Dear Santa: This year I have been pretty good except for when I was awake and stuff so I’m hoping you can grant a few modest requests.

I should mention that I’ve spent a lot of time in parliamentary committee hearings, which explains why I’ve been so unpleasant to children and little old ladies lately. You know how it is.

You don’t? Listen, Mr. Red Suit and Black Boots, forget sitting in a mall while kids ply you with avaricious requests for flashy electronic devices (though while I’m on the subject, when I was a boy all we had to play with was bits of cardboard and wood so we put a brave face on it and called it "chess"). You try sitting in a committee room while politicians demand stuff and see how long you can keep the Ho ho ho flowing. But I digress.

I have compiled a list, not of who’s naughty and nice (and I hope on yours my name is misspelled or something so we can proceed) but of what I think would be reasonable. Given, you know, the committee business. So enough chit-chat, beard dude. Here’s what I want for Christmas.

1. $300,000 in cash. Or $225,000. After all, who’s counting? Not Revenue Canada, that’s for sure. It’s in a safe- deposit box in New York. Or not. You’ll never know. Oh, and no need to bring it down our chimney where it might get, um, dirty. I’ll meet you in a hotel room. I presume Rudolph can keep a secret. Or a retainer. We can talk about all that in six years. If absolutely necessary.

2. I’d also like the ability to promise clients no fee increase, then break the news that actually, heh heh, the tab has gone up 4.9 per cent, and they just pay. Every year.

3. And a trip to Bali because I really, really care about the environment, which I gather has something to do with scenery.

4. Speaking of scenery, I’d like a laptop whose screen is not visible to people behind me.

5. And a huge advance for memoirs I pay someone else to write.

6. Or for memoirs I write myself that include everything but the kitchen sink and the bit about the envelopes in hotel rooms but say I was right all along and why oh why don’t people like me more.

7. A plan for health care that works for the long term, by which I mean until several weeks after the election is over.

8. Lucrative appointments and consulting work later on.

9. A Harvard teaching post when I get bored with Canada.

10. Heck, a Harvard teaching post, then a lucrative appointment. Or some corporate directorships.

11. The ability to blame other people when I don’t look after things that, on paper, I’m responsible for. It’s only paper. And not that nice coloured kind with pictures of people and security features.

12. A job where I can yell, call people names and jab my finger at them without being thought uncivilized, make barnyard noises for 45 minutes every weekday afternoon except Fridays and only visiting schoolchildren object, yell "resign" and be thought witty and ask "Will the minister resign?" and be regarded as public-spirited.

13. A free pass on how prepositions work in English.

14. A mayor who doesn’t uncannily resemble a space alien.

15. City councillors who don’t uncannily resemble mediocrities from the planet Taxon.

16. Nine lords a-leaping. No, wait. Scratch that. Wrong list. Plus they always leave the place such a mess, especially if they do their thing near the geese a-laying and the maids a-milking. I don’t know what interdepartmental committee set that up.

17. Enough snow for a snow job. My, that was fast. Now how about enough money for snow clearance in a $2-billion city budget in a cold place?

18. Or how about global warming that makes things warmer? I don’t want you to have to hitch Donner and Comet to a wagon or a kayak or anything. I just like names that mean something.

19. A health care premium ... uh ... tax.

20. A $2.6-billion revenue windfall.

21. Make that a health care tax and a $2.6-billion revenue windfall. Oh, and voters with short memories, low standards or both.

22. La langue français vibrant in Saskatchewan. Sorry, should that be française? François? I’m not sure. But I would like a grant du théâtre.

23. A Senate appointment.

24. A reputation for generosity because I give away other people’s money.

25. Oh, and did I mention the envelopes full of cash? Twenties, 50s, 100s, I’m not fussy.

If I get all that stuff I promise not to go into politics. Heck, I won’t have to.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It is a melancholy reflection that we had to wait for the Ontario provincial election to lurch to a dismal end before we could turn to urgent questions of policy. Melancholy turns to depression at the urgency of health care reform. And tears begin to flow at the thought that the major parties’ positions on that topic contrived to be at once irrelevant and profoundly inimical to any sensible solution.

The diagnosis here is grim. On Saturday the Globe and Mail’s Jeffrey Simpson wrote, “The Liberals boast they have jacked up health-care spending by 29 per cent over four years, to $37-billion, a staggering eight per cent a year.” Strange for a government to boast of its profligacy. Especially as, Mr. Simpson went on to note, the Liberals also promised to reduce the rate of spending increases to five per cent a year, which suggests there was something wrong with their previous behaviour. The Conservatives said they’d do the same, which suggests there was nothing wrong with the Liberals’ new promise. Uh, unless you count Mr. Simpson’s pointed observation that, “No Ontario government has been able to keep annual increases to five per cent.”

Thus we may swiftly conclude that neither party had a plan for doing what they promised, and move on to the next problem. Namely, that if the party leaders did somehow keep their word it is not obvious what advantages would accrue. For one thing, increasing spending faster than revenue generally causes trouble, especially on an item that already devours nearly half of program spending. For another, laying aside the calculator for a stethoscope, how will a health care system that couldn’t cope with existing demand while gobbling down eight per cent annual increases deal with the growing needs of aging boomers on just five per cent? Sadly we were not favoured with a discussion of such alarming matters.

Alarming is not too strong a word. Mainstream politicians generally dismiss as “ideological” those of us who saw trouble coming and urged preventive action years ago. But Mr. Simpson is hardly the excitable sort of columnist prone to the print equivalent of leaping about hollering, so you might think his observations would worry the people who run the system. Apparently they don’t worry easy.

Most politicians didn’t break a sweat when Health Canada warned that Canada will be short 5,800 doctors by 2010. Nor at last week’s Citizen report of one Ottawa doctor who predicts that with middle-aged doctors working so hard they’re burning themselves out and younger doctors working less in pursuit of a more rational work-life balance, the real shortage might be as large as 10,400. Politicians also shrugged off the Canadian Nurses’ Association warning that nationally we’ll be short 78,000 nurses by 2011 and 113,000 by 2016 and this week’s Citizen story saying we’re even short of nursing school faculty to train replacements. People with weaker nerves would be especially bothered by the demographics that make these problems so hard to fix. Not only are the patients aging, so are doctors, nurses and even the remaining nursing school faculty; the Canadian Nurses’ Association says more than half of the latter were over age 50 in 2005.

The one thing I’ve noticed recently that might make politicians panic is the increasing tendency, noted in Wednesday’s National Post, for doctors to bill for various services not covered by socialized medicine, from telephone advice to faxing prescriptions, that most provided free before provincial governments got so tight-fisted with their fee schedules. Apparently, the harder the government throttles the goose that lays the golden eggs, the harder the wretched bird fights for air. But our statesmen’s fingers are as strong as their minds are weak.

I do not exaggerate either the seriousness of the crisis or the feebleness of their understanding. From time to time I may inflict upon readers obscure quotations or arcane research. But you’ll notice that all the examples in this column are from very recent newspaper stories. You don’t have to be smart to uncover this stuff. But you have to be singularly dim to ignore it. And politicians are.

Faced with such atrocious mismanagement of such a key policy issue, I occasionally fantasize about entrusting affairs of state to persons selected by citizens in a competitive process designed to oblige candidates for public office to offer detailed, practical, intelligent solutions on matters of particular import.

Wait a minute. We just did that. * Sob * Could someone please pass me a large, absorbent handkerchief?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With less than a week to go I’m wracking my brains for something constructive to say about this wretched zombie of an Ontario election. A dry, choking sound from within the voting booth doesn’t seem to qualify.

It remains tempting for several reasons. Let’s start with Dalton McGuinty and get it over with. My colleague Randall Denley just underlined his “proven record of mendacity.” (As Captain Barbossa might say, “means: he lies a lot”.) Plus Mr. McGuinty actually rewarded George Smitherman’s smugly obtuse belligerence as health minister by making him deputy premier. Re-elect that bunch and you’ll deserve what you get. Unfortunately, I’ll get it too.

Then there’s John Tory. We did not need another demonstration that a sophisticatedly amorphous Red Tory approach is as futile in political as in policy terms. We got one anyway. Then he crumpled on his only principle-like position. Thanks for coming out. Now go away.

As for Howard Hampton, is he still campaigning? I cannot understand how the NDP could achieve so little traction against such off-putting adversaries. But Mr. Hampton found a way. The last straw was his pledge to subsidize any municipal transit system that freezes fares for two years. The NDP poses as a “progressive” party keen to sweep away obsolete institutions, and our system of municipal funding really is obsolete. But if that’s their idea of vision, I’ll pass. It sounds too much like a meddlesome quick fix.

Faced with this dismal slate, I say in the short run, if there’s a fringe party running in your riding, please vote for it. Signal willingness to participate coupled with contempt for your main options.

I also say please vote because of the wretched electoral reform referendum. For reasons I discussed in April (see my “Flashback Column” at www.thejohnrobson.com), I still think MMP is a terrible idea. I’m hoping it will perish from lack of interest but, just in case, go hammer a stake into it. I suspect it will rise repeatedly from the grave, but before we can attend to the long run we have to get through October 10.

What, though, of other days? What if we’d rather not want to vote every time with paper bags on our heads (which, parenthetically, you apparently can do in Ontario elections)? What advice can I give about this election that might give us some better choice than to greet the next one with Dorothy Parker’s reaction to a ringing telephone: “What fresh hell is this?”

It seems to me that we need to broaden our horizons. There must be something wrong with the questions we habitually ask in politics if we keep getting answers as offensively silly as Re-Elect Dalton McGuinty or Vote for John Tory. We take a certain type of public discussion for granted even though we hate the results and, what’s more, we permit and even encourage it by the way we react to public affairs.

While pursuing this line of thought I stumbled across a prescient warning in an old book about a common but “distressing” type of soulless orators who “walk and talk, and do not know that they are dead. Neither, of course, are they alive to the deadness of their own creation … Hence … the inanimate speeches, cumbered with the carcasses of worn-out metaphor and flower of rhetoric trampled to death; hence the movement into urgent battle of the embalmed mummies of sentiment, horsed like the dead Cid, and rigid in their grave-bands beneath the imposing panoply.”

Gosh, I thought. That’s strangely familiar. Yet it’s from mystery writer Dorothy Sayers’ 1941 meditation The Mind of the Maker so it has, ostensibly, nothing to do with Ontario politics in the 21st century. Moreover, her explanation of this bizarre phenomenon is, to put it mildly, uncongenial to the modern temperament. But that’s what makes the resonance of this passage so dashed resonant. How can her analysis be so pertinent to contemporary problems on which Naomi Klein has so little to say, at such length? Does she not eerily foretell Stéphane Dion insisting that “I have to fight with a Stéphane Dion who doesn’t exist. I’ve never been this cool, distant person.” He walks and talks, and doesn’t know he doesn’t exist.

So by all means vote next week, indignantly, for the lesser of various evils. But afterwards let us guard constantly against dead prose and its hollow purveyors. We must not let every vivid observation be labelled a gaffe, every controversial statement be pilloried as “divisive.” It is up to us to make politics congenial to politicians who really talk to us in living language about living issues.

The alternative is the awkward, disgusting and frustrating task of fighting mummies right inside the voting booth.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

It is not entirely clear whether you can vote with a paper bag over your head in Canada. But our MPs should consider it.

Unless you habitually go about with your eyes and ears covered, you’ll know the recent discovery that you can vote federally with your face concealed has caused great upset on Parliament Hill. Amid a flurry of denunciations, the House Committee on Procedure and House Affairs (PROC) unanimously urged Chief Electoral Officer Marc Mayrand to reverse this ruling and, when he refused, unanimously summoned him to appear before them. To their shame, as it is their blunder, not his.

As Mr. Mayrand pointed out in a press conference this Monday, his job is to enforce the law not make it. The law as written does not require voters to unveil and, most crucially, as MPs just revised the Canada Elections Act this summer and didn’t incorporate any such requirement, it is not his place to read it in. Veiled voting was a prominent issue in the Quebec provincial election earlier this year and Mr. Mayrand personally drew parliamentarians’ attention to it in May, while the relevant Bill C-31 was before the Senate, and again in a conference call with representatives of the registered parties on July 26. Since MPs failed to act on it, he concludes, the constitutional protection of freedom of religion requires him to interpret the law permissively in this regard.

I found Mr. Mayrand less persuasive on two side issues. First, if MPs clearly indicate a determination to amend the law to forbid veiled voting at their earliest opportunity I think he not only can but must use his emergency powers to ban it in the Monday by-elections. Second, he told the press conference the rest of us could not vote with paper bags on our heads. But the Constitution protects freedom of conscience and speech as well as religion, so if veiled voting is permitted we should be able to wear other types of mask in, for instance, an orderly protest against bad electoral policy. Otherwise he was convincing.

Unlike MPs, who contrived further to disgrace themselves, no easy task in Ottawa nowadays. Tory Joe Preston said Mr. Mayrand should appear before PROC “and explain to us what he doesn’t understand about photo ID.” A Sept. 10 Bloc Québécois press release claimed (my translation) Parliament “has decided that from now on, all voters must identify themselves to vote at the federal level.” And the prime minister called C-31 “a law designed to have the visual identification of voters.” But it is they who do not understand, even after Mr. Mayrand publicly explained it, what the law they just wrote says.

Section 143 of the amended Canada Elections Act, for better or worse, specifies three ways of establishing your identity at the polling station. One is a piece of ID from some Canadian government bearing your name, address and photo, in which case you must show your face. But the second is “two pieces of identification authorized by the Chief Electoral Officer each of which establish the elector’s name and at least one of which establishes the elector’s address” but need not have photos. In which case there’s obviously no identification function served by showing your face. Anyway, the third is simply to be vouched for by someone who has established their own identity one of the first two ways. Plus, you can vote by mail which doesn’t involve photo ID or any other kind.

I do not think MPs should have written the law in this fashion. While Canadians are by and large honest, it is asking for trouble to permit voting with weaker security than you’d tolerate to rent a car. But that’s not the point here. Nor is the widespread and legitimate discomfort among Canadians with people who insist on covering their faces in dealings with strangers.

The point at present is that on an important issue most MPs seem incapable of perceiving their error, which speaks poorly of their intellect, or of admitting it, which speaks poorly of their character. To his credit NDP MP Yvon Godin has confessed that “maybe all parties should be kicking our own butts. We could have fixed it ourselves.” But the reaction of most of his colleagues has far more Bart Simpson than Edmund Burke in it.

One is tempted to ask if they cannot read the relevant statute. It’s not hard to find; Mr. Mayrand handed out copies at his press conference. But in any case the appropriate response is: Read the law? You wrote it.

If it turns out the paper bag is illegal, MPs could vote wearing dunce caps. I expect they’d fit nicely.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With an Ontario election campaign about to start, what I really want to ask the main party leaders is, “Would you please keep your wretched candidates from ringing my doorbell?” Like Ebenezer Scrooge, I do not conduct my affairs in the teeth of inclement weather. And I’m insulted that you think I’d decide how to vote based on a prepackaged porch pitch without clarifications of the sort candidates do not give while cold wind blows through the doorway onto my dinner. I’m interested in “why” questions, not “what” questions. I want to know why you politicians hold the positions you hold (or claim to) and why you think your solutions would actually work, especially if they’re things — like “Target health care funding where it is needed most” — that I’ve heard a dozen times before. So perhaps I can contribute a few more pertinent questions than “Would you please leave me alone?”, which I already know you might possibly do during the campaign if I bar the door and hide under the bed for the next 39 days but most certainly will not do once elected no matter what desperate measures I adopt.

I don’t even insist that your answers persuade me. I just want proof that you’ve thought about this stuff.

On health:

Mr. McGuinty, since health care now takes almost half the provincial budget yet many Ontarians have no family doctor, how high would its share have to go before you concede that the current system is unworkable?

Mr. Tory, your platform speaks of efficiencies, electronic records and healthy lifestyle choices, but if it’s so easy to fix the system, why hasn’t it been done already by governments panicked by escalating costs?

Mr. Hampton, would you like to see anything else important, such as food or cars, produced under the same basic conditions as health care in Ontario? Would you consider a Canada Food Act ridiculous, and why?

On education:

Mr. Tory, how do we keep publicly funded faith-based schools from teaching divisive or even hateful values?

Mr. Hampton, what right does the state have to pre-empt parents when it comes to their children’s moral education?

Mr. McGuinty, why is it divisive for anyone else to have their own publicly funded schools, but not for members of your religion?

On universities:

Mr. Hampton, why should taxpayers subsidize post-secondary tuition for middle-class kids to enjoy lucrative, prestigious careers?

Mr. McGuinty, should public universities restore a structured curriculum in the humanities instead of students choosing “cafeteria-style” from professors’ often exotic offerings?

Mr. Tory, why shouldn’t Ontario’s universities be privatized?

On energy:

Mr. Tory, how much waste does a modern nuclear plant produce in a year and where is it safe to get rid of it, and what kind of conservative would legally require an “energy audit” before a person could sell their house?

Mr. Hampton, how many of those “War of the Worlds” three-bladed windmills would we need to replace the coal-fired plants?

Mr. McGuinty, for years you’ve been promising to shut the coal-fired plants and haven’t pulled it off, so why should we believe anything else you say?

On infrastructure:

Mr. Hampton, if you’re not willing to divert billions from social programs, where would you get the money to pay for urgent road and water system work?

Mr. Tory, the Harris Tories loudly boasted that they had solved Ontario’s infrastructure woes, so what went wrong and why did their good intentions fail?

Mr. McGuinty, what are Ontario’s most pressing $5 billion in infrastructure needs?

On abortion:

Mr. McGuinty, how can you profess to be Roman Catholic yet support abortion?

Mr. Hampton, doesn’t abortion on demand favour the male swinger’s agenda over genuine respect for women?

Mr. Tory, could anything including the threat of immediate deportation to Neptune induce you to speak the word “abortion” in public, even favourably?

On philosophy:

Mr. McGuinty, how does your liberalism relate to that of John Stuart Mill?

Mr. Tory, how does your conservatism relate to that of Edmund Burke?

Mr. Hampton, how does your socialism relate to that of George Bernard Shaw?

One more, if I may, for all the leaders:

A few weeks back I suggested a reading list for aspiring politicians. And yes, I’d like to know if you’d read any of it. But my question here is what you’d recommend to young people interested in public affairs and seeking to educate themselves. What three books do you think they should read first, and why?

If you can answer these questions you won’t need to peddle banalities at my doorstep during dinner. And if you can’t, it won’t help you to try.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

While I’m giving advice to politicians (and just try to stop me), might I recommend humility? As a partisan tactic, I mean.

OK, so pride is a deadly sin and humility might be good for the soul, if you have not sold yours or simply misplaced it. And fortunately in my job, I have to worry more about whether my advice is good than whether it’s palatable. Still, with one covetous eye on being listened to, let me sugar-coat this bitter pill by noting that the constant offensive braying in the political fray is turning voters off in ways you could exploit.

Now I quote Chesterton: “What makes the ordinary political partisan spiritually unconvincing is, not so much that he points out that his opponent is spotted, as that he implies that he himself is spotless.” I have never shared the widespread distaste, real or feigned, for negative political ads; as things stand, there is usually more truth in the bad things politicians say about their opponents than in the good things they say about themselves. But candidates could improve our choices, and their chances, by thinking a bit harder about spottiness including their own. We might even get better government.

In Wednesday’s City section, the Citizen editorially lamented the lack of discernable difference between the parties in the looming Ontario election, defying readers to guess from which platform they had plucked certain bromides about health care. The homogeneous paste on offer in campaigns is in part the result of too much focus-group guidance and too little principle. But it also derives from the undetected, rampant sin of pride.

A couple of weeks back, I furnished a reading list to give aspiring politicians some grasp of the issues behind the issues. But they are unlikely to pile such books on the bedside table as long as they genuinely believe the main problem in public life is that their opponents are callous bums and the remedy for almost anything that ails us is to elect their shining selves.

Might I single out Dalton McGuinty for a minute here? Oh good. Imagine if he were still in opposition, campaigning against a premier who’d made exactly the promises he made from not raising taxes to closing coal-fired plants, then broken them with the same smarmy air of rectitude. He’d be outraged. He’d thunder about hypocrisy and public trust. And he’d be right.

The question then becomes, why isn’t he the least bit ashamed now? How does he preserve not merely the facade but, I am persuaded, the sublime inner certitude that he is splendidly spotless?

OK, that’s not the question. I don’t care how he does it. I just want to know how we can stop electing politicians like that. John Tory doesn’t strike me as humbly focused on avoiding political temptation. And Howard Hampton appears to believe that belligerent self-righteousness is the answer to any policy problem (which, given his other resources, might be the safe choice). So how do we get people who acknowledge that there are powerful reasons why governments, of all stripes, tend to make similar bad decisions, and then explain in their campaign speeches and literature what they will do to avoid these errors?

In part the secret is that we must be willing to vote for those who confess to sin, who admit they too would be tempted by what has manifestly long tempted everyone holding the office they seek, from pandering to middle-class voters to seeking short-term gain, glossing over genuine governing difficulties and blithely waving off the laws of economics. But we can’t vote for them unless they run.

So my direct advice to politicians is: Stand up and say you know all problems will not disappear just because you’re the great you. Admit you’ve studied policy and have ideas on how to do things that go beyond preening before the mirror then uttering fatuous banalities while sneering at your wretched and uncaring adversaries.

If you’re not going to rely on superior personal qualities, you may have to fall back on superior understanding of the issues. And for many of you that would be a long drop indeed. But look on the bright side. It would make you more electable.

Cynics have long said sincerity is the key to politics and when you can fake it, you’re golden. The trouble is, everyone’s faking it now. Or worse. Public life is crowded with sincerely sanctimonious prats. But wake up and smell the opportunity. We voters are tired of egomaniacs who substitute imaginary rectitude for genuine policy.

So start faking humility. Who knows, you might develop a taste for it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Now that we’ve discussed the heck out of whether there will be a cabinet shuffle, when, who’s hot, not or forgot, and the optics of what actually did happen, can we talk about something else? Like the cabinet? No, really. I read the speculation (it’s my job). And I read the stories about who went up, down or sideways, plus insider commentary on key issues like Tory prospects in Quebec, their ability to sell the Afghan mission to voters and who introduced the prime minister to his wife. It’s like reality TV we have an excuse for watching. Without, fortunately, having to see Gordon O’Connor throw a fit wrapped in a towel.

Now we’re tired of it and ready to watch a sitcom — say, the zany antics of the New Ministers and their wacky neighbours, the Oppositions. Still, some high-end digital channel might air a nerdy show on the irrelevant question of what, exactly, qualifies various people for their cabinet posts.

Take Peter MacKay. Please. As you know, he was recently our foreign minister because he’d led the pre-merger Progressive Conservatives, remains a potential leadership contender and was not conspicuously prone to public gaffes, unless you count his recent slip on the Arctic ice when he warned Russia the North Pole was Canadian, a ringing declaration sadly not based in fact.

Maybe as defence minister he’ll do something about the Russian bombers now test-firing cruise missiles over this “Canadian” territory. Or not. But I digress. My point is that nothing in his C.V. would, in any other business, justify giving him such important, difficult and specialized posts. How many books on defence or diplomacy has he read in his life? (Not counting The North Pole: Mine Mine Mine by Johnny Canuck.)

The National Post editorial board liked him in defence because: “That ministry needs a high-profile minister who can talk about our Afghan mission in the broader context of its importance to the international community and how Canadians are improving the lives of ordinary Afghans….” I’m more concerned about whether he can run the mission. But I’m the sort of nebbish who thinks a grandmaster should be able to play the Benoni counter-gambit not just spin it, and understand its prospects on the board as well as in Quebec.

To be sure, the guy formally best qualified for his cabinet job was Gordon O’Connor, and he was just dumped from defence into national revenue to avoid conceding the obvious to the juvenile hecklers across the aisle. (The prime minister said of the 68-year-old former brigadier-general and military lobbyist: “It’s time for him to have some other experiences.” Like being fired sardonically.) But if he was not up to defence, what possible reason is there for thinking he’s ready for national revenue? Does the PM value his views on consumption taxes, the Ricardian equivalence theorem or the appropriate deduction for truckers’ lunches? Pshaw.

This being Canada, you might be reluctant to start down a road that leads to asking if this country should have a heritage minister who struggles with English. But this is picking nits. The real question is what qualifications any of these people bring to such jobs in this or any cabinet.

In this week’s “Monday Morning” column, Donna Jacobs profiled incoming Canadian Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Perrin Beatty, in cabinet at 29 and, under Brian Mulroney, minister of national revenue, solicitor general, minister of defence, health and welfare then communications, and Kim Campbell’s secretary of state for external affairs. He’s no fool, and I daresay he’s a quick study. But would even Mr. Beatty claim he was given these jobs because of how much he knew coming in, or that he held any of them long enough to figure out when his bureaucrats were feeding him a line? We wouldn’t hire bricklayers this way.

Let me not seem unkind to the prime minister. Especially with so many Senate vacancies going begging. Our system places severe constraints on his freedom of choice, from regional politics to internal party dynamics to a drastic shortage of MPs capable of doing any cabinet job at all, never mind well. Most ministers, caught between the pincers of the bureaucracy and the Prime Minister’s Office, have little impact on policy or administration, and usually it’s just as well. As Sir John A. Macdonald once responded to criticism of his ministers: “If you want a better cabinet, send me better wood.”

Voters ultimately control timber quality. But the routine failure of our system to produce candidates for ministerial office with anything resembling relevant professional qualifications is, I submit, a subject not yet exhausted by press coverage of this shuffle.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

They say it’s better to light a single candle than to curse the darkness. It’s not as much fun. Still, let me seek to dispel a bit of murk today with a list of 10 books on government that aspiring Canadian politicians should read.

Sixty years ago Joseph Schumpeter called it a “well-known argument” that “the democratic method creates professional politicians whom it then turns into amateur administrators and ‘statesmen.’” I fear that we have since forgotten the argument despite living daily with the result. But to avoid an ill-tempered digression, let me simply note that the vast majority of people who run for office genuinely intend to put public interest ahead of partisanship, raise the tone of debate and make their country a better place. Given the generally pitiful results, it is fair to conclude that there are important things about government most of them don’t even realize they don’t know.

Last Friday, CFRA radio host Stephanie Egan challenged me to offer help on this point. Okay. I can’t make people read and understand this stuff before they go into politics, let alone take time out of their hectic schedules for some reflective reading once elected. On the other hand, with three weeks of summer left, what better use to make of the comparative calm?

To avoid the proverbial drink from a fire hydrant, I determined to list books not on specific issues but on how public affairs work generally, and only ones any person of good will and sound mind could get through quickly, profitably and pleasurably.

1. Henry Hazlitt, Economics In One Lesson. Sixty years ago, Hazlitt himself complained that “a mere recital of the economic policies of governments all over the world is calculated to cause any serious student of economics to throw up his hands in despair.” It still is, because people who seek office still haven’t read this wonderfully clear little volume.

2. Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World From The Twenties to the Nineties. Theory, my father used to say, is just practice with the hard bits left out. It would be comforting to know that those who aspire to influence the course of events had some knowledge of actual events.

3. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty. The classic, and still unsurpassed, defence of free political institutions.

4. Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay, eds, The Complete Yes Minister. Government has its own particular rules, rhythms and reasons. While economists drone on about “public choice theory,” this hilarious British satire still explains it better, faster and far more enjoyably.

5. Jack Granatstein, Who Killed the Canadian Military? Defence of the nation is the first duty of any government. Yet in Canada it has been tragically neglected by every government ... and we citizens elected them all.

6. George Orwell, 1984. Government is not a toy. People who dabble in politics need to understand just how badly public affairs can go wrong, and be instinctively averse to the sort of language and thought that take us in that direction.

7. Darrell Huff, How to Lie with Statistics. I want everyone in public life to read a book on science as an adult, if only to prove that they can. But this classic is still the best inoculation against error and flummery with numbers.

8. A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of The Law of the Constitution. Unless you know how parliamentary self-government is meant to work, and why, you’re liable to reduce it to the mess we see today. Read Dicey on Westminster in its heyday and you’ll never look at a parliamentary committee the same way again.

9. Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom. The Teutonic prose style makes it the most difficult read on the list. But it explains why comprehensive economic planning is not just undesirable but impossible. Do not approach Canadian health care without it.

10. Thomas Sowell, A Conflict of Visions: Ideological Origins of Political Struggles. Nothing turns public debate into ill-tempered bickering faster than mistaking a philosophical difference about how the world works for a specific policy disagreement. Sowell’s book can’t make the arguing stop but it can improve its intellectual and rhetorical tone.

It’s best to read the books on this list before entering politics because, as Henry Kissinger once observed, people do not generally “grow in office” (unless by that you mean “become more left wing” or refer to the probable consequences of too little exercise and too much fast food). Lurching from crisis to crisis more often exhausts whatever intellectual capital politicians dragged in with them. But, hey, better late than never.

If these 10 books give off even a faint glow it will, I trust, be worth the candle.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]