.

For instance, on May 1 I was told that in just one more day "The Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Health, along with the Honourable Doug Currie, Prince Edward Island Minister of Health, will announce an important health investment for the people of Prince Edward Island." Which maybe they did. It seems more likely than that Rick Dykstra, MP for St. Catharines, actually managed on May 9, "On behalf of the Honourable Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages," to make "an important announcement ... concerning the Niagara Folk Arts Festival" or that the next day Mike Allen, MP for Tobique-Mactaquac, contrived to do so "about the Carleton-Victoria Arts Council." Again one wonders what they would categorize as an unimportant announcement on these topics.

My favourite in this genre was the April 30 notice that "The Honourable Beverley J. Oda, Minister of International Cooperation, will make an important announcement" on a subject they didn't even bother to specify later that same day. Regrettably I had trouble persuading myself the Hon. Beverley J. Oda would under any circumstances make an important announcement about anything and I confess that I never did discover what it was. If you don't pay attention in this town you can miss a lot.

Including that Ottawa is a darn exciting place where important people are forever doing important things or at least saying important things or, cynics might assert, saying they're saying important things in case no other evidence of this fact could be unearthed even by trained experts. If I didn't know better I'd think some PR hacks in drab cubicles had hit upon an uninspired strategy of routinely inserting hyperbole into boring press releases because they had to do something to justify their salaries or because their employers needed a new way to annoy us after finally getting as tired as we were of the phrase "Canada's New Government".

Probably the powers that spin will consider me a crank for airing this possibility. And yes, I'm also the sort of person who doesn't react well to the adjective "delicious" on a menu. Years ago I encountered a sound rule of thumb that lots of adjectives on menus are bad; if they tell you their alfredo sauce is "creamy" it amounts to admitting you might well have different expectations after seeing the restaurant and talking to the waiter. But "delicious" is doubly bad because (a) as the customer I should decide after tasting it and (b) to tell me so pre-emptively implies that I look like such a chump you don't feel any need to hear my opinion before disputing it.

Sorry, I lost focus there. And as a result almost missed two ministers of the Crown going to Lima for, they announced pre-emptively, "an important announcement to advance Canada's trade relationship with Peru" - as opposed to an unimportant announcement on that subject which a trained journalist might have carelessly assumed he could ignore.

So I hate to go away because I might miss something important. Especially given how often it happens even when I'm here.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Maxime Bernier burned his way through a promising political career amazingly fast. I don't know what this former future prime minister and sexiest MP in the House will do next. Maybe go tell his old Parti Québécois friends Anglos are too uptight, especially about sex. If so, list me among them. I shed no tears for Mr. Bernier. And as for his ex-girlfriend, Julie Couillard, now playing the wounded innocent, if this is a babe in the woods, the bears better look out. But what has me really bent out of shape is that, having sanctimoniously denied that it mattered who a senior national security minister was getting naked with before the business of the sensitive documents came up, the prime minister still insisted in accepting Mr. Bernier's resignation that "This is not to do with the minister's private life."

One never knows how much sincerity to attribute to contemporary political spin. But it's safe to attach maximum ridicule to this one. If Mr. Bernier had left sensitive documents at the home of a person he was sleeping with, and he'd been married to her for 15 years and not one of her former biker squeezes had turned police informant/corpse in ditch, there'd be no scandal. Especially if she hadn't also tried to get a security-sensitive airport contract in 2004 for another boyfriend who later committed suicide amid rumours of biker debts.

The personal lives of senior politicians matter. What if a minister of defence, a foreign minister or a prime minister was sleeping with a hit man, a Chinese spy, or a Hamas official? And the fact that the Tories have been fibbing ever since this messy affair became public proves they know it matters. They claimed the relationship ended months before the pair were seen dining together in March and then he, in April, left classified documents at her home during what she bizarrely called a "routine visit." And early this month the government maintained that Mr. Bernier only found out about the biker business when the press got nosy, an excuse as useless as it is implausible because it tacitly admits he would have worried if he had known so he, and his colleagues, should have known.

The basic idea seems to be that nothing shall be allowed to interfere with sensual pleasure, least of all some trivial thing like matters of state. A claim on which the NDP seems to have nothing to say, not even a press release on their website. Meanwhile Liberal Deputy Leader Michael Ignatieff was quoted in this newspaper on Tuesday saying that this "is about the possibility ... of a link between organized crime and airport security in Montreal and the possibility of improper bidding for contracts relating to security. I don't care about her skirts, I don't care about her cleavage, I don't care about her past, I don't care about any of it, it is none of my business quite rightly." But the possible link with organized crime is her "past."

Only the Bloc seems to have got it right. In a May 27 press release on their website their spokesman on public security, MP Serge Ménard, said (my translation) "contrary to what the prime minister claims... the risks posed by this relationship to public security are indeed real." Mr. Ménard dismissed claims it was a private matter, and called for the Commons Committee on Public Safety and National Security to report to the House on "security questions raised by the relationship of the former minister of foreign affairs with a person having had links to organized crime." Especially, I say, because in listing Ms. Couillard as his "spouse" for official travel purposes Mr. Bernier, among other things, let her meet the President of the United States (and, she boasted on TV, impress him with her looks so forget the ingénue act).

It's hard to say you do care about her cleavage without sounding simultaneously like a prude and a lecher. But such an intimate partner isn't just evidence of bad judgment. She's a cause of it. A stable family life is a good thing for someone with important responsibilities and a foreign minister who changes playmates like shirts is liable not to be properly grounded, to say nothing of being too distracted to master details like how many transport planes we have and who is president of Haiti.

The Citizen quoted the founder of Carleton University's Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security that "Frankly, I don't believe that a minister of the Crown engages in pillow talk on high policy." Which is very Austin Powers: I wasn't talking to her, I was just shagging her. But even if true that kind of life wears you down and the pro-family Tories, of all people, shouldn't be claiming otherwise.

Call me repressed, but my message to politicians is: Go home and sleep with your spouses.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The Victoria Day long weekend produced the usual outburst of ill-mannered resentment at the monarchy. I'd say just ignore it, except for the harm three decades of presumptuous ignorance have already done to our constitutional order. Last Thursday Toronto Star columnist Bob Hepburn wondered why we "continue to set aside a national holiday to honour a foreign monarch who died 107 years ago," in a country where people "can celebrate their unique heritages while at the same time being proudly Canadian." Simple: because if there's nothing common for us to celebrate we're going to have problems being proudly Canadian, and a heritage of good government is among the most important things we do have in common.

The incapacity to recognize this point on the May long weekend underlines a fundamental problem with foes of the monarchy. They don't seem to have any idea what it does or what to replace it with. Except perhaps abuse. On Sunday in this newspaper Janice Kennedy weighed in with an ill-tempered outburst about "Colonel Blimp" and humiliation that wound up claiming Queen Elizabeth II couldn't understand Stompin' Tom Connors and "wouldn't recognize a hockey puck if it ricocheted off her gem-encrusted crown."

Its brazen inaccuracy manages not to be the most offensive feature of this passage. That honour goes to its mean-spirited irrelevance. Not only would the Queen, who is extremely well-informed, certainly recognize a puck if one slammed into Janice Kennedy's head (ha ha ha funny isn't it?), she has a sound grasp of constitutional principles unlike certain columnists I could name.

For instance, that any system needs a head of state in some form. A key question the anti-Victoria-Day crowd never seem to answer, or even understand, is what we replace the monarchy with if we toss it onto the rubbish heap of history. An elected chief executive who is also head of state, on the (gasp) American model? We could have someone appointed by the prime minister who rubber-stamps everything the latter does. But who then guards the guardians in our brave new constitution? Bud the Spud?

As to the monarchy being anti-democratic and foreign, I didn't even know in this era of multiculturalism it was still OK to jeer at foreigners. But the Queen of Canada is not a foreigner. And it is a great strength of our monarchy that she did not become queen based on a partisan program and no one, however offensively ambitious, can aspire to make themselves our head of state. (The last to scheme his way into the post was William of Orange and he died after falling from his horse in 1702.) If the Queen's formal and informal capacity to obstruct obnoxious measures from this exalted non-partisan position has nevertheless atrophied it presents a problem but I don't see what the anti-monarchists propose to do about it.

More generally, I don't see what they think are sound constitutional principles. Do they favour a separation of powers, with or without checks and balances? Should the chief executive have a veto over legislation? Should Supreme Court appointments and foreign treaties require legislative assent or remain part of the executive prerogative? Or would they prefer "convention" government by an all-powerful legislature, a quasi-monarchical system where all power rests with an elected executive, or perhaps pseudo-aristocratic government by appointed judges accountable only to their own impeccable political correctness? Do these people have a theory of government at all? Resentment doesn't qualify, and neither does insolence.

A singular feature of our constitutional history is that since 1981 fools have rushed in, unencumbered by knowledge of history or theory, and created governments at once vast and inept. In Britain, former prime minister Tony Blair tried to get rid of the ancient office of Lord Chancellor on a constitutional whim and only managed to politicize it instead. Let's not make a similar blunder here with the far more important office of head of state.

Mr. Hepburn concluded that "we can't be a grown-up country in the 21st century if we stick with Victoria Day." Don't blame the century. In this or any era a nation, like an individual, has grave difficulty being grown up until it comes to terms with its past.

If people don't know our history, including why we honour Queen Victoria, they should learn it. Good government isn't just for dead white males. All Canadians enjoy an enviable constitutional heritage. And while suggestions for refining it are welcome, they require a foundation more solid than ill-informed scoffing and hitting distinguished people in the head with hard objects.

So God Save the Queen ... and us.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

My enthusiasm for an amphibious assault on the Irrawaddy delta is extremely limited. I appear, once again, to be the weirdo.

On Tuesday former Liberal foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy surfaced in this newspaper calling for us to exercise the so-called "responsibility to protect" (R2P) in the Myanmar formerly known as Burma. What? Are you still talking? How could anyone take seriously the proposal to send an army we haven't got to an Apocalypse Now up-river to Rangoon?

Sorry, that would be Yangon now. I bet they even changed the name of the river. Yup, it says online the Irrawaddy is now the Ayeyerwady. But it's still wet. Look at a map. The starting point of Mr. Axworthy's "plan" seems to be a massive amphibious assault on a steaming, immense, swampy river delta half-way around the world. About the level of practicality one had come to expect from him.

I'm not making light of the tragic situation in Burma produced by natural disaster piled on horrible government. Quite the reverse. I'm pointing out that these things are so serious that we have a very definite responsibility to make sense when discussing them.

Which is why I wouldn't start with Lloyd Axworthy. He was a vocal critic of free trade while in opposition in the 1980s, a misjudgment that would have dented the self-confidence of a lesser man. His vaunted ban on land mines hasn't stopped terrorists in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003 using "Improvised Explosive Devices" which are home-made land mines.

He also held a senior national security post in a government that badly neglected Canada's military. He spent years bloviating about the "responsibility to protect" while signally neglecting its practical counterpart, the ability to do so, the very incarnation of Teddy Roosevelt's warning about combining the unbridled tongue with the unready hand. And Mr. Axworthy never explained where he and his Chrétien-era colleagues acquired either the legal or moral right to override the sovereignty of other nations. He just seemed convinced he was so incredibly smart, well-meaning and persuasive that other people just couldn't not do what he wanted, and that now includes invading Burma.

To my amazement, his proposal is turning out to be the conventional folly. "UN should force Burma to accept aid for cyclone victims: Bernier" was the front-page headline in this newspaper Wednesday, over a story that said "Canada is pushing the United Nations Security Council to press Burma's military dictators to permit international aid to reach cyclone victims, Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier said yesterday. The move comes as the Conservative government faces mounting pressure to back the UN's 'responsibility to protect' doctrine..." And France has already urged the Security Council to invoke R2P.

So Canada is pushing the UN to press Burma because the Tories are under increasing pressure. This stuff is so deep somebody's going to get the bends. But how, I ask you, is it different to invade Burma to stop a humanitarian disaster inflicted by a brutal, demented government than to invade Iraq to do so? Other than Burma is bigger, harder to reach and a lot wetter.

I ask you not because you suggested it but because I'm far more likely to get a sensible answer from you than from Lloyd Axworthy. Which may not narrow the field much. But as his idea seems to be catching on I hope someone is prepared to explain the legal, moral and practical justification for his proposal.

Inflicting aid on Burma by force is an idea so silly it even made me welcome the Canadian expert quoted in the Globe and Mail on Tuesday urging the world community to carry out covert drops of food and water in defiance of both Burma and its Chinese patrons (yes, the same Chinese patrons who wield a veto in the UN Security Council which people expect to invoke R2P). I fear a certain amount of air power would still be required, in case, for instance, the Chinese air force noticed you flying around up there. But at least it would spare us hitting the beaches in force, rifle in one hand and food package in the other.

Well, not us exactly. The essence of Mr. Axworthy's suggestion seems to be: It would improve human rights in Burma to have Russia and China invade it. Or was the idea to have George Bush blast his way in, kick out the tyrants and impose order and liberty? A sorry climb-down after all that lovely America-bashing, to come begging the loan of their army.

Unless of course it's just a bunch of politicians yakking to cover the fact that they don't even realize they have no options. Which is pretty ugly... though not compared to storming the Irrawaddy beaches only to find they're literally a quagmire.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Donald Savoie's new book on the breakdown of government in Canada will leave you both wiser and more worried. It's a worthwhile trade-off. But please also leave room on your bedside table for Jean Louis de Lolme's The Constitution of England. Not quite so hot off the presses; my final edition dates to 1784. But when a book this old is this relevant to modern problems you may be sure its author, too, got the fundamentals right. As the Citizen reported Monday, Mr. Savoie's central concern is that we now have "prime ministers who rule like monarchs surrounded by a tight circle of courtiers." In that sense Canada today resembles Britain eight hundred years ago, when the "curia regis" or king's personal court combined legislative, executive and judicial functions in a system as devoid of effective checks as of formal procedures. But if the problem is familiar maybe the solution is, too.

It was not easy to make the executive accountable under the rule of law without crippling it. But it was accomplished. Due to legislative control of the power of the purse, the otherwise formidable Crown in 18th century England was, as de Lolme put it, "like a ship completely equipped, but from which the Parliament can at pleasure draw off the water, and leave it aground -- and also set it afloat again, by granting subsidies."

This exclusive power of Parliament to levy taxes, which amazingly dates to the late 13th century, remains the core of its power in Canada today. Surely it's worth trying an old remedy before adopting some novel expedient that might, instead, prove to be an old mistake.

Here I must cite de Lolme's argument that another enormous advantage of the British system was its concentration of the executive power in one place so the legislature, and the people, could know where trouble was coming from and correct it by yanking on the purse strings. For that reason it is hazardous not only to create a proliferation of entities here in Canada, and in Britain, that seem to be neither executive, legislative nor judicial, but even to divide the executive branch into independent parts.

I do not understand contemporary protests against cabinet control of executive agencies. If we cannot punish the ministry for arrogance, sloppiness or overt wrongdoing in government, what are we supposed to do about it? Just turn them loose and hope power doesn't corrupt this time? And so I confess to unease at Donald Savoie's proposal to give various parts of the executive more clearly defined legal personalities. The current system of blame-shifting may remind one of the Yes Minister sketch about the distinctions between policy, administration, the policy of administration, the administration of policy and finally the administration of the policy of administration versus the policy of the administration of policy. But making it worse won't make it better. Here I say de Lolme trumps Savoie.

The Constitution of England is a bracingly fundamental book, from its defence of a divided legislature to its reminder that the separation of powers is no more an American conception than free speech. It is sobering to reflect that the system of checks and balances it persuasively describes may be incompatible with the volume of legislation we now seek from government. During the New Deal smart young things in the United States objected to a "horse and buggy" Constitution in an automobile age and boasted that they would sweep away restraints on executive power.

Well, it happened here too, and it doesn't look so clever any more. I wish some grounds existed for thinking those involved in the creation of the modern Canadian constitution, not just the appalling Constitution Act of 1982 but the entire structure of modern governance, had any acquaintance with de Lolme's or any other book on the merits of the existing system.

I don't want to wax nostalgic here. De Lolme's "Advertisement" in the 1781 edition complained that he might as well have used the manuscript to boil his tea-kettle for all the support he received in publishing it at the time. However it now is available for just $12 from Liberty Fund and I urge everyone who cares to buy it.

You'd get your money's worth just from this warning, as familiar to the American Founding Fathers as it is lost today: "If the Crown had been allowed to take an active part in the business of making laws, it would soon have rendered useless the other branches of the Legislature." The Crown's position is, of course, a legal fiction today, but essentially it is exactly what has happened to us.

So read Savoie. Then turn back the clock to 1784 for some very contemporary advice.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]