The U.S. midterm elections had something for everyone, from Tea Party triumphs to Tea Party flameouts, progressive stalwarts hanging tough or going down hard, centrists and radicals, inspiration, pathos and comedy, principles, ideas and stupidity. It's the sort of raucous free-for-all in which America specializes and I call it healthy democracy. It even offered lessons for Canadians. For instance there is now a very real possibility that Congress will repeal Obamacare after only a couple of years. On our side of the border it may seem an odd way to conduct public business. Imagine making an expensive mistake, realizing you'd blundered, and undoing it. Not how we do things, is it? We let Judy LaMarsh determine health policy for decades.

No, really. The Canada Health Act is over 25 years old, passed by a discredited government in its waning months on assumptions long outdated or wrong from the start. It never worked as advertised and is now destroying provincial budgets, souring federal-provincial fiscal relations, and setting us up for a massive crash as the boomers age. Therefore it is sacred because ... um ... Why? Why are we stuck in this rut?

The Globe and Mail reported last Friday on a new Canadian Institute for Health Information study saying spending on doctors is the fastest-growing part of public health spending and "sparking growing calls for an overhaul to the payment system for doctors." It then quoted the director of the Centre for Clinical Epidemiology and Evaluation at Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute, who said "The system that we have in Canada incentivizes volumes." Duh. Years ago I wrote that economic planners have a stark choice between rewarding intensity or rewarding quantity. Neither works: If you set nail quotas by volume the factory churns out pins and if you set them by weight it makes one 60-foot nail.

Health care is no different and it matters. But it is more than six months since former Bank of Canada governor David Dodge told a Liberal conference in Montreal that Canada needs an "adult conversation" about the future of health care and we're not doing well.

Shortly before Halloween, Brian Mulroney actually called for a review of whether medicare is financially sustainable. Roy Romanow, of 2002 Royal Commission fame, retorted that medicare had been "studied to death" and "Essentially, this is a values-of-Canada debate. Namely, is health care a social good which is to be provided through the common wealth of governments -- federal/provincial -- in order to make sure everybody is covered? Or is it going to take on more and more the concept of not a common good but an individual responsibility? That means user fees and more privatization."

Very sonorous. But play it back and note that he says it is a question of values whether we adopt the concept that health is a common good. I am tempted to say this is not a grownup way to discuss an issue. But clearly a large number of grownups do talk this way, to their shame and our disadvantage. So instead I will yield to the temptation to quote Chesterton: "We must see things objectively, as we do a tree; and understand that they exist whether we like them or not. We must not try and turn them into something different by the mere exercise of our own minds, as if we were witches."

The principles of economics are in the exist-whether-we-like-it-or-not category. They are not a question of "values" and they do not change with the passing years nor in response to our incantations.

Friday's Globe story added, "Ontario Health Minister Deb Matthews responded to the report by warning doctors that she plans to pay more on salaries ... Part of the growth in physician billings comes from the fact that there are more doctors. In Ontario, the McGuinty government has helped one million more people find a doctor since 2003, said a spokesman for Ms. Matthews." This is another of those blow-on-the-head moments for which our politicians are so famous. They spent years trying to get more doctors so people could actually get health care, and now they've realized it means more doctors' bills. Who saw that coming? (Answer: the health ministers who, in 1992, cut medical school enrolment to reduce doctors' bills -- and failed to realize reducing the number of doctors would impact service.) So who now sees that putting doctors on salary will mean better treatment for fewer patients? Back to the 60-foot nail!

If this were the United States, someone would campaign in the next election on the idea that this system wasn't working and, after more than a quarter century, wasn't about to start working. They would be criticized, ridiculed, supported and talked about and in the end something different might happen.

Can you imagine doing it that way here? Yes, I can.

First published in The Ottawa Citizen]

Within a week the American political landscape will be altered almost as dramatically as Toronto's would have been had -- to take an absurd idea -- Rob Ford become mayor. Oh, that actually happened in Toronto. This could start to get exciting.

I am sure Republicans will regain the House of Representatives and probably also the U.S. Senate. This is not where the smart money is but I am not the smart money. I am a pundit. However, my prediction of a Republican victory in the Senate is not the product of wishful thinking nor is it a prediction of a Republican victory. To begin with, I do not regard electoral victories as transcendent or permanent. I grew up when the world really seemed to be going up the spout, and was delighted to see Thatcher, Reagan and John Paul II emerge. But when I read my friend John O'Sullivan's The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World, a convincing argument that we can't possibly be in the mess we're in now, my reaction was: if those three changed the world, it sure changed back fast.

Lady Thatcher herself once said that there are no lost causes in politics because there are no won causes. It was not a very deep remark. I can readily reel off lost causes from Akkad to Bolshevism to the Mayan Empire. (I know their calendar is meant to make the world end in 2012 but I'm not cancelling my auto insurance just yet.) But she was right about permanently won causes. It does not surprise me that the left believes in salvation by voting alone but it seems oddly out of place on the right.

Moreover, what is coming up is not a Republican victory. Never mind formal labels; it will represent a victory for insurgents against a Republican Establishment too obtuse either to sympathize with or to thwart the uprising.

In this sense something important is going on. A recent MSNBC commentary explained, in splendid pundit fashion, why the Republicans would and would not take the House, including in the latter category, "the Tea Party pushing the GOP too far to the right" and "our poll shows the GOP with a lower fav/unfav than the Dem Party."

Connect the dots, people. The Republican party is unpopular because under George W. Bush it proved less than competent in foreign policy and wackily irresponsible on budgets. Tea Partiers dislike RINOs ("Republicans In Name Only" for those of you without Grand Union flags) more than Democrats. And when they provoked the usual scornful sniffing among the chattering classes, it only strengthened them.

Rob Ford's victory in the Toronto mayoral election is a non-trivial echo of this phenomenon, especially his running much further ahead of shoo-in progressive favourite George Smitherman among immigrants than native-born Canadians. The angry-white-male dismissal of the phenomenon is simply not possible any more.

As J. Budziszewski noted about patterns behind the apparent random madness of public affairs, people "are more logical than they know; they are only logical slowly." They are slowly but inexorably realizing that the methods and ideas of the past half century have definitively failed. If the political elites don't adjust, unbelievable things will continue to happen because only fringe candidates will speak important truths: We cannot make the state bigger, more expensive or more intrusive; it has exhausted its managerial capacity at the size it now is and runaway public spending is threatening not only the economy but the very social programs making the spending run away.

The inability of any of our mainstream parties to get traction with the electorate is a deeper symptom of the same thing. Even in boring Ottawa, where we put a perennial political insider back in a job he held more than a decade ago, mayor-elect Jim Watson felt obliged to say "the public has voted for change and they have voted for change in a very big way." The tune is all wrong, but the lyrics are revealing. Large numbers of people, here too, no longer believe that if the usual suspects are left undisturbed, they'll have everything under control in a year or two.

Of course, as Ottawans' decision to elect Larry O'Brien last time around proves, getting rid of someone hopelessly mired in the failed remedies of the past is no guarantee that you'll get someone who knows how to go back to the sound remedies of the more distant past. And even if you do, it won't be long before some charismatic clown comes along peddling exploded fatuities of state paternalism as bold and new. There may be heaps of lost causes in politics, but no permanent victories.

I've seen 'em come and go and I take it in stride. But when I sense the popular mood changing in ways politicians and elites can no longer ignore or safely insult, I nearly get excited.

[First published in The Ottawa Citizen]

So now we've all seen pictures of Russell Williams in stolen lingerie and read ghastly details of his murders and other sex crimes. Have we learned anything about the nature of evil?

I hope so, because we have surely been on a trip through hell this week and if we did not go there to learn something important we may be suspected of disgraceful voyeurism. Indeed, my initial reaction to this week's news coverage was that it was lurid and grotesque. Permit me to quote the tee-up from this very newspaper on Monday: "It's not yet clear whether anyone, least of all Williams himself, will offer any insight into his state-of-mind. The case promises to draw reporters and columnists from across Canada and the U.S. (The Citizen is sending a team of seven to cover the sentencing.)"

How many journalists does it take to type "He was convicted of unspeakable sex crimes and sentenced to life with no parole for 25 years"?

There was a time when people would have called such crimes "unspeakable" and meant it literally. Only a small number would have been privy to the details: police, a coroner, a few court and prison officials. And they would not have spoken of it because it was morally filthy without redeeming value.

I do not mean to sound squeamish. I would not, for example, oppose showing photographs of the emaciated, naked corpses found at Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps. It is not merely dangerous to be unaware of evil in the world; it is a dereliction of duty. We must understand who and what we are, the depths to which we can sink and how, if we are to be fully human and live as we should.

In the case of Nazism, there was a practical lesson: It was important to grasp the kind of horror that could emerge not from primitive cultures but from modernity. And I wish all who call themselves "pro-choice" would watch Silent Scream before defending abortion. But when it comes to sex killings, we are all already aware of their existence, their brutality, deliberate humiliation and terror. Would you look at pictures?

No? But stories and columns in recent days have not only given me obscene details of Williams' conduct, they have detailed the agonized horror of his victims' last hours and even described the position in which one died. What business have I knowing that, and what business has anyone describing it?

At this point you may object that I have clearly read the accounts and accuse me of hypocrisy for poring over the details and then professing shock. It was not possible to avoid exposure to the famous pictures of Williams in stolen lingerie. But I could have refused to read further and very nearly did.

My justification for doing the opposite is that, as a public commentator, I thought it was important to find out whether the stories that are selling newspapers were as lurid as the headlines suggested. They are. They are full of words I will not put in print, and images that will haunt us all our lives. Which brings me back to my opening question: Are we doing this to learn something important?

We might be. If you go back and read the quotation near the top of this column, it refers to the murderer's state of mind. What the devil do I care for his state of mind? This is not Silence of the Lambs and we are not sending him to a psychiatrist. What interests me in this dreadful affair is the state of his soul.

So look again at those internationally famous pictures of him in stolen underwear. Standing there expressionless, awkward, ludicrous and sinister, he looks like ... what? I was tempted to say he doesn't look like anything, that there is nothing useful to see here. But then I realized he looks like an idiot.

I don't mean that in a cheap shot kind of way, as you might call someone an idiot for driving badly or wearing an ugly hat. There is no therapeutic value in calling a sex killer names. I mean he literally looks like an idiot. That blank stare shows no trace of intellect, emotion or moral awareness.

In this there is something of value: the familiar but important recognition of the banality of evil. A number of stories referred to his escalating deviance as though he were embarked on some wild, forbidden adventure. But the truth lies in the pathetic quality of the pictures when he had to look at them in a courtroom.

Here is no superman, no transvaluer of values, dethroning God and issuing his own commandments. He is lethal, but utterly squalid. As Chesterton has Father Brown observe, "There is this about evil, that it opens door after door in hell, and always into smaller and smaller chambers."

We are justified in peering far enough into these crimes to reinforce the vital conclusion that even the worst evil is sordid, small and banal. The rest is just gruesome smut.

[First published in The Ottawa Citizen]

One of the saddest things in the newspapers is the collapse of British military power. A century ago Britannia ruled the waves and a good thing too. Now they seem ready to cede the waters to the Chinese or Iranians and lose the Battle of Britain by default. Might I ask why?

Wednesday's Daily Telegraph revealed that the British air force is going to cut its purchase of the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighters from 138 to about 50, and probably get rid of all its Tornadoes, shut two bases and ditch almost 5,000 people. But you just know how politicians talk when doing something ruinous and dumb.

"We've got aeroplanes that are ready to do dog fights with the Soviet Union air force. That's not right," droned Tory PM David Cameron. Whereas not having aeroplanes at all is right because ... ?

The closest thing to an honest answer, and the farthest from their lips, is we couldn't get them anywhere useful anyway because the fleet is going to be deep-sixed (or, given budget realities, probably deep-threed). As the same newspaper reported last Friday, the British navy "is set to be reduced to the smallest size in its history ... cut by almost half to just 25, with frigates, destroyers, submarines, minesweepers and all amphibious craft scrapped" in order to fund two new aircraft carriers which won't have any planes but that's OK because one will probably be mothballed as soon as it's finished if it ever is.

How did this happen? Part of it is a failure of nerve; five years ago when the British celebrated the 200th anniversary of the magnificent victory at Trafalgar that helped inaugurate the century-long Pax Britannia, they did it with "blue" and "red" fleets rather than British and combined French/Spanish lest they should seem to be happy and proud that they won.

Mostly it's budgetary. The welfare state is unaffordable but, because of its political dynamics, it takes everything else down with it as it goes. The first duty of the state may be defence but it's the last thing most democratic governments are going to fund today, even if it means the glorious geopolitical role Albion has played for 500 years becomes a curiosity in a glass case.

What galls me about this miserable business is that nobody said they were going to do it before they did it and, worse, nobody admits they are doing it now. I realize politicians are not in the habit of telling you what they are going to do on those rare occasions when they know; the same Prime Minister David Cameron recently admitted that they probably should have mentioned during the campaign that they would cut the child benefit for millions of single-income families instead of, um, saying the reverse repeatedly, ending with the classic "yes I acknowledge this was not in our manifesto. Of course I'm sorry about that, but I think we need to be clear about why we're doing what we're doing."

OK. Be clear. Start with we're cutting middle class entitlements cuz we're busted. Then tell us, before you mothball the fleet: Does the world seem a safer place today than 10 years ago? Are we more confident that we can dispense with the capacity to project force into troubled regions?

If only they were that wrong. But in the case of former PM Tony Blair we know the reverse is true. No hard Realpolitiker, he openly believed that British and American military power should be used unsparingly for the improvement of mankind. He just didn't spend the money necessary to support his ambitions.

What on earth was he thinking? How was it all supposed to work?

We may never know, just as it's impossible to figure out what Canadian politicians think about a budgetary situation that has left us even less able than Britain to afford crucial defence spending. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty just admitted in his economic update that last year's deficit was even higher than predicted and two of the next three will be too. But as to whether stimulus spending is now over, he pledged that the government would not be "inflexible" while Liberal finance critic Scott Brison retorted "It's very important that governments remain nimble." So you have no idea what they're going to do and even less idea of why.

When everyone veered from supporting balanced budgets to running vast deficits, did they tell you they suddenly realized Keynes was right? That they'd always believed it? No, they just insisted we had to spend money we didn't have on stuff we didn't need for reasons we couldn't explain, even if it meant neglecting the military while radical states dominate international debate and scramble to acquire lethal weapons.

Stand by for a full, honest and sensible explanation ... just as soon as we discover why sinking Britain's navy and crashing its air force makes sense in the modern world.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Washington is a great city. This sentiment might shock my American and libertarian friends, who consider the place a wretched sinkhole of bloated arrogance, destructive politics, horrifying deficits and liberty-destroying anti-Constitutional policies, which they always manage to make sound so tawdry. But it has a really nice free zoo. Where's ours?

It is not a frivolous question. Washington is a city that works. Congress might be a dark star orbiting a twin at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue and the city has its share of poverty, misery and terrible public schools. But I am enthralled by D.C.'s clean, well-maintained graffiti-free parks, its free museums and zoos, its outstanding subway, and its superb historical monuments and important organizations within comfortable walking distance of each other via about six million Starbucks outlets. D.C. is a great place to visit and the worthy capital of a great nation.

One libertarian colleague did ask me how I could praise a free zoo. Isn't it a classic example of legalized theft, of people in one place taking money from those elsewhere to spend on themselves? Isn't doing so wrong in principle and enormously destructive in practice; once we all seek to better ourselves by beggaring our fellows don't we only accomplish the latter, they cry? I do not dispute the analysis. I think we'd be better off if we were far less willing, or able, to engage in the politics of plunder (and add that not only the American but our own founding principles and Constitution are far less friendly to the practice than we have been led to believe). But spending public money to make the capital glow is an exception.

No, no, put down the smelling salts (and the rocks). I have not turned into one of those nits who thinks politics elevates and unites us. I still occasionally watch question period, you know. It is true, and important, that politics can unite us in moments of great crisis, though I'd far rather live in quiet times when mediocrities in high places can embarrass the nation quietly. But a great capital city is a desirable thing because politics and governance can embody our virtues in a key way.

When a constitution enshrines liberty and procedural fairness, when the laws say and the state insists that citizens may not murder, assault or rob one another, nor meddle patronizingly in their affairs, band together to take away their fellows' goods or freedoms or otherwise use the power of the majority tyrannically, that the state shall not deny, delay or sell justice, and that we shall defend to the death one another's right to responsible liberty, it really does enshrine our devotion to justice and fair play. That does not mean the government must become an agent of compassion; a constitution that says charity shall be private because a generous people care for one another and dependency on public assistance is soul-destroying is also a noble thing in my view.

Government may enforce these virtuous rules inefficiently and obnoxiously, incompletely and stupidly. But nevertheless thou shalt not do murder and thou shalt not steal are highly moral principles and a constitutional order that enshrines and enforces them is a thing to celebrate.

Who are we? Why are we a nation? These questions find expression in our political institutions, our foundational documents and our national capitals. Within walking distance of the White House the Theodore Roosevelt Island National Memorial commemorates, in a startlingly wild setting, the peculiar 26th president whose legacy includes the creation of national parks and the beginnings of a serious and practical environmental movement. Where else should it be? Should no such thing exist? And where is ours?

It is right that a capital should show off the spirit of a free people. A glorious national capital is obnoxious only when it lies, when it fakes national excellence and good governance rather than reflecting it, as too much monumental architecture does in the Third World (think of Pyongyang's statues or Saddam Hussein's obscene monuments).

So I ask again, who are we? Are Canadians mediocrities, ineffective ditherers, prattling about excellence and compassion while exhibiting neither? Or is it true that "Canada is free and freedom is its nationality" as Sir Wilfrid Laurier boasted?

In Washington I find the existence of free museums and other facilities not a betrayal but a celebration of responsible liberty. I also believe that spirit animated the founders of Canada and appeals to far more of us than the usual suspects would have you believe. So why can't we build a proper light rail system, let alone a Canadian counterpart to the Washington Mall and the proliferation of statues, parks and monuments that make D.C. so great?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

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]