Do our leading politicians strike you as a sorry lot? No, not that way. I mean do they seem to be in a constant state of mourning? If not, they are brazen hypocrites or wooden windbags.

I say this with confidence because the tidal wave of sludge that deluges me in my professional capacity as a journalist includes a steady stream of press releases from senior public figures saying they "mourn" or are "deeply saddened" or feel "profonde tristesse" due to various events. They not infrequently insist that they "stand with all Canadians as we mourn" or some such formulation that dares assign an approved emotion to the rest of us only to horn in on it without delay or embarrassment.

If I were thus to wave my superior sensitivity in your face you would insist that I remove my bleeding heart from my sleeve and tuck it back into my chest. And if I were genuinely in mourning I would resent a politician converting my feelings into a "sorrow op." In any case, one look at them on a day they've stapled their superior feelings to their foreheads tells you they are not feeling the emotions they shout from the rooftops. No shadow of reflection on the transitory nature of life, the vanity of ambition (the what?!) or our common humanity in the face of our common fate interrupts the flow of political boilerplate.

I know what a person in mourning looks and sounds like. These politicians seem smug and snide, not sad. And they are lying for political advantage on a subject where it ought to cause even more shame than usual because the most frequent occasion for the missives is the death of a Canadian soldier. I trust I will not be accused of indifference to the military or their friends and families when I say this is obnoxious hooey.

I have consistently called for higher military spending, more realistic strategic goals, and a better appreciation of how and why defence is the first duty of government. I have tried to increase appreciation for Canada's military past, I wear something red every Friday and I understand that every soldier's death leaves a hole in the lives of those who love them. So do all deaths, but those in the military risk death or mutilation in defence of my freedom and I am anything but unmindful of it. But I do not appropriate it to make myself seem praiseworthy. (The response to Haiti's devastating Tuesday earthquake offers an instructive contrast: The Governor General, who is from Haiti, has shown what genuine grief looks like while, I am pleased to note, the government's reaction combined rhetorical restraint with practical help.)

I'm glad our politicians make a show of "supporting the troops." But as the old Spanish proverb says, love is deeds, not fine words. If they really support the troops they ought to devote more money to defence and less to buying the votes of the middle class. Otherwise, it's Matthew 6:21 for the lot of them ("where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.")

I do not even know what benefit they think they derive from this purple haze, since I have never seen a news story quote one of these releases. Perhaps they think it does no harm when hypocrisy falls in the press gallery and no one hears it. It may even be objected, as a last-ditch defence, that they neither write nor read this stuff before their staff slide it out the door. Some of them might have grounds for contracting out their emotional responses. But the result is both weird and harmful.

To be sure, politicians send me a lot of strange stuff, like Monday's 13-second, soundless video clip of the prime minister getting a national security briefing. (Oh Max, not the cone of silence!) But there's a darker side to this sludge.

The appropriate response to the enemy killing a soldier is resolution, not depression. On Remembrance Day I give solemn thought not only to the soldiers of Afghanistan, the two World Wars and Korea, but the Boer War, the Napoleonic Wars, the Armada, Agincourt, and for that matter Hastings, Stamford Bridge and Alfred's battles against the Danes. I am not convinced our party leaders know this history or feel gratitude. But I am quite certain it would be impossible to function, let alone make sound strategic decisions, if one were in the grip of such emotions on a regular basis.

Imagine what would have happened to our leaders during the Normandy campaign if each of the 70 Canadians killed a day had plunged them into mourning? Or to Winston Churchill's inspiring, steely resolve if every British death, in battle or Blitz, had broken his heart? It would have broken his will, and Hitler would have prevailed.

Indeed, it is the conviction and hope of the Taliban that killing just a few of our soldiers will demoralize us. Why does our political class pretend, with vacuous futility, that it's working?

They are a sorry lot.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Just how dull is Canada? Last month Citizen Editorial Pages Editor Leonard Stern said an HBO biography of America's second president, John Adams, "reminded me just how unremarkable the story of Canada is. I love being Canadian, but boy do I envy the Americans their history." I beg to differ.

American history is indeed glorious. It has towering heroes, great villains, magnificent achievements and what Barack Obama called the grotesque "original sin" of racial slavery. But ours is only dull if seen from the wrong vantage point: that it started in 1867 and was promptly put on hold pending Quebec's Quiet Revolution after which we became a western bastion of anti-Americanism.

It would be remarkable if Canada really had no history before 1867, and none worth mentioning afterward until Pierre Trudeau arrived like a rock through a stained glass window bringing us sex, bell bottoms and then, through the Charter, human rights at last. But that is not how Canada's founders saw things.

Sir John A. Macdonald famously declared in 1891 that "A British subject I was born, a British subject I will die." And he prefaced this boast, for such it was even if boasting is now deemed unCanadian, with less celebrated but remarkable words: "Under the broad folds of the Union Jack, we enjoy the most ample liberty to govern ourselves as we please and at the same time we participate in the advantages which flow from association with the mightiest empire the world has ever seen ... behind us towers the majesty of England."

And why not? Canada was conceived by most of its founders, not excluding some francophones, as a continuation of England's glorious past. And when they took vaguely unseemly shots at the Americans, listen to the context. As Brian Lee Crowley writes in Fearful Symmetry:

"Richard Cartwright, a prominent pre- and post-Confederation politician, spoke for almost all his contemporaries when he said in the United Province of Canada legislature in 1865, 'I think every true reformer, every real friend of liberty, will agree with me in saying that if we must erect safeguards, they should be rather for the security of the individual than of the mass ... For myself, sir, I own frankly I prefer British liberty to American equality'."

Whatever else one makes of this sentiment, it fits very poorly with the stifling modern orthodoxy that our defining national characteristic is a preference for Canadian equality over American liberty.

Even if we accept the strange proposition that Canada's history began in 1867, I do not see that D-Day, the Battle of the Atlantic, or Vimy and Passchendaele were dull or bureaucratic. If we had not considered Britain's wars our own in the 20th century we might have got to do some hard fighting on our own soil but it doesn't mean we missed the excitement.

Americans do history right, from the 1607 replica ships I just visited in Jamestown to the breathtaking Lincoln Memorial. I wouldn't trade the latter for a devastating civil war and the blight of racial slavery. But the Great Emancipator gazes across the Washington Mall reflecting pool toward a stunning Second World War memorial we cannot match. And that same trip took us past a sign in rural western Virginia to a D-Day Memorial. Where in Canada does one find such a thing? We also saw a live bait vending machine and I admit we don't have those either. But we do have a history. We're just ashamed of it.

Here we touch on the most awkward matter of all: We tend to downplay most of our past because of Quebec. Even the war against Hitler was highly unpopular in Quebec, let alone events before 1867.

Remember Jean Chrétien's wish that he'd been there to awaken Montcalm and win the Plains of Abraham for corrupt, stupid French absolutism? And he was far from the most tribal of Quebecers. We may admire the endurance of the Habitants or the brave idealism of many Jesuits. But our freedom comes from Britain, not France, and if we fail to celebrate our heritage the main cause is fear that it has too much of Wolfe the Dauntless Hero in it and too little of Richelieu, Robespierre and that crowd.

You may say we have no Gettysburg Address and hence no wall to put it on. But what of John Simcoe who set slavery in Canada on the path to extinction before 1800? American historian Kenneth Stampp says American Southerners were not inherently bad people but somehow at key moments their vision failed them. Ours did not. Where's the statue?

As for sacred texts, we have Magna Carta and Elizabeth's pre-Armada address to her troops. By what logic are they not a part of our past? Because we moved? And if the American Founding Fathers could name their first flagship after Alfred the Great, why can't we put him on Parliament Hill?

We are the nation that rallied to him at Egbert's Stone. And there's nothing dull about it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Memo to: Santa Claus North Pole Enterprises Inc.

From: Scrooge and Marley Consulting.

Re: Reducing the cost of the 12 Days of Christmas

Dear Nick: Our team of penny-pinching misers and shivering overworked clerks have carefully examined the PNC Financial Services Group report on the growing cost of a full-service, 12-day Christmas with all the trimmings from 12 drummers to a partridge.

As you know, PNC calculated the cost at $21,465.56, up $385.46 over last year, a significant concern for those preferring an arguably excessively traditional Christmas in the ongoing recession.

We regret to inform you, first, that PNC's figures dramatically understate the problem.

They costed acquisition of, in total, 12 drummers, 9 ladies, 5 rings and on down to that pesky partridge and its arboreal accessory (the latter accounts for 93.7 per cent of the price, incidentally; can you just use a hatstand?).

But the fine print in the carol requires that the true love be given a partridge and tree every day, 3 French hens on 10 occasions, 10 lords a-leaping three times and so on.

That the true love bags 40 rings rather than five is a significant issue given the 42.9 per cent rise in gold prices since 2008.

And as Walt Kelly of Pogo fame calculated long ago, the resulting chaotic cackling hissing 364-item mess would require a barn, warehouse or other large storage space, another cost PNC omits.

Our second finding, on various superficially appealing radical options, is also discouraging.

One of our principals suggested cancelling Christmas entirely but further analysis revealed massive hidden fuel and wood costs. (The exact text of his proposal was "every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart.")

Our legal department also warns of potentially enormous attorney's fees, and you cannot count on the contemporary celebrant having "his own pudding" even if he is in all other respects a prize idiot.

Bob Cratchitt feels that large-scale immersion of unduly perky individuals in lethally hyperthermic dessert foods conflicts with traditional Santa branding efforts while the late Mr. Marley notes the further expense of large cooking vessels.

Thus we cannot recommend this approach.

Nor can we endorse more careful selection of romantic partners, or greater sensitivity to their gift-related hints, to enable swains to eliminate everything on the list except the gold rings.

The modern girl's indifference to a flock of 36 calling birds is liable to be offset, unpredictably, by a taste for such expensive tokens of affection as an unlimited-minutes calling plan.

If, Santa, you put more competitive cell phone rates in Canadian stockings, it might reduce the volume of Dec. 26 text messages beginning "Hey, Fatso" but it is impossible reliably to quantify the financial implications of such an approach.

Now the good news. The PNC survey finds the price of turtle doves is down due to scientific breeding.

And Mr. Scrooge suggests that as people eat geese (after they have laid, so as not to forgo the economic benefits of free eggs) they could surely add doves, hens, "calling birds" (whatever those are) and even swans to the menu although rumour has it the latter are a bit chewy. Perhaps with pear sauce?

This approach offers substantial reductions in the grocery bill for costly meat proteins.

Further, if the maids have access to cows as the odd phrase "a-milking" seems to imply, we recommend the sale of dairy products to offset their $7.25 hourly wage. Bulk milk is not lucrative especially given the need for quotas; we prefer a speciality cheese.

(And must they milk cows? The close identification of reindeer with the Santa brand strongly suggests reindeer brie, or goose-egg-and-reindeer-cheese quiches.)

Having the ladies milk when not dancing is also attractive to reduce labour costs.

Better yet, get the maids to dance; the ladies cost over 10 times as much per hour.

Similarly, have the drummers leap in their spare time. This will not only reduce the racket, but as the "lords a-leaping" are thought to have been morris dancers anything improvised by the percussion section will necessarily render the overall effect marginally less appalling.

We also wonder if it is possible to milk one-handed, so the maids could beat drums with the other, and leap on their breaks.

Are the 22 pipers "piping" on pan flutes or something else tasteful? Try giving them bagpipes and everyone else will probably leave, reducing your hospitality and wage bills.

Despite our best efforts the total savings we are able to offer are not substantial. Favourable movement in commodity and labour markets are your best hope.

On the bright side, you're not on the hook for any myrrh.

Yours sincerely,

SMC.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

[First published on Mercatornet.com] The most decorous thing to do in the Tiger Woods affair would be to avert one’s gaze. I feel especially sad for his children who, whatever the outcome, will in this internet age be pursued by the grisly details all their lives. But, in respectful disagreement with MercatorNet’s editor Michael Cook, I argue that, with as much decorum as we can muster, we need to examine squarely the partly hopeful lessons of this sad business.

I don’t mean lessons like “Don’t cheat on your spouse.” It is true and important but we could discuss it without staring at this sordid mess. As for an enormously successful, wealthy, sexy man having plentiful opportunities to stray beyond the bonds of matrimonial fidelity, Louis XIV knew all about that and so I imagine did Rameses II. And while they didn’t know the internet could deliver every unpleasant detail to the prurient, we certainly do.

On the other hand, sordid misconduct by those who seem to enjoy life’s blessings, and those of our society, deserves some notice. When people complain about the muck in the media I often quote my former boss at the Ottawa Citizen, Neil Reynolds, who said that a newspaper is a daily measure of the moral state of a community. When the weather is lousy, I add, you don’t smash the barometer. Those maxims would not justify wallowing in the sordid details of what the press have a habit of calling Tiger Woods’ “affairs” -- although his encounters don’t seem to have risen even to that level -- but my own opinion on reading the barometer is that we can expect slightly better than predicted weather.

What strikes me about this mess, and encourages me, is that even in this liberated age, the overall result of the scandal has been revulsion. In 2005 I began a newspaper column with, “As the narrator of Russell Kirk’s ghost story The Invasion of the Church of the Holy Ghost wanders the sordid main drag of his decaying parish, a neon sign above a stripper bar flashes ‘Stark Naked or Your Money Back’. What a slogan for our times.” I still think so. But the short version of the Tiger Woods business is, “Stark Naked and our Money Back.” As it should be.

From golfing fans to the general public and to Mr. Woods’ commercial sponsors, the general reaction has not been to excuse or diminish his conduct but “Ugh, get away from me.” The mass of humanity in the West has, it appears, managed to resist the siren song of sexual modernity far better than we had feared.

The metaphysics of modernity was expressed very nicely by Malcolm Muggeridge in 1966 when he said, “Sex is the mysticism of materialism. We are to die in the spirit to be reborn in the flesh, rather than the other way around.” It was obvious from the start to many people that this plan was fatally flawed. But it is nice to see that most normal people’s reaction to Tiger Woods is that, after 50 years letting it all hang out, we would like to see much of it get tucked back in.

It is somewhat unfair that all this should land on Tiger Woods. To some extent celebrity carries an unfair price. But Tiger Woods was always interesting for three reasons, two inherent and one self-inflicted. The first inherent reason was sheer talent; it was amazing to see how good a human being could be at something at which many of us have failed ignominiously. The second was application; it was intriguing to see how much he could make of his enormous natural gifts both within his chosen field of endeavour and as a human being. The third is that he marketed himself assiduously as, among other things, clean-cut. In this last respect Tiger Woods differs even from admitted bad boy golfer John Daly whose misconduct, while reprehensible, escapes the reproach of hypocrisy, and even more from Bobby Fischer, whose chess genius brought fame he neither sought nor enjoyed and that turned his descent into anti-Semitic madness from a private tragedy into a public scandal.

The talent and the on-course achievements remain amazing. But what he did with his success off the course attracts attention for solid moral reasons as well as ignoble Schadenfreude. Even on the infamous night in which Tiger Woods’ life unravelled publicly the thought may have surfaced briefly that all his achievements made no difference as he fled a woman scorned and wronged. Certainly, in the aftermath, even those of us unlikely to romp to victory in our first Masters are usefully reminded that managing to stagger along the straight and narrow path matters more than any other achievement mundane or spectacular.

A few columnists (female, no less) have suggested that Tiger Woods did what any typical man would do given the opportunity, or that his failings make him seem more human. I personally hope for more from men and mankind. And I am encouraged by the way this matter is unfolding.

Tiger Woods betrayed his wife and his children and broke the moral law and is being heartily condemned. Some say he may one day recover his standing in the world of golf and with the public. And perhaps he will. But if so it will not be by clever PR or clever golf shots. It will be through genuine repentance and improved character.

I am sorry it happened at all, and for the sake of the children in particular I cringe at the public way it happened. But despite all the pounding away at traditional morality in the last century and especially the last 40 years, despite the saturation of popular culture by the Playboy philosophy, we all still know this sort of thing is wrong. And despite everything we still care.

That is worth noting.

The Greenpeace stunt on Parliament Hill last week went over my head. Literally. I arrived for a conference while they rappelled down West Block before an audience of emergency responders and media. I was actually lost; my event was elsewhere. But I eventually found it, whereas respect for the rule of law is still missing.

I promise not to talk about the substance of that protest. I know people think nothing is more important than climate change; Wednesday's Daily Telegraph quoted British Prime Minister Gordon Brown saying that the "'future of humanity' is at stake in the Copenhagen climate talks." Under such circumstances, fussing about the rule of law might appear more irrelevant than sinister. But what's the point in passing laws, on climate change or anything else, if the concept of orderly procedure is receding faster than a Swiss glacier?

It seems odd to me that the Copenhagen meeting has witnessed endless disorderly protests by people demanding something be done about the environment. If you were a global warmer, I'd have expected you to think existing processes were working pretty well at this point. Isn't everyone who is anyone at Copenhagen, including Mr. Brown, U.S. President Barack Obama, Prince Charles, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Al Gore and UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, all demanding immediate massive action or everybody dies? Aren't rafts of expensive experts working day and night to create workable plans to combat global warming regardless of the expense?

If the red greens were marching in support of the program, or making orderly objections on details, or if there was chaos in the streets because the conference had been cancelled, it would make some kind of sense. But rioting in their moment of triumph raises the crucial question: "Why can't these people make their case without breaking the law?"

It is not as though the digital age offers a shortage of ways to spread even an unpopular message. Besides, climate alarmists enjoy the sympathy of virtually every major media outlet and most political parties, with the partial exceptions of U.S. Republicans and Australian Liberals. So why are activists going up the wall, literally and figuratively?

As it happens, the conference I did eventually reach on Monday, sponsored by the Canadian Centre for Policy Studies, was on the erosion of rights in Canada. And on my panel Peter Stockland, executive director of the Centre for Cultural Renewal, addressed precisely this puzzling rise of youthful hordes convinced it is their right to hijack debate by illegal acts. It is a trend whose ominous shadow reaches far beyond any one issue, however vital.

Civil disobedience acquired a saintly aura during the civil rights protests of the early 1960s as people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi broke the law in an orderly and non-violent way, in defence of unfashionable causes and willing to suffer legal penalties. Today's disruptors ape that tradition but do not belong to it.

They break the law in disorderly ways, in defence of fashionable causes, knowing there is no penalty. Where protestors in the 1960s broke the law to challenge the Establishment, today's crop do it to support authority and with its blessing. Even the West Block event was pure theatre. The official response was relaxed, even leisurely, and the police and persons of fire I saw quietly watching the Greenpeace stunt were supporting actors in a familiar, harmless comedy called "Stick it to the man" when everybody knows there is, in fact, no man.

The immediate dangers of such contempt for law are obvious; as Senator Colin Kenny asked, what if they'd been terrorists? And the recent assault on Italy's Silvio Berlusconi underlines that degrading personal assaults on right-wing politicians are not just good, clean left-wing fun. (Man throws shoe at George Bush: hilarious. Man throws shoe at Barack Obama: outrageous, probably racist.) But there's a deeper issue.

Progressive politicians may tolerate this lawlessness for several reasons, including camouflage and intimidation. Next to the mob in the street, elected officials look both prudent and wise, and if you don't let us give the economy to Burundi, your bank and coffee shop windows will get it, and maybe your legislature as well. But under such conditions law itself disintegrates. And then what? If Copenhagen produces a real plan, the transparent fraudulence of law in much of the Third World means it won't be carried out in key developing nations. Do we want that here?

For now, forget your position on climate change. Just ask whether lawlessness is good policy on crucial issues. You can't ignore it, because it can now clamber all over our system of self-government and no one seems surprised, let alone alarmed.

Are we all in over our heads?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Columnists, like tourists, must resist the impulse to shout when speaking normally does not get them what they want. But, with snow piling up outside, the climate change industry jetsetting around Copenhagen, and billions of dollars at stake, it is necessary to make a few observations about the real "deniers" on this issue.

Consider an Agence France-Presse story that made its way into Wednesday's Citizen and who knows how many other newspapers around the world. It began, "If the evidence is overwhelming that man-made climate change is already upon us and set to wreak planetary havoc, why do so many people refuse to believe it? The UN's panel of climate scientists, in a landmark report, described the proof of global warming as 'unequivocal.' That was two years ago, and since then hundreds of other studies have pointed to an ever-bleaker future... Yet surveys from around world reveal deep-seated doubt among the public."

To explain this important state of affairs, the story went on to quote a philosophy professor at the University of London blaming "the individual reluctance to give up our comfortable lifestyles" and "a professor of psychology at Knox University in Illinois" that "We are told a thousand times a day, notably through advertising, that the way to a happy, successful and meaningful life is through consumption" before suggesting "a darker explanation. It is the human instinct to shut out or modify a terrifying truth: that the world as we know it is heading for a smash."

I cannot help wondering how many readers, after the crucial opening sentence, said we must get the views of a professor of psychology at Knox University in Illinois. A far more rational response would be to ask scientists: Is the evidence so "overwhelming"? Which got me wondering: Who does AFP assign to cover this vexed scientific question anyway? According to one of their websites, the author of this article has been with AFP since 1995 and "Before becoming a health, science and environment reporter in January 2007, he worked in the agency's news graphics service, as a lifestyle editor, and in a business development unit for new media." If the media have a former lifestyle editor interview a professor of psychology at a university you never heard of and pronounce ex cathedra on science, it may not be a great mystery why circulation and revenues are declining. Moreover, at the risk of spoiling the lavish Copenhagen party, including importing limousines from around Europe to pamper the simple-lifestyle elite, I venture to suggest that, in addition to doubts about details, the public is aware that science does not proclaim dogma and excommunicate heretics the way the alarmists claim it does.

Long before global warming was a gleam in Al Gore's eye, Richard Weaver criticized the use of "science says" as a high rhetorical trump card in the modern era. "Science is not," he warned, "as here it would seem to be, a single concrete entity speaking with one authoritative voice .... there are many scientists holding many different theories and employing many different methods of investigation. The whole force of the word nevertheless depends upon a bland assumption that all scientists meet periodically in synod and there decide and publish what science believes. Yet anyone with the slightest scientific training knows that this is very far from a possibility."

Many members of the public know at least that much about science. Those who've done a little homework on climate change know climate is immensely variable in ways the computer models can't explain even for known past events. They know many scientists dispute the claims of the warmers even though great gobs of government money are available only to those who endorse the panic. And now they know that statistical chicanery as well as rhetorical bludgeoning has been employed to conceal the extent of scientific uncertainty. But this truth cannot be hidden or ignored any longer.

Let me therefore praise a very revealing piece of honesty that appeared in the National Post on Saturday. Britain's High Commissioner to Canada, described as a "climate-change believer," opened a print debate with Terence Corcoran on global warming with "I will grant that climate science is in its infancy. There are so many variables, positive and negative feedback loops and cycles within cycles that only fools or rogues pretend to be sure of what is going on. Our climate models are barely predictive."

Indeed. Only rogues and fools pretend to be sure. But that's what's blaring out of Copenhagen, amplified by too many uninformed journalists.

That is why there is so much doubt among members of the public. And given the importance of the issue, scientifically and economically, it bears repeating.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The first impulse of the global warmers is to brush off the leaked e-mails about fiddling numbers and silencing adversaries. The drumbeat of political and journalistic propaganda for "Copenhagen" took precious little notice of it. But like the frog in a pot, they're going to get boiled without even noticing until it's too late.

If the hacking was illegal it must be investigated. But it blew the whistle on a scandal of the first order and forces scientists to take a stand. Whatever their field or view of climate change, they know this wasn't proper science. It was bullying.

Of course bullies can be right. The global warming thesis could be correct even if some of its defenders manipulated data and behaved thuggishly. But such behaviour strongly suggests they were afraid to make their scientific case honestly and people are going to ask why. When they do they're going to find trouble a-plenty.

I suggest curious laymen start with Ian Plimer's Heaven and Earth: Global Warming the Missing Science. There's no using the "not peer reviewed" canard here; he's an award-winning professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences and his book is a compilation of well-established facts.

I've struggled with how to present Heaven and Earth ever since I read it. I could pile up zingers like "That great ball of heat in the sky drives climate." But it would misrepresent the tone of the work, a masterful compilation of what we know about climate (and, more troublingly, what we don't). Thus his chapter "The Sun" not only exhaustively catalogues Sol's impact on warming and cooling the Earth, but details similar effects on Mars, Jupiter and Triton, which I trust not even Al Gore could blame on humans.

Plimer's only problem is the proverbial drink from a fire hydrant. Page after page of things like "There is a 25-month fluctuation of sun-spots and, superimposed on the 11-year cycle (Schwabe Cycle) and 22.2 year cycle (Hale Cycle), are other solar cycles (33 year Bruckner Cycle, 87-year Gleissberg Cycle, 210-year DeVries-Suess Cycle and the 1500 ± 500 year Dansgaard-Oeschger Cycle)" gets a little overwhelming. There's something in-your-face about 2,311 footnotes, and in places I felt he'd put everything he knows on file cards, sorted them into the best possible order then hit "Print."

In places we get more data than information. But I'd like to hear politicians and journalists who say the science is beyond question or compare skeptics to Holocaust deniers dispute Plimer's conclusion that "The main cycles that have driven past climate change on Earth are the Schwabe, Hale, Gleissberg and Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles. There are no reasons to suppose anything different for the future." When they're done, they can try to refute his meticulous detailing of the Earth's history or the chemistry and physics of glaciers, water and air.

If they fail, here's what remains. Climate has always been enormously variable. There is much we do not understand about Earth's frequent dramatic freezing and sudden warming, but what we do know does not support the alarmists' clichés. We have an enormous amount of data, and Plimer subjects us to most of it; to cite just one example, massive glaciation 450 million years ago happened with far more atmospheric CO2 than today. By the time he's done poking holes in the warmers' balloon, it's not just empty, it's shredded.

I do not say this is good news. Climate is not susceptible to study using the mathematical methods that have proved so fruitful in the past 500 years in chemistry, physics, optics and so on. That means we cannot predict events that might prove catastrophic. For instance, the warming at the end of the last Ice Age, which made civilization possible, suddenly and dramatically reversed 13,000 years ago. Earth plunged into the "Younger Dryas" deep freeze in less than 100 years, possibly in a single decade, and stayed there for about 13 centuries. Should such a thing happen now, mass death would be unavoidable. Will it? We just can't tell. The computer models can't even run known past data and predict the Younger Dryas. And if they can't predict the past, they certainly can't predict the future.

Plimer also shows that warmer periods have favoured civilization and colder ones have brought upheaval, war, death and the fall of Rome. That doesn't justify wreaking havoc on the environment. But it does remind us that we know of a huge number of temperature fluctuations that cannot be linked to man-made emissions of methane or CO2 and that the mighty climate predictors can't explain even when they're not employing some statistical "trick" to hide their existence.

Concern for the environment is a good thing. But there's no excuse for cooking the books on cooking the planet. And this time they won't get away with it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Last Saturday I spent the day trying to organize a chant of "It is no act of Parliament, unless it be made by the King, the Lords and Commons." It didn't go very well. But I'm not easily discouraged.

It doesn't help that, in Canada, you have to substitute Senate for Lords. But on a panel at St. Paul's University discussing "Can the Senate act as a catalyst for informed public engagement in ethical policy making?" I said it was certainly worth a try. We're not overloaded with public engagement or ethical policymaking these days. The great obstacle to the Senate playing this role, I noted with regret, is the same one it faces whenever it tries to do anything worthwhile: Widespread public conviction that Senators are illegitimate participants in government because they are not elected.

This objection overlooks that democracy is a means toward good government, not an end in itself. A pedantic quibble? Well, few people mind that we don't vote for judges, who comprise one of three branches of government. I never heard anyone complain that public servants aren't elected even though they now generate much of the policy rubber-stamped by MPs. And today, when the ship of state is all sail and no anchor, a good case can be made that an unelected upper house is good for parliamentary government.

Following Richard Weaver's The Ethics of Rhetoric, let me ask what the Senate is meant to be before rushing into what it should do and how. I answer that it is intended as a brake upon the autocratic ambitions of the Executive, and the demagogic ambitions and reckless haste of the House of Commons. If someone has a plan for electing senators to make the Senate better able to do those things I'm keen to hear it. And if anyone is so bold, or foolhardy, as to say today we need less sober second thought in legislating, they too may speak up. Meanwhile, I shall proceed with my chant.

It comes from Edward Coke in the early 17th century. His immediate concern was that the monarch would proclaim laws on his own or with the fig leaf of assent of the Lords, brushing aside protests from the Commons. I realize Queen Elizabeth isn't about to usurp our liberties. But his larger concern about executive power is acutely relevant now that cabinet has fused with the public service and largely absorbed Parliament. Today, Coke's three separate agencies jealous of one another have been replaced by an omnipotent hybrid dominated by a small group around the prime minister and in the upper civil service before whom backbench as well as opposition MPs are effectively helpless.

Only the Senate can now stand in the way of this juggernaut. So I find it paradoxical that the people most irritated by the narrow autocratic style of, say, the Harper Tories are also generally most determined to get rid of the two independent bastions of constitutional authority that must also assent to legislation.

One of my fellow panelists observed that many nations get by with unicameral legislatures. But most places I'd be willing to live have upper houses, including Canada, Britain, Australia, the U.S., France, Germany and Japan. And while our provincial governments lack second chambers and are not conspicuously worse than our federal one, the weakness of our Senate deprives the comparison of much of its value.

Electing the Senate might seem the obvious way to reinvigorate it. But let us reason from first principles. As Jean-Louis de Lolme suggested a quarter-millennium ago, unelected upper houses are structurally a brake on populism because they cannot aspire to seize executive power, alone or in company with the Commons, in the name of "the people." They stand for the people's liberties precisely because they cannot embody the popular will.

Mind you, as a fellow panelist rightly observed on Saturday, the great weakness of the Senate is an appointment process that undermines public trust. It's not obvious that the electoral process is doing wonders for the Commons in this regard either. But prime ministers do have a vested interest in appointments that discredit their only effective institutional opponent. And if the Governor General, who actually appoints senators, won't reject a few as insufficiently distinguished and dare the PM to fire her, we may need to ponder the Australian method of electing senators, and of resolving deadlock between the two houses.

These are details. And details matter. But we must begin with this crucial point: When a breakdown of the separation of powers has left legislative authority in the hands of demagogues who wrap reckless profligacy in a skilful counterfeit of the popular will, our upper house needs more power and authority, not ridicule, abolition, or conversion into a spare tire for the Commons.

So chant it with me: "It is no act of Parliament ..."

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]