It's difficult to know what to make of events in Iran because I don't know what has happened in the last seven seconds. Quick, someone tweet me.

Oh, didn't you hear? Coverage of this semi-revolution was another triumph for the new media. In the Daily Telegraph on Wednesday, Andrew Keen described a conference of big-time tweeters in New York, unpronouncably called "@140conf," where a CNN anchor was berated because "While Twitter automatically exploded with tweet after tweet of rumor, falsity and fact" and "the streets of Tehran were jammed with furious Mousavi supporters, CNN's major news story on Saturday June 14 focused on American consumers' confusion about the domestic switch from analog to digital tv signals."

OK, so I don't care about the latter. But I didn't learn a lot from various twits sending out 48 billion news reports a minute from Iran full of events, rumours, plans and various other electrons either. What did it all mean?

Here, I submit, is where the old media wins, at least if we're smart. The old slogan attributed to the Chicago City News Bureau was "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." Actually I trust my mom. But when a twit tells me Iran is having a revolution I think checking it out makes sense. And how is Twitter going to do that?

I'm not saying the "Main Stream Media" has given us a good feel for what the Soviets used to call "the correlation of forces" within Iran. I certainly wasn't impressed by this New York Times E-mail teaser on June 15: "NEWS ANALYSIS/ Iran's Leader Emerges With a Stronger Hand ... Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's victory demonstrated that he is the shrewd front man for a clerical, military and political elite more unified than at any time since the 1979 revolution."

I concede that it's no easy task to say "what's really going on" in Iran. I suspect the theocracy is falling apart and I certainly hope so. But we don't really know whether the regime has forfeited much of the support of ordinary people or whether it ever had it, and we also don't know if it needs it. I doubt the Iranian government knows either, especially after its persistent and largely successful attempt to prevent the spread of information, including obstructing or expelling western journalists. But Twitter does not help our mission here, does it?

I'm not knocking Twitter (you can even get a feed off my own website). It's doing two very good things in this crisis. First, it lets Iranian dissidents plan and share rumours faster than the state can possibly react. Second, it furnishes the raw material for foreign news stories. But it's just raw material.

Someone still has to filter it, check it, then publish a reliable summary. Like the piece by Stratfor chairman and CEO George Friedman, published online at Mercatornet.com on Tuesday. He makes a discouragingly persuasive argument that most Iranians do not support the protesters, based on detailed factual insights of the sort most newspapers and TV news outlets did not offer because, pretty obviously, no one on their staff knew any of it. But they could have, and should have.

Friedman even makes the unhappy point that when we had access to the protesters, they seemed overwhelmingly English-speaking and tech-savvy. In short, it was a revolt of people like us. Of whom there don't seem to be enough in Iran. In this regard Twitter may actually have confused us.

It gets worse. I think the seductive lure of immediacy to a society with ADD makes Twitter seem far cooler than it is as a tool for news gathering.

Consider Paul Reiser's complaint from Couplehood: "Here's my thing with the news: I don't know what I'm supposed to do. ... Now, if you told me that tomorrow a bus was going to go sailing off the Himalayas, I would get involved. I'd pick up the phone and warn them. 'Don't get on the bus. Didn't you see the paper?' But if I read on Sunday that something happened on Saturday, what can I do? At best I can call to console. 'I only just now heard.'"

He wrote those words in 1994, when I was busy installing my first (external, 14.4k) modem. But all E-mail and Twitter have done is let us know, or think we know, on Saturday night that a bus went off the Himalayas 12 minutes ago instead of 12 hours. It doesn't cross the critical barrier between learning after and before it happened, so it doesn't let us do any more than we otherwise could have. And for that worthless immediacy we pay in certainty.

The result is not harmless. We only have so much time, and the more of it we spend chasing titillating rumours the less we spend properly informing ourselves. Worse, we can accustom our mental palate to intellectual junk food.

Uh, hang on. This just in: Situation in Iran unclear. Maybe.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Modern art has clearly gone badly wrong. But how did it take socialism with it? Consider this passage from William Morris. “I do not believe in the possibility of keeping art vigorously alive by the action, however energetic, of a few groups of specially gifted men and their small circle of admirers amidst a general public incapable of understanding and enjoying their work. I hold firmly to the opinion that all worthy schools of art must be in the future, as they have been in the past, the outcome of the aspirations of the people towards the beauty and true pleasure of life.”

A horribly reactionary sentiment, you may say. Or splendidly so. But Morris was not just a famous craftsman, designer and leading light in the Arts and Crafts Movement who tried to bring back quality, taste and genuine human fulfilment in a world of mass-produced cheap junk, offering sandalwood, ivory and topaz to a world of pig iron and cheap tin trays. He was also a passionate and famous socialist.

In this he deserves our sympathetic attention. I say so first because his stuff really was nice. Consider the famous Red House designed for him in Bexhill in 1859, a hobbit house if ever I saw one. It’s exactly the sort of thing real people including real workers would want to live in, entirely unlike the ghastly buildings and hideous sculpture, paintings and music foisted upon us by the Bauhaus and neotranspostmodern art.

Second, Morris may have been a socialist but he was no modernist. In his first public lecture he insisted that “there is only one best way of teaching drawing, and that is teaching the scholar to draw the human figure: both because the lines of a man’s body are much more subtle than anything else, and because you can more surely be found out and set right if you go wrong.” His socialism, like his art, was a reaction against modernity not an endorsement of it. He thought capitalism had made life ugly and wanted socialism to make it beautiful again; his inspiration was backward not forward.

In this he was not as unusual as he might seem today. In 1960 in The Unfinished Revolution Harvard scholar Adam Ulam tried to explain why revolutionary Marxist-style socialism appealed not to advanced industrial societies but to those just entering the most wrenching phase of modernization. The key, he said, was its promise somehow to leap over the socially disruptive part and get back to the organic and harmonious condition of pre-industrial society (real or imagined; my point here is the attractiveness of the vision rather than its practicality) while obtaining the wealth and geopolitical power only capitalism brings.

Morris’s novel News From Nowhere, however insipid and naive, presents precisely such a vision, the Middle Ages without the dirt or violence. As socialists will, he badly underestimates the complexities of actually creating wealth. But this persistent wish that we could all get along better and live more fulfilling lives in nicer surroundings should be condemned for impracticality, not ugliness.

This impulse is conspicuously absent from modern art, which has clearly become totally disconnected from the real life of the people. Nothing that wins the Turner Prize, or any kind of public acclaim from the smart set, would be allowed into a normal person’s living room even to be consumed in the fireplace.

Obviously popular taste has its drawbacks as well. Any snob worth his finishing salt can mock the decor of a suburban rec room, or the paintings of Elvis, ships or flowers on real velvet that too often adorn the upstairs spaces. But at least they try to be nice. Morris thought socialist art should too.

So what went wrong with socialism? Just as modern artists are overwhelmingly leftist, modern socialists are overwhelmingly modernist. Flaps over offensive art, especially if state funded, invariably pit conservative philistines against the political left as well as the literati. But socialism was meant to bring art back to the people, not expel them. Socialist realism, now apparently extinct except on the walls of Harvey’s restaurants, may have been awkward and ugly but at least it tried to celebrate and appeal to ordinary people.

No such claim could be made, even drunk, about Jackson Pollock. And while Le Corbusier famously called a house a “machine for living”, he lived in a garret and ate in bistros that would have appealed to William Morris far more than the junk the trendy “Corbu” and his ilk foisted on the gullible rich and the very poor. Aside from public housing, corporate high-rises and a few modern houses from the 1960s, with flat roofs, round windows, crumbling disconsolately in upscale neighbourhoods like abandoned sets for Peter Sellers’ The Party, there has been a total divorce between high-tone architecture and the “vernacular” style of houses people actually want to live in.

Modern art neither teaches morality nor aspires to. Its shocking of the bourgeoisie has become stale and lucrative and its message of futility is futile. No one is listening. And anyway, William Morris-style socialist art was meant restore meaning and beauty to people’s lives, not pound them relentlessly with the hideous futility of human existence.

Somewhere along the way, socialists seem to have become disgusted with the vulgarity of common people in whose name they still claim to speak. In 1905 Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle dramatized the misery of working-class immigrants with a horrific scene of dirty, dangerous work in a meat-packing plant, and prompted an immediate, irresistible public demand not for socialism but for better regulation of the food industry. “I aimed at the public’s heart,” Sinclair later said, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.” Later socialists seem to have developed an ill-concealed desire to hit it there on purpose which modern artists all too obviously share.

In a much-mangled line from Breakfast of Champions Kurt Vonnegut said an abstract painter “with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid.” Why would socialists want to join in? But try to imagine Jack Layton, Ted Kennedy or your favourite local socialist suggesting that the state only subsidize art regular working stiffs understand, or talking like William Morris above.

Despite their supposed opposition to “elitism” it’s impossible, isn’t it? However did socialism get so ugly it could be a piece of modern art?

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

In light of the Ontario government's a brave new plan to nationalize children, might I submit a modest proposal of my own? Forget kindergarten and after-school programs. The state should pick up your kids from the maternity ward and return them with an MA and a social conscience 22 years later.

No, really. The Toronto Star characteristically gushed about Dr. Charles Pascal's new report, "Ontario parents of 4- and 5-year-olds should be able to leave their children at school from 7:30 in the morning to 6 p.m." creating "the so-called 'seamless day'... Research has shown that, especially for younger children, the fewer transitions, the better." A day later the Globe and Mail chirped about making "the neighbourhood public school the hub of every community, where parents will get everything from prenatal advice and nutrition counselling to childcare for those under four, full-day kindergarten, and before and after school programming" so "parents can minimize the difficult transitions that disrupt their own lives and the lives of their children ..."

So let's get serious and dispense with a bunch of other disruptive transitions like rushing the kids home at night and back to the bureaucrats in the morning. Who could object?

OK, teachers' unions squawked about having to share their turf with those wretched "early childhood educators" and threatened legal action. But they can be bought off. The only really sour note was my friend Andrea Mrozek of the Institute of Marriage and the Family Canada saying parents would rather look after their own kids and complaining "What this suggests is professionals can do a better job than parents." Silly girl. Of course it does.

Behind all this prattle is one central assumption, so let's cut to the chase. As G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1920, "the latest light on the education of the young ... assumes that a child will certainly be loved by anybody except his mother." It still does, assuming that a close and nurturing bond naturally exists between public employees and young people that is absent or defective between them and their parents.

Whatever the solemn media greybeards think of the program's details, has one of them raised the possibility that children might, as a rule, be better raised and educated by their own parents? Even the Globe's Margaret Wente kicked off her critique of the report: "Who could possibly argue against more kindergarten for our kids? Not me. You might as well denounce apple sauce and motherhood. Kindergarten is a lot of fun, not to mention a safe, convenient place for mom and dad to stash the kids while they go to work." So much for motherhood. And Dalton McGuinty and the experts know it. So why pretend?

It might be thought tactful to avoid blurting out anti-family sentiments and spooking the vulgar masses. But they are openly voiced when the hicks are assumed not to be listening. Like John Kenneth Galbraith's would-be bon mot in 1973 that "the modern household does not allow expression of individual personality and preference" because it "is essentially a disguise for the exercise of male authority."

Or Michael Ignatieff's claim in The Rights Revolution that: "So-called family values, as propagated in the rhetoric of North American popular entertainment, pulpit sermonizing, and political homily, are a downright tyranny. ... Nature and natural instinct are poor guides in these matters. If good parenting were a matter of instinct, families wouldn't be the destructive institutions they so often are." Whereas social science is ... um ... gee ...

This is no mere fad. Seventy five years ago Chesterton called the family something "now never mentioned in respectable circles." When parents are mentioned in discussions of the Pascal report, it is almost universally to note what a relief it will be for them to be rid of their offspring for a whole day. The Globe editorialized that the report's social science might be unsound but "no doubt the Ontario plan would make life easier for working parents. ..." And this newspaper headlined a Wednesday story, "McGuinty plan called 'great' for parents, tough on day cares," though it did warn that some need to warehouse their kids outside these bourgeois working hours. Indeed. But since we are all gender communists now, let's stop pussyfooting around.

Even my initial proposal was too timid. Forget maternity wards. The state should cultivate children from conception in nutrient-rich artificial wombs, care for them through college, guarantee them jobs and social security as adults, furnish pensions for their senior years and wrap things up with government nursing homes, euthanasia clinics and cremation.

Talk about convenient.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Oh, here's a sexy story. A cabinet minister was caught privately calling a difficult problem "sexy" and an opportunity for career advancement. We journalists would never do that.

Get caught, I mean. We certainly have blunt private conversations about our colleagues' failings and the way certain tragic events make for great copy. And we could not do our work at all if every editorial discussion made it into print.

People in public life are equally unable to function without space for frank private conversation. Especially about the things they must be most smoothly hypocritical about in public.

Would it not be terrifying if politicians' private talk presented the same appalling mix of fake outrage and smothering vacuity as their public utterances?

Defending embattled Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt in question period, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said "This minister has been working around the clock to make sure we get a greater supply of isotopes. That's what this minister is doing, that's what this government is doing, not playing cheap politics." But we do not think members of cabinet work around the clock and never sleep, nor do we want them to. Surely the PM doesn't either.

Even if politicians often are as vacant as their more polished utterances suggest, it is no excuse for the rest of us to turn into bellowing buffoons just because a politician has been detected smelling opportunity in a crisis. There are far worse ways to advance a public career than solving problems; watch question period and you'll see what I mean.

It took a ridiculous comedy of errors for Ms. Raitt's infamous remarks to become public.

But honestly, if she does solve the medical isotope crisis, wouldn't you be willing to promote her even if you knew that's why she'd done it?

Just as you'd pay a mechanic to fix your car even if you knew he'd done it for the money.

In perhaps his most famous passage, Adam Smith said: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages."

And the same is true of politicians, if we are smart.

Some people honestly think politics is less grubby than private enterprise. Stephen Leacock satirized one utopian socialist for depicting office-holders as "sagacious and paternal ... free from the interest of self and the play of the baser passions" who "work ... as work the angels". But, Leacock snapped, "let me ask in the name of sanity where are such officials to be found?"

Not, clearly, in our Parliament.

In a classic piece of standardized outrage over the Raitt affair, Michael Ignatieff snarled, "The cheapest politics here is to call a crisis a career opportunity." As if he did not treat every Conservative misdeed, real or imagined, as both a massive crisis and a stepping stone toward 24 Sussex. I certainly hope he and his inner circle are aware of what they are doing, and honest about it in private. Cluelessness is not a desirable quality in a politician. Or in a citizen.

In the name of sanity, then, let us take James Madison's advice, in Federalist #51, that to secure liberty and check the appetite of the authorities for power, "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."

Ambition is part of human nature, especially among those drawn to public life. As Madison also said, "If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."

Politicians might have us believe they are so exceptionally public-spirited and virtuous that we may dispense with checks and balances in our political arrangements. But to borrow another phrase from Adam Smith, those who make such claims are by no means such fools as those who believe them.

It is the beginning of wisdom in public affairs to reward politicians who solve problems and punish those who do not. That way we harness their mighty ambition to our well-being, instead of prompting it to work for our undoing.

In this case, I grant, Ms. Raitt's instinct for advancement seems to have come unhitched from any functioning instinct for self-preservation. But that's just one more thing I hope, and trust, her colleagues are discussing privately in salty language.

Politicians alert to career opportunities!

Partisans exploit crises!

Ministers backbite!

It's as sexy as rutabaga. So stop the presses .... and don't start them again until we get a grip on human nature, political ambition and the fundamentals of political economy.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

What, I ask myself, would Matthew Arnold say about contemporary politics and public debate? And a silly answer I get back, because I now pile shallowness on pomposity by admitting all I’ve read by him is “Dover Beach.” But somehow I seem to have absorbed more than I deserved of his ideas and you should too.

To cement my status as a Philistine I’m going to quote famous Western author Louis L’Amour: “Someone has said that culture is what remains with you after you have forgotten all that you have read…” In this case culture is what remains after you never read it. But I bring it up because it’s amazing how much remained.

For instance, in teaching university courses I assign book reviews, which my students hate. I suggest various technical aspects of reviewing books, but always to help them make an overall appraisal. And now I discover that Matthew Arnold, who really invented the profession of “critic” in the mid-nineteenth century, said “Literary criticism’s most important function is to try books as to the influence which they are calculated to have upon the general culture of single nations or of the world at large.” Which is exactly what I wanted my students to be doing. I just didn’t phrase it that clearly… until now.

Comedian Bob Newhart joked that “You don’t actually have to be intelligent if you can just create the perception. This can usually be accomplished by a reference to Kafka. Even if you never read any of his – or her – works.” On that basis I’m going to praise Arnold after reading not his works but the Oxford Past Masters profile of him by Stefan Collini.

If citing Arnold makes me sound snobby it is far from obvious that he would object, since he described criticism as “the disinterested endeavour to learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.” But even if it is pompous, there are worse tasks one could set oneself. And that word “disinterested” is extremely important in this context. For there’s another major theme in Arnold’s writing that I had somehow absorbed: his warning about the distorting effect on our intellectual decency of putting cause ahead of cultivation.

When he spoke of being “disinterested” Arnold did not mean we should not reach firm conclusions or defend them vigorously. He himself did both, though to be honest I don’t share a lot of his beliefs. But here’s what I do share. According to Collini, partly through long, tedious contact with English Dissenters in his day job as school inspector, Arnold realized “that those whose fundamental identity was given to them by their status as members of a sect could not help but respond to all ideas and values, and judge all issues, from the constraining vantage point of the person with a grievance.”

The sentiment may not seem remarkable today, with political correctness all around us. But I spend much of my time watching politics as a journalist and commentator. And I found this passage electric because it now applies not only to the genuinely marginalized or self-marginalized but to our mainstream parties and to people in power as well. Partly through the process of sharpening their polemical weapons by taking on the tone of the legitimately aggrieved, and partly due to a general coarsening of intellectual and cultural life, they have succumbed to this peril in their rhetoric and their thinking.

Party men and women nowadays do not evaluate an issue or an event from a broad perspective, considering its place in the long history of human thought and action and its probable impact on the general culture before fitting it into their partisan concerns. Instead, they instantly weigh its usefulness or danger to their entrenched positions, and base all their thinking about it on that narrow, crumbly foundation.

As for political activists and politicians as individuals, do they not remind you of Arnold’s question about what “the everyday, middle-class Philistine... finds so attractive in Dissent? Is it not, as to discipline, that his self-importance is fomented by the fuss, bustle and partisanship of a private sect, instead of being lost in the greatness of a public body? As to worship, is it not that his taste is pleased by usages and words that come down to him, instead of drawing him up to them; by services which reflect, instead of the culture of great men and religious genius, the crude culture of himself and his fellows? And as to doctrine, is it not that his mind is pleased at hearing no opinion but its own, by having all disputed points taken for granted in its own favour by being urged to no return upon itself, no development?” Now attend a party convention… and weep.

Through your tears, recall Arnold’s belief that the “best spiritual work” was “to keep man from a self-satisfaction which is retarding and vulgarizing”. Now admit it: The parties you like exhibit this deplorable quality every bit as much as those you do not. Don’t they? (And while you’re at it, watch out for this problem in the blogosphere as well.)

I do not presume to appropriate Arnold for my own narrow causes. Rather, I hope I can claim to be affiliated, however imperfectly and without having noticed it, with his program. Can we not still aspire to think broadly before acting narrowly? When we contemplate the opinions and programs of those we despise, can we not try to hold fast to one more Arnoldian sentiment for a troubled age: “One gains nothing on the darkness by being... as incoherent as the darkness itself.”

So there you are. I’m going to read some Arnold… as soon as I’m done with Kafka’s plays… or essays… or whatever she wrote.

[First published on MercatorNet]

This just in: marriage is better than family breakup. No, really. A new study from the Institute of Marriage and Family Canada demonstrates the cost to governments of "non-traditional families." But it's no chilly venture into bean-counting or mean-spirited exercise in moralizing. It's about the kids.

Let me declare right away that my wife helped edit this report and I have done work for the IMFC in the past. I even spoke at their opening and predicted a bright future for them in a Citizen column on Feb. 24, 2006. So I'm now praising a friend, not announcing a discovery.

The report, Private Choices, Public Costs, available at www.imfcanada.org, has three cardinal virtues. First, authors Rebecca Walberg and Andrea Mrozek say something important about an important topic. Second, they use statistics without worshipping them. Third, they make policy recommendations without putting excessive faith in political action.

It might be controversial today to say marriage is important. But this April a major study found that nine in 10 Canadian teens expect to marry, for life, and have children. So we need to tell them how and why intact marriages matter to their future kids.

Bluntly, children from other kinds of homes are more likely to flunk out of school, go to jail, get hooked on alcohol or drugs and have other things go wrong with their lives. Including, the key statistical fact behind this report's analytic work, that single parenthood roughly doubles the chance of living in poverty.

The authors logically conclude that cutting family breakup in half would keep half of the affected families off public assistance and thus reduce the cost of federal and provincial anti-poverty programs for single-parent families by a quarter. Which cost, they estimate roughly, is now nearly $7 billion a year.

True, if we saved Canadian governments $1.7 billion a year they'd probably do something stupid with the money like buy a car company. But we can't fixate on politicians' ability to turn a silk purse into a sow's ear or we'd never get anywhere on any issue. Besides, this cynical retort risks obscuring the authors' most important methodological insight: Family breakdown isn't bad because it hurts public finances; it hurts public finances because it's bad.

These authors use public dollar costs the way doctors use thermometers: they treat the fever as a rough measure of how ill someone is, but do not mistake the temperature for the illness. They note frankly various limits to their methodology.

For starters, children from single-parent homes are disproportionately involved in crime. So a large part of the cost of policing, courts and jails should be included in a global figure of the cost to government of family breakdown, but it's not in their study.

More profoundly, a large share of the material and psychological losses suffered by victims of crime would have to be included in a measure of the true social cost of failed marriages. And the blighted lives of those who drift into crime because of a troubled upbringing would have to be counted in the true personal cost. Likewise the pain of drug abuse, promiscuity, and the misery of family disintegration.

Of course, these things are hard or impossible to quantify. But the authors avoid the trap of thinking that what cannot be precisely measured does not matter much.

They also avoid the temptation to say that since family breakdown is bad for society and public finances, governments should aggressively try to promote traditional marriage. True, they recommend changing the tax code to let married couples file jointly, and getting schools to teach young people that marriage is hard work worth doing. But they do not equate government action with social action.

They merely note that where the state is doing things wrong, like penalizing marriage on tax day, it should stop. And since it has taken control of education, whatever needs to be done by schools must, primarily, be done by state schools.

It would be difficult to read this report and accuse the authors of lacking compassion. Some people may still try ...

if they read it at all. The rest of us should keep our focus on this key passage: "The point of debate should not be whether a lack of two married parents matters for children but rather what to do with the reality that it does."

It leaves a lot to discuss, from program design to tax fairness to private versus state action to celebrating those who succeed in single-parent settings without deceiving ourselves, and the next generation, about how much harder this "lifestyle choice" usually makes things for children.

It's a conversation well worth having. Think anyone in Ottawa will want to?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

You can't believe a word they say. We face a horrendous truth deficit.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty just said the federal government deficit will be $50 billion this year. And it might. But the fact that he said it makes it less rather than more believable.

Permit me to review the facts, a term here meaning "the long sequence of non-facts that issued forth from the mouths of senior federal politicians."

First, during the campaign the PM promised us no deficits.

Second, two days after the election the PM told us he wouldn't rule out deficits in 2009-10 but there wouldn't be one in the current fiscal year (2008-09).

Third, 10 days after that, the finance minister told us he couldn't rule out a deficit in 2008-09.

Fourth, in his Nov. 27, 2008 update he predicted a small surplus for 2008-09 and 2009-10.

Fifth, in December, Flaherty said there would be a deficit in 2009-10 but not 2008-09.

Sixth, a few days before the January budget, in what the Citizen called "an unprecedented move to soften the blow of next week's federal budget" a "senior official with the Prime Minister's Office, who declined to speak on the record" told journalists the deficit would be $34 billion in 2009-10 and $30 billion the year after that.

Seventh, in the January budget the government said there would be a deficit of $1.1 billion in 2008-09, $33.7 billion in 2009-10 and a cumulative $50.1 billion in the next three years.

Eighth, on May 25 they told us the figure for 2009-10 would be more than $33.7 but they wouldn't say how much until June.

Ninth, on May 26 they told us the 2009-10 deficit would be $50 billion and claimed they were telling us to avoid "inaccurate" speculation that might confuse markets. A bit rich given their own record of ... what exactly?

Are these lies? Perhaps. But at this point I am not willing to give them that much credit. Remember: A man who lies knows what the truth is and deliberately fails to convey it accurately or completely. He does not merely "say the thing that is not," he knows it is not.

And it is not now possible to state with any degree of conviction that the people just cited knew whether their remarks were accurate when they made them. Or even to maintain plausibly that they cared.

From a purely practical point of view it is hard to quarrel with the government's behaviour or to express surprise at it psychologically. It is manifestly clear that they can say whatever sounds good, then change their story months, weeks or even a single day later without political consequences. And psychologically, once you discover that you can utter self-serving fibs and pay no price the temptation becomes enormous. It is so much easier and more fun to assume an air of solemn responsibility and make oracular declarations as a Very Important Person dealing with Very Important Matters in a Very Important Way than to admit that you have no idea what's going on. And why not, if there's no price to pay?

Actually, there is a large social price to pay when you foster cynicism on this scale. It's just that, as with the financial cost of deficits, political leaders don't pay it, we do.

If I may quote my own Jan. 30 Citizen column: "Now it's obvious what the pre-budget leaks were about. They were softening us up, so when we saw the actual $84.9 billion five-year deficit figures we'd go, oh well, that's only $20 billion more than the $64 billion over two years they already said, and what's $20 billion to government?"

Does not this cynical passage seem that much more plausible now that we've been through a further series of apparent softening-up steps, including moving from a $34 to $50 billion deficit for next year in two slices of only, say, $8 billion each? But I confess to growing doubts about its accuracy.

Such an analysis makes the politicians sound devious and sinister. But when these guys talk, there may well be no deceit, no depth, no hidden pool of knowledge and cunning. What you see is what you get. Their conceit and fatuity make them say whatever sounds good, and believe it as soon as they hear their own voice saying it.

They couldn't tell us the truth if they wanted because they don't know what it is. I don't mean they don't know the specific truth about the deficit, though they don't. I mean they don't know what "truth" is. When Flaherty said Monday that he wouldn't reveal the true deficit figure until June, do you think he had a firm intention to reveal it Tuesday? Or a firm intention not to? If so, you misunderstand his mental landscape. It doesn't contain such items.

You can't believe a word they say. Not one word.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

When the Tories attacked Michael Ignatieff for having spent time abroad, he could have retorted that it's no point of pride that you're a parochial ignoramus. Instead he pretended to be one, saying that to know how much the world loves Canada you sometimes need to see it "from afar."

Which is a pity, given the things he might have learned about political scandal if he hadn't spent the whole time gazing adoringly into our navels.

Ignatieff lived for years in the U.S., where they caught Nixon and impeached Clinton, and where Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich was found out, kicked out and signed up for reality TV faster than you can say Business Development Bank.

And Ignatieff spent years in the UK, where the Speaker of the House of Commons is the latest, but by no means the last, victim of a juicy political expense-padding scandal. Whereas here Brian Mulroney can hide cash income for years, pay tax on only half of it, then oleaginously declaim, "I have never in my life knowingly done anything wrong."

Do not try this at the CRA, folks. For that matter do not try it in the confessional, either. Nominally, at least, Mulroney is a Roman Catholic, yet if his words are to be taken at face value he believes Original Sin only happens to other people. Like tax bills, receipts and full disclosure, I suppose. But I digress.

Over in the UK, MPs are in scalding hot water over a House of Commons housing allowance scheme as lax as it was generous. It helped them rent or buy second homes in London to conduct parliamentary business even if they lived nearby or, in the case of some Sinn Fein MPs, did not take their seats. And it subsidized not just politicians' mortgages but their big-screen TVs, tennis courts, an ice cube tray, a hot tub and even the clearing of a moat.

But when the Daily Telegraph got hold of the story, a most remarkable thing happened. Three, actually.

First, highly-placed politicians including the Minister of Justice and now the Speaker lost their fancy jobs and maybe their seats.

Second, scores of MPs are now either caught in the slimelight and paying back their subsidies with a sad display of false contrition or trembling at the prospect that they will be next, or face criminal prosecution.

Third, and to me most remarkable, is the rapid emergence of a crushing consensus that even if MPs were technically following the rules, their conduct was wrong and must be punished.

Contrast that with Mulroney's sanctimonious explanation that he didn't answer questions about his hidden income in 1996 because nobody asked because it was hidden so he's totally innocent and angelic. Or Jean Chrétien's weird dealings over the Auberge Grand-Mère. Or Gordon Campbell's drunk driving. Or any number of other Canadian cases where the Bart Simpson rule "I didn't do it nobody saw me do it you can't prove a thing" is good enough even if they did and we can.

Mind you, these British MPs got in trouble by committing the cardinal political sin of being both arrogant and petty.

Let Stephen Harper or Dalton McGuinty promise no new deficits, then write bad cheques for tens of billions on posterity's account, and the public mind just boggles. We know they lied, played us for rubes and took our cash, but the sums are so huge we can't cope. Eighty-four billion might as well be a googleplex. Whereas in Britain they helped themselves to fancy items we understand and might want. Um, except the moat, which presents its own PR challenges because castles just scream aristocratic luxury. As with the Reform Party getting pretty good traction in the early 1990s over subsidized meals and haircuts for MPs, it's generally the small stuff that raises the biggest stinks.

Still, you have to love it.

I take particular delight in seeing a Speaker once praised for trashing traditions like wearing a wig and breeches now being ousted for trashing traditions like respect for public money in public office.

But I think we can all enjoy British politicians being caught cutting themselves a big fat slice of pie because "I'm worth it" (when in fact the public thinks they're skunks) and actually paying the price.

In Canada, however, politicians don't have to be above suspicion, just above conviction. And as usual, it's our fault. Our political culture is to blame, and we're it.

Still, I wonder. During his years abroad did Michael Ignatieff learn anything he'd like to share about how the Americans and the British root out wrongdoing by politicians so vigorously?

Or is he a parochial ignoramus who spent his whole time thinking everyone admired Canada for letting them get away with it?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]