This just in from outer space. The government is censoring reporting of the election but doing it badly. OK, it's not from outer space. It's from Elections Canada, who on Sept. 9 e-mailed the press to remind us that the law imposes strict requirements, if we report on polls during an election, about what information we must divulge.

State agents pry from us such things as "how many persons were contacted" and "the survey's margin of error."

This law is at once foolish and malignant, two qualities I personally try to avoid even in isolation let alone in combination.

As an attempt to prevent objectionable speech during an election this weird little restriction on what we can say (or, more exactly, what we cannot not say) is entirely feeble. We print journalists remain free to speculate as to what various parties' campaign strategies are and whether they're working without having to justify our claims in any way to the meddlers at Elections Canada. We can cite "experts" without having to explain our choice of which experts we call. We can even declare that nobody understands how a given Tory policy would work but that it's "crafty politics" without having to put any evidence on the table. But cite a poll and we must include statistical details or offend the truth police.

Actually the law on poll reporting is such ineffective censorship that it only says the first outlet to report it must provide all this tedious detail. Thus, for example, the Citizen could report Wednesday an Ipsos Reid poll on Canadians' diverse electoral concerns without pestering you with how many people in northeastern Saskatchewan with blue garage doors were consulted on the economy versus health care as their main concern. Which is fine by me and I expect by you as well so the government should just buzz off.

On the whole, I'm not much interested in polls and wish everyone spent more time discussing issues (like, say, censorship). Sometimes polls are slanted for partisan purposes, and other times they're flawed because normal people either won't talk to pollsters or are not entirely frank with them. On the other hand, pollsters rely for their reputation, and thus their income, on the accuracy of their results so they try hard to avoid such pitfalls. Anyway, how much information journalists provide about polls and how often we report on them should be between us, the newspaper, and you, our readers. It is not properly the business of people to whom these poll numbers might spell electoral doom. And are those in government so thoroughly on top of their more important tasks that they have time to spare on this sort of stuff?

OK, the only practical effect of this rule is to make us occasionally waste ink and paper including statistical caveats of minimal interest. Mathematicians don't need them, whereas to the average reader a margin of error plus some phrase like "19 times out of 20" is just a fancy way of saying "unless it's not" which they already knew. But the Canada Elections Act that lies behind this warning from Elections Canada was written by incumbent politicians to prevent us from doing something they fear might get them voted out. And even if statistically imprecise reporting of polls is unlikely to have that effect, inept censorship remains censorship and sets a very bad precedent. Of which this warning is not the only example.

Radio stations, for instance, are legally obliged to provide "equitable" political coverage. Which is just a soothing name for the government hovering over their reporting on the government to make sure it's not left to citizens to decide what's fair. Our election laws also silence third parties during elections. And if the state can dictate coverage to radio stations and citizens, why not newspapers? Why just harry us over fiddly details of poll reporting when they could prosecute us for unfair coverage of their own splendid selves?

I'll tell you. It's because you the voter, not they the incumbent politicians, should decide whether we the press are giving you the information you need to cast an informed vote. Always.

Instead, if I say Stéphane Dion is a Martian, the law lets you make up your own mind about the reliability of the claim. But if I tell you 68 per cent of Martians support the Liberal leader, I'm obliged to disclose how many little green men I talked to with how large a margin of error, lest you be hoodwinked into some harmful voting behaviour impossible to specify. It may sound silly rather than toxic. But once the censorship principle is conceded, it's hard to fight back if the application gets more obnoxious.

Stupid, yet unfair. How strangely Earthlings conduct public affairs.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The possible election of Barack Obama as president of the United States has engendered a puzzling level of enthusiasm among Canadian progressives. It is puzzling first because they are normally skeptical of American influence on Canada and second because it is not obvious, even if he possesses the wonderful qualities his more enthusiastic supporters attribute to him, how President Obama would bring about exciting changes in Canada. That we are in need of some rejuvenation of our political culture is beyond doubt. But Washington is not the place to look for it.

"Since September 11 Canada has, like the United States, experienced precisely no terrorist attacks, so Obama will have mathematical trouble bringing that number down any further."

It might be carping to suggest that the direct impact of President Obama’s policies on Canada is liable to be negative insofar as it is discernable. Despite some bobbing and weaving, he does seem hostile to NAFTA, on which so much of our recent impressive economic growth is based. And if he should miscalculate in foreign policy, as his rhetorical tendency to oscillate between extremes of accommodation and belligerence suggests, we might well find ourselves in a far less attractive world. Those to the left of George W. Bush on foreign policy may think Obama would bring a more enlightened attitude to diplomacy leading to a more peaceful world. If so, the benefits are obvious, starting with our possibly being able to bring our brave soldiers home from Afghanistan. But at the risk of sounding hard-boiled, since September 11 Canada has, like the United States, experienced precisely no terrorist attacks, so regardless of his excellence, Mr. Obama will have mathematical trouble bringing that number down any further. And if he ends up flopping his flip on a hasty withdrawal from Iraq, then his Canadian supporters, even if they find it aesthetically superior to see a Democrat engage in foreign military nation-building ventures, will have little of substance to celebrate.

Perhaps the issue is not policy. At least some Canadian Obama enthusiasts expect his positive impact on us to be more a matter of changing our national mood than any concrete steps he might take. And here there is one way in which his example might do us good. It has been mentioned that the recent Democratic nomination contest between the senator from Illinois and Hillary Rodham Clinton presented a remarkable contrast with Canadian political parties and their all-white-male-all-the-time leadership ambiance. (The Republican race, with a maverick war hero, a Mormon, a libertine and a preacher man offered considerable variety even before John McCain chose the gun-totin’, whistle-blowin’, former beauty queen, pro-life Alaskan governor as his running mate.) And if Mr. Obama really is a fresh face, rhetorically inspiring rather than insipid, above the politics of image and manipulation, and living proof that anyone can aspire to the presidency, we might be prompted to ask ourselves why such things do not happen here. But that is about all the help we are going to get from him.

Even if American political institutions are working in such a way as to provide this inspiring ray of hope, we cannot attempt to imitate any changes Obama helps to cause in Washington directly because our own institutions are different. Indeed, one need not be naive about American governance to say that ours legitimately seem to be in a far more advanced state of disrepair.

The extent of visceral disdain for George W. Bush in Canada, especially among the literati, can easily deceive people into thinking that the American political system, and their very constitution, must have disintegrated for such a man to occupy the White House. The 2000 election was stolen, the war in Iraq is illegal, Guantanamo Bay violates the Geneva Conventions, the economy is collapsing because of the subprime mortgage lending fiasco, and so on.

"It is now hard to believe that newspapers called Abraham Lincoln a coward and a baboon, and Senator Ben Tillman threatened to stab Grover Cleveland with a pitchfork over his bank policy."

The prevalence of such talk underlines that the last two presidents have had an unhealthy polarizing effect on American politics. Indeed, I confess that Bill Clinton had that effect on me. But I also remember the invective of the Reagan years. And as a U.S. historian by training, I am acutely aware that at various other times in America’s past the level of bitterness and division seemed perilously high, including periods now remembered as calm and harmonious or as times when giants walked the earth. It is now hard to believe that newspapers called Abraham Lincoln a coward and a baboon (as did a member of his own cabinet), South Carolina senator Ben Tillman threatened to stab President Grover Cleveland with a pitchfork over his bank policy and some parents washed their children’s mouths out with soap if they spoke the name of Franklin Roosevelt. Or that Orson Welles and Norman Mailer suggested on television that Richard Nixon might cancel the 1972 elections, while Daniel Patrick Moynihan urged Nixon to make some sort of reassuring statement to black Americans in his first inaugural address because “the rumor is widespread that the new government is planning to build concentration camps.”¹ And those last two examples came less than a decade after the supposedly transforming glory of Camelot.

There are plenty of grounds for criticizing George Bush on matters both of substance and of style. But neither his policy failures nor offputting personal style grotesquely exceed those of Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam and race riots, Richard Nixon over Vietnam and Watergate, or Jimmy Carter over energy shortages and superpower relations. And, in any event, voters have already given both houses of Congress to the Democrats to rein in President Bush. The United States is simply not in a pit of such Stygian darkness that Barack Obama will transform it, even if he is everything his supporters imagine him to be. And even if he does, he certainly will not transform Canada as well.

Viewed dispassionately, our governance is not going well. But our problems cannot reasonably be attributed to George W. Bush or a Republican Congress, which the United States does not even have any more. Our policies bear little resemblance to those of Mr. Bush and our institutional difficulties are quite unlike those of the United States. To start with the obvious, Question Period routinely sinks to a level the Obama-Clinton debates never did. And it is no fluke, no passing result of our 2006 election or the 2000 one in the United States. It has been this way for well over a decade regardless of which party is asking or answering the questions.

Novice members of Parliament now routinely enter the Commons genuinely convinced that they can and will help raise the tone of Question Period. But before you know it they are turning artificially purple, jabbing fingers in a way that causes fights in bars and making barnyard noises while their colleagues across the aisle attempt to be heard further lowering the tone of debate.

And it is not just Question Period. Take legislative committees. American congressional committees have their failings, but they continue to play a vital and effective role in the discharge of Congress’s legitimate and constitutionally mandated functions. If you have sat in on any significant number of parliamentary committees lately, which I have, you will know that many of them are on the verge of total meltdown due not to otherwise real problems, such as overwork, but to a complete lapse in civility that inhibits even routine substantive and procedural activities. Even the notorious disruption of, for instance, the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics over the “in-and-out” affair has its roots in a ferocity of partisan attachment among almost all members of Parliament that leaves no room for a higher allegiance to Parliament or concern for its proper functioning that might transcend the vicious battle for short-term party advantage.

Our discontents go further. Whatever one thinks of the Liberal Party’s traditional image of itself as the only national brokerage party, it is surely alarming to see the geographical and sociological fracturing of our politics into voting tribes among whom there is little communication, never mind conversation. There is widespread fear of another election among parties and voters for reasons ranging from financial to aesthetic. But the biggest problem is that we are liable to get back the same parliament again and again. (If the Conservatives do obtain a dissolution of Parliament this fall, uncertain at the time of writing, it will be from fear of something worse, not the hope of something better.) It is hard to see how George Bush can have created this electoral paralysis and, therefore, hard to see how Barack Obama might end it. And you certainly cannot blame the outgoing Republican incumbent for the fact that Canada’s three opposition parties share a sufficiently similar social democratic philosophy to cooperate almost reflexively in committees, and even sometimes in passing money bills through the House, yet cannot bring themselves even to bring down the Tories and cause an election, let alone assemble a coalition to pass a coherent governing program based on things they all loudly declare themselves to believe in.

Such a state of affairs would not be a problem in principle in the United States. Their constitution, with its separate election of the executive, does not depend upon the president having a working majority in the legislature. For much of its history he has not, and the founding fathers would be happy to hear it. Moreover, even a president with significant partisan majorities in Congress may be unable to control the legislative agenda. But in Canada, with a constitution in many ways similar in principle to that of Great Britain, the executive depends upon a working majority in the House. The Conservatives, lacking one, should not be able to govern, and in certain important respects, including the work of committees, they cannot. The unwillingness of the opposition parties to take on the unpleasant as well as pleasant tasks incumbent on a majority in Parliament, leading them to abstain on or duck crucial budgetary votes, is a peculiarly Canadian pathology that denies citizens a government they can hold responsible for what actually happens politically, and an opposition they can turn to for alternatives. Barack Obama cannot help us with that even if he turns out to make John F. Kennedy look like Ike.

Right now people are thrashing about, proposing remedies that are incompatible with our fundamental institutions and unrelated to our current difficulties. We are digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the hole with proposals such as Reform’s direct democracy in the 1990s and a proliferation of arm’s-length agencies impossible to situate within the executive, legislative or judicial branches and unconstrained by traditional rules appropriate to any of them. We need a plan here, not a mood swing.

"One advantage of a sweeping advocacy of change, currently working to the benefit of Barack Obama, is that its lack of specificity makes it hard to criticize."

One advantage of a sweeping advocacy of change, currently working to the benefit of Barack Obama, is that its lack of specificity makes it hard to criticize. Regrettably it has precisely the same effect on implementation. One waits in vain for progressive Canadian enthusiasts for the coming Obama revolution to tell us what exactly it is that, fired with newfound enthusiasm, we ought to do to make Canada—rather than the U.S.—a better, happier place.

Some prominent Canadian commentators have invoked the atmosphere of Camelot with respect to Mr. Obama. Cynics might retort that the senator from Illinois in 2008, like the one from Massachusetts in 1960, is young, handsome, inexperienced and gifted at raising expectations with empty rhetoric. But the analogy is noteworthy because the American “Great Society” of the 1960s really did furnish the model, or at least a significant inspiration, for our own “Just Society” five years later—the last great burst of transborder progressive enthusiasm.

Retrospective discussions of government in Canada in the 1960s contain an air of breathless excitement. Politicians of vision worked closely with brilliant public servants such as Gordon Robertson and Robert Bryce to sweep aside old structures within government and outside it and to revolutionize Canadian society by harnessing the potential of a marriage of social science and political power. Bliss it was to be alive, and to be young was very heaven, especially given free love.

What is too often overlooked in such fond reminiscing is the awkward fact that it did not work. I say this not as a sour and sidelined relic of the past age, even if I am one. I simply take at face value the verdict of activists and advocates for progressive causes. Read their rhetoric about, say, income distribution in Canada today and it is obvious that the welfare programs brought in with such fanfare, often profoundly influenced in their design by American ideas, have not done what their supporters said they would, however much they may have confirmed, or confounded, the expectations of their critics. And progressive politicians share that verdict.

"In 1943, journalist Bruce Hutchison wrote that “we Canadians can probably claim the distinction of being the most rugged surviving individualists,” having rejected the statist embrace of the American New Deal."

Just Society reforms sought to curb native Canadian traditions like free enterprise and the politics of liberty, sometimes reflexively dismissed in this country as “too American” or in an even more partisan way as “too Republican.” But in 1943, William Watson observes in Globalization and the Meaning of Canadian Life, journalist Bruce Hutchison wrote that “we Canadians can probably claim the distinction of being the most rugged surviving individualists,” having rejected the statist embrace of the American New Deal. As Watson goes on to point out, as late as 1958 Canadian governments took a smaller share of gross domestic product than American ones. Parts of Canada’s welfare state date back to 1940 (rudimentary unemployment insurance) or even 1927 (the first, grudging old age pension), but the bulk of it dates to the two decades from 1956 (the Unemployment Assistance Act) to 1968 (federal medicare), including the Canada Pension Plan in 1965 and the Canada Assistance Program and federal aid to education in 1967.

Yet by 1973 the throne speech was promising a dramatic revamping of a system that was not working, which the subsequent orange paper prepared for health and welfare minister Marc Lalonde failed to deliver. In 1994 Lloyd Axworthy, then Minister of Human Resources Development, undertook a grandiose consultation exercise that saw the Human Resources Committee of the House of Commons travel across Canada in a propeller plane listening to activists complain from sea to sea to sea. (I know. I was there, as a Reform staffer.) In the end they cut spending and renamed unemployment insurance to employment insurance Not a lot to show, really.

By the same token, satisfaction with the existing public healthcare system is hardly greater among its most fervent supporters than among its most acerbic critics. They disagree sharply on prescriptions but not on the crisis, for which politicians routinely produce expensive fixes that are meant to last a generation and are lucky to quiet the complaining and demands for more money for a few months.

In the midst of all this, there is reasonably wide agreement that the volume of activity now undertaken by the executive branch precludes effective scrutiny by Parliament or even, nowadays, Cabinet. Quarter-trillion-dollar budgets, thousands of pages of regulations, massive bills drafted by hordes of bureaucrats, all simply roll through unchecked and poorly understood because no one has the time or capacity to check or understand them.

"It is outrageous that the Ontario Human Rights Commission could caustically pronounce Maclean’s and Mark Steyn guilty while admitting it lacked jurisdiction even to hear their case."

Now turn to the field of judicial innovations, from the broad reading of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms by the Supreme Court to the proliferation of human rights tribunals not bound by traditional rules of judicial procedure. Some people including myself are appalled that, for instance, Ezra Levant had to spend almost three years and $100,000 defending his right to reprint cartoons as part of a news story while one of the complainants could casually walk away two years into the case without spending a dime on lawyers. And it is outrageous that the Ontario Human Rights Commission could caustically pronounce Maclean’s and Mark Steyn guilty while admitting it lacked jurisdiction even to hear their case. But defenders of the process do not appear much happier; they still seem to regard Canada as a nation riddled with injustice, hatred, bigotry and exclusion, with only a thin red line of human rights commissions between us and the resurgent net-savvy KKK.

If one listens to the voices of progressives in politics or that frequently amazingly uncivil bunch wrongly dubbed “civil society,” it is clear that no Just Society has emerged in Canada, nor is one about to. Conservatives may lament the demise of parliamentary sovereignty and the rise of an imperial judiciary in vain; their opponents derive no satisfaction from these processes.

It is, of course, possible to assert that it is just a matter of persisting, that the medicine will have the desired effect provided the patient adheres to the course of treatment long enough. But those who await a second Camelot under Obama, casting reflected glory upon ourselves, must believe that in such an event we will find new approaches that will at last bring the New Jerusalem or Albion into being upon the banks of the Rideau. And whatever else one thinks of that position, it is logically incompatible with the claim that the dramatic changes we have made in the last half century were the right ones and that we now need a calm hand on the wheel and a steady-as-she-goes mentality of the sort most prominently associated recently with Jean Chrétien.

If prompted I can certainly offer a quite different program of action, based on undoing much of the unsound innovation of recent decades. And I can tell you where to find the necessary spirit: in a splendid tradition going back more than twelve centuries. Let us not forget that our political institutions were explicitly modelled primarily on those of Great Britain, which, in a characteristic passage, the famed 18th-century commentator William Blackstone called “a land, perhaps the only one in the universe, in which political or civil liberty is the very end and scope of the constitution.”

My proposal is to take a very deep breath and remind ourselves what our institutions are for and how they are meant to work. In the process we must grasp that we have had not too little but too much change in government in the past 40 years, and have replaced our under-appreciated traditional parliamentary system with a bizarre new one that does not work at all.

If my proposal does not appeal, I am willing to entertain alternatives. Maybe you do not want to restore the spirit with which Canadians tamed a wilderness, beat Hitler and made parliamentary democracy work in a federation. But whatever you do want, we are not getting it from Washington, even if Barack Obama is everything his more excitable supporters in both countries expect him to be.

Note ¹ Raymond Price, With Nixon (New York: Viking Press, 1977), page 44.

[First appeared in the Literary Review of Canada]

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]