So I see from the papers that the Ontario government's decision to buy overpriced politically correct power is going to cost us all money. As will its need to catch up on neglected mainstream generating capacity and, gosh, lots of other stuff that will force them to tighten our belts something fierce.

From among many ominous harbingers of taxes yet to come let me draw your horrified attention to Wednesday's Citizen report on a study for Canadian Manufacturers and Exporters by Aegent Energy Advisors that "tallies up anticipated hydro cost increases from a dozen different sources between now and early 2015" and says Ottawans could get hit with a 41.8-per-cent rate hike by 2015 on top of the 17.7 per cent we were already whacked with this year alone.

Read it again. No, not the 41.8. The bit about "a dozen different sources." It seems a whole lot of chickens are coming home to roost... in your wallet.

One even has the impression, at times, that the need to admit stuff like this to prospective voters has brought politicians in Canada to an important realization. Protest against these sorts of rate hikes and they explain to you, in the aggravated I-have-a-headache tone of reasonableness overburdened parents use near the end of a hot day, that a great deal of bad policy has left a mess that can neither be ignored nor solved cheaply.

Thus the Citizen went on to note that in an interview with the paper in August, "Ontario Energy Minister Brad Duguid acknowledged that electricity rates will continue to rise to pay for the province's 'critical investments' in clean and reliable power."

It sure beats the old mantra of "Hey everybody, free money. Don't let those mean right-wingers tell you it doesn't exist." But what people in government clearly still don't grasp is the way all these things fit together.

As you've doubtless noticed, it's not just your energy bill. Your property taxes also keep going up, accompanied by reassuring verbiage about the long run and capital funds and why zero means cash grab and all that. And much of it is not implausible. In isolation I could probably even be convinced to put up with it. But it's not isolated.

Every day in every way, governments are taxing us better and better, from hydro bills to property taxes, tuition fees, fees for school supplies, eco fees, health "premiums" and more subtle things like freezing the basic exemption for the CPP so inflation nibbles quietly at us. But they don't seem to realize what the cumulative impact is or, indeed, to grasp that there is one. Every problem, from fading generating capacity to crumbling roads to Ontario's multi-billion-dollar municipal pension plan shortfall to the looming demographic threat to our social programs to the rust-out of our military, strikes them as an isolated anomaly justifying a tax hike just this once to get things fixed.

They don't seem to see that all these separate problems intersect in public budgets and, therefore, converge on voters' wallets in a highly problematic fashion. Instead, they keep promising us more: all-day kindergarten, for instance, or tax breaks for pottery lessons for the kiddies. Like the boozer who just needs another stiff one to muster the courage to cut down, they keep staggering back to the spending cabinet to crack open one fresh program after another.

Always it's bwa-bwa-bwa about prudent investments in the future. But where do these bwasters think we're going to get enough money to deal with all these crises at once? If they were to come clean with us and say the party's over, that all that free money we were promised has proved to be shockingly expensive, I might ask which frenzied charlatans told us otherwise for decades. But then we could tackle the root causes of bad governance. Because instead they insist on viewing each problem as a freak accident and dismissing citizens' frustration as proof of vexing immaturity, we can't have that conversation with them and hardly even with ourselves.

That Citizen story about hydro rate hikes also said in his interview with the paper, Energy Minister "Duguid wouldn't estimate how large the increases will be because the Ontario Power Authority is still working on a long-term energy plan, expected this fall."

Well yes, you've only been in power seven years. Plus he has no more idea of it than he does how the government will cope with health care taking 46 per cent of provincial program spending and rising while education is underfunded and the premier just expanded it and the roads and sewers are disintegrating but it's all fine here folks, top men are on it, just need a few more of your dollars now and some in a bit and another wad later and then see we have this deficit and a shortfall ...

Until at some point they tighten our belts so much we can't eat or breathe.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

By the time you read this I hope to be sitting on my subsidized dock drinking subsidized beer and waiting to pour subsidized maple syrup on my subsidized pancakes. Not because Labour Day lets me pick my employer's pocket by posing as a worker or I was somehow granted preferential access to the trough. What prompts this shimmering vision of subsidies dancing across the wavetops on a sunny afternoon is those dang press releases that keep pouring in about how everything in Canada is subsidized.

You think I got into the beer early and exaggerate? Banish that unsubsidized thought. I've been collecting these communiqués all summer and know whereof I speak. Yes, at some point I have to give them up. It's an unhealthy, obsessive habit that's interfering with what passes for my social relationships. But meanwhile let me grab your sleeve in the sickly but tenacious grip of the failing zealot and force you back into a subsidized Muskoka chair to hear my latest thoughts on the subject.

First of all, subsidized maple syrup is not some fantasy based on licensed premises. It's cold (or hot) reality in Canada, in both official languages. Back on July 14 the ideological libertarians in the Tory caucus boasted of shoveling 36 grand at the Association des francophones de Nanaimo for their 11th Maple Sugar Festival/11ième Festival du Sucre d'Érable. But if you don't live in B.C don't worry; on Aug. 16 the government told me the Minister of Veterans' Affairs would be in St-Norbert d'Athabaska to announce that he was lost ... no sorry, to troll for votes ... I mean give money... uh, make that "announce investments that will benefit maple syrup producers." And we all know Quebecers can't make maple syrup without state assistance.

As for the beer, on Aug. 11 I was told that no less august a personage than the Minister of Foreign Affairs was headed for Ile-du-Grand-Calumet, Que., "to announce an investment in support of Quebec's Hops industry." (And, apparently, promote the gratuitous Capitalization of Nouns while he was at it.) Not spending. An investment. Except the Money just goes out and never comes back.

I find it hard to determine whether our political class has, at this point, anything left resembling beliefs about the usefulness or sustainability of all this spending. But clearly they expect the majority of voters to accept that nothing worthwhile can happen without state support in Canada, that we need government funding for every imaginable vaguely worthwhile activity to free us from anxiety and want so we can sit on our subsidized botties wondering where on Earth all these oversized tax bills came from.

Possibly my dock, or at least its wooden bits. On July 28, the government boasted of hurling a billion dollars at 24 pulp and paper mills because, the Tory MP who just happened to represent the New Brunswick riding getting the latest boodle droned, "Projects like these are an example of how our Government's targeted investments are helping transform Canada's forest sector." On July 30 two cabinet ministers ganged up to announce they were about to "make an announcement in support of forest sector companies planning innovative projects" which, an Aug. 3 follow-up said, put taxpayers on the hook for another $100 million. (Funnily enough, Stockwell Day launched the same program on the same day in Vancouver with a separate press release, which at least tries to buy votes economically.) There was also $20.4 million from the feds and Quebec for the world's first nanocrystalline cellulose plant in Windsor, PQ, on July 16, the same day the Federation of B.C. Woodlot Associations bagged $421,000 courtesy of, gosh, the local MP on behalf of the agriculture minister.

On July 30 a senator was bragging of giving $2 million to a hardwood plant in New Brunswick. And on July 7 ... (Enough with the trees - ed.) Not so, I reply. Why, just this Wednesday Michael Ignatieff berated the PM for not giving loan guarantees to the forest industry in Quebec. But OK, let's consider other plants.

Having an organic salad this weekend? Subsidized. (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Sept. 1.) Buying flowers for that special someone? Subsidized. (Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada Aug. 31).

What if you just want to get to the cottage and sit down? Well, tire makers are getting booty, along with wharves and boat ramps and ships and "traditional fishing boats, custom pleasure craft, and commercial workboats" (ACOA, Aug. 4) and even a Flying Boat Festival -- Legacy Fund (Canadian Heritage, Aug. 11) and they gave the car companies a big whack of money in 2009 so no matter how you get there tax dollars cushion your ride.

I think I need that beer now. Then I'll try to convince the PM my dock is a wharf needing a further investment to help stimulate my economy and his re-election. Cheers.

[First published in The Ottawa Citizen]

Isn't it reassuring that the Obama administration has invited Israeli and Palestinian leaders to Washington to resume what the Citizen delicately called "long-stalled direct peace talks"? Mind you, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cautioned that "there will be difficulties ahead." Darn it all. Difficulties in the Middle East? How did that happen? You could start with George Will's column in Wednesday's National Post asking bluntly: "Negotiations about what?" Israel, he rightly said, is determined not to allow a third Islamic republic in the West Bank to go with those in Iran and now Gaza. And that is the Palestinians' minimum condition in negotiations.

Let me rephrase that. It is their minimum condition for negotiations. John Thompson, of the Mackenzie Institute, once ridiculed Yassir Arafat's "impulsive urge for trying to take the pot with a pair of fours and a lot of bluff." But it wasn't just him. The Palestinian leadership has catastrophically overplayed its hand at every turn since the 1920s; it is hardly surprising that they should now demand that in return for talking to the stinking Jews they should be permitted to sneak up behind them with murder in their hearts.

What is surprising is that so many in the West overlook or excuse this vicious and delusional attitude while insisting that if only Israel were more reasonable everything would be fine. Pay no attention to that blood libel in front of the curtain.

As Will notes, when the Israelis withdrew from Gaza and Hamas took over and started raining rockets on them, the so-called international community didn't object. ("The number of UN resolutions deploring this? Zero.") But world opinion was "theatrically appalled" when Israel retaliated.

So far, so sadly familiar. We say again and again that Israel isn't just the only place in the Middle East where gays or women have rights, it's the only place where Muslims do. So why do so many intelligent and, I strive to keep believing, well-intentioned people in the West blame Israel first, last and always or prattle soothing idiocies about an alleged Middle East Peace Process like Hillary Clinton?

Here I'd like to lay aside my usual scorn for social science and cite a story in Saturday's National Post about a study by Joseph Henrich of the University of British Columbia on co-operation, altruism and culture. Henrich et al revisited a famous experiment called the Ultimatum Game in which Subject A is given $100 and told that he can offer to divide it with Subject B any way A likes. If B says yes, they each get their agreed-upon share. But if B says no, neither gets anything. And each pair only plays once so there's no room for strategic decisions about future encounters.

It has long been known that educated Americans, if assigned the role of Subject A, will offer an average of $48. And when assigned the role of B, they tend to reject anything under $40. In other words, Americans, (and other Westerners) expect fairness, value it highly, and resent its absence. But Henrich and his colleagues discovered that elsewhere, starting in the Amazon jungle, people react very differently, usually making smaller offers as A and accepting them as B.

The researchers concluded that Westerners differ from non-Westerners. "Really?," I'm tempted to say. You discovered the Third World. Way to go. Have you ever been abroad? But better late than never.

What these researchers say is mostly true and important. Including their insistence that we are the weirdos. They call us "Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic" or WEIRD for short. I think this admittedly clever terminology puts too much emphasis on post-Industrial Revolution material conditions and too little on cultural factors going back at least to the fateful meeting of Athens and Jerusalem in the Roman Empire. But the brutal fact is that we in the West are unusual.

We are not the world. And what we're seeing in the Middle East, or trying not to, is a confrontation, one might even say a clash of civilizations, between a Western society and its non-Western neighbours who think very differently about getting along and value fairness far less.

In their paper, Henrich et al suggest that too much emphasis on WEIRD test subjects has misled behavioural scientists. To which I respond that they oughta meet our political and cultural elite. To adapt a jibe from William F. Buckley, our chattering classes are always chattering about different cultures but are always amazed to find that there are other cultures. They assume that because the Palestinians keep rejecting Israeli peace offers, those offers must have been somehow insincere or ungenerous because that's what it would mean if Hamas, Hezbollah and Fatah were all good bourgeois exurban Westerners.

So yes, there could be difficulties ahead, most of the important ones coming from that obtuse attitude.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The latest inept and expensive flip-flop from the Ontario government, on overpriced rural solar power, has me scratching my head till my scalp hurts on a key question of political economy: Is it in fact possible to be a cunning dunce?

In case you missed it, the McGuinty Liberals just proposed a massive bounty for rural solar power and apparently (I am not making this up) didn't realize people would come for it ... in which case why offer it? Their "microFIT" program offered nearly 20 times the market price for solar-generated electricity, 80.2 cents per kilowatt hour (kW·h) rather than 4.02, to try to get people to put a few panels on their roof. To the government's astonishment, a gold rush ensued instead.

By July 2, with almost 19,000 people lined up for the free money, the province said it would only pay 58.8 cents per kWh, provoking a wave of rural anger that Wednesday's Citizen described as "so strong that it reportedly threatened the re-election chances of nearly two dozen Liberal MPPs." So the government flapped the flip of its flop and will now pay 80.2 cents per kWh for every project registered before July 2 but only 60.4 afterward.

How can you spend your adult life aspiring to govern, relentlessly and shamelessly pursuing political power, and then know nothing about the processes of government even when you've been in office for seven years? Did no one see this coming?

It reminds me of an exchange in Yes Minister when the hapless politician Jim Hacker demands to be told what he doesn't know about an important issue and the ultimate bureaucrat Sir Humphrey Appleby responds, "I don't know what you don't know, Minister. It could be almost anything."

So it seems. But in fact it's almost always the same thing. Politicians are woefully, even wilfully, obtuse on the fundamental principle of government that if you build it they will come. Politicians just can't seem to grasp that incentives matter. Politicians are therefore astonished to discover that higher unemployment benefits change people's attitude toward work, that charging too little for water leads us to waste it, and that allowing bogus refugee claimants to live among us for decades while engaging in procedural shenanigans encourages human traffickers to target Canada -- and on and on and on.

How can they be so dumb, I want to shout. "Lots of practice," replies my wife, without even shouting.

But not so fast.

When they realized this dopey plan to pay way more than it's worth for politically correct electricity was going to break the bank, the McGuinty Liberals decided to break their promise -- which at least suggests a certain primordial instinct for rational self-preservation. And while they botched their initial response by annoying the people already in line for a promised handout, when they saw more than 20 seats in peril they deftly reversed course again, buying off the early adopters while seeking to put a lid on runaway costs. Which is definitely cunning.

So they can't be completely stupid even though the whole mess was created by unadulterated, grade A pure stupidity on economics compounded by a hefty dose of it on the one subject, politics, you'd think they actually know something about.

Besides, if you reviewed the CVs of Dalton McGuinty's caucus, or gave them IQ tests, you'd find that far from fitting the dictionary definition of stupid, most of them are clever, determined and accomplished.

Yet they are manifestly licensed buffoons when it comes to elementary principles of political economy. And to exhibit an impressive degree of primal cunning once cornered by their own ineptitude argues that they are at once both clever and stupid. Moreover, the Ontario government's latest stand on the issue, trying to buy their way out of trouble while not buying more trouble, suggests they see clearly how people respond to the very incentives they got into this mess by ignoring.

If it were just them, we might write it off as a quirk. But it's not. As I noted last week about the federal Tories, modern politicians in every party and every region clearly think citizens respond to incentives in the sense that they, citizens, will give votes in return for money. And yet politicians do not expect us to change our behaviour in other ways when they change our circumstances. How can this be?

The paradox disappears if you realize that they think of the mass of humanity as reliably grateful for state benefits precisely because we are too inept to manage our own affairs rationally. Thus we respond to one incentive and one incentive only.

To paraphrase Orwell, it is precisely the sort of stupid thing only an intelligent person could believe. It is also insulting. But as long as we keep electing them, we are looking in the right place for cunning when we scrutinize our politicians, but in the wrong place for the dunces.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

One thing I cannot stop myself doing is noting all the press releases the federal government puts out touting the myriad ways it has spent public money trying to buy support. What a lack of monument to democracy. No reasoning, no eloquence, just cash changing hands.

It's one thing to be obsessed with insider stuff. But as these releases pour into my inbox I wonder in horrified incredulity who on Earth the senders think wants to read them, even among political junkies. Can they even interest their authors?

I mean, what public or partisan interest is served by telling the Parliamentary Press Gallery about your government supporting two affordable housing developments in Burlington, giving over a million bucks to Pneus ABC Tires Inc. of Atholville, N.B., to create "up to 15 new jobs," $15,763,384 to Francophone communities in Newfoundland and Labrador, $534,820 for "25 arts and heritage projects in Newfoundland and Labrador," and "more than $48,000" to visitor services at the Cape Jourimain Nature Centre in Bayfield, N.B.? And that was just Wednesday morning. By 8 minutes past noon they'd added $52,826 in EcoAction Community Funding for Regina and central Sask-atchewan, and before 1:30 Fraser Specialty Products Ltd., Beaulieu Plumbing and Mechanical Inc., and IPL Inc. of Edmundston, N.B., had bagged almost $2 million ... and on it went.

I also don't think I need two press releases on consecutive days telling me Bob Rae would hold a press conference on Wednesday "to discuss Liberal opposition to Conservative census cuts;" I don't even want to hear him discuss the cuts let alone dwell narcissistically on his opposition to them. "Navel lint in K1A" shouts the headline, or would if anyone covered it. (Plus his colleague Mark Holland had sent two releases threatening to do the same boring thing six days earlier.)

Then why, cries my last remaining reader, do you spend a whole column telling us you don't care about things we don't either, in agonizing detail?

Two reasons. First, you need to know this is what the guardians of the public purse (governmental and opposition) consider important. It is where they put their time and energy and while they're sending dozens of these every week they aren't doing, or thinking about, anything else. And it is costing you plenty, as the Tories try to buy support from every conceivable constituency and the opposition parties hammer them for not doing so on nearly a lavish or shameless enough scale.

Second, I just started reading a book of Wilfrid Laurier's parliamentary and public speeches before he was prime minister. Oh, there's an issue of interest to Canadians, comes a sarcastic shout from the back. Yes but, I shout back. Things used to be genuinely different, and could be again if we grasp what went wrong.

As an 1889 tribute to Laurier put it, "To be a Parliamentary orator, in the genuine sense of the words, one must bring to the discussion not only an agreeable voice and a chaste style, but a rare faculty of organization, a very practical mind, and a great knowledge of facts." Whereas the modern House is dominated by the likes of John Baird, a master of ersatz outrage and obfuscation who never said anything anyone reading this column can remember. And I think there's a connection between the two.

So humour me. Think of your favourite parliamentary orator. You've drawn a blank, haven't you? There may be politicians you like. But not one prompts you to say, as a contemporary did of Laurier in 1874, "His eloquence springs rather from the mind than from the heart ..." and he clearly "understood that the orator must be an honest and a good man."

Many of our MPs are honest, intelligent and dedicated to the public good, on all sides of the aisle. And I'm sure Laurier knew the black arts of politics; you don't succeed in any era without them. But when he put a man down he did it with lethal elegance, for instance pre-empting a windbag in an 1886 public debate with "You will speak after me, but I know what you will say and I will therefore answer it at once. For a long time past I have known the circle in which the ball chained to your feet permits you to travel."

Today's would-be statesman, with the ball chained to his lips, burbles things like: "We are the coalition, the Liberal Party of Canada is the coalition, I'm not running to make coalition with anybody else, I am running to win a Liberal government." Suggesting the only tax he doesn't like is syntax.

How did we get from there to here? I say it's because modern politicians aren't appealing to principle or invoking morality. They're trying to appropriate public money for every imaginable private interest that might respond with votes. This is the logic of modern politics, and its dismal eloquence.

Boring, yet horrible. I can't look away, and neither should you.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

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]