This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 13: Some people collect stamps. Others join chess clubs. Me, I read political press releases. But I’m not just a weirdo lucky enough to get paid to indulge his unaccountable hobbies. They really are highly informative.

You don’t take them at face value, of course. But as with Soviet rhetoric back in the day, even mundane details let the connoisseur discern much about politicians’ thought patterns and unexamined assumptions.

For instance, here’s a real beaut from last month: the House and Senate Speakers announcing the appointment of Canada’s 5th Parliamentary Poet Laureate since the post was created in 2001.

Bet you can’t name one. This is a silly job. But through this press release you can discover not only that our parliamentarians think it important to have a poet laureate and proclaim him to an indifferent nation, they think it worth a $20,000 stipend, up to $13,000 a year for travel to places keen to hear his verse, and “a budget for programming, administrative expenses and translation/adaptation of works into Canada’s second official language.”

What sort of works? I figured you wouldn’t know either. But the Parliamentary Poet Laureate web site says “the Parliamentary Poet Laureate may:

* write poetry, especially for use in Parliament on important occasions * sponsor poetry readings * advise the Parliamentary Librarian regarding the Library’s collection and acquisitions to enrich its cultural materials, and, * perform other related duties at the request of the Speaker of the Senate, the Speaker of the House of Commons, or the Parliamentary Librarian”

Wait a minute. Are you seriously telling me Parliament uses poetry on important occasions? Can you name one such poem, or occasion? And what’s a related duty? Mock a ministerial gaffe in doggerel?

I’m not just being cynical here. I’m also self-interested. As a government press release garburator I keep seeing people I never heard of appointed to boards and commissions I never heard of, like the new “Co-Chair of the Canada Excellence Research Chairs (CERC) Program Selection Board.” If I don’t figure out what I’m doing wrong, I could end up the last person in the country without a government sinecure.

Indeed, I just got passed over for a Senate job… again. But hope springs eternal, and … hey, that’s a line from a poem. Maybe I’m barking up the wrong tree.

OK, admittedly it’s from “Casey at the Bat”. But I’m also a devotee of Theodore Geisel’s oeuvre and could once recite “The Cremation of Sam McGee” so fast people couldn’t clear the room before we hit Lake LaBarge.

So forget the Merchant Seamen Compensation Board. How do I qualify as next official green and red chamber poetaster (a fancy poet-type word meaning “bad poet”)?

Well, that press release quotes the Senate Speaker: “As a distinguished poet, editor, and teacher Fred Wah is known across Canada for his interest in a range of subjects. Mr. Wah brings forth a collaborative approach and unique perspective to his work inspiring younger poets, students and others both nationally and internationally with his reflections on Canadian culture.”

Hmnnnn. I’m not exactly known for my collaborative approach or inspiring younger poets. But I’m probably as “known across Canada” as Fred Wah, I’m interested in a range of subjects and my perspectives have been called unique … or was “weird” the exact term? Meanwhile the House Speaker said Wah “has done much to encourage and promote the importance of literature, culture and language within Canadian society.” Fine. I yield to no one in promoting the importance of language within our society. How would we talk without it? (And as an editor I could make short work of that bafflegab.)

I still think I’d make a great Senator. For starters, it’s an unelected body and I’m clearly unelectable. Plus I can sit through committee hearings without turning into something Andy Sirkis would play with the aid of digital animation. But never mind. Parliamentary poet laureate sounds good too.

Now lend an ear, and Parliament I’ll gladly show to you Where QP sees our MPs howl like monkeys in a zoo At other times, on matters grave, their rhetoric doth soar O’er empty seats, green row upon row, their colleagues out the door

So bray and preen and fudge your facts and lose the next election But soft, good sir, the poet comes to banish your dejection In verse that’s known across the land I’ll write your epitaph A statesmen then you’ll surely be, and nobody will laugh

I’ll call you wise, to your surprise, and noble and foresighted They’ll raise a statue when I’m done with which you’ll be delighted In marble they will carve your form, or cast your bust in brass While solemn words upon the plinth deny you were an ass.

Click here to read.

This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 12: Oh oh. The federal government is spending tens of billions more than they admit. Through tax loopholes.

When the Finance Department published its latest attempt to list them all and estimate their cost, the Globe and Mail headline “Flaherty’s tax credits cost Ottawa billions” prompted a colleague to grump “The left always talks as though the money belongs to the government … It’s our money. Tax cuts don’t ‘cost’ the government since it’s not their money to start with.”

Well, you should be grumpy. But not because he’s right. Because, for once, the Globe is.

As you may imagine, I’m all for tax cuts. I want the government to spend less and tax less. And when it must tax, to raise the money it needs to pay for its programs, rates should be as low as possible on as broad a base as possible so they have the least possible impact on our wallets and our behaviour.

Tax credits do the opposite. They grant special favours to some group the government likes, or to reward some behaviour the government likes. They are social engineering. And they force the rest of us to pay more.

If the government cuts everyone’s income tax by $75 we all pay less of our income and that’s good. But if it gives everyone who puts their kid in art class a $75 “tax credit”, that is, $75 back from the government, someone else has to come up with that $75 and that’s bad. After all, government spending hasn’t gone down. So everyone who doesn’t enroll their kid in art class has to pay a little bit more to cover the total $100 million cost of this particular goody for those who do.

Now tell me: What’s the difference between the government giving you a $75 “tax credit” and it giving you 75 bucks because you enrolled your child in something it considers artistic (which oddly includes chess… and if you don’t agree you still pay.) Right. None.

So why do it through the tax system? Simple: It lets you spend without admitting you’re spending.

If you’re wondering how much it lets them spend on the sly… Finance wonders too. Their report warns “Many of the tax expenditures … interact with each other such that the impact of several tax provisions at once cannot generally be calculated by adding up the estimates and projections for each provision.”

In short, the tax system is so complicated even the people who created it don’t know what it does. Which certainly suggests it’s not an effective policy instrument. But as I’ve noted before, the main appeal of the individual loopholes to most politicians isn’t what they do for culture, the economy or fairness. It’s what they do for their reelection prospects. (You can’t imagine how many press releases the government put out touting the “Volunteer Firefighters Tax Credit” alone, but unless you think they think people just love firefighters – down girls – the only explanation is they wanted every one of them to know, on election day, who’d given them money.)

Despite Finance’s warning that their monster is too complex even to measure, I did a quick and dirty total of the 128 personal income tax loopholes listed, leaving out those under $2.5 million that were too small for Finance to bother calculating, a few big ones I thought shouldn’t count like the basic personal exemption, and some that looked like legitimate attempts to avoid double-taxing. The remaining stuff like the $280 million Tuition Tax Credit, $2 billion Canada Employment Credit, $15 billion for Registered Pension Plans etc. produced a total north of $70 billion.

If all this were counted as the spending it really is – coming out of the general tax revenue pool to reward things and people the government likes – rather than entered as a frugal, small-government reduction in revenue, federal budgets would top $350 billion, a quarter over their on-paper $280 billion. And if it didn’t exist, personal income taxes could be $70 billion lower – hardly trivial given that they only net just under $120 billion now. (The 67 corporate ones worth about $26 billion – against just over $30 billion in net revenue – are even worse.)

Finance estimates the personal stuff isn’t even effective income redistribution because the government has managed to cram enough something-for-everyone into it. But in any event if you want to hand out money to relieve poverty, call it spending because that’s what it is.

Torquing the tax code for politically advantageous social engineering then disguising it as tax relief makes reducing the meddlesome intrusion of government into our lives and our crushing tax burden much harder. And it’s dishonest.

You should be mad.

This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 11: You can see why journalists love things like the New Hampshire primary. They give us something to talk about. Better yet, we can tell you beforehand what’s going to happen and explain afterward why it didn’t and what it all means. Which might explain why a lot of people don’t love journalists. But they should still love primaries.

In the first place, a lot of people hate politics and politicians even more than the media but, to paraphrase Leon Trotskii, even if you’re not interested in government it’s interested in you. In the second place, primaries, caucuses and other such convoluted political insider processes are a really good way of putting candidates through a fool-and-rogue filter before serving them to regular voters in a general election.

I know a lot of people find American primaries, caucuses and straw polls chaotic and contrived. But you don’t have to be a fan of Mitt Romney – trust me on this one – to think it beats buying a pig in a poke. In this case it’s found the Tea Party’s favourites wanting one by one… not what most Republicans may have wanted, but better now than in a general election.

I grant that the unseemly scramble for influential early spots in the primary schedule has pushed contests too far toward New Year’s Day and threatens to spill backward into Christmas. And the states that won are hardly typical: Iowa almost all white, heavily evangelical and agricultural; New Hampshire very white, very New England and semi-libertarian; South Carolina very southern and 30% black.

And I’ll give the critics one more thing: the rules are incredibly complicated. For instance Iowa Republicans just held not a “primary” but a grassroots precinct “caucus,” mostly to elect delegates to March 10 county caucuses which elect delegates to April 21 district caucuses which elect delegates to the June 16 state convention.

Iowa Democrats, in presidential election years, cast binding votes in their precinct caucuses for county convention delegates pledged to a particular candidate (unless a sitting president is unchallenged). But on the Republican side they don’t. Instead they hand out blank paper on which citizens write whoever they like for the GOP nomination, which the June state convention ignores in selecting delegates for the Republican National Convention in Tampa this August.

So why care? Because people who get up early to sit on folding chairs in chilly auditoriums for up to two hours to bicker about soybean subsidies or county vice-chairs, without being political insiders, are opinion leaders among ordinary voters. Their judgement reflects what many more people will eventually think.

The chaotic variety of rules also helps the process work. The Iowa caucus is “closed,” restricted to party members. New Hampshire’s primary, which sends delegates to the RNC pledged to a particular candidate, is “semi-closed”: you must be or become a registered Republican to vote in it. (Though you can deregister immediately.) Meanwhile in South Carolina’s “open” primary anyone can vote.

By the time someone has been through these very different states and systems they have not only endured endless scrutiny by citizens, party members, journalists and fundraisers, they’ve courted the Midwest, New England and the South. They’ve been through the crucible.

If you’ve read James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds you’ll know the general public is much better at choosing between options than at determining which options to consider. That’s why primaries work. And the parties seem to like them.

Not since 1992 have either Democrats or Republicans nominated someone who didn’t win two of these three early contests. Indeed for the GOP South Carolina is 8-0 since 1980. But to win there you must first survive Iowa and New Hampshire.

Of course, despite their elaborate nominating process Americans often get mediocre leaders or worse. But Canadians too have had more than our share of duds we didn’t even get to pick ourselves after due consideration. Wouldn’t its current leadership race be more useful to the NDP, and the nation, if candidates had to win over party members and Canadians generally in staggered, highly public provincial contests with local rules and flavours, instead of stage-managed debates, backroom manoeuvers and centralized voting?

Given our parliamentary system, I’d actually prefer a return to MPs choosing the leader. But as that’s too radical and “elitist” for these fiercely nonconformist times, who’s up for the B.C. straw poll, the Ontario primary and the Nova Scotia caucus?

This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 10: Here’s a job you don’t want: The federal Joint Review Panel began 18 months of hearings today on the proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline to carry oil from Bruderheim, AB to Kitimat, BC. Talk about mind-crushing boredom combined with blazing political controversy then dunked in total irrelevance.

See? You’re bored already. But I’m plunging ahead because North American energy security matters and so does bogus participatory democracy.

Start with the boredom. The panel’s original schedule for hearings has already been extended by a year because over 4500 people want to yap, though the panel “does not expect oral statements to be longer than 10 minutes” (good luck with that mate). It’s too late to register for those, by the way. But don’t worry. The usual suspects heard of them in plenty of time to grab a spot at the mike. But what for? What can anyone say in 10 minutes that will sway the panel? Especially the 4,500^th person, filling the 45,000^th minute?

After hearing all this chatter and being bothered at length by “Intervenors” (too late to register for that too, but you can still write by March 13 and they promise “Panel members will read and consider all letters of comment” although they may consider them ridiculous), any members who have not expired from boredom and frustration will make a recommendation complete, if positive, with conditions that may number in the hundreds (the Mackenzie Valley pipeline approval had 264). That recommendation will then go to the Minister of the Environment and, once the government has responded, the panel will make a final decision. After which someone will sue.

This process stinks. There’s been a considerable ruckus, including on this network, over the fact that foreigners are giving money to pipeline opponents. But that one doesn’t bother me at all. Since I have worked for several Canadian think tanks that received at least some money from foreign foundations I would be hypocritical to take the opposite view. But it never bothered me then, and doesn’t now, because intelligent thought about policy issues doesn’t stop at national borders nor, often, does the practical impact of decisions governments make. Including environmental ones.

Lots of people believe, wrongly in my view, that this pipeline and the associated oil tanker traffic would harm ecosystems including international ones. But I welcome their trying to help the Canadian government get the best information it possibly can. If it turns out the pipeline would be a mistake I’d be grateful to anyone who helps us avoid blundering, especially at their own expense. And given the crushing boredom of hearing thousands of people stammer and rave their way through the same talking points, I welcome anyone who might help supporters or opponents of the project speak clearly, to the point and briefly.

I also note that Canadians, like everyone else, give Americans endless pointed advice on the environment, defence and every other topic under the sun. And while Americans don’t have to listen, they often hear something good if they do. Like Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard address warning them against socialism and a failure of nerve and blasting the peace movement for abandoning Indochina.

So all means slick up the presentations. But could somebody then cut them short? What really gets me about this process is the false participatory sheen. As the panel acidly notes, their decision “will be made on the content of the information it receivers and not on the number of individuals that relay the same message…. Repeating similar views a number of times does not provide the Panel with useful information.”

So why let so many people do it? Especially given scathing commentary about President Barack Obama deferring a decision on the KeystoneXL pipeline until after the coming election. And given that the Northern Gateway question probably won’t be settled by what’s said in the hearings at all.

The way we actually make decisions, and it is participatory if not perfectly so, is through elections. But you can bet the government will point to the hearings as proof of an “open” process and to dodge the dreaded charge of “elitism” that results if you just win an election and then govern, that is, make decisions not everyone likes.

So: Foreign money? Bring it on. Endless gabbing? Shut it off. Panel members? Stock up on coffee ... and aspirin.

This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 9: When Mexico joined NAFTA back in 1994 it looked as though, after centuries of undemocratic rule and economic stagnation, Mexicans were going to get an open society – not just open commercially but politically. Those hopes seem to be withering, and a major reason why is drugs. Or rather, the war on drugs.

To most of us, Mexico only makes the news when a Canadian tourist or visitor is murdered – atrocious but apparently random acts of violence. The sad truth is that Mexico is suffering a devastating breakdown of its government and the main reason is the drug trade. Among other things, tens of thousands of Mexicans have died violently since late 2006. And the question every sane person has to ask is: Is it worth it?

To some people, including me as well as Ron Paul, the state telling adults they may not take a harmful substance is wrong in principle so the answer is obviously not. John Locke, hardly a pothead, said we enter society to protect our lives and property and we not only should not ask the state to go beyond that in making other people act the way we want, we can’t, because we can delegate to the state only powers we actually possess.

In a “state of nature,” if no society and government exist, my natural right to self-preservation lets me prevent you from killing or robbing me. So I can authorize the state to do so on my behalf. But since in a state of nature I have no right to use force to stop you drinking beer, smoking marijuana or shooting heroin, I can’t have the state do it for me.

I know a lot of people, including conservatives, don’t agree with Locke. They think the very act of becoming intoxicated, at least with some drugs, constitutes harming others by creating the moral equivalent of air pollution. I’m not sure I see the principled basis of this argument but it persuades a lot of people and I don’t want to tackle it here.

What I do want to say, to anyone anywhere on the political spectrum who favours prohibition of at least some drugs and vigorous enforcement of laws against them, is that to support such a policy in a reasonable way, you have to take into account its costs as well as supposed benefits. Including the enormous damage drug trade money does to governance in other countries, especially poor ones.

To be sure, Mexico’s GDP is around the same size as ours. But its population is nearly four times as large so its per capita income is way less. And especially near the U.S. border the gross revenue of the drug trade, on which estimates vary enormously but go as high as $50 billion, dwarfs the opportunities for legitimate earnings among many people crucially including local police. The drug war has also punched huge holes in the southern border of the United States, and as debacles like Operation Fast and Furious indicate has embarrassed if not undermined the integrity of some American law enforcement officials.

I am not so naïve as to suppose all Mexico’s governmental problems come from drug money. It has been badly governed since before Columbus. Aztec rule was a horror; the Spanish Empire was arrogant, bureaucratic, corrupt and stagnant; independence in 1821 essentially replicated that system on a local scale; the revolution of 1910 ushered in a decade of civil war that killed 10% of the population, followed by the unjust, arrogant, stagnant rule by the tragicomically named Institutional Revolutionary Party.

For NAFTA not just to turn a page in this history, but open a new volume, was a long shot. But the 2000 election of Vicente Fox Quesada of the National Action Party, the first non-IRP president since the revolution, showed how many Mexicans were tired of the existing system and its nationalist/collectivist rhetoric. Whatever you think of the morality, or practicality, of the drug war inside the U.S. and Canada, what is happening now in Mexico thanks to the vast profits of the illegal drug trade is doubly tragic, not merely breaking down law and order but threatening to block long-overdue national reformation.

Perhaps some argument can be made that it is nevertheless worthwhile. But it needs to be made… and I can’t make it.

Click here to read.

The elaborate American system of primaries, caucuses and straw polls strikes some people as too long and complicated. But it certainly gives voters, and the politically committed, a thorough look at the ideas and characters of candidates... if they have either. And while the concept of an "open" or "semi-open" primary where people who aren't even members of your party can vote might seem scary to those who prefer their politics tightly controlled from the centre, it's a good way of testing the ability of possible leaders to appeal to the general public while keeping the party faithful happy. For my money, Canadian contests like the current NDP leadership race would be more interesting, and more useful to the party and the nation, if the candidates were going out and trying to win over party members and Canadians generally in a loose series of very public provincial contests with locally determined rules and local flavours, instead of staged national debates, backroom endorsement-winning manoeuvres and a highly centralized voting process.

Of course, for all their elaborate nominating process Americans often get mediocre leaders or, worse, ones who leave you longing for good old mediocrity. But I'd argue that Canadians too have had more than our share of hapless or disastrous political masters, and in my view our system means we are far more likely to get handed a dud than pick him or her ourselves after proper consideration.

I'd actually like to see a return to the days when the parliamentary caucus chose the leader, which I think is more in keeping with the parliamentary system. But if that's too radical for our progressively populist times, who's up for the B.C. straw poll, the Ontario primary and the Nova Scotia caucus?