Does anybody remember policy? We used to spend a lot of time not discussing it. But today it seems we've just lost interest.

No really. In the glory days of the 1980s and early 1990s we actually bickered about things like free trade and tax reform.

We weren't discussing policy; rather, we hurled insults with some fairly clear connection to the substantive matters we were avoiding. Whereas today policy ideas seem to wander about in an intellectual Tartarus, barely recognizable shades of their former selves, without memory or purpose, gibbering inanely.

Consider social programs. Back in the day we thought about pondering their shortcomings, possibly even mentioning aloud that they might be making people's problems worse not better. Which I mention not from nostalgia, but because the Institute of Marriage and the Family Canada just brought a very important speaker to Ottawa to try to raise the topic.

It was Iain Duncan Smith, who used to lead the British Conservative Party and is now Chairman of the Centre for Social Justice. And as he explained to me in an interview on Wednesday, the Centre for Social Justice has had considerable impact in Britain because it has produced a mountain of research on what's wrong (including the massive, frightening 2006 study Breakdown Britain) and also on what could be done better. In the process, Duncan Smith and his colleagues have silenced the more abusive among their critics by piling this research on the table and asking "What do you know that we don't?"

If you're at all interested in the topic I recommend their website (www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk). But be very sure you type it correctly because their idea of "social justice" is not like a lot of other people's, in that it is well-informed rather than shrill.

Duncan Smith explained to me that his centre's approach is to survey existing research and then do its own, both statistical analysis and one-on-one interviews with actual humans caught up in various social pathologies from addiction to debt to crime. As a result, Duncan Smith is able to make a convincing case that serious problems really do exist in identifiable forms, including the harmful effects of family breakup on children.

Will anyone here care? I'm inclined to doubt it. If Bill Clinton were in town bloviating about building a better world, the press would be all over it and the smart set would be lining up to shell out ticket fees that would embarrass a rock band. But when the Institute of Marriage and the Family Canada brings in Duncan Smith and other experts to address a conference, no one even bothers shouting "Booooring."

True, John Ivison interviewed Duncan Smith then wrote a fair and intelligent piece in the National Post. But it focused on whether the Centre for Social Justice approach would work politically for Stephen Harper, which strikes me as somewhat less important than whether it would work for the poor.

To define a problem accurately is not to dictate a solution, of course. And frankly I find some of the CSJ suggestions damp while others are positively soggy. (Sorry, that may be a British joke, because over there Duncan Smith is what they call a "wet," roughly corresponding to a Red Tory in Canada.)

When I spoke to him in Ottawa this week, he made some very good points about the existing welfare state asking the wrong questions from the wrong angle, starting with a top-down "What can the government do?" instead of a bottom-up "What's really wrong with people's lives?"

Too often existing programs address problems in isolation, from unemployment to alcoholism to single parenting to poverty, that usually form a tangled mess in actual individual lives. But he put forward solutions I find quite moist, about the state funding private agencies that have shown themselves to be good at preventing rather than patching up problems at a personal, human level.

I think Duncan Smith and his colleagues underestimate the structural tendency of government funding and regulation to create perverse incentives for any people and any private agencies that become dependent on state help. But I'm pretty sure his response to that criticism would be to put a mountain of research in front of me about places where this approach is working in various countries. Then we could have a discussion.

We might even have a debate. But it would be courteous, constructive, intelligent (on his part, anyway) and no one would turn purple, bluster, jab fingers at anyone, yell, make barnyard noises or substitute abuse for analysis.

Unfortunately it's very hard to see how politicians could be drawn into such a conversation. If you don't agree, watch Question Period and then tell me what you know that I don't.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Thomas Jefferson famously said "Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter." If he were alive today, I think he'd look at the troubled state of the industry and say, "Is that thing a newspaper?"

I don't mean that snidely. It's easy to be snide about modern newspapers, and governments, and indeed about Jefferson, who in turn was very snide about the defects of journalism in his time. But I think his initial reaction to today's newspapers would be an expression of bafflement at the format.

He might be startled by the vulgarity and puzzled at the mildness of the political invective.

But what would really surprise him would be all the advertisements. Here my colleagues on the business side sob "What ads?" And of course I know about the relentless, technologically driven decline in ad revenue. That's why I invoke Jefferson, to insist that advertising is not as central to newspapers as we might think.

Recently in these pages David Warren warned that "The future of newspapers cannot be assured by making them any more frivolous or sensational ... The cost-cutting should be aimed at eliminating the frivolous, and concentrating instead on the classical function: fearless reportage and truth-seeking in a world that has always been too full of lies." Indeed. So forget truth and honour while I prate about technology.

I'm not some dizzy pseudo-conservative who thinks economic progress can forgive our trespasses or deliver us from evil. Rather, like Marshall McLuhan, I study modernity to avoid being run over by it. And in the process I note that technological change created the modern newspaper so it is unreasonable to complain, and obtuse to deny, that it is contributing to its decline.

Late 19th-century "convergence" of rotary presses, wood pulp paper and better graphics made cheap magazines and newspapers possible just when corporations wanted publicity for their newly packaged and branded products. Centralized production for a mass audience, supported by advertising, made such good economic sense that the United States went from fewer than 600 daily papers in 1870 to more than 2,500 by 1909, and circulation rose to more than 24 million. (It also worked immediately for radio in the 1920s.)

Unfortunately the microchip came along. Then some darn fool invented the Internet (I think it was Al Gore) and wretched entrepreneurs promptly created countless new ways to interact socially, politically and commercially. Including connecting buyers with sellers. That's what's doing us in on the advertising revenue side and regrettably the Internet is bigger than we are and we can't make it go away by shouting or banging pans.

So we need to rethink our business model. To be blunt, a newspaper is not essentially a bunch of ads with some facts and opinions jammed into the "news hole" because without that guff there won't be readers to look at the ads. It's a business that gathers and filters information, then writes about it for literate, engaged people. I don't resent that advertisements have paid my wages. But those days are going fast, and we must start raising money primarily from readers.

Or rather, go back to doing so. And why not? Newspapers flourished economically and culturally on that basis in the 18th and 19th centuries and can do it again in the 21st.

Here the Internet is friend as well as foe. Electronic delivery saves huge sums on paper, ink, machinery, maintenance, heating, property taxes, trucks, gasoline and labour. And clever business people keep improving the on-screen reading experience.

Of course we must get the content right. And if we do, we have a big advantage over bloggers. G.K. Chesterton warned that cities are parochial because their size and diversity let us consort only with people like ourselves. The Internet makes this problem far worse and a good newspaper is one way of combating it. (A bad newspaper, by contrast, is a wasteful way of repackaging elite prejudices about trivia, and if we go broke doing that we have only ourselves to blame.)

Here I am not chasing the will-o-the-wisp of "objective" coverage. Old-tyme newspapers tended to be organs of opinion, which is fine by me. But done right, they offered informed opinion to intelligent readers willing to pay to be made to think rather than merely emote.

That's the essence of a newspaper: the news, not the paper and certainly not the ads. And obviously no one said the job would be easy. But hey, the modern decentralized economy brought back the 18th-century coffee house.

Why not the newspapers they used to read there, too?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It is bizarre and confusing that David Ahenakew was just quietly found not guilty of hate speech. If his venomous ravings weren't hate speech, what is? And how is anyone meant to understand our laws or court system now?

In case you missed it, a provincial court just let him off, following a 2005 conviction and successful appeal, because his, although his statements "about Jewish people were revolting, disgusting and untrue," he lacked the intent to spread hate -- and you need to have intent for the remarks to be criminal. Now this is foolishness because, as Lorne Gunter wrote in the National Post, Ahenakew repeatedly spewed filth in public settings, even after a theatrical apology, including during his first trial.

I trust you remember the gist of his original 2002 outburst. For one hesitates to repeat his various revolting statements, even when they are well known and even though there now seems to be no legal jeopardy in making them enthusiastically, let alone quoting them critically.

Actually I take that last bit back. Our courts are by now in the habit of delivering astounding judgments and I can well imagine them convicting someone, especially a white person, for saying precisely what David Ahenakew said about any minority except, possibly, Jews. I just don't understand why the legal system does what it does.

The authorities seem equally lost. The Crown prosecutor in the case says he hasn't yet decided whether to appeal the acquittal, but either way "The fact that these comments were noted to be disgusting, untrue and revolting -- that's why these cases must be prosecuted." Which is compound foolishness, implying as it does first that it is the job of the state rather than citizens to blow raspberries at jerks and, second, that it is not the job of the state to create clear rules only against what it considers significant acts of force and fraud, and then enforce those rules firmly, consistently and impartially.

Ahenakew clearly is a jerk. His response to the verdict was "Thank God it's over" but "I'm still that same guy. I'm too damn old to change." So he's not merely unrepentant, he can't even stop swearing in public.

Yet part of me wants to support this verdict, because I am opposed to hate speech laws. Now, now, don't go moving away from me there on the bench. I'm not defending the content of offensive speech.

Rather, I am very close to a free speech absolutist because, as I've said before, John Stuart Mill nailed it in On Liberty. Free speech helps truth defeat error, first because a heretical opinion may turn out to be correct, and second because when a remark is both offensive and wrong, its open expression leads to vigorous criticism and denunciation. Moreover, hateful speech is the rattle not the fangs and usefully warns us that the latter are present.

For instance, news stories at the time of his original outburst made it clear that David Ahenakew's associates knew about his views of Jews, and other minorities. Yet they continued to accord him respect and position. Everybody, of every race, needs to be aware of the long years of bigoted mistreatment of aboriginals in Canada. But we also all need to recognize the sometimes unpleasant and unreasonable forms the resulting resentment has taken. And we should all be able to discuss and debate these things without worrying that someone might go to jail for speaking frankly, even if they are both bitter and wrong.

So I wonder where the defenders of hate speech laws stand on this verdict. Do they, like me, suspect that it is an isolated case, and that if one were to suggest the extermination of six million ... No. I can't. A concern for decency and my legal situation alike forbid me to suggest in print, even to illustrate a judicial hypothetical, that some other group deserved to be dealt with as Mr. Ahenakew praised Hitler for treating Jews.

The same concern for decency requires me to ask pointedly, "Is it just Jews?" and "Did he get off because he's not white?" If so, I defy anyone to justify it. But if not, I presume we're going to get rid of our hate speech laws and Star Chamber tribunals persecuting Mark Steyn and Maclean's, Ezra Levant, and sundry Christian eccentrics and loudmouths. Instead we'll just let people argue and, if they choose, disgrace themselves by the arguments they put forward.

Won't we? Or is it now a coin flip whether spewing race hatred gets you a jail sentence? Indeed, if Mr. Ahenakew were tried again would he be convicted? Can anyone say with any confidence what the rules are, or why?

Surely that's an astounding state of affairs, incompatible even with order, let alone good government.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The kerfuffle over re-enacting the battle of the Plains of Abraham has ended, as expected, with a humiliating sacrifice of our history on the altar of political correctness. Possibly I should be glad they didn't restage it with Montcalm awakened by Jean Chrétien, as the latter famously wished in 1999, in time to win the battle. But unless you're in the Louis XV fan club, I can't understand why you'd want to falsify or deny our past.

The outcome of this squabble has rightly been deplored as a victory for intimidation. I do not think it is an invitation for everyone to play this game and I do not think that anyone should.

But it distresses me that anyone who dared threaten a group of separatists would not merely be arrested and punished, but would in the process probably be given exactly the same stern lecture about peace, order, good government and the Canadian way that this ragtag band of odious sovereigntists were not. Almost as though those in power were in sympathy with their motives.

Sorry. Did I say "almost"? Actually, Premier Jean Charest, though condemning the threats, supported the cancellation of an event he had earlier criticized and pointedly refused to attend. And as Graeme Hamilton noted in the National Post, in announcing the cancellation, National Battlefields Commission president André Juneau said "French people were still worried to see all those red uniforms on the Plains, even if it's 250 years ago."

Excuse me? Were there protests in Paris? Who are these French people of whom you speak? And what exactly is their ethnic or intellectual affiliation with Louis XV and his troops?

My question would, I am sure, be met with contempt in Quebec. Allow me to reciprocate.

As I wrote in 2005, "It was appalling tribalism for Jean Chrétien to wish he'd been there to wake up Montcalm, as if a preference for constitutional monarchy, civil rights and representative institutions over French absolutist tyranny were some grotesque Anglo propensity like boiling vegetables into pasty grey submission."

There are aspects of history that are genuinely painful to recall. For instance, things that are just plain bad. In the U.S. history course I'll be teaching this spring at the University of Ottawa, covering 1865-1945, we must deal frankly with obscene racism including the ghastly reality of lynching. But while we shudder, we do recall it, with moral as well as factual clarity.

A second painful category is events where something good was squandered on behalf of something bad. Thus Americans re-enact Gettysburg without controversy, and even express some nostalgia for the chivalry of the Old South, but only because virtually everyone knows that on the main point, slavery, the Confederacy was utterly and repugnantly wrong.

A third and more problematic category is events in which both sides were in large measure wrong. An example is the enduring and lethal divisions in Ireland over the Battle of the Boyne, where wilfully obtuse Jacobitism faced off against centuries of brutal misrule from London. But no such thing happened when Wolfe met Montcalm.

On the Plains of Abraham the political fate of the northern part of North America was settled. Not the ethnic fate, the political fate. And it was settled in favour of democracy and toleration. The British government promised francophones "langue, loi et foi" and kept their word. Does anyone think a victorious enlarged New France would have respected the English language, Protestant religion, common law or for that matter self-government?

It is not irrelevant here to observe that Quebec separatists don't even like their own history, let alone ours. They repudiate the Church and the deferential society of 19th-century Quebec in theory and in their personal lives. They call even the Duplessis years "the great darkness." Not one of them would advocate the political, cultural, religious or economic arrangements of 18th-century France.

So what's the problem? Are the Montcalmites sorry they missed their date with Robespierre and Madame Guillotine? Do they wish they had stood with Napoléon at Waterloo, and Napoléon III at Sedan? Quebec nationalists didn't exactly rush to the colours when France was threatened in 1914 or needed rescuing after 1940. What's wrong with British self-government, suppression of the slave trade and defeat of Hitler that you'd rather be part of, say, Vichy France?

The past isn't about competing narratives equally valid for various ethnic groups. It's about truth. The truth is that Britain defeated France in the Seven Years' War. And in the process self-government vanquished absolutism on the Plains of Abraham, leaving everyone including Quebecers far better off.

So shut up and put on your wool coat.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Would you please just stop? Stop panicking, running in circles and throwing money into the bonfire? No, apparently not. Wednesday morning I picked up the paper and found that President Barack Obama had found a way to hurl another $2 trillion into the flames.

OK, he didn't find a way, let alone a reason. His administration just announced its determination to do so anyway.

I realize there is more to life than failed subprime investment vehicles. But much as I would like to write about Michael Ignatieff deciding to let a handful of opposition MPs actually oppose the budget, roughly seven seconds after realizing he couldn't stop them, or the Heart and Stroke Foundation suggestion, trumpeted by the press, that the government should regulate the price of foodstuffs so pasta doesn't cost more in Dawson City than in Barrie, the fact remains that the meltdown of thought and government finances in the United States is of primary importance to all of us now.

And while it's a long way from Canada to Washington, especially these days, if we all raise our voices a little one of us might emit the final "Yawp" that will be heard somewhere outside the House Republican Caucus.

It's increasingly urgent that we do so. I gave a speech on Tuesday on "How not to stimulate the economy" that, with all due respect to the expensive follies of our own governments, gave pride of place to the Americans for the magnitude and hysteria of theirs.

At that point the latest costly weirdness was the Obama administration's delaying revealing its "plan" to spend $350 billion bailing out banks, because refusing to explain specifics would make Congress more willing to fork over another $827 billion to bail out whatever. Oh, and because, the New York Times added, "Details of the new plan, which were still being worked out during the weekend, are sketchy." So it's not really a plan, then, is it? (And by Thursday the other bailout had become $789 billion; who knows what it might be come Monday.)

As it turned out, the details -- revealed Tuesday after Congress voted -- were both sketchy and scary. As the Times then reported, the plan-like object "is far bigger than anyone predicted ... Administration officials committed to flood the financial system with as much as $2.5 trillion..."

I found that ominous, because I already felt that $350 billion was a lot. Where do they think they're going to get all this money?

Well, the Times continued, $350 billion was to come "from the bailout fund and the rest from private investors and the Federal Reserve, making use of its ability to print money."

So part of the Obama's administration's hope is that private firms will step up and purchase enormous quantities of toxic assets with whatever money they have left after huge deficits, high taxes, ominously underfunded social programs and a bewildering succession of hugely expensive amorphous bailout plans.

Unfortunately the private sector has, very belatedly, come to the realization that if it's toxic it's not an asset. It is time governments came to that realization too.

Next they must recognize that a determination to hurl staggering sums about ataxically is very bad for desperately needed private sector confidence. As the Times further observed, "the initial assessment of the plan from the markets, lawmakers and economists was brutally negative, in large part because they expected more details." Fools. Why would we give you details? You might be tempted to think we politicians knew what we were doing.

Or not, since the part of the plan to save the economy by printing money was scarier even than the private purchase of toxic assets or the vagueness and delay.

Last week I wrote: "When the U.S. Congress threatens to apply sweeping 'buy American' requirements to its stimulus package we are driven to stop debating the dubious merits of stimulus packages and start trying to explain free trade instead. From the beginning." And now, it seems, the U.S. administration wants us to stop debating the dubious merits of protectionism and start trying to explain sound money again. From the beginning. As if we hadn't fled Salvation Island, refused to Free Silver and hosed back all manner of other money quackery over the years.

When you increase the money supply, but not the real wealth of a community you don't get richer, you get inflation. Everywhere, always, for obvious reasons. Inflation lies, confuses and confiscates.

We need sound money, balanced budgets and sensible policy. And above all, we need to stop panicking expensively, and instead give people time to collect their wits and start sorting out their investments and personal finances.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

How is it possible that in the Year of Our Lord 2009 we should find ourselves debating protectionism? It is a central premise of our civilization that free inquiry and open debate will over time improve our understanding. But apparently the product may not be exactly as shown in the advertisement. When the U.S. Congress threatens to apply sweeping "Buy American" requirements to its stimulus package we are driven to stop debating the dubious merits of stimulus packages and start trying to explain free trade instead. From the beginning. As though neither logic nor experience had previously been invoked on the subject or, worse, had been invoked in vain.

Back in 1817 David Ricardo offered an elegant and compelling proof that free trade benefits both parties. It is almost the only thing the social sciences have ever proven with mathematical rigour and yet it is disputed, or ridiculed, by persons who accept with comic credulity the pseudo-scientific findings of sociologists like Alfred Kinsey.

Here in Canada we have always had anti-free-traders, and I still get the odd scary mailing from the Council of Canadians about how under NAFTA the Americans are going to suck the Great Lakes dry and blow the dust in our faces, or some such nefarious plot.

But I thought after 1988, with the clearly enormous benefits of free trade, such views had retreated to the margins. Hoo hah! Instead, as Bill Watson pointed out in Wednesday's Citizen, the latest "conservative" federal budget includes $175 million for new Coast Guard vessels that will protect shipyards not only against foreign but against interprovincial competition.

After the catastrophic beggar-thy-neighbour trade policies of the 1930s, almost everyone became a free trader in theory. But almost no one did in practice, partly because they didn't actually understand the theory. Politicians and citizens alike generally remain convinced that exports are good and imports are bad, and free trade means getting foreigners to buy our exports by agreeing to endure their imports. But this analysis is backwards, and makes those who succumb to it vulnerable to bouts of panicky protectionism at bad moments.

In truth the only reason we export is to pay for imports. When we export, we put labour and material into things then give them to foreigners in return for bits of coloured paper with dead politicians on them. When we import, by contrast, we give bits of coloured paper with dead politicians on them to foreigners in return for useful things they produced with effort and expense. If we could import indefinitely without having to pay for it we would. Regrettably we can't. But in an economic emergency we might try temporarily to stop sending useful things out of the country while continuing to bring them in; we certainly shouldn't want to do the reverse.

I won't repeat Ricardo's argument here, partly because in graduate school I once tried to combat a piece of dopey protectionism by invoking it, and when no one had heard of it I began, "Suppose you have two countries and two products," and the professor interrupted me with "Whoa, this is way too complicated." I stifled any grade-imperilling retort about the complexity of two plus two, and learned instead to cite economist Arthur Laffer's illustration of the folly of protectionism: "Say we invented a cure for polio and Japan invented a cure for cancer. True to form, they prevented us from selling our cure in their country. Should we get even? Should we stop them from selling their cure for cancer here?"

In case Democrats in Congress think the answer is yes, let me try to catch them in their own fallacy by asking simply: Why should foreigners buy American goods if Americans won't buy theirs? Oh, you hadn't thought of that. Hadn't thought, period.

That the United States might be about to trigger a catastrophic bout of protectionism is certainly alarming enough for one day. But that it is happening in 2009 leads me to clip this passage from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty ... and burn it: "as mankind improve, the number of doctrines which are no longer disputed or doubted will be constantly on the increase: and the well-being of mankind may almost be measured by the number and gravity of the truths which have reached the point of being uncontested." As mankind improve? We appear to need a far bleaker conception of history, one that not only incorporates P.J. O'Rourke's maxim that "ignorance is a renewable resource" but admits that large numbers of superficially intelligent and well-meaning people seem strangely busy actively renewing it.

If you don't agree, tell me, please, how we can even be discussing protectionism in the Year of Good Grief 2009.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

You know what makes me proud to be Canadian? The Harper government standing alone in the UN Human Rights Council. That body's latest one-sided anti-Semitic resolution passed 33 to one, with 13 abstentions. We were the one, alone, and you couldn't ask for better company.

Of course the usual suspects started squawking about our having "abandoned a more even-handed approach." But what sort of idiot would take an even-handed approach to Hamas? Unless you count pounding it with both fists.

In a column three years ago, I quoted Article 7 of the Hamas Charter: "The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: 'The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.'"

I think I'll plant me some Gharkad trees. Because the question now is not what sort of compromise one might reach with people who talk like that but why you'd want to. It is a point of pride with radical Islamists that they are in love with death. Hamas certainly is: Other people's if possible, ideally Jews, lots of Jews, but if not, then the deaths of one's neighbours and family and if all else fails one's own. Only on the last point do I sympathize.

Hamas is flat-out loathsome. During the Cold War, I was frustrated by those who drew a spurious moral equivalence between the West and the Soviet Union. Now I miss them. Communism was evil, stupid and dangerous, to be sure. But it didn't say God would one day finish the work Hitler started.

Periodically I encounter people arguing that Israel, though not perfect, should be preferred because it is democratic, has free speech, has a sizable peace movement, and extends to its Muslim citizens an extensive array of rights denied not only to Jews but to Muslims in Israel's neighbours.

Such people note that other democratic governments urging "restraint" on Israel cannot even say what this restraint would be, except it involves Jews submitting to a rain of terrorist rockets these same governments would not tolerate hitting them. They also point out that Israel actively seeks peace with neighbours who run newspaper stories based on the blood libel and TV series based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Sometimes they discuss the political usefulness of xenophobia, specifically anti-Semitism, for regimes unable to satisfy their citizens' desire for freedom, prosperity or anything else worth having.

I pay these arguments little heed. Not because they are wrong but because they are so obviously right that they manage to be beside the point. No one of good will and sound mind is unaware that Hamas dreams of exterminating Jews and dancing in the gore. People's position on the Middle East nowadays is based on how they feel about that fact, not whether they know about it.

On that basis I welcomed Michael Ignatieff's lucid statement last Thursday that "Hamas is a terrorist organization and Canada can't touch Hamas with a 10-foot pole. Hamas is to blame for organizing this, for these rocket attacks and then for sheltering among the civilian population. And Israel is justified in continuing military operations." And while I'm giving credit where it's due, in her confirmation hearings as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton bluntly told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee "We cannot negotiate with Hamas until it renounces violence, recognizes Israel and agrees to abide by past agreements." Curiously, the emphasis on past agreements is a nice touch; although Hamas's perfidy is hardly its most atrocious characteristic, this condition makes even a tactical deception harder to perpetrate on the U.S. which, of course, would also have voted no if it were on the UNHRC.

If the situation in Gaza were reversed, with Hamas overrunning Israel, civilian casualties would not number in the hundreds but the hundreds of thousands and the UN would do nothing. If Israel's defences were to crack, its neighbours would conduct the "war of extermination" and "momentous massacre" promised by the Secretary-General of the Arab League in 1948, and the world would not lift a finger even if it could. Or rather, some governments would cheer. Others, like the sanctimonious Scandinavians, would wring their hands and urge mutual restraint.

To be alone in one's position on Israel in the UNHRC is no embarrassment. It is the only place of pride.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday Sir John A.! Happy Birthday to you!

OK, technically it's on Sunday. But perhaps you were not aware of it since we don't tend to celebrate him, as the Americans do George Washington, with a holiday, public spectacles or even a mattress sale.

It's curious given the high-volume ersatz patriotism pumped out by our elite. Years ago I read Desmond Morton's 1982 A Short History of Canada and was very much struck by its ending: "Beneath their shell of self-deprecation and cynicism, Canadians are as proud of their land as any people on Earth. Make no mistake about it." The academic doth protest too much, methinks. At any rate, you wouldn't have to issue such a warning about Americans.

Mind you, Sir John A. is no George Washington. Forget cherry trees; Washington really was a man of great accomplishments and character who towers over posterity. Sir John A. was, well, a lovable rogue who lurched toward it. If I were to fail to describe him properly because I succumbed to intoxication, then rescued my reputation with a clever quip, I would be true to the spirit of the man. Whereas to follow in Washington's footsteps ... really, no method suggests itself. At best I might conduct myself in such a manner as not to incur his displeasure.

Is it possible we don't want to remember Macdonald because we're embarrassed? Unlikely, since we like being ashamed of our history. We can't get enough of the Acadian Deportation (the federal government even designated a day to wallow in it, July 28), so we should be able to face "the man who made us" being a drunken schemer. Unless something in our national mythology blurs our vision of our past.

Last April Stéphane Dion told the international Progressive Governance Conference, "Early in Canada's history, Canadians realized that in order to live in peace in our huge, magnificent, but rough country, people and communities from different religious, linguistic and historical backgrounds would have to learn to accept each others' differences. For this purpose, they invented novel institutions ... The Liberal Party of Canada is the political expression of this desire."

This is revealingly sanctimonious gooblahoy. For one thing, our institutions were not novel. They were deliberately modeled on those of Britain except for being federal, in which we were following the Americans. Yet the conception of Canada as growing out of a prematurely postmodern vision may make it intolerable to accept that in many important ways this country was put together on a bargain with Quebec that deliberately elbowed aside considerations of principle. Perhaps unnecessarily; the U.S. was a huge, magnificent but rough country assembled out of very diverse communities and instead of the 18th-century equivalent of duct tape they overcame virtually every problem by the careful and articulate application of political philosophy. (The one area where they made a bargain instead of a principled stand, slavery, was their most appalling failure.)

I would have thought there were things to celebrate about Sir John A. for almost everyone. Even his constitutional settlement fits the bill: for the left, it foiled American expansion; for nationalists it accommodated Quebec by entrenching federalism to protect provincial powers; for the right it was deliberately and generally successfully based on the British model.

OK, Macdonald is no Washington or Alfred the Great. But he set out to create Canada and succeeded; he was also a man of remarkable resilience who largely overcame his personal demons, won eight majority governments, gave loving care to handicapped family members and despite scandals drove the national railway to completion. In many of his expedients there was, if not statesmanship, a rough and serviceable wisdom.

And he said one thing about Confederation worth carving in stone: "We will enjoy here that which is the great test of constitutional freedom -- we will have the rights of the minority respected. In all countries the rights of the majority take care of themselves, but it is only in countries like England, enjoying constitutional liberty, and safe from the tyranny of a single despot or of an unbridled democracy, that the rights of minorities are regarded."

If we don't honour him it can't hurt him now. But ignoring his birthday invites the conclusion that we are not proud of him. Good, bad, sometimes ugly, Sir John A. remains the man who made Canada. Surely we can muster one cheer and a firecracker for his birthday on Sunday.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]