Apparently I am the victim of an enormous, constitutionally prohibited outrage. I have never received a single art subsidy. In days of yore this complaint might have been rejected by galleries, granting organizations and the general public who would apply to my oeuvre the antiquated technical critical term "bad." And I concede that my still lifes have a zombie-like quality of inanimate mobility while my stick men resemble neither sticks nor men, my abstracts are concrete and my concrete is behind the shed. As for my music, remember the old ads about how "They laughed when I sat down to play"? Well, I assure you I soon had them in tears.

On those grounds I would at one time have had a better chance of breaking into the art world as an easel than as a participant, while even Picasso would have rejected me as a model. But I am pleased to say that as progress levels everything worth having, an indignant editorial in the Globe and Mail this week denounced the federal Conservative government's decision to cancel some art subsidies because "To control access to those grants on the basis of ideology or centrally determined notions of good taste is censorship, plain and simple." I'm old enough to remember when people knew the difference between free speech and free money. But that was in the dark days, before the Charter.

Thus the NDP "Critic for Digital Culture," in an indignant press release that regrettably misspelled the word "disdain," declared that "Canadian artists shouldn't be vetted by the PMO and his pointy-headed staff of Rush Limbaugh-style ideologues." Uh, shouldn't that be "its" staff? Meanwhile a press release from the Office of the Leader of the Opposition called the decision "arbitrary" and included the sentence, "During the Conservative tenure, arts and culture have again and again seen their importance diminish and marginalized by cuts or ideological attacks" -- a sentence that does for the English language what Cubism did for landscape painting, while incorporating the distorted notion that anything not subsidized is marginalized. Impressive.

Let me say, and spray-paint it on a wall for good measure (an expression here meaning "in the hope of getting money for it"), that if you cannot make a living in the arts through sales of your work, or voluntary grants from private organizations, you are probably in the wrong trade. And people who don't like the way politicians and bureaucrats judge art might reasonably oppose state funding for culture. But if we are going to have such grants surely public authorities need some criteria for sorting applicants at least into "Yes" and "No" piles even if they don't publicly admit to also having a "Whoa Nelly, no!!!" pile. Unless you accept the views of the neofinancial critical school that in cultural matters the state should just be a conveyor belt onto one end of which tax money is dropped and from the other end of which anyone who calls himself an artist is entitled to pick it up in whatever quantities seem appropriate.

The Globe editorial deplored "a fundamental misunderstanding by the government of the nature of free speech in a democracy." I seem to be having the same problem myself. But maybe a Titian or Michelangelo could do us a suitably massive, tortured Hercules straining to carry enough money to the front end of the conveyor to satisfy the demands at the back end if we were to take seriously the concept that the government cannot have criteria for who receives art funding. Meanwhile, it would take Hieronymus Bosch to depict a smart set irate at these tiny cuts (one percent of the feds' $3.5 billion annual culture funding according to libertarian author Pierre Lemieux, who adds that such spending previously rose 15 per cent under the Tories) but unperturbed that genuine censorship is permitted under our abstract impressionist 1982 Constitution that guarantees rights "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." And by justified they don't mean to us, the hapless citizens, any more than we are meant to be able to do anything about public subsidies to artistic productions we wouldn't like if we had the misfortune to encounter them. Ask Ezra Levant, who has spent 900 days and $100,000, so far, defending his right to reprint cartoons as part of a news story, what he thinks of artists who cry censorship when they aren't given public cash.

As for the allegedly creative souls for whom loss of subsidies means loss of livelihood, permit me a small excursion into the genre known as folk art, specifically the derisive chant: "Cut your hair, take a bath, get a job."

Rustic, yet forceful. Now where's my grant?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

How much is your life worth? Oh dear me no. I don't mean to you or your family. I mean to the Finance Ministry. You see, news out of Britain informs us that their government just isn't willing to spend that much to save lives. The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (known scarily as NICE), which has already rejected various expensive drugs available in the U.S. and elsewhere in Europe, has now formally declared that "There is a powerful human impulse, known as the 'rule of rescue', to attempt to help an identifiable person whose life is in danger, no matter how much it costs. When there are limited resources for health care, applying the 'rule of rescue' may mean that other people will not be able to have the care or treatment they need. ... The Institute has not therefore adopted an additional 'rule of rescue'."

Of course government health providers should try to control costs, especially when medical care now consumes, not untypically, 46 per cent of the Ontario budget. And they have been trying in Canada, since at least the ill-fated 1992 decision to cut medical school enrolment by 10 per cent to reduce the number of doctors treating people and submitting bills. One is tempted to file it under "Be careful what you wish for." But the crucial point is that you didn't wish for it. They did.

Which takes me back to a century-old warning from Albert Venn Dicey about a then-novel wave of legislation intended to protect citizens from their own poor judgment or weak bargaining position, real or imagined. "The point is elementary," he wrote, "but it is worth insisting upon, since there is a constant tendency on the part both of theorists and of so-called practical men, to forget that protection invariably involves disability, i.e., limitations on the individual liberty of the protected person."

I remember when it was those on the "right" who had to insist that we think sensibly about tradeoffs in public policy. Thus Thomas Sowell once asked in exasperation: "Would anyone really spend half the Gross National Product to wipe out the last vestige of shop-lifting, or every minor skin rash?" But NICE is hardly conservative. And while Dicey's massive white beard and solemn praise for the Victorian constitution might tempt us to classify him as conservative, reactionary, even a fogey, as a Benthamite defender of political innovation in the name of laissez faire he doesn't quite fit today's pigeonholes, despite dating from an era when desks actually had such. So let's just read his words and see if they tell us anything.

They tell us that when the law prevents us from doing something that might be contrary to our interests, the tradeoff for the possible protection is the inevitable prevention. In this case, the prohibition on buying and selling medical care in the free market might protect you from being unable to afford it, buy more than you need, get worse care than the rich, etc. But in doing so it necessarily prevents you valuing your own life or health more than the government does. Which is every bit as bad as it sounds.

As things stand, you do not merely pay for health care what Dalton McGuinty says you should. You get the treatment he makes available to you, when and where he makes it available, of the sort and in the quantities he makes available, and nothing else. And if you don't like it, you cannot take your business elsewhere. It has, in every important sense, ceased to be your business.

If you were responsible for your own health care you would, of course, try to ensure cost control, as I presume you do in every aspect of your life with varying degrees of determination, skill and success. You'd want to look after yourself but you'd also want a car, a home, education for the kids, a retirement fund, a bit of bacon in your porridge and a decent chance of living long enough to enjoy all these good things. In short, you'd worry about getting the right mix of cost and service.

When you hand over health care to government, or your fellows do it for you, these still-necessarily value-for-money calculations are not merely done by someone else. They are also done very differently. They are generally not done well, for familiar reasons that need not be reviewed here. For now consider only that, even if the state did not have serious problems making rational tradeoffs, public servants and politicians would still make their calculations of efficiency based on different criteria.

Including, most importantly, that if you died they wouldn't miss you nearly as much as you would. But they'd sure miss the money needed to treat you. And you'd better think about that, because they are.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

No one ever said life would be easy. So if you haven't been horribly murdered on a bus I say you should feel lucky. Of course such incidents, narrowly defined, are extremely uncommon. And so far we haven't had any annoying lectures about the human tendency to overestimate rare risks, although I wonder how many people have slept on buses in the past week.

We've also had relatively little annoyingly off-key political whining. One MP called it a "wake-up call" about mass transit security while another rejected armed guards on buses but called, in a most unfortunate phrase, for security experts "to put their heads together." But buses are actually surprisingly safe, and if you really want to improve security further you could simply arm the drivers.

Probably nothing could have saved Tim McLean, who seems to have been immediately mortally wounded. But the attacker was only kept at bay by the driver, a passenger and a passing truck driver waving a hammer and a crowbar, after the driver managed to disable the bus from outside to prevent it being stolen and used for worse mayhem. Whereas in Israel, where normal law-abiding folks are frequently armed, anyone who starts to run amok is promptly shot. That's my public policy lesson here.

My broader lesson is that nothing can fundamentally change the fragility of life. Bus beheadings may be rare, even unprecedented, but malevolence, illness or simple bad luck can strike any of us at any time. This spring an Ottawa grandmother was crushed in a bus shelter when an elderly driver lost control of her vehicle. Politicians might call it a wake-up call for sturdier bus shelters, and I might suggest greater willingness to revoke the licences of unfit drivers. But the key point is that when the American newspaperman Damon Runyon said all life is six to five against he was wildly optimistic.

What amazes me about psychopathic violence, like suicide terrorism, is not how common but how rare it is. We trust our fellows implicitly not suddenly to stab us or run us over as we walk down the street pondering where to eat lunch, and almost invariably they don't. Even the strangest-looking ones, or those with the weirdest internal monologues going on, do not so much as punch us in the nose. Yet they might, and what really can you do to prepare yourself?

Many years ago, hitchhiking across Canada with one dollar in my pocket, I got a lift from a very unpleasant B.C. truck driver who at one point genially observed that I seemed small and cute to be travelling alone. I genially showed him the metal bar I carried for protection and shortly afterward he genially let me out. Was he Clifford Olson? I don't know. I don't remember what he looked like.

I'll never know how lucky I was that night. But I've certainly slept on buses, and if you wake up with a knife jammed through your windpipe it's hard to rebound -- as it is if you die of malaria at three weeks old, get raped and massacred by marauding Huns, are eaten by crocodiles or suffer any number of other horrible fates that have overtaken huge numbers of people and, despite vapid political rhetoric, will undoubtedly afflict many more.

Like being sent to a concentration camp. I happened to be rereading One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich last week, shortly before Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, having survived war with the Nazis, Stalinist labour camps and persecution by Stalin's successors, expired peacefully at 89. And it filled me with gratitude at all the horrible things that never happened to me. It reminded me of Ben Stein's account of floating in his heated Hollywood pool looking up at the same stars visible from Auschwitz and wondering "Why me?"

The question cannot be answered directly. But it also cannot be evaded because you, and I, were incredibly lucky. Yes, you. Even if you are now mortally ill, suffer lingering trauma, or get murdered tomorrow, if you have lived long enough to read this article, and can read it, you are ahead of a great number of people. Would you switch places with that seven-year-old Toronto girl brutally beaten to death by, allegedly, her government-sanctioned caregiver?

Exactly. So the real question is not "Why me?" but "What am I going to do with my luck?" Shall I, who was never once randomly slaughtered on a bus in my youth, go about complaining that my back hurts from digging fence post holes? Or shall I attempt to conduct myself in such a way that people do not generally curse immediately after speaking with me on the telephone? Shall I take some of my luck and share it, or hoard it and whine that there should have been more?

We are all on the bus. If you were lucky enough not to get death as a seatmate yet, try to make something worthwhile of the trip.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Would it ruin your long weekend barbecue plans if I mentioned that 35 years have passed since we were warned that "Soylent Green is people"? I'm not so much worried about giving away the plot as spoiling your appetite with memories of the phrase "starring Charlton Heston," one of many things that could never happen and yet was frequently discussed in the 1970s. Like that we were all going to starve and choke amid general gloom. Some younger readers may be perplexed by the foregoing since Soylent Green was a truly bad science fiction film without attaining the exquisite awfulness that makes Attack of the Killer Tomatoes a classic.

Today it's just unwatchable. Nevertheless, as you head for the cottage or the backyard, it is worth scraping up memories of the dark side of the 1970s. Or rather the insufficiently lit side; the truly dark side had to do with the Khmer Rouge and the descent of 1960s hippie idealism into drug overdoses and Charles Manson. I'm thinking instead of the "Limits to Growth."

The pinnacle of this intellectual movement, such as it was, came with the election of Jimmy Carter. Again he may be familiar to younger readers primarily as an ex-president who, in James Taranto's excellent phrase, has become "an international nuisance who aspires to be a menace."

But in those days he radiated boring, dismal decline. With him, we'd all just turn the thermostat down, don frumpy cardigans and fade glumly away.

Now contrast him with Barack Obama. While the expectations of his partisans are almost as daffily over-the-top as his rhetoric, he cannot be accused of fostering or exploiting a mood of depressed resignation.

I don't know what to make of "People of Berlin, people of the world, this is our moment. This is our time." But when he talks about the environment he enthuses so goofily about alternative technology he could be a Canadian premier. "It's a strategy that will create millions of new jobs that pay well and cannot be outsourced, and one that will leave our children a world that is cleaner and safer."

That sounds more like a 1939 commercial break featuring Popsicle Pete, winner of the "typical American boy contest," than a '70s dystopia like Logan's Run or Soylent Green.

I'm not saying go out and rent the latter. It is so unredeemably, drably bad that it stands as a monument to what Doonesbury once called a kidney stone of a decade. But kidney stones are better to read about than have.

So all I'm saying is, if you check out one of the excerpts readily available online, you'll realize that what was meant to happen to New York City by the early 21st century has entirely failed to materialize there, or in Seattle or Dallas, but it is very much in evidence in Beijing, where pollution is so bad they're thinking of rescheduling Olympic events involving endurance. Such as breathing. And in Hong Kong, in Chinese hands since 1997, the Citizen reported on Wednesday that you could barely see across the harbour for all the smog.

Of course the Chinese regime does not literally use humans for food (something that is central to the plot of Soylent Green).

But the metaphor fits because China certainly has no compunctions about sacrificing them to a ghastly parody of economic "growth" that impoverishes people and ruins the environment. Exactly like the old Soviet Union. Whereas in the free societies, a term never employed without quotation marks by the 1970s smart set, citizens, corporations and even politicians have found amazingly creative ways to stop trashing the environment without sinking into the swamp of malaise toward which Mr. Carter beckoned us. It is elsewhere that the dystopian predictions came true and people's views have changed as a result.

I know there is a residual anti-human ethos among some Western "Deep Ecologists" who would refuse to eat Soylent Green primarily because it contains meat. And yes, global warming is meant to kill us all eventually. But even among most childless Malthusian liberals, the despair of the 1970s has given way to a hedonism that, while shallow, possesses at least a veneer of cheerfulness. There weren't spas in the world of Soylent Green and the phenomenon of liberal cities like Seattle and San Francisco having more dogs than children would also not have happened for reasons animal-lovers won't want me to specify.

We shouldn't become complacent. So don't let that barbecue smoke too much. But do derive comfort from the fact that even environmental alarmists like Al Gore now clearly endorse the view that free societies are creative, while the cheery way Barack Obama summons us to environmental combat makes you forget you ever saw a Charlton Heston movie.

Whereas over in China, they have to live in one. This weekend, be grateful we don't.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Put down the pill bottle and back away slowly. Aha! What’s this? Expired antibiotics? You’re in big trouble, buddy. Actually we all are. Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are everywhere, swarming over hospital towel-racks and bedsteads and heading right for our soft bits when we’re already feeling sick. Nature is, proverbially, short of mercy. But we’re making the problem way worse by misusing what were once “miracle drugs,” but have somehow become “whiny entitlement drugs.”

Look at this new study conducted for the Public Health Agency of Canada. According to Tuesday’s Citizen, the study “found almost one in three Canadians either wrongly believes antibiotics are effective against colds or doesn’t know if they are. Only 44 per cent know antibiotics kill bacteria, but not viruses. Close to half incorrectly think recent use of an antibiotic protects against reinfection or don’t know whether it does … one in 10 Canadians has used leftover antibiotics from old prescriptions belonging to them or someone else.”

Of course people wouldn’t be able to hoard expired antibiotics and take them for colds and other virus-based illnesses if doctors didn’t sometimes prescribe them just to get loud rude people out of their offices. In Britain, where the problem is so bad the government just issued strict new guidelines to doctors not to give antibiotics for coughs, colds and ear infections, the Daily Telegraph notes that family doctors “claim they often feel under pressure from patients who are angered if they are refused treatment.”

I can’t help thinking it’s a breach of medical ethics to give in to make these cretins go away. But I have a lot of sympathy for Canadian and British doctors, who are overworked, underpaid and treated like serfs by a public that seems to think their state-given rights include not only free access to whatever treatment does exist, but who also think that a treatment must exist for whatever is bothering them.

Those doctors willing to pacify us with pills, as though we were children getting lollipops, are responding to what is plainly widespread and socially condoned behaviour. (In fact they’d probably get in a lot more trouble for giving candy to kids in an age that gobbles antibiotics, but shuns sugar.) And knowing the difference between a bacterium and a virus, even in the “information age,” isn’t snobby pedantry like knowing the Venetian from the Florentine school of Renaissance painters. We aren’t going to die if we mistake a Donatello for a Tortellini. Yet far more people know their star sign than their blood type even though the latter won’t even help you get a date any more. And people succumb to ridiculous scares about cell phones but don’t pay attention to bugs that can kill their kids.

Most people also have no idea what it was like to live in an era without antibiotics. “Hey, I scratched my finger.” “Oh. Goodbye.” Of course not every wound was fatal. But American president Calvin Coolidge had an all-too-typical experience of watching helplessly in 1924 as his 16-year-old son blistered a toe playing lawn tennis on the White House grounds, developed blood poisoning, and died. It would be silly to go back to those days because we can’t be bothered to read the label or just decide not to believe it.

On that last point, pollsters and analysts have recently hailed a “decline in deference” among Canadians, as though rudeness were a virtue. That deference is a bad thing is a common misconception among intellectuals, though it’s odd to hear it from the same people who praise Canada’s differences from the famously egalitarian United States. In any case, the American ideal required people, in place of deference to their superiors, to be self-reliant and community minded.

Abusing free drugs manifests neither quality. And insisting that the government look after our health care sounds deferential to me, even if we’re also whiny. But let’s make the best of it. The only proper way to get antibiotics, aside from a few ointments, is from a pharmacist on the advice of a doctor. And they both tell you exactly what to do. Take the pills as instructed, complete the treatment even if you feel better, don’t hoard old pills for some arbitrary use later on. Oh, and if you get the sniffles don’t go to the doctor. Just take some quack remedy you found online and the cold will be gone in seven days instead of lasting a whole week.

I don’t want to die of some wretched superbug because people were too lazy or insolent to follow simple directions on a bottle, or had a misplaced sense of entitlement that the universe owed them a cure for the common cold. So I say again, put down the bottle and back away. Doctor’s orders.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Remember how the old Perry Mason TV program would end with his brilliant interrogation trapping the guilty party into sobbing out a confession? It's very much unlike watching a parliamentary committee in action. I liked Raymond Burr's show better. As a rule, MPs on committees seem to have very hazy goals in questioning witnesses and no coherent strategy for reaching them. But things were far worse at this week's special meeting of the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee, apparently summoned for the sole purpose of generating silly-season headlines about Tory sleaze based on a supposed election financing scandal. First, opposition members wasted their time trying to get Canada's Chief Electoral Officer, Marc Mayrand, to slam the Tories in ways he had explicitly said at the outset he would not do, because he could not comment on anything currently before the courts or under investigation by the Commissioner of Elections Canada.

Then Pierre Poilievre led off for the Tories. Since he usually reminds me of Mason's haplessly belligerent TV nemesis, DA Hamilton Burger, I wasn't expecting things to improve. But he surprised me with not one, nor two, but three of the dramatic moments that habitually marked the climax of the old Mason show.

First he asked Mr. Mayrand why slide 6 of his PowerPoint handout to the committee defined "Candidate election expenses" as "any expense incurred, or property or service used to directly promote or oppose a candidate during an election period" when the Elections Canada candidates' handbook for the 2006 election (on p. 25) directly quotes clause 407(1) of the Canada Elections Act that it must be "used directly to promote or oppose a registered party, its leader or a candidate during an election."

Since the crux of this matter is spending by local candidates to promote the national party, the altered wording to leave out "party" is not a trivial omission. (Especially as the latest, 2007 Elections Canada candidates handbook also removes the reference to parties (see p. 27) while citing the same, unaltered, clause 407(1) of the Elections Act.) But Mr. Poilievre wasn't done with his fireworks.

He then read an e-mail worth quoting in full: "Hi Phyllis, We are told by communications folks in BC that these were radio ads with the Candidate's personal tag on the end -- therefore a local expense to be reported under the Candidate's expense ceiling, regardless of who pays. For rebate purposes, we were asked to bill each campaign -- in the case of VanEast, $2,612.00. The good news is that the Federal Party will transfer $2,600 to the Federal Riding Association as we agreed to pay for the ads. We hope that you are able to squeeze this in under the ceiling. Some expenses are not considered election expenses subject to spending limits, such as fundraising costs. Please have a look at the totals and get back to us if you think we have a problem." It was signed by the federal party bookkeeper.

It sounds like sharp practice. But did it require investigation? Mr. Mayrand refused to comment without more information. So Mr. Poilievre revealed that it was an NDP e-mail obtained by the Tories from Elections Canada. Yet Mr. Mayrand testified that no other party had engaged in the sort of "in-and-out" financing that prompted him to refuse dozens of Tory reimbursement claims and ask the Commissioner of Elections Canada to investigate.

The third Mason-style moment concerned Mr. Mayrand's attempt to show that his office had not given the press or the Liberal party a heads-up on the police raid on Conservative Party HQ. In his opening statement the Chief Electoral Officer said an internal review had cleared him and his staff, though when Scott Reid on a point of order required him to table the review he quickly downgraded it to "not truly a report, barely a sheet."

So Mr. Poilievre asked who conducted the review and Mr. Mayrand grudgingly confessed that it was one M. Mayrand. Since he certainly wouldn't let the Tories investigate themselves on the in-and-out affair, Mr. Poilievre called it surprising that he'd think it appropriate to investigate himself on the leak. And it is.

The more I watch this stuff, including the ugly procedural fiddling on Wednesday, the more convinced I am that if there's a scandal here, it doesn't involve the Tories. But nobody seems to care. The opposition want a scandal, the press want a scandal, and since everybody who's anybody knows Conservatives stink, let's not bore ourselves with details on a beautiful summer day.

Imagine a Perry Mason show where, after the dramatic denouement, the jury convicted his client anyway. I expect it would be cancelled in a hurry.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

In politics you're never sure who to despise. David Cameron seemed a thoroughly safe bet and now look what he's done. Mr. Cameron, in case you don't follow the disintegration of the public sector in Britain as closely as here at home, took over the British Conservative party in December 2005 and, like a classic Canadian Tory, proudly declared himself centrist while articulating uniformly left-wing policies.

Uh, until this week. Speaking in a Glasgow constituency his party wouldn't win if hell did freeze over, he suddenly unleashed a withering blast against political correctness. For instance he told fat people to eat less and exercise more.

Please don't file a hate speech complaint against me because I'm just reporting the facts. (Wait a minute. That's not a defence before our Star Chambers, is it? Oh well. The truth shall make us free. Aaaaaah I just quoted the Bible. I'm in trouble now.)

Before they lock me up, to assure you I am not exaggerating Mr. Cameron's clarity, let me quote him: "Refusing to use these words -- right and wrong -- means a denial of personal responsibility and the concept of a moral choice. We talk about people being 'at risk of obesity' instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise."

Ouch. The fat's in the fire now. And sizzling, as he continued: "We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it's as if these things -- obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction -- are purely external events like a plague or bad weather. Of course, circumstances -- where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school, and the choices your parents make -- have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices that people make."

Now try to imagine a major Canadian politician making such a statement. I'm sorry. Did you hurt yourself laughing? Sure, a backbencher occasionally says something similar, generally flubbing the delivery, but they are quickly repudiated by their more reputable colleagues. However, before denouncing our politicians as a sorry mix of conformists and crackpots, remember that there is a filter in Canadian politics that determines who gets to be a politician. The electorate. Us. And look what we let Dalton McGuinty do to John Tory over faith-based schools, while sending his own kids to one.

The Daily Telegraph claimed: "It is a sign of the political confidence that Mr. Cameron now has -- backed by consistent opinion poll leads of around 18 points -- that he feels able to make such strong comments." And I grant that in Britain, as here, politicians trailing in the polls are peculiarly adverse to bold efforts to gain ground. But those ahead in the polls generally seem even more afraid of blunt talk. I say Mr. Cameron made a moral choice to speak out.

Others could usefully imitate him, and not just politicians. Wednesday's Citizen quoted the supposedly Roman Catholic premier of Ontario praising the induction of Dr. Henry Morgentaler into the Order of Canada because "I know Dr. Morgentaler is seen as a controversial figure, but I believe in a woman's right to make a very difficult decision and if she makes that difficult decision and chooses to have an abortion, I want her to be able to do that in a way that is safe and a way that's publicly funded." If the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Canada takes church teachings more seriously than Mr. McGuinty, they ought pointedly to deny him communion. While we await their decision, let me share with you, and them, a bit more of Mr. Cameron's amazing outburst.

"We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order to avoid injury to people's feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgmental, we have failed to say what needs to be said... we prefer moral neutrality... Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more." He admitted politicians are far from perfect: "Our relationships crack up, our marriages break down, we fail as parents and as citizens just like everyone else. But if the result of this is a stultifying silence about things that really matter, we redouble the failure."

Wow. He finished: "There is a danger of becoming quite literally a de-moralized society, where nobody will tell the truth anymore about what is good and bad, right and wrong. That is why children are growing up without boundaries... The values we need to repair our broken society... should be taught in the home, in the family.'"

I would love to hear a politician in this country seize a microphone and deliver equally blunt remarks. Even if it means I have to stop despising him.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

If I had an Order of Canada I'd return it to protest the appointment of Henry Morgentaler. But of course people like me don't get that little white snowflake lapel pin. We're too divisive. I have to start by laying on the table my most fundamental objection here. Dr. Morgentaler has devoted his life to the killing of unborn babies and I do not think he deserves an award for having been good at it. But I do not produce that statement as a trump card. Rather, I do not want to be accused of dealing off the bottom of the deck in my subsequent arguments.

For while I am pro-life, to add anything to this discussion I need to reach out to people who may be uneasy about at least some abortions but do not share my core position. I must argue that appointments of this sort are wrong without requiring that you endorse my specific objection to it.

The first major difficulty is identifying appointments "of this sort." The closest analogy I can find to abortion is debates over slavery in Britain and the United States two to three centuries ago. It is the only other time essentially democratic societies were bitterly divided over a widespread practice that hinged on what, or who, qualified as a "person."

A Globe and Mail editorial on Wednesday said it would have been easier for the selection committee not to give this award, and probably better for the dignity of the Order, but praised the committee for its courage in doing so anyway. The editorialist asked "would it be right to overlook Dr. Morgentaler simply because he is a controversial figure?" No. But that's obviously not the point. Canada is full of "controversial figures" like, say, Don Cherry. But the people who dislike him think he's a blowhard, not a mass murderer.

Consider CAW national president Buzz Hargrove, who also got the Order of Canada this year. He is surely controversial, both for his beliefs and for his tactics. But given the position of trade unions in our society and the esteem he enjoys among his colleagues, I am happy to see him get the award even if the citation claim that he is "respected on both sides of the bargaining table" may contain an element of exaggeration.

As for Kim Campbell, the citation reference to "her distinguished contributions to Canadian politics" is impossible to take seriously. But it is a necessary fiction because, barring a Nixon-like fall from grace, all former prime ministers should have portraits on Parliament Hill and Order of Canada pins. And you don't have to be an ardent devotee of TV newscasts to consider Peter Mansbridge exactly the distinguished, reputable, non-controversial sort who should make up the bulk of the Order. Especially since the selection committee is chaired by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who does not wish to seem biased in the culture wars given her day job.

There's the rub. The Globe editorial conceded that as only 5,000 people have received the Order since 1967, it is the awarding of the honour, not the withholding of it, that requires justification. And in this case the real motive seems to be not that Dr. Morgentaler was an activist but that he was a particular type of activist, like the pastor who performed Canada's first same-sex marriage and received the award last year (a topic also raised in Jean Chrétien's 2007 citation). Thus the Globe editorial argued that while Dr. Morgentaler "is not a popular figure ... his fight for legal abortion and the availability of that procedure greatly benefited the health of Canadian women." Which I strongly dispute, but never mind that now.

The point here is that the real reason for supporting his award isn't that he's controversial, it's that he's an abortionist. And it's no excuse for pushing it through that he's unwell and it cannot be given posthumously. If there is no afterlife there's little point rushing to collect attractive coffin decorations and if there is, that little white lapel pin will not help him face his accusers on the other side.

Sorry, was that divisive? Well, so was this award, which amounts to endorsing his position on abortion in a deliberately offensive manner, despite the euphemistic reference to his "commitment to increased health-care options for women" (Apparently the word "abortion" might raise uneasy thoughts about what increased "options" his activism offered the roughly 50,000 girls aborted each year in Canada, or more given sex-selective abortion.)

Feminist Judy Rebick said "For me, it's got a symbolic importance that it was announced on Canada Day." Exactly. It symbolized a slap in the face from official Canada to millions of Canadians for whom widespread abortion is a transcendent horror.

If you have an Order of Canada, send it back.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]