According to the newspapers, the international community is putting pressure on Iran over nuclear weapons. This is very bad news.

Consider the Monday New York Times story that the U.S. wants new sanctions that "could include a cutoff of investments to the Iranian oil-and-gas industry and restrictions on many more banks than those currently blacklisted."

I'm sure that has Tehran shaking. But with laughter, not fear. The same day the Globe and Mail editorialized in favour of "sanctions with real teeth" because an "end to Iran's nuclear-weapons ambitions must ... be a priority for the world."

But life is not a Coke ad (or a Globe editorial) and we are not the world.

Remember Qaddafi and Ahmadinejad at the UN? That's "the world". So is Robert Mugabe. And 56 members of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, many strongly favouring Tehran's atomic-death-to-Jews policy. That's the world, not the fictitious entity in the Globe's Tuesday headline "Will the world get tough on Iran?"

Too many journalists share the delusion of politicians like German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Britain's Prime Minister Gordon Brown and U.S. President Barack Obama that Western leaders are moral superpowers some of whom just happen to have nuclear weapons. (Canadian politicians even think relinquishing nuclear arms increased our global influence.)

And they are further dangerously convinced their virtue is irresistible, provided nothing remotely savouring of consequences taints their nobility.

Thus the American president, on the weekend, spoke of sanctions as an alternative to diplomacy rather than a component of it. As for Frederick the Great's "diplomacy without force is like music without instruments," it's a tune they cannot carry.

Last Thursday, the hapless Gordon Brown uttered two revealing fatuities. First, "The level of deception by the Iranian government and the scale of what we believe is the breach of international commitments will shock and anger the entire international community." Second, there is "no choice but to draw a line in the sand."

By "the entire international community" he means not actual governments but high-minded post-modern liberals like himself who think words are deeds and therefore use them in highly inappropriate ways. For instance calling vacuity "pressure." And using "line in the sand" in the opposite sense to the original.

According to Livy's History of Rome, when Seleucid emperor Antiochus IV invaded Egypt with a massive army, a solitary Roman official named Gaius Popillius Laenas confronted him with an ultimatum from the Roman Senate: withdraw or fight.

Antiochus (whose realm included modern Iran) offered to discuss it with his advisors but Popillius drew a line around him in the sand and said "Before you cross this circle I want you to give me a reply for the Senate." Antiochus sweated a bit then promised to withdraw, and did, because Rome had the capacity and demonstrated will to act.

This time the legions will not come, and Ahmadinejad knows it. Besides, he doesn't care. He thinks if he and we die in a nuclear exchange, he will go to heaven and laugh at us eating Zaqqum berries in hell. (Koran, Sura 37: "We have made this tree a scourge for the unjust. It grows in the nethermost part of Hell, bearing fruit like devils' heads: on it they shall feed, and with it they shall cram their bellies, together with draughts of scalding water.") Against which we threaten further restrictions on banking, unless China says no.

Gordon Brown disposes of considerable conventional and nuclear forces. But he plainly lacks the will to use even the former against Iran. So Ahmadinejad did not just cross his line in the sand but danced all over it hooting death to Israel. And Western leaders stood there pretending not to notice, the exquisite crowning touch in their ghastly public shaming.

When Iran tested its newest missiles on Monday, Britain's Foreign Secretary brushed it off as "part of an annual provocation" while Javier Solana, the European Union's babbler-in-chief, said in talks with Iran starting Thursday: "'Failure is clear -- if there is no more meetings it's failure ... Success is more difficult to judge." We want meetings, they want missiles. If both succeed, it will go ill with us.

So let me translate those newspaper stories into real world language. The Iranian government is building nuclear weapons so it can blow the Jews off the face of the earth, and our leaders have neither the spine to act nor the wit to perceive their own shameful paralysis. It's that bad.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

A piece on mine in the current Fraser Forum looks at means and ends in public policy.

[First published on Mercatornet.com] When Barack Obama's health reform program ran into serious trouble, a number of people triumphantly threw the race card onto the table. It promptly skidded off onto the floor.

President Obama gets some credit for this wholesome outcome. Having refused to run as the "black candidate" in 2008, he has good-naturedly brushed aside such cries of racism over health care in 2009.

It is a pity others could not do the same. Instead, the stakes were dramatically raised when Jimmy Carter told NBC's "Today" show "I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man... because of a belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country."

It is tempting to dismiss Carter as a mean-spirited old fool who never forgave Americans for voting him out after a single disastrous term. As the Wall St. Journal's "Best of the Web Today" wrote last year, "President Carter has turned himself into an international nuisance who aspires to be a menace." But his aspiration to be a menace on the subject of race and ObamaCare deserves attention even if the effect is merely to be a nuisance. For depicting opposition to the plan as primarily driven by bigotry risks blinding supporters of the plan to its real defects, maligns the electorate and, given the deep racial wounds in American history, attempts to poison the well of policy discourse.

Most opponents of the president's health care plan are not bigots. Moreover, most bigots who oppose the plan do not oppose it because they are bigots. In saying so I make no attempt to deny the obvious. Race continues to matter in American politics and on Election Day 2008, millions of votes were cast based on it. Curiously, most went to Barack Obama because almost anyone inclined to vote against him on the basis of race would have voted against a white person with his attitudes and policies as well. Even if they were thinking the ugly word starting with "n" as they voted, it didn't determine their vote. Remember, correlation is not causation.

It was not always so. As recently as the 1960s most white supporters of either major party were unreflectively racist. The most committed white supremacists were then Democrats, but either party would have suffered a catastrophic defeat if it had nominated a black person for president and race would have been the reason. By now, most of the dwindling number of serious white bigots have moved to the Republican camp though not always for racist reasons.

I am not mud-slinging here. Though no bigot, I would be a Republican if I were an American. But I must face the sad truth that some hard-core Republicans turned out to vote against Barack Obama because he is black who would otherwise have stayed home rather than support the maverick John McCain. But not many, because to the extent that they are hard-core Republicans they would have showed up to vote against any clearly liberal candidate anyway. It doesn't excuse their bigotry, but it neutralizes it as a factor in politics.

Moreover, their numbers were clearly dwarfed by the wave of first-time or reluctant voters, of both races, who turned out to vote for Mr. Obama precisely because he is black. Some were Black Panther wannabes and other left-wing lunatics with racist views as ugly as, if less immediately dangerous than, those of white supremacists. Others were inspired by the historical significance, within living memory of the "long hot summers" of the 1960s, of peacefully electing a black man who did not even dwell on race. As race-based votes go, those were pretty benign. But they were still race-based.

All these considerations also apply to the health care debate. Just as almost everyone who voted against Barack Obama because he was black in November 2008 would also have voted against him because he was a liberal Democrat, almost all those who might in principle object to his health care plan because he is black would have objected to it anyway on substantive grounds. They didn't like HillaryCare, which one might in desperation label sexist. But they'd have hated ObamaCare if Edward Kennedy had sponsored it, and they're not rabidly anti-Irish. Meanwhile quite a few people support the plan at least partly because they fear that its opponents are bigots.

This is no mere quibble. For one thing, if all non-bigoted opposition could be made to go away, the residual protests would be tiny and ineffective so racism is not the key factor. For another, to suggest that this sort of mass movement could spring up based on bigotry is to paint a false and slanderous picture of the American electorate.

After formerly obscure Republican Joe Wilson apologized to the president for shouting "You lie" during his over-hyped address to a joint session of Congress, House Democrats were inclined to let the matter be until the Congressional Black Congress insisted on action, at which point a party-line vote disapproved of the heckle. Hank Johnson, a black Democratic Congressman from Georgia, said "I guess we'll probably have folks putting on white hoods and white uniforms again, riding through the countryside intimidating people. That's the logical conclusion if this kind of attitude is not rebuked." But if that were not appalling nonsense, black men would not win Georgia Congressional elections or compel their colleagues to pass such resolutions.

The very fact that the charge of racism is so politically potent proves it is a spent political force. In years gone by "bigotry" was a cry of frustration not a war cry. Now the U.S. has a black president.

It also has an increasingly unpopular and very poorly designed health care reform plan. But the two are unrelated. Correlation is not causation, and it is not 1888 out there. Put that card away, and keep it there.

Hey, where'd my update go? No, not software. The Sept. 10 Update of Economic and Fiscal Projections. Jim Flaherty announced a catastrophic change in the federal government's fiscal situation, labelled it "staying the course", scurried off, and everyone went back to discussing Michael Ignatieff's electoral prospects. It would be more appropriate to recall Brian Mulroney's.

This budget update was a downdate, a trip a quarter century back into the dismal past of bad decisions defended by fantasy. The runaway spending and deficits are bad enough. But what really scared me about the Update was its return to the pattern of the Mulroney years in which, whatever could reasonably be foreseen was terrible but whatever lurked on the borders of Never-never-land was mysteriously going to be fine. People ignored this phenomenon until it was very nearly too late.

And now it's back.

In the 2009 Update shows that over the next three years or so, the lines denoting ballooning deficits and debt have the shape known technically among economists as "scarily steep" and then they suddenly relax and become "reassuringly flat." We have seen this before, and it was bad news. (In case you like charts more than my editors, I've posted a few here).

Federal deficit projections in the 1980s always had the shape of Vimy Ridge, dauntingly steep on our side but sloping gently away on theirs. Worse, the point where we were magically saved moved inexorably away as we approached, exactly as though it was a mirage and exactly the way it receded by a year between the September 2009 Update and the budget just eight months earlier.

And with finance ministers peddling such snake oil, instead of a refreshing drink of solvency, all we ever got was an oily brew of self-satisfaction.

So I invite you to savour Flaherty's "Foreword" and the "Introduction" to the Budget Update. They ooze reassuring phrases like "will stay the course ... committed to its plan ... Although the timing of this return to balanced budgets has changed, our commitment ... has not. When the time is right... additional spending restraint is necessary.... staying the course ... return to a balanced budget as the economy recovers.... stay the course... committed to returning to balanced budgets.... continue to follow a disciplined approach to fiscal planning... a return to budgetary balance without endangering the... recovery."

Reading this guff, you wouldn't guess the actual numbers in the crucial "Summary Statement of Transactions" show spending up $13.9 billion dollars this year alone, would you? No. That would require the finance minister to say "My hair is on fire and my projections are out the window ha ha I have no idea what nasty surprise I'll pass on next!" Which they never do even when they're quietly admitting in the Summary Statement of Transactions that next year's deficit is also now predicted to be fifteen and a half billion dollars more than they expected eight months ago.

I call that pretty ugly. A deficit for this year and next of $101.2 billion, $37.7 billion higher than they said just eight months earlier, strikes me as a bit of an "Ooopsie." But not for these guys an admission of past error or a confession that current projections are as worthless as the last batch. Instead they say on the one hand the recession made them do it, and boast on the other that Canada is singularly well placed to weather the recession, apparently unaware of the glaring contradiction. And they never get to the third hand where this incredible surge in spending makes any sense. As for the fact that they're planning to add $76.1 billion more to the debt in the next five years than they were as recently as January, it's just not something to discuss in polite company.

Yup, $76.1 billion. That's $2,200 per Canadian. And that's just the difference between the $83.1 billion they planned to add to the debt over five years back in January, and the $159.2 billion they now intend to add over five years. The total debt is now meant to reach $622.9 billion by 2013-14, or $18,500 for each of us including little babies. And that's assuming that the swell downturn in catastrophically runaway spending happens magically three years from now exactly the way it persistently didn't in the 1980s.

Then we have the government's cackling about a "disciplined approach to fiscal planning," a phrase that means "not cutting anything that buys votes." Even before the recession hit, the Tories -- between bouts of yapping about those awful big spending Liberals and socialists-- were hiking spending seven per cent a year.

So never mind Michael Ignatieff's risible electoral prospects or budgetary fantasies. It's Brian Mulroney's that matter now.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

A lot of bloodthirsty maniacs out there want to blow us up. What are we meant to do about people who don't take it seriously?

On Monday, the Israeli Embassy invited me to meet Dr. Jonathan Fine of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya. Claiming some knowledge of the terrorist threat, I asked him to skip the basic briefing and instead tell me how to move the discussion forward.

He said start with ideas. Talk about who our enemies are and what they want. Too often, he added, even counter-terror experts immediately turn to the adversary's strategy and tactics. These things matter, he said, but first things first: Tell me your adversary's image of you, and I'll tell you his strategy and tactics.

I was immediately sympathetic.

A great paradox of the modern world is that most intellectuals do not think ideas matter. During the Cold War, the chattering classes didn't take Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism seriously; in the 1930s they dismissed Nazi doctrine; now they brush off radical Islam. New era, old error.

The standard materialist liberal claim that poverty causes violence is not merely, as Chesterton said, a slander on the poor. It is also preposterously at odds with the facts. Where are the suicide bombers from Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa? And it is dangerously arrogant.

Liberals who cannot conceive of honest, intelligent dissent from their own views interpret any sign of genuinely different thinking as, essentially, cover for a ransom demand. So they offer bribes, foreign aid for roads, jobs, clean water, etc. on the theory that if only those foreigners had nicer stuff they'd stop that jibber-jabber about jihad.

This approach is madness. Once you have paid him the Danegeld you will never be rid of the Dane.

Besides, some people want your blood not your money.

Here Fine stressed the transition from secular to religious terror at, essentially, the Iranian revolution of 1979. And he underlined the Ayatollah Khomeini's threefold justification for suicide bombing: The suicide bomber purifies himself, purifies his community, and shows contempt for the Judeo-Christian belief in the sanctity of life in this world.

I consider the third crucial. Christians holding "John 3:16" signs in football end zones agree with Jews who believe Genesis 1:31 ("God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good."). Suicide bombers do not. They hate this world and everything in it, so offering them more of life's good things is not just ineffective but feeble-minded.

When Islamists say they are in love with death, we need to believe them before we do anything else. Their deaths are as sweet to them as ours and it dictates their strategy and tactics.

Jonathan Fine notes that traditional terror movements before 1979 had socioeconomic goals. Their aims may have been as unrealistic as they were horrible, and their methods despicable. But in principle they wanted things we could give them.

The FLN wanted France out of Algeria not France, while even the ghastly Yasser Arafat, at least in public, criticized "the Zionist entity", which was ostensibly an attack on the policy orientation of the Israeli government and not a cry to exterminate the Jews. The Hamas Charter is an entirely different matter, as only those who refuse to read it can fail to recognize. And Osama bin Laden's followers want a caliphate from Cordoba to Indonesia and beyond. Their starting point is Spain, and we are next. And they cannot be negotiated with.

As Fine noted, air traffic control repeatedly tried to contact the 9/11 hijackers. But Mohammed Atta and company wouldn't pick up the radio even to shout abuse. And Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh gasped "Can't we talk about this?" to the Islamist who was shooting, stabbing and trying to behead him. But there was nothing to discuss. The medium was the message. Thus, Fine observed, you could at least buy time by haggling with old-style terrorists but "once a suicide bomber enters the target zone it is lost" which means the only effective response is preemptive.

So, he said, start with ideas and read the sources. Including one I should have known but didn't, bin Laden's mentor Abdullah Yusuf Azzam.

There comes a point where it's OK to stop accumulating examples; how many times does someone have to shout "Slaughter the Jews" before you abandon attempts at dialogue on a two-state solution? But to get there you need to spend some time on the Palestinian Media Watch website and learn what "Itbach al Yahud" means.

Some people ignore such chants due to a corruption of the will rather than merely a clouding of the intellect. Everyone else needs to take ideas seriously and read the sources in horrified amazement.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

There's a lot of excitement in the press about the Liberals' new campaign ads. So perhaps I could request 37 seconds of your time on the subject.

I pick 37 seconds for two reasons. First, that's how long the incredibly exciting English-language ad lasts, which suggests either an insulting estimate of your attention span or a realistic estimate of your interest in Michael Ignatieff's views. Second, I make the second estimate.

I'm personally about as enthusiastic about the churn of Canadian politics as about leprosy. My excuse for writing about it is that an election can come even if you don't want it to and someone will win even if you refuse to vote. If space permitted, I could draw critical lessons about the media here, from their enthusiasm for the subject to the fact that the Globe and Mail and a major Ottawa-based newspaper both ran front-page stories Monday that said the ads were available on YouTube but didn't even provide the URLs let alone put hyperlinks on the online version.

(FYI the English one is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZ2ixKkwljI and the French ones at 9pHJ273PlGU and Q1SMxRWem9Q. There, that wasn't hard, was it?) But apparently many journalists still think the Internet is something we write about not through, which... [Space does not permit - ed.]

Yes, sorry, back to the ads. They are interesting, in a grotesque sort of way, for what they reveal about the person who made them. One newspaper ran the headline "New ad tries to soften Ignatieff 's image, expert says" without waiting to see what effect the ad actually had on voters before covering it. But I digress.

The ads clearly are intended to soften Ignatieff's image. For obvious reasons. But the attempt is so transparent, from background to clothing to overgrooming, that it's hard to believe it will work, especially since voters will, at some point, see and hear him speak. What struck me listening to Ignatieff's English-language ad was how clumsy it was. He even starts: "Wherever I've worked, I've met Canadians who are the best the world has to offer." They might as well have included a subtitle: So there's nothing wrong with Mike here having been abroad his whole adult life. And a lot wrong with the parochial hicks who didn't even go to Harvard ... d'oh, that's the voters. Aaaargh.

Even more awkward, even in a 37-second clip, is the blatant absence of any real argument in the ad. I mean argument in the classic sense of a series of logically connected propositions taking you somewhere mentally. There's no subordination, no if-then. It's all just assertion. A revealing sign: he never says the word "if." Which might go some way to dispel Ignatieff's image as an intellectual but not in a good way. Especially since one of the weird things about him, even as an intellectual, is how hard it is to name one important idea with which he's been consistently associated.

Even his desire to be prime minister has more whim than long-term obsession about it. And his infamous "Wait and see" on how to balance the budget without raising taxes wasn't just the most unsuccessful attempt I ever saw to evoke Trudeau's "Just watch me." It also embarrassingly underlined that whatever he spent his academic career pondering, it didn't include how to balance budgets in a vote-buying welfare state.

As Jeffrey Simpson noted in the Globe and Mail, Ignatieff, in the same appearance, insisted that the Liberals balanced the budget in the 1990s without raising taxes but that's not true. In 1995, they "raised taxes on corporations, financial institutions, tobacco and gasoline, and made other corporate tax changes and alterations to retirement plans that added about $1.5 billion to Ottawa's coffers each year." So Ignatieff's assertion was either a clumsy lie or embarrassing ignorance. I know he was out of the country at the time, but shouldn't a former Harvard professor have had his staff do a bit of research?

As for the French ads, they show first that Ignatieff attended the Ekol Joe Clark de Fransay, second that he thinks Québécois have even shorter attention spans at just 31 seconds, and third that he has no more interest in assembling an argument in the other official language. It's just one surly assertion after another, set against a harsh black background rather than the soft fake natural one of the English ads.

For the record, I agree with his attack on the Harper government's budgetary policies. The slogan "Nous méritons mieux" might be a stretch but as for the English version "We can do better," it shouldn't even be hard. The problem is, he has no idea how and doesn't even realize it matters.

That is worth 37 seconds of your time to verify. Probably not 40. But 37.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

In Alan Garner's novel The Weirdstone of Brisinghamen, the stolid British farmer Gowther Mossock is awakened by his dog barking at a sinister little intruder returned to prowl round his farm so he fetches his shotgun. His wife says "Watch thy step, lad. You're bigger than he is, and that's all the more of thee for him to hit." "I'll be all reet, but he wunner," Gowther replies. How times have changed.

I'm not recommending this second-rate fantasy for teens I happened to revisit as part of my summer reading. But far better to read about Gowther than imitate him.

Act like that today and the authorities will swoop on you for violating firearms laws, daring to defend yourself, and for good measure tag you for a hate crime against goblins, who would probably then get government jobs under an affirmative action program.

We were never told this would happen.

Those who brought in various changes to the law over the last half-century to expand the rights of criminals, restrict those of normal folks and import exotic brands of sociology into the justice system never warned us we would be turned into terrified wimps reduced to calling 911, fleeing, being told there was no film in the surveillance cameras and charged if we fight back.

We were hypnotized into passive acceptance in a way Garner's evil wizards would admire and envy.

What is most revealing about a society is not the things on which it concentrates its attention but those it takes for granted.

That is why humour is so revealing, and so problematic for outsiders. And it is what makes this trivial action by Farmer Mossock so significant.

In order to sell us the far-fetched action and chaotic, fragmented metaphysics of his yarn, Garner has to make the background dialogue and action as normal as possible.

Which makes the most extraordinary part of his book not Cadellin the wizard or the magic jewel Firefrost but the casual assumption of the author, in 1960, that a normal, reassuringly solid Cheshire farmer will have firearms, feel comfortable using them, and be utterly, unflappably willing to defend himself with them.

Likewise, in G.K. Chesterton's older novel The Man Who Was Thursday, published a century ago last year, the main character's experience becomes so odd that at one point even "the common things he carried with him -- the food and the brandy and the loaded pistol..." start feeling strange and fantastic.

Who in Canada today, I ask you, would not find a revolver in their pocket stranger, more fantastic and more terrifying than, say, an iPod full of hip-hop "tunes," a sex manual, or maybe that pole-dancing doll for young girls that's been causing an online flap lately (see for instance the gadget blog gizmodo.com).

What happened to us? It wasn't always this way; in Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde the increasingly apprehensive narrator Dr. Lanyon recounts that "though I dismissed my servants to bed, I loaded an old revolver that I might be found in some posture of self-defense."

It's not just "right-wingers" like Chesterton and, I suppose, Stevenson.

In the 1937 edition of his The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism George Bernard Shaw observed as a commonplace about hobbies that, "Indoor people want books and pictures and pianos: outdoor people want guns and fishing-rods and horses and motor cars."

Aaack. Guns? Yes. And three years after Shaw wrote, and 20 years before Garner did, the British government intentionally distributed weapons to the civilian populace to resist a feared Nazi invasion.

At the time it seemed not merely logical but part of a hallowed tradition going back to the early fifth century assertion, as Rome withdrew, that free men could bear arms, affirmed repeatedly in such vital documents as the 1688 Bill of Rights.

Yet if Britain were faced with such a deadly peril today, would any politician dare defend such a measure, or would the scientific extermination of the populace seem far more reasonable and civilized than its disorderly self-protection? We're the strange case, and an intelligent woman urgently needs a guide to us.

I would expect young people to find some aspects of life in days past unfamiliar, even magical, like riding in a horse-drawn wagon, not watching television or going to bed by candlelight. But it worries me that they would have less trouble believing in Garner's ancient wizard keeping 140 knights in an enchanted sleep until the final showdown between good and evil than in a normal person having a gun they were neither afraid nor ashamed to use in self-defence.

There's something weird here. But it's not that stone. And we are not all reet.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The past week has seen a typical flood of press releases from the federal government claiming to highlight "Canada's Economic Action Plan." They make it sound like not much of a plan yet at the same time a very bad one.

Let me cite three telling examples: "PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER ANNOUNCES CONSTRUCTION OF NEW SMALL CRAFT HARBOUR IN PANGNIRTUNG"; "PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER LAUNCHES NEW REGIONAL ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AGENCY FOR CANADA'S NORTH"; and "PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER LAUNCHES NEW ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AGENCY FOR SOUTHERN ONTARIO."

Do only ideological purists object when the Conservative Party, headed by an ex-libertarian, thinks the prime minister should not merely interest himself in but fund and announce the construction of a dock in the Arctic? But government, of any stripe, is overstretched if such matters occupy the time and attention of the guy or gal at the top. I think it's also worth debating whether a new regional economic development agency could possibly play a meaningful role in the long-term economic development of Canada's North. And whether this one is likely to have the appropriate structure and philosophy when the same government that created it had, five days earlier, announced a similar body for Southern Ontario.

Who, I ask, is meant to provide the money to help struggling Toronto find prosperity? And what dazzling new approaches to effective wealth creation will this agency unveil to a region that, throughout our history, has done little besides lead one of the world's most productive nations in a few minor areas like finance, manufacturing and services?

The press release said the prime minister babbled, "This is a region with distinct needs, and the people of Southern Ontario deserve economic programs delivered in ways specifically tailored to their own priorities. FedDev Ontario is one more tool to ensure that workers and businesses in Southern Ontario have the resources they need to succeed."

OK, it's probably just more of the boilerplate press-release writers put in the mouths of people who, whatever their sins, never actually said such nonsense, rhetoric that neither means anything nor tries to. I realize the government subjects us to a thunderous, almost automated barrage of such self-congratulatory sludge; it is not unusual to get four a day on Canada's Economic Action Plan alone, a surprising number specifically crediting the PM. And it can seem both trivial and off-putting to be told that Harper's tour of the Yukon Energy Project site is a "Photo opportunity only," in which we may depict but not speak to him.

Trying hard to be fair, I grant a photo op heads-up is useful to the press. And when the PMO distributes its own photos of the boss in remote places it smacks of vainglorious flattery but saves us the time and expense of getting to places like Pangnirtung which probably don't have a convenient Starbucks. Sometimes they even save us the trouble of taking our own unflattering shots of Mr. Harper's belly.

Besides, even a PMO picture can be worth a few hundred words.

For instance, the Aug. 20 one tagged "Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Nunavut Premier Eva Aariak, Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq and Indian and Northern Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl visit the community's small craft harbour." It's a revealing shot of rugged-looking boats on a Pangnirtung tidal flat, with Strahl looking ready to get behind the wheel of one of those babies and Harper looking like an unusually plump model in outdoor clothes he'd never otherwise wear trying in vain to stand in a natural pose next to a real working man's boat with two big shiny outboard motors.

What most struck me was that a lot of the boats had two engines. I take it the locals are firmly persuaded the waters off Pangnirtung are no place to have your only motor conk out. And who am I to argue? Or tell them where or how to build their docks? Then again, who is Stephen Harper to do it? At least I've spent a lot of time driving boats, mostly not into rocks.

Even a photo op consumes the time and attention of the person involved. As for an economic action plan that apparently depends on the notion that not a sparrow gets a job in Canada, from Pangnirtung to Toronto, without a strategic government initiative, it absorbs enormous quantities of mental effort as well as money, even if flacks do most of the appalling writing.

Government can't do everything, and when it thinks it not only can but must, it's a certain and ominous warning that it won't be devoting enough time, money or attention to the things it actually can and should do.

An economic development agency for Southern Ontario? What rubbish.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]