It's amazing to watch the scandal unfolding in Britain over MPs' ridiculous housing allowance claims. The Daily Telegraph has been all over it and it's the usual picture of a system ripe for fiddling by politicians with a runaway sense of self-important entitlement. But they're getting caught. Revelation after revelation spills out, some heads have already rolled a short distance at least and much more is to come, both political disgrace and possibly criminal prosecution. Why are the British so good at rooting these things out? Surely there are some lessons we can learn, not about preventing scandal perhaps, but about exposing and punishing it.
When the Tories attacked Michael Ignatieff for having been abroad and seen the world, the Liberal leader did not respond with an attack on narrowness and parochialism. Instead he succumbed to it, saying sometimes you had to go abroad to see how much the world loves Canada. Another sorry example of how Canadian politics makes even smart people talk as if they had neither brains nor wit. As it happens, one thing you learn if you spend time abroad but not under a rock is that foreign newspapers pay about as much attention to Canada as they do to Guatemala. Which Mr. Ignatieff probably does know. But while Canadian politicians pretend to pay attention to the world, they generally express not sober analyses of what we can really do and how but wildly exaggerated views of our influence and effectiveness (skewered by Roy Rempel in the Breakout Educational Network book Dreamland) that seem intended partly for domestic political consumption and partly for self-flattery.
I was therefore struck by this passage in The Spirit of English History, a 1943 book by English historian and Labor Party sympathiser A.L. Rowse: “The achievement of nationhood by Canada aided the working-out of a peaceable settlement of the boundary with the United States in the course of this century. In this it has formed a primary link in the friendship between the British Empire and the United States, which, signalled by alliance in two world wars, is a determining factor in the history of our time.”
So there's something we really can proudly take credit for. Over to you, Mr. Harper, Mr. Ignatieff, Mr. Layton, Ms. May and (har har) M. Duceppe.
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Out in B.C., the Ottawa Citizen reports, voters reelected Gordon Campbell's Liberals, possibly faute de mieux. But they decisively rejected a referendum to switch from first-past-the-post to a complex Single Transferrable Voting system. Again. This STV idea was supposedly the work of a random group of citizens who just happened, after extensive briefings, consultations and workshops to endorse a wonky proposal they never heard of before which by sheer coincidence was heavily favoured by the people doing the briefings and running the workshops. It has almost literally no support among the ordinary people who are meant to be the beneficiaries and practitioners of self-government. But it is hugely popular with that segment of the chattering classes that spends its time thinking about how the masses would conduct themselves politically if they were less vulgar.
My guess is STV will be on the ballot again and again in B.C. until it somehow passes in a moment of inattention. Then we'll be told the debate is over and it's time to move on. For instance to implementing it in Ontario and then nationwide.
OK, I have to end by quoting Cheserton: “The notion of self-government was not ... that the ordinary citizen is to be consulted as one consults an encyclopedia. He is not there to be asked a lot of fancy questions to see how he answers them. He and his fellows are to be, within reasonable human limits, masters of their own lives."
Although I'm not convinced that mathematics is the language in which all true theories are written there certainly are times when a number is worth a thousand words. And here's one, from the latest Institute for Marriage and the Family Canada study to cross my desk, namely Derek Miedema's “Care-Full? The Demographic Crunch and Senior Care in Canada”. Here's the number: “in 2002, 35 per cent of seniors aged 65-74 had 4 or more children still living, while only 11 per cent of parents aged 45-54 had the same number.”
Can you say demographic catastrophe?
As numerous news stories relate, "delegates" walked out of the Durban II anti-racism conference over Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's predictable racist rant. (And as CFRA radio's "Madely's Morning Minute" and the National Post editorial board observe this morning, a number of western nations were already boycotting the conference, following Canada's example. An actual example of our moral leadership in the world - think our progressives will celebrate it?) What the news stories don't mention is who didn't walk out. Surely significant.
Defence is the first responsibility of any government. Unfortunately it ranks far lower as a budget priority, at least among democracies in peacetime. A balanced but depressing piece by Canada's preeminent military historian Jack Granatstein in today's National Post illustrates how the Harper government's words outran its deeds in this area.