In politics you're never sure who to despise. David Cameron seemed a thoroughly safe bet and now look what he's done. Mr. Cameron, in case you don't follow the disintegration of the public sector in Britain as closely as here at home, took over the British Conservative party in December 2005 and, like a classic Canadian Tory, proudly declared himself centrist while articulating uniformly left-wing policies.

Uh, until this week. Speaking in a Glasgow constituency his party wouldn't win if hell did freeze over, he suddenly unleashed a withering blast against political correctness. For instance he told fat people to eat less and exercise more.

Please don't file a hate speech complaint against me because I'm just reporting the facts. (Wait a minute. That's not a defence before our Star Chambers, is it? Oh well. The truth shall make us free. Aaaaaah I just quoted the Bible. I'm in trouble now.)

Before they lock me up, to assure you I am not exaggerating Mr. Cameron's clarity, let me quote him: "Refusing to use these words -- right and wrong -- means a denial of personal responsibility and the concept of a moral choice. We talk about people being 'at risk of obesity' instead of talking about people who eat too much and take too little exercise."

Ouch. The fat's in the fire now. And sizzling, as he continued: "We talk about people being at risk of poverty, or social exclusion: it's as if these things -- obesity, alcohol abuse, drug addiction -- are purely external events like a plague or bad weather. Of course, circumstances -- where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school, and the choices your parents make -- have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices that people make."

Now try to imagine a major Canadian politician making such a statement. I'm sorry. Did you hurt yourself laughing? Sure, a backbencher occasionally says something similar, generally flubbing the delivery, but they are quickly repudiated by their more reputable colleagues. However, before denouncing our politicians as a sorry mix of conformists and crackpots, remember that there is a filter in Canadian politics that determines who gets to be a politician. The electorate. Us. And look what we let Dalton McGuinty do to John Tory over faith-based schools, while sending his own kids to one.

The Daily Telegraph claimed: "It is a sign of the political confidence that Mr. Cameron now has -- backed by consistent opinion poll leads of around 18 points -- that he feels able to make such strong comments." And I grant that in Britain, as here, politicians trailing in the polls are peculiarly adverse to bold efforts to gain ground. But those ahead in the polls generally seem even more afraid of blunt talk. I say Mr. Cameron made a moral choice to speak out.

Others could usefully imitate him, and not just politicians. Wednesday's Citizen quoted the supposedly Roman Catholic premier of Ontario praising the induction of Dr. Henry Morgentaler into the Order of Canada because "I know Dr. Morgentaler is seen as a controversial figure, but I believe in a woman's right to make a very difficult decision and if she makes that difficult decision and chooses to have an abortion, I want her to be able to do that in a way that is safe and a way that's publicly funded." If the Roman Catholic hierarchy in Canada takes church teachings more seriously than Mr. McGuinty, they ought pointedly to deny him communion. While we await their decision, let me share with you, and them, a bit more of Mr. Cameron's amazing outburst.

"We as a society have been far too sensitive. In order to avoid injury to people's feelings, in order to avoid appearing judgmental, we have failed to say what needs to be said... we prefer moral neutrality... Bad. Good. Right. Wrong. These are words that our political system and our public sector scarcely dare use any more." He admitted politicians are far from perfect: "Our relationships crack up, our marriages break down, we fail as parents and as citizens just like everyone else. But if the result of this is a stultifying silence about things that really matter, we redouble the failure."

Wow. He finished: "There is a danger of becoming quite literally a de-moralized society, where nobody will tell the truth anymore about what is good and bad, right and wrong. That is why children are growing up without boundaries... The values we need to repair our broken society... should be taught in the home, in the family.'"

I would love to hear a politician in this country seize a microphone and deliver equally blunt remarks. Even if it means I have to stop despising him.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

George Smitherman has again failed to produce his promised glorious 10-Year Plan for saving health care in Ontario. It's like sitting in a fancy restaurant with a mouth-watering menu and great prices but whatever you order you invariably get a long delay and a bunch of excuses -- and then they chuck deep-fried leftovers on your plate and charge you double. While you can change waiters and cooks once every four years, it seems you can never leave. In a speech to the Cato Institute this spring, P.J. O'Rourke explained that while he actually knows and likes many politicians, "The problem isn't the cook. The problem is the cookbook. The key ingredient of politics is the idea that all of society's ills can be cured politically. It's like a cookbook where the recipe for everything is to fry it. The fruit cocktail is fried. The soup is fried. The salad is fried. So is the ice cream and cake. And your pinot noir is rolled in breadcrumbs and dunked in the deep fat fryer."

Because government is force, it can do the things that need to be done through force, often very effectively: fight crime, beat Hitler, make people pay taxes -- just as a fast-food restaurant can often make a great burger and fries when that's what you want. Unfortunately at Chez Gouvernement, where they don't just insist on frying everything including the ice cream but they promise they can also bake, roast, sautée and serve raw, you don't simply get an unhealthy diet, you get deceived.

The latest sizzling empty plate was Stéphane Dion's carbon tax. I gave him some credit when he first suggested it because clearly it didn't come from focus groups. I would even say it came from conviction except, as so often, it didn't come at all.

It was proudly listed as delicious nutritious greens, price zero. Yes, zero, by shifting taxes from desirable activities to environmentally destructive ones. But when he put it on the menu he didn't have a recipe or ingredients, and he still doesn't.

Last week I asked Angel Gurria, secretary-general of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which also favours a carbon tax, how such a tax would work in practice when carbon dioxide and methane both have one carbon atom but methane is said to be 23 or 30 times as bad for the environment. He replied, and I quote, "We believe the enemy is carbon and we believe carbon is the one that has to be priced and taxed."

This reply is unfit for human consumption. Diamonds are pure carbon, but if geologists announced that Greenland had unexpectedly turned out to be one giant diamond, no one would be concerned about the implications for global warming. If it then caught fire they would, because it would start releasing greenhouse gases.

As former Natural Resources Stewardship Project executive director Tom Harris recently observed, calling a tax on carbon dioxide a "carbon tax" is like calling your water bill a "hydrogen tax". To work, a carbon tax must fall on things that worry global warming alarmists, roughly in proportion to how much worry they cause. But Mr. Dion's "plan," larded with offsetting tax breaks, has as its sole nutrient a wholesale tax on fuels based on how much carbon dioxide they release, starting at $10 per tonne, rising to $40 in four years.

Or not. In his press conference yesterday, Mr. Dion talked about "carbon dioxide," as did the press release, but the bit on pricing in the "Handbook" (see thegreenshift.ca) only says "carbon emissions" and "greenhouse gas emissions." The handbook doesn't mention methane and neither did Mr. Dion, like chefs who don't know butter from margarine. But both stress that gasoline gets a free pass because there's already an excise tax on it that exceeds the proposed final $40-per-tonne-of-CO2 price.

The whole plan is absurd if the point is to change behaviour significantly by changing incentives dramatically. But the plan is logical if you suddenly realize all you can do is fry up a politically attractive mess of empty calories. I don't know if this meal will really be free, but it sure won't be nourishing.

Nor does it help to change waiters. No one has a more substantive carbon plan than Mr. Dion.

And while Ontario Tory health critic Elizabeth Witmer berated Mr. Smitherman over his missing 10-year plan, in her press release she quoted herself that "Ontario requires a long term vision .... How much longer must we wait for this government to take action and develop a long overdue plan?" As if she had one either. Like Mr. Smitherman, she's happy to list it on the menu but let her take your order and it's, um, uh -- oh, look here's some batter, fry some excuses for me quiiiick I've got hungry rowdies at table 42.

I hate this restaurant. Is there no way we could eat somewhere else?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

One problem with living in Ottawa is that if you go away you might miss something important. Especially these days. By "important" I don't just mean so awful it's also funny. The word usually carries a quite different meaning here. And I can prove it.

You see, one of the peculiar pleasures of my job is to be inundated with press releases that routinely plumb new depths of banality, hypocrisy and vanity, often simultaneously. Like one from Foreign Affairs on May 20 that said "Minister Bernier Concludes Successful Visit to Croatia".

At the time I wondered what it would take for them to categorize a visit as unsuccessful. Would he have to fall down the steps of the plane, call publicly for the resignation of a senior official, dispatch planes we didn't have or show up with a "spouse" to whom he isn't married who'd forgotten her shirt? Obviously it has since become clear that when it comes to foreign ministers the bar had been dramatically lowered, raised or otherwise placed somewhere unexpected. But let us not dwell on spilled confidential documents. My topic is important things in Ottawa and you cannot imagine how many of them there are unless you, too, get these press releases.

In case you don't because you have a life, allow me to explain. As an important journalist I am informed on an almost daily basis that some minister or other will make an "important announcement" on, say, infrastructure in Hampton, New Brunswick (April 24), the transfer of the federal gas tax to Saint-Elzéar, Quebec (May 20) or some other thing I might otherwise have overlooked.

For instance, on May 1 I was told that in just one more day "The Honourable Tony Clement, Minister of Health, along with the Honourable Doug Currie, Prince Edward Island Minister of Health, will announce an important health investment for the people of Prince Edward Island." Which maybe they did. It seems more likely than that Rick Dykstra, MP for St. Catharines, actually managed on May 9, "On behalf of the Honourable Josée Verner, Minister of Canadian Heritage, Status of Women and Official Languages," to make "an important announcement ... concerning the Niagara Folk Arts Festival" or that the next day Mike Allen, MP for Tobique-Mactaquac, contrived to do so "about the Carleton-Victoria Arts Council." Again one wonders what they would categorize as an unimportant announcement on these topics.

My favourite in this genre was the April 30 notice that "The Honourable Beverley J. Oda, Minister of International Cooperation, will make an important announcement" on a subject they didn't even bother to specify later that same day. Regrettably I had trouble persuading myself the Hon. Beverley J. Oda would under any circumstances make an important announcement about anything and I confess that I never did discover what it was. If you don't pay attention in this town you can miss a lot.

Including that Ottawa is a darn exciting place where important people are forever doing important things or at least saying important things or, cynics might assert, saying they're saying important things in case no other evidence of this fact could be unearthed even by trained experts. If I didn't know better I'd think some PR hacks in drab cubicles had hit upon an uninspired strategy of routinely inserting hyperbole into boring press releases because they had to do something to justify their salaries or because their employers needed a new way to annoy us after finally getting as tired as we were of the phrase "Canada's New Government".

Probably the powers that spin will consider me a crank for airing this possibility. And yes, I'm also the sort of person who doesn't react well to the adjective "delicious" on a menu. Years ago I encountered a sound rule of thumb that lots of adjectives on menus are bad; if they tell you their alfredo sauce is "creamy" it amounts to admitting you might well have different expectations after seeing the restaurant and talking to the waiter. But "delicious" is doubly bad because (a) as the customer I should decide after tasting it and (b) to tell me so pre-emptively implies that I look like such a chump you don't feel any need to hear my opinion before disputing it.

Sorry, I lost focus there. And as a result almost missed two ministers of the Crown going to Lima for, they announced pre-emptively, "an important announcement to advance Canada's trade relationship with Peru" - as opposed to an unimportant announcement on that subject which a trained journalist might have carelessly assumed he could ignore.

So I hate to go away because I might miss something important. Especially given how often it happens even when I'm here.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Maxime Bernier burned his way through a promising political career amazingly fast. I don't know what this former future prime minister and sexiest MP in the House will do next. Maybe go tell his old Parti Québécois friends Anglos are too uptight, especially about sex. If so, list me among them. I shed no tears for Mr. Bernier. And as for his ex-girlfriend, Julie Couillard, now playing the wounded innocent, if this is a babe in the woods, the bears better look out. But what has me really bent out of shape is that, having sanctimoniously denied that it mattered who a senior national security minister was getting naked with before the business of the sensitive documents came up, the prime minister still insisted in accepting Mr. Bernier's resignation that "This is not to do with the minister's private life."

One never knows how much sincerity to attribute to contemporary political spin. But it's safe to attach maximum ridicule to this one. If Mr. Bernier had left sensitive documents at the home of a person he was sleeping with, and he'd been married to her for 15 years and not one of her former biker squeezes had turned police informant/corpse in ditch, there'd be no scandal. Especially if she hadn't also tried to get a security-sensitive airport contract in 2004 for another boyfriend who later committed suicide amid rumours of biker debts.

The personal lives of senior politicians matter. What if a minister of defence, a foreign minister or a prime minister was sleeping with a hit man, a Chinese spy, or a Hamas official? And the fact that the Tories have been fibbing ever since this messy affair became public proves they know it matters. They claimed the relationship ended months before the pair were seen dining together in March and then he, in April, left classified documents at her home during what she bizarrely called a "routine visit." And early this month the government maintained that Mr. Bernier only found out about the biker business when the press got nosy, an excuse as useless as it is implausible because it tacitly admits he would have worried if he had known so he, and his colleagues, should have known.

The basic idea seems to be that nothing shall be allowed to interfere with sensual pleasure, least of all some trivial thing like matters of state. A claim on which the NDP seems to have nothing to say, not even a press release on their website. Meanwhile Liberal Deputy Leader Michael Ignatieff was quoted in this newspaper on Tuesday saying that this "is about the possibility ... of a link between organized crime and airport security in Montreal and the possibility of improper bidding for contracts relating to security. I don't care about her skirts, I don't care about her cleavage, I don't care about her past, I don't care about any of it, it is none of my business quite rightly." But the possible link with organized crime is her "past."

Only the Bloc seems to have got it right. In a May 27 press release on their website their spokesman on public security, MP Serge Ménard, said (my translation) "contrary to what the prime minister claims... the risks posed by this relationship to public security are indeed real." Mr. Ménard dismissed claims it was a private matter, and called for the Commons Committee on Public Safety and National Security to report to the House on "security questions raised by the relationship of the former minister of foreign affairs with a person having had links to organized crime." Especially, I say, because in listing Ms. Couillard as his "spouse" for official travel purposes Mr. Bernier, among other things, let her meet the President of the United States (and, she boasted on TV, impress him with her looks so forget the ingénue act).

It's hard to say you do care about her cleavage without sounding simultaneously like a prude and a lecher. But such an intimate partner isn't just evidence of bad judgment. She's a cause of it. A stable family life is a good thing for someone with important responsibilities and a foreign minister who changes playmates like shirts is liable not to be properly grounded, to say nothing of being too distracted to master details like how many transport planes we have and who is president of Haiti.

The Citizen quoted the founder of Carleton University's Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security that "Frankly, I don't believe that a minister of the Crown engages in pillow talk on high policy." Which is very Austin Powers: I wasn't talking to her, I was just shagging her. But even if true that kind of life wears you down and the pro-family Tories, of all people, shouldn't be claiming otherwise.

Call me repressed, but my message to politicians is: Go home and sleep with your spouses.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

In the battle pitting the federal Conservatives against Elections Canada, the opposition and the press, a typical Ottawa competition to see who can perform most discreditably, my money was on the Tories. Until I made a crucial blunder: I did research. The key issue is whether the Conservative party, in the last election, could donate money to riding associations to purchase advertisements very similar to national ones without those ads being counted against national campaign spending and putting the party over the national legal spending limit. It was, at least to begin with, a dispute not about facts but about how to interpret the law.

At this point I foolishly read what I hope were all the relevant sections of the 500-plus page Canada Elections Act. Here, in unavoidable legalese, is what I found.

The Act does set separate spending limits for registered parties (clause 422.1) and for their candidates (clauses 440 and 441). But Clause 422 (2) lets parties give money to local candidates and not count it as "an election expense..." So the key question is whether those candidates can spend that or any other money, up to their local limit, on what is essentially national advertising. And the crucial Clause 407 (1) defines an "election expense" as "any cost incurred, or non-monetary contribution received, by a registered party or a candidate, to the extent that the property or service for which the cost was incurred, or the nonmonetary contribution received, is used to directly promote or oppose a registered party, its leader or a candidate during an election period." What in there says local spending must happen locally or concern local issues? I see nothing.

Of course the courts might not agree with my interpretation. Or they may say the Tories did a legal thing but in a carelessly illegal way; one Liberal staffer suggested to me that the central problem was that local candidates did not technically "incur" the costs in question. Even if true, that claim hardly justifies Liberal MP Dominic LeBlanc's reference to "an Enron-style accounting practice" at a Thursday press conference.

If recent allegations of document-tampering are substantiated, it's a whole different matter. But my legal opinion, worth what you paid for it less the cost of this newspaper, is that the Tories are right, even if too clever by half, on the initial issue.

It has been suggested that this dispute reflects hostility between Elections Canada and the prime minister going back to his former life as libertarian head of the National Citizens' Coalition, waging court battles against what the coalition (rightly, in my view) called election "gag laws."

But if so, it doesn't prove the primary fault lies with the Tories. I want a court to rule whether the dramatic police raid on Conservative party headquarters was necessary. And I'd certainly like to know how not only journalists but Liberal staffers heard of it in time to film it.

Especially because former Chief Electoral Officer Jean-Pierre Kingsley took a strangely vocal role in policy debates for the head of an organization that, as part of the executive not the legislative branch of government, is supposed to enforce laws not create them. Liberal MP Ken Dryden wrote in the Toronto Star on Wednesday that the Tory financing scheme "isn't what Elections Canada intended" and that "Elections Canada set national and local limits" because it "intended that national spending be for national purposes, and local spending for local purposes..." as if it, not Parliament, had created the Canada Elections Act. Then Mr. Dryden waved away the Tory position because "Elections Canada has ruled that for advertising to be considered local, it must directly promote that local candidate or oppose his or her opponent...," as if the centuries-old struggle to keep the executive branch from creating law and acting as judge in its own case had recently been quietly and benignly settled in favour of Charles I.

Mr. Dryden in his article and Mr. LeBlanc in his press conference both cited the Canada Elections Act provision that you cannot do indirectly what is expressly prohibited directly. OK. But it cannot be read as a Phantom of the Paradise style "All clauses that are excluded shall be deemed to be included" provision. If the Act does not directly forbid local candidates buying national ads, it does not indirectly forbid it either.

The Tories responded to this ruckus in a manner at once paranoid and juvenile and it worked about as well as you'd expect. But it doesn't mean there's anything scandalous in their challenging a technical Elections Canada ruling in court, even if they ultimately lose.

Besides, on my reading of the law, they might win.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

My colleague Randall Denley wrote this weekend that if we consider municipal amalgamation in Ottawa a failure we should undo it. What a splendid heresy. Not his sentiment that the megacity is not working out as promised, which others have also noticed. In any case, he isn't ready to give up on it entirely. No, I single out for praise his remarkable assertion that if a piece of public policy proves to be a mistake we should undo it, and his even more startling underlying premise that we can.

Trivial, you say? OK, when is the last time a government introduced a measure, then admitted it was a mistake and simply repealed it? When, for that matter, is the last time a government admitted something its predecessor had done was a mistake and simply repealed it, even after campaigning on precisely such repeal?

When you suggest getting rid of some flagrant error, people are prone to chirp that you can't turn the clock back, a remarkable triple fatuity in just six words. In the first place, we turn the clock back every fall when we go off daylight savings time. In the second, we turn the clock back whenever we notice that it is fast (unless it is the technologically advanced clock on some modern convenience we can't operate). In the third, and most fundamentally, it incorporates the mistaken notion of society as engaged in desirable linear progress through a set of predictable homogenous stages. This 19th-century mechanistic vision of society, most famously expressed in Marx's schema of an inevitable primitive-slave-feudal-capitalist-socialist-communist progression, is itself so outdated that to espouse it is, ironically, to turn the clock back.

Despite its complete historical inaccuracy, this notion manages to confer an air of inevitability on various schemes with no other apparent virtues. For instance, municipal amalgamation, which I warned against before it happened (on Dec. 1, 1999 in this very newspaper). Unfortunately I argued on the basis of economic and political principles and everybody who was anybody knew the megacity was going to happen and you can't fight the clock.

Or something. How, for instance, would this tiresome clock metaphor categorize my own desire to strengthen federalism by dramatically increasing the number of provinces, essentially dividing existing ones up by telephone area code? I also think we have too few politicians and should double the size of both the federal Commons and our provincial legislatures, giving us far more legislators who either do not seek or do not anticipate ministerial office and the perks it brings, and devote themselves instead to making the legislature work as a check on the executive including by strengthening the committee system.

The latter suggestion is driven by a desire to return to past practice. But the mechanism I propose is unfamiliar in this country though the British House of Commons exceeds 600 members. However you could start by repealing the Harris Tories' fatuous "Fewer Politicians Act." Am I then an advocate of turning the clock sideways?

When I also say Parliament should, and could, repeal the 1982 Constitution Act, are we to conclude that I'm so reactionary I use a sundial not a clock, but want to turn it forward? And why do you never hear arguments about the operation of a clock when someone tries to force progress? Why did no one say when the Supreme Court bestowed gay marriage upon us that you can't turn the clock forward, so be patient?

We should turn this metaphor down, and with it any notion that every piece of policy innovation is like Jacques Parizeau's infamous lobster pot, into which once lured we have no hope of escape. You can remove the lid and sometimes you should.

A simple solution, and not only to our metaphorical difficulties, is to suggest we navigate with a compass rather than a timepiece. For instance, I can show you coherent and principled defences of the constitution of liberty going back not merely to the Federalist Papers or William Blackstone but to mid-12th century England. Yet where, in the debate over our Constitution Act of 1982, was there even a failed attempt at reasoning from first principles or long experience? At best you'd get one of those silly claims that Canada only works until you start trying to understand why. Mankind has seen no shortage of confused politicians over the ages but it is a rare and obnoxious innovation for them to make it a point of pride.

There is no need for us to join them, in our rhetoric or the ideas it expresses. We can undo our policy mistakes. I say let's start with ditching the megacity.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Start practising the phrase “President Barack Obama.” It’s not so bad. Except as in “President Barack Obama denied today that his naive and spineless foreign policy has encouraged terrorism.” It’s annoying when pundits intone that it’s come down to Obama v McCain as they easily could have predicted. But I did predict it, on CFRA radio in December. Possibly I hedged my bets, but I said both parties would take their least unattractive option, and both have. Republicans don’t nominate pro-abortion candidates, which only left the Mormon, the creationist, the asleep guy and the obnoxious hyperactive maverick whom they chose. Meanwhile the Democrats are rationally opting for inexperienced over horrible.

Trust me, folks. It’s over. The collapse of Hillary Rodham Clinton has surprised many people including her. But if revenge is a dish best served cold, I’m having ice cream here. Democrats who applauded Bill Clinton’s filthy tactics against Republicans were repulsed when he turned them on his own party in South Carolina, and she’s lost nine straight primaries since. Yum yum.

I certainly worry that Senator Clinton is way further left than she admits, on foreign and domestic policy. But my primary concern is character. Whatever the Clintons were caught doing, however sordid, they always dismissed with “We’ve moved on” or words to that effect. It won’t do. The human mind, like the life of a nation, organizes itself around stories or sinks into chaos. The fundamental truth of our mortal existence, bounded by time, is that it hinges on choices and consequences. Persistently to excuse villainy, even as you pocket the benefits, just because “that was then” is to deny any possibility of moral coherence. That Ms. Clinton should belatedly sit down to a banquet of devastating consequences is delicious irony.

For some of my friends the taste is spoiled by fears that Barack Obama is a far-left babe in the foreign policy woods. He may be. Almost no Democratic presidential candidate since Harry Truman has been fit to serve as commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful free nation. But it is intellectual partisanship to declare any Democrat ipso facto unworthy of office (or any Republican, I remind colleagues on both sides of the border). Besides, many conservatives are too concerned with how the Republicans might win in November and not enough about why we want them to.

I do not consider George W. Bush a total disaster. Journalists and academics tend to describe any incumbent Republican as among the worst presidents ever, from Reagan to Coolidge and beyond. Even Lincoln got some horrible press in his day. Later, commentators tend to give them some credit if only to draw invidious comparisons with their successors, and I suspect this president’s foreign policy will be praised in retrospect, like Truman’s, for its resolve and clarity on basic issues. But not his domestic policy. In early 2000 I asked then-candidate George Bush if there was any area from which government should simply withdraw. In response, I wrote in an April 21, 2000 Citizen column, “he stared at me as though he’d never heard such an idea before, pressed his hand to his temple in perplexity and eventually stammered that he’d have to get back to me. (He didn’t.)” Still hasn’t. And as there’s no reason to suppose John McCain would be better domestically, surely we could live with Barack Obama as an alternative.

Especially since he seems to be an honest, decent man. Oh, and he’s um uh you know ... black. And while I don’t care what colour you are, race can have political consequences and does here. If Barack Obama’s skin tone helped undermine Hillary Clinton’s gender-based appeal to Democrats, well, those who live by identity politics cannot complain if they perish by it. But a black U.S. president would draw positive attention abroad to the marvellous openness of American society. Even more important, his political success with all sorts of voters, as a candidate who is black rather than a “black candidate,” not only symbolizes but actively contributes to healing America’s ancient racial wounds. You could do a lot worse in a Democrat. So why not send the GOP to the minors for a bit?

The answer may hinge on whether you’d elect a president who can’t comb his own hair. John McCain can’t, because he was so brutally tortured by communists as a POW in Vietnam. When Barack Obama debates such a man on national security, a couple of careless cheap shots or conspicuously daffy policy statements would lose him an election that is, at this point, his to lose.

So say after me “President Barack Obama.” And while you’re at it, practice “Carteresque.”

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

A lot of bad things have been said about the Harper Conservatives’ grimly sour approach to communications. And rightly so. But why shouldn’t they do it that way? The obvious response, that it’s not good for our democracy, has considerable merit. But those not hopelessly naive about politics (most cynics are) ought to understand that the question “why shouldn’t they do it?” has two very different meanings.

One is “Why don’t we want them to do it?” which is answered above. But the other is “How might we try to discourage them from doing it?” And on that subject I wish you could have been at Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn and Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s Monday press conference on job protection for reservists called to active duty.

For what it’s worth, I support the government on this one. The reserves are extremely important to Canada’s military preparedness and always have been, despite some legitimate concerns about their training standards in years gone by. As the ministers noted, the national government can only legislate such job protection for people in federally regulated industries and the federal public service (and post-secondary students), though a number of provinces have taken similar steps while others are expected to. But I was delighted to hear Mr. MacKay say the things I’ve long wanted to hear a senior minister say about the reserves, and back his words with appropriate deeds.

Of course I realize that holding the press conference at the Cartier Square Drill Hall standing in front of a bunch of reservists was a photo op. I’d go further and say the only real reason for this press conference was TV visuals. For all other purposes they could just have sent us a press release. But that’s OK. If the government thinks it has an important story to tell, they try to frame it in a compelling way. It’s neither incompetent nor unreasonably calculating.

Alas, after that things went wrong. When Mr. MacKay and Mr. Blackburn finished their prepared remarks, the first question was not about reservists generally or the new law in particular but prisoners in Afghanistan. The second was about helicopters. The third concerned the upcoming NATO meeting in Vilnius on Feb. 7 and 8. The fourth returned to helicopters. The fifth was whether Mr. MacKay expected acrimony in Vilnius.

What on Earth did the journalist think or hope the defence minister would say in reply? “Yeah, I’m betting we slap one another’s glasses off and throw cutlery?” Instead he was smooth, dull, unmemorable, and therefore unharmed.

The sixth question also concerned detainees, as did the seventh. Finally the guy in charge of the question queue asked wearily if anyone had anything to ask about the reserves. Yes. What was the government doing about thousands of reservists not covered by the new legislation? Mr. Blackburn patiently explained the division of powers under the Constitution, again. Then I asked how many of the roughly 350 reservists now in Afghanistan would come under the new policy, which they couldn’t answer, and time ran out.

Why ask the other questions in this setting? Acrimony at NATO is an interesting and important story, but best pursued by speaking to experts after obtaining and comparing the considered positions of various NATO allies. As for questions about detainees, helicopters and so forth, the best hope for a genuinely informative response is to submit them in writing or by telephone to Mr. MacKay’s office.

To be sure, his reply might be evasive, tendentious or both. But to ask them with the cameras running, when the ostensible topic is something different, is to abandon any pretence at seeking enlightenment and lunge for a “Gotcha!” TV shot of the minister red-faced and incoherent as his bullying right-wing incompetence is exposed.

Mr. MacKay’s polished responses made it evident that he and his communication team saw it coming. Which speaks better of him than of us. In the end, the Tories didn’t really get their story out, but at least they avoided embarrassment. I’m not convinced the journalists did. Instead of setting traps as futile as they were crass, why not interview one of the 36 Cameron Highlanders or 14 Governor General’s Foot Guards headed to Afghanistan in the next rotation in August 2008? Or at least ask something genuinely tough about the new legislation?

I cannot guarantee this or any other government would be more forthcoming if asked better questions under more appropriate circumstances. But neither the press nor citizens benefit from doing things this way.

So I ask again: Why shouldn’t the Tories stonewall? It may be bad for democracy but it’s not bad for them. And for that you cannot entirely blame them.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]