With Canada's health-care system in chronic crisis this is no time for stale clichés. We need fresh ones. Vibrant, patient-centred, 21st-century clichés. We need rhetorical transformation and we need it now.

So I turn to the Canadian Medical Association's new report "Health Care Transformation in Canada." I savour one of those taglines that hollers vacuity: "Change that works. Care that lasts." And I plunge into a clarion call for transformative inaction.

I am entirely unsurprised, because basically these reports must do two things. First, demand fundamental change because anyone with half a brain can see that Canada's health system is unsustainable, including many CMA members. Second, avoid any genuinely radical ideas for fear of demagogic politicians and CMA members passionately committed to the status quo.

Thus the Executive Summary sets the boldly equivocal tone: "This document is predicated on the belief of the CMA that new demands for adaptation must be addressed starting now, and in a manner consistent with the spirit and principles that have guided Medicare from the beginning." And as you'd expect from a report written by a committee with all eyes looking nervously over every shoulder real and imagined, it doesn't just endorse the

existing five pillars of the Canada Health Act (all together now: Universality, Accessibility, Comprehensiveness, Portability and Public Administration) but adds two: "Patient-centred" and "Sustainability."

I won't quibble that grammatically it should be "Patient-centredness," lest it spoil the mood of sensitive. But I will say that if wishes were horses beggars would ride and central planning might work.

You can read the entire report at www.cma.ca/cma-paper-hct. But the basic idea is that if only we had better management, better technology and a better attitude, things that don't now work would and we could even expand health care.

In fact what we need is better incentives. And by that I do NOT mean better targets. The CMA report gives cautious pseudo-endorsement to this notion, in recommendation #2 in their "Framework for Transition." But the fact that incentives matter does not mean any set of incentives will do.

When you get into the details, the report talks about targets for wait times and "activity-based funding" -- which is to say, "a reimbursement mechanism that pays hospitals for each patient treated on the basis of the complexity of their case."

Now why, I ask you, should hospitals be rewarded more for treating more complex cases? Surely some illnesses require intensive but simple treatment.

I'm not just picking nits here. My point is that providing incentives to meet targets will increase the rate of people meeting targets. But no one has ever found a way to match targets to patient satisfaction and if we're not talking about that we're not talking to any purpose.

Consider this trivial example from a recent Citizen story: With Ottawa Hospital emergency waits getting longer, the provincial government just earmarked another $40 million "for an incentive fund to reward those hospitals that see a noticeable drop in how long their patients spend in the ER." Great. Now they'll wait somewhere else. And a much scarier story from Britain, from last Thursday's Daily Telegraph: "Four babies died at an NHS heart unit where managers were trying to raise the number of patients being treated in order to avoid closure, according to a damning report."

Targets are not just ineffective. They're unsafe. A genuinely bold report on Canadian health care would start "There are two kinds of superficially attractive health care targets, those that sacrifice quality to quantity and those that do the reverse." Later it would discuss a third kind, which sacrifices both to the needs of the minister of finance. (Another Telegraph story, from two weeks ago: "NHS bosses have drawn up secret plans for sweeping cuts to services ... Some of the most common operations -- including hip replacements and cataract surgery -- will be rationed as part of attempts to save billions of pounds, despite government promises that front-line services would be protected.")

Thrashing desperately, the new British government just announced new quality standards that will eventually cover 150 clinical areas. Hospitals that don't meet them will lose their right to carry out some procedures and yet, calling them "evidence-based," Health Secretary Andrew Lansley denied they were targets: "These are standards, not diktats. It is not politicians establishing these," said the politician establishing them.

These are standards, not diktats. What a vibrant new cliché. Great PR. Utterly useless for health care, mind you.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/columnists/Clich%c3%a9s+health/3365542/story.html#ixzz0vpLbiTwA

Ottawa is still buzzing over the government's decision to make the long-form census voluntary. At least some of Ottawa's more, uh, introverted insiders are. I just can't convince myself it's an important issue, compared to billions of dollars' worth of fighter planes, border security, the crumbling of Parliament and a host of other things it has chased out of the editorial pages. It seems so ... so ... what is the phrase? How about "K1A"?

I endorse this suggestion because it captures the situation, it is very Canadian and comes from my boss at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Brian Lee Crowley. Put those considerations in any order you like. But here's the explanation.

As Brian pointed out on the MLI blog yesterday, Americans have a vivid and highly appropriate metaphor for this sort of flap: they call it "Inside the Beltway" talk. But what's the Canadian equivalent? I've heard "North of the Queensway" as a proposed alternative in Ottawa and I've used it myself. But I've never liked it because there's too much north of the Queensway from shopping centres to residential neighbourhoods that isn't governmental or government-obsessed.

OK, there's a lot of stuff inside the Washington, D.C. beltway too. But that term has stuck, and when you're inside the beltway it is hard to shake the feeling that everything around you that isn't part of the government or supping at the public trough is selling or renting things to people who work for the government or desperately seeking subsidies. Not here.

While we were discussing the matter, Brian e-mailed an observation that became the core of his blog post: "When I was in the UK studying, I heard a talk by a very senior civil servant who, instead of using the 'Whitehall' language to describe British government preoccupations, called them 'SW1 problems', SW1 being the postal code that covers much of the government machinery in London. 'SW1 problems' were by definition 'insider insider', the things that preoccupied grey mandarins and fed the conversations in the pubs around government offices, but had no resonance in Balham or Birkenhead or Bristol." And our equivalent, he went on to suggest, is K1A.

To adopt this term would not just be in keeping with Canada's heritage, given how much of our political machinery and culture, both good and bad, comes from Britain. It's also easy to remember: just think "Keeping 1t Absurd". And it's extremely precise. Not only are all postal codes beginning K1A federal government offices, it is also the only postal code to cross a provincial boundary so as to include those parts of the bureaucracy located for "two solitudes" reasons in Gatineau (née Hull). And only the bureaucracy; all residential and business postal codes there start with J.

As one online commentator with too much time on his hands observes, "the use of K1A for all government offices in Ottawa-Gatineau means a department can be moved between Ontario and Québec without changing its postal code." So can an issue. Conveniently bypassing everyone and everything normal in the country in the process.

Talk about two solitudes. I don't deny that sometimes a "K1A issue" actually matters to the country if not to its inhabitants, including which new fighter planes to buy and in what quantities. Clearly some of my obsessions with parliamentary operations, procedure and staffing are "K1A" or, worse, restricted to the postal code between my ears. But there are other things about which you could not get a conversation going with ordinary Canadians (one commentator called the census flap "the world's most boring political scandal," while going on to devote an entire column to it) and yet we who haunt K1A not only discuss them, we know their acronyms and flaunt them.

I can say this because I have one foot in K1A and if you go up that leg, you reach the pocket with my wallet in it. I make my living commenting on K1A stuff. But at least I feel some sort of unease at how often the preoccupations of those of us who think we speak for Canada, and certainly speak about it, fail utterly to connect with the people who live in the place.

It should convince us there's something wrong with the way we discuss things even when there isn't something wrong with what we're discussing. Instead, so insular are our chattering classes that we didn't even have a proper term for the disconnect. I wish I had coined "K1A" but at least I can adopt and push it.

Admit it. It has that special ring. I mean, is this census flap totally "K1A" or what?

[First published in The Ottawa Citizen]

Congratulations! You have been specially selected to receive the Robson Long Form Questionnaire. Please answer all questions honestly and in detail or you will be obliged to sit through a five-year round table on federal-provincial relations in the post-Meech Era. Admittedly that's a bit of a heavy-handed way of forcing you to spend time answering intrusive questions so we can meddle in your life in your own best interest if only you knew it.

But let's face it: You desperately need to be pushed, prodded and scientifically socialized into a less unappetizing form.

And as responses to the voluntary Robson Short Form Intrusive Questionnaire were discouraging, nay discourteous, well, we have no choice but to use force.

Remember, we're from the government and we're here to help. So no cheating. Back in 2001, 21,000 Canadians told the census their religion was "Jedi" and here at the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments we frown on levity. Now that we've strapped you down please do try to be serious.

Question one: How excited are you about lengthy debates on the government's decision to scrap the long form census?

(A) I don't give a hoot

(B) I only give one hoot and I got it from a passing owl

(C) The government's decision to do what?

(D) Get off my porch before I call the cops

Question two: If the government is determined to go around telling you not to canoe in the noonday sun without a flashlight, putting you in jail if you smoke marijuana and otherwise guaranteeing your right to a satisfying life, how much do they need accurate information?

(A) They should know everything about me including which molar has a crown

(B) As much as I know about them

(C) They already know everything, (didn't you read Dan Gardner's Wednesday Citizen column about the government and bank data?)

(D) Given what they've done with what they already know I don't want to encourage them.

Question three: If it weren't a hot day in July with Parliament in recess would journalists give this subject much ink?

(A) Heck no, the silly season is always like this

(B) It's always silly season for journalists

(C) It's always silly season for politicians

(D) I don't know, I skipped those stories.

Question four: If the government didn't collect lots of information in the census, couldn't they get it faster, cheaper and more accurately from the reams of market research and sociological study done by firms whose prosperity depends on getting the answers right, from politicians whose re-election depends on it and from academics who find numbers fascinating?

(A) Duh

(B) Yes, that's why the British government is planning to ditch their census

(C) Actually the government collects buckets of information about all of us in lots of other ways anyway

(D) No, because people lie to pollsters too.

Question five: Given that the Canadian government spent two years and $400,000 to develop made-in-Canada astronaut meals, missed their 2009 deadline, and wound up with nothing but some "Canasnack" cream-filled oatmeal cookies and a bunch of off-the-shelf beef jerky, what makes you think they could do anything sensible with accurate information even if by some miracle they got some?

(A) I'm naïve

(B) I work for the government

(C) I'm so stoned those Canasnacks sound good ... aaaaah, wait, I don't want the government knowing that

(D) Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful Force collecting all my data.

Question six: Overall, how satisfied are you with the Robson Long Form Questionnaire.

(A) I want my hoot back

(B) The owl wants its hoot back

(C) Get off my porch before I call the cops

(D) The farce will be with me always

Oh dear. Well if that's your attitude, with the failure of the Meech Lake Accord we ...

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Hello readers. Look at your modern art. Now back to this Old Spice ad. Now back at modern art. Now back to Old Spice. Sadly, modern art is not an Old Spice ad. But it could be less repellent if it stopped dousing itself in self-important shock-the-bourgeoisie theory and tried to make things people would actually like.

Ordinarily this would be my cue to explain that unless you live in a cave you'll have seen the brilliant Wieden + Kennedy ad where Isaiah Mustafa tells women if their man traded his effeminate body wash for Old Spice they could wind up on a boat receiving two tickets to "that thing you love" that turn into diamonds in the hands of a shirtless Adonis who, as a final touch, reveals that "I'm on a horse." But as most caves now feature broadband even the troglodyte set have been enjoying this instalment of the new Old Spice YouTube ad campaign with unbridled enthusiasm. (watch it on www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE)

Unbridled not unbrided. So great a hit has Muscles Mustafa become that he has started making personalized messages for his Twitter followers that include proposing on behalf of one of them to a girl who said yes. My wife thinks it would be really cool if he sent her a sensual, amusing, sophisticated yet unpretentious message featuring an exotic lifestyle, classy sensitive gifts and romantic adventure. Regrettably we are experiencing technical difficulties unrelated to where I accidentally bit through the modem cable in three places while trying to brush my teeth with a bookshelf.

Look down. Now back up. Where are you? You're in an ad that's a classic soft sell in that it doesn't take itself too seriously. But it's not ironic, dark or bitter. It's just great fun. And to me a special pleasure is that not since Mickey Spillane had seven of the 10 best-sellers in U.S. history and was the fifth-most-translated author in the world have the highbrows been spritzed with such a down-market scent.

If there's one thing urban sophisticates love to hate, it's advertisements. They are meant to be the ultimate in vulgar, shallow obnoxious misuse of aesthetic talent. Yet in truth, when an ad is well done it is humane, profound and enchanting. (Classics from my youth include one asking "Does your garage door put the 'ugh' back in ugly?" a line Shakespeare would surely have envied.)

That commercials must try to please people is not, in fact, a point of inferiority by comparison with art. Ads only really work when they engage our sympathies and appeal to our better natures. And I don't see what's wrong with that, except, as noted, when it emphasizes our worse physiques in front of our better halves. I shall move on.

Another special pleasure is that the ad makes amazingly little use of computer-generated graphics. I'm not against those; to be honest I now wince a little at the original Star Wars which, those of you born in caves will recall, seemed like ultimate wizardry at the time. But in a world that seems to be turning into the Matrix at least in terms of decor, I like the fact that the vanishing bathroom stall in the Old Spice ad is done with a crane and he's showering with real water.

It's a reality thing. As I like to tell the kids glued to their little screens all day, when I was a boy we had nothing to play with but lumps of wood and bits of cardboard which, to put a brave face on our misery, we called "chess." And I especially treasure the authentic, gritty illusion-making in the "I'm on a horse" ad after reading the e-mail Quotation of the Day from Tuesday's New York Times from a woman who used to feed geese in Prospect Park in Brooklyn that "It's eerie to see a whole population gone. There's not one goose on this lake. It looks as though they've been Photoshopped out."

I have no quarrel with Photoshop, which I use as avidly as I don't use Old Spice (or body washes; we cave-dwellers figure fresh air is nature's deodorant and very rarely does anyone venture close enough to disagree). Geese, on the other hand, well, nature is wonderful and all but sometimes you have to side with the predators. I'm on a tangent. What I mean to say is that this ad is a ticket to that thing I love because we've gotten to the point where people say something real is so vivid it's like a computer effect. Whereas this ad is so real it's real. I like that.

No wait. I don't. My wife looked at the Old Spice guy and won't look back at me. And I couldn't even tell her that chiselled chest is just an artifact created by a team of geeky designers who'd have to Google pecs then Photoshop them in if I could get her attention.

Since I have yours, I won't promise you diamonds from which an Old Spice bottle rises suggestively. But I will say if you trade in your Turner Prize for some commercial kitsch, you could be smiling as broadly and naturally as me.

I'm on a hobby horse.

Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/entertainment/Look+this+back/3284798/story.html#ixzz0tqOTQCgc

The appearance of CSIS director Richard Fadden before a special sitting of the House of Commons public safety committee revealed a problem. We seem unable to think logically about national security.

Let me pose three simple questions. Do you think foreign governments ever attempt to gain influence over legislators in order to affect policy or acquire information? Do you think they ever do so through a combination of innocent-looking favours and appeals to ancestral loyalties? Do you think it ever works?

No sensible person could answer no to any of these questions. But taken in sequence they demonstrate that Fadden's concerns are justified.

It is true that the picture is complicated by what the CSIS head called the "level of granularity" of his charges. What he meant, in English, was that he referred with possibly spurious precision to cabinet ministers in at least two unspecified provinces and several unidentified municipal politicians in B.C.

If he does not have solid evidence against particular individuals it was both foolish and irresponsible to say it the way he did. If he does, please note, there may be security or even legal reasons why he cannot make this evidence public. But either way what he said is happening is happening, and we all know it. Right?

So I have a fourth question: Do we care? It amazes me how many people seem to think it does not matter whether foreign nations are manipulating ethnic loyalties and employing junkets to the old country and such sugar-coated bribe-like objects to suborn Canadian legislators. It only matters if someone complains about their doing so.

Not everyone has taken that position. In this newspaper last weekend Liberal Senator Colin Kenny wrote "Fadden did Canadians a service by pointing out that too many Canadian politicians are effectively on other countries' dole." If you do not agree, do you deny the bit about the dole, or that he did us a service by mentioning it? No, no, don't change the subject.

Too late. They already did. It was tragicomic to see Bloc Québécois MP Maria Mourani demand, "Who are the traitors in the current political class, Mr. Fadden?" But to be fair, the BQ makes no secret of working to dismember Canada at your expense. The far more unpleasant part came when he responded that there was no question of treason and she snapped "You don't use the word 'traitor' but I'll say it."

As Fadden tried to explain, the issue is not blunt appeals to politicians to commit treason that would probably backfire. It is subtle and insidious attempts to seduce them into inappropriate conduct without ever creating a bright line they might refuse to cross.

I'm not saying it is always wrong to accept a trip or other favour. But it is wrong to do so in ways that might be compromising, including not saying anything. When I went to Israel on the dime of the Canada-Israel Committee, I made a point of disclosing that fact in commentary about the trip. Which is my cue to mention that I was recently hired as managing editor at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Though I am not a spokesman for the Institute in this column, readers should be given sufficient information to judge whether where I stand is determined at least in part by where I sit (starting with my boss having written in defence of Fadden).

Why is this so hard to grasp? Yet New Democrat Don Davies told Fadden "You've created great consternation and anxiety, unwarranted suspicion and an unfounded stain on ... every provincial cabinet minister in the country." Bosh. No one thought Fadden meant the UK government was plying ministers of recent British extraction with crumpets and tea.

If he did something bad, it was to cast unwarranted suspicion on cabinet ministers who are first- or second-generation immigrants from countries of west, south and east Asia, especially that big one near Taiwan. Given the normal hypersensitivity of the politically correct to any whiff of bigotry, Davies' line of attack was weirdly off-target.

Afterwards Davies said, "I don't think he understands ... the damage that he's done to the political process in this country." What about the damage politicians do to it when the head of CSIS warns of foreign penetration of our political system and most of them go after the messenger rather than the problem?

To talk as though multiculturalism trumps national security brings politics into disrepute. Yet as Fadden rightly told the committee, "If I had simply said, 'There is foreign interference in Canada,' you, ladies and gentlemen, would be all at your holidays right now."

On Tuesday, Liberal MP Marlene Jennings demanded a quick review of the allegations because "Four more weeks is simply too long to allow this issue to linger." Until Fadden spoke out, she'd have let it linger for four decades.

We have a problem.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The G8 and G20 have been and gone amid much sound and fury. But all the people making noise seem to have signified less than nothing.

First, the hard-core protesters who went around smashing stuff and setting fires. You could easily find mainstream outlets for your message if you even had one; much of the mainstream press, academia and the political class are uneasy with these economic summits. You rampage because you are thugs who insist that your point of view prevail even when you cannot persuade people of it, which is either childish or sinister or perhaps both. Democracies have seen this sort of thing before on many occasions and sensible people know it is toxic.

Next on my list are critics of the police, whether they are attempting a back-door validation of the vandals or simply playing the bourgeois-radical game of "second-guess-the-cops." Some have said the police were too tough, others too soft, and at least one commentator accused them of both simultaneously.

The first is absurd; it was not police burning dissenters' cars in Toronto. The second is hardly less so given the theatrical outcry that would have resulted from even one serious overreaction. But the third is also problematic. If a reasonably small number of people are bent on smashing glass, vandalizing vehicles, creating a shifting mass of unruly mobs and hoping to trick the police into breaking one innocent head, it is not possible for the security forces to stop them from doing so entirely even with severely repressive tactics.

That brings me to the non-violent protesters. You shut up, too. Not because you don't have every right to peaceful dissent, but because the real problem for the police is too much winking at the hard core by their fellow travellers. If you do not want the image of protest to be masked hooligans and flaming cop cars, you must sever the links of sympathy between the radical legal left and the radical illegal left. It does little good for cranky conservatives like me to deplore the rock-throwers; you must do it, too. You must confront them when it is happening and you must help the police prevent it beforehand and punish it afterwards. I'm not really sure what your complaints about these summits even were anyway, but I don't want to hear a word of it until you sternly and effectively disavow the radical rabble hiding in your midst with deeds as well as formulaic pieties.

When I champion peaceful dissent here, I'm willing to walk the walk. For having attempted to dispose of the critics, I'd now like to shut up the participants. Everything useful they said would have been far more usefully said at home.

You say they came and promised to be fiscally responsible? Well, the proof of this pudding is in the eating. If they get their budgets under control, they don't need to travel to exotic countries, or Canada, to stand around saying one day they'll do it. And, if they don't, their words were just so much wind over sand or, in the case of Toronto, asphalt. If they really feel the need to send a joint message they can circulate a PDF, affix electronic signatures and send it out to the press. We'll get it. We have e-mail.

I'm not just being irritable. I believe there's a kind of faux federalism behind these gatherings that risks misleading citizens and perhaps even politicians into thinking there's been a partial pooling of sovereignty into the G8 or G20, creating some kind of supranational authority to manage global economic affairs that, among other things, binds their members not to do foolish things when they go home because they promised not to in Toronto.

I am a big fan of real federalism. Certain tasks must be done by central governments because they cannot be done by subordinate ones (the classic example being national defence), while others, like education, are far better delivered locally. That doesn't mean I want a global federation; I'm with Bertrand de Jouvenel, who said he favoured world government until he crossed the Swiss border half an hour ahead of the Nazis. But the key point is that these gatherings are not a convincing attempt at it.

Federalism requires subordinate units permanently to surrender important legal powers they will be irresistibly tempted to use unless these powers are put definitively out of reach (if, for instance, states or provinces can withdraw their troops from the national army when they feel threatened or disgruntled, no war effort can survive). But the G20 neither does so nor pretends to. Promises to foreigners are even less binding than promises to one's own voters, and that's all we saw in Toronto.

At these summits even the people who had something to say said it in the wrong forum for the wrong reasons. Sound? Check. Fury? Check. Significance? Nothing good.

Let's not do it again soon.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

One great thing about a newspaper column is I can criticize Barack Obama without jeopardizing my position and creating a spectacle of public humiliation. In this I do not resemble Lt.-Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal.

As in many other things, you may retort. Gen. McChrystal is a rock-hard warrior whose steely blue eyes drill right through you. Mine are the exact shade of brown that mystery- and action-story authors never allot to their heroes. When the general enters a room all heads swing toward him. When I do so the door swings. And when he was appointed commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, the National Post reported that he only ate one meal a day "to avoid feeling sluggish". I operate under no such restriction. But it is the first difference that matters here.

Much as I despise Barack Obama, he clearly had to relieve Gen. McChrystal for his idiotic words. But he had to do it properly. Once the general's staff had openly derided "the wimps in the White House" the only way to contain the damage was for them not to live up to the characterization. And they couldn't, for the obvious reason that it was accurate.

Consider the revealing babble by White House press secretary Robert Gibbs that "There has clearly been an enormous mistake in judgment that he will have to answer to" and "The purpose for calling him here is to see what in the world he was thinking."

Yes, Gen. McChrystal made an error of judgment in allowing his views to be made public. But he was called to the White House to answer for the views, not their public expression. Moreover, it was blazingly obvious what he was thinking; his words left nothing to the imagination. It was equally obvious that he was not thinking: No former commander of the Joint Special Operations Command (which oversees the Delta Force, Navy Seals and such) could fail to sense danger in allowing Rolling Stone to follow him around, record the profanity-laced commentary of his staff and print the result unless his brain was completely AWOL.

The most disturbing part of the White House reaction is that President Obama, and Defence Secretary Robert Gates, repeated the psychobabble charge of "poor judgment." What the general showed, unmistakably, was insubordination. But the president's first instinct was not a severe yet dignified reproach. It was a big dollop of lukewarm PR pablum: "Whatever decision that I make with respect to Gen. McChrystal, or any other aspect of Afghan policy, is determined entirely on how I can make sure that we have a strategy that justifies the enormous courage and sacrifice that those men and women are making over there, and that ultimately makes this country safer." He needed focused outrage at insolence toward the office of Commander in Chief, not soothing vacuity.

Harry Truman once commented that when he encountered insubordination from Douglas MacArthur over the Korean War, "I was ready to kick him into the North China Sea." It would probably have been as unsafe to try to propel MacArthur into a large body of water with your foot as to perform the operation on Stanley McChrystal. But I'll bet Truman would have made a creditable attempt. Not Barack Obama.

"No drama Obama" is increasingly clearly in the wrong chair as Commander in Chief. Which is very troubling not just for the president but for his country and, therefore, for its allies. If he had not fired Gen. McChrystal it would have given free rein to widespread contempt for the president and his ilk within the military. But firing him will only deepen that contempt unless he now takes decisive action in Afghanistan, a war he doesn't know how to win but doesn't dare lose. And he's already over a barrel with his new commander whether David Petraeus's appointment is interim or permanent.

The problem is that whoever he now picks can dictate strategy and insist on its public endorsement. The president can't say no to such demands, because should anyone decline or resign the Afghan command, no matter how decorously, everyone will know senior generals are unwilling to try to win a war on behalf of an administration that considers it more important to give radicals control of the global gender agenda than to defend friends in Israel and crush foes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Everyone. At home and abroad. Which means the president must also back his new commander even if the Afghan war strategy goes badly wrong. No amount of schadenfreude at the discomfiture of the wimps in the White House can compensate me for how much more likely this episode makes failure in Afghanistan. And it is Gen. McChrystal's fault for not keeping his big steaming yap shut.

I think more or less the way McChrystal does, without all the obscenities. But I can say it. He couldn't.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The reflexive hostility to Israel on the democratic left is becoming troubling. I think well-meaning progressives need to increase their vigilance in the name of decency.

Consider the ruckus caused by remarks in which NDP deputy leader Libby Davies appeared to denounce the very founding of Israel as illegitimate. Once her comments went viral, and her party commendably repudiated them, she wrote a letter saying "My reference to the year 1948 as the beginning of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory was a serious and completely inadvertent error." But this explanation does not wash.

That her comments were serious I grant. But inadvertent? This was not some slip of the tongue like a right-winger shouting "Long live Communism" when they meant to say "Capitalism." She knows 1948 was the founding of Israel, not a subsequent war in which it acquired "disputed" territory. And she had also broken with her party to endorse a boycott and sanctions against Israel. There is deep hostility here that, one fears, is uncontroversial among many of her associates.

Then consider Fidel Castro's declaration, proudly circulated by Cuban diplomats at a typical recent UN anti-Israel session: "The hatred felt by the state of Israel against the Palestinians is such that they would not hesitate to send the one and a half million men, women and children of that country to the crematoria where millions of Jews of all ages were exterminated by the Nazis. It would seem that the Fuehrer's swastika is today Israel's banner." And ask yourself: Where is the outrage on the democratic left?

I will not rehash old quarrels about whether Castro is a vicious incompetent or a romantic anti-imperialist hero. But anyone who reads the newspapers knows it is Hamas that is pledged to exterminate Jews, not the other way around. And putting swastikas over the Star of David is second only to the blood libel in gratuitous malevolence. So why aren't we hearing more criticism of Castro from his erstwhile admirers? You're not sympathetic, are you?

I don't believe so. I'm convinced most Canadians on the left are motivated by precisely the compassionate sensitivity to injustice and bigotry they proclaim a little too often and too loudly. And I am certain that, if they actually read the drearily revolting stream of anti-Semitic blood-libel cartoons, sermons and political statements in Middle Eastern publications and, increasingly, Islamist outlets in the West, they would be physically ill. But I also know they do not read these things, on purpose. And I don't understand why not.

Thus I appeal to the Canadian left, with absolute sincerity: Please recognize that there is an enemy to your left and it is creeping up on you.

I realize you believe you have adversaries and enemies on the right. I am not convinced you draw a sufficiently careful distinction between the merely misguided and the genuinely malign to that side but I grant that the latter do exist. Including anti-Semites in the fever swamps of the right. But they inhabit the fever swamps of the left as well. I am increasingly persuaded that anti-Semitism is an infallible badge of vile extremism everywhere. And if you look hard to your left you will see a loathsome horde dripping its slime and heading your way.

Of course not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. If it were, it would make most Israelis anti-Semitic, since the inhabitants of that fractious democracy incessantly debate every aspect of public life and criticize their own government with considerable glee. Ever since Job berated God for callous incompetence, it has been normal within Judaism to question everything without standing on ceremony.

I love it. But why doesn't the left? You all know Israel investigates itself constantly over the Gaza blockade, the Lebanon incursion, the withdrawal from Gaza and everything else, and Israelis quarrel about them constantly. You all know that in Syria, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Gaza dissent brings death. Yet the very existence of Israel seems increasingly offensive to some of you.

The naive still ask why the left dislikes Israel despite its democratic openness. But darker questions are starting to arise. You cannot be unaware of the moral gulf between Israel and Hamas. And as long as you side reflexively with Hamas, you cannot reassure me that you are not culpable in a weird infiltration of hate into progressivism.

It is a relief that even an American media icon like Helen Thomas destroys her career by telling Israelis openly to "get the hell out of Palestine" and "go home" to "Poland. Germany. And America ..." But her views cannot have been a secret to colleagues who continued to respect her until she went toxically public.

Anti-Semitism is wicked and grotesque. Please do not let it seep into the mainstream left.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]