Over the years Tintin has laughed off yetis, international drug smugglers, the curses of dead Aztec kings, hundreds of concussions, crocodiles and alien abduction. Even bullets seemed only to graze him. But now the intrepid Belgian boy reporter has met his match in Quebec's language paranoia.

As the National Post reported on Saturday, 30 years of wildly popular translations of Tintin's adventures into regional dialects from Alsace to Tahiti came to a screeching halt when the book, titled Colocs en stock, got the usual reception accorded outsiders in la belle province, a withering, non-negotiable, contemptuous, "If you don't know why I'm angry I'm certainly not going to explain it." Mille millions de mille sabords, if I may say so.

My own fondness for Tintin has the sort of peculiar origin readers of this column may by now take for granted. I read comic books to teach myself the rudiments of foreign languages, normally Astérix if I can find it. But some years back I was attempting to scrape the rust off my high school German to see if any metal remained at the bottom of the heap and couldn't find the intrepid Gallic boy warrior in that language so I settled for Die Sieben Krystalkugeln.

OK, Tintin is not highbrow literature. There's no Tintin à la Recherche de Temps Perdu ... thank goodness. And I confess that one can find all sorts of faults with Tintin, from an excessive fondness for pratfalls to ludicrous coincidences to grotesque offences against the laws of physics to the appalling ethnic stereotypes of early efforts like Tintin au Congo to laughing off the tragedy of alcoholism (until Captain Haddock becomes a sympathetic character and learns to ease off the rum a few points).

But Tintin remains wildly popular around the world among children of all ages because the adventures are great fun and core virtues like courage, perseverance, imagination and loyalty dependably lead good to triumph over evil. (OK, in Tintin au Congo he blows up a helpless rhinoceros for fun, in the dark days before environmentalism; but the yeti in Tintin au Tibet is a good guy.)

So yes, there are things in these stories that might harm impressionable children. But nothing justifies the angry eruption of childish Quebec nationalists at the rendition of Tintin into Québécois dialect.

A typical reaction, in Le Devoir, sniffed "We have a bit of pride left. Don't go taking that from us." A bit of pride? Let an impure laine put one foot wrong in Quebec and you'll encounter enough wounded pride to generate a manual on Deadly Sin #7. And there's practically nowhere to put a foot right.

The strongest negative reaction, apparently, was a conviction that people were making fun of them, a strangely pervasive and intense reflection of ubiquitous wounded pride. Get over it, folks. Jokes about English teeth merely make me laugh through my crooked yellow ones. So what's the deal in Quebec?

Normally you can go wrong in another culture in two opposite ways, by ignoring local folkways or patronizing them. But decades of the Quebec nationalist elite deliberately inflaming local resentments at history, outsiders, anglos, capitalists and so forth have apparently caused the two ends of the spectrum there to swell up into angry red blobs that overlap in the middle.

Nationalist Quebecers complain if you ignore them and they complain if you don't, with no happy place in between. As the Post story noted, give them a film with French slang and they howl. Give them a comic with Quebec slang and they howl. Give them something in English and they howl. What are we meant to do, speak Latin?

It doesn't have to be that way. Visiting Israel a few years ago, I was very struck by the locals' good humour at my stumbling efforts to squeeze out a few words of Hebrew. (They thought it was especially funny that I wanted to know how to say "Please.") And it's not as though Jewish history doesn't give ample grounds for doubting the good will of outsiders.

It's possible to argue that this is just the work of the usual suspects, a small, unrepresentative minority unavoidable for comment. But one odd part of Quebec's distinct culture seems to be extreme deference to elites. At any rate, Casterman doesn't just say Quebecers' reaction to the regional edition is unprecedented. They say it's so intense they won't produce a second volume in the series. Which is, of course, further proof that outsiders don't respect Quebec. See how they turn their backs.

Imagine Tintin undone by Quebec bigotry. It seems so pitiful.

[First appeared in the Ottawa Citizen]

If vindication is sweet, why do I have this bitter taste in my mouth over socialized medicine like I just ate stale kibble?

I ask because it is now 16 years (where do they go?) since I began an article in Fraser Forum: "Would you eat in a restaurant whose owners ordered out? If the answer is no, you need to think hard about socialized medicine, and about the case of Robert Bourassa. You also need to think about the 'restaurant critics,' the media, who haven't reported what sounds to me like a major story." Bourassa had gone to the United States for cancer treatment, but neither he, his political fellows nor the media claque would admit that citizens ought in principle to have the same right.

What has been the result of years of culpable silence since? Our doctor shortage has grown worse, our waiting lists longer, our expenses higher, our population older and our politicians still yap in the same shrill, annoying manner. And now Newfoundland and Labrador Premier Danny Williams is off to the U.S. for medical treatment. In the interest of decency I wish him a quick and successful recovery. But just maybe he'd like to reciprocate by admitting that if it's good for him, it could be good for us.

Which is not to say we could all afford it. Williams is in the enviable position of having a big pile of money (back on The Rock he is sometimes known as "Danny Millions" for his success in both the cable TV and law businesses). I'm not against people being rich; I'm just not good at it myself. But I don't think that's anyone else's fault. And I'm not so naive as to suppose the rich and well connected won't have nicer stuff than everyone else.

This view may lead to accusations that I have a heart of stone and head to match. But at least I don't say one thing and do another, or pretend I've created a utopia where none exists. Which leaves me a lot better off than Danny Williams in non-financial matters. Or the normally vocal defenders of Canadian health care, who may be afraid to bite the hand that feeds them. But what price dignity?

If I could, I'd ask the Newfoundland premier: If our system is the best, why are you going elsewhere? If the answer is that you need to jump the queue because you're really sick, and Canadian law makes it impossible here, aren't you admitting we've established a system particularly favourable to the very wealthy? And if that's the case, doesn't a decent respect to the opinions of mankind, or at least our bit of it, require you to say whether it was on purpose and whether it's a good thing?

The question is pressing. Consider these other items just from this week's clipping file. First, from Saturday's Citizen, the Vancouver Island Health Authority apologized for leaving an elderly man in a bed in a hospital hallway for five months and then attempting to charge his family $55 a day for these luxury accommodations. Wednesday's Citizen reported that in response to Dalton McGuinty's threatened spending freeze, "Eastern Ontario hospitals say they would have to make cuts that would cause 'irreparable damage' to the region's health system if implemented ..."

It would be tedious, nay revolting, to read McGuinty's self-satisfied prose over the years about saving our health care system with a tax hike he first promised not to implement then denied was a tax. But no matter how badly they bungle the system, they insist that it is for our own good because we are not under any circumstances to be trusted to make our own arrangements. You would not, in fact, treat a dog like this (see another of my 1993 articles, in the April Fraser Forum, on being allowed to buy CAT scans for Rover and Fido but not granny). So what even lower life form do they take us for?

The press have done much better on the story this time around, including Don Martin in this newspaper on Wednesday noting that Williams will be famous in the U.S. for this decision, but not in a way helpful to Barack Obama. So let's exploit this publicity to focus on the core issue. A third of a millennium ago an English Puritan, denouncing abuse by the powerful, said he could not believe Providence had sent "a few men into the world, ready booted and spurred to ride, and millions ready saddled and bridled to be ridden." He was promptly executed but his phrase echoes still as our masters gallop off to the United States for health care they deny to us chattels at home.

Our politicians cannot figure out how to fund health care as currently structured, or find any way to reduce the growth in costs and will not admit they are wrong. Despite this record of dismal failure they will let you rot in a hospital corridor while they get treatment abroad, because they think they are way, way better than you. Is this a great country or what? Woof.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

[First published at www.mercatornet.com] Barack Obama gave a decent election speech on Wednesday night. Unfortunately he was meant to be delivering a State of the Union address.

No one expects such an address to be entirely apolitical, or crafted to please his philosophical adversaries. But Barack Obama finds himself in a peculiar political hole in which his own smoothness makes the sides unclimbable. And plainly he does not know it.

A year into his mandate the wave of enthusiasm generated by his campaign oratory has receded, leaving a thick residue of public suspicion that he’s all talk and no action. The last thing he needed was one more airy and self-satisfied display of rhetorical prowess when an endless string of precisely such performances have him plunging in the polls and unable to secure legislative triumphs.

Even his rhetoric seems to have lost the charm it once possessed. His words are too polished to have edges; he speaks plausibly, but never produces a memorable phrase. And he has the three deadly unities of dull speaking: his pitch, pacing and volume never vary. Somehow in the campaign it seemed cool, especially to chronically ironic youth, but it is difficult now to recall why.

Contrast his delivery with that of Martin Luther King Jr. We cannot expect every orator to match Dr. King on a historic occasion, of course. But we can all watch his August 18, 1963 "I Have a Dream" and learn from a master. King’s splendid words are set to appropriate vocal music: He soars to a higher register or thunders from the depths; rushes onward in an unstoppable flood then pauses majestically; alternates quiet conviction with intense fervour. Obama just drones.

Wednesday’s speech was pseudo-professorial. It had the slightly patronising, crisp manner of a college instructor addressing ill-informed though somewhat promising students, but not the content of even a second-rate university lecture.

The president pedantically quoted the Constitutional requirement that he "from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union". But given his PR woes, information was the crucial word. Instead his speech was virtually fact-free, relying at key points upon the sorts of touching anecdotes effective on the stump but insulting to members of Congress with detailed policy responsibilities.

When he finally got to the deficit, more than half way through the speech, he promptly blamed George Bush for it. But he did not say how big it was. When he called for a spending freeze, he did not say how much it would save or why he now embraced an idea he once rejected. When he said it would exempt four key spending categories, he failed to explain what share of federal spending would be left unaffected. When he advocated abolishing the capital gains tax on small business investment, he didn’t say what the threshold for "small" business was.

Within hours MSNBC published an Associated Press "fact check" piece noting inaccuracies in more than a few of the facts he did offer. Mark Alexander of The Patriot Post chimed in that Obama’s only other reference to the Constitution, "We find unity in our incredible diversity, drawing on the promise enshrined in our Constitution, the notion that we’re all created equal" was botched because that’s the Declaration of Independence, a strange blunder from a former University of Chicago professor of constitutional law.

Complaints about lack of substance from politicians might themselves seem ritualistic. But compare the 1975 State of the Union by Gerald Ford, who not even his most ardent supporters considered an orator:

"To bolster business and industry and to create new jobs, I propose a 1-year tax reduction of $16 billion. Three-quarters would go to individuals and one-quarter to promote business investment. This cash rebate to individuals amounts to 12 percent of 1974 tax payments – a total cut of $12 billion, with a maximum of $1,000 per return."

Good idea or not, it’s specific. As was "we must reduce oil imports by 1 million barrels per day by the end of this year and by 2 million barrels per day by the end of 1977." Ford also warned that "If we project the current built-in momentum of Federal spending through the next 15 years, State, Federal, and local government expenditures could easily comprise half of our gross national product. This compares with less than a third in 1975."

This is actual information. Obama offered only hype, blame-shifting, and vague initiatives suitable for a campaign based on hope but deeply inadequate for a president mired in discontent because of the growing conviction that he’s all talk. (In 7,000 words he gave just 13 actual dollar figures; in 4,000 words in 1975 Ford managed 27.)

The speech also spectacularly lacked any sense of occasion. We cannot all be Abraham Lincoln either. But we should know that inappropriate bursts of levity and casual diction undermine any attempt to project gravitas to dispel a gathering image as shallow.

Obama conspicuously failed to engage in blunt talk about the nature or intractability of problems that would remain even if Congress did what he wanted. And the only specific fault he admitted, failing to explain his health care plan to voters, was catastrophically obtuse. Even if one grants that his plan is capable of clear and compelling explanation, he has given by one count 30 health care speeches as president. The notion that one more will do the trick is not now the solution to his political troubles but their cause, when so many Americans doubt he can do anything other than give pretty speeches.

Had he entitled Wednesday’s address "Why I was right all along and you should do what I say" it would have given fair notice of its content and tone. Its laundry list of solutions mirrored his campaign, unintentionally signalling that he had forgotten nothing and learned nothing. With a few minor edits it would have been a blockbuster in October 2008. But in January 2010 it merely reinforces the suspicion that Mr. Obama is a one-trick pony, and that trick is electoral not governmental.

Every step he took was false. He smirked that "Our administration has had some political setbacks this year, and some of them were deserved" but failed to say which or when or why, let alone take personal blame or indicate lessons learned. Instead he blamed Congress, lobbyists and partisan politicians, everyone but him. He even managed to provoke a Supreme Court Justice to shake his head and mouth "Not true" on camera, proving that you can deplore polarization while engaging in it, by vulgar berating of the Court as it sat solemnly in its robes before him.

The lack of sense of occasion was overwhelming. Not merely that it was the State of the Union, but the political context in which he found himself giving it. At the end he declared fiercely "I don’t quit" as though delivering the State of the Administration or State of Obama rather than State of the Union address.

For a different president, with different problems, it might have been the right rhetorical note of defiance. For Barack Obama, it was one more proof of shallow narcissism. And the last thing he needed.

By now I've reached the point in my career where I have a sizeable collection of half-written articles on issues that once seemed important that a search party couldn't find today. I don't expect my dusty files to command your sympathy, but spare some alarm for our collective attention deficit disorder. When we quietly forget trendy policy concepts without analyzing their failures properly we don't learn, we just flit about posing.

Consider the Japanese economic model. Remember when the land of the Rising Sun was going to show us all how crony corporatism beat free markets hollow? Or Germany, or Europe? Heck, I'm old enough to remember when the Soviet Union was a superior model for Third World development. These ideas sure look silly now. But emptying an old closet full of snake oil isn't like quietly purging your bell-bottoms and big glasses.

In this context please ponder Haiti. I've been getting more than 100 press releases a week on the devastating earthquake. Of course I'm not criticizing the urgent humanitarian response to a massive disaster. But surely the people really busy helping out have no time to draft, edit, proof and send out a flood of generally self-serving publicity as though it constituted some important form of international first aid.

The time politicians spend passing each other notes is time not spent digging through rubble or handing out water. Besides, it tends to create the unpleasant impression they are wasting scarce brain power figuring out how to pose to best effect against a riveting backdrop of human tragedy.

Most press releases have at least resisted the crass impulse to use the crisis as leverage for a favoured policy change. But, within two days, the Bloc Québécois demanded a "Marshall Plan" for Haiti as if the Marshall Plan were not, very famously, a successful initiative to rebuild advanced industrial economies devastated by war rather than a plan to promote development where it had not previously taken place.

Six days later the head of the IMF, who has a PhD in economics, repeated this inane demand.

Such bloviation is not harmless. The latest rhetorical trend is self-satisfied and misleading rhetoric about a 10-year effort to help Haiti as though we had any genuine idea how to do it. Remember, an equally powerful earthquake near San Francisco in 1989 killed 63 people rather than 200,000. The lethal difference is that Haiti is an "underdeveloped" country. We've been trying to help such countries since long before poverty was renamed "the Third World" with surprisingly little success.

And, while there are some clear lessons from decades of failed development aid, we don't seem able to focus on them. Indeed, a month from now I expect Haiti will have disappeared from my journalistic inbox as completely as, say, effective reform of Canadian health care.

Or aboriginal policy in Canada. Once a hot topic, it too has gone almost totally cold despite occasional tragic or alarming news stories. Which does not, I hasten to add, mean it's not still a major problem. Indeed, it means it's likely to get a lot worse.

There are a number of reasons why progress on the aboriginal front is difficult, from a deep background of historical tragedy, to aboriginal leaders' stridently impossible demands to oily and nebulous mainstream politicians.

I don't mean politically impossible; I mean metaphysically. History cannot be undone and the white man will not get back on his ship and go "home" to Europe. Any mainstream politician who tries to engage the Indian Industry in real discussions courts policy failure and PR disaster. But that does not begin to excuse their lack of imagination or courage.

Here I'd like to insert a plug for the riveting new novel Uprising by my colleague Doug Bland, chair of defence management studies at Queen's University (full disclosure: my wife and I are credited with helping in the editing). Uprising combines page-turning action with a sympathetic portrayal of many points of view including frustrated aboriginal radicals. The one group Doug's vitriolic pen fully dissolves, and rightly so, are politicians who ooze their way to the top with emptily smug rhetoric. With no vision beyond seeing themselves re-elected and advancing in ministerial rank, they will not speak hard truths to voters or aboriginal activists, and cannot bring themselves to make major policy changes that might avert the drift to disaster.

The scary scenario Doug outlines is a warning, not a prediction. But it is horrifyingly plausible in many ways. And when it reaches its disastrous conclusion, Ottawa is reduced to a pitiful attic full of abandoned files on forgotten initiatives.

For a journalist that's just life. For a nation it's a major problem.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

We need a new punchline to "What do you call a Republican Senate candidate from Massachusetts?" The old one was "Nobody calls him" or "You can't remember either?" I don't want to hear what they're calling him in the White House right now. But I'm calling him payback for a Nobel Peace Prize. And proof that I was right.

To my right-wing friends and colleagues, I told you Barack Obama was not as dangerous as you thought. Sure, he's far to the left and plausible. But he's also amazingly narrow, a stereotypical liberal always talking about other points of view who has never knowingly been in the presence of such a thing. And he lacks the political skills that made, say, FDR a menace to America economically and constitutionally.

To my left-wing friends (if any) and colleagues, I told you his agenda was neither well-thought out nor popular. Far too many commentators, like Obama himself, do not understand right-wing views intellectually or electorally. They assume everyone is, at heart, a Harvard professor, and they thought Americans had finally realized everything was George W. Bush's fault, boo hiss, let's have socialized medicine. In Canada, the short version was, "Finally, Americans have become Canadians," which was exceptionally silly.

At least no one is pretending Scott Brown's upset victory was a blip or a local aberration. The best line so far is The Patriot Post's "The Scott heard 'round the world" and there is no doubt this outcome has large implications. Not that Massachusetts has turned into Mississippi; the real punchline to my opening joke may well be "A Democrat," since Brown is pro-choice and once posed nude for Cosmopolitan. Not exactly a God and guns Republican. More a David Frum Republican ... but then David probably wishes the GOP would run Edward Brooke for president. Sorry, that's a Massachusetts Republican senator joke; Brooke, on the left fringe of the GOP anyway, lost their last Bay State Senate seat in 1979 (they haven't held both at once since 1953).

In the long run, this result might be less ominous for the Democrats than getting thumped in the Virginia governor's race two months ago. If Virginia is not becoming a swing state, as it seemed in 2008, it blasts their hopes of recovering majority party status, whereas no one supposes this outcome gives Massachusetts even a slight purple tinge.

But a Republican victory in a dark blue state is important. It underlines how badly Barack Obama is doing, in polls and by proxy in elections (and that's without yet having a major foreign policy disaster), because he overpromised and underdelivered domestically. I do not know who ever believed his clichés about nonpartisanship, pragmatism and changing Washington. But one man's pragmatism is another man's ideology, and when the product arrived, definitely not as shown in the ad, the clients' resulting disgust was hardly surprising given the product ... and the clients.

Americans sufficiently upset with George Bush to switch and vote his party out were generally unhappy that the economy was going sour, the budget was out of control and there was probably a connection between them. Remember: Bush never vetoed a big spending bill, a major reason the GOP got demoralized and was punished politically.

I do not say John McCain would have done better. But I do say that if Barack Obama had promised in 2008 the kind of spending Democrats produced in 2009, we would not be wondering how a McCain presidency would have gone. No one, especially not the swing voters who gave the balance of Congressional power to Blue Dog Democrats, wanted this before it happened or likes it now.

Americans are not immune to the lure of free money, especially my otherwise beloved Middle Americans. But they do insist it be free and, since it never is, a backlash is unavoidable and legitimate. They threw the bums out in 2008 the only way they could. But do not suppose their arms are now exhausted.

As for socialized medicine, some are making a big deal out of the Democrats now being one seat short of the 60 needed to ram health-care reform through the Senate. But if a party that still controls all three Houses (upper, lower and White) needs procedural tricks to pass supposedly popular legislation, then obviously it's not popular, for reasons so obvious only an intellectual needs them explained: It is intolerably complicated, will cost a fortune and will make U.S. health care worse.

The American people do not share the commentariat's cultural and economic radicalism and, unlike voters in other democracies, are not too demoralized to push back. And if commentators like diversity as much as they claim to, they should be happy.

What do I call a Republican Senate candidate from Massachusetts? Proof that the Republic is all right, and most commentators are all wrong.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

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]