Parliamentary committees might seem the ideal place to die of boredom. Actually they’re not that interesting … unless pathology fascinates you. The high point of my recent two-week period watching them was Tory MP Mike Lake telling colleagues trying to draft a bill, “This isn’t a high school project here.” If it had been, it would have fizzed a bit then leaked gunk onto the desk. I don’t need to tell you Parliament is in disrepair. Literally: You saw the crumbling masonry in Tuesday’s Citizen. But on May 15 in West Block room 209 I watched the Government Operations and Estimates committee try in vain to figure out how much they’re already spending to fix a building threatening to fall on their very own heads. You can get the minutes online, but they don’t capture the special flavour. It amounts to a crisis in self-government.

Yeah, yeah, sure. Question period is a disgrace. But why committees? you yawn. Because there, if anywhere, our MPs could do constructive work.

I realize they differ on policy and, in principle at any rate, on philosophy. But in committees, away from the glare of TV cameras, they should be able to put angry partisanship on hold and do four important things together: examine legislation for technical flaws; investigate specific things that have gone wrong; scrutinize spending before it happens; co-operate to make Parliament itself function.

Now you laugh. But MPs are supposed to revere not just self-government in theory but its parliamentary version in practice. Which, I venture to remind them, evolved subtly over centuries to manage partisan differences deeper than theirs, over bigger issues, among abler men.

Regrettably, most MPs today seem to think partisanship is principle. Our Tories aren’t conservative. The Grits’ policy files contain only bumper stickers about inclusiveness and competitiveness, while few NDPers could discuss the relationship between, say, their socialism and that of George Bernard Shaw. And there’s little more to the Bloc’s separatism than spite. But give them purple faces, wagging fingers and an eight-second TV “hit” and they think they’re Abraham Lincoln. It’s a mental desert out there, where cunning passes for conscience and Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s quaint phrase “the treasury benches” falls on deaf ears. Where are the Stanley Knowles of yesteryear, committed idealists and partisans who also loved Parliament?

Not in committee, I can tell you that. Two weeks back, upholding the highest standards of the journalistic profession, I arrived at a Government Operations and Estimates committee meeting on the Main Estimates six minutes late and missed it entirely. I don’t say MPs, finding the room vexatiously warm, abdicated their core responsibility of scrutinizing proposed spending in five minutes. No. They took just two.

To atone for my sins, I switched to a nearby Human Resources, Social Development and the Status of Persons with Disabilities Committee session for a scheduled clause-by-clause vote on private members’ bill C-303: “An Act to establish criteria and conditions in respect of funding for early learning and child care programs in order to ensure the quality, accessibility, universality and accountability of those programs, and to appoint a council to advise the Minister of Human Resources and Skills Development on matters relating to early learning and child care.” Sheer poetry. And sheer incompetence.

After MPs tormented some witnesses with questions that illuminated nothing but their own lack of preparation, the NDP tried to pass a flurry of last-minute amendments to a bill from one of their own, plus two “friendly” subamendments to “friendly” Liberal amendments but apparently the sponsors hadn’t consulted so they never got to the main amendments. Nobody here can play this game.

Instead, after trading banal insults, the NDP, Liberals and Bloc mechanically voted for everything they actually got to, while the Tories mechanically abstained, unwilling to vote “yea” to measures no one there including the experts could explain, but unwilling to vote “nay” for fear of being pilloried in the House and the press as bad, awful meanies.

When I fled this shambles, an attempt to adjourn was mired in partisan wrangling. Since then, the Official Languages committee has disintegrated, the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics committee witnessed an ill-tempered and pointless five-hour filibuster, a Senate committee got poisonously partisan over Kyoto, and a procedural manual became bitterly controversial.

This all-party display of incompetence, vacuity and mean-spiritedness eventually made committees front-page news. But it’s no way to run a parliament. In fact, if it were a high school project, it would get an F as late, incomplete and incompetent.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Man, I never know what’s going on. Bottled water went from status symbol to environmental faux pas and the smart set started sipping from trees while I was seeking a rhyme for “macchiato” because impersonal corporate giant Starbucks is now threatened by cosy neighbourhood coffee shops. How’s a satirist to keep up? I really do try. It’s true that I don’t watch TV news; my theory is that if something important happens it will be in the morning paper or my house will explode, so either way I’ll find out. But I drank gallons of ink on the political demise of André Boisclair, wondering how many ways pundits could say: “Toast pops from toaster.” And many trees were consumed to show me the admittedly comical spectacle of Gilles Duceppe executing an elegant half-loser, bouncing off the PQ and crashing back down right where he started. But honestly, how much did it matter? And what can a satirist add to such a performance beyond applause?

Oh, well. If politics has achieved transcendent self-parody, there’s always culture. Indeed, I still like Jackie Mason’s suggestion to save money on a date by plopping two fizzy tablets into water and giving her “selzier” instead of Perrier. But now Maclean’s informs me that trend-setters are rejecting the bottled water without which, until quite recently, no celebrity would venture forth improperly dressed. It may not have dawned on them that paying 3,000 times the price of tap water for a product no more wholesome shows gullibility, not edginess. (Here I tip my hat to Tom Davey, editor of Environmental Science & Engineering magazine, who has long argued that furnishing reliably safe drinking water for less than 1/10 of a cent per litre, to a populace no longer familiar with cholera or the “bloody flux,” is an environmentalist triumph as spectacular as it is uncelebrated.) But the eco-starlets have at last noticed it’s not all that good for the environment to fly water thousands of kilometres in small plastic containers.

I confess, without wishing to join Andrew Cohen in the stocks for blurting out that Ottawa can be drab, that I’ve always found its tap water strange-tasting. But a Brita filter fixes that problem without fuss or status, cleansing the palate for further trendy-beverage-related news, also courtesy of Maclean’s, of a Manitoba bottler of fine fruit wines tweaking an old hooch recipe to make wine out of birch sap. Say what?

This way of consuming trees seemed a natural for my weekly roundup of strange stories until the magazine added that birch wine, far from being a fatuous novelty, was mentioned by the Dominican friar Albertus Magnus in 1240. Monks drank trees? Why wasn’t I told? Maclean’s further informs me that birch wine was a favourite of Queen Victoria’s consort, Prince Albert. Possibly explaining his famously wooden demeanour, though it was not he but George III who once addressed an oak tree at length as Frederick William III of Prussia. But as he did not try to chug it, we are off topic here. Revenons à nos arbres.

It’s not like I’m a total hick. I am aware that the Greek wine industry’s answer to ouzo, retsina, is made with grapes deliberately contaminated with some sort of residual pine gunk. The thing is, it tastes like it. (I know Boxcar Willie sings about how the water in his hometown tastes like turpentine, but this is ridiculous.) Whereas birch sap, containing fructose rather than maple sap’s sucrose, has evidently long been famous for its delicate flavour.

In fact, Maclean’s says, because Canadian aboriginals used it as a sweetener, the Manitoba vintners named their wooden wine Tansi, meaning “Hello, how are you?” in Cree. Instead of also furnishing the Cree for “I’m good, thanks, just quaffing this tree, later the wife and I are having friends over for some cedar steaks, think you can make it?” the magazine delivered the verdict of “Wedge Ritcher, a product education co-ordinator at the Manitoba Liquor Control Commission” that the wine “resembles a chardonnay blended with a sauvignon blanc with a little something that finishes it off just right.” Namely a big old tree.

I could not invent Wedge Ritcher, product education coordinator. It sounds like satirical science fiction. Nor could I invent it becoming cool to drink from a tap. I’m reduced to ridiculing birch wine. Except actually it sounds pretty good.

Regrettably sales, although comparatively brisk, have yet to approach the 1.9-billion litres of bottled water Canadians buy for more than we pay for gasoline with far less grumbling. And that I can scorn. Sixty litres each, a year, of overpriced water is enough to drive a man to drink.

Specifically, a tall, cool, trendy 2007 Eau de Robinet. Phew. I am cutting edge at last.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Thanks to reporter Don Butler in this week’s Citizen, we know that some 20 Canadian “peace” activists just finished hanging out in Cairo with Islamist terrorists. It’s both alarming and depressingly familiar. The question is, will people on the respectable left in Canada take a stand? Against, I mean. I realize that most progressive politicians, academics, journalists and citizens would never attend such an event. But it’s not enough. They must publicly and indignantly refuse to rub shoulders with people like the Canadian Peace Alliance, who have been rubbing shoulders with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and Jamaat al-Islamiya. Unless, as writer Terry Glavin warned in yesterday’s Citizen, they don’t mind seeing causes they support hijacked by lunatics. And unless they cherish the disgraceful title of fellow travellers.

That people on the far left hold odious views is old news. Beneath the hard smiles and yelling about tolerance they are seething cauldrons of hate. But there isn’t much point in arguing directly with them: Blowing up civilians isn’t peace and you know it; Hezbollah loathes homosexuality and you know it; the Hamas Charter speaks of killing Jews, not Israelis, and you know it; and so on. Why expend useful argument on unresisting villainy? You know what you are and so do we.

The problem is the shelter and sympathy such people find on the broader left. And yes, it is primarily a problem on the left. Remember when, weeks after 9/11, Sunera Thobani, prominent feminist and University of British Columbia professor, denounced U.S. foreign policy as “soaked in blood”? Do you think if a right-winger had talked like that after the Oklahoma City bombing he’d have kept his Canadian academic job? Or found defenders in the mainstream press? Not that we don’t get the odd kook or bigot, but we do our best to detect and expel them. Whereas the progressive reflex that there’s no enemy on the left has a demonstrated capacity to create curious, even wilful blindness to evil, provided it shares their immediate dislikes.

I applaud those who resist this impulse. The Liberal Party of Canada recently dumped a nominated candidate in Edmonton, Farhan Mujahid Chak, who’d written very nasty stuff about Israel and peddled conspiracy theories about terrorism, though technically they booted him for falsifying his résumé. And when Green party leader Elizabeth May learned that Kevin Potvin, nominated for the Greens in Vancouver, had written disquieting things about 9/11, she investigated, then ditched him. Such vigilance is especially important now, when anti-Semitism is trying to creep in on the left. In the fever swamps, “Never again” is turning into “Well, maybe once more,” making this otherwise trivial Cairo conference an urgent test for decent progressives.

For instance, Wednesday’s Citizen reported that “Ali Mallah, who represented the Canadian Arab Federation, the Canadian Union of Public Employees and two antiwar groups” in Egypt, said “the question of Israel was ‘very difficult,’ because Middle Eastern groups reject its right to exist.” What’s difficult about that? Denounce it and walk out. Since he didn’t, has CUPE anything it would now like to say? Or, indeed, the Canadian Arab Federation?

Mr. Mallah, the Citizen added, “said officials from Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood told delegates they do not view religion, nationality or ideology as a barrier to co-operation with other activist groups, ‘as long as they agree on opposing the war, striving for peace and most importantly, standing up against imperialism and occupation.’” The paper then quoted former CSIS chief of strategic planning David Harris that “to the extent that their audience and any of us are gullible enough to actually believe that, then perhaps we deserve the consequences.” Actually, the Islamists were both clear and honest that they don’t care if you share their ideology as long as you’re willing to serve their purposes. If you think that sounds attractive you have major problems, but gullibility isn’t among them.

Especially since we’ve been here before. In the 1930s Stalinists said that if western progressives were willing to help destroy democracy, Communists wouldn’t ask awkward questions about why. Too many progressives did prove willing: When Malcolm Muggeridge reported Stalin’s genocidal famine, his newspaper fired him; when Walter Duranty concealed it, he won a Pulitzer Prize. There really were spies and fellow travellers. And in the 1960s, too many liberals gushed over Castro and Mao.

If I now say that those people and groups that attended this Cairo conference and came home happy should be shunned, investigated, and expelled from larger organizations, will I face the wrath of progressives?

If so, we’ll know which side you are on, too.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Q: You are John Robson? A: I might be.

Q: You are a professional journalist?

A: If it says so on my tax return.

Q: You have read stories about the Conrad Black trial?

A: Arguably.

Q: What do you think of it?

A: Well, maybe we shouldn’t say read. As a professional journalist, if I am one, maybe I skimmed those stories. I don’t recall. I have no idea how my initials got on those clippings.

Q: Aren’t journalists supposed to read the papers carefully?

A: All that fine print hurts my eyes.

Q: Don’t you think you should have paid attention if you wish to be paid money?

A: Ridiculous. If you’ve been skimming the clippings, which I neither confirm nor deny possibly having done, you will be aware that under oath a number of prestigious former associates of Lord Black of Crossharbour, glittering members of society of the sort to whom I am literally transparent at parties, now insouciantly declare they had no idea their buddy was a grasping wretch because they were out of the room while their e-mail was being read or some such.

Q: So you have been following the stories.

A: As I might have said, I don’t recall.

Q: Aren’t you insouciantly denying responsibility.

A: Insouciance is only for the rich. If I did it, it would be insolent.

Q: Weren’t these audit board members paid up to $5,000 for telephone meetings?

A: I don’t recall.

Q: Is there anything you feel you should disclose?

A: Like when Conrad Black purchased Southam, it led to my being plucked from obscurity in the Ontario backwoods and installed in obscurity on the Citizen editorial board? No. Instead I wish to state without prejudice that Conrad Black did a signal service to journalism in Canada by investing money and believing in us. Especially me. Unless he didn’t. I don’t recall. He paid my salary. I paid no attention. I’m not sure there is a Conrad Black. Unless you have pictures of me groveling before him.

Q: Wouldn’t it feel good to see Conrad Black dragged down here with the rest of us? Wasn’t he supercilious, grandiloquent and self-indulgent? Shouldn’t he be compelled by law to use short words?

A: I do not wish to kick a man when he’s down, especially if he might get up and kick me back. But I will stipulate that Conrad Black was a tycoon. He not only became very rich through complex, massive high-stakes transactions, he openly enjoyed it. He enjoyed the money. He enjoyed the risk. He enjoyed being larger than life. Whereas when I got that way I had to go on a diet.

Q: What about the woman some British journalist tagged Attila the Honey?

A: Let me also stipulate that some of his wife’s unguarded comments were unhelpful to his public image. Not that either of them seemed to care much. And why should they? A gentleman, it is said, is one who does not unintentionally offend others, but --

Q: How would you know?

A: [Ahem] My point is, if you openly don’t care what people think, there’s no issue of non-disclosure.

Q: Isn’t being rich crass?

A: In some hands, yes. But life is not a popularity contest. At least I hope not. For my sake and that of Lord Black, who I fear has discovered that money brings fairweather friends. I wouldn’t personally try to buy happiness even if I possessed sufficient resources. Think of the paperwork. Besides, right now I’m trying to rent misery and even that’s coming a little steep.

Q: So what’s your beef?

A: I have no recollection of possessing cow products. I’m just saying it’s repulsive for people to traipse about in high society trailing money, fame and prestige, then testify that the former colleague who paid them luscious fees to sit on corporate boards was a slime for “secretly” doing things described in documents they couldn’t be bothered to read carefully even at rates approaching $1,000 an hour.

Q: Not by any chance bitter, are you?

A: Moi? I know in a recent survey journalism was inexplicably listed as a sexy job by people who I can only assume don’t get out enough. But in my years on the Citizen editorial board I attended innumerable meetings at well below $5,000 per, yet was expected to pay reasonable attention to the proceedings and even read preparatory documents sent by editors icily unimpressed by any admission or involuntary disclosure that you had failed to do so because you were busy, they were dull or for any other reason.

Q: In short, Conrad Black should have put you on the Hollinger Board.

A: Look, I told you, I may not know any Conrad Black. But if I did and he had, I’d have read the fine print a lot more cheaply than the people he did hire, whose conduct now strikes me as cheap in the least attractive sense of that word. Maybe. If I have principles. I don’t recall.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

In the decade since I began writing for the Citizen many things have changed. Not always for the better. But even on many issues where debate has not ended, the tone and specifics of 1997 would sound quaint. Except on my very first topic, aboriginal policy, where almost nothing has changed. And that’s a tragedy. Ten years ago people denied there were health care waiting lists; balancing budgets was controversial; Japan was a rising economic power; terrorism was a minor issue in the post-Soviet era. Our personal lives were different, too. We didn’t have cell phones. And where did this grey hair come from?

Now read this passage from my first Citizen column: “There is no doubt that the economic and social situation of too many of [Canada’s aboriginals] is appalling. Nor is there any doubt that the devastating impact of European technology and Old World diseases on their culture was exacerbated by policies that were usually just as harmful when well-intentioned as when hostile. But there is something of a cargo cult mentality among them, as they wait for their ancestors, or at least the treaties they signed, to bestow perpetual abundance on them. The difference here is that those in the larger society who profess to be their friends encourage this mentality when they ought to be discouraging it.” Is there one word that doesn’t still resonate?

Consider that the B. C. government spent 13 years and a billion dollars negotiating land claims. This year, finally, the first deal was voted on by the 234-member Lheidli T’enneh band. And rejected. Whereupon Grand Chief Stewart Phillip of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs declared the whole formal treaty process useless because it required aboriginals to give up too many traditional rights for too few concrete benefits. Leaving what, beyond a conviction that stubborn adherence to something nebulous can make wonderful things fall from the sky?

I do not know what aboriginal leaders and activists think or say about the rest of us when we are not around. They have a lot invested in the notion that most of their problems come from our bigotry. But that’s unfair. If we non-aboriginals really had a piece of paper we could sign that would right historical wrongs and end present-day social pathologies that resulted from them, 98 per cent of us would sign without hesitation even if the costs were enormous. The problem is, we don’t. And as long as aboriginal leaders insist that we do, and that only racism prevents us from signing it, and that sufficient political militancy can make us one day give in and sign it, no progress can be made. We can’t even surrender to militancy.

No one can give back the ways of the ancestors. If they were brave, wise, compassionate people, those virtues are timeless, but they cannot be conferred from outside. As to the specific cultural patterns of pre-Columbian North America, they are long gone and I don’t imagine most aboriginal Canadians have the slightest interest in giving up electricity, metal and central heating. So what do they want?

The excessive, even millenarian expectations raised by aboriginal leaders mean no practical, limited settlement can ever be put on the table from their side nor accepted by them if it comes from others. Their basic negotiating proposal is “Deal with us and get burned.” Note that the B. C. negotiations started under NDP governments, as politically correct a bunch of do-gooders as you could find on the planet. If anyone had the desire and ability to satisfy aboriginal demands it was them. And it ended like this. Now who’d like to stake his reputation on another go? It is obviously very bad public relations for non-aboriginal politicians to seem indifferent to native issues. But any serious effort to find solutions ends in policy failure and PR disaster.

So the rational response is to stall. Make sympathetic noises. Stage photo ops. Welcome any number of meetings to devise consultations to develop frameworks for progress toward a process intended to lay the groundwork for a meaningful settlement of preliminary questions to set conditions for forward movement. Make sure your staff knows nothing is ever to emerge from all these meetings except more meetings. And let existing levels of funding continue or gently increase; though expensive, the payments are not unaffordable and any effort to cut or significantly restructure them would cause political disaster.

How does that sound? Familiar, I’m afraid. It’s exactly where we were 10 years ago. Except we’re all 10 years older and many more aboriginal lives have been blighted by hopeless living conditions.

I really don’t want to write this again in another decade.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

Ontario is slated to hold a “historic” referendum this October on whether to discard our centuries-old system of electing representatives in favour of something called MMP or “mixed member proportional.” Just say No. It’s a bad solution to the wrong problem. The whole thing feels like one of those ghastly facilitated exercises where, without any sort of pressure at all, moderators with flip charts and soothing manners and information packages massage and re-educate you into a consensus on, of all things, exactly what the organizers had in mind when they summoned you to the facility. How many of the participants came in thinking we really should keep electing 90 MPPs in ridings, but have parties that get at least three per cent of the vote appoint, in total, 39 more MPPs to bring their share in the legislature up to their share of the popular vote? Why would they?

I know some people complain that under our existing first-past-the-post (FPP) system, majority governments get elected by a minority of voters. And yes, I’d rather they were elected by a majority of voters. But under MMP they wouldn’t get elected at all. Instead, we’d get endless coalitions dominated by the most tireless and self-serving of backroom politicians who would, moreover, invariably get some of the 39 seats reserved for the various parties’ most tenacious hacks. And this is a solution to which of our pressing public-policy problems?

Not, certainly, the lack of independence among politicians. Nor that our governments overspend so they overtax, that our politicians are arrogant and smoothly evasive or that the presentation and even content of policy is relentlessly spun and focus-grouped and calibrated to subsidize key middle-class demographics. And you could add a lot more to this list before coming to a problem caused by an electoral system giving parties such big legislative majorities that they can afford to take unpopular steps for the long-term good of the country.

On the plus side we’re told MMP will produce legislatures that better reflect the population. I take it the idea is that parties will, from their lists, appoint people we wouldn’t vote for but who fulfill the requirements of “diversity.” But I care if your philosophy is libertarian on policy and conservative on the human condition, not what colour your hair is or whether you wear heels. At the risk of sounding old-fashioned, I want legislators who think like me, not ones who look like me. If I were that obsessed with my own reflection I’d just look in a mirror. Say, do I have a subsidy stuck in my teeth?

That brings me to my final objection: that focusing on our electoral system distracts us from what’s really going wrong in our politics. Classical theorists from Aristotle to James Madison warned that democracy was turbulent and prone to elevate to high office those most skilled at pandering to the worse impulses of the populace. Can you disagree? But I do not see that MMP was designed to solve this problem.

Many of MMP’s opponents don’t make much sense, either. Provincial Tory leader John Tory dismissed the proposal on the grounds that it would increase the total number of MPPs from 103 to 129, saying, “In all of my travels around the province ... I have not met one person yet who has told me that the answer ... is to have more politicians of any kind at Queen’s Park or anywhere else.”

Allow me please to introduce myself. I want more politicians, here and elsewhere, because legislatures exist to keep the executive under control. They’re less likely to do so if there are attractive jobs (in cabinet, on “important” party task forces, as committee chairpersons who must go on junkets, or as critics on prestigious files) for almost all the boys and girls. Give us more discontented government backbenchers, and more opposition members with time on their hands they might as well use poking around in the public accounts or thinking of really awkward questions to ask in committee.

If, on the other hand, fewer politicians is better, why not just have 10? Or four? Or one? Mr. Tory’s remark admittedly reads like a talking point crafted by some belligerently partisan 20-something in an expensive but ill-fitting suit who looks as if he shaved and had a haircut every seven hours. But having read it, Mr. Tory said it, even though it managed, like MMP itself, to be simultaneously irrelevant and wrong. Amazing how contemporary politics can turn anyone into an angry hayseed in short order. One more thing MMP won’t change.

There’s nothing wrong with the way we elect politicians. What’s wrong is whom we elect and why, and how little thought they, or we, give to basic issues in political economy. Like why MMP is a bad answer to the wrong question.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

The best and brightest seem shocked that nearly two-thirds of Canadians favour electing judges. They would not be if they grasped that ideas matter. If you watched public affairs on a daily basis, it might be hard to convince yourself that ideas even exist. But as Bob Harvey quoted Queen’s University history professor Don Akenson in the Citizen’s Weekly a few years back, while people may have small ideas, “big ideas have people.” For instance if judges determine public policy, self-government requires us to elect judges.

In reporting the poll saying 63 per cent of Canadians now favour exactly that, the Globe and Mail sniffed: “The results may come as a surprise to the legal community, where it has long been assumed that Canadians see the election of judges as a major drawback of the U.S. justice system.” Perhaps they do. And not entirely without reason; a Republican member of the Ohio Supreme Court recently admitted that “I never felt so much like a hooker down by the bus station” as when running for judicial office. It doesn’t matter. If you have a U.S.-style constitution, eventually you will get most of its attributes, good or bad. And that’s what we’ve had for a quarter-century now.

That the people who crafted the 1982 Constitution and Charter of Rights did not intend to give us such a thing, nor realized they had, speaks badly of their intellectual acumen. It says nothing about our system of government.

It is true that Canada has had the theoretically problematic combination of a parliamentary system and a written constitution ever since 1867. But the BNA Act really infringed the sovereignty of our national Parliament only by putting the powers of provincial legislatures more or less beyond its reach. It was a reasonable attempt to give Canada a constitution “similar in principle” to the United Kingdom while furnishing a guarantee of the federal structure without which Confederation could not have proceeded.

With the coming of the Charter, that changed fundamentally. It doesn’t matter whether people formally recognize it or whether the 25th anniversary of the Charter of Rights occasions much learned gum-flapping of a singularly irrelevant nature. Once we had a constitution that allowed judges to second-guess legislatures on policy, it was inevitable that judges should become more powerful. And once they did, it was inevitable that the public should want a say in who sat on the bench. Self-government demands it.

In the old days all judges could do was tell federal or provincial politicians to let the other bunch settle some question. Now they can abolish marriage, free terrorists, bestow strange new fishing rights on aboriginals and then snatch them back, give us extra parents and who knows what all. And since in the words of University of Texas philosopher J. Budziszewski, people are “logical slowly,” they have slowly but surely come to demand control over those who wield such awesome powers.

Many judges oppose it in the same instinctive sort of way. It doesn’t have to be consciously articulated; it’s the deep inner logic of our institutions. A functioning system of self-government places irritating daily restraints on the presumption of the great and the good which, naturally, they make continual small efforts to shake off. Last week the Globe noted delicately that Ontario Chief Justice Roy McMurtry had taken “the highly unusual step of endorsing a candidate to replace him upon his retirement next month.” The instinct of a ruling elite to control its own membership is understandable, indeed natural. Which is precisely why the constitution of liberty does not permit it.

The Globe also reported that “Chief Justice McMurtry said that if Canadian judges felt compelled to impose popular verdicts and sentences to ensure their re-election, ‘it could really destroy the very best traditions of an independent judiciary. I think it would be a tragic initiative for the administration of justice.’“ His disdain for the notion that judges should be induced to make rulings of which the public approved says more than a shelf full of volumes of political economy.

That’s why another poll, reported in Wednesday’s Citizen, found that 68 per cent of respondents favoured keeping the Charter’s notwithstanding clause. Jack Jedwab, executive director of the Association for Canadian Studies that co-sponsored the poll, said, “I was surprised because there’s a sort of stigma attached to the notwithstanding clause, or so we think.” Who’s “we”? The notwithstanding clause guarantees that MPs the people elect can still, in many areas, override judges they don’t elect. It is, again, an instinct to preserve self-government.

If judges rule us, we want to choose them. You get the idea.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]

On the anniversary of Vimy Ridge we should remember not just one battle but a whole proud heritage in which Canadians saved the world. Twice. In freezing salt water and stinking mud. Our schools should teach students to be proud of the desperate struggles against German submarines in the North Atlantic in 1940 and 1941 and the slaughter in Passchendaele in 1917. The Canadian assault on Juno Beach on D-Day is one part of our history that is still generally remembered and celebrated. Most schoolchildren could place it in Normandy, not Norway, maybe even on June 6, 1944. D-Day was indeed the beginning of the end for Hitler. But our most important contribution to his defeat came earlier, at sea.

Winston Churchill confessed that the only thing that ever really worried him in the Second World War was the U-boat campaign through which Hitler sought to starve Britain into submission. Had it succeeded, he would have gained control over all of Europe. And then what?

The Battle of Britain was a very close conflict, and we should not forget the 103 Canadians who flew over England from July to October 1940, of whom 23 died there and 30 died later in the war. But as Niall Ferguson wrote in his book Empire, “Without Canadian pilots the Battle of Britain might well have been lost. Without Canadian sailors, the Battle of the Atlantic surely would have been.” And with it the war.

No admiral towers over that grim struggle the way Nelson does over Trafalgar. All credit goes to ordinary sailors and seamen depicted in Frank Curry’s War at Sea, with its petrifying description of “white mist” striking the corvette Kamsack. Unprepared but not unready, thousands of young and not-so-young Canadians answered the call of duty in the most unglamorous, uncomfortable and dangerous conditions imaginable. There was no defence against torpedoes, no medal and no final resting place, only the dreadful end of Jack Nichols’s haunting painting Drowning Sailor (1946).

During the war Canada’s navy went from 13 fighting ships to 373, including two aircraft carriers, and from 3,000 personnel to 95,000, plus 6,000 women in the Women’s Royal Naval Service or “WRENS.” (After equally dramatic expansion our shipyards churned out about 400 merchant vessels.) Canada built what was then the third-largest navy in the world, and it did roughly half the work in the North Atlantic, helping escort 25,343 voyages by merchant ships carrying 164 million tonnes of cargo. There was a tremendous cost: 24 warships sunk and more than 2,000 sailors killed.

As well, according to Wilfrid Laurier University historian Roger Sarty, 752 Canadian airmen perished in maritime operations, mostly in the Atlantic. And our flag flew on 210 merchant ships, of which 62 were sunk, killing 1,600 Canadian merchant sailors, or one in eight of those who braved those hazards. That men continued to go to sea in the face of such casualties should not be forgotten; nor should the simple truth that they did not die in vain.

By May 1943 the Battle of the Atlantic was over, and the surviving U-boats fled the North Atlantic. Did Canadians sink the U-boat fleet? Not by a long shot, though our ships and planes sank or helped sink 50 submarines. Our largest contribution came not at that turning point, or later. It was getting the Allies to the turning point at all, going out into the freezing dark without proper equipment or protection again and again and again, even as losses mounted.

Without that effort, when the margin of survival was thinnest, Britain would have fallen, there would have been no Juno Beach, and Hitler would probably have won. Instead, what Canadians endured, more even than what they inflicted, turned defeat into victory in the Allies’ darkest hour.

The notion of a vital Canadian contribution to the First World War is harder to assert or defend. The reasons for that struggle are mostly forgotten, its importance buried under a flood of pacifist ridicule dating to the 1920s. Definitive histories such as A. J. P. Taylor’s The Great War lean toward the view of philosopher Sidney Hook who, though an atheist, called 1914 “the second fall of man,” if not to Edmund Blackadder’s jibe about the master plan “to continue the slaughter until everyone’s dead except Field Marshal Haig, Lady Haig and their tortoise Alan.”

In this country we have somehow converted In Flanders Fields into an anti-war poem, and tend to remember not Canada’s contribution to the Great War but its contribution to us, how Vimy Ridge made us a nation. It did. But the rest of the conventional wisdom is dubious.

The outcome did matter: An aggressive, undemocratic power dominating the Eurasian land mass and challenging freedom of the seas would have been bad in 1914, as in 1940 (or 1814). And while technology and geography gave generals and politicians few options, they were not soulless morons. The combatants went into war with cavalry, balloons and frontal assaults and came out with tanks, airplanes and the “leapfrog” tactics behind a creeping barrage developed, let us not forget, by Canadian Gen. Arthur Currie at Vimy Ridge.

To be sure, the Great War did not “end all wars,” but appeasement in 1938 was not the fault of the victors in 1918. And we should be proud, not ashamed, that the German high command considered Canadians “the enemy’s elite soldiers,” while their troops dreaded the kilted Canadian soldiers they called the “ladies from Hell.” And we should be proud, not ashamed, that Canada’s contribution at Passchendaele in 1917 helped the Allies survive to 1918 and victory.

If Passchendaele is remembered at all today it is as a byword for bloody futility, incompetence and heartlessness. There’s a famous story of Sir Douglas Haig’s chief of staff seeing its bloody mud, weeping and crying out: “My God! Did we send men to fight in that?” Yes, they did, and as with the even-more-notorious Battle of the Somme in the summer of 1916, not because they were idiots.

The Somme cost 620,000 Allied casualties, including the infamous first-day destruction of the Newfoundland Regiment at Beaumont Hamel. But the German losses, probably higher, were certainly less affordable. The Somme, later described by a member of the German general staff quoted in Philip Warner’s book World War One as “the muddy grave of the German field army and of faith in the ability of German leaders,” prevented Germany from breaking the French line at Verdun and winning the war in 1916.

Nevertheless, in spring 1917 the French army mutinied. After three years of appalling leadership, mistreatment and genuinely futile offensives, entire divisions refused to fight. They could not be disciplined: Who would do it, and how?

Meanwhile, the road to Paris lay essentially open. French military leaders concealed the disaster from politicians lest they blurt it out and lose the war. But they told their British counterparts, who with similar fears decided faut de mieux to launch an all-out offensive in Flanders in late July to draw German manpower and attention away from the French sector. And the soldiers responded — including Canadians at Hill 70 in August 1917, in what Canadian War Museum historian Tim Cook calls “one of those battles that no one knows about.”

With the British foundering in Flanders, Currie was ordered to launch a suicidal frontal assault on the town of Lens to divert some German troops south from Passchendaele. Instead, in his first battle as commander of the Canadian Corps, Currie seized Hill 70 overlooking Lens, forcing the Germans into more than 20 counterattacks and at least 20,000 casualties in three days, against just more than 9,000 Canadians killed or wounded. In October and November the Canadian Corps lost another 15,600 men finally taking what was left of the town and the ridge of Passchendaele. That victory was less strategically important than the one at Hill 70, as the French were now back in their trenches, but it was psychologically significant given the losses the British had sustained trying to take it, and those the Germans had sustained trying to hold it.

True, the Canadian soldiers did not know why they were being sent over the top. They knew how bad the terrain was, and the odds. But their sense of duty was far stronger than their sense of self-pity. And because they responded, the whole Allied line held. Given how close the final German offensive in 1918 came to breaking through, the psychological and material losses Canadians inflicted in 1917 may have saved the Allies twice.

These stories are rarely told nowadays for several reasons. One is that both world wars divided Quebec from the rest of Canada over conscription. Another is that in 1917, and in the 1940s, it was not multiculturalism, peacekeeping or tolerance that Canada brought to the struggle for freedom and decency in the world but courage, determination and an honourable willingness to kill or be killed.

No one should forget the horror of war, nor should they conclude that because of it appeasement, surrender or quick defeat are preferable to grim determination.

Canadians did not do it alone, to be sure. Nor could they have. But in a desperate “all hands on deck” situation, they filled positions without which the Western alliance would have foundered despite others’ heroics.

Winston Churchill once told his countrymen, “It is no use saying, ‘We are doing our best.’ You have got to succeed in doing what is necessary.” In precisely that spirit, Canadians saved the Allies in 1940-41 and in 1917.

Schools should be ashamed not to teach it.

[First published in the Ottawa Citizen]