After the stock market crash of 1929, progressive Republican president Herbert Hoover claimed his long-serving Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon succinctly advised him to "liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate." He should have listened. Instead Hoover steered huge tax and tariff increases through Congress, flattening his own re-election hopes along with the economy and paving the way for his "pragmatic" successor Franklin Roosevelt to impose an endless bewildering series of ill-advised interventions accompanied by bitterly anti-capitalist rhetoric. It worked so well that 10 years after the crash the United States was still mired in a massive depression.

As Americans ponder whether this is a bad time to panic or the perfect opportunity, it's worth noting that after the earlier catastrophic slump of 1921, Mellon's advice was followed. Instead of kicking the economy when it was down, Republicans let markets sort themselves out, cut taxes, paid down debt and launched a long boom. Some may say the 1920s witnessed false prosperity under laissez-faire. But it's hard to deny that the 1930s witnessed real depression under intervention.

So forget partisan bickering over who's to blame for lack of government oversight of U.S. financial markets. The answer might surprise you, especially John McCain's new ad featuring Bill Clinton blaming the Democrats. But what's the point?

The problem wasn't too little regulation so there's not a lot to be gained by arguing about who wanted more. The root cause of this crisis is the U.S. government massively pumping up mortgage markets ever since the New Deal, piling program upon program to subsidize unsound lending, including Mr. Clinton's own administration putting aggressive political and even legal pressure on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to boost subprime markets.

What has now gone wrong is that huge numbers of people have suddenly realized that for decades banks were making loans they should not have approved to people taking out mortgages they could not afford because of guarantees the government should not have given. And no package should pass Congress that doesn't have some rational bearing on this problem.

The right answer is to get rid of those guarantees, not add to them. When you get a "meltdown," panic, recession, correction or whatever name makes you feel better about it, what has happened is not that the economic fundamentals have gotten out of whack but that large numbers of people have noticed they are out of whack. Proposals to "stabilize" financial markets under such circumstances amount to substituting make-believe for honest mistake. Why would you want to do that, and how could you? What you need is to get your financial system back in alignment with people's understanding of what the real assets are worth and the only way to do that is to let the prices of paper assets fall to realistic levels.

Please keep in mind that liquidating the unsound financial structure doesn't destroy real wealth. It doesn't mean going to houses purchased with triply unsound credit and burning them down. They will still be there and, odds are, the same people will still be living in them. Rich people aren't going to move into 10 cheap suburban houses each and put typical American workers into cardboard boxes. The best economic use of modest houses is to house folks of modest means and that's what a tidied-up financial system would do with them.

Panic, by contrast, means throwing good money after bad. All the Bush administration seems to have is the old something-must-be-done, this-is-something, so this-must-be-done argument. Other voices are no more persuasive. For instance a strangely cheery Globe and Mail piece from a British academic proclaimed not only that "the U.S. free-market creed has self-destructed" but that the "era of U.S. global leadership ... is over". Phooey. This bubble had nothing to do with free markets. And left-wing professors have been gloating over the decline of the American empire since at least 1970, when Richard Nixon took the United States off the gold standard amid the Vietnam entanglement, race riots, economic stagnation and a rising Soviet challenge. It's old news and it isn't true.

It also isn't relevant. No amount of government profligacy can make unsound subprime derivatives valuable in any geopolitical context. And Americans seem to know it. Hence the shameless loading of expensive unrelated goodies to the second, Senate, version of the bailout to seduce the surprising number of Congresspersons who heeded Mellon, and voters, the first time around.

Here's hoping they listen again.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

When is a gaffe not a gaffe in politics? When it's untrue, apparently. Enjoy the campaigns. A classic gaffe, a career-threatening humiliation delightful to the press, is when someone expresses a home truth in plain language. Like that if a foreign nation attacked a country with which you had a defensive alliance you would defend them. You can have real trouble living something like that down.

It's an especially juicy gaffe when someone blurts out what everyone knows.

Like the NDP candidate, formerly campaign director for the B.C. Marijuana Party in 2005, who got dumped because video surfaced of him smoking pot. Surely the real mistake was made by whoever in the NDP welcomed him as a candidate without realizing the marijuana in question was the stuff you smoke to get high. Didn't the party grasp that a guy whose political philosophy was openly based on weed had probably sampled it? So why is actual video of him smoking it confirmation of anything but the obvious? (The video of the other ex-NDP candidate apparently driving after taking hallucinogens is an entirely different matter -- surprising, stupid and dangerous).

Then there's the September 22 NDP e-mail inviting me to visit their digital "Orange Room" where a video called "Stephenstein" offers 39 seconds of alternating shots of the prime minister and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, then says "Don't Let This Fool Fool You."

I say that posting mean, childish junk on your website reveals something important about your party. But, evidently it's just good clean fun, unlike, say, a cyberpuffin pooping on someone. Blurting out your real partisan feelings only seems to qualify as a gaffe when conservatives do it.

The most interesting case thus far this fall is the amazing howler by Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden in a September 22 CBS puffball "Exclusive" full of hard-hitting journalistic observations from Katie Couric like "Relating to the fears of the average American is one of Biden's strong suits" and "You say what's on your mind and I think people appreciate that." After claiming the Republicans will take things he says out of context (but "If I have to go parse through every single thing that I'm gonna say then I'm not me"), Mr. Biden illustrated his concept of true leadership with, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'look, here's what happened.'"

Well, yes. Except Roosevelt wasn't president at the time and there was no commercial television. If Sarah Palin had said it, she'd have been pilloried for cluelessness, and rightly so. But isn't it at least as bad for Biden, put on the Democratic ticket expressly for his knowledge and experience, having been first elected to the Senate in 1972, roughly half-way between the actual inauguration of Roosevelt in 1933 and that interview? It's peculiar, in fact, that the high-priced talent at CBS didn't notice this oopsie while filming, editing and airing the segment. After all, the fact that Republicans were in power when the Depression hit had a huge impact on American politics for the next 50 years and you'd think they'd know that and so should Biden.

Wednesday's Citizen suggested Mr. Biden mostly got away with that blunder because attention was focused on "two bigger gaffes" in the same week, namely not knowing Barack Obama's position on clean-coal plants and calling one of the Obama-Biden campaign's own TV ads "terrible" because it mocked John McCain's not knowing how to send e-mail (in fact Mr. McCain has great difficulty typing because of permanent injuries from being tortured as a Vietnam POW). The latter isn't a gaffe. It's refreshing honesty with a dash of decency. So of course it's what's getting him in real trouble.

Here at home, a Tory candidate in Toronto just "resigned" after his party learned he'd stated abrasively on a blog that if Canadians weren't sissies someone would have come to the aid of that poor guy beheaded on a bus, and advocated "concealed carry" handgun laws in Canada partly to help women and gays defend themselves against violent hate crimes. And he's gay. We complain endlessly that political debate is trite, bland and vacuous, with politicians constantly trying to play it safe. But look how we treat anything frank and unconventional during an election.

On the other hand, I don't see much point in debating Joe Biden's claim that President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation on TV in 1929. It raises serious questions about his fitness to be vice president. But at least it wasn't a gaffe.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

A recent BBC poll indicates enormous enthusiasm for Barack Obama outside the United States. In 22 countries from Italy to Egypt he leads John McCain by about four to one on average, margins not seen since the last time a Democrat faced a Republican in an American election. It's one more warning to Mr. Obama's domestic supporters that he's not quite the phenomenon they think he is. This foreign enthusiasm is puzzling. Recent liberal Democratic presidents have performed fairly poorly on security and trade, and if Mr. Obama had consistent positions they might well be protectionist. Meanwhile to many of his American supporters his appeal is less programmatic than spiritual; he will heal America of divisions that allegedly run as deep as any the republic has ever known. Why this prospect would appeal in, say, Singapore or France is not obvious, especially to people who don't like America very much. But in any case it is untenable because based on a false premise. Barack Obama may be a healer, and the inauguration of a black president would certainly be good for America. The problem is simply that the premise that America is divided as never before does not withstand informed scrutiny. Not on race, not on foreign affairs, not on economics, not on anything. Compare today with 1800, when the election of Thomas Jefferson prompted a leading member of George Washington's Federalist party, Fisher Ames, to expect "the loathsome steam of human victims offered in sacrifice." The Jeffersonian Republicans in return accused the Federalists of being closet monarchists possibly plotting to hand the U.S. back to Britain, and in 1814 the remnants of the Federalist party did make a politically lethal though otherwise feeble effort to take New England out of the Union. But after a short-lived "Era of Good Feelings," by 1832 president Andrew Jackson was threatening to hang his own former Vice President, John C. Calhoun, over tariff policy linked to states' rights and slavery.

Speaking of slavery, in 1856 Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was savagely beaten on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, to general Southern approval, in the lead-up to a civil war that would kill over 600,000 Americans, nearly as many as all America's other wars combined. And the man who saved the Union, President Lincoln, was himself subjected to extraordinary abuse in his day, including unflattering comparison to a baboon by a member of his own cabinet.

The Civil War was obviously the nadir. But how do today's divisions compare with Senator "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman's campaign promise to stab president Grover Cleveland, a fellow Democrat, over bank policy? From a resurgent Klan in the 1920s to Republicans washing their children's mouths out with soap in the 1930s for saying "Roosevelt" to McCarthy-era accusations of treason in high places to "Hey Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?" and "Burn Baby Burn", persistent urban rumours that Nixon would put blacks in concentration camps and ridicule of Ronald Reagan as a senile warmonger, American politics is consistently rambunctious, with a dash of venomous paranoia at least as evident on the left as the right. Even the relatively placid Clinton era saw the president impeached as a wretched cad then acquitted on a bitter partisan vote.

I happen to think the United States has had surprisingly good government under this system, in part because issues get very thoroughly aired. And (speaking for the record as a hard-core conservative) I consider 2008 a fairly unimportant election in which a cranky mediocrity and a charming novice seek to replace a disappointing incumbent.

I can't muster any views more apocalyptic than that. Except that, based on the historical record, enthusiasts for Barack Obama consumed with hatred of George W. Bush are in part imagining and in part creating the very abyss of partisan loathing they claim their man can fix with a few ritual phrases and a laying-on of hands. As for foreigners, they don't get to vote and Americans mostly don't care what they think. Rightly not, judging by that BBC poll.

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

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This just in from outer space. The government is censoring reporting of the election but doing it badly. OK, it's not from outer space. It's from Elections Canada, who on Sept. 9 e-mailed the press to remind us that the law imposes strict requirements, if we report on polls during an election, about what information we must divulge.

State agents pry from us such things as "how many persons were contacted" and "the survey's margin of error."

This law is at once foolish and malignant, two qualities I personally try to avoid even in isolation let alone in combination.

As an attempt to prevent objectionable speech during an election this weird little restriction on what we can say (or, more exactly, what we cannot not say) is entirely feeble. We print journalists remain free to speculate as to what various parties' campaign strategies are and whether they're working without having to justify our claims in any way to the meddlers at Elections Canada. We can cite "experts" without having to explain our choice of which experts we call. We can even declare that nobody understands how a given Tory policy would work but that it's "crafty politics" without having to put any evidence on the table. But cite a poll and we must include statistical details or offend the truth police.

Actually the law on poll reporting is such ineffective censorship that it only says the first outlet to report it must provide all this tedious detail. Thus, for example, the Citizen could report Wednesday an Ipsos Reid poll on Canadians' diverse electoral concerns without pestering you with how many people in northeastern Saskatchewan with blue garage doors were consulted on the economy versus health care as their main concern. Which is fine by me and I expect by you as well so the government should just buzz off.

On the whole, I'm not much interested in polls and wish everyone spent more time discussing issues (like, say, censorship). Sometimes polls are slanted for partisan purposes, and other times they're flawed because normal people either won't talk to pollsters or are not entirely frank with them. On the other hand, pollsters rely for their reputation, and thus their income, on the accuracy of their results so they try hard to avoid such pitfalls. Anyway, how much information journalists provide about polls and how often we report on them should be between us, the newspaper, and you, our readers. It is not properly the business of people to whom these poll numbers might spell electoral doom. And are those in government so thoroughly on top of their more important tasks that they have time to spare on this sort of stuff?

OK, the only practical effect of this rule is to make us occasionally waste ink and paper including statistical caveats of minimal interest. Mathematicians don't need them, whereas to the average reader a margin of error plus some phrase like "19 times out of 20" is just a fancy way of saying "unless it's not" which they already knew. But the Canada Elections Act that lies behind this warning from Elections Canada was written by incumbent politicians to prevent us from doing something they fear might get them voted out. And even if statistically imprecise reporting of polls is unlikely to have that effect, inept censorship remains censorship and sets a very bad precedent. Of which this warning is not the only example.

Radio stations, for instance, are legally obliged to provide "equitable" political coverage. Which is just a soothing name for the government hovering over their reporting on the government to make sure it's not left to citizens to decide what's fair. Our election laws also silence third parties during elections. And if the state can dictate coverage to radio stations and citizens, why not newspapers? Why just harry us over fiddly details of poll reporting when they could prosecute us for unfair coverage of their own splendid selves?

I'll tell you. It's because you the voter, not they the incumbent politicians, should decide whether we the press are giving you the information you need to cast an informed vote. Always.

Instead, if I say Stéphane Dion is a Martian, the law lets you make up your own mind about the reliability of the claim. But if I tell you 68 per cent of Martians support the Liberal leader, I'm obliged to disclose how many little green men I talked to with how large a margin of error, lest you be hoodwinked into some harmful voting behaviour impossible to specify. It may sound silly rather than toxic. But once the censorship principle is conceded, it's hard to fight back if the application gets more obnoxious.

Stupid, yet unfair. How strangely Earthlings conduct public affairs.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The possible election of Barack Obama as president of the United States has engendered a puzzling level of enthusiasm among Canadian progressives. It is puzzling first because they are normally skeptical of American influence on Canada and second because it is not obvious, even if he possesses the wonderful qualities his more enthusiastic supporters attribute to him, how President Obama would bring about exciting changes in Canada. That we are in need of some rejuvenation of our political culture is beyond doubt. But Washington is not the place to look for it.

"Since September 11 Canada has, like the United States, experienced precisely no terrorist attacks, so Obama will have mathematical trouble bringing that number down any further."

It might be carping to suggest that the direct impact of President Obama’s policies on Canada is liable to be negative insofar as it is discernable. Despite some bobbing and weaving, he does seem hostile to NAFTA, on which so much of our recent impressive economic growth is based. And if he should miscalculate in foreign policy, as his rhetorical tendency to oscillate between extremes of accommodation and belligerence suggests, we might well find ourselves in a far less attractive world. Those to the left of George W. Bush on foreign policy may think Obama would bring a more enlightened attitude to diplomacy leading to a more peaceful world. If so, the benefits are obvious, starting with our possibly being able to bring our brave soldiers home from Afghanistan. But at the risk of sounding hard-boiled, since September 11 Canada has, like the United States, experienced precisely no terrorist attacks, so regardless of his excellence, Mr. Obama will have mathematical trouble bringing that number down any further. And if he ends up flopping his flip on a hasty withdrawal from Iraq, then his Canadian supporters, even if they find it aesthetically superior to see a Democrat engage in foreign military nation-building ventures, will have little of substance to celebrate.

Perhaps the issue is not policy. At least some Canadian Obama enthusiasts expect his positive impact on us to be more a matter of changing our national mood than any concrete steps he might take. And here there is one way in which his example might do us good. It has been mentioned that the recent Democratic nomination contest between the senator from Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton presented a remarkable contrast with Canadian political parties and their all-white-male-all-the-time leadership ambiance. (The Republican race, with a maverick war hero, a Mormon, a libertine and a preacher man offered considerable variety even before John McCain chose the gun-totin’, whistle-blowin’, former beauty queen, pro-life Alaskan governor as his running mate.) And if Mr. Obama really is a fresh face, rhetorically inspiring rather than insipid, above the politics of image and manipulation, and living proof that anyone can aspire to the presidency, we might be prompted to ask ourselves why such things do not happen here. But that is about all the help we are going to get from him.

Even if American political institutions are working in such a way as to provide this inspiring ray of hope, we cannot attempt to imitate any changes Obama helps to cause in Washington directly because our own institutions are different. Indeed, one need not be naive about American governance to say that ours legitimately seem to be in a far more advanced state of disrepair.

The extent of visceral disdain for George W. Bush in Canada, especially among the literati, can easily deceive people into thinking that the American political system, and their very constitution, must have disintegrated for such a man to occupy the White House. The 2000 election was stolen, the war in Iraq is illegal, Guantanamo Bay violates the Geneva Conventions, the economy is collapsing because of the subprime mortgage lending fiasco, and so on.

"It is now hard to believe that newspapers called Abraham Lincoln a coward and a baboon, and Senator Ben Tillman threatened to stab Grover Cleveland with a pitchfork over his bank policy."

The prevalence of such talk underlines that the last two presidents have had an unhealthy polarizing effect on American politics. Indeed, I confess that Bill Clinton had that effect on me. But I also remember the invective of the Reagan years. And as a U.S. historian by training, I am acutely aware that at various other times in America’s past the level of bitterness and division seemed perilously high, including periods now remembered as calm and harmonious or as times when giants walked the earth. It is now hard to believe that newspapers called Abraham Lincoln a coward and a baboon (as did a member of his own cabinet), South Carolina senator Ben Tillman threatened to stab President Grover Cleveland with a pitchfork over his bank policy and some parents washed their children’s mouths out with soap if they spoke the name of Franklin Roosevelt. Or that Orson Welles and Norman Mailer suggested on television that Richard Nixon might cancel the 1972 elections, while Daniel Patrick Moynihan urged Nixon to make some sort of reassuring statement to black Americans in his first inaugural address because “the rumor is widespread that the new government is planning to build concentration camps.”¹ And those last two examples came less than a decade after the supposedly transforming glory of Camelot.

There are plenty of grounds for criticizing George Bush on matters both of substance and of style. But neither his policy failures nor offputting personal style grotesquely exceed those of Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam and race riots, Richard Nixon over Vietnam and Watergate, or Jimmy Carter over energy shortages and superpower relations. And, in any event, voters have already given both houses of Congress to the Democrats to rein in President Bush. The United States is simply not in a pit of such Stygian darkness that Barack Obama will transform it, even if he is everything his supporters imagine him to be. And even if he does, he certainly will not transform Canada as well.

Viewed dispassionately, our governance is not going well. But our problems cannot reasonably be attributed to George W. Bush or a Republican Congress, which the United States does not even have any more. Our policies bear little resemblance to those of Mr. Bush and our institutional difficulties are quite unlike those of the United States. To start with the obvious, Question Period routinely sinks to a level the Obama-Clinton debates never did. And it is no fluke, no passing result of our 2006 election or the 2000 one in the United States. It has been this way for well over a decade regardless of which party is asking or answering the questions.

Novice members of Parliament now routinely enter the Commons genuinely convinced that they can and will help raise the tone of Question Period. But before you know it they are turning artificially purple, jabbing fingers in a way that causes fights in bars and making barnyard noises while their colleagues across the aisle attempt to be heard further lowering the tone of debate.

And it is not just Question Period. Take legislative committees. American congressional committees have their failings, but they continue to play a vital and effective role in the discharge of Congress’s legitimate and constitutionally mandated functions. If you have sat in on any significant number of parliamentary committees lately, which I have, you will know that many of them are on the verge of total meltdown due not to otherwise real problems, such as overwork, but to a complete lapse in civility that inhibits even routine substantive and procedural activities. Even the notorious disruption of, for instance, the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics over the “in-and-out” affair has its roots in a ferocity of partisan attachment among almost all members of Parliament that leaves no room for a higher allegiance to Parliament or concern for its proper functioning that might transcend the vicious battle for short-term party advantage.

Our discontents go further. Whatever one thinks of the Liberal Party’s traditional image of itself as the only national brokerage party, it is surely alarming to see the geographical and sociological fracturing of our politics into voting tribes among whom there is little communication, never mind conversation. There is widespread fear of another election among parties and voters for reasons ranging from financial to aesthetic. But the biggest problem is that we are liable to get back the same parliament again and again. (If the Conservatives do obtain a dissolution of Parliament this fall, uncertain at the time of writing, it will be from fear of something worse, not the hope of something better.) It is hard to see how George Bush can have created this electoral paralysis and, therefore, hard to see how Barack Obama might end it. And you certainly cannot blame the outgoing Republican incumbent for the fact that Canada’s three opposition parties share a sufficiently similar social democratic philosophy to cooperate almost reflexively in committees, and even sometimes in passing money bills through the House, yet cannot bring themselves even to bring down the Tories and cause an election, let alone assemble a coalition to pass a coherent governing program based on things they all loudly declare themselves to believe in.

Such a state of affairs would not be a problem in principle in the United States. Their constitution, with its separate election of the executive, does not depend upon the president having a working majority in the legislature. For much of its history he has not, and the founding fathers would be happy to hear it. Moreover, even a president with significant partisan majorities in Congress may be unable to control the legislative agenda. But in Canada, with a constitution in many ways similar in principle to that of Great Britain, the executive depends upon a working majority in the House. The Conservatives, lacking one, should not be able to govern, and in certain important respects, including the work of committees, they cannot. The unwillingness of the opposition parties to take on the unpleasant as well as pleasant tasks incumbent on a majority in Parliament, leading them to abstain on or duck crucial budgetary votes, is a peculiarly Canadian pathology that denies citizens a government they can hold responsible for what actually happens politically, and an opposition they can turn to for alternatives. Barack Obama cannot help us with that even if he turns out to make John F. Kennedy look like Ike.

Right now people are thrashing about, proposing remedies that are incompatible with our fundamental institutions and unrelated to our current difficulties. We are digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the hole with proposals such as Reform’s direct democracy in the 1990s and a proliferation of arm’s-length agencies impossible to situate within the executive, legislative or judicial branches and unconstrained by traditional rules appropriate to any of them. We need a plan here, not a mood swing.

"One advantage of a sweeping advocacy of change, currently working to the benefit of Barack Obama, is that its lack of specificity makes it hard to criticize."

One advantage of a sweeping advocacy of change, currently working to the benefit of Barack Obama, is that its lack of specificity makes it hard to criticize. Regrettably it has precisely the same effect on implementation. One waits in vain for progressive Canadian enthusiasts for the coming Obama revolution to tell us what exactly it is that, fired with newfound enthusiasm, we ought to do to make Canada—rather than the U.S.—a better, happier place.

Some prominent Canadian commentators have invoked the atmosphere of Camelot with respect to Mr. Obama. Cynics might retort that the senator from Illinois in 2008, like the one from Massachusetts in 1960, is young, handsome, inexperienced and gifted at raising expectations with empty rhetoric. But the analogy is noteworthy because the American “Great Society” of the 1960s really did furnish the model, or at least a significant inspiration, for our own “Just Society” five years later—the last great burst of transborder progressive enthusiasm.

Retrospective discussions of government in Canada in the 1960s contain an air of breathless excitement. Politicians of vision worked closely with brilliant public servants such as Gordon Robertson and Robert Bryce to sweep aside old structures within government and outside it and to revolutionize Canadian society by harnessing the potential of a marriage of social science and political power. Bliss it was to be alive, and to be young was very heaven, especially given free love.

What is too often overlooked in such fond reminiscing is the awkward fact that it did not work. I say this not as a sour and sidelined relic of the past age, even if I am one. I simply take at face value the verdict of activists and advocates for progressive causes. Read their rhetoric about, say, income distribution in Canada today and it is obvious that the welfare programs brought in with such fanfare, often profoundly influenced in their design by American ideas, have not done what their supporters said they would, however much they may have confirmed, or confounded, the expectations of their critics. And progressive politicians share that verdict.

"In 1943, journalist Bruce Hutchison wrote that “we Canadians can probably claim the distinction of being the most rugged surviving individualists,” having rejected the statist embrace of the American New Deal."

Just Society reforms sought to curb native Canadian traditions like free enterprise and the politics of liberty, sometimes reflexively dismissed in this country as “too American” or in an even more partisan way as “too Republican.” But in 1943, William Watson observes in Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life, journalist Bruce Hutchison wrote that “we Canadians can probably claim the distinction of being the most rugged surviving individualists,” having rejected the statist embrace of the American New Deal. As Watson goes on to point out, as late as 1958 Canadian governments took a smaller share of gross domestic product than American ones. Parts of Canada’s welfare state date back to 1940 (rudimentary unemployment insurance) or even 1927 (the first, grudging old age pension), but the bulk of it dates to the two decades from 1956 (the Unemployment Assistance Act) to 1968 (federal medicare), including the Canada Pension Plan in 1965 and the Canada Assistance Program and federal aid to education in 1967.

Yet by 1973 the throne speech was promising a dramatic revamping of a system that was not working, which the subsequent orange paper prepared for health and welfare minister Marc Lalonde failed to deliver. In 1994 Lloyd Axworthy, then Minister of Human Resources Development, undertook a grandiose consultation exercise that saw the Human Resources Committee of the House of Commons travel across Canada in a propeller plane listening to activists complain from sea to sea to sea. (I know. I was there, as a Reform staffer.) In the end they cut spending and renamed unemployment insurance to employment insurance Not a lot to show, really.

By the same token, satisfaction with the existing public healthcare system is hardly greater among its most fervent supporters than among its most acerbic critics. They disagree sharply on prescriptions but not on the crisis, for which politicians routinely produce expensive fixes that are meant to last a generation and are lucky to quiet the complaining and demands for more money for a few months.

In the midst of all this, there is reasonably wide agreement that the volume of activity now undertaken by the executive branch precludes effective scrutiny by Parliament or even, nowadays, Cabinet. Quarter-trillion-dollar budgets, thousands of pages of regulations, massive bills drafted by hordes of bureaucrats, all simply roll through unchecked and poorly understood because no one has the time or capacity to check or understand them.

"It is outrageous that the Ontario Human Rights Commission could caustically pronounce Maclean’s and Mark Steyn guilty while admitting it lacked jurisdiction even to hear their case."

Now turn to the field of judicial innovations, from the broad reading of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by the Supreme Court to the proliferation of human rights tribunals not bound by traditional rules of judicial procedure. Some people including myself are appalled that, for instance, Ezra Levant had to spend almost three years and $100,000 defending his right to reprint cartoons as part of a news story while one of the complainants could casually walk away two years into the case without spending a dime on lawyers. And it is outrageous that the Ontario Human Rights Commission could caustically pronounce Maclean’s and Mark Steyn guilty while admitting it lacked jurisdiction even to hear their case. But defenders of the process do not appear much happier; they still seem to regard Canada as a nation riddled with injustice, hatred, bigotry and exclusion, with only a thin red line of human rights commissions between us and the resurgent net-savvy KKK.

If one listens to the voices of progressives in politics or that frequently amazingly uncivil bunch wrongly dubbed “civil society,” it is clear that no Just Society has emerged in Canada, nor is one about to. Conservatives may lament the demise of parliamentary sovereignty and the rise of an imperial judiciary in vain; their opponents derive no satisfaction from these processes.

It is, of course, possible to assert that it is just a matter of persisting, that the medicine will have the desired effect provided the patient adheres to the course of treatment long enough. But those who await a second Camelot under Obama, casting reflected glory upon ourselves, must believe that in such an event we will find new approaches that will at last bring the New Jerusalem or Albion into being upon the banks of the Rideau. And whatever else one thinks of that position, it is logically incompatible with the claim that the dramatic changes we have made in the last half century were the right ones and that we now need a calm hand on the wheel and a steady-as-she-goes mentality of the sort most prominently associated recently with Jean Chrétien.

If prompted I can certainly offer a quite different program of action, based on undoing much of the unsound innovation of recent decades. And I can tell you where to find the necessary spirit: in a splendid tradition going back more than twelve centuries. Let us not forget that our political institutions were explicitly modelled primarily on those of Great Britain, which, in a characteristic passage, the famed 18th-century commentator William Blackstone called “a land, perhaps the only one in the universe, in which political or civil liberty is the very end and scope of the constitution.”

My proposal is to take a very deep breath and remind ourselves what our institutions are for and how they are meant to work. In the process we must grasp that we have had not too little but too much change in government in the past 40 years, and have replaced our under-appreciated traditional parliamentary system with a bizarre new one that does not work at all.

If my proposal does not appeal, I am willing to entertain alternatives. Maybe you do not want to restore the spirit with which Canadians tamed a wilderness, beat Hitler and made parliamentary democracy work in a federation. But whatever you do want, we are not getting it from Washington, even if Barack Obama is everything his more excitable supporters in both countries expect him to be.

Note ¹ Raymond Price, With Nixon (New York: Viking Press, 1977), page 44.

[First appeared in the Literary Review of Canada]

Personally I'd put Brie on my mooseburger and alienate all key sectors of the U.S. electorate at once. For good measure I'd discuss U.S. politics right after a Canadian election call and annoy my countrypersons as well. But at least I'd know it. Contrast me with the hordes of commentators appalled that Sarah Palin can "field-dress" a moose without being sure what that procedure involves. Vegans can make principled objections. But when people who eat meat flinch at someone able to obtain it, you are up against snobbery rather than analysis. And if you can't understand why I like Sarah Palin, I don't much care why you think I shouldn't.

Perhaps my disdain for Canadian politics is a form of reverse snobbery. But I'd far rather deal with the entrails of a moose than with the political kind in this country. I mean, the other day I got an e-mail from the NDP saying, "For too long, Stephen Harper has listened to those sitting around the boardroom tables, not the kitchen tables." Phooey.

It's not that I don't believe the charge. It's that I don't believe NDPers believe it. It has plausibly been suggested that Stephen Harper only listens to himself. Or that such advice as he does take comes from careful polling of those at kitchen tables, to the virtual exclusion of principled conservatives. But does anyone believe Jack Layton believes Mr. Harper takes campaign and policy advice from captains of corporate Canada? And while I don't really mind Mr. Layton being wrong, it bothers me that he's being ridiculous without knowing it.

Likewise, Stéphane Dion just denounced "Stephen Harper's laissez-faire, I don't care approach" and repeated for good measure, "This is the Canada he wants to build, laissez-faire, I don't care." Oooh, that's hip, a rhyming slogan. Hit it, boys. Regrettably it's such absolute babble that, again, one cannot believe he believes it. This Tory government inherited spending of $209 billion a year, aimed to get it to $240 billion within three years and, as the Canadian Taxpayers Federation just noted, is way ahead of that extravagant target so far this year. This batch of Tories wouldn't know laissez-faire if the collected works of Adam Smith fell on their heads. Stéphane Dion is too smart not to know it, but too dumb to see how silly he looks saying it anyway.

As for the Tories having a computer-animated bird poop on Mr. Dion, it shows the dangers of giving youthful political zealots leeway -- and, again, of operating in a closed environment where you basically only talk to people who share not just your beliefs, but also your ethos.

Which brings me back to Sarah Palin and her moosburgers. When John McCain picked her, the cognoscenti -- from journalists to journalists to journalists -- condemned it as a disastrous choice because, fundamentally, it was a vulgar one. Smart, determined, caring mother with successful career, mean shot with a rifle, won the high school basketball championship on a broken foot. What, exactly, is it about that resumé that so many supposed feminists find disgusting?

It seems to be that she's somehow tacky. Not "one of us." Worse yet, she's one of them. That great vulgar horde of self-reliant, resilient, practical Americans. You know. Hillbillies. Yuck.

To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., North American elites are forever yammering about other cultures, but generally seem surprised to find that there are any. And disgusted.

Lack of self-awareness is a tragic failing. Including that Canadian politics is far more sociologically exclusive than American, in everything from skin colour to family size. (Their four major candidates had seven, five, four and two kids; ours one, two, two and two.) Yet Canada was settled by people with a large dollop of frontier spirit of their own: anglos, francophones, allophones, aboriginals, practically any group you can name, with a formidable capacity to survive on their own, to endure hardship, do disgusting tasks, shoot to kill in this nation's wars and down on the farm and raise big families. So where's our Sarah Palin, instead of four guys you wouldn't want helping you change a tire? Even Mr. Dion's snowshoeing ads have "environmentally correct yuppie hobby" rather than "check the trapline" written all over them.

I say if you're going to be a snob you should at least know it, especially if you're a journalist or a politician. Remember John Kerry's major 2004 campaign gaffe when he asked for Swiss cheese on his Philly cheese steak? I'd prefer it myself; the classic fast-food Philly is actually disgusting. But if I were posing as a common man I'd at least understand why I'd better make a joke of putting Brie on my mooseburger.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

At the risk of stirring controversy I'd like to declare that Barack Obama would probably make an OK president. To his supporters this will sound outrageously tepid. Whereas many conservatives are passionately convinced the rookie Senator from Illinois is absolutely the worst imaginable candidate for the Oval Office since, um, the last guy the Democrats nominated. In this respect, at least, hard-core Republican and Democratic sympathizers are quite similar: Compare what the latter now say about John McCain with the way they used to praise his independence from George W. Bush, and ask yourself whether they, too, don't need either a reality check or an honesty transfusion.

The test I apply within my own social circles, such as they are, is to ask which Democratic nominee for president in the last 60 years they do not consider conspicuously unfit for that office. Not just potentially ineffective, lacking experience and/or liable to espouse bad polices, but offensively unsuited to it. I realize conservatives are likely not to support liberal candidates regardless of their personal qualities (and vice versa). But in a democracy, if your hair rises in panic at every nominee from the other party it is your judgment that is called into question, not theirs.

I apply my 60-year test to Republicans because I want to be sure my net is large enough to catch Harry Truman. He had his failings, but his temperament was well suited to the difficult job of U.S. president, and particularly in foreign affairs he is now vindicated as thoroughly as he was pilloried at the time. The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson opined on Tuesday, expressly respecting George W. Bush, that "Almost every North American politician who leaves office unpopular hopes for a Truman. Alas for them, Mr. Truman's rehabilitation was unique." Oh really? What about Ronald Reagan? Or Richard Nixon? Or Dwight Eisenhower? Shall I go on naming Republicans or is the point clear?

I know it's hard to rally the troops with a dramatic cry that while your own candidate is uninspiring the other guy is liable, on balance, to be marginally worse. But even active partisans should try to remember which of their utterances are deliberate exaggerations or outright lies. Those who merely follow politics with passion have no excuse for plunging into the bile so enthusiastically as to splash it about. I don't expect Democrats to prefer Republican candidates or vice versa but I do expect them to keep a little perspective.

A number of essentially mediocre Democratic candidates in the past half-century might have made a dangerous mess of Soviet-American relations. But that doesn't make Walter Mondale a leftist menace like Al Gore, or a cad like Bill Clinton. Democrats should be ashamed of the enthusiastic welcome they gave Mr. Clinton at their convention 10 years after he was impeached; Richard Nixon was not even at the 1984 RNC a decade after resigning. But honestly, would conservatives, or Americans, be worse off today if Michael Dukakis had defeated George Bush Sr. in 1992? And if Sarah Palin were a Democrat, would the Globe editorially demand her resignation from the ticket and peddle rumours of a "shotgun" wedding for her pregnant daughter?

Some of my Republican friends tell me Sen. Obama is bitter, radical and dangerous. I don't believe it. Yes, he inhaled some noxious vapours from the left-wing fringe of black American politics but I don't think they poisoned him. Indeed the one extravagant expectation of his supporters that I think he could meet is to help heal America's deep and ancient racial wounds, simply by raising his right hand and repeating the oath of office.

I grant that on foreign policy he seems to vacillate rhetorically between appeasement and belligerence and if he were to do so in office we'd all regret it. But honestly, what true Republican liked John McCain before the campaign started? And if the Democrats are going to win, would you rather it be with Hillary Clinton? Or Al Gore? They can't all be worse than one another. Membership in the Democratic Party may indicate poor judgment, but unless you're willing openly to call it proof of imbecility, depravity or both you can't treat every nominee as confirmation of that claim. And by the way, if liberals would extend the same courtesy to conservatives, in Canada as well, it might not harm political discourse there or here.

In the end, I tell my conservative friends that, if elected, Barack Obama will either do a decent job, which would be good, or be a comically catastrophic bust like Jimmy Carter and push the country back to the right, which would also be good. So we have nothing to lose but our sense of proportion.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

When a habit brings intense short-term sensual pleasure but saps your vitality and eats away at your body it's time to quit. I refer of course to the war on tobacco. Tuesday's Citizen reported a StatsCan's finding that smoking has not declined in the past three years and a Canadian Cancer Society spokesman's irritated response, "The reason the smoking rate stopped going down is because of the serious contraband situation. It's completely undermining the progress we'd otherwise be seeing in reduced smoking." Once again bad assumptions lead to bad policy.

First and foremost, the reason smoking declined for so long is that people decided to stop, and the reason it's not falling now is that more people aren't quitting. Yes, people. Apparently one cannot say often enough, in public policy, that individuals insist upon weighing alternatives and making decisions for themselves.

I resent people clinging to their own opinions even after I've told them mine and clearly I'm not alone. But they just won't stop no matter how much we lecture them, and since we cannot make this annoying problem go away, we must deal with it.

So face this awkward fact as well. People stubbornly refuse to follow the instructions of their betters not because they are defective in the way they make decisions. It's that they have unauthorized desires. For instance, the desire to smoke cigarettes. It's not a desire I share or, to be more precise, not one I indulge because I consider the health costs too high. At the risk of committing heresy, I would like to state for the record that smoking is sensually satisfying in many ways from taste to nicotine rush to the physical act. It's the lethal lumps and the heart disease that get me down, to the point that I quit years ago.

Other people feel differently. Whether they enjoy smoking more than I do or like other aspects of being alive less, they haven't decided to quit. Like myself, they weigh the costs including monetary, but the math comes out differently. And because they weigh the costs it is, of course, true that if you can raise the retail price it will make some more people decide that on balance smoking isn't worth it. Unfortunately it will also make others decide that on balance buying cigarettes illegally is. And just as smokers weigh costs and make decisions, so should people concerned with public policy.

At some point we need to weigh the gains from further discouraging smoking against the costs of spreading illegality and corruption. Ideally that point would lie well in the past but since it doesn't I nominate the present. And please don't distract me with the claim of a legitimate public interest in forcing people to quit because the health care system is public. It's financially wrong because smokers tend to die long before they can use up in medical costs all the money they paid in taxes, and it's morally scandalous casually to claim that my body has been nationalized, even with general consent. But it's also irrelevant because the topic here is not the moral legitimacy of attempts to quash smoking through the state but their practical effects.

Some policies, like ordering convenience stores to hide their cigarettes, strike me as simply fatuous. It's not as though smokers will forget the things exist if they temporarily can't see them. (I also remember when the porn was hidden and the cigarettes were in plain view and I am not convinced we are very far ahead morally now that the situation is reversed.) But raising the price sufficiently to create widespread smuggling is pernicious.

It doesn't just turn regular folks into scofflaws willing, at least, to wink at the plainly illegal source of their smokes. It also makes them complicit in the corrupting influence of organized crime on law enforcement. Black market vice needs security and it can afford it, and since crooks cannot dial 911 they must either provide their own or else bribe public authorities.

I find it especially worrying that contraband tobacco smuggling drills holes in the border that can then be used for other purposes.

Here I think not only of illegal drugs but also terrorist weapons and even terrorists. And for what?

Smoking may be dumb. But a policy that corrupts citizens and police, and that menaces public safety, needs very strong positive effects to pass the test of common sense. Does further discouragement of smoking, at this point, seem to you to qualify?

The rush of bossing people about, the tingly puritanical pleasure of snatching peoples' glowing cigarettes from their very lips and stamping them out in front of their faces is a short-term pleasure that comes at too high a long-term cost. Time to give it up.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]