Once in a while you hear an idea so remarkable you can’t believe you didn’t think of it. The light bulb (Edison), telephones (Bell), telephone soliciting (Satan), teaching grade six kids vaginal lubrication (Dalton McGuinty). But the one I’m currently kicking myself for missing is Canadian Anglicans’ plan to cope with declining membership and revenue by soliciting corporate advertising. Why didn’t Jesus think of the Sermon on the Billboard? Yea, verily. Michael Valpy wrote in Tuesday’s Globe and Mail “The Anglican Church of Canada is inviting corporate sponsorship of its national convention this year, selling space for brand logos on delegate documents, advertising signs in its meeting spaces and a private lunch for executives with the church’s senior archbishop. It’s the first time in its 117-year history that the Canadian church made its governing synod available for a mess of pottage... Asked about the genesis of the sponsorship idea, Vianney Carrière, the Anglicans’ national director of communications and information resources, said: ‘The genesis is the need for money.’... The synod agenda is described as ‘timely, relevant and important and includes debates, resolutions and presentations on major global issues such as poverty, human sexuality, the rights of indigenous peoples and the care of the environment.’”

OK, that’s a tough sell. But I still think turning religion into an advertising rather than a spiritual venture has enormous untapped potential that not even Bruce Barton recognized when he depicted Christ as the world’s greatest ad man back in the 1920s.

Start with ancient Egyptian religion. Among the advantages here is it won’t offend anyone because no one worships Ra any more (at least I don’t think so; I suppose I could steal one of Dan Brown’s ideas and write a thriller about a journalist pursued by a secret Ra cult because of a sacrilegious column but I’m going to get so rich with this other stuff I won’t have to bother). Now you may think a lack of adherents limits the commercial possibilities even if the whole justification for the Anglican initiative is that they, too, are running out of parishioners. But Horus, Isis and that crowd offer a spectacular advantage unrelated to bodies in pews: pyramids.

That’s right. Pyramids. A marketing dream beyond compare. First of all, they’re famous and evocative. Just as writing a “vampire-themed” book where the vampires aren’t evil, smelly or allergic to sunlight still rips off the mystique painstakingly crafted by Bram Stoker et al., so pyramids automatically entrance people.

Secondly, they’re really big and obvious. The great pyramid at Giza was the tallest building in the world for almost 4,000 years and progress has yet to surround it with ugly cement or glass-and-steel boxes. What a spot for a billboard.

Following the Anglican inspiration to try to squeeze money out of companies that already do business with the church, I suppose you’d start trolling for pyramid sponsors among embalmers or goldsmiths. But since no one knows much about ancient Egyptian religion anyway (I mean honestly, who even in Cairo has much of an opinion about Osiris today) I expect you could hawk breakfast cereal as well. “Ptah says start your afterlife with barley bits!”

I realize some people think the pyramids were built by aliens with a strange sense of humour. But since I’m not too worried about them returning in wrath or for five percent of net revenue, I think a few cute ET-type product spokesmen are also a strong possibility.

As for the sphinx, why should it sit there mute and mysterious when it could be dressed up as everyone’s favourite hamburger clown? Talk about product placement. OK, the Anglicans might consider it in poor taste as they’ve sort of gone off salt of the earth. But hey, even the best idea involves some challenges.

Like marketing with Osama bin Laden types. Other than “blows up real good” it’s not obvious what a jihadi values in an airplane, building, car, pair of shoes or person. A belief that attractive clothing on women leads to earthquakes is a godsend to cartoonists but a nightmare for marketers. But there’s already an Easter Island statue Kleenex dispenser and I’m sure those babies could also push headphones or pillows. And let’s use all those smiling buddhas to peddle enticing terrestrial pleasures not boring spiritual calm. Fancy microwave entrees, say, or skin care products.

Now we’re all rich, I have one final wacky idea for you Anglicans. Ordinarily you seem content to dwindle and vanish in a comfortably sanctimonious, socially just manner. But if you’re desperate enough to consider advertising, why not try using your convention, churches and social groups to sell people this “Bible”, the dead Nazarene carpenter and salvation in return for virtue?

Nah. Too crazy.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

[First appeared on Mercatornet.com] Whatever happened to Britain? I realize a map of Europe still shows it sitting off the north coast of France. But what happened to the land of Kipling, Drake and Horatio Nelson, and for that matter Edward Coke and William Blackstone?

This melancholy thought was underlined for me the other day by a Raffles story. Raffles, for those of you not familiar with second-rate vaguely seedy Victorian crime writing, was a "gentleman thief" created by Arthur Conan Doyle's brother-in-law E.W. Hornung, whose escapades are narrated by his faithful sidekick "Bunny." (No cheap shots about public schools please.)

One might find the stories morally as well as aesthetically disagreeable. But they are permeated by a special kind of Britishness, an assurance of cultural strength and resilience so profound that elegant misconduct by a superficially respectable member of the elite merely added spice and depth to British life. This atmosphere of effortless excellence lingers as late as, say, the mid-20th-century's The Avengers or James Bond. But it was dissipating fast even then, and seems to me to be all but gone today.

This feeling has been growing on me since I had a chance to walk around London two years ago. The evocative magic of Marble Arch, the Albert Memorial, Trafalgar Square and Big Ben remain. I was inspired, even transported, just to be there, gazing at statues of real historical heroes from Wellington to "Monty". But I was also brought almost to tears by the powerfully peculiar sensation of walking among ruins that had not fallen down.

After Rome fell, one could see the broken buildings, the toppled columns, the shattered facades, and sense that something great had been destroyed. But at least the Romans, even in their terminal decay, insisted that barbarians take the trouble to knock the place down. Somehow Britain succumbed to dry rot instead. London remains the heart of a great empire, but what happened to the body? Where are the limbs, the brains, the blood?

I am tempted to blame the Labour Party, whose rise to power starting in the 1930s seems to coincide with Britain's tumble from insouciant magnificence into shabby ruin. But it would be unfair for two reasons. First, in the period of Labour ascendancy the Conservatives have generally been no better, accepting decline if not actively promoting it and, despite Mrs. Thatcher's efforts, deceiving voters with the shadow but not substance of a real alternative.

The revelation that the current Labour Party deliberately allowed mass immigration precisely to alter the character of the electorate so as to rub the noses of Tories in multiculturalism is exactly the sort of thing I mean. Of course there was a small outcry among the usual suspects. But the Parliamentary Conservative party didn't have the guts to make a major issue out of it and, one suspects, they didn't so much lack the courage of their convictions as suffer a massive deficit in both areas.

When Bertold Brecht suggested dissolving the electorate and electing a new one in the 1950s, it was considered the height of villainous communist arrogance and social engineering. When Labour was caught doing it 50 years later, no one really cared enough about the old one to object.

Thus my second reason for not concentrating too much on the Labour Party is that the persistent habit of electing socialists who seem ashamed of their country is more likely to be a symptom than a cause of decay. It reflects on voters and citizens more than on politicians.

I am not inclined to list the sort of yobbish behaviour now too evidently on display as a cause of the decline. Possibly it is not even a symptom. There has always been a drunken, rowdy side to the British character that was, I think, part of the strength of the Empire. Upper-class twits may have commanded the regiments, but rough-edged Cockneys and Highlanders and Ulstermen formed the infantry squares and furnished the redoubtable sergeant-majors who made the redcoats what they were. The distressing impression I have formed, however, is that somehow all the mortar has been washed away, leaving the building blocks scattered in a disorganized fashion.

It may seem absurd, and offensive, that such a small foggy island should have played such a large role for so long. It may be particularly offensive that Britons had cultural habits that let Britannia rule the waves when her population was smaller even than that of various European rivals, let alone those enormous portions of the globe whose combined resources could not fend off a "butcher and bolt" expedition or even a gunboat.

On the other hand, recall that one of the most famous gunboat incidents involved the Royal Navy shelling the palace of the sultan of Zanzibar until he agreed to end the slave trade... and then billing him for the expended ammunition. This episode reminds us that when Britannia ruled the waves the British were a mighty force for good in the world even if they were at times insufferable about it. And the critical problem seems not to be that foreigners resented this special quality of Britishness, but that somehow the inhabitants of Albion themselves began to do so.

For many years the British, broadly speaking, were convinced that they would somehow find a way through any difficulty. That conviction was not itself the foundation of their success; the British really did a lot of things much better than other people, from creating wealth to tolerating dissent to fighting. But when it disappeared, when it started to seem somehow gauche to think Britain was different from other cultures and should be, it all went to wrack and ruin.

Now it may also be argued that, for all this decline and despite the Labour Party underfunding and overstretching their military in a way not even our governments can match, Britain remains the second-most-powerful country in the world. After the United States, no one can project force like the British and, moreover, no one else is as likely to do it for generally good motives.

I should also note the argument by Niall Ferguson in his book Empire that what finally broke Britain as a world power was throwing everything the Empire had left into the struggle against Hitler which, in his view, justified everything about the Empire including its less attractive features. And undoubtedly World War II took a lot out of Britain. But so, surely, did the long struggle against France from the 17th century through the final defeat of Napoleon, which only inspired Britons to new greatness.

For that reason I find the contrast between Britain just a century ago and Britain today both sad and scary. Nobody conquered them. Nobody took away that special feel and the extraordinary results it generated. They just seem to have gotten bored and demoralized and tossed it aside. As far as I can see they did it to themselves.

If that's true, the same thing could happen to us. In fact I think it is. So next time you're in London ask yourself: As recently as the 1940s it inspired the inhabitants to sing that there'd always be an England. And now it's only true geographically. It's enough to make Nelson jump off his column.

Two years ago, James Taranto of the Wall Street Journal aptly called former U.S. President Jimmy Carter "an international nuisance who aspires to be a menace." But it is curious how often the current president, despite all the powers his office gives him to do real harm, seems to be stuck merely being annoying.

Consider Barack Obama's new nuclear doctrine. He claims the United States would not retaliate with nuclear weapons against a nation that attacked it with chemical or biological weapons but was in compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This assertion probably isn't even true. But it's certainly worrisome.

It is made worse, not better, by its misleading veneer of good sense. The ostensible idea is to give nations an incentive to comply with the NNPT rather than go about providing terrorists with radioactive material. The goal is appealingly rational: Nobody wants terrorists to have nuclear devices except terrorists and their more deranged sympathizers. And the method looks rational, too: It relies on incentives rather than exhortation.

The difficulty is that it only affects people who are seriously considering attacking America with weapons of mass destruction. And the only change from their point of view is that if they pick the right WMD, they supposedly face far less devastating retaliation than before. So making such an attack now appears more attractive while not making it looks just the same.

I say "appears" advisedly. This so-called policy doesn't even really help the bad guys, because a major biological attack on the United States by an identifiable government is just as likely to provoke a nuclear response as before the president's fatuous babbling. But it might trick them into thinking otherwise. So all it really does is marginally increase the risk that thousands of Americans and then thousands of non-Americans will die. Not exactly a win-win policy, is it?

I must not call making it more tempting for evil regimes to try to slaughter millions of the citizens Obama is sworn to protect "stupid" in the technical sense. Obama is many things, but he's not dumb. Indeed, I think what really lies behind this policy is a very bad idea held primarily by smart people.

I believe the real conceptual basis of this gesture is the notion that tension in the world is due, in large part, to fear of the democracies and their bullying foreign policies, so measures to reduce that fear by softening both the tone of American foreign policy and the military capacity behind it will make aggression against the West less rather than more likely. Again, one cannot properly label this policy "stupid" because it is held by large numbers of intelligent people, just as it was in the 1930s, the 1900s, and indeed the 1970s. But it is a very, very bad idea.

So is the just-concluded gabfest about better control of nuclear material which, again, had a dangerously misleading coating of good sense about it. Its goal was not irrational. Nobody except maniacs favour careless handling of things that could atomically go boom. Nor is the method stupid; it cannot hurt for decent governments to pay more attention to where they put dangerous radioactive stuff. But can anyone show me an example from history where real, stupidity-class carelessness in the handling of potentially dangerous material played a major role in letting the villains strike at the good guys?

No. The real dangers are quite different. What has encouraged aggression since recorded history began is, first, a pervasive and consistent reluctance to accept the existence of evil in the world and, second, an even more pervasive and consistent reluctance to deal with evil once you have been forced to notice it. A relatively trivial, but revealing, example is the Canadian proposal to impose an oil embargo on Italy after Mussolini attacked Ethiopia in 1935. This proposal got people's attention, because it would really have hurt, and was promptly repudiated by all the democracies including, humiliatingly, Canada's own.

The result, naturally, was to embolden evil. It tipped the bad guys off that we knew they were bad, but assured them we were currently unwilling to do anything important or painful about it so they should arm fast and strike hard before we recovered our wits and spines. Which very nearly led to Hitler conquering the world. And, again, everybody knew Hitler was re-arming Germany in violation of its international obligations. It was their unwillingness to act on this knowledge, not careless handling of tank parts, that led to the blitzkrieg.

For Barack Obama to expend time and effort and enlist the prestige of his office on initiatives that distract us from the need to acknowledge and confront evil is certainly irritating. On reflection, I'm inclined to find it scary as well.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Can we think about the niqab issue a bit? The answer may be no. We may be either unwilling or unable to make sense of the matter. But as stupidity is undignified let's give it a try.

On Monday a Globe and Mail columnist snootily pronounced Quebec's niqab debate "just more proof, if it were needed, that minority rights should never be left to government". Who does she think should protect them? Corporations? Newts? Space aliens? It is hard to talk sense in such an environment but I am determined to try.

My starting point is that cultural habits matter. I realize this contention is itself controversial. Some people, including me, say culture is a set of working tools.

And when we encounter a widespread habit, we ask what this particular tool is for and how well it works. Others say cultural habits do not matter, that superficial differences in the ways we do things have no more bearing on what we do, who we are or what we're like than the colour we happen to paint our house.

To these people the basic analogy is the belief, popular in my youth, that Eskimos rubbed noses instead of kissing. I do not believe they did any such thing even before they became Inuit (illustrating, incidentally, that multiculturalists do not believe what they say, since their response to a cultural habit of using inappropriate ethnic terms is anything but tolerant).

No doubt many things are superficial. Two men holding hands in Ottawa are likely to be gay whereas in Saudi Arabia they are just good friends. But not all cultural differences are trivial; if two men in Saudi Arabia were thought to be gay they would face lynching or execution.

Given that grisly reality, some multiculturalists give the nihilistic response that while cultures clearly do differ we are in no position to pass judgment on how others conduct their affairs. To which I retort that if you can't see that clitorectomies are horribly wrong you are a dim-witted accessory to evil.

So before we continue, please take a pencil and paper and make a list of all the people who cover their faces in interactions with others.

I get the Ku Klux Klan, holdup men, terrorists and riot instigators. Notice anything about this list? Right. All of them are denying the humanity of those with whom they interact. The purpose of covering the face is not remotely comparable to the purpose of covering the hair. It is to establish a gulf across which normal moral links do not bind us.

It is not immediately obvious to me whether the niqab is designed to deny my humanity, hers or both. But I am equally unwilling to tolerate any of these. And by that I do mean I want it banned.

To begin with, on practical grounds, governments not only can, but must, require people to identify themselves in a wide variety of settings. Even a speeding ticket requires the officer to verify the person behind the wheel is who they claim to be. And to demand the state furnish a female police officer lest a man's gaze should soil a woman is to require my government to sanction an invidious separation between the sexes.

As to non-state interactions, I would normally insist the state has no business regulating dress unless it impairs a legitimate state function, is obscene or is so odd as to be either threatening or dangerously distracting to motorists (the legal offense of "stunting"). But hiding your face, unless you're a mascot or playing some other immediately identifiable role, isn't like wearing a turban or a hijab. It's dehumanizing, on purpose.

If I were free to respond by refusing to sell to, hire, or speak to a person who scorned to let me see their face I might be willing to leave the matter there. But the nanny state has raised the stakes. Under modern law, to shun a person is to invite a human rights complaint, so we either ban the niqab or ban any display of distaste for it. I say ban the niqab.

If that sounds unfair, tell me what the niqab is for. Why would you cover not only a woman's face but even her hands? Is it so other tribes cannot tell if she's young and worth abducting? If so, I tell you bluntly we don't steal women here. Nor do we mutilate their genitals, marry three at once (pending the next zany court ruling), kill them for having boyfriends, wed them before they're adults or make them go around with bags on their heads.

So never mind a haughty "This is my culture" with an unspoken "you dirty kafir" after it. Tell me: Why the niqab? Is it because she will be defiled by my gaze, or because I will?

I warn you in advance I'm not accepting either answer. But I defy you to produce another.

And if you demand that we accommodate behaviour you're not even willing to explain, my answer is No.

In this country we employ reason. And despite what you may sometimes see in newspapers, we would be ashamed not to.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

When a bunch of people gathered in Montreal last weekend to figure out what Canadian political liberalism is, it presented a paradox. You'd only go if you knew you were a liberal. But if you don't know what liberalism is, how can you tell you are one?

I'm not criticizing the conference. It was thoroughly justified, politically and intellectually, by the maxim that if you don't know where you're going, you'll probably end up somewhere else. I just think Liberals should also ponder the deeper point that if you don't know who you are, it might be somebody else there in the mirror.

Whoever it is, it's not a classical liberal. But I don't want any libertarians shouting "Stop thief" respecting the label. It will distract us from discussing what liberalism is, why its program has changed since Victoria ruled India, and what nevertheless lies at its core.

I submit that the essence of liberalism is liberation. Liberation from specific restraints in specific circumstances, certainly. But a more general endorsement of Rousseau's "Man is born free but is everywhere in chains."

And liberalism in this country has another traditional quality that, while less central, is very important to the current project. Unlike their colleagues in many countries, Canadian Liberals have consistently fought the socialists politically and intellectual because, ironically, of a favourite saying of socialist icon Tommy Douglas: "The trouble with socialists is that they let their bleeding hearts go to their bloody heads."

In my view the rebirth of Canadian liberalism must start here, with the hard heads. Back in 2005, a famous Canadian-born Harvard professor sternly reminded the federal Liberal biennial convention that Liberals know how to say "No." I say that means no to special interests, to voters, and to their own bad ideas, wrong impulses or mistaken paths. Especially as you must be tough-minded about where you've been to see where you should be going.

Here's where you've been. First, 19th century classical liberals identified Rousseau's chains with feudal restraints on economic freedom. Politically they succeeded in removing most barriers to freedom of contract but it didn't work out metaphysically even if it did make us all much richer.

Early 20th-century interventionist liberals then decided the main chain was material want. Politically they succeeded in creating massive social programs but that didn't work out metaphysically and it's not doing well fiscally either.

Finally, late 20th-century social liberals decided, on the analogy of the civil rights movement, that the chains keeping us from authentic freedom were primarily those of social exclusion. Now if you liberals are comfortable with the prissy tone and coercive apparatus of political correctness, I have nothing more to say to you except you clearly don't know how to say no to dangerous foolishness.

So before we continue, gaze hard into the mirror and ask how the person looking back at you feels about Ann Coulter being silenced at the University of Ottawa.

I grant that she's obnoxious. But if you believe a university can be dedicated to the pursuit of truth and at the same time create a "safe space" where no militant progressive ever hears a discouraging word, with unruly crowds as the enforcement mechanism, you have no use for ideas anyway.

Otherwise, let's revisit Rousseau's "chain" issue. I presume none of you now think that dramatically reducing state intervention might knock off mankind's fetters. But are you tough-minded enough to admit that the current welfare state is holding us back from creative policy, and blighting lives, by costing too much and delivering too little?

Remember, in your glory days Liberals didn't break the bank in pursuit of social justice. Instead you fended off the NDP with fiscal prudence and the Conservatives with compassion. (And if you can truly get spending under control while the Tories wallow in red ink, you will once again consign those hapless chumps to the political wilderness the way you used to.)

What, then, of social justice? Well, if big social programs are working badly at excessive cost, you need to do a much better job of identifying specific social "choke points" keeping people from fulfilling their potential, and slashing what doesn't work. Pension reform obviously commands your attention. But so does education reform, health care reform, welfare reform and smaller, smarter economic intervention.

I'm not saying it will be easy. I'm not even saying it's possible.

I personally endorse Aleksandr Herzen's tart retort to Rousseau's dream of transforming human existence: "Fish were born to fly, yet everywhere they swim." But that's a topic for a conference on Canadian Conservative political thought.

Speaking of paradoxes.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Barack Obama won a dramatic, unexpected political victory on health care this week. Even in partisan terms it might be wise to withhold congratulations until November 2. But here's the question I want to ask: When's the last time a major government program did what it was supposed to do, or cost what it was supposed to cost?

I concede that it's a political triumph. The president got a bill passed that looked doomed and emerged looking more like a leader. And I won't quibble that his vaunted non-partisanship came down to a House of Representatives vote in which not one single Republican supported his health-care bill. We have political parties because people disagree on fundamental issues, and it is as undesirable for politicians to deprive voters of important choices by ganging up on us as it is unlikely, given their propensity to squabble. But it doesn't much matter.

What matters is the policy question: Why do we think this bill will work the way it's meant to? I am constantly amazed at the way the American and Canadian chattering classes plow ahead with one government initiative after another on the assumption that it will, if enacted, perform as advertised. Why do we think that?

Here the tendency of journalists to put their liberal partisanship ahead of their professional duties is a significant obstacle to clarity.

"Obama signs historic health-care legislation," they gush. "Barack Obama was able to make history ... a milestone that will change the face and character of this country ... assures him of a legacy".

This rush to judgment is unseemly and unhelpful.

In a revealing lead sentence in Tuesday's Globe and Mail, John Ibbitson wrote "Canadians love to disparage America's privately funded health care, just as conservative Americans love to slag Canada's public system." Shoving aside his casual assumption that all Canadians love to disparage America's system, while only conservative Americans slag ours, what can he mean by saying the United States has a "privately funded" system? Is it really a secret that more than half of every health care dollar in the United States comes from one level of government or another, and only 12 cents from patients?

His article continued: "But beyond all the name calling, this much is true: Congress dedicated the better part of a year in search of a way to 'bend the curve' on health-care costs. In Canada, however, the curve keeps climbing, because politicians would rather not talk about it."

Once again his assumption is that because Americans talked about containing costs, and passed a bill that promises to do so, the result is assured or at least likely. I beg to differ.

While star-struck journalists were hailing this bill as on a par with civil rights, social security or Medicare, I was researching the latter and found this nasty tidbit: When created in 1965, Medicare was projected to cost $3.2 billion dollars a year. But it cost $4.2 billion its first year, $7.1 billion by 1970 and $18 billion by 1975 with its sibling Medicaid costing as much again. By 1989 the two combined were costing $76 billion and by 2004, $606 billion. So much for cost projections.

As for effectiveness, it was precisely the catastrophic failure of these brilliant landmarks that made Obamacare so urgent in the minds of liberal politicians and reporters. And this is no fluke; as far as I can see big government social programs invariably cost way more than they were meant to and deliver way less.

Can you name one, here or in the United States, with which progressives are now happy? Can you tell me one significant social problem that was solved by a government program? And yet rhetorical outrage at the inadequacy of existing measures is invariably accompanied by unguarded praise for the next big thing. Why? Do we never learn?

If Obamacare should prove as expensive and ineffective as its predecessors I would argue that it's a bad thing even if it makes the president look good and lets his party hold both Houses of Congress in November. It's also distinctly possible that the whole thing is unconstitutional; at least 14 states have filed suit against the bill on the grounds that no one can locate the passage in the United States Constitution that authorizes the federal government to require individuals to purchase health insurance.

If American courts turn out not to share the journalistic contempt for "Tea Party" activists as gun-slinging bigots, it will serve only to revitalize the limited government movement. And while such an outcome would constitute a historic development and a legacy for Barack Obama, it wouldn't quite fit the narrative on this week's front pages.

Let's not summon the stone masons to the Washington Mall just yet.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It seems the Obama administration has finally found itself the sort of mishandled foreign policy problem without which no agonizing political tailspin is complete, a dispute with Israel over housing in East Jerusalem that comforts their enemies, alarms their friends and annoys voters. Now it only remains to be seen how cluelessly they will thrash their way through it. You can't get into a crisis like the one that erupted during Vice-President Joe Biden's visit last Tuesday without some preparatory blunders, particularly intellectual. And President Obama and his advisers started with a howler that, being tiresomely familiar, offered no hope of a creative exit when it failed again.

They assumed everyone in the Middle East wants peace except, perhaps, their own beleaguered democratic ally, and everyone but their ally is behaving suitably. So they pressured Israel for concessions that could only be read on the other side as feeble-minded weakness, an approach the Israelis have sensibly long since discarded.

The White House also set its sights too high in this troubled region. American presidents habitually crave a Middle Eastern peace breakthrough as their crowning foreign policy triumph. And maybe Mr. Obama wants another Nobel Peace Prize. But there is no Middle East peace process so he can't move it along by being so transparently great.

He seems not to have read the relevant history, another key ingredient in a diplomatic disaster. Ever since the 1920s, Jews/Israelis and western powers have been offering compromise settlements, every one of which the brilliant Arab leadership has contemptuously rejected. After a period of developments unfavourable to the Arab position, sometimes gradual and sometimes militarily spectacular, they have been offered another compromise which they have again waved off with belligerent disgust.

The Arab political class may uneasily sense, after 90 years or so, that each compromise offer is less attractive than the one before. But they can't seem to grasp that their position keeps deteriorating because they are neither willing to settle for what is now available nor able to improve their situation between bouts of negotiation, and this pattern is likely to continue. But it is; whatever Israel builds on is probably off the negotiating table next time, and as long as no real talks take place the building will continue.

So what does Barack Obama bring to all this? Perhaps the objection that the construction is on disputed territory. But as George Jonas wrote in Wednesday's National Post: "Every inch of Israel is disputed. That's what the Middle East conflict is about." Does the Obama administration grasp this point? And do they, in any case, really think they can take over Israeli housing policy? If they don't know that Washington has been objecting to such housing construction since 1967 in vain, they must be bigger fools even than they seem.

Of course as soon as the White House started yelling at Israel, the Palestinians went into stone-throwing mode. But that causes Israelis to become more intransigent and makes persistent American pressure on Israel seem either naive or malicious. If the Americans did not see this coming, they must be bigger fools even than they seem. But if they did, what's their plan for managing the short-term spat with Israel? As a leading Republican commented of Woodrow Wilson's feckless blundering into the First World War, in diplomacy you must not "shake your fist at a man and then shake your finger at him."

At first Israel's ambassador to Washington appeared to have blundered in calling the dispute "a crisis of historic proportions." He now denies the remarks, but it may have been a clever trap. For the Americans to endorse his words meant admitting they had somehow blown up their relationship with Israel over nothing. But to deny it was to back down, which they did. "I don't buy that," said Hillary Clinton. "We have an absolute commitment to Israel's security." Then the administration shook its finger, cancelling a visit by a Mideast envoy the Israelis probably didn't want to hear demand unilateral concessions from them anyway.

This combination of ill-preparedness and fatuous illusion is about as efficient a way of blundering into foreign policy disaster as the copious inventiveness of man has discovered at any point in history. And it works great domestically too.

Back in January I expressed surprise at "how badly Barack Obama is doing, in polls and by proxy in elections ... without yet having a major foreign policy disaster." Now he seems to have found one, tailor-made to alienate a vast slice of Middle America by appearing disloyal to friends, spineless in the face of aggression, and laughably confused.

How dumb can they get? Stay tuned; these guys are good.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Dalton McGuinty has solved our health care problems again. How many times is that?

This time the idea is to replace global budgets for hospitals with a "Health Based Allocation Model" (H-BAM) that will apparently send money to hospitals serving growing and aging populations and also, as the Globe and Mail reports, give hospitals "additional money based on how cost-effectively they treat patients." Hey, efficiency. Why didn't I think of that?

This is a definite case of "If I could walk like that, I wouldn't have to work for a living." If the Ontario government knew how to direct funds to hospitals that treat patients cost-effectively, do you not think they would have done it before now?

Actually it's "If I could stagger like that" because when Ontario health minister Deb Matthews tried to explain the throne speech proposal that "for more and more services -- money will follow the patient," it went badly.

"We know," she told reporters, "that rural hospitals, hospitals in smaller communities will (still) need the global budget because of the nature of the care they provide, but in some of the larger hospital budgets, as we transition to more patient-based payments, we're going to be able to drive those efficiencies." You go, girl. Drive those efficiencies. Uh, where's the steering wheel?

Don't ask George Smitherman, who's now threatening to do for Toronto what he did for health care in Ontario as minister from 2003-2008 (earning the moniker "Furious George" not "Effective George," you'll note).

And don't ask Matthews, whose muddled interview with Steve Madely on CFRA can be found at www.cfra.com/chum_audio/Deb_Matthews_Mar09.mp3

In fact, don't ask anyone in the political health business. I am astounded to find it's now 11 years since I responded to a federal minister's glassy-eyed declaration that, gosh, he'd like some way to measure health-care outcomes.

I reminded him of the Soviet experience. "Without prices," I wrote on February 19, 1999 "planners are reduced to setting two basic kinds of targets: quantitative and qualitative. In the first, they tell the factory 'Make as many nails as possible' or 'Make at least this many nails' and it does, but the nails are feeble pins. In the second, they say 'Make the sturdiest nails you can' or 'Make nails at least this big' and the factory makes one 60-foot-long nail. When they set window quotas by weight, they got panes of glass too thick to see through. When they switched to quotas in square feet, they got windows so thin they shattered if lifted."

Any questions?

Well, how about: Did they ever find a way to measure outcomes? (No.) Are they about to? (No.) Does anyone remember or care about that initiative? (No.) If you can't measure outcomes, how are you going to direct money to cost-efficient hospitals? (Um duh dawk.) Say, aren't you currently trying to switch doctors from fee-for-service to global budgeting? (What? Are we?)

There is no reason to believe any of these questions were ever raised in the inner councils of the Ontario government, where the solution to major difficulties is to ignore them or, when cornered, make patently untrue statements in a tone of sober responsibility. Consider the throne speech claim that "In Ontario, no one who gets sick is turned away." Then what's a waiting list? Or what about being stashed in a hospital corridor and turned away from treatment happening elsewhere in the building?

It is impossible to tell whether McGuinty knows such soothing sentiments to be false or even recalls what that term means. But the style is mentally poisonous.

Consider his post-throne speech comment to reporters about the gaping $24.7-billion deficit: "We don't want to compromise our future by moving to balance the budget too quickly." Who on Earth, or beyond the asteroid belt, worried that the Premier might balance the budget too quickly, or believed he had any clue how to do so if that malevolent impulse somehow seized him? What honour, or value, is there left in pouring out oily reassurances on false issues, while dodging the crucial question whether he knows his arm from a tree branch about managing large, complex, ruinously expensive government programs?

When George Smitherman was health minister, I got to tell him the old Soviet joke about what would happen if the Soviet Union invaded the Sahara ("For 25 years, nothing; then a sand shortage"). He was not amused. I'm finding it less funny since the throne speech confessed "20 years ago, 32 cents of every dollar spent on government programs were spent on health care. Today, it is 46 cents. In 12 years, it could be 70 cents."

It will be even less funny in 12 years when some slick politician announces with obtuse delight that efficiency is the 70-cent solution. And gets re-elected.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]