In today's National Post Terry Glavin has another excellent piece on Canada's troubling relationship with China. He's not only very clear on the sinister nature of the government in Beijing and the aggressive style as well as content of its foreign policy. He's also one of the few commentators I know who understands that we are cozying up to an "increasingly decrepit" as well as "belligerent Chinese police state". It is remarkable how wrong the conventional wisdom is about the nature and dynamism of this regime. And Terry is much to be commended for seeing through it.

In my latest National Post commentary I say it’s nice that the premiers have again promised to remove the internal trade barriers they themselves put in place. But (as Brian Lee Crowley, Robert Knox and I argued six years ago) the feds have the legal and moral authority to compel them if they don’t follow through, and should make clear that they will.

Woot. Today is Tax Freedom Day in Canada. That's right. June 7. That's the day, according to the Fraser Institute, that the average family stops working for the state and starts working for itself. And that was the good news. The bad news is that if governments paid for everything they took, that is, if you count deficits as if they were covered by taxation now instead of later, it still wouldn't be tax freedom day until June 18. (This methodology I believe relies on mean averages for income and taxation.)

You can find the depressing details including a provincial breakdown in their study. But here's a question to ponder as you do so. How can it be that, with Canadians so much wealthier today than they were thirty or sixty years ago, we can possibly need so much more help from government?

Remember, as we get richer, government could keep getting bigger while tax freedom day got earlier. Why isn't it happening? If it's too much to ask that government actually get smaller as our private means, including for charity, get larger, couldn't it at least take a smaller share?

Instead the total tax rate (see p. 9 of the Fraser study) is higher in every province except Alberta and BC today than in 1981. So where does it all end? And why does current political debate take so little notice of the relentless expansion of the state relative to citizens, talking instead about all the wonderful things we could get if only government finally became truly big and busy?

In my latest National Post commentary I argue that if we can't stop our governments from plunging into debt, we can at least avoid doing it ourselves.

In my latest National Post commentary I praise the New Brunswick court ruling that our Constitution (S. 121) does indeed clearly expressly ban interprovincial trade barriers. It’s high time someone did something about them, and shameful that the New Brunswick cabinet apparently intend to continue riding roughshod over the rule of law and their citizens. See also the paper I had the privilege of co-authoring for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in 2010, along with its Executive Director Brian Lee Crowley and the late Robert Knox, a veteran of efforts to free up interprovincial trade, arguing for striking down all internal protectionism in goods, services and trades on exactly those grounds. It looks as if it’s finally going to happen.

In my latest National Post commentary I agree that trains are charming, historical and fun. But I deny that they should be subsidized just because people like them. We can’t continue to subsidize everything or we’re going right off the fiscal rails. And there’s just no justice in picking my pocket for your train ticket.

Yet another warning in my inbox this morning from the C.D. Howe Institute (full disclosure: my brother runs the place and was co-author of the study) about how the federal government continues systematically and dramatically to understate the unfunded liability in its employee pension plans. It may seem like a sleeper. But one day it will wake up and it won't be pleasant. According to authors William Robson and Alexandre Laurin, the feds admit to roughly a $150 billion shortfall. But the real figure is $269 billion. And, they say, if the difference were added to the national debt (as the admitted amount already is) it would stand at $730 billion not $612 billion.

It goes without saying that you should not try this sort of thing at home. The government would not like it.

It's a Three Fold Total Bad. In the first place, it's deliberately dishonest. C.D. Howe has been warning about it for years and they are not some radical right-wing outfit prone to bungling or torqueing their calculations.

In the second, it's fiscally reckless. Even the move to have federal employees fund their pensions more fully is undermined, that other Robson and Laurin note, because they calculate the amount required according to the understated figure. And all the blather about how debt is small and manageable as a share of GDP is also undermined by such jiggery pokery.

In the third, it's yet another case of people in government cutting themselves a great big generous slice of pie while the rest of us tighten our belts in hard times and, when we look at them sidewise, go "What? What?" as though their cheeks were not bulging. Whatever happens, federal employees will collect generous pensions they have not paid for. Even if the rest of us have to be taxed within an inch of bankruptcy to make it happen.

Then they wonder why government is in disrepute nowadays. All the way to the bank.

Of course, they're counting on us to sleep through the various alarms. But this is no time to hit the snooze button.

Next month, I'm delighted to say, I'll be taking part in the REIC annual meeting and conference in Ottawa. The topic of my address will be "Without Ethics, None of This Works". Institutions are vitally important. But even more fundamental is a political and commercial culture that values honesty and shuns and punishes deceit. Without honesty, formal rules mean nothing, in government, in real estate and commerce generally, and in our private lives.

Without ethics, none of this works.