The other day I was asked to take part in an event benefitting the homeless. No, that's not the punchline. It's that I ended up getting rejected because I was unable to attend the mandatory technical training first.

Some readers may think my compassion needs work. But not, please, through the sorts of cybernetic techniques Robert McNamara applied in Vietnam. The result of such a technocratic approach is a form of insanity all the more chilling for being hyper-rational. Not merely in its manifestations, but in its foundations: a relentless determination to quantify everything, however inappropriate it might be.

Ironically, whatever compassion I might be feeling for anyone or anything was being simultaneously and dramatically impaired by another manifestation of this weird modern mindset. Did you know that it is government policy in this province that we not be able to see the lake from the deck?

I am not making this up, just fixing it up. You see, a building inspector recently came to check some changes to our cottage and, on his way by, condemned our existing deck as unsafe and required us to block the view.

I realize the inspector was only doing his job. But I do not see that it is the business of the state to determine whether my deck is safe. Governments are instituted among humans to secure our legitimate rights against invasion by others, and their duty is to suppress force and fraud and act where genuine "free rider" problems lead to things like polluted lakes. (Which we have, by the way.)

Canada was settled by people who took responsibility upon themselves for constructing suitable homes, barns, vehicles and other necessities, and I can assure you that if the pioneers who broke the sod of Quebec, Ontario or the prairies had been obliged to go through today's scientific permit application process, the country would be an unspoiled wilderness from sea to shining swamp.

If you're wondering what would become of us without all this supervision, well, there's a major risk of our becoming a great nation, wealthy, confident and a bastion of freedom in two world wars. And if we sometimes have trouble judging safety, the private insurance industry is a mighty backstop. Unlike governments, insurance companies have to be right about what's safe, because they must charge reasonable premiums and offer reasonable payouts and leave room for a small margin of profit by getting both right.

Governments face no such constraint. I know. I was there, standing on a deck that was not "unsafe" in the primitive, non-technical sense of ever having been the scene of an injury even though, before we bought it, it had no safety railings at all, just posts and a top board above a yawning, vertiginous gap. We disliked this sufficiently to put in what we decided was a safe railing, leaving a space at the top for gazing at the lake.

Regrettably such things have been cybernetically de-authorized. It is now mandatory to have a railing 42 inches high with spindles running all the way up. How many of you own "Muskoka" chairs or similar furniture that let you see over a 42 inch railing? Sorry, that question does not compute.

The crowning irrational glory in my view, or obstruction thereof, is the requirement that we raise our railing by one inch before installing the spindles. See, ours is only 41 inches high so it must be raised, regardless of the expense or transparently evident lack of contribution to safety.

As G.K. Chesterton observed exactly a century ago, "These great scientific organizers insist that a man should be healthy even if he (is) miserable." My guess is they'll only achieve the latter, because enjoyment of nature is very good for us and these regulations place economic as well as visual barriers in the way of this venerable but unscientific Canadian habit.

The episode is cast in a revealingly artificial light by the ruckus over the fake lake at the G20 summit in Toronto. It would take me too far afield (but don't worry, it's just a depiction of a field within an air-conditioned building) to ask what business it is of the state to promote tourism. Or how good at it they're likely to be if they try. But people who think a puddle in a plastic basin with some canoes and a painted backdrop of what you'd be seeing if you really were in the Muskokas and the railing regulations were different are unlikely to be concerned that they're ruining the experience for the rest of us.

Indeed, they're far more likely to think I'd appreciate their efforts better if I'd had the appropriate technical training.

But alas, the social engineers lag behind their woodworking counterparts so there I sit like a rotting deck in a damp forest with real flies, a shockingly backward specimen of unsafe self-reliance whose compassion is now, technically, homeless.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

[First published on Mercatornet.com] To Kill a Mockingbird is a magical book. That is the word. From the moment of its publication 50 years ago it radiated magic. To this day you may with confidence place it in the hands of anyone, anywhere, of any age, race or gender and know that if they do not love it, they have missed something transcendent.

The first thing to be said to clarify the magic is that its portrayal of childhood is wonderful. I mean this not as a stock word of praise from an author afraid of blundering stylistically if he writes “magical” again. I mean it literally: Mockingbird captures the wonder of childhood.

Once Scout and Jem befriend the visiting Dill, their familiar world cracks open with a series of delightful fissures caused not by the shattering impact of evil, though it surrounds them, but because it is expanding wonderfully and must do so. They are able to have a series of new adventures undreamed of before it all started yet somehow perfectly natural once they are happening. And this, to me, is one of the outstanding features of a good childhood.

I should interject autobiographically that I was fortunate enough to have a happy childhood including reading many books whose spell never entirely faded. Mockingbird was not among them, and when I first read it in my early 30s I was inclined to add to my very short list of regrets about my life that I didn’t read it as a kid. Try as we might to become again as little children, almost nothing that happens to us as adults seems to have that luminous quality of immanence that pervades a happy childhood, where every day or week may bring some new, unexpected wonder larger and richer than we have yet experienced.

On reflection I’ve changed my mind on that point. Part of the magic of the book for me when I did read it was its uncanny capacity to conjure up overpowering flashes of childhood (including the plan to lay out lemon drops that Boo Radley would follow “like an ant”). I believe I relished these far more for being an adult.

If all the book did was remind you of what childhood excitement felt like it might be at best a minor classic. But it did far more. It made sense of that excitement.

Mockingbird has had its share of detractors. Not just racists who objected to its obvious and compelling refutation of their position but critics and other authors who found it childish, naive, unworthy of study. At the risk of seeming all these things myself, I would suggest that their real problem is that the book is hopeful.

When a Virginia school board was considering banning it as “immoral literature” in 1966, Harper Lee wrote a stinging letter to the editor whose key passage was “Surely it is plain to the simplest intelligence that ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ spells out in words of seldom more than two syllables a code of honor and conduct, Christian in its ethic, that is the heritage of all Southerners.”

That response underlines the two key reasons the book is so important. From an American, and especially southern American perspective, the book is an act of statesmanship. Not some Yankee ridiculing of mean rednecks, it was a key part of the redemption of the South, a reminder that however deep the currents of racism might run, there were other currents deeper still (a magic from before the beginning of time, one might even say) that were incompatible with it.

Generations of southerners, including Confederate soldiers, might have been at once honorable and Christian and bigoted. But it was an unnatural combination and in their hearts they knew it. Indeed, the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s depended upon finally getting white southerners to admit to themselves that they did know it.

This deep magic is not limited to time and place. In reminding white southerners of this thing they always knew about their particular situation, Mockingbird reminds all of us of the things we always know about our situation whatever it may be, knowledge we cannot evade but struggle to heed. Atticus Finch is not just a man who knows what he must do. Almost anyone can manage that. Atticus Finch is a man who knows he must do it, and does it, and we wish we were more certain that we were like him.

Atticus stands for truth against the mob. He faces down his own fears and therefore other men’s viciousness. He meets with triumph and disaster and treats these two imposters both the same, and so shows his children what the meaning is of a world that keeps opening new and marvelous vistas for them. And again I use “marvelous” with etymology aforethought: The world is full of marvels and Mockingbird knows it.

Its particular and often dark marvels make it to some extent a “coming of age” book. Within its pages we see Scout growing up a little; three years is a long time when you’re six and her childish conceits about “hants” and so forth become a bit more mature within its pages. Outside its pages, in part because of the flashback narrative technique, we sense what sort of adult she will become, in large part through the influence of her father and other adults, both good and evil. And thus we know that “coming of age” is not just a matter of growing bigger and more self-aware, or self-absorbed, while eventually discovering girls or boys.

The transition from childhood to adulthood is above all about morality, about becoming one of those who does take responsibility for what is right and wrong. In this context it has been suggested that Mockingbird’s “coming of age” theme is tragic, as the characters come to grips with failure. Such critics clearly missed the magic. What Harper Lee tells us in this story is that success and failure cast lights and shadows in this world but take place within us. Atticus is never a failure even when he fails. Nor will his daughter be.

If like Han Solo we explore the world around us we’re bound to see “a lot of strange stuff”. But that’s not the marvel. Nor is it real growing up. The magic, the expansion from childish wonder to the adult kind, is realizing that life means something, something incredibly important and boundlessly joyful: The fundamental structure of the universe is moral not material.

That is the magic at the core of To Kill a Mockingbird. And it has only gained in brilliance in the last half century.

One major lesson of history is that humans are frequently vile chumps. Unfortunately, because we are the audience as well as the topic, the lesson often fails to sink in.

I strongly suspect the same problem lies behind our frequent inability, or unwillingness, to draw obvious historical analogies. Presumably we all know exactly what to do the next time Hitler demands part of Czechoslovakia. But we nevertheless stare in bafflement, or worse, at North Korea or Hamas. Why?

Consider this luminous passage about appeasement I just encountered while rereading Peter Calvocoressi and Guy Wint's 1972 book Total War for a seminar I'm teaching on America at war. "Hitler's ravings," the authors say, "were passed over and he was regarded as a man who would make bargains and stick to them because it was difficult to see what to do if he was really a totally different kind of person."

Does this observation not shine a brilliant light on what's happening today, starting with Western regimes begging the Chinese government to help them do something about North Korea sinking a South Korean warship?

I would not say Western governments are completely unwilling to understand the North Korean regime. It is so evidently insane you just look stupid denying it. On the other hand, our would-be statesmen consistently insist that the correct response to any North Korean behaviour, comparatively tame or psychotically violent, is restraint by us. Is it not clear that the North Korean regime does not react well to restraint?

It may be objected with some justice that Pyongyang doesn't react well to anything, but, if it did, it wouldn't be to empty words or carefully harmless sanctions. That tyrannically insane government couldn't care less if the country's entire population starved to death, and they laugh at our reproaches. So what impact are mild sanctions or hollow condemnations meant to have? In short, Western policy toward North Korea is in substance (or lack thereof) driven by assumptions with nothing to recommend them except the difficulty of seeing what to do if they are unfounded.

When it comes to the People's Republic of China, the problem is considerably more acute because China is both stronger and less clearly insane (though Hitler was pretty obviously demented and people didn't let it affect their judgment that he was reasonable). But China is unlikely to be a useful partner in reining in North Korea because the Chinese are its strongest backer. And they are its strongest backer because....

Oh dear. How very many unpleasant ways there are of finishing that sentence and how few pleasant ones. So we assume that China's rulers have limited, reasonable geopolitical ambitions and a fundamentally peaceful diplomatic orientation not because anything they ever do supports that assumption, but because it is difficult to see what to do if they are really totally different kinds of people.

My ruminations on this disquieting subject earlier this week were rudely interrupted by the latest news that Israeli efforts to inspect a convoy headed for Gaza resulted in pacifists attacking IDF members with clubs, knives and guns and getting shot.

Now it is perfectly obvious that Israel is not going to permit uninspected cargoes to enter Gaza and it is obvious why: Gaza is ruled by Hamas, which is sworn not only to destroy Israel, but also to exterminate Jews. (See, again, Article 7 of the Hamas Charter, where rocks and trees erupt in anti-Semitic fury.) No one but Israel would ever be asked to let such an entity import uninspected cargoes for murderous purposes; not only would Canada not permit it under similar circumstances, but also we would not ask Syria to stand for it, or North Korea.

Admit it. If a convoy of activists insisted on bringing uninspected cargoes into North Korea, attacked customs officials who tried to inspect them and got killed, there would be no outcry. We'd soberly note that nations have a right to protect their borders, urge restraint, and perhaps make a grovelling submission to the Chinese government to help us persuade North Korea to shoot the next bunch with smaller calibre weapons.

So what's the deal with Hamas? Why does the press insist on running headlines like "After deadly raid, Israel stands alone" and "Israel's alliances hit the hardest" and "Bloody Israeli raid on flotilla sparks crisis"? I'll tell you. It's because Western diplomats, politicians and journalists pass over Hamas's ravings and members of the convoy chanting about Muhammad's army coming to kill Jews and insist on regarding Hamas as an organization that will make bargains and stick to them because it is very difficult to see what to do otherwise.

So what do we learn from history? So little that, if Hitler did demand the Sudetenland again, we'd probably give it to him.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

So apparently there's this new Robin Hood movie that proves Russell Crowe's accent is as bad as his temper. The critics seem to feel it couldn't split an arrow at one pace, and I'd sooner fight Little John with a quarterstaff on a narrow bridge than go see it. But first let me cudgel the film for trying to steal from our heritage to give to political correctness.

The problem is the old canard that Robin Hood stole from the rich to give to the poor. The New York Times once called Fidel Castro "The Robin Hood of the Caribbean", but in his lawless use of state power to reward those he liked, Castro was, and remains, a Prince John. Robin Hood did the opposite. He took back from the rich and powerful what they had stolen from the poor and meek. His standard was justice, not envy. He did not practise class war and he never stole.

Quibblers may object that he did nothing, period. In university I took a fascinating "Legend, Myth and History" course in which the professor demonstrated to my satisfaction that King Arthur did exist a bit but Robin Hood did not.

I mean intellectual satisfaction, not emotional. I like Robin Hood.

I also like Arthur. I'm glad he existed and I like the core of the legend, if not the dreadful purple prose of Parsival or subsequent literary and cinematic manglings. The historical Arthur seems to have been a Celtic leader whose valiant resistance halted the tide of Saxon barbarism for half a century. In that sense he's the last hero of Roman Britain rather than a forerunner of the Albion we know and love.

Since the Saxons laid the foundations for the only functioning system of self-government the world has ever seen (after they settled down a bit and became Christian), Arthur's defeat was not as bad as it seemed at the time. But he remains a magnificent emblem of a cause so lost that history has even misplaced Mount Badon where he won his great victory. And lost causes have a special romance because those who go down in such a manner defy the maxim that "might makes right." Arthur tells us an important truth we all know anyway, and it's a conservative one.

So does Robin Hood. This makes him an icon, irresistible to today's imaginatively bankrupt filmmakers to appropriate an aura they can no longer create. See "Bond, James: endless sequels" for more on this theme. But note also that Robin's romance has more to do with Bond than Arthur. For despite his technical non-existence, he is not the emblem of a lost cause. He is the emblem of Magna Carta triumphant.

In the classic stories he personally fades away or perishes through treachery to preserve the adolescent atmosphere of the Merry Men. But no, it doesn't mean they were all gay. Not even the Sheriff of Nottingham tried to transvalue Robin Hood and we shouldn't either. Sometimes an arrow is just an arrow. And Robin is a straight arrow who would never steal, because theft is wrong.

Robin Hood stood for legitimate authority. Unlawfully deprived of his own inheritance as an act of bigoted injustice, he fought the tyrannical regent Prince John while waiting for the rightful King Richard Coeur de Lion to return and set all right.

Here we must admit history has been split by a willow shaft.

Richard was a wretched wilful king entirely miscast as just and noble. John on the other hand is a villain straight out of central casting. Despite occasional rehabilitation efforts, and brief Protestant enthusiasm for a king who defied the Pope, the last word on my wretched royal namesake goes to historian Christopher Brooke: Given John's generally odious family "some have wondered whether John was really any worse than his father or brothers. To this it can only be answered that contemporaries clearly thought that he was... Precisely what was wrong with John is very hard to say. But men did not trust him; they refused to fight in his company; they sought to exact unusual promises from him."

Maybe it was that bit where he murdered his nephew in a drunken rage, attacked ancient liberties, lost the crown jewels in a river and was generally vile, brutal, liquored up and incompetent.

In short, a classic tyrant, the eternal enemy of British liberty.

Against him, eternally, Robin Hood is a conservative hero in every way. Dedicated to the rule of law, brave, resourceful, cheerful in adversity, loyal to his friends and his sweetheart, chaste before marriage, a true Catholic, and faithful to the spirit of the Second Amendment in taking up arms against tyranny. He's even a die-hard constitutional monarchist.

In short, he's ours and you can't have him for your nasty left-wing causes, no matter how bad your accent or your temper.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Egad. I think I've found a less popular position than my proposal to quintuple MPs' office budgets. It is that the auditor general should not examine their spending, for managerial, political and constitutional reasons.

Let us start with the constitutional because it is most fundamental. The central function of Parliament in our battered system of self-government is to control the executive. Its central tool is control of the purse strings. And the central defect of our governance today is that legislators are unable even to figure out where the executive is spending, let alone what to do about it.

Arguably MPs and senators do not wish to spend time scrutinizing the "estimates" or reviewing spending because it offers neither professional nor personal satisfaction. It is scandalous to read that legislators gave up their power to approve government borrowing in the 2007 budget and didn't even know they'd done it. And the Liberal excuse for allowing a further shocking erosion of Parliament's authority in the latest massive omnibus, nay juggernaut budget bill, that they want to oppose the budget without bringing down the government, certainly underlines MPs' complicity in their own neutering.

So yes, there's a lot rotten in the state of Parliament. It doesn't mean we should make it worse and hope it helps. It means we need to get back to basics.

Here's one now. The auditor general is an officer of Parliament whose function is to assist legislators in understanding Executive branch spending so they have some hope of doing something about it. For her instead to devote her time to scrutinizing Parliament is not under present circumstances simply beside the point; it is directly contrary to it. What's out of control is executive, not legislative, spending.

At this point the political objection becomes pertinent. I recognize that MPs are currently held in shockingly low public regard for which, as with their powerlessness, they bear much blame. But clearly everyone including lazy journalists hopes if the AG turns her searchlight around 180 degrees we'll get juicy scandals involving expensive meals, fancy junkets and if we're really lucky busty hookers or embezzlement.

We don't need that and we don't want it. The executive branch already has the legislative on the ropes and the last thing we need is further manufactured outrage to reduce legislators from puppets and clowns to vaguely comic slime.

Of course I'm not trying to help legislators misuse or misappropriate public money. Honesty in public life is extremely important and Canada is very fortunate in that corruption in government is so rare here while citizens react with genuine, sustained outrage to any hint of it. But, despite what you read in the newspapers, we have safeguards in place here.

MPs are subject to rigorous rules about spending. And the House of Commons board of internal economy scrutinizes their spending, audits it thoroughly, and publishes the results on its website, by member (see www.parl.gc.ca/information/about/boie-e.htm). If we like, voters can insist that MPs offer more detail or face electoral defeat. But it's no defence against fraud. That's what real audits are for. And the board of internal economy already does those while the auditor general isn't trying to.

Thus the managerial issue. Despite what many commentators seem to be implying, the AG isn't offering to track down lavish or illegal spending. She's offering a "performance audit" to discover whether Parliament spends in ways that seem effective to people who teach business administration.

I would not devote one cent of public (or private) money to such flow-chart gooblahoy. It is just more illusion of technique. And I can already tell you the answer: Parliamentary spending is completely ineffective because there isn't nearly enough of it.

MPs have a basic office budget of under $300,000 with which to track a million times that much executive branch spending. That budget hires at most four employees: two in the riding, one buried in administrative work, and one hapless overloaded underpaid young person doing all the policy research while desperately hoping one day to become a weakly supported MP instead of weakly supporting one. (Legislators also get help from the diligent but overloaded Library of Parliament and committee staff).

A U.S. Senator has from two- to five-dozen staffers and an important congressional committee has more than 100. There you can have a long, prestigious, well-paid career keeping legislators informed on one important issue. That's value for money. But you don't figure it out with flip charts and bullet lists. You use common sense.

MPs do many annoying things. But they are not evading financial scrutiny and they are not trying to. So don't be mad at them, or me, on this one.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The old Roman advice to beware Greeks bearing gifts would probably run you onto the shoals of political correctness today. But doesn't this giant EU bailout for Greece call to anyone's minds that big wooden horse outside the gates of Troy?

There's actually a B horror flick quality to the scene in the Odyssey where the Greeks have been besieging Troy for 10 years and then one day they've all gone away and there's this big wooden horse and the Trojans don't suspect anything.

But then, isn't this Greek bailout thing one of those news stories that should have you barring the gates and doubling the guard on the walls before you're even done with the headline?

Or imagine you're there on the couch after midnight and Jim Flaherty solemnly assures people this rescue plan is "comprehensive and credible." The hair on your neck should already be rising as you anticipate, correctly, that the article will go on to tell you "Details remain elusive as to how the $1-trillion U.S. scheme will eventually unfold." Then politicians promise prudent and responsible reforms as soon as we've done this absolutely stupid and reckless thing with a dollar sign then a one followed by 12 zeros and newspapers describe how maybe the EU will enforce its own fiscal rules for real, this time for sure, or centralize power in a real functioning federal government.

If this were a B movie the audience would all be shouting "No, no, the elite is sneaking up behind you" at the hapless dopes on the screen. Thus Gordon Brown's crumbling, repudiated Labour government just put taxpayers on the hook for "at least £13 billion of debt held by other European governments" in the giant euro bailout and, the Daily Telegraph reported Monday, they "had no choice but to surrender because the decision was taken under a Lisbon Treaty 'exceptional occurrences' clause that stripped Britain of its veto." In theory Britain ducked an even larger £624 billion package, but if you believe that I have a big wooden horse for you that surely doesn't contain any Greek warriors.

The New York Times credited Barack Obama with tricking the German Chancellor into going along with this incredibly big, expensive, reckless and complicated fiscal schmozzle. Which is something the Americans have some experience with after their housing market meltdown and then their stimulus package and $1.4 trillion federal deficit. If there were two horses out there I'd suggest the Americans had put the second one in place, knowing their own public finances are in such a colossal mess that they need the EU in financial flames to make sure nobody has anywhere to flee from the U.S. dollar. More probably Obama is a dupe rather than a conspirator. But again, if European voters don't like it, they can't vote him out of office. I'll tell you one thing that's not in this horse: democratic accountability.

Do you think that any of these central bankers and finance ministers assuring us rubes that top men have worked it all out would wheel this horsie into their own homes? Would they put 10 bucks of their own at risk here? Hoo hah. But they're happily pulling it into the Treasury because they'll be home in bed when it goes up in flames. One Citizen story reported that "Markets have run wild since a debt crisis triggered in Greece spread to euro neighbours including Portugal, Spain and Italy -- with speculators accused of running for cover from euro currency and bond markets." Hey you speculators, wait for me. No, wait, I forgot, taxpayers can't run for cover. Politicians won't let us.

In Germany, voters actually punished the pseudo-conservative ruling Christian Democrats for making a sacrificial offering of £19 billion at the horse; in regional elections on Sunday they deprived Chancellor Angela Merkel's party of its majority in the upper house. But the result, the Daily Telegraph reports, is hardly encouraging: "The election defeat means the German Chancellor has lost control of the legislative process, allowing Social Democrats and Greens to block reforms aimed at cutting Germany's high public spending."

This apparently perverse result actually makes sense. A German government that doesn't even think Greece really ought to cut down a little is clearly not ready to reform its own spending.

In that sense this crisis is not the Greeks' fault at all. They're just playing the same game as everyone else, with less shame and less skill but to general applause. That's why they ran out of pretend money first and rolled a big horse up to the walls of central banks, insisting it has that special air of solemn responsibility that will convince everyone there's no danger. But why did they get so much help building it from inside the city?

Not even the Trojans were that dumb.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Now that the chalk dust has settled let's draw a few lessons from the ruckus over sex education in Ontario. First, write on the blackboard 100 times that, having been thrown out the schoolhouse door due to public outcry, this sexually radical curriculum will sneak back in the window. The modern progressive agenda is relentlessly committed to sexualizing childhood and, while the Ontario government may be claiming it's going to back off, we know by now what commitments from the McGuinty regime are worth, including, most recently, that the HST won't increase the tax burden.

Second, Dalton McGuinty furnishes dramatic proof that a dull, prosaic, suburban exterior offers excellent camouflage for virulent partisanship and ideological radicalism. Some defenders of the new curriculum portrayed it as an innocent excursion into biology, as though it were possible innocently to describe sexual mechanics to people below the age of puberty. But others admitted frankly that the plan was to create a New Sexual Person to replace the untutored and vulgar cretins who had to this point cluttered up planet Earth.

Thus the Globe and Mail editorialized: "A new sex-education curriculum in Ontario treats homosexuality as a normal part of life, and so it should, in a country in which gay marriage is legal." The editorial went on to ridicule the idea that "children may choose homosexuality because of what they learn in school," while insisting that children will choose tolerance because of what they learn in school. It then said "even young children" already know the term gay "may be used as an insult. It does no one any good to leave the children on their own to make sense of it all."

Note the key assumption that unless schools step in children will be left "on their own." It would be true if they had no parents or, alternatively, if parents were manifestly unfit to teach morals or manners acceptable to Globe editorialists. Since I dimly recall from my own sex ed classes that children tend to have parents, it must be the latter.

Dalton McGuinty openly agreed, which is why he initially supported the new curriculum. Children, the premier gurgled, "are going to get this information. If we can provide (it) in a format and in a venue over which we have some control or they can just get it entirely on their own and be informed by potentially uninformed sources, like their friends at school. So why wouldn't we recognize that we live in an information age and why wouldn't we try to present this information in a thoughtful and responsible and open way?" The obvious answer is "because it's their parents' job." But equally obviously, Mr. McGuinty, despite his boring Father Knows Best persona, has no time for such ignorant talk in this "information age."

The National Post quoted one American advocate who was really excited by the Ontario curriculum. "Then when I saw they changed their minds, I thought: 'Oh great, why don't you just move down here.' That's what we do in the States, kow-tow to parents' groups and religious leaders instead of sticking our feet in the ground and saying, 'We are the educational experts.' We certainly don't have parents deciding whether or when or how to teach math ..."

Actually I think schools teach math because parents want them to. Now pardon me while I go hunt a mammoth.

Another lesson is that when sex meets ethnicity, political dishonesty soars to new heights. The newspapers beat the usual drums about opposition to this curriculum change coming from wretched know-nothing Christians. But surely much of it actually came from Muslim parents. And since multicultural ideologues are committed to the notion that all cultures are relentlessly vibrant and quaint but have no substantive differences, the prospect of imams weighing in publicly on teaching grade school kids that gay is good terrified them into an abrupt tactical retreat.

Snobbery also made an appearance. The Citizen's Elizabeth Payne opined that "For all its cosmopolitan airs, Ontario is not so far removed from the days when ladies' auxiliaries, county fairs and church suppers were an essential part of the fabric of life and when public debate centred on worries about the corruption of minors." Now it seems to centre on concerns that the state isn't doing enough in this area; Payne went on to say "sex ed circa 2010 is very much aimed at promoting tolerance and openness about sex -- a positive move" and that "'... masturbating ... is common and is not harmful ...' is how teachers are prompted to answer questions about what is normal."

So the key lesson is that this episode was about schools telling children what's normal instead of parents. Public authorities may look like boring liars but underneath they're panting social engineers. Memorize it, because it will be on the test.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

I don't know what effect defenders of our historical tradition are having on its enemies, but by God they frighten me.

Consider Andrew Cohen's column supporting renaming Wellington Street for Sir John A. Macdonald. And he's president of the Historica-Dominion Institute, "the largest, independent organization dedicated to Canadian history, identity and citizenship." So what's he doing whiting out our past? (Uh, sorry, kids, a pre-computer reference about as relevant to you as Harold Godwinson's offer to King Harald of Norway.)

His most revealing argument was that having a street named for the Iron Duke reflected "the insecurity of an adolescent nation trapped in its neo-colonialism." Actually, adolescents are those who cannot bear to be in the presence of their parents because they yearn to be independent but lack the capacity. Hence Mark Twain's comment "When I was 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have him around. When I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years." Adults may not always like where they came from, but they don't pretend it's not there.

Consider that it's now been almost as long since Vimy as the 102 years between Vimy and Waterloo. Andrew said getting rid of Wellington Street "would be a natural step for a country that has been vigorously asserting itself in political, social and constitutional ways since Vimy Ridge in 1917." But do you think the men who made Canada a nation on that ghastly battlefield were embarrassed to stand in the line from Drake to Marlborough to the Iron Duke? Would they have taken the ridge if they had been?

Likewise, many accounts of D-Day have soldiers calming their pre-invasion jitters by recalling Shakespeare's Henry V's pre-Agincourt speech about how "gentlemen in England now a-bed/ Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,/ And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks/ That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day." To soldiers approaching Juno Beach these weren't just pretty words. They were a reminder of their heroic past.

Then there's this week's ruling by Commons speaker Peter Milliken that the executive branch may not refuse a parliamentary demand for documents. "Before us," he said, "are issues that question the very foundations upon which our parliamentary system is built. In a system of responsible government, the fundamental right of the House of Commons to hold the Government to account for its actions is an indisputable privilege and, in fact, an obligation."

These foundations were not laid 28 years ago, or 143. Nor even in the 17th-century quarrels with the Stuarts. They were laid before the Normans came to Hastings and if they are undermined or left to crumble, the building erected on them cannot stand. A paradox of trying to "Canadianize" our history is that the heroes of this endeavour, other than Trudeau, were fully aware of this fact.

There was a revolting touch of adolescent self-absorption in Lester Pearson telling a farewell banquet in England in June 1941 he was pleased "to be a Canadian, with a line of national development stretching 'from the Magna Carta to the Sirois Commission'." (I quote Andrew Cohen's biography.) Frankly, I should expect the Sirois Commission to hold its manhood cheap whilst any speaks of Magna Carta. But if even the guy who ditched the Red Ensign was proud of that line it may prove hard to erase entirely.

Suppose we did try to take seriously the concept of Canada as having no historical antecedents, as having sprung full-grown from the brow of Sir John A. That his is generally regarded as the boozy brow of a hack isn't exactly inspiring. But it's also not fair; Macdonald thought seriously about the British foundations of our liberty. It is disingenuous to try to purge British influence from our capital in the name of a man whose final campaign slogan was "A British subject I was born, a British subject I will die."

And what will students say when they learn that he prefaced this sentiment with: "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."

I do not think we elevate ourselves by doing to Wellington symbolically what Napoleon could not do in fact. I'm reminded of Chesterton's line "It requires real courage to face the past, because the past is full of facts which cannot be got over; of men certainly wiser than we, and of things done which we could not do." Like saving freedom by defeating Napoleon. It takes real courage to face Wellington at Waterloo, and the men he commanded. But if we are a grown-up nation, I'm sure we can do it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]