Personally I'd put Brie on my mooseburger and alienate all key sectors of the U.S. electorate at once. For good measure I'd discuss U.S. politics right after a Canadian election call and annoy my countrypersons as well. But at least I'd know it. Contrast me with the hordes of commentators appalled that Sarah Palin can "field-dress" a moose without being sure what that procedure involves. Vegans can make principled objections. But when people who eat meat flinch at someone able to obtain it, you are up against snobbery rather than analysis. And if you can't understand why I like Sarah Palin, I don't much care why you think I shouldn't.

Perhaps my disdain for Canadian politics is a form of reverse snobbery. But I'd far rather deal with the entrails of a moose than with the political kind in this country. I mean, the other day I got an e-mail from the NDP saying, "For too long, Stephen Harper has listened to those sitting around the boardroom tables, not the kitchen tables." Phooey.

It's not that I don't believe the charge. It's that I don't believe NDPers believe it. It has plausibly been suggested that Stephen Harper only listens to himself. Or that such advice as he does take comes from careful polling of those at kitchen tables, to the virtual exclusion of principled conservatives. But does anyone believe Jack Layton believes Mr. Harper takes campaign and policy advice from captains of corporate Canada? And while I don't really mind Mr. Layton being wrong, it bothers me that he's being ridiculous without knowing it.

Likewise, Stéphane Dion just denounced "Stephen Harper's laissez-faire, I don't care approach" and repeated for good measure, "This is the Canada he wants to build, laissez-faire, I don't care." Oooh, that's hip, a rhyming slogan. Hit it, boys. Regrettably it's such absolute babble that, again, one cannot believe he believes it. This Tory government inherited spending of $209 billion a year, aimed to get it to $240 billion within three years and, as the Canadian Taxpayers Federation just noted, is way ahead of that extravagant target so far this year. This batch of Tories wouldn't know laissez-faire if the collected works of Adam Smith fell on their heads. Stéphane Dion is too smart not to know it, but too dumb to see how silly he looks saying it anyway.

As for the Tories having a computer-animated bird poop on Mr. Dion, it shows the dangers of giving youthful political zealots leeway -- and, again, of operating in a closed environment where you basically only talk to people who share not just your beliefs, but also your ethos.

Which brings me back to Sarah Palin and her moosburgers. When John McCain picked her, the cognoscenti -- from journalists to journalists to journalists -- condemned it as a disastrous choice because, fundamentally, it was a vulgar one. Smart, determined, caring mother with successful career, mean shot with a rifle, won the high school basketball championship on a broken foot. What, exactly, is it about that resumé that so many supposed feminists find disgusting?

It seems to be that she's somehow tacky. Not "one of us." Worse yet, she's one of them. That great vulgar horde of self-reliant, resilient, practical Americans. You know. Hillbillies. Yuck.

To paraphrase William F. Buckley Jr., North American elites are forever yammering about other cultures, but generally seem surprised to find that there are any. And disgusted.

Lack of self-awareness is a tragic failing. Including that Canadian politics is far more sociologically exclusive than American, in everything from skin colour to family size. (Their four major candidates had seven, five, four and two kids; ours one, two, two and two.) Yet Canada was settled by people with a large dollop of frontier spirit of their own: anglos, francophones, allophones, aboriginals, practically any group you can name, with a formidable capacity to survive on their own, to endure hardship, do disgusting tasks, shoot to kill in this nation's wars and down on the farm and raise big families. So where's our Sarah Palin, instead of four guys you wouldn't want helping you change a tire? Even Mr. Dion's snowshoeing ads have "environmentally correct yuppie hobby" rather than "check the trapline" written all over them.

I say if you're going to be a snob you should at least know it, especially if you're a journalist or a politician. Remember John Kerry's major 2004 campaign gaffe when he asked for Swiss cheese on his Philly cheese steak? I'd prefer it myself; the classic fast-food Philly is actually disgusting. But if I were posing as a common man I'd at least understand why I'd better make a joke of putting Brie on my mooseburger.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

At the risk of stirring controversy I'd like to declare that Barack Obama would probably make an OK president. To his supporters this will sound outrageously tepid. Whereas many conservatives are passionately convinced the rookie Senator from Illinois is absolutely the worst imaginable candidate for the Oval Office since, um, the last guy the Democrats nominated. In this respect, at least, hard-core Republican and Democratic sympathizers are quite similar: Compare what the latter now say about John McCain with the way they used to praise his independence from George W. Bush, and ask yourself whether they, too, don't need either a reality check or an honesty transfusion.

The test I apply within my own social circles, such as they are, is to ask which Democratic nominee for president in the last 60 years they do not consider conspicuously unfit for that office. Not just potentially ineffective, lacking experience and/or liable to espouse bad polices, but offensively unsuited to it. I realize conservatives are likely not to support liberal candidates regardless of their personal qualities (and vice versa). But in a democracy, if your hair rises in panic at every nominee from the other party it is your judgment that is called into question, not theirs.

I apply my 60-year test to Republicans because I want to be sure my net is large enough to catch Harry Truman. He had his failings, but his temperament was well suited to the difficult job of U.S. president, and particularly in foreign affairs he is now vindicated as thoroughly as he was pilloried at the time. The Globe and Mail's Jeffrey Simpson opined on Tuesday, expressly respecting George W. Bush, that "Almost every North American politician who leaves office unpopular hopes for a Truman. Alas for them, Mr. Truman's rehabilitation was unique." Oh really? What about Ronald Reagan? Or Richard Nixon? Or Dwight Eisenhower? Shall I go on naming Republicans or is the point clear?

I know it's hard to rally the troops with a dramatic cry that while your own candidate is uninspiring the other guy is liable, on balance, to be marginally worse. But even active partisans should try to remember which of their utterances are deliberate exaggerations or outright lies. Those who merely follow politics with passion have no excuse for plunging into the bile so enthusiastically as to splash it about. I don't expect Democrats to prefer Republican candidates or vice versa but I do expect them to keep a little perspective.

A number of essentially mediocre Democratic candidates in the past half-century might have made a dangerous mess of Soviet-American relations. But that doesn't make Walter Mondale a leftist menace like Al Gore, or a cad like Bill Clinton. Democrats should be ashamed of the enthusiastic welcome they gave Mr. Clinton at their convention 10 years after he was impeached; Richard Nixon was not even at the 1984 RNC a decade after resigning. But honestly, would conservatives, or Americans, be worse off today if Michael Dukakis had defeated George Bush Sr. in 1992? And if Sarah Palin were a Democrat, would the Globe editorially demand her resignation from the ticket and peddle rumours of a "shotgun" wedding for her pregnant daughter?

Some of my Republican friends tell me Sen. Obama is bitter, radical and dangerous. I don't believe it. Yes, he inhaled some noxious vapours from the left-wing fringe of black American politics but I don't think they poisoned him. Indeed the one extravagant expectation of his supporters that I think he could meet is to help heal America's deep and ancient racial wounds, simply by raising his right hand and repeating the oath of office.

I grant that on foreign policy he seems to vacillate rhetorically between appeasement and belligerence and if he were to do so in office we'd all regret it. But honestly, what true Republican liked John McCain before the campaign started? And if the Democrats are going to win, would you rather it be with Hillary Clinton? Or Al Gore? They can't all be worse than one another. Membership in the Democratic Party may indicate poor judgment, but unless you're willing openly to call it proof of imbecility, depravity or both you can't treat every nominee as confirmation of that claim. And by the way, if liberals would extend the same courtesy to conservatives, in Canada as well, it might not harm political discourse there or here.

In the end, I tell my conservative friends that, if elected, Barack Obama will either do a decent job, which would be good, or be a comically catastrophic bust like Jimmy Carter and push the country back to the right, which would also be good. So we have nothing to lose but our sense of proportion.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Apparently I am the victim of an enormous, constitutionally prohibited outrage. I have never received a single art subsidy. In days of yore this complaint might have been rejected by galleries, granting organizations and the general public who would apply to my oeuvre the antiquated technical critical term "bad." And I concede that my still lifes have a zombie-like quality of inanimate mobility while my stick men resemble neither sticks nor men, my abstracts are concrete and my concrete is behind the shed. As for my music, remember the old ads about how "They laughed when I sat down to play"? Well, I assure you I soon had them in tears.

On those grounds I would at one time have had a better chance of breaking into the art world as an easel than as a participant, while even Picasso would have rejected me as a model. But I am pleased to say that as progress levels everything worth having, an indignant editorial in the Globe and Mail this week denounced the federal Conservative government's decision to cancel some art subsidies because "To control access to those grants on the basis of ideology or centrally determined notions of good taste is censorship, plain and simple." I'm old enough to remember when people knew the difference between free speech and free money. But that was in the dark days, before the Charter.

Thus the NDP "Critic for Digital Culture," in an indignant press release that regrettably misspelled the word "disdain," declared that "Canadian artists shouldn't be vetted by the PMO and his pointy-headed staff of Rush Limbaugh-style ideologues." Uh, shouldn't that be "its" staff? Meanwhile a press release from the Office of the Leader of the Opposition called the decision "arbitrary" and included the sentence, "During the Conservative tenure, arts and culture have again and again seen their importance diminish and marginalized by cuts or ideological attacks" -- a sentence that does for the English language what Cubism did for landscape painting, while incorporating the distorted notion that anything not subsidized is marginalized. Impressive.

Let me say, and spray-paint it on a wall for good measure (an expression here meaning "in the hope of getting money for it"), that if you cannot make a living in the arts through sales of your work, or voluntary grants from private organizations, you are probably in the wrong trade. And people who don't like the way politicians and bureaucrats judge art might reasonably oppose state funding for culture. But if we are going to have such grants surely public authorities need some criteria for sorting applicants at least into "Yes" and "No" piles even if they don't publicly admit to also having a "Whoa Nelly, no!!!" pile. Unless you accept the views of the neofinancial critical school that in cultural matters the state should just be a conveyor belt onto one end of which tax money is dropped and from the other end of which anyone who calls himself an artist is entitled to pick it up in whatever quantities seem appropriate.

The Globe editorial deplored "a fundamental misunderstanding by the government of the nature of free speech in a democracy." I seem to be having the same problem myself. But maybe a Titian or Michelangelo could do us a suitably massive, tortured Hercules straining to carry enough money to the front end of the conveyor to satisfy the demands at the back end if we were to take seriously the concept that the government cannot have criteria for who receives art funding. Meanwhile, it would take Hieronymus Bosch to depict a smart set irate at these tiny cuts (one percent of the feds' $3.5 billion annual culture funding according to libertarian author Pierre Lemieux, who adds that such spending previously rose 15 per cent under the Tories) but unperturbed that genuine censorship is permitted under our abstract impressionist 1982 Constitution that guarantees rights "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society." And by justified they don't mean to us, the hapless citizens, any more than we are meant to be able to do anything about public subsidies to artistic productions we wouldn't like if we had the misfortune to encounter them. Ask Ezra Levant, who has spent 900 days and $100,000, so far, defending his right to reprint cartoons as part of a news story, what he thinks of artists who cry censorship when they aren't given public cash.

As for the allegedly creative souls for whom loss of subsidies means loss of livelihood, permit me a small excursion into the genre known as folk art, specifically the derisive chant: "Cut your hair, take a bath, get a job."

Rustic, yet forceful. Now where's my grant?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Remember how the old Perry Mason TV program would end with his brilliant interrogation trapping the guilty party into sobbing out a confession? It's very much unlike watching a parliamentary committee in action. I liked Raymond Burr's show better. As a rule, MPs on committees seem to have very hazy goals in questioning witnesses and no coherent strategy for reaching them. But things were far worse at this week's special meeting of the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics Committee, apparently summoned for the sole purpose of generating silly-season headlines about Tory sleaze based on a supposed election financing scandal. First, opposition members wasted their time trying to get Canada's Chief Electoral Officer, Marc Mayrand, to slam the Tories in ways he had explicitly said at the outset he would not do, because he could not comment on anything currently before the courts or under investigation by the Commissioner of Elections Canada.

Then Pierre Poilievre led off for the Tories. Since he usually reminds me of Mason's haplessly belligerent TV nemesis, DA Hamilton Burger, I wasn't expecting things to improve. But he surprised me with not one, nor two, but three of the dramatic moments that habitually marked the climax of the old Mason show.

First he asked Mr. Mayrand why slide 6 of his PowerPoint handout to the committee defined "Candidate election expenses" as "any expense incurred, or property or service used to directly promote or oppose a candidate during an election period" when the Elections Canada candidates' handbook for the 2006 election (on p. 25) directly quotes clause 407(1) of the Canada Elections Act that it must be "used directly to promote or oppose a registered party, its leader or a candidate during an election."

Since the crux of this matter is spending by local candidates to promote the national party, the altered wording to leave out "party" is not a trivial omission. (Especially as the latest, 2007 Elections Canada candidates handbook also removes the reference to parties (see p. 27) while citing the same, unaltered, clause 407(1) of the Elections Act.) But Mr. Poilievre wasn't done with his fireworks.

He then read an e-mail worth quoting in full: "Hi Phyllis, We are told by communications folks in BC that these were radio ads with the Candidate's personal tag on the end -- therefore a local expense to be reported under the Candidate's expense ceiling, regardless of who pays. For rebate purposes, we were asked to bill each campaign -- in the case of VanEast, $2,612.00. The good news is that the Federal Party will transfer $2,600 to the Federal Riding Association as we agreed to pay for the ads. We hope that you are able to squeeze this in under the ceiling. Some expenses are not considered election expenses subject to spending limits, such as fundraising costs. Please have a look at the totals and get back to us if you think we have a problem." It was signed by the federal party bookkeeper.

It sounds like sharp practice. But did it require investigation? Mr. Mayrand refused to comment without more information. So Mr. Poilievre revealed that it was an NDP e-mail obtained by the Tories from Elections Canada. Yet Mr. Mayrand testified that no other party had engaged in the sort of "in-and-out" financing that prompted him to refuse dozens of Tory reimbursement claims and ask the Commissioner of Elections Canada to investigate.

The third Mason-style moment concerned Mr. Mayrand's attempt to show that his office had not given the press or the Liberal party a heads-up on the police raid on Conservative Party HQ. In his opening statement the Chief Electoral Officer said an internal review had cleared him and his staff, though when Scott Reid on a point of order required him to table the review he quickly downgraded it to "not truly a report, barely a sheet."

So Mr. Poilievre asked who conducted the review and Mr. Mayrand grudgingly confessed that it was one M. Mayrand. Since he certainly wouldn't let the Tories investigate themselves on the in-and-out affair, Mr. Poilievre called it surprising that he'd think it appropriate to investigate himself on the leak. And it is.

The more I watch this stuff, including the ugly procedural fiddling on Wednesday, the more convinced I am that if there's a scandal here, it doesn't involve the Tories. But nobody seems to care. The opposition want a scandal, the press want a scandal, and since everybody who's anybody knows Conservatives stink, let's not bore ourselves with details on a beautiful summer day.

Imagine a Perry Mason show where, after the dramatic denouement, the jury convicted his client anyway. I expect it would be cancelled in a hurry.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

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]