OK, this is weird. The battle of Vimy Ridge is almost as long ago now, at 90 years, as Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo in 1815 was when Vimy was fought. It’s almost like we’re part of history and should try hard to remember why it matters. A century may seem unimaginably long to people who thought The Sopranos would never end. But Wednesday’s Citizen reported the passing of Cécile Desrivieres Dubé this March 24th in Montreal at age 107. Born Nov. 22, 1899, she was already a young woman when Vimy was fought and middle-aged in 1936 when the monument was dedicated; married in 1919, she was widowed in 1953.

It only takes one more centenarian to get us from Ms. Dubé’s youth to the Napoleonic Wars and another to the Glorious Revolution that ousted James II. Yet 1689’s Cécile Dubé might as a child have watched the Spanish Armada drift burning down the English channel. And a woman who was old when Elizabeth I memorably rallied her sailors for that battle was alive when Richard III lost crown and head at Bosworth Field.

That just five long lives can take us back before Columbus helps underline that history is a living thing, not some particularly tedious version of Trivial Pursuit or a quaint but irrelevant swirl of Pharaohs, galleons and Maid Marian. We live in the shadow of deeds past and the light of past examples.

Or rather we once did. Francois VI, duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, 1613-80, soldier, wit, intriguer and author, who my editor reminds me in avuncular fashion (“Listen up, you dolt ...”) is now also forgotten, suggests that famous villains like Tiberius or Nero do more to keep us from vice than famous heroes to encourage virtue. Indeed, he asks, how many braggarts did Alexander’s courage create? How much treason Caesar’s glory? How many importunate philosophers did Diogenes encourage, Cicero babblers, Pomponius Atticus lazy men, Marius and Sylla the vengeful, Lucullus the voluptuous, Alcibiades and Antony libertines, Cato the opinionated?

Nowadays none, I dare say. All this might as well be Amenhotep III (18th dynasty pharaoh c. 1391-1353 BC, father of Akhenaton) to modern progressively educated youth who don’t know if Nero was a man or a horse. Or jurists: In 2002 a Canadian court accepted an affidavit calling gay marriage a venerable institution because Nero and Elagabalus did it. Whoa, cool, Nero like married a guy. Party like it was 59 A.D.

In these forgetful times newspapers have a deplorable habit of calling things “historic” that aren’t even interesting. A search through my files revealed journalists recently applying the term to Shippagan, N.B., the Chateau Laurier, and the 2004 first ministers meeting on health before Andrew Coyne finished me off by using it on the Quebec elections of 1960, 1970 and 1976.

Politicians are far worse. Even those who don’t think “historic” means “historical” or just “old” toss the term about exactly as if they had no idea what history is or why we should care. Like Ernie Eves’s finance minister Janet Ecker using it on the 2003 Ontario budget, Ontario’s Minister of Health Promotion Jim Watson on the Smoke-Free Ontario Act, Toronto Mayor David Miller on the City of Toronto Act, and then-ambassador to the United Nations Allan Rock on the year 2005 for the UN.

If this keeps up we’re going to run out of marble. But by mislabelling trivia in this fashion we miss the truly historic, the long trends that define eras and the great events that shape them. We could miss the coming of a new Dark Ages because we’re glued to YouTube or wondering if Keith Richards really snorted his father’s ashes mixed with cocaine.

We also cheat ourselves of a grand adventure. When we no longer care enough to remember our story, we are unlikely to bestir ourselves to take a part in it worth even a small, shabby, monument. I ask you: A century hence, on what will Canadians gaze back as they now do on Vimy? A statue of Allan Rock?

It is generally safe to praise Vimy, at least in English Canada, as the place where we “became a nation”; it’s hard to get in trouble favouring that. But behind the photo ops, Vimy, and the equally PR-friendly Juno Beach, represent moments when many Canadians knew, and proved they knew, that for all its undoubted flaws our way of life is worth dying for. It matters. As it matters that back when England expected every man to do his duty, they did it. We who forget that will not be remembered.

So meditate on the restored Vimy Memorial. Then let’s build a big statue of the Iron Duke right on Parliament Hill.

Waterloo. It’s closer than you think.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Call me weird, but I’m worried about the Quebec election. Not the result, but the fact that discussion of it is taking place in two, how shall I put it, solitudes. Do you know why many Quebecers voted for Mario Dumont? OK, it’s also baffling that many Ontarians voted for Jean Chrétien. And some things about the election were strange in the usual way — for instance, politics being shaken up by an anti-establishment outsider first elected at 24 (versus Jean Charest’s 26 and André Boisclair’s 23) whose 1987 high school yearbook ambition was “to become premier.” But when it comes to Quebec’s place in Canada, it’s like we don’t even speak the same language.

Take Jean Charest … please. Anglos of the Juh swee uhn Kaybeckwaââ variety have long called him a federalist champion of Canada. Which reminded me of an old Hagar the Horrible cartoon where (if memory serves) a bartender announces “You gotta be real tough to drink in this place, sonny,” Hagar growls, “We’ll see about that,” drains his glass, goes “Ack gahrg give me a glass of your water” and the bartender replies grimly, “That was a glass of our water.”

Seven months after donning his Captain Canada costume in 1998, Mr. Charest told a University of Sherbrooke audience, “No matter what the consequences, I will defend what I have always had in my heart and in my soul. I will always defend the interests of Quebec.” In the campaign this year, he accused Mr. Dumont of having once gone “to grovel” before the wretched Anglos, and warned voters that a “minority government would limit our bargaining power with the rest of Canada.” His party severed formal links with its federal counterpart in 1964, and in the 1995 referendum refused to approve any TV ad that mentioned “Canada.” And that was a glass of our federalism.

Still thirsty? Try a swig of Mario Dumont. Red Tory Senator Hugh Segal assures us the ADQ victory is a message from voters to focus on economic issues: “Don’t hide behind la question nationale.” Blue Tory Stephen Harper welcomes “an official opposition that’s opposed to having another referendum.” Hold on, les gars.

Mr. Dumont may not want a referendum. But his party, the National Post blurted out after the election, has since 2004 wanted Quebec to have its own constitution and citizenship because “Our first fidelity, our passion and our loyalty are toward Quebec.” It wants to rename Quebec the “Autonomist State of Quebec,” fight “submission to Canada” and affirm Quebec’s “sovereign rights.” What part of buzz off don’t you square-heads understand? That was another glass of our federalism.

We don’t speak the same language these days in more ways than one. And forget members of the Anglo elite who say Quebec’s vital contribution to Canada is to make it left-wing. In 2004 Paul Martin told a TVA interviewer the Liberal vision “is really a Quebec vision.” The Globe’s Lawrence Martin asked earlier this month “for all it receives — what does Quebec ever give back?” and replied “Our status as a progressive, liberal, culturally tolerant nation — a beacon to the world — owes itself in large measure to Quebec …” Even Al Gore recently told young Montrealers “Quebec is the conscience of Canada” on the environment. And an anglo prime minister has told Quebecers “le Québec est le coeur du Canada …” But the attempt to persuade Quebecers that we’re left-wing too is falling on deaf ears; in a 1998 poll, 80 per cent of Quebecers said their province invented medicare. They just don’t believe Anglos can be progressive like them.

Indeed, this election reminded me that Quebec pundits rarely enjoy three-way races because there’s no NDP there. Odd since both are socialist, pacifist, environmentalist and feminist? Well, here’s the scary bit. Ask why in Quebec and you get the usual disgusted head shaking as they walk away. In English Canada you get “Hey, yeah, that’s weird — I never noticed.” Sounds like solitude not solicitude.

In my youth I backpacked around the world feeling oh so Canadian/cosmopolitan when I got to translate between French and English for fuddled travelers. I’ve since realized the feeling was never mutual. In a recent iChannel TV discussion, one of my panelists gave the standard Anglo bilingualism-makes-us-a-glorious-tolerant-light-unto-the-nations speech, so I asked if it bothered him that this sentiment is alien to francophone Quebec. It should.

While we’re busy talking about how much they love us, they’re busy talking about how much they despise us. And neither of us seems to know it, despite all the modern communications, expensively futile second-language training, and obsessive gazing from this side into that side’s navel. Maybe Mr. Dumont got his wish. Maybe Quebec quietly left and we missed it.

Am I weird to be worried by all this solitude?

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

My bonnet is full of bees. My pet peeves constitute a menagerie. And I constantly grind a shed full of shiny axes. My excuse is they come in handy. For instance, I must wave three of them at the federal budget: Our Conservatives are not conservative, our governments are giant vote-buying machines and most politicians are too dim to grasp it. Obviously, this government is Conservative in name only. Program spending is to rise from $175 billion to $206 billion in just three years. But it’s not only the scope of the spending or the gleeful way it is unveiled. It is the evident conviction that there is nothing government cannot or should not do, from $2 million for free MedicAlert bracelets for children to increased tax breaks for long-haul truckers’ meals. I am not saying kids should get sick or truckers should faint from hunger behind the wheel. I am saying any Tories who remember once thinking government had some other purpose than trading money for votes have evidently long since forgotten why they used to care.

It is true that this budget, in the finest Mulroney fashion, predicts a dramatic slowdown in spending later while causing a dramatic increase now. But modern governments chronically exceed their spending targets. Do the Tories not know this, or not care? Either way, they are not conservative.

What they are is consummate panderers. To break the Liberal stranglehold on power they have had to learn, and clearly have learned (Axe 2 here, borrowed from political economist Anthony de Jasay), the exquisite art of sending the maximum possible benefits to older, articulate middle-class voters in key ridings. A number of pundits have scornfully declared this a Liberal budget. It is, but only because it is the budget that wins elections in a modern, decadent democracy regardless of party. Unfortunately, buying the middle class gets harder fiscally each year, especially as the population ages, but harder not to do politically. It would be a serious problem if it were understood. It is critical because it is not.

Axe 3 is that too many of our leading politicians are obtuse lumps of stultified hebetude lucky to put together a complete sentence without cue cards or a complete thought even with them. I concede that in his budget-day news conference, Jim Flaherty showed mastery of the details and that as a device for buying middle-class votes this budget was well crafted. Yet members of the other parties are so philosophically challenged they no longer recognize that the Tories are doing what they themselves would do, let alone why.

Stéphane Dion, for instance, stammered: “I don’t want to win an election, but I cannot stand up for a budget that is doing so little with so much.” Empty gibberish. Liberal Finance critic John McCallum fared little better, saying: “This is a shotgun budget. It is as if the finance minister shut his eyes, held a shotgun into the air, pulled the trigger and hoped that it would hit as many targets as possible.” Which is exactly backward. Ruthless political microtargeting is a fiscal strategy open to sharp criticism on many grounds. This one not among them.

Meanwhile, NDP child-care critic Olivia Chow snarled: “Working children and families are getting crumbs.” I don’t even know what a working child is. I thought we had laws against that. But I know a talking point when I see one. NDP leader Jack Layton sneered: “The average working family sitting at the kitchen table was expecting something more than just crumbs from the prime minister. It’s the boardroom table that got the big gift.” Which is what he’d say regardless, so why pay attention? Especially since the middle class got the money, not plutocrats.

Mr. Harper snapped back: “The NDP in opposing this budget is rejecting what every NDP leader in history has stood for.” Which should make you wonder why the Tories introduced it. Mr. Harper had earlier said the “major priorities” in the 2005 Liberal budget “are Conservative priorities.” So I guess we’d have to elect the NDP to get a Liberal budget and close the circle. In short, philosophy no longer matters, and that’s something we should worry about.

Things are so bad that the most intelligent comment came from Bloc Québécois leader Gilles Duceppe, whose party supports the budget: “We can’t let $3-billion get away. We’ll take the money.” It’s pure materialism — and exactly how the Tories hope key electoral groups will feel.

Our government is broken in several ways, including the collapse of parliamentary oversight. It is certainly broken in that budgets no longer even pretend to be about finance and politicians can’t figure out why not.

Thus I keep grinding my axes, to keep them sharp enough to cut through this nonsense.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

What rude men. While my unfortunate wife pondered the substance of Tuesday night’s Quebec political leaders’ debate, I concentrated on their demeanour. It was appalling. Pompous, windy and belligerent, they spent the evening jabbing fingers at one another, talking over one another and calling one another liars. Exactly how you provoke a fight in a bar. And they wonder why they get no respect.

I’m not saying politicians shouldn’t contradict one another. I’m saying the way they go about it is childish and disgraceful. From leaders’ debates to question period it’s all purple faces, mock indignation and pointing fingers. They all seem to dream of reliving Brian Mulroney’s ‘You had an option, sir’ crushing of John Turner over patronage, as if his subsequent conduct hadn’t made a mockery of those words and contributed to a further decline in the quality of our governance and the civility of our politics.

As G. K. Chesterton said, ‘it is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer.’ Which is regrettable, given the pressing need for rational debate in this country.

For instance, I spend a few minutes every morning reading British news online, and I think our policy-makers should openly discuss the disintegration of British health care, education and indeed apparently Great Britain itself. Especially as Canadian policies on hospitals, schools and disgruntled regions resemble those of Britain closely enough to offer serious grounds for concern to politicians … if they knew about it.

Speaking of world affairs, because Canada is evidently helpless even to rein in a thug such as Robert Mugabe, let alone stop the genocide in Darfur, there is scope intelligently to question the limits of our influence in the world, and what Roy Rempel has dubbed the “Dreamland” in which Canada is a moral superpower. And on fiscal policy, with a fresh federal budget about to slap us in the face, we need informed, civilized debate on why spending is so large, and why it so dependably grows faster than intended federally and in most provinces. It should be discussed intelligently because it is serious, and civilly because it happens regardless of the partisan stripe of the incumbent regime.

I realize the Harper government’s election promises of fiscal restraint have given way to runaway spending driven by transparently cynical political calculation. But opposition parties wondering “Where’s the outrage?” must recognize that the Liberal party, to whom the shrugging, glowering, stonewalling Jean Chrétien remains a model of statecraft, stands aghast before lowered public expectations like a sorcerer’s apprentice. And the NDP has not habitually given sound fiscal advice. No one is sufficiently innocent to sneer here. If only they could argue instead.

I have long given up on politicians reading, say, A. V. Dicey or even knowing who he is. I hardly expect them to get through C. D. Howe Institute studies (like the one my brother just coauthored on the chronic inaccuracy of budget projections). But can’t they at least watch TV? I picked up my Wednesday Citizen and found that Canada’s New Government plans to establish a centralized bureaucratic agency very much like the Department of Administrative Affairs over which Jim Hacker presided in the BBC’s wickedly funny political satire Yes Minister. In a more civilized age, it would have prompted Mr. Harper’s adversaries to wit, not stunned silence or empty bluster.

It is instructive and, thanks to the Internet, easy to compare today’s televised leaders’ debates with the 1960 set between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy that started it all. They were more formal, even stiff. But if the format has improved, the content has not. Never mind that JFK started by quoting Lincoln. Just note that the two men took turns speaking, and both were conspicuously courteous.

Nixon stressed his respect for Kennedy’s sincerity. Kennedy responded, “I think Mr. Nixon is an effective leader of his party. I hope he would grant me the same. The question before us is: Which point of view and which party do we want to lead the United States?” And Nixon came back with an observation with which we have yet to come to terms: “When we look at these programs, might I suggest that in evaluating them we often have a tendency to say that the test of a program is how much you’re spending.” Come our federal debates, look for a competition over who can spend more on every significant policy. Conducted with finger-jabbing, shouting down and disrespect.

As I’ve said before, I entertain no illusions about the quality of political discourse and conduct in days of yore. But when you can’t bring to public debate the decency of Richard M. Nixon it should surely cause you concern.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Hey everybody. I’ve thought of a way politicians can spend more money. On themselves, no less. They could spend millions hiring new staff. Isn’t that swell? No, really. I mean it. There is much that is wrong with our government, but it is not always what you think. For instance, a significant reason for Parliament’s generally shoddy performance is not that MPs are lazy but that they are overworked. And here’s another important point that frequently confuses citizens and candidates for office: It is not what politicians spend on themselves but what they spend on us that accounts for bloated, swelling public budgets. Voters clamour for wars on waste and expanded social spending. Politicians oblige.

Facing a chorus of boos, I console myself that surveys show journalists already rival politicians for unpopularity. One possible reason is that we are almost the only people in the country who take them as seriously as they take themselves. (Another is that we are lurid, ignorant and biased, but let us not get distracted here.) And while I am a right-wing zealot you may, within limits, include me in the indictment for being fixated on political affairs.

Certainly I consider good government very important. My defence is that I don’t think the state can make us healthy, wealthy and wise. Rather, my acute awareness of the horrors of bad government, and of the necessity of government to fend off the even worse horrors of anarchy, makes me interested in how our political institutions work, or don’t, and how they are meant to. And the essential purpose of Parliament is oversight of the executive branch, through the “power of the purse.”

As Senator Anne Cools has warned, we are losing even the vocabulary with which to discuss public affairs.

Responsible government doesn’t (or shouldn’t) mean we send men and women to Ottawa or to Queen’s Park to raid the treasury on our behalf. It means we send them to rein in our rulers by pulling hard on the purse strings when necessary to prevent the government from doing bad things but also, more often in a civilized country like Canada, to prevent the government from doing things badly.

How? In principle it is simple: Deny the Crown its requests for revenue unless it heeds our grievances about what it is doing, how it is doing it and how little it is telling us about either. In practice, it is a great deal more complex for two main reasons.

First, government is by now so enormous that it is very hard to scrutinize either what it is doing or how it is paying for it. Did you ever try reading a federal budget? Did you even know there are Departmental Performance Reports? Quite possibly neither did your MP.

For, second, we the citizens aren’t paying proper attention. How many voters know, or care, what committees their MP sits on? What parliamentarian ever goes back to the riding and gets an earful about the “estimates”? And if scrutinizing estimates doesn’t get them reelected, why should they care?

In short, we don’t reward MPs for doing their actual job even if we remember what it is. And we don’t give them the ability to do it. They are run off their feet with Commons, caucus and constituency duties and are expected to cast informed votes on every topic from defence procurement to the causes of poverty to what Quebecers really want. And they get four, maybe five staff members in total, for their Ottawa and riding offices combined.

No wonder they’re so prone to bluster and manufactured outrage. To many it may also be temperamentally congenial. But in a pinch it sure covers a multitude of ignorance. Thus denying them staff is penny wise and pound foolish.

Poking around a bit, I’ve discovered that American Senators get between 24 and 60 office staff depending on the population of their state. U. S. Congressional committees also have large research and logistical staffs; one House of Representatives committee alone has more than 100 employees. It puts both institutional memory and relevant factual knowledge at the disposal of elected members.

Not that the U. S. government doesn’t make appalling mistakes. And American voters, too, often seem interested only in looting the treasury. My proposal is not a cure-all. But a journey of 1,000 miles begins with single step. And the paradox here is that if our politicians spent more on support staff, they might spend a lot less overall and would sure waste a lot less of what they do spend.

I say MPs should spend more on themselves.

Don’t all thank me at once.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

They say madmen don’t laugh. So you see that I am not mad. For I laughed when I saw my property tax bill. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Here, look. I’m afraid you’ll have to pick it up for yourself. I can’t seem to get my arms out of the sleeves of this nice canvas jacket the men in white helped me into. I remember how it was … before. Public policy always put me on edge. But I thought I had redlined in the Trudeau years over windily self-satisfied political incompetence. Then I opened my property tax bill and executed an elegant final plunge into the steaming cauldron of venomous resentment. I saw red, and went into it.

I’ve always been careful about money. Even a bit odd. I can’t deny it. I do yard work in shoes I bought when Jimmy Carter was president. I use the same coffee cup all day to save dish detergent. It took me months to agree to my wife’s “proposal” to throw out a treadmill I bought used in 1998 and was busted three different ways. I live a life of almost compulsive frugality, with the occasional wild spree of tax-paying extravagance.

I only ever borrowed money to buy a house. Oh, and once a cheap TV on the instalment plan but I realized it was insane and paid it off. In 1993. When it died in 2003 I replaced it for $250. I have a $250 television.

Then I got a property tax bill for 10 times that much. Sound like a lot? It was just the second instalment. Despite which I had to take my own big trash to the dump and pay for the privilege and take my busted microwave to a participating recycler. Even though the trash removal fee was just removed from the general municipal assessment then added back on separately to avoid raising taxes. They say I am delusional.

I didn’t invent this, though. I’m sure of it. They said they wouldn’t raise my municipal taxes and they went up three per cent in 2005 and another six and a half per cent in 2006. I remember it like it was this week. Which it was. And I like how they spread the pain through the year by taking a big hack in March and another in June. I think fair would be, say, March and September, you know, half a year apart. But then they’d have to wait to count the loot and what fun would that be? For them I mean. I don’t count. At least not other people’s money. These days not my own either. All gone. Easy to keep track of. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha. See? Mad people don’t laugh. I am not mad.

I can’t be, because I also laughed when my taxes went up without being raised because the sale price of my house skyrocketed without being sold according to some people who never saw it and wouldn’t buy it at that price. Its “value” went up by a percentage that would make Donald Trump’s hair stand on end. Which admittedly might be an improvement. I used to get online ads offering me the “Trump Lifestyle” and I didn’t even want the Trump hairstyle. But that’s not the point. The point is, turning Donald Trump into Don King is not a legitimate public policy undertaking. Nor is turning me into a dissolute pauper who, like most people, pays more in taxes than anything else. June 19 was Tax Freedom Day in Canada. And it was an “improvement” over 2005’s June 24. But my house isn’t falling apart like, say, the public health-care system, the roads and sewers or the Armed Forces. I cut my weeds. Say, I wonder if they’ll let me play with a shiny new train set in here. I paid more to the city for transit than policing and I think that nice Bob Chiarelli’s getting one. A train, that is.

Out there our total annual tax bill exceeded the sticker price of our car. Of course the car wasn’t fancy. After taxes I couldn’t afford a nice one like politicians get. But it was sturdy, affordable and reliable. Exactly unlike government.

City officials complain about large bills for social services downloaded from the province. Perhaps justly. But then they tax us until we head for the poorhouse or the madhouse and add to their expenses.

Last year I spent more on property taxes than on everything else to do with my house except utilities (also mostly public and, by coincidence, I just got a Hydro Ottawa pamphlet where my electricity rates went up 1.9 per cent in the first sentence and 3.5 per cent by the end of the first paragraph. I am not mad.). Paint, repairs, insurance, garden, furniture for gosh sakes, all combined were less than my property taxes. Perhaps they are experimenting on us. I think they are very strange people.

Although when people say politics is uplifting I have to agree. There go my taxes now. Ha ha ha ha ha. I am not mad.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

You know it’s Easter when the snow melts, little coloured eggs appear, some fool kicks the Easter Bunny and the media start running what I think of as their “Was Christ a black lesbian?” features. First off the mark was Maclean’s, whose April 3 cover asked “Did He Really Die on the Cross?” It also claimed that Michael Baigent, author of The Jesus Papers, “inspired The Da Vinci Code,” though a British judge disagreed. Still, he got into newspapers as well, and was interviewed on Fox News (by a guy who thought Jesus would have been “near his 70s” in AD 45), although his principal hypothesis is completely silly. He claims Pontius Pilate was in a bind after Jesus said people should pay taxes to the Romans (render unto Caesar being, apparently, not a parable but accounting advice) because the Zealots really wanted him dead and the Romans really wanted him alive.

So by pretending to kill him, Pilate satisfied the mob while by secretly not killing him he ... um ... didn’t satisfy the Romans because a convincing fake execution has exactly the same public impact as a real one. But never mind. Jesus isn’t God nyah nyah nyah, he went to France and had a daughter with Mary Magdalene, he had sex, we have sex, yay.

I realize the press is not trying to be offensive to Christians. After all, as they assured us while not publishing the Danish cartoons, they would never deliberately offend religious sensibilities. But if they were, this is how they would go about it.

They’d tell us that maybe Jesus walked not on water but on ice that just happened to form, just then, in a land where last time I looked the only ice outside a freezer was a skating rink in the Canada-Israel Friendship Centre. Then they’d breathlessly hype the Gospel of Judas, though if a document of this provenance appeared supporting orthodox Christian doctrine, the Judas Seminar and journalists would vote it off the island without delay. Not least because it was written years after the fact by people with an agenda, precisely as revisionists assert without ground about the canonical Gospels.

There’s a lot you can say about the New Testament, and the Old. But not that either bears the stamp of imposture. It is not clear why someone would want to fake such a thing, nor how. But if they did it wouldn’t look like this. A competent forger would at the very least have harmonized the two very different versions of Judas’s death, one the mortal sin of suicide and the other where he just breaks gruesomely in half. Whereas any traffic cop can tell you that eyewitness accounts differ in bizarre ways.

Like a traffic accident, the story of Jesus of Nazareth continues to fascinate even those it horrifies. Which is a bit weird. Look, if Jesus didn’t really walk on water, the whole story is an invention and there’s no need for ice; ditto the resurrection and fables about corpse skulduggery. As for those who, claiming he was merely a great moral teacher, go through the New Testament ripping out every passage in which he claims divinity before handing you the tattered remnants and saying look he never said it, pace Damon Runyon, if it is not a fraud, it will do until a fraud comes along. But what prompts these bizarrely persistent attempts to reject the substance but cling to the illusion?

This includes all the baroque conspiracy theories that a wealthy powerful cynical Catholic Church concealed that Jesus married Mary Magdalene and had children who were kings of France or Rosicrucians or space aliens or some such. It is, I suppose, possible that the Church would have both motive and opportunity to do so hundreds of years after the fact. But not in the crucial first three centuries when Christians faced ridicule and torture, which makes such theories useless to explain the central mystery.

That mystery, as C. S. Lewis said, is that Jesus was either what he claimed, or a liar, or mad. Yet the Sermon on the Mount does not reek of madness, nor does the Lord’s Prayer feel like a lie. Tricky. But if you reject the third option, it is better to remain silent than talk nonsense.

If Christianity was all a big inexplicable mistake can’t you just shut up about it after 2,000 years? After all, most people don’t go to church nowadays and many who do might as well not bother. But whatever you do, don’t talk rot -- like the authorities in St. Paul, Minnesota did who removed the Easter Bunny lest it offend non-Christians. It would be splitting hairs in the barber shop of an asylum to note that St. Paul is Christian and the Easter Bunny is not. But honestly, what sort of credulity does it take to think there’s a pink rabbit with decorated eggs in the Bible?

Oh wait. Maybe it’s in the Gospel of Judas. Happy Easter anyway.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Guess who's coming to dinner? Looks like Bob and Carol and Alice, but not Ted. Ideas matter, and polygamy is a bad one whose time has come. Some people deny the doorbell is ringing. The Globe and Mail's Margaret Wente wrote, "Until [Tory leader Stephen] Harper brought it up, there was no polygamy debate, except on the outer lunatic fringes . . . " If true, it wouldn't be very reassuring, given Parliament's overwhelming vote in favour of traditional marriage in June 1999, and then justice minister Anne McLellan's assurance that "the definition of marriage [as] 'the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others' [was] considered clear law by ordinary Canadians, by academics and by the courts" and the House was wasting its time on "a motion, on which, I suspect, there will be no fundamental disagreement inside or outside the House." Yesterday's lunatic fringe, today's orthodoxy. But in any case it's not true.

Polygamy was not brought up on the outer lunatic fringes. A federal department, Status of Women Canada, suddenly offered a big pile of cash money for quick research hostile to it--and not to help pass the long winter nights. For more than a decade, the British Columbia provincial government has been afraid to crack down on open polygamy amongst some of its more eccentric rural residents for fear of what the courts might do. B.C. Attorney General Geoff Plant just confirmed that two separate confidential legal opinions from senior jurists lay behind his letter to a newspaper in 2003 saying, "The province has questions about the constitutional validity of the Criminal Code provisions that make polygamy a criminal offence." Some lunatic. Some fringe. Thoughtful citizens must recognize that the gay marriage saga shows our courts to be anything but shy about following modern human rights logic wherever it may lead.

Justice Minister Irwin Cotler says it leads nowhere: "Polygamy is a criminal offence, it is illegal. Same-sex marriage is constitutional and valid." Perhaps he never heard before of a court striking down a law and making something previously illegal, um, legal. For instance, two people of the same sex marrying. More lucid commentators have assured us that court rulings allowing two people of the same sex to marry don't say more than two people can marry. True, but irrelevant. If courts can strike down one restriction on marriage, they can strike down another one if the same logic applies. It probably does.

Until very recently, marriage was understood to be something that existed independently of our wishes, a social or theological reality to which human law and institutions could conform well or badly at their own peril. It may sound comically fusty in this context, but we still understand many legal matters precisely that way: we do not think murder is wrong because it is illegal; we insist that it be illegal because it is wrong. But recently, positive (man-made) law has elbowed aside natural law in many areas, including family, so that statutes no longer reflect reality but, instead, create it.

The most egregious example was the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1992's Casey vs. Planned Parenthood upholding the right to abortion because "at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." And while we may in principle reject U.S. influence, too often in practice we conform to it. Thus Public Health Minister Carolyn Bennett defended gay marriage, after polygamy had raised its ugly head, by saying: "This country is only as strong as the people who decide to look after one another in individual family units that they should get to define . . . Whether people are comfortable or uncomfortable with same-sex marriage is not the issue anymore. The issue is, are you prepared to turn human rights on and off like a light switch." So what if "they" wanted to define it as patriarch and three young wives? Are you prepared to turn human rights on and off like a light switch? Because logic has no off switch.

The big bite of the apple is not any particular alteration of the definition of marriage to meet our needs. It is the concept that we may engage in such alterations at all. Indeed, the Law Commission of Canada, in a 2002 report Beyond Conjugality, speculated about abolishing marriage entirely, in favour of a voluntary institution with various legal rights and duties available to two individuals who cared for each other, including a disabled person and a caregiver. If we can expel love and sex from marriage, and husband and wife, it borders on feeble-minded to insist the "two" is sacred.

As for democracy, Bennett took the increasingly common position that the notwithstanding clause is an embarrassing anachronism because "minority rights isn't a place where majority rules." By that logic, if the courts bestow polygamy upon us, the fact that a majority disagrees will be mere bean water--if one even does. A 2003 survey by sociologist Reg Bibby found 20 per cent of Canadians willing to accept polygamy, although, thus far, only four per cent were positively in favour. How long ago were just a fifth of us ready to accept gay marriage? And did it matter?

It gets worse. Kate Heartfield, a member of the Ottawa Citizen editorial board, recently noted that the Criminal Code prohibits "any kind of conjugal union with more than one person at the same time, whether or not it is by law recognized as a binding form of marriage," and regardless of how it was entered into and whether it involves sex. This ban on a lifestyle not just on its legal recognition, she says, means "the polygamy law is not analogous to the question of same-sex marriage. It is analogous to the criminalization of homosexuality." If so, it won't last long in court. As theologian and philosophy professor J. Budziszewski observes in his book, The Revenge of Conscience, people "are more logical than they know; they are only logical slowly." So are courts, rather more quickly.

Better set a few extra places at the table.

[First published in Western Standard]