Apparently the UN has not in fact decided to appoint an ambassador to the little green men. Despite what you read in the newspapers, Mazlan Othman, head of its Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA), is not being made responsible for co-ordinating humanity's response to alien contact. What a lost opportunity.

In the first place, as columnist Lorne Gunter noted, if invading aliens were to pull a "take me to your leader" stunt on the UN, there is every hope that their lethal hordes would perish slowly and miserably in a massive bureaucratic tangle of delay and inefficiency, their deadly laser blasts only making the red tape hot and sticky while the forms in triplicate gave off suffocating smoke.

In the second place, Unoosa would make a great name for an alien.

In the third place, it would have been darkly funny if, as initially reported, the UN had proposed a more inclusive approach to aliens. Evidently the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which UNOOSA really does oversee, obliges UN members to protect Earth from contamination by sterilizing alien species but, a certain newspaper claimed Monday, "Othman is understood to want a more tolerant approach." I could have dined out on the UN putting the vital interests of mankind a distant second to those of beings prone to erupting from our bellies, probing our brains after a perfunctory "I come in peace" or falling implausibly in love with James Tiberius Kirk.

Mind you, I am not one to support travelling through space to locate exotic alien races and perpetrate injustices upon them.

Indeed, I do not support travelling through space at all; if we cannot make a decent go of life on Earth I cannot imagine that some moon of Saturn rendered inviting by picturesque seas of liquid methane (at a bracing minus 161.6 degrees C) would furnish a more appropriate stage for our greed and folly. But survival is the first order of business, and even Stephen Hawking, not the most bellicose of individuals, says if there are aliens don't wave at them because "The outcome for us would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the native Americans."

With luck their first contact with us through transmissions of I Love Lucy will convince them that, while too stupid to resist conquest, we have no brains worth feeding off so why go there?

It is to my enduring shame that I can quote from memory Skeletor's disparagement of Earth in the sci-fi film Masters of the Universe as "this primitive and tasteless planet," but remember: tasting bad is a legitimate defence mechanism.

The other reason I wish we had a UN office of aliens is to deal with the ones I am increasingly persuaded live among us. I'm not talking about this week's news report that a few retired American air force officers and one NCO claim aliens have been sniffing around their nuclear sites for half a century. There are a lot of mighty weird people on this planet who don't have the excuse that they came from Alpha Centauri and I don't see why the antics and errors of a handful of them deserve media attention, however convenient it may be to life forms who convert strange stories into radio waves.

Rather, I was trying to imagine the scenario where aliens land and say "Take us to your leader" and we show them Dalton McGuinty and they say "You must be pulling my tentacle. Who's really in charge?"

And I suddenly thought that if they did meet the premier, they'd do some weird secret Arcturian handshake and wink some odd visual apparatus then waddle off as though nothing had happened to avoid blowing his cover. But it's too late because he gave the game away with his lost-in-space advice to families to save up their laundry for weekends to conserve electricity.

To be fair, Dalton McGuinty generally does a plausible imitation of an Earthling. But obviously he's from a planet where the beings own many more garments than humans do, dirty ones don't smell after six days in a heap and politicians can tell you when to wash your clothes even though they themselves don't do it and you don't mind.

And it escaped his notice that this planet isn't like that. A tiny error, but it's the little things that give you away. Like the character in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy who did a good job of blending in on Earth except for a shaky start when he decided Ford Prefect (it was a 1950s British car) would make a nicely inconspicuous name.

Now if we could just get the UN to co-ordinate our contacts with Premier McGuinty, it might keep both of them too busy to bother us while we do our laundry, fend off alien invasions, get the state out of our basements and try to determine which stories in the newspaper have some foundation in fact.

Unoosa, call home!

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

One of the oddest stories of the week, which takes some doing, was Michael Ignatieff apparently trying to undermine Canada's bid for a UN Security Council seat. I know politics here doesn't stop at the water's edge but tries to shove the other fellow in. Still, this seems weird.

For the record, I'm not objecting because I want us to get a Security Council seat. As I subtly hinted in endorsing the suggestion back in 1999 that the UN be dismantled and hurled brick by brick into the river, I consider it a dangerous organization, less for the generally feeble things it does than for the illusions it fosters among well-meaning Westerners that there is some sort of world government committed to fair play and decency. Wednesday's Citizen said our annual push to censure Iran's human rights record might cost us crucial votes for that Security Council seat which gives you a pretty good idea what really goes on at the UN.

Nor am I complaining from a partisan standpoint that Ignatieff was attempting to undermine Stephen Harper's foreign policy. I grant that, little things like the premature Afghan pullout aside, it has been less objectionable than usual but not sufficiently to command my enthusiastic support. What bothers me is more fundamental: It is not possible to discern what the Liberal leader was trying to do. His remarks simply make no sense on any level.

What he said was "This is a government that for four years has basically ignored the United Nations and now is suddenly showing up saying, 'Hey, put us on the council.' Don't mistake me. I know how important it is for Canada to get a seat on the Security Council but Canadians have to ask a tough question: Has this government earned that place? We're not convinced it has."

Where to start? I for one cannot decipher his contention that Canada has basically ignored the UN for four years. If we had paid more attention to it, what does he think we would have been paying attention to and what would we have done? He has no idea and neither do you.

Next, he says he knows how important it is for Canada to get a seat on the Security Council. I dispute this. What important world issue is not only going to be settled by a Security Council vote in the near future, but settled by a vote so close our ballot will prove decisive? Ridiculous.

I also do not know, when he says he doesn't think we have earned such a seat, what behavior he thinks does qualify a nation for it. (The Council's current non-permanent members are Austria, Bosnia and Herzogovina, Brazil, Gabon, Japan, Lebanon, Mexico, Nigeria, Turkey and Uganda. You tell me why.)

Nor, finally, can I see what purpose is served by Ignatieff's remarks taken as a whole. He can't really believe they will persuade the "international community" to wait, to pass over Canada until that awful Stephen Harper finally goes away before giving us our seat. And since he maintains the public pose and, I expect, the private belief that he will soon replace Stephen Harper as prime minister, if they do work he'll be depriving himself of the right to appoint and instruct its occupant. To what end?

If, by contrast, he was simply posturing for a domestic audience, convinced that believers in the UN in Canada are generally not believers in Stephen Harper, it is slightly more credible on the face of it. But does he think voters of this high-minded sort will not object to a stand that, whatever its other merits, runs Canada down abroad for partisan advantage at home?

There is much head-scratching and head-shaking nowadays about the relentlessly partisan tone of Canadian politics. Yes, it has always been a tough game. But modern practitioners seem weirdly unable to stop at the venom's edge even in the face of widespread disgust with the shallow nastiness of public discussion; look no further than Jim Flaherty's strangely out-of-place campaign speech to the Canadian Club of Ottawa on Tuesday, or the daily horror of Question Period.

Michael Ignatieff himself just told columnist Don Martin that to reform question period, "I don't think changing the rules are as important as changing the atmosphere. It's real simple. I ask a real question and I get a real answer. ... I'm prepared to ask a real question hoping to get a real answer. That's all I can do and the other guy's got to do his bit."

In short, I'm taking the high road unlike my stinking low-down opponent. And that, I feel, is the real explanation of his outburst against Harper and the UN. When they've only got one gear, you don't really have to ask why they're driving in it. Yet it seems out of keeping with what the public wants and Ignatieff's pre-political persona.

How does contemporary politics turn well-meaning, intelligent people into monotonously annoying partisans with such depressing regularity? It's very strange.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Can you believe our governments intend to make us eat less salt? Have they nothing better to do?

OK, less sodium. There really is a public-sector initiative to reduce my MSG intake, as insulting as it is useless. (For the record, I also don't eat pure sodium; I hate the way it bursts into flames in water.)

Such a story certainly makes me shake my head at periodic fulminations about a hard-right conservative counterrevolution in Canada. This initiative came from a meeting of health ministers in Newfoundland that included federal Tory Leona Aglukkaq and four right-of-centre provincial representatives. So I ask you: What sort of conservative thinks the state should be telling people what to eat? For that matter, what kind of liberal thinks the state should be evicted from the bedrooms of the nation only to move into the kitchen and mess with the condiments?

All of them, apparently. Members of our political class clearly believe they have the right, duty and ability to make us better people, including at the table.

On reflection, I'm reluctant to say they actually think these things. I have never heard any of them articulate any moral theory or even endorse publicly the idea that the best people may change the displeasing dietary habits of the vulgar masses. (When Genesis says we are our brother's keeper, the point is don't slay him, then deny all knowledge of the whereabouts of his corpse; it's not a mandate to fiddle with his spice rack.) And I know of no political philosophy that asserts that the state has the duty to improve our diets by force, nor do I find it anywhere in our Constitution. Let there be no mistake on this point. Government, as George Washington said, "is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force."

Few people would accuse our politicians of putting on a conspicuous display of reason or eloquence. But, behind their platitudes, the plan is to use the coercive power of the state to require manufacturers and sellers to do or refrain from doing certain things on pain of fine or imprisonment and thus interfere with our liberty to buy and eat the food we want and feed our children as we choose.

Actually there is no plan, which brings me to the third issue: politicians' incapacity to do this thing they have no right to do. As one news story said, "The majority of Canadians' salt intake comes from packaged or restaurant food, but the government has no plans to enforce new laws or regulations that would force industry to comply." A plan. You're right. I'll need a plan. That's some realization for people with decades of experience in public life.

It gets worse. In revealing her mission to desalinate the populace, Aglukkaq said that, if we're going to sustain health care in the long term in Canada, then "equally important to treatment when people fall ill is to prevent people from getting ill in the first place."

Back in April 1998, I ridiculed then-health minister Allan Rock for ordering us to exercise more because "if over the next five years we could reduce the level of inactivity by 10 per cent, we would save about $5 billion in health care." Sure, if people didn't get sick, we could make socialized health care work with better planning. And, if you had some ham, we could make ham sandwiches ... if you had any bread. Rediscovering this fatuity 12 years later is pathetic.

Should we eat less salt? Of course. We should eat less everything. I treasure a 1949 radio ad for Pepsi touting "two full glasses of sparkling Pepsi from one big 12-ounce bottle." Serve a kid six ounces of soda today and watch his jowls quiver with baffled indignation as he reaches for his Pail-O-Pop.

Muffin tops? You've got to be kidding me. But what has any of this to do with government, that vital institution to which we delegate some of our right of self-preservation so our efforts to live co-operatively together will not be overwhelmed by violence or fraud?

Unfortunately, the politicians' contrary attitude that they can make us pull our socks up over our swollen, flabby ankles by shouting "Hey you hypertense fatties, put down the shaker and back away slowly" is not merely an insulting distraction. Such self-satisfied haughtiness stands squarely in the way of the humility increasingly necessary to clean up their own act on budgets and deficits, crucial government functions like defence and criminal justice or for that matter decorum in Question Period. On the last point, arrogance may imagine itself to be grand, but it is generally petty and vindictive. Hence the scornful lunge for your fork.

Where do these politicians claim they get the authority to meddle with the dietary choices of grown men and women? And do they really think they have nothing better to do?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

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]