Michael Ignatieff just ain’t from ‘round here. He objects when the Tories say he’s only visiting. But when he casually suggests handing our national security to hostile foreigners it sure doesn’t look like he’s attached to Canada. Click here to read the rest.
There’s something important Michael Ignatieff doesn’t know about public spending in Canada. Whoa, you cry, there’s a well with no bottom! But here’s what I want to pull up and splash around right now: He doesn’t know Canada’s government is a nearly perfect vote buying machine. Click here to read the rest.
Enjoying the election yet? Don’t worry. There’s more where that came from. But while we can’t make them go away, we can’t make them smarter and we can’t make them quieter, we can take back the conversation if we want. That’s why I’m glad to be joining Sun Media especially in the middle of this offensive electoral hoohah. I’m convinced Canada can do better. It wouldn’t even be that weird.
When the recession hit in 2008, Canada's governments fell off the balanced budget wagon with amazing speed, pouring themselves billions in public debt and courting a horrible interest payment hangover. Today, with the country's economic troubles supposedly in the past, the "emergency" spending continues in the apparent belief political, if not economic survival, requires it.
Except in the birthplace of Canadian socialism, Saskatchewan, where premier Brad Wall has the only budget surplus in the country and the highest popularity rating.
When Justin Trudeau rolled the new citizenship guide into a dunce cap and jammed it firmly onto his head he revealed a great deal about the sorry mess that is modern liberalism.
It is true that he has since apologized. But his contrived apology is of no interest. It is their unreflective words that reveal politicians' thoughts, not the paste squeezed out of the PR machine once it is switched on, from the opening "Perhaps" through a disingenuous reference to "semantic weeds" to blaming his partisan opponents' cynicism, to the "if they've been interpreted" ploy that apologizes for other people's taking offence not his giving it. Plus it only appeared after a series of Tweets defending his original comments.
What merits attention is his original remarks. And not because he's a deep or leading thinker. Rather, when a handsome and privileged but otherwise ordinary political celebrity talks without a script we get contemporary liberalism unfiltered. And unfiltered, it wrinkles its nose at a vigorous denunciation of "honour killings" and "female genital mutilation." Calling them "barbaric," he said, made him "uncomfortable" because it was "pejorative."
I should hope it was. That both practices are widespread in the Middle East and parts of Africa clearly indicates that too many people there are in the grip of a profound and evil hatred of women. If such things don't make you want to shout something indignant, you have a problem. The question is, what problem?
Modern liberals don't seem to hate women. You can take serious exception to their entire feminist agenda, from no-fault divorce to abortion on demand to universal daycare, without denying their genuine outrage at violence against, discrimination against or even demeaning language directed at women. But why, then, do they instinctively recoil from a robust denunciation of those who do hate and harm women?
The problem is that they are also committed to a mentally and politically paralyzing cultural relativism, driven more by sentiment and snobbery than serious thought, that renders their core beliefs unredeemably incoherent.
It was in that intellectual mess, not "semantic weeds," that the hapless Justin Trudeau so wretchedly entangled himself when he said, "There's nothing that the word 'barbaric' achieves that the words 'absolutely unacceptable' would not have achieved. We accept that these acts are absolutely unacceptable. That's not the debate. In casual conversation, I'd even use the word barbaric to describe female circumcision, for example, but in an official Government of Canada publication, there needs to be a little bit of an attempt at responsible neutrality."
Why? Why does there need to be a public attempt at "responsible neutrality" between those who think you should destroy women's genitals early so they won't enjoy sex and those who call this practice revolting and wicked and don't want it practised here? Clearly what "barbaric" achieves that "unacceptable" does not is to express indignation. The question is why someone would find such a thing shocking, especially when he'd said it himself privately.
It's quite simple. If we admit publicly that such things are barbaric and also that they are common in some other cultures but very rare in our own we cannot, even if we are not very smart, avoid the conclusion that our culture is better than many others. Say that aloud and, before you know it, you're looking in the mirror and seeing George W. Bush. You become patriotic and proud of Western civilization, and start reading Kipling and watching Chuck Norris films. But to deny it depends on cultural relativism which is, in the end, inseparable from moral relativism and a nihilistic attitude toward truth. Thus Michael Ignatieff, supposedly a clever man, got drawn into the issue in Montreal on Tuesday and plunged voluntarily into some extremely rank semantic weeds.
"Let's not play word games with this stuff. ... There's no such thing as an honour killing, there's only killing and it's a crime everywhere. We're based on equality here and any of these practices are simply unacceptable. If you want to use the word barbaric, use the word barbaric."
No. Not good enough. The question isn't whether I "want" to use the word barbaric. It's whether the word "barbaric" accurately describes the practice. If it does, it's moral and intellectual irresponsibility not to use it, or to deny that "honour killings" exist. But the only way to avoid speaking such truths is to snatch for the totally relativist card and say what you call things is just "word games."
What snared Justin Trudeau was not semantic weeds. It was intellectual ones, deep and deadly, and if you get caught in them they'll strangle your brain. By demonstrating that point, he did us all a favour with his remarks. Uh, except himself. Nice dunce cap, buddy.
[First appeared in The Ottawa Citizen]
So how do we get yet another spending increase even bigger than they're letting on, dragging tax hikes behind it? I'll tell you: unanimously. Things are back to normal in the City of Ottawa and we're all going to pay for it.
I grant that under Larry O'Brien politics drifted much further from usual than we really wanted. But at least when he was mayor we thought big tax increases were just one among several choices and a bad one at that. Whereas under Jim Watson we're back to the soothing conviction that there is only one policy course open to reasonable people, which regrettably is lousy but we should all smile and look wise while lurching toward disaster. And the whole city council agrees.
I realize the headlines said the tax increase was only 2.45 per cent, which sounds sort of OK until you realize at that pace your taxes would double every 30 years. Moreover, as Randall Denley noted in Wednesday's Citizen, the official spending increase of $79 million is larger than the tax increase, at about 3.4 per cent. (And we all know what happens when spending goes up faster than revenues ... though our governments happily do it anyway and call it stimulus.) As Randall went on to say "it gets worse" because the real spending increase is $112.9 million or 4.95 per cent. It's just that "City staff have decided to make the figure look smaller by subtracting the revenue that growth provides, but there is no compelling rationale for that."
Actually, there is a rationale if you're in government and want to deflect attention from how fast the budget is growing and especially why. The latter is in fact the central question about the failure of the state in the late 20th century: Why, as we get more affluent, with far greater resources than our parents or grandparents for coping with our own problems and assisting our fellows, does government keep getting more expensive?
It should not necessarily get absolutely cheaper. More homes does mean more streets from which snow must be plowed and more trash to collect. The real issue is: Why isn't government getting cheaper relative to our growing wealth? Why are taxes outpacing our ability to pay them?
Even if a bigger, richer city generates more trash per inhabitant, and larger houses have a few more yards of street to plow per inhabitant in newer neighbourhoods, surely today's garbage trucks and snow plows outperform their 1960s counterparts as decisively as today's cars do. Plus if half a century of entrepreneurial innovation has made firms like Wal-Mart or Mc-Donald's massively more efficient, why aren't cities better at dealing with snow in winter or trash all year round which, the uninitiated might assume, is more predictable than consumer demand over time? And why aren't all those programs designed to mitigate social problems resulting from poverty getting less expensive as poverty diminishes?
In cities like Ottawa one reason leaps out, at least at me. Randall Denley began his column by complaining about "the abysmal job city council did of scrutinizing the budget." And clearly all the specific problems stem, ultimately, from that general one. Unless we fix it, we're in for politics as usual until our wallets cry Uncle. And we won't fix it until we ask: What is city council for?
OK, let's eliminate the funny but discourteous suggestions that just popped into our heads. Seriously, what do we pay these people for? They didn't write this 919 page budget (or, I fear, read it). Municipal staff did that. So why have 23 people rubber-stamp the thing when one clerk could do it way cheaper?
It won't do to explain that councillors are the board of directors of Ottawa Inc. responsible to "shareholders" for the performance of management. That model too easily degenerates into a mutual admiration society. I'd far prefer to have them act as a city legislature, using the power of the purse to control the executive on behalf of citizens and divided into one party that generally supports the mayor's program and one that offers an alternative.
Partisan politics gets a lot of bad press for obvious reasons. But oneparty government is a great deal worse. Even in a peaceful city in a civilized democratic country, where it doesn't get anybody shot or tortured, it means right out of the gate, Ottawa city councillors are all in this together, with a vested interest in convincing us that inexorably rising taxes may ruin the city, stunt the aspirations of the young and drive seniors from their homes but they are what all prudent, responsible non-weirdo-from-Mars types favour.
Sure, partisanship is ugly and mentally stifling. But it gives a lot of relentlessly ambitious people a serious incentive to delve into what's wrong with existing policy and suggest less hideous alternatives. Our municipal structure does not do that and we are paying the price ... every year.
[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]
The other day I was treated to a modern fairy tale about how the Big Bad Capitalists were gobbling up Little Red Unionized Worker in the America's formerly happy Dairyland of Wisconsin. I suppose these things frighten impressionable children. But it just left me baffled.
The story, told by the CAW's Jim Stanford during a debate on BNN, said that long, long ago when people were progressive and deficits had not been invented, governments bestowed upon the downtrodden masses the right to collective bargaining. And there was much rejoicing and prosperity reigned. But unionization worked so well the economy stagnated and real wages stopped rising and unionization declined except in the public sector and now there's an evil plot against them there too. Huh?
I know in fairy tales we're meant to accept flying carpets and talking trees and Keynesian economics. But here in the lands that we know, I cannot grasp how it can be asserted that anti-employee neo-liberal rich people have captured government and are using it to bash unions when unionization rates in the public sector are more than triple those in the private sector in Canada (75 per cent versus 19 per cent) and more than five times as high in the United States (36 per cent versus seven per cent).
What these numbers clearly show instead is that unions have captured government after being squeezed out of the private sector by their tendency to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. In government, unlike private business, you can hand someone else the bill. And while there may not really be ogres living in caves or trolls lurking under bridges, there certainly are activists, politicians and special interest groups working together to extract unearned benefits from the political process at the expense of those too young to vote or not yet born.
Personally I don't think even Rocky and Bullwinkle's old Fractured Fairy Tales could get voters smiling at a segment where the old business about capitalist hobgoblin mine and railroad and steel mill owners reducing the toiling masses to dirty bags of bones just for the cruel sport of it gets retold with public servants as the proletariat. Taxpayers tend not to react well to this kind of bedtime story for some reason.
Oh, I remember why: It's because taxes keep going up and services keep going down. Governments are in hock up to their eyeballs. And they may soothe us with tales of a happy-ever-after when deficits won't come calling and items that are "off budget" can't suddenly jump out and bite right through your wallet. But after they turn off our lights, they don't keep talking that way. It's not because they're mean. It's because even the most obtuse among them have to do the math eventually.
Those of you too old to be frightened by things that go bump in the night may recall that after his tax-funded trip to the Big Rock Candy Mountain went bad, former Ontario premier Bob Rae forced public sector workers to take unpaid days off and was bizarrely miscast as anti-union. Now it's current Premier Dalton McGuinty imposing pay freezes and insisting that future collective bargaining won't pay off the way it used to. But casting him as a neo-liberal troll just waiting to gobble up collective bargaining rights is about as convincing as having Little Red Riding Hood eat the wolf.
McGuinty isn't doing these things because he wants to. He's doing them because in Ontario, typically, compensation (wages, salaries and benefits) accounts for more than half of provincial program spending. And unless your treasury is well stocked with magic beans, you can't rein in runaway spending if you don't do something about big expenditure items that keep growing faster than inflation.
Wisconsin Democrats have run away from this reality, figuratively and literally, and hoping the big bad quorum won't find them. But grown-ups do not believe in this sort of stuff. Nor do they think Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is the big bad wolf or, as some protesters' signs alleged, Hitler.
Nor are he and his colleagues the band of real-life Simon Legrees depicted by New York Congressman Charles Rangel who said, "Collective bargaining is something that is so close to slavery in terms of abolishing it. ..." Tell me about lamps and genies if you must. But don't try to convince me if William Wilberforce were among us today he would be trying to free bureaucrats. You just cannot kiss this frog of an argument and turn it into a handsome prince.
If you're wondering, the Big Bad Capitalist story went on that within governments, beleaguered but defiant unions bravely continue their battle for the wretched of the Earth like public servants and autoworkers in desperate need of protection from robber barons, whereas those working part time in fast food restaurants can ... hey, the rest of the pages are missing.
Oh well. It was a silly story anyway.
[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]