The Mulroney and Dhalla inquiries are media magic, at once lurid and relevant. But between the accusations, self-pity and sobs I occasionally wonder if there isn't a bit more to public policy.

I'm not saying these inquiries aren't important. If an MP has abused his or her position it is a fundamental breach of the spirit, and the letter, of self-government. But so are unfounded accusations against an MP. Our right to be represented in government depends on the ability of our representatives to carry out their duties without harassment. We cannot have Charles I bursting into Parliament, sword in hand, in pursuit of five MPs who deny his divine right to rule. Nor can we have MPs subject to frivolous proceedings to keep them from their work.

We must suspend judgment until we know the facts. But we must know them, even though this issue is a media nightmare for everyone.

The Liberals cannot afford to appear to be pounding on immigrant nannies, whose PR advantages range from race and gender on the left to hard-working aspirations for a better life on the right. Nor can the other parties afford to appear to be pounding on Ruby Dhalla for precisely the same mix of reasons. One can only hope MPs all realize they are parliamentarians first and partisans second, and bring the appropriate discernment and determination to the task of punishing wrongdoing by colleagues while shielding them from frivolous proceedings.

As for publicity, this case is one where justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be done. As opposed to the Mulroney inquiry, which brings to mind British humorist J.B. Morton's quip that "Justice must not only be done, it must be seen to be believed."

It may be the crushing, final proof of Canada's blandness that a former prime minister could take envelopes of cash secretly from shady characters, not tell the tax man for years, and there's actually nothing going on. It is certainly a troubling reflection on the dry rot in our public life that, despite a high-profile inquiry so distasteful Wednesday's Globe and Mail editorial cartoon had it on TV in hell, we still don't know what went on and probably never will. Unresolved questions and failed scrutiny undermine faith in our governing institutions far more than any other outcome possibly could.

So I want both matters settled in public, despite the unavoidable hint of soap opera. But it bothers me that they are all over the front pages, editorial pages and cartoons, while a different hearing I attended back on April 2 was so poorly attended by the press that if a pin had dropped there, the noise would still be echoing in the empty chamber. I refer to the joint committee on the Library of Parliament listening to members of the Association of Former Parliamentarians express concern that Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page is exceeding his mandate, usurping the role of Parliament and zzzzzzz.

Sorry. Are you bored? Bored with the way Parliament spends hundreds of billions of dollars a year with barely a second glance? Including tens of billions it doesn't even have, sticking our children and grandchildren with huge unpaid bills? Well, in dull days of yore when people had nothing more interesting to do than watch MPs flee kings with drawn swords, they cared whether those we sent to Parliament could hold the executive to account for how it spent money.

I went into that April hearing sympathetic to the budget officer and came out very worried about him. Patrick Boyer, one of the ex-MPs and my colleague in Breakout Educational Network, repeatedly said Page was in contempt of Parliament and surely such a claim deserves serious attention. But I'd settle for frivolous attention if the alternative is none at all.

I realize that, in the vernacular sense, contempt of Parliament is as Canadian as maple syrup. But Boyer's objection was specific, technical and convincing: that the Parliamentary Budget Officer draws on the authority of Parliament in participating directly in public debate, yet trades on weariness with politicians in presenting himself as an independent voice. Instead of strengthening MPs' voice, the argument goes, he usurps it.

And if you wonder how Parliament has any prestige to appropriate the answer comes back, convincingly, that MPs are the procedural repositories of our right to govern ourselves. However badly they do the job, and however badly we choose them, there is no alternative, so that's our voice being appropriated and we should pay attention.

It's certainly important to find out if parliamentarians are doing their jobs wrong. But we also want to make sure they're able to do them right. Even if no one looks glamorous, bursts into tears or pockets a thick wad of unmarked bills.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Is there truly no limit to the wilful obtuseness of politicians? The short answer is, none that is tolerable.

The latest fiscally alarming affront to common sense is Ontario Economic Development Minister Michael Bryant saying "The state has got to be strategic ... we need to act as an entrepreneur and invest directly in businesses."

When someone tells you they are being philosophical about things you need to ask which philosophy. So when a politician says he is being strategic you must ask what his strategy actually is. And what Mr. Bryant told the Canadian Club of Toronto on Monday is: "This is government choosing winners and losers. This is supposed to be the thing that governments weren't supposed to do. But this is the business that we are in."

Aaaaaaaargh!

There's a reason governments aren't supposed to do that. It never works. When government starts picking winners and losers it winds up with a big pile of the latter, which quickly comes to include taxpayers. What makes Mr. Bryant think his government is so special or that the laws of economics have changed?

I want to be fair here. In this recession governments have discarded a number of supposedly solid lessons of the recent past with unseemly haste and ill-concealed enthusiasm. But on a few things they've also had good excuses, if not good reasons. We thought, for instance, that we had learned to avoid deficits. But a lot of people never entirely conceded that deficits don't stimulate the economy. They just accepted that it was so hard to stop running them when prosperity returned that on balance they did more harm than good.

I don't agree.

But I admit these people were not throwing all the lessons of the past out the window when they claimed things were so bad we should try a stiff belt of stimulus now and worry about putting the cork back later. (Even so, I wish the politicians weren't smirking so much while doing it.)

As for buying shares in, say, Chrysler, I think it would be a silly thing to do even if it didn't set a dangerous precedent. But if someone says look, it's a one-off, it's a major company, a big employer, a big purchaser, a mainstay of our economy, it's a position that, though wrong, deserves an answer.

The state plunging into the investment business as a general practice is a totally different matter. There's just no coherent argument for it that merits a detailed response. Indeed, when confronted with his minister's blithering, Premier Dalton McGuinty offered not logic backed by evidence but one of his trademark pieces of mendacious vacuity.

"Free markets are alive and well," McGuinty said, "It's just that they have a new partner." As if free markets were single things like fish markets that could have "partners," rather than enormously complex rule-based processes involving millions of participants. And as if government, already the rule-maker and referee, could also become a player without cheating all the others in the short run and getting itself in trouble over time.

McGuinty further drivelled that: "I think what Mr. Bryant was trying to say is that the days of governments kind of quietly presiding over the gradual evolution of the economy are behind us. If you take a look around the world, the strongest economies have governments playing an active role ... I think the smart way is to find where are your sectoral opportunities and find ways to nurture growth in those strong sectors."

It is misleading to say governments used to preside over the evolution of economies. It is false to claim that the strongest economies have historically had governments playing an active role. And it is idiotic to refer, as a documented phenomenon, to governments showing aptitude at detecting sectoral opportunities, let alone nurturing growth in them. His remarks are as arrogant as they are ignorant.

Based on their past performance, would you entrust the Ontario cabinet with your retirement funds if they opened an investment firm or, as Bryant seemed to suggest at one point, a bank? I'm not even certain, if they had been obliged during the 2003 election to put out a prospectus subject to the same rules about honesty and full disclosure that confront corporations, whether they would now be in office, or in jail.

Luckily, the decision whether to let them make investments for you is not in your hands. People like McGuinty and Bryant are not stupid. They are clever, and good at politics. But they are wilfully obtuse when it comes to historical lessons about the actual capacity of the great and good to bestow benefits on the unwashed.

So they're going into business with our money, without warning or permission, and won't stop until it is gone. Which I grant is a limit of sorts. But not one we're going to like.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Scared about swine flu yet? If not, we have more headlines. Like "Government not ready."

Oh sorry, did you miss that one? Too busy looking at that fetching statue of a Mexican lass wearing a mask ... and nothing else. Not sure how that got in the paper. But amid the "we're all gonna die" coverage there is one good reason to think we're all gonna die. Two, actually. But neither is really about swine flu.

As Ottawa doctor and commentator Barry Dworkin observed, to me and his radio audience, coverage of this disease is out of all proportion to its impact. How many new cases of colon cancer were diagnosed last week, he asked me, and how much press did they get? As for Third World havoc, what about malaria or trichinosis? They just don't get much ink because Hollywood celebrities and western journalists tend not to get them.

I don't want to spoil all the fun here. I sympathize with the impulse to panic. Killer epidemics are among my favourite fears, and I realize everyone's ready for a reprise of the dreaded Spanish flu of 1918.

Well, when I say "ready" I mean "not ready." So if you really want to panic I highly recommend a savoury blend of two stories from the front page of Tuesday's Citizen. The lead story had a splendidly terrifying photo of a Mexican in cowl and mask looking uncannily like the man on horse number one. But the text assured us that "Ottawa chief medical officer of health, Dr. Isra Levy, said Monday that the city -- indeed, the country -- is as ready as it could be to face a pandemic. He said 50 million doses of antiviral drugs had been stockpiled, more than enough for every Canadian. The drugs are the first line of defence. Ottawa, he said, would be well protected."

Ordinarily I would have filed this under the Mandy Rice-Davies rule, named for the woman who dismissed an official's denial during Britain's Profumo scandal with the immortal "Well, he would, wouldn't he?"

It is a regrettable feature of modern spin control that when public figures say precisely what you expect them to, regardless of the facts, their words tell you nothing. But look across the page.

Lurking there was a story that "As area hospitals respond to the heightened alert over swine flu, emergency planners are grappling with whether they will have enough nurses and doctors to treat a sudden surge in patients if the deadly outbreak in Mexico triggers a pandemic here. 'It's the million-dollar question because hospitals are at the edge in terms of their capacity already,' said Thomas Hayes, who chairs a committee of emergency planners from area hospitals, nursing homes and other health-care providers."

That bit about hospitals at the edge of their capacity is not what they would say regardless, and tells you everything you really need to know. Our health-care system, in good times, with infectious diseases under control, a healthy, relatively young population and a long period of prosperity, has been brought to its knees by central planning.

No amount of Mandy Rice-Davies style declarations of allegiance to socialized medicine until the last drop of someone else's blood can change this fact.

Nor can a bunch of sanctimonious rhetoric about collective rights from Michael Ignatieff's latest tome change the reality that in health care, as in life generally, it is impossible to know exactly what is going to happen next so you must try to be ready for the unexpected.

Individuals should exercise, eat right and drink plenty of water to give their bodies a fighting chance if they do get sick. And medical systems need to be flexible, responsive, decentralized and operating well below capacity so they can absorb the ferocious blows of a real epidemic without collapsing.

Now look in the mirror. Do you take good care of yourself? You don't have to tell the rest of us but you know the answer.

Now look in the paper. Have politicians taken good care of our health-care system, or only said what you know they would say anyway to protect the well-being of their political careers? Once again you know the answer.

I said at the outset there are two good reasons for thinking we're all gonna die. One is everybody dies, and the goal of keeping fit, ducking when you hear loud noises and seeking appropriate medical care is simply to postpone the event as long as is reasonably possible. The other is that our health-care system is stretched to the breaking point without anything major having gone wrong.

The swine flu is unlikely to be that thing though you never do know. Sooner or later something really bad will happen, and smooth official assurances that everything is under control will be the predictable, useless accompaniment to man-made catastrophe.

There. Now you can panic.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Oh great. Now we're supposed to stand there and gawk while courts give us legal incest. The intolerable alternative would be self-government plus moral clarity.

Citizen Editorial Pages Editor Leonard Stern wrote two weeks ago that "A few years ago it would have been unlikely to hear conversations in Canada about the decriminalization of incest. Now we find them on morning radio. What happened? Same-sex marriage happened. I supported same-sex marriage, and still do." Stern then asked: " ... polygamy among consenting adults? There is no constitutional basis on which to make it illegal. The revulsion against incest is even more pronounced than that against polygamy, but unfortunately the same principles of autonomy and freedom apply."

He admitted to sharing that revulsion but "I just don't see how in a secular democracy we can insist" that incest be illegal.

Now, let's see. In the first place, we can insist on it by an act of the legislature. In 1999 Canada's justice minister told us it was a waste of time for Parliament to pass a Reform motion affirming the traditional definition of marriage because no one wanted to change it. In fact it was a waste of time because when a lower court foisted gay marriage on us five years later, MPs had neither the will nor, they claimed, the power to intervene. But Parliament has the power if citizens can summon the will.

For that we must address moral as well as institutional questions.

In his incest piece, Stern made the surprising assertion that "The gay rights movement, during the fight for same-sex marriage, shut down talk about slippery slopes."

I agree that it tried, with the connivance of liberal-minded journalists. But I did not know any group of activists had the right to shut down free expression here. Certainly when the Citizen endorsed gay marriage, I wrote a dissenting column at the editor's invitation that talked of slippery slopes.

The one that concerned me most was not sexual or behavioural. I said the whole argument about gay marriage was taking place on unsound intellectual foundations because marriage as a legal institution is not about love or about sex. It is, as Robert Louis Stevenson said, "a friendship recognized by the police," and unless you know why, you can't say anything coherent about it. So I ended that column with a line from C.S. Lewis: "Beware: Those who call for nonsense will find that it comes." And it has.

Stern admits that his "moral intuition is that incest is a grotesquerie and should be illegal even if participants are consenting adults". But having said "If you are repulsed by sex between two men or women, that's your problem ... the state has no business pronouncing on what consenting adults do in their bedrooms," he suggests that his revulsion at incest is his problem.

It's not. His problem is that he denies the possibility of moral reasoning. As McGill university ethicist Margaret Somerville just wrote in the Globe and Mail, "Those making the case for legalization reject the idea that incestuous conduct might be inherently morally wrong. Rather, moral relativism governs ... Ethics becomes nothing more than personal preferences."

Disliking this position, she tried to construct a biological argument against it. But if it's just our genes talking, why should we listen?

She wound up saying "Even some people who advocate decriminalizing incest admit to a 'yuck factor' response to it ... We need to listen to our moral intuitions ..." True, but we need to do more than listen. We need to reason about them.

There are things that are Wrong with a capital W just as there are things that are Right with a capital R. Normally the law only forbids things that are wrong because they involve force or fraud, and leave us to work out our salvation in fear and trembling on the other stuff. But once in a while we declare some behaviour such an affront to human dignity that we will not permit it even with consent. For instance cannibalism.

Our binding duty to defend human dignity is why we care about genocide and even why we have criminal law.

Doubtless it is inconvenient and tasteless to be ripped off or murdered. But we don't forbid force and fraud because they are yucky.

We forbid them because intuition and logic reveal the absolute truth that they are wrong.

So is incest. You know it, I know it and Leonard Stern knows it. I don't know where he gets the idea that we are a secular democracy. Our Constitution calls us a Constitutional monarchy under God. But either way it's very simple what we can do.

Prohibit incest through an act of Parliament because we know it's wrong, and invoke the notwithstanding clause if need be. What kind of society in terminal decay would find that statement perverse or incoherent?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Would you like tea with that tax revolt? It sounds sweet to me.

A lot of Americans like theirs that way too. Tea and tax revolts, I mean. Wednesday saw tax-day "Tea Parties" across the United States protesting the way Barack Obama and his Democratic party are determined to spend other people's money they don't even have, on things they didn't mention in the election, until everyone is rich or busted.

We dropped in on one such festivity on our way back from North Carolina.

They sure do things differently there.

Why, they even still have those gas pump handle doo-hickies you flick over so you can fill your tank without cramping your palm.

Of course their pumps, like ours, shut off once the tank is full so there's no danger of a spill or explosion. So why can't we be trusted with them? No one has ever said. We just can't. And we put up with it.

I don't mean to spit tobacco juice on liberals' shoes here. Well, a bit. As you may have guessed, I love the robustness of American political culture.

Like Virginia licence plates with the official slogan "Fight terrorism." Admittedly, a state official explained, it's just one of 200 slogans Virginians can choose from (and some folks are so dull they had plain licence plates anyway). But what a place, first, where a significant number of people do drive around with that salty motto and second, where they get 200 choices instead of a mandatory "Ontario: Yours to discover."

Another sign of a different culture, and I mean that most sincerely, was the one on the way to a North Carolina aquarium saying "Inmates Working."

There was also a notice in the aquarium "Please do not walk, mosey, saunter, stroll" on or otherwise trample their plants. And trucks with patriotic and religious slogans. And a coastal church advertised with "Your place to seek the Son." These folks wouldn't put up with "Je me souviens." Whereas you get the feeling that if we were in their shoes, we'd hand the place back to George III and apologize.

Speaking of George III, one guy at the Scranton protest we visited had an American flag with a Union Jack (minus the Irish cross) in place of the stars. When I asked he informed me, which I should have known, that it was the first "Grand Union" flag flown by George Washington and by John Paul Jones on the first American flagship, which I did know was the USS Alfred.

I won't claim the rally was huge. But there were about 300 folks, which isn't bad for a shrinking coal town of 74,000. And contrary to liberal stereotypes, these folks knew their stuff, carried politically literate signs and listened with polite attention to the speaker who wanted to repeal the 16th Amendment.

The 16th Amendment expressly authorized the federal government to collect an income tax.

I have mixed feelings about the 16th. It was, intentionally, done to permit dramatic lowering of tariffs, which I favour. On the other hand, tariff revenue could never have funded the growth of government in the 20th century, which I'm against.

Either way, what really impresses me is that Americans debated a national income tax, passed legislation, then held a national vote (well, a nationwide series of state votes) before taking this momentous step. Whereas in Canada we just went gosh, you want my money? Sure. J'acquiesce.

It's easy to say Americans are lucky, with symbols like the Boston Tea Party around which to rally. But here as so often, people largely make their own luck. The 1773 Party was triggered by the British reducing the duty on tea imports to America. But they did it without consulting colonial legislatures and the colonists' rights were not for sale.

Americans have kept themselves lucky by remembering that freedom is not free. And if that puzzles foreigners, the Americans don't care. Incidentally a certain newspaper ran the headline "U.S. navy opts for patience in pirate standoff" one day before the U.S. navy opted for dead pirates, which was actually my preference too.

I also like 70 mph speed limits. Mind you, it's hard to drive that fast with licence plates saying "Je m'excuse." But lest I seem unpatriotic, Canadians inherited the same libertarian British tradition as the 13 colonies, and we too could name warships for Alfred the Great of Wessex if we felt like it.

A British member of the European parliament recently made himself a folk hero by telling his prime minister bluntly "you have run out of our money."

So why not us?

We too could mosey, saunter or stroll on down to the town square and, instead of lifting our pinkies at tea parties, raise our voices and lower our taxes.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

[First appeared on Mercatornet.com] Stop the presses? Can it be? Compared to the suddenly very possible demise of newspaper titans including the New York Times, the fate of the “unsinkable” Titanic a century ago seems mildly odd, the collapse of General Motors merely a bit strange. It’s going to leave a gap in the American national conversation. But we’ll all survive fairly easily.

It’s weird to see this fate overtake the daily press, an institution that once seemed as much a part of American life as the neighbourhood barber shop. Twentieth century fiction and commentary alike could not imagine urban life without daily mass circulation newspapers, or those newspapers without the authoritative, massive, eternal flagships every reporter and editor envied. Now paper after paper folds up or seeks bankruptcy protection, and even the mighty Times is reduced to swearing it really honestly won’t go bankrupt... next month.

The economic difficulties of newspapers are not all that surprising. It is true that they have not been in a long slow decline like most of the “rust belt” industries that defined American economic might from the turn of the century into the 1960s. Newspapers were not slowly ground down by foreign competitors figuring out mass production while compulsory unionization drove up costs and drove out innovation. Instead, they were suddenly blindsided by the Internet.

It’s not that anyone solved the problem of how to make money giving something away free online. Instead, online searches and email took away newspapers’ ability to do exactly that the old-fashioned way. In their old, apparently unsinkable business model, subscription and newsstand prices never even attempted to cover production costs. Instead, they attracted readers with cheap papers, and then advertisers paid them to deliver their messages to those readers. And unfortunately the Internet made it possible for buyers and sellers to find one another faster and more reliably, and revenue from classified and retail advertising collapsed with catastrophic rapidity.

Thus far newspapers have my sympathy, and not only because they have been a major source of my income for the past dozen years. I didn’t see this terrible problem coming a decade ago either. But the other major problem now afflicting newspapers was entirely self-inflicted and I did see that one coming. It was content: what they covered and, even more, the way they covered it. The newspaper industry as a whole took on a particular tone of smug bias that now prevents it from adapting to changed circumstances in the only way I think is realistic.

There were exceptions, of course, but the typical newspaper and especially the typical elite newspaper deserve exactly the reproach my distinctly unconventional colleague David Warren delivered last May. “In my view... The idea of the news sheet remains essentially sound... People still want something to read that is portable and companionable and requires no technological savvy whatever. But those who can read want something ... intrinsically lively, informative, interesting, and even reliable and trustworthy and aesthetically satisfying.” Instead of which, especially as they came to recruit mostly from journalism schools, newspapers became the preserve of a narrow liberal elite “who think and sound like sociology majors, and express themselves in a jargon stream of pompous, preachy, preening, vaguely leftist and reptilian drivel.”

The only way newspapers can survive in the digital era is to exploit the negative tendency of the Internet to overload us with information of dubious quality. They must become trusted gatekeepers, sites to which you subscribe even for things you could get free elsewhere because they collect it all in one place in an intelligent and fair-minded way and save you hours of precious time for a few dollars a week. And nobody now trusts them to do so but the sorts of liberals who, in William F. Buckley Jr.’s apt jibe, go on endlessly about other points of view but are always amazed to find that there are other points of view. There aren’t enough such people to sustain the industry on reader rather than advertiser revenue.

Take The New York Times ... please. On questions of factual accuracy, and weight with the chattering classes in liberal epochs, it had some real claim to be the American newspaper of record. And it deserves credit for broadening its pages by inventing the Op Ed page (a seemingly timeless feature, it actually began in the “grey lady” in 1970). But the Times took a reliably and offensively biased liberal position from time out of mind without even realizing it.

In the 1920s it assured its readers Hitler had been tamed. In the early 1930s it published Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer-winning lies denying Stalin’s famines. Its crusade against the Vietnam war culminated with the notorious headline “Indochina Without Americans: For Most, A Better Life” from Phnom Penh, Cambodia on April 30, 1975, the day the Khmer Rouge took the city and began their genocide.

In 1983 the Times sonorously informed its readers that “the stench of failure” hung over the Reagan White House. And on and on. In a master-stroke of clueless pomposity, every four years the editorial board stroked its collective long grey beard before pronouncing that on this occasion they considered the Democratic candidate for president superior... 14 straight times and counting.

I do think the collapse of a national press is bad for a nation. Love them or hate them, a few generally recognized leading publications created a shared framework for a national conversation in which virtually every informed person knew many of the same facts and was reacting to the same thoughtful presentations of those facts.

The development of technology from the dawn of the microchip era was bound to fragment this conversation to some extent. Even cable television reduced the shared cultural experience of audiences in the industrial democracies in the 20th century, hearing the same handful of major radio shows then watching the same handful of entertainment and news programs. You don’t have to think it could have been prevented to see some drawbacks to the shattering of this common focus and the development of a sort of national and international ADD.

The Internet does take Chesterton’s warning about the parochialism of big cities to new heights; with millions of blogs to choose from we can easily avoid information overload by focusing only on those sources that confirm everything we already think in exactly the tone we find most congenial. Newspapers could make money combating that tendency, if they hadn’t long ago succumbed to the temptation to perform it for one elite point of view only.

They will be missed for what they might have done. But not, sadly, for what they chose to do instead while they still had a choice.

Hey, kids, an adult here. Got something to say. No, no, don't go rolling your eyes at me. Actually, I know you won't. You're all so darn clean-cut. Not LOL here. Really. I just read in a newspaper (that strange papery thing over there that doesn't go "tweet") how sociologist Reginald Bibby says you're all sober, industrious, get along with your folks and plan to have good jobs, stable marriages and a passel of kids. Makes me wonder why we all bothered to be so decadent. Honestly, it's like the 1950s out there.

Actually, I'm delighted that you have these aspirations. Beats planning to hang out and get hammered. Still, I realize maybe there's a couple of things we ought to have mentioned while you were growing up that we kind of didn't. Especially one of those ugly four-letter words: work. W-o-r-k.

I know what you're thinking. We work all the time. Mom and Dad scramble out of bed, rush you off to daycare, fly to our offices, eat at our desks, check our BlackBerrys during dinner, slam you into bed and rush back to our e-mail.

But remember what Seneca said: "a delight in bustling about is not industry -- it is only the restless energy of a hunted mind."

Work properly understood is the systematic and determined application of your energies to things that really matter. And we didn't take the time to explain it for a couple of reasons.

First, we were so busy. Second, we really, really wanted you to feel good about yourselves because ... um ... why was that? Oh yeah, because we insist on feeling good about ourselves. It's a human right. Fulfilment. We have a right to be fulfilled or, more exactly, to feel fulfilled. If you feel fulfilled it's the same as being fulfilled, right?

Besides, who wants to be all judgmental and evaluate people by what they do? So we started by giving marks for effort and ended up giving marks to make you feel fulfilled.

I gather it worked. Another study said a third of college students expect a B just for showing up and 40 per cent for doing the readings. Which I find a bit odd since, as a university teacher myself, I don't take attendance in my lectures. I have no way of knowing whether you did the reading except if you show familiarity with it on your written work.

Aaaaargh. There's that word again. Which brings me to something I feel kinda bad about, but should probably get out anyway.

The main reason we didn't explain about work is it would have taken work -- work to explain it and then to live up to it.

Starting with the work of raising you. I mean, you're cute and all, but remember what I said earlier about fulfillment. I needed a career to feel fulfilled, so you sorta had to go to daycare. Which looked nice, they had friendly staff and pretty toys and you got socialized with a room full of anxious toddlers which, uh ...

Point is, I realize our lifestyle cut into our time for meaningful discussions. And left a big tax burden. Sorry about that. But not very. It doesn't seem to have hurt much. We did insist that daycare foster your sense of personal worth. And it looks like it did.

After all, that Bibby survey says you're optimistic. You want fulfilling jobs with good pay and stable marriages and big families and what's more you all seem to expect to get them without ... urk ... say, this is awkward, isn't it?

Look, I'm not saying I want you to be depressed. It's just that optimism is a psychological state and given the facts of human existence a fatuous one. What you should be is hopeful, which is a theological virtue.

Oh, we forgot to explain that word, too, didn't we? Virtue. We relied on psychology and didn't exactly dwell on morality. It could have led to awkward questions.

Like why so few adults around you are in first marriages. And, since many of you expect to cohabit then get married for life, did we mention that people who cohabit are more likely to divorce if they marry? I know it sounds weird to people who are used to the concept of "test driving," but the problem is that cohabiting is just fun until it's not and you split whereas marriage takes ... you know.

To make marriage work you have to put the other person first. Which is all fine and good with wine and roses and candlelight, but a bit harder with too little sleep and job pressure and a nagging feeling that you're not so much fulfilled as harried.

Mind you, good luck raising kids if you can't put others first. You'll probably end up plunking them into a daycare.

Anyway, I'm glad you're feeling so perky. Hope this little chat didn't get you down. Wish we'd made time earlier. Oh well. Gotta go.

[First appeared in the Ottawa Citizen]

One of the small joys of my job, and by joys I mean "things that keep me from being driven insane by political idiocy," is consuming the rich buffet of press releases I get via the Parliamentary Press Gallery.

I devour the self-satisfied prose, indignant focus on trivia, specialized language of partisan drivel and the fact that unlike mine, politicians' computers apparently don't have elementary grammar and spell-checking capabilities. But I most enjoy the way everything is dunked in crème de sublime conviction that they are in control as well as in charge. Of anything.

Here, taste this March 31 release from the Canada Revenue Agency and the Minister of National Revenue. The appetizer is the headline "The Canada Revenue Agency succeeds in reducing the Paperwork Burden for Businesses", with the chefs congratulating themselves for something that in a normal restaurant you'd wait for customers to thank you for.

Next, savour the phrase some flack put into the minister's mouth that "Canadian businesses are a vital part of local, provincial and national economies" which I guess was cooked up to feed pro-business sentiment but tastes both bland and greasy. They whip this vacuity up on short order in large amounts, yet make it look effortless.

Finally the entrée, the claim that "the CRA has identified over 8,000 obsolete or non-essential information obligations imposed on business. The elimination of these obligations, when implemented, will reduce the paperwork burden on business by 24.2 percent." That extra decimal place gives me a special frisson. Not "about a quarter" or even "24 percent" but "24.2 percent".

Wow.

Such precision.

Such attention to detail. We're lucky to have that kind of government. It's a vital part of local, provincial and national rhetorical overload.

Or not, since obviously they haven't measured exactly how burdensome various regulations are. How could they even know how time-consuming these rules are, let alone what other vexations they impose and in what amounts? CRA staff can't sit in every small businessperson's office or kitchen and monitor their blood pressure as they fill out forms.

I like how the headline said the CRA had succeeded whereas here the text only says it will succeed. But I love the precision of the estimate, particularly that delicious point two per cent. That's because my deepest satisfaction in a meal of this sort is the pungent, lingering aroma of certainty not only that scientific management is the answer to public policy problems, but that our governments are currently engaged in it.

As with that crust on crème brulée, I am intrigued by the consistency with which they get this surface on everything they do.

Take Dalton McGuinty ... please. How can he be so invariably untroubled by any suspicion that he might not be able to manage your affairs for you better than you can manage them yourself? Right down to the free programmable Internet-accessible thermostat the province recently offered me, with fine print admitting they might occasionally reset it for me without warning, though only when they felt like it.

It doesn't matter what evidence of ineptitude floods in, like massive churn in the federal public service or Wednesday's Citizen report that 10 per cent of Ontario's core public service hauls in over a hundred grand a year. Finance Minister Dwight Duncan sneered that the latter was nothing to the salaries paid to U.S. financiers and besides many small Ontario firms depend on the trade of well-heeled bureaucrats to survive. It would be irrelevant to ask whose taxes he thinks fund those plump salaries.

What really matters is that neither federal nor provincial governments have any real handle on their own staffing, yet blithely tell us where to smoke, what to drive, what to think, when to exercise and in their spare time fiddle with our thermostats.

The illusion of control is so widespread that hardly a week passes without calls for a "national strategy" for something or other, as though massive centralized bureaucratic political initiatives had been proven by recent experience to work at all, let alone better than decentralized private voluntary ones.

(Why, here's a March 19 call for a "national injury prevention strategy for youth in sport"; let them implement such a thing, and next they'll be boasting of a 24.2-per-cent reduction in preventable youth sport injuries).

And hardly a day passes without a press release stating indignantly that the government "must" do something when it's obvious that it doesn't have to do it, probably shouldn't attempt it and very possibly couldn't do it if it tried.

So taste, taste. Savour the exquisite flavour.

Just don't swallow any of it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]