To get ready for Halloween our politicians are dressing as the ghosts of deficits past. I admit it's scary. But it's also in very bad taste. It's scary because spending money you ain't got is unwise in good times and catastrophic in bad and, as Adam Smith warned, accumulating public debt "has gradually enfeebled every state which has adopted it." And if Smith is too "right-wing" for you, how about that mad Jacobin Thomas Jefferson, who said "The principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale."

Such was the dusty wisdom of the ancients, blithely discarded in the 1960s and then painfully reacquired in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Strange that it should so promptly go out the window in the 2000s. Frightening, too.

These costumes bring back queasy memories of tragicomic finance ministers in the late 1970s and 1980s assuring us the deficit was finally tamed, and proving it with lovely charts showing it shooting up for a couple more years then suddenly coming down as though we had elected fiscal Uri Gellers who could bend curves with their minds. Of course the end result was that interest on the debt started crowding out program spending and after the electorate pummelled governments that relied on the paranormal to restore order, we actually got quasi-cutters who, in good times, managed to sort things out within reason.

I say within reason because the Chrétien Liberals balanced the budget largely by cutting transfers to the provinces, which meant cutting other people's spending, not their own. Which is more than the Mulroney Tories ever did. But they never learned how to curtail the tendency of governments year after year to do less with more -- nor did the provinces, who responded by delaying vital spending on health care and infrastructure, thus swindling futurity in a different way rather than treating it with honest respect.

Given that in many ways we are already that futurity, the trick looks less impressive now than it once did. Hence the new Fraser Institute report saying that, having blown the locks back off the treasury door in the good times just ended, six provinces will spend more than half their revenue on health care by 2036. Underinvestment followed by panicky overspending isn't prudence and it isn't frugality. It certainly isn't leadership.

Our political masters have the rhetoric down pat for their disguises. Stephen Harper, whose Tories inherited annual spending of $210 billion and have already sent it past $240 billion in a budget titled "Responsible Leadership," just declared it "premature" to say whether he'll run a deficit. (Though it wasn't premature to say he wouldn't during the campaign.)

However, Mr. Harper gravely assured us, his government would definitely maintain "responsible fiscal policies." Exactly the right tone: Solemn guff about responsible policies was the invariable accompaniment of irresponsible ones in the past, and will be again.

Then there's Ontario's Dalton McGuinty, uniting with his fellow premiers in demanding that Ottawa maintain transfers even if it means a federal deficit but unlike them admitting that, even if he contributes to financial catastrophe at the federal level, he'll inflict it provincially as well.

"I've got 200,000 people who have lost their jobs, so now I'm going to shut down their hospitals? It just doesn't make any sense," was his excuse for possibly going into a deficit so he wouldn't have to make program cuts or raise taxes.

"I think Canadians are ahead of us," he blithered. "I think they understand these are very challenging economic times, they understand that our revenues are going to go down, that we have to make some difficult choices."

It's exactly the appropriate tone of brazen double-speak, because drifting into disaster to avoid changing his spending or revenue plans is neither difficult nor a choice. And it was delivered with such sanctimonious solemnity you'd think Don Mazankowski was back, wrapped in the tatters of his budgets, especially once you remember that Mr. McGuinty inherited spending of around $74 billion, and within four years had cranked it up to $96 billion with further large increases planned.

Hard choices? It is to laugh. (And in case you're thinking about Ralph Klein, his Tories doubled program spending between 1996/97 and 2005-06. Yes. Doubled.)

What's really scary is that politicians haven't forgotten the lessons of the past. They haven't forgotten how to cut spending; they never learned it. And they haven't forgotten that deficit spending is ruinous. They just don't care.

So yes, the costumes are scary. Now please take them off before we really say Boo. And then boo hoo.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

If Barack Obama campaigns down to the wire it will be a courtesy to the Republicans, since he could now stop canvassing entirely and still win comfortably. Neither John McCain, Sarah Palin nor Joe the Plumber can hurt him on Nov. 4. It’s Nov. 5 he should be worried about. Judging by his recent comments at the Al Smith dinner, he doesn’t believe his own supporters’ more extravagant flattery. But he must also resist the temptation, widespread in his party and among the chattering classes, to assume that the size and ease of his victory mean those vulgar middle Americans are no longer politically significant.

In fact what historian Walter Russell Mead in Special Providence calls the “Jacksonians”, and David Hackett Fischer’s invaluable though regrettably interminable Albion’s Seed calls “borderers” (for their origins in the Anglo-Scots border region), remain the largest single component of the American political community. These folks left a huge stamp on America, with their rough and ready egalitarian manners and robust, unapologetic self-reliance.

It is they whom observers like Tocqueville took to be typical Americans and in large measure they still are. And though many will vote Democrat this time, it’s not because they share Barack Obama’s cultural or foreign policy instincts. If he doesn’t understand why he didn’t have to court them during the campaign he will become politically irrelevant with a speed that would astonish even Jimmy Carter. Especially given the growing contingent of “Blue Dog” Democrats in Congress, noted by Canadian commentator John Ibbitson in the Globe and Mail, who are classic Jacksonians, culturally conservative foreign-policy hawks.

At the moment Middle America is disaffected from the Republican party for good reasons. But not those the Democrats take for granted. Jacksonians have no patience with cultural radicalism. And they do not care that the world seems to despise America; Jacksonians despise foreigners and rally ferociously round the flag when America is attacked.

As long ago as 1798, when the Jacksonian influence on politics was far smaller than it would be from the 1830s on, a war scare with France brought a surge of support to the Federalist administration that ebbed away when President John Adams settled the conflict peacefully and never returned. And in the 1960s this group turned against the Vietnam War not because it was immoral but because it wasn’t working. The Democrats, who mistook this sentiment for their own, have been critically weak on national security ever since.

It is a mark of just how bad things are for Republicans this year that the Democrats can run a senator from Illinois and one from Delaware and romp to victory. Their last totally non-Jacksonian ticket, the Minnesota/New York team of Mondale and Ferraro, carried one state plus the District of Columbia in 1984. In the 1990s they won twice with a border twofer from Arkansas and Tennessee. They only won once in the last century without a southern or border presence on the ballot, FDR’s third term in 1940. Whereas the last time they elected an elegant northern intellectual who made liberal women swoon it worked out rather badly.

Mr. Obama’s running mate, Joe Biden, recently committed a classic political “gaffe” (that is, spoke an important truth honestly) about the parallel: “Mark my words, it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.” But, curiously, he went on “it’s not gonna be apparent initially, it’s not gonna be apparent that we’re right.... I promise you, you all are gonna be sitting here a year from now going, ‘Oh my God, why are they there in the polls? Why is the polling so down? Why is this thing so tough?’”

No such difficulties will arise if Mr. Obama meets the test with resolution. It’s if he exudes sanctimonious weakness like, say, Jimmy Carter, that he faces domestic as well as foreign policy disaster. As Mead notes, the Jacksonian tradition in foreign policy frequently baffles observers although it is quite straightforward. At its core is this belief: “You can deal with a bully only by standing up to him. Anything else is appeasement, which is both dishonourable and futile.” If Barack Obama cannot understand and respect that sentiment, he will find himself in big trouble.

The Middle American charm of Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber has galvanized the Republican base but won’t help them much on Nov. 4. As of Nov. 5, though, the Jacksonians will be back. President Obama had better be ready.

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

The Social Democratic Party of Canada is to blame for the dismal election result we just had. If such a party existed and had run, we'd have a majority government. First, let's back up.

The outcome last Tuesday is definitely not Stephen Harper's fault. True, 143 seats out of 308 isn't a majority. But 133 of 233 outside Quebec sure is. And it isn't fair to ask, if Mr. Harper couldn't win a majority against Stéphane Dion or Paul Martin, whom can he beat? His problem was Gilles Duceppe. Besides, the right went through a prolonged period of soul-searching in the 1990s, and even if you don't like what they found, it's reasonable to assume there isn't anything else there they could go back and get.

The situation on the left is very different. So the first requirement for political progress in Canada is that Liberals avoid blaming Stéphane Dion and his admittedly wretched campaign. They must accept that they are not the natural governing party any more. They haven't won a majority in Canada under an Anglophone leader since Mackenzie King in 1945, nor a majority of Quebec seats since 1984. People have voted in three elections who weren't born then. This is not their grandfather's Liberal party and to see the policies they value implemented the Grits can't follow his strategy.

The second requirement is for the NDP to abandon the belief that they're still on the verge of that big breakthrough they've been expecting since 1961. Sure, they gained seven seats, but their share of the national vote rose by less than one per cent. And while they're understandably boasting about winning an Alberta seat, their most remarkable achievement is winning a Quebec seat in a general election for the first time ever.

That brings me to the Bloc and its weirdly anodyne campaigns. Their slogan this time was "Présent!", which is normally what you say when you show up but don't vote. The day after the election a BQ press release attributed to Mr. Duceppe the idea (my translation) that "the election result shows clearly that two visions confront one another, that of Quebec and that of Stephen Harper; the proof is that it is Quebec that kept the Conservatives in a minority by giving the Bloc two thirds of the seats." But the Tories got less than half the seats in Ontario and were wiped out in Newfoundland. Plenty of other voters and politicians desperately wanted Mr. Harper held to a minority, and helped do it. Why not work with them?

Mr. Duceppe's explanation makes no sense. From 1921 through 1988 every majority government in Canada included more than half of Quebec's MPs. Since 1993 it seems Quebecers have taken leave of their strategic senses, giving a majority of their seats six straight times to the one party that will never form even part of a government. Yet it can't be a deliberate attempt to paralyze our politics so that we will let them leave, because in referendums they keep voting to stay. So what is their game? It's a fair question, and the third requirement for sorting out our politics is that we get a sensible answer.

One prominent separatist tried to ask it during the election, reproaching Mr. Duceppe for having made the BQ just another social democratic party. The Bloc leader brushed him off. But social democrats should raise the same question from the other side, demanding to know what policies the Bloc, and their supporters, want implemented in a separate Quebec that could not be implemented across Canada by a social democratic government.

Of course neither the party of Laurier and Trudeau nor that of Tommy Douglas would form a coalition with separatists. But why does sovereignty matter when the position of the Bloc on questions from abortion to Kyoto to Afghanistan is substantially identical with that of Liberals and the NDP? Why not form a Social Democratic Party of Canada and implement them, in Quebec and elsewhere?

In Wednesday's National Post Jonathan Kay suggested that the divisions among left-wing parties are essentially cultural. But as Thomas Sowell says, culture is a set of working tools, and there should be no taboo on discussing whether some of the gear in the shed is plumb worn out. Especially given the equally powerful cultural phenomenon, unmistakable in parliamentary committees, that Liberal, NDP and Bloc members share a political sensibility as well as a political philosophy and are very comfortable working together. It's time they took responsibility for governing.

Even the Tories would benefit; the only way they can get a majority now is for the nation to try coherent social democratic governance and decide they don't like it very much.

I'm not saying I want a Social Democratic Party majority after the next election. I just want an explanation of why the social democratic majority doesn't either.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

With the election just days away, it's not enough to declare that contemporary Canadian politics is disgusting. You need to show it. So allow me to empty upon you a bucket of slop from my e-mail inbox. It contains a lumpy mess of campaign-driven press releases the parties send out to the Parliamentary Press Gallery in a concerted and largely successful effort to prove that they are as shallow as they are mean. They manage to hit one another with a fair quantity of well-aimed mud but rarely succeed in ducking what's coming back at them, and not infrequently wipe their filthy hands on their own clothes without seeming to notice it.

For instance, the Liberals had every right to point out that Stephen Harper's March 20, 2003 speech on Iraq contained an embarrassing amount of cutting and pasting from remarks by then-Australian prime minister John Howard two days earlier. But after a Conservative staffer confessed to having been "overzealous in copying segments" of Mr. Howard's speech and resigned, the Liberals put out another, thoroughly revolting, press release saying "The story does not add up, and took seven hours to concoct" as though it were self-evidently the deliberate policy of the PM to plagiarize.

Of course it is also appalling that Mr. Harper had harried staff slap stuff together for him on a topic of such importance. And how about the Liberals catching Jack Layton assuring CTV that when NDP deputy leader Thomas Mulcair advocated water exports years ago he only meant bottled water despite clear evidence to the contrary from the Quebec National Assembly's Journal of Debates? I do not know whether Mr. Layton made up a fib on the spot, was misled by Mr. Mulcair or just accepted a flip assurance from a junior staffer. But I do know he didn't bother finding out the truth before saying whatever sounded good.

It seems they're all willing to say just anything, provided it isn't sincere, clever or in tune with the public mood. Read the titles of four press releases I got within hours of the English-language leaders' debate, plainly written before the debate even started: "Harper reassures Canadians with plan for economy," "Jack Layton dominates English debate," "Dion stands out as only leader with a plan for the economy," "Elizabeth May wins English debate." For bad measure the Greens had earlier told me "Elizabeth May wins French debate" and later described her as "Fresh from victories in the national televised leaders' debates last week." Who do any of the parties think this stuff impresses? Who do they even think reads it? And haven't our politicians got anything less redolent of the frat house to say?

I get dozens of such missives a week and on the whole I find the accusations that other parties are making unsound policy on the fly convincing. It's the tone of angry self-satisfaction that I find not merely unjustified but actively disgraceful, given public disenchantment with the whole business. OK, guys. You got them, and they got you. But we got nothing.

I am put in mind of an observation by Alexis de Tocqueville that when politics seems stagnant, it "is the time for intrigues and small parties ... great political parties are those more attached to principles than to consequences, to generalities rather than to particular cases, to ideas rather than to personalities ... small parties are generally without political faith. ... They glow with a factious zeal. ... The means they employ are as disreputable as the aim sought."

Thus this election confronts me with a new version of a familiar dilemma. It's not that I'm puzzled how to vote when my ballot seems unlikely to be decisive nationally or even in my riding; that's normal. Nor is it how to vote "strategically"; all voting is strategic. The novel problem is finding a sensible strategy for voting for decency, since no party has attractive policies and all have a repellent political style. I would sooner watch crows squabble over road kill for two hours than our leaders at a table interrupting, talking over one another and jabbing fingers incessantly.

The question is, how do you vote for decency under such circumstances? In a few ridings you have the happy choice of supporting an incumbent who seems to be part of the solution rather than the problem. In others, I say, the less happy but equally clear obligation is to try to vote out the appallingly rude incumbent regardless of doubt about the civility of any possible replacement.

Yes, our politics is disgusting. To help clean it up, on Oct. 14 vote for the person in your riding you expect is most dismayed not at their opponents' vitriol, but at the sludge pouring out of their own camp.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

When is a gaffe not a gaffe in politics? When it's untrue, apparently. Enjoy the campaigns. A classic gaffe, a career-threatening humiliation delightful to the press, is when someone expresses a home truth in plain language. Like that if a foreign nation attacked a country with which you had a defensive alliance you would defend them. You can have real trouble living something like that down.

It's an especially juicy gaffe when someone blurts out what everyone knows.

Like the NDP candidate, formerly campaign director for the B.C. Marijuana Party in 2005, who got dumped because video surfaced of him smoking pot. Surely the real mistake was made by whoever in the NDP welcomed him as a candidate without realizing the marijuana in question was the stuff you smoke to get high. Didn't the party grasp that a guy whose political philosophy was openly based on weed had probably sampled it? So why is actual video of him smoking it confirmation of anything but the obvious? (The video of the other ex-NDP candidate apparently driving after taking hallucinogens is an entirely different matter -- surprising, stupid and dangerous).

Then there's the September 22 NDP e-mail inviting me to visit their digital "Orange Room" where a video called "Stephenstein" offers 39 seconds of alternating shots of the prime minister and Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, then says "Don't Let This Fool Fool You."

I say that posting mean, childish junk on your website reveals something important about your party. But, evidently it's just good clean fun, unlike, say, a cyberpuffin pooping on someone. Blurting out your real partisan feelings only seems to qualify as a gaffe when conservatives do it.

The most interesting case thus far this fall is the amazing howler by Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden in a September 22 CBS puffball "Exclusive" full of hard-hitting journalistic observations from Katie Couric like "Relating to the fears of the average American is one of Biden's strong suits" and "You say what's on your mind and I think people appreciate that." After claiming the Republicans will take things he says out of context (but "If I have to go parse through every single thing that I'm gonna say then I'm not me"), Mr. Biden illustrated his concept of true leadership with, "When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the, you know, the princes of greed. He said, 'look, here's what happened.'"

Well, yes. Except Roosevelt wasn't president at the time and there was no commercial television. If Sarah Palin had said it, she'd have been pilloried for cluelessness, and rightly so. But isn't it at least as bad for Biden, put on the Democratic ticket expressly for his knowledge and experience, having been first elected to the Senate in 1972, roughly half-way between the actual inauguration of Roosevelt in 1933 and that interview? It's peculiar, in fact, that the high-priced talent at CBS didn't notice this oopsie while filming, editing and airing the segment. After all, the fact that Republicans were in power when the Depression hit had a huge impact on American politics for the next 50 years and you'd think they'd know that and so should Biden.

Wednesday's Citizen suggested Mr. Biden mostly got away with that blunder because attention was focused on "two bigger gaffes" in the same week, namely not knowing Barack Obama's position on clean-coal plants and calling one of the Obama-Biden campaign's own TV ads "terrible" because it mocked John McCain's not knowing how to send e-mail (in fact Mr. McCain has great difficulty typing because of permanent injuries from being tortured as a Vietnam POW). The latter isn't a gaffe. It's refreshing honesty with a dash of decency. So of course it's what's getting him in real trouble.

Here at home, a Tory candidate in Toronto just "resigned" after his party learned he'd stated abrasively on a blog that if Canadians weren't sissies someone would have come to the aid of that poor guy beheaded on a bus, and advocated "concealed carry" handgun laws in Canada partly to help women and gays defend themselves against violent hate crimes. And he's gay. We complain endlessly that political debate is trite, bland and vacuous, with politicians constantly trying to play it safe. But look how we treat anything frank and unconventional during an election.

On the other hand, I don't see much point in debating Joe Biden's claim that President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation on TV in 1929. It raises serious questions about his fitness to be vice president. But at least it wasn't a gaffe.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

A recent BBC poll indicates enormous enthusiasm for Barack Obama outside the United States. In 22 countries from Italy to Egypt he leads John McCain by about four to one on average, margins not seen since the last time a Democrat faced a Republican in an American election. It's one more warning to Mr. Obama's domestic supporters that he's not quite the phenomenon they think he is. This foreign enthusiasm is puzzling. Recent liberal Democratic presidents have performed fairly poorly on security and trade, and if Mr. Obama had consistent positions they might well be protectionist. Meanwhile to many of his American supporters his appeal is less programmatic than spiritual; he will heal America of divisions that allegedly run as deep as any the republic has ever known. Why this prospect would appeal in, say, Singapore or France is not obvious, especially to people who don't like America very much. But in any case it is untenable because based on a false premise. Barack Obama may be a healer, and the inauguration of a black president would certainly be good for America. The problem is simply that the premise that America is divided as never before does not withstand informed scrutiny. Not on race, not on foreign affairs, not on economics, not on anything. Compare today with 1800, when the election of Thomas Jefferson prompted a leading member of George Washington's Federalist party, Fisher Ames, to expect "the loathsome steam of human victims offered in sacrifice." The Jeffersonian Republicans in return accused the Federalists of being closet monarchists possibly plotting to hand the U.S. back to Britain, and in 1814 the remnants of the Federalist party did make a politically lethal though otherwise feeble effort to take New England out of the Union. But after a short-lived "Era of Good Feelings," by 1832 president Andrew Jackson was threatening to hang his own former Vice President, John C. Calhoun, over tariff policy linked to states' rights and slavery.

Speaking of slavery, in 1856 Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner was savagely beaten on the floor of the Senate by South Carolina congressman Preston Brooks, to general Southern approval, in the lead-up to a civil war that would kill over 600,000 Americans, nearly as many as all America's other wars combined. And the man who saved the Union, President Lincoln, was himself subjected to extraordinary abuse in his day, including unflattering comparison to a baboon by a member of his own cabinet.

The Civil War was obviously the nadir. But how do today's divisions compare with Senator "Pitchfork Ben" Tillman's campaign promise to stab president Grover Cleveland, a fellow Democrat, over bank policy? From a resurgent Klan in the 1920s to Republicans washing their children's mouths out with soap in the 1930s for saying "Roosevelt" to McCarthy-era accusations of treason in high places to "Hey Hey LBJ, How Many Kids Did You Kill Today?" and "Burn Baby Burn", persistent urban rumours that Nixon would put blacks in concentration camps and ridicule of Ronald Reagan as a senile warmonger, American politics is consistently rambunctious, with a dash of venomous paranoia at least as evident on the left as the right. Even the relatively placid Clinton era saw the president impeached as a wretched cad then acquitted on a bitter partisan vote.

I happen to think the United States has had surprisingly good government under this system, in part because issues get very thoroughly aired. And (speaking for the record as a hard-core conservative) I consider 2008 a fairly unimportant election in which a cranky mediocrity and a charming novice seek to replace a disappointing incumbent.

I can't muster any views more apocalyptic than that. Except that, based on the historical record, enthusiasts for Barack Obama consumed with hatred of George W. Bush are in part imagining and in part creating the very abyss of partisan loathing they claim their man can fix with a few ritual phrases and a laying-on of hands. As for foreigners, they don't get to vote and Americans mostly don't care what they think. Rightly not, judging by that BBC poll.

[First published on Mercatornet.com]

[display_podcast]

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]