Gods of the Copybook Headings

As the World Passes Us By

Among the more pernicious comments one hears in modern Canada is this:  "We're better than most places in the world."  Mediocrity and smugness, our two gravest sins, summed up perfectly.  It's worse than that old joke about the softball team cheering "We're #2."  It's the softball team gloating about how they're better than average.  Excellence is not among our virtues, it seems.  My working thesis of Canadian history is that of a duel - indeed I'm trying to write a book on exactly this topic - between Sir John A Macdonald and George Brown.  For most of the last 140 odd years it's John A who's won the war, with Brown scoring some significant upsets.  It's a war we're still seeing waged today, between freedom and statism on one level, but deeper still between the cult of compromise and that of principled thought and action.

It's unlikely that John A would have approved wholeheartedly of the Trudeaupian experiment.  Despite the best efforts of scholars there is no evidence that our first Prime Minister approved of either abortion or socialized health care, though his support of woman's suffrage is often cited as proof of his liberality.  Take that George Washington!  It is less often noted that he supported female suffrage because he, like most politicians and thinkers of the time, believed that the vote should only be given to property owners i.e. the poor shouldn't have the right the vote.  Why not?  Because if you gave the poor the vote they'd vote themselves the wealth of the rich.  For evidence of this please refer to the previous 60 years of federal and provincial budgets.  Our first Prime Minister was a moderate statist, a belief that a little bit more government goes a long away.  This is, of course, a relative position.  Subsidizing railroad construction doesn't seem that interventionist by modern standards, but Macdonald's two great boondoggles, the Grand Trunk and Canadian Pacific Railroad, nearly bankrupted the country. 

Contrary to popular myth Macdonald was no pragmatist, instead he was a ideological politician with a keen eye for any chance to implement his ideas.  One of this country's leading public intellectuals, Frank Underhill (a figure largely and sadly forgotten), observed correctly that Macdonald was in fact a Hamiltonian (the book to read is In Search of Canadian Liberalism).  Like Alexander Hamilton, John A believed that government should encourage certain strategic industries to promote national development and strength, key among these banking and transportation.  In the 20th century these policies have acquired the name dirigisme, though its modern practice is far more aggressive that either men could have envisioned or perhaps desired.  For Hamilton this meant the creation of a quasi-central bank (the First Bank of the United States), high tariff walls to protect infant industries and subsidies for canal construction.  Macdonald's gloss on this was railroad subsidies and a national policy that combined tariffs with high immigration levels (never quite achieved in Western Canada until after his death).  No serious attempt to set up central bank was made in Canada until the 1930s, though the banking system was centralized and highly regulated since before Macdonald's entry into elective politics.

The rationale for these policies was of transforming weak colonies into great powers, explicitly citing British economic history as a pattern to be followed.  The end result of these policies is not, as Hamilton and Macdonald assumed, rapid economic growth.  Britain emerged as a great power not because of its high tariffs, which were never as high as say those of Portugal or Spain (see Book IV of The Wealth of Nations), but because of its relative economic freedom.  The highly sophisticated system of British canals, and later paved national roads (turnpikes) and railroads was built almost entirely with private funds and under private direction.  The British state confined itself to regulating freight and passenger charges, under the old common law tradition of a common carrier.  A youthful William Gladstone suggested, in the 1840s, nationalizing the British rail system (which was eventually done almost exactly a century later), and shocked his cabinet colleagues by doing so.  The British example was a canard.  Britain had only seemed to have grown rich and strong because of a Hamiltonian style system.  In any case the Hamiltonian system, though influential, had a limited impact on American economic development. 

The sheer scale of the United States, and the fiscal limits imposed upon the federal government by the original constitution, mitigated the extent of the practice of the Hamiltonian approach.  Despite high profile projects like the Erie Canal and the transcontinental railroad, the vast majority of American infrastructure was built by private capital.  High tariffs excluded superior British goods, but the natural tariff of distance was perhaps just as influential in the early years of the republic, and the country's vast internal market always ensured hearty competition and innovation.

None of this could be said of Canada.  Our small population and low density rendered any Hamiltonian style policy far more influential in our development.  The Erie Canal was one of many canals, the Union Pacific one of many transcontinental, all relying on various degrees of government support, but still employing mostly private capital.  While the CPR did enjoy massive loans from the Bank of Montreal, loans which would have destroyed the bank had Macdonald not arranged several last minute bail-outs (including one in the aftermath of Riel's second rebellion in 1885), federal loans, grants and guarantees loomed far larger in their finances and our economic development. 

High tariffs were a nuisance to the growing American giant, to our farmers and consumer they imposed a real hardship as cheaper goods from the south were denied them.  Their long term impact was also far more pernicious.  American corporations capable of surviving the Darwinian marketplaces of the Republic had little trouble selling their wares to the world.  Companies raised in the Canadian hothouse, such as the now defunct Massey-Ferguson, were unlikely to survive, or inclined to try, the marketplaces of the world.  This lead in turn to a vicious cycle of Canadian business becoming dependent on protection, which also took the form of foreign ownership restrictions (particular for our banks and insurance companies), and refusing to relinquish these protections as time passed.  What began as protection for infant industries became a form of addiction.  This protectionist attitude, begun in heavy industry, spread to finance and then to culture.  Reaching its zenith in the 1970s, though still very much alive today (wait for Dalton McGuinty to open his mouth), its two greatest testaments are perhaps the CBC and the Bricklin car, Canadian products even Canadians don't want to buy, if they get a choice.

The end result can be observed in the recently released book by Andrea Mandel-Campbell, Why Mexicans Don't Drink Molson.  As noted in the Amazon review:

Using illustrative examples too numerous to list (but including the titular Molson company whose colossal failure in Brazil is emblematic of Canada's larger foreign expansion problem), Mandel-Campbell describes a nation hobbled by arrogance, diffidence, xenophobia, short-sightedness, excessive government intervention, and a general lack of moxie, as well as some really appalling manners.

We are provincial creatures of the Macdonald hothouse.  It's unlikely that John A himself, too shrewd a politician, would have accepted the status quo.  What has prevented a real questioning of the hothouse mentality, apart from that rich bounty of natural resources that has so often saved us from ourselves, is another Macdonald invention, the cult of compromise.  It's sheer success has, in hindsight, made Macdonald seem like a pragmatist, his own excellent political timing (such as campaigning for high tariffs just when it became clear that the Americans weren't interest in signing a free trade deal in the mid-1870s), obscured this as well.  Yet a closer examination of his career reveals a broad Hamiltonian approach where possible.  He defended a free trade deal with the United States in the 1850s and 1860s, though only in natural products. Three decades before the completion of the CPR he helped incur a massive debt for the then province of Canada to build the Grand Trunk Railway (stretching from Windsor to Quebec City), the longest railroad in the world.  The CPR originated corruption and political alienation of rural Western Canada in the early years of the 20th century, was presaged by the Grand Trunk nearly a half century earlier. 

His creation of the cult of compromise stemmed in part from a political culture dominated by rent seeking activities, though Canada was far from alone in this, but far more so from his alliance with Francophone Quebec.  To Macdonald the alliance was practical politics, a necessary step to implementing his agenda of economic and political development.  The alliance rested on a code of silence, kept to this day by federal politicians, including Stephen Harper, demanding that Anglophones never ask too many questions, or make too many criticisms, about the appalling backwardness of Quebec's political culture. 

For all the charm and richness of Francophone culture, political freedom has been at best misunderstood phenomenon among them.  Rejecting modernity in the Victorian era and for most of the 20th century, they accepted a faddish version thereof with a vengeance during the Quiet Revolution.  Amidst these controversies, and the many abuses that occurred, the Rest of Canada remained silent.  While the Duplessis government persecuted Jehovah's Witnesses, English speaking Canada remained silent.  When, in the years before Confederation, Catholic Bishops such as Andre Bourget proclaimed the supremacy of church over state, the ROC pretended not to notice, despite having just fought a two decade struggle over the separation of church and state.  Highway overpass bridges collapse in Quebec - a very rare occurrence in Ontario - and there are some veiled comments in the MSM about problems in the province's construction industry.  Everyone is too polite to notice that Adscam is almost entirely a product of the Quebec branch of the Liberal Party, as are most of the major scandals of Canadian political history.  For 140 years we have had a near third world political cultural grafted onto one of the world's leading liberal democracies.  To make that kind of alliance work in practice requires evasions on a massive scale, that in turn requires a cult of compromise that effectively silences debate.  If we say anything too controversial we might just upset the Quebecois, whether on prohibition, conscription, foreign policy, abortion or health care.  The ROC invariably leans one way on an issue and Quebec the other. 

This has not been entirely a bad thing, it helped prevent a US style system of prohibition being introduced, our armed forces were overwhelmingly composed of volunteers in both world wars and our ability to navigate between the superpowers during the Cold War did accord us some international clout, however ephemeral.  Yet it stifles debate to an extent the generation that founded this country could not have imagined.  Not being acclimatized to strong principled debate, we began to assume these were American traits.  English Canadians used to boast about being free born subjects, this didn't play too well in Quebec so we toned it down.  Now two generations of Canadian students know nothing about Magna Carta, Simon de Montfort, the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and precious little about the Rebellions of 1837-8.  Canadians are about compassion, repeats the ahistorical mantra.  John A was a firm and principled defender of basic civil liberties, even going so far as to help defend a man accused (and later convicted) of treason when no one else would.  Whose side do you think he would have been on during the Ezra Levant controversy? 

Macdonald's nemesis, George Brown, was widely hated in Quebec during his lifetime, and since, for the nasty habit telling unpleasant truths.  That the separation of church and state did not exist Quebec, thereby breeding an undemocratic political culture.  That massive government subsidies for railroads creates an unholy alliance of big business and big government, to the economic and political detriment of the nation.  That free trade, free markets and low taxes are the only real practical ways of stimulating and maintaining economic growth.  His attacks on the Catholic Church, at least in part motivated by his strong protestant convictions, enraged the man in the street and field.  His attacks on government intervention alienated the Montreal business elite.  His defense of freedom alienated everyone else, especially the overwhelming majority of the intellectual classes in the province.  Brown, and his newspaper The Globe, had an uncanny ability to say what everyone was thinking but didn't have the guts or talent to do so.  He and Mark Steyn would have gotten along famously.

If Mexicans are ever going to drink Molson, we need not a William F Buckley as some have suggested, but another George Brown.  Our history is rich enough, if we bother looking, to furnish examples for Reform.  Otherwise the world will continue to pass us by.

Assorted Links: May 12, 2008

"C'mon Boys, Remember that You're Canadians"

The words of an officer leading an attack during the 2nd Battle of Ypres.  The Germans had launched the first modern poison gas attack on a position held by French and Canadian units.  The French ran, the Canadians launched a counter attack that prevented a German outbreak near the village of St. Julien.  True Canadian Battles that Forged Our Nation 1759-1953 recounts 17 battles stretching from Samuel Champlain's alliance with the Hurons against the Iroquois to the battle of Kap'yong during the Korean War.  Written by Arthur Bishop, WWII Spitfire pilot, public relations executive and son of the legendary Billy Bishop, in a vivid and clear style.  Originally published in 1996 as Canada's Glory: Battles That Forged A Nation, Key Porter has recently re-issued under its Prospero Books label and is being sold at Chapters-Indigo in the "bargains" section.  The book perfectly puts paid to the notion that we are only a nation of peace-keepers.  We didn't peace-keep up Vimy Ridge or onto the beaches of Normandy and here is a concise one volume proof of that fact.

"England will not exist in the year 2000."

No, these are not the words of Enoch Powell, or some other nasty right winger, but of Al Gore's personal hero Paul Ehrlich - who's field of expertise is actually butterflies.  Walter Williams has some fun with doom-mongers of years past.

At the first Earth Day celebration, in 1969, environmentalist Nigel Calder warned, "The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind." C.C. Wallen of the World Meteorological Organization said, "The cooling since 1940 has been large enough and consistent enough that it will not soon be reversed." In 1968, Professor Paul Ehrlich, Vice President Gore's hero and mentor, predicted there would be a major food shortage in the U.S. and "in the 1970s ... hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." Ehrlich forecasted that 65 million Americans would die of starvation between 1980 and 1989, and by 1999 the U.S. population would have declined to 22.6 million. Ehrlich's predictions about England were gloomier: "If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000."

In 1972, a report was written for the Club of Rome warning the world would run out of gold by 1981, mercury and silver by 1985, tin by 1987 and petroleum, copper, lead and natural gas by 1992. Gordon Taylor, in his 1970 book "The Doomsday Book," said Americans were using 50 percent of the world's resources and "by 2000 they [Americans] will, if permitted, be using all of them." In 1975, the Environmental Fund took out full-page ads warning, "The World as we know it will likely be ruined by the year 2000."

Only on the academic left, even in the physical sciences, could me n get away with being so wrong so often and keep his job.

A Sad and Desperate Woman

You've probably guessed who I'm talking about.  It's been over fifteen years since we first set eyes on this reptilian second hander and her used car salesman persona husband.  Wealth, power and education make poor substitutes for creatures who seek power for its own sake.  My fellow conservatives, we are not cruel, we do not seek to punish beyond need.  Is it time for us to feel sorry for Hilary Clinton?  This vain and petty thing has polluted the political cultural of our American friends too long.  Yet there is something truly pathetic about her lies and obfuscations, it's all pointless now.  It isn't just that the Republicans are the party of grown-ups, they're the party of dignity and decency, relatively speaking. 

Witness Mitt Romney, a man denounced by conservatives as being a flip-flopper and opportunist.  Surely he is, by Republican standards.  By the standards of the Dems he is a man of rock solid integrity.  When it became quite clear he had lost the nomination he stepped aside.  It was the right and classy thing to do. Mike Huckabee lingered a little too long, but he had a point to make, as does Ron Paul.  What point is Hillary making?  What does she offer except a soul-less pragmatism?  Years ago the Hildebeast, as one of this blog's regular readers likes to call her, admitted that as a teenager she very much admired Ayn Rand's classic novel, The Fountainhead.  The youthful Hillary Rodham also campaigned for Barry Goldwater.  Power lusters soon enough know their own.  She did not belong with those who follow Jefferson in saying that the government which governs least governs best. 

Near the end of The Fountainhead the hero, Howard Roark, meets again Peter Keating, the novel's pragmatic second hander and architectural flavour of the month. Keating's derivative style and desperate need for approval lead to professional and personal failure.  After begging Roark to design a public housing complex, which Keating is incapable of doing, he leaves.  Roark's response, contrary to the Rand stereotypes, is one of pity and then revulsion at the very idea of pity.  Keating was a human being utterly lost and barren; Roark grieves at the loss and hatred for the notion that pity is a noble sentiment.  Loss is something to be fought and rebelled against where possible, by Roark's code. 

Hillary Clinton is a wreck of a human being, but no longer a real danger to the American body politic.  It is appropriate enough that her ambitions were ruined by her very lack of principles, millions of Democrats saw Clinton's cynicism and Obama's supposed idealism and went after the idealism.  That those ideals are pernicious is beside the point here, between cynicism and idealism people will always feel drawn toward the ideal, sometimes like moths to a flame.  So what should we feel about this creature?  Pity?  Contempt?  Sadness at the loss of a human soul?  Or simply anger at a culture that allows such beings to destroy themselves, and many others as well in the process?  Freedom isn't just good for the economy, its good for the soul as well.

25 Million

Speaking of the Atheist Capitalist Devil, as she is often portrayed, Ayn Rand's works have just passed the 25 million sales mark.  A remarkable accomplishment for any author, particularly given such a small body of works, it is astonishing - we would say miraculous, but we won't - given their intellectual content and philosophical approach.  Are all 25 million purchasers living in their parents' basement?  Never held down real jobs?  Don't give a damn for anyone but themselves? Humourless? Never read a book by anyone except Ayn Rand?  Please add your own cliches.  Yes, many, many admirers of Rand's works and thought fit these descriptions but 25 million?  It's not like Star Wars fans watching the same movie 20 times.  Like it or not Ayn Rand is mainstream.  Live with it.

Since the publication of Ayn Rand's first novel, We the Living, 72 years ago, sales of her books increased exponentially, having recently reached the mark of 25 million copies, a staggering figure considering the length of her two major novels and the philosophical nature of their themes and ideas.

We the Living, whose theme Ayn Rand described as "the supreme value of a human life and the evil of a totalitarian state that claims the right to sacrifice it," had a small initial printing of three thousand copies. The novel, which tells the story of three individuals facing an all-powerful communist state, steadily gained popularity through word of mouth, as did all of Ayn Rand's novels, and 70 years later has sold more than 3 million copies.

Anthem, Ayn Rand's shortest novel, was published two years later, in 1938, and so far has sold more than 4 million copies. Anthem portrays the struggle of an individual to discover his ego and gain his independence in a futuristic society where individualism is ruthlessly suppressed and the word "I" is no longer used--in conversation or thought.

The recurring theme of the conflict between individualism and collectivism is also present in Ayn Rand's third novel, The Fountainhead, published in 1943. This conflict is dramatized in the story of Howard Roark, an architect whose independent vision and unbreakable artistic integrity pits him against the mediocrity and conformism prevalent in his own profession and in the society of his time. Sales of The Fountainhead reached 20,000 copies in its first six months of existence, climbed to 150,000 copies two years after its initial publication, and recently surpassed 6.5 million copies.

Ayn Rand's last and most important novel, Atlas Shrugged, was first published in 1957 and, like The Fountainhead, has sold more than 6 million copies since its release. With a theme stated by Ayn Rand as "the role of the mind in man's existence," it sought to demonstrate "a new moral philosophy: the morality of rational self-interest" and to present a "moral defense of capitalism." The plot of Atlas Shrugged involves the mysterious disappearance of the most able and productive individuals in a collectivist society that oppresses and exploits them while refusing to recognize their need to function in freedom.

Right premises indeed.

Born in the USA

Keeping with the Ayn Rand theme, the flight of medical talent from our socialized health care system is an unacknowledged version of Atlas Shrugging.  Nothing quite so dramatic, or philosophically explicit, as hiding out in a secret valley in Colorado, just thousands of doctors saying that they've had enough and leaving.  On a wider scale this process was seen in Britain during the post-war consensus, lasting until its reversal under Mrs T, highly skilled professionals in all areas fleeing to Canada, Australia and the United States.  Medicare also parallels the world of Atlas Shrugged in its allocation of resources along bureaucratic and political lines.  Here is yet another case in point:

More than 100 Canadian women with high-risk pregnancies have been sent to United States hospitals over the past year – in what a doctors' group attributes to the lack of a national birthing plan.

The problem has peaked, with British Columbia and Ontario each sending a record number of women to U.S. neonatal intensive care units (NICUs). Specifically, 80 B.C. women have been sent to U.S. hospitals since April 1, 2007; in Ontario, 28 have been sent since January of 2007, according to figures from the respective health ministries.

André Lalonde, executive vice-president of the Society of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists of Canada, said the problem is due to bed closings that took place almost a decade ago, the absence of a national birthing initiative and too few staff.

“Neonatologists are very stretched right now,” Dr. Lalonde said in a telephone interview from Ottawa. “We're so stretched, it's kind of dangerous.”

Do the Americans have a "national birthing plan?"  Nice Stalinist ring too, eh?  Maybe it's the plans that are the problem.  Planned chaos, as Rand's old friend Ludwig von Mises used to say.

"A Blood Libel on Our Civilization"

What on earth has prompted Ben Stein to become a raving creationist?  Nothing on earth, actually.  One of the problems of trying to balance reason and faith is never knowing when to draw the line.  Reason is fine, it seems, in trying to understand the common law or free market economics, but it fails us when trying to trace the Origin of Species?  There is a reason creationist biologists are treated with contempt by most scientists, they're incompetent.  If Old Publius decided he wanted to become a Catholic priest, perish the thought, he would be rightly refused entry on the grounds that he is an infidel in very good standing.  If you're not playing by the ground rules of the scientific method, then you shouldn't be working as a scientist.  That some environmentalists are getting away with the same type of con, this time with man made causes for global warming, is not an excuse.  Derb on Expelled:

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

The “intelligent design” hoax is not merely non-science, nor even merely anti-science; it is anti-civilization. It is an appeal to barbarism, to the sensibilities of those Apaches, made by people who lack the imaginative power to know the horrors of true barbarism. (A thing that cannot be said of Darwin. See Chapter X of Voyage of the Beagle.)

And yes: When our greatest achievements are blamed for our greatest moral failures, that is a blood libel against Western civilization itself. What next, Ben? Johann Sebastian Bach ran a slave-trading enterprise on the side? Kepler started the Thirty Years War? Tolstoy instigated the Kishinev Pogrom? Dante was a bag-man for the Golden Horde? Why not go smash a few windows in Chartres Cathedral, Ben? Break wind in a chamber-music concert? Splash some red paint around in the Uffizi? Which other of our civilizational achievements would you like to sneer at? What else from what Waugh called “the work of centuries” would you like to “abandon … for sentimental qualms”? You call yourself a conservative? Feugh!

For shame, Ben Stein, for shame. Stand up for your civilization, man! and all its glories. The barbarians are at the gate, as they always have been. Come man the defenses with us, leaving the liars and fools to their lies and folly.

King Stephen

Academics have been bemoaning the concentration of power in the hands of the PMO since Sir John A was in knee pants.  What has changed since John A's day is the institutional power now accorded to the PMO.  Previously a charismatic and forceful leader could act in a dictatorial manner, witness Macdonald and Laurier, though neither were consistently so.  A weak PM, such as the four leaders who served between Macdonald's death and Laurier's historic 1896 win, were usually incapable of controlling cabinet or shepherding key legislation through the house.  A figure like Paul Martin would likely have been thrown out of office in a cabinet putsch in Victorian Canada, the institutional powers that have accumulated to the PMO give mediocrities a chance to rule, until the electorate has their say.  From whence does this power grow?  We may blame the media in part, not in the sense in which the media is usually blamed, which is in the same sense as people's parents get blamed, but the very nature of modern media. 

The pre-modern media was far more mediated, though no less edited.  You read about something that happened or heard someone talk about something that happened.  The only events you could directly perceive and hear were those in your local community, a very small place by modern standards - Toronto had a population of about 50,000 in 1867.  A local newspaper and local member of parliament were vital sources of news, biased though they might be.  Items of national importance came filtered through these two sources, greatly increasing their power.  The only news outlet, at the time of Confederation, with any pretense at being national was The Globe.  Modern media is today almost entirely national in origin, save the nightly newscast and certain sections of the newspaper.  As such, there simply isn't enough time to focus on your local MP, MPP or MLA, less attention means less power in elective politics.

The rise of a nationally focused and based media has been paralleled by the modern obsession with "democracy."  The founding fathers of both Canada and United States abhorred the term and considered it one of abuse.  Democracy was what the Athenians had, unconstrained mob rule.  Whatever their differences, which were important but not enormous by current standards, the founders of both countries were constitutionalists, they believed in the rule of law and accepted elective institutions not as arbiters of truth but as means of keeping governments accountable to the governed.  Observe the original designs of the U.S. Senate and its Canadian equivalent.  This healthy skepticism of majority rule waned in the early decades of the 20th century, giving way to a populist notion of Vox populi, Vox dei. 

This belief came to be embodied in the political reform movements of the time, calling for "democracy" as a key to cleaning up North American political system.  Reformers targeted the election of political party leaders as being in special need of democratic improvement.  In Canada this came to fruition in the 1919 Liberal Leadership Convention, where leaders were directly elected by delegates from ridings across the country.  The previous method had been for members of the Parliamentary caucus to elect a party leader.  This proved to be the vital moment in the birth of the Imperial Prime Minister.  As time passed leaders were less and less accountable to their caucus and far more so to the national party, a highly fluid entity often stacked with the leader's appointees.  Leadership conventions soon transformed themselves into the vote buying exercises they have largely become, some recent minor reforms notwithstanding.  Trudeau observed that MPs were nobodies a few hundred yards from Parliament Hill, thanks to the modern media and modern understandings of democracy, he was at least right about that.

Assorted Links: May 5, 2008

"The Angry Metis"

Why do people threaten to kill or harm Darcey?  I suspect it's because they've never met the man.  He is of slight build, moderate height and about 2% body fat, the rest of him is muscle and steel.  So are his friends.  Just not a smart idea.

I'm not sure what to say about the deluge of Sikh trolls coming onto this site and using their race as some sort of argument for advancing terrorism but I'm getting a little tired of it. Actually - I'm getting a little irritated. In white man's terms it means I'm furious and I'm doing everything I can do to control myself. You friggin idiots just pissed off a Metis who has always been fair.

Idiots in their multicultural ghettos with their heads up their multicultural enclave ghetto asses paying no attention to how their actions reflect on the rest of us or affect the rest of us need a good old time ass kicking or need a good old time airline ticket back to their precious old country  - I'm willing to provide either one.

One more threatening anonymous phonecall, one more threatening email, one more shit comment and I'll bring in a shitstorm of Metis hunters who are not as nice as me - from coast to coast.

We are the cockroaches of society and we are the original Canadians.

When you don't threaten to kill him he prefers a hug to a handshake and always offers to buy you a drink.  Just not a smart bunch these punks.  When my parents arrived in this country they were told to leave their old quarrels in the old country.  Why, again, did we stop telling immigrants this? 

The Era of Big Government

Still not over.  Not even close.

The welfare state should have peaked in the 70's, writes Business Edge's D'Arcy Jenish. However, it continues to grow. Today 3.3 million work in the public sector in Canada, more than 10 percent of the population. Technology, which allows businesses to do more with less people, failed to make the government any smaller. And, even if programs don't work anymore, they often still continue. The Fraser Institute has more on this topic here.

What on earth are all these people doing?  I ask merely for information.  Nearly a fifth of the workforce of the country works for the state.  In a country where Prime Minister Stephen Harper is considered a "far right-wing" conservative, this is only to be expected.

Falling Behind

Apropos of nothing, really, we follow a piece on the vast expansion of the public sector with news that Rogers is bringing the iPhone to Canada, one year after its release in the United States.  I'm sure the delay is the result of a terrible misunderstanding, and has nothing to do with regulatory approval or a legally enforced cable and telephone duopoly.

The hugely popular iPhone is coming to Canada.

Telecom giant Rogers announced Tuesday that it has brokered a deal with Apple to sell the high-tech smartphone north of the border later this year.

"We're thrilled to announce that we have a deal with Apple to bring the iPhone to Canada," said company president Ted Rogers in a statement. "We can't tell you any more about it right now, but stay tuned."

The phone allows users to listen to voice messages in the order they prefer; to select numbers by touch screen; and to watch movies in high resolution. It currently sells in the United States for between US$400 and $500.

The news came on the heels of a strong few months for Rogers, which doubled its first-quarter profits this year, reporting net earnings of $344 million. During the same period a year earlier it made $170 million.

Fun With Numbers

The pretzel logic of the equalization system reaches its climax; the richest province in the country is soon to be a "have not."

Ontario will soon be a have-not province, and is poised to start collecting equalization payments in two years, economists at Toronto-Dominion Bank say.

Ontario's economy is struggling to deal with the compounding effects of high energy costs, a strong loonie, and now a U.S. downturn, the economists note in a paper published Tuesday morning. But it's the rising prosperity of the energy-rich provinces, and not Ontario's actions, that have turned Ontario into a have-not, their paper argues.

“The change in Ontario's equalization status is essentially a story of soaring commodity prices,” say Derek Burleton, director of economic studies, and Don Drummond, chief economist. “There is much more at play here than just Ontario's economy.”

They calculate that Ontario would be eligible to receive $400-million in federal equalization transfers in the 2010-2011 fiscal year, and $1.3-billion in fiscal 2011-2012.

But Mr. Drummond is skeptical about whether Ontario would actually ever see any equalization money, even if it does qualify.

He notes that in the 1970s, Ontario was eligible for payments, and actually received some money, as energy prices soared. But support for Ontario was not politically acceptable, and so Ottawa changed the equalization formula, and retroactively clawed back Ontario's payments.

Leaving aside the envy laden terms "have" and "have not," which could have been lifted from the supposedly unrealistic dialog of an Ayn Rand villain, the equalization formula works as follows:

Equalization payments are based on a formula that calculates the difference between the per capita revenue yield that a particular province would obtain using average tax rates and the national average per capita revenue yield at average tax rates. The current formula considers five major revenue sources (see below). The objective of the program is to ensure that all provinces have access to per capita revenues equal to the potential average of all ten provinces. The formula is based solely on revenues and does not consider the cost of providing services or the expenditure need of the provinces.

In other words its not people that "have" or "have not," its governments.  Each of the provincial governments must have a per capita revenue base equal to the Canadian average, if the average goes up sufficiently, because Alberta is enjoying another oil boom, then Ontario, which is roughly speaking standing still, becomes "have not."  The system provides a perverse incentive to poorer provincial governments to expand government services beyond what is required by the needs of their people, instead to as far as other provinces can afford to subsidize them.  There is no incentive to become self supporting or to rationalize government administration.  It is a program that effectively traps much of the country into welfare dependency.

Cool Conservatism

If you're wondering what Russ Kuykendall (aka Burkean Canuck) has been up to since abandoning his blog, check out this month's installment of the Interim, featuring an obituary on WFB.

Buckley wasn’t always right, er, correct. He opposed the civil rights movement. Buckley seemed unable to distinguish between the radicalism of Elijah Mohamed and Malcolm X and the peaceful, though militant, movement led by the black Baptist preacher Martin Luther King, Jr. Although undoubtedly conversant in the Christian doctrine of the “IMAGO DEI,” Buckley supported white Southern Dixiecrats’ adherence to Southern tradition and privilege over King’s aspirations for all Americans. Buckley also opposed George Bush’s invasion of Iraq and Norman Podhoretz’s characterization of the invasion and occupation of Iraq as an installment in “World War IV.”

There were other contradictions. Bill Buckley was a devout Catholic devoted to playing the music of the Lutheran Bach on his harpsichord and who inhabited the upper reaches of a Manhattan high society created by generations of Upper East Side WASPs. He disavowed physical exercise, but was an expert sailor who navigated Atlantic crossings three times. Buckley was a mid-Atlantic “Americanist” who married a West Coast Canadian socialite, his beloved Patricia. Buckley took a formerly dour, cranky conservatism and mounted a charm offensive with a wry sense of humour and mischievous turns of phrase populated by some of the English language’s most obscure vocabulary. He gave it a better wardrobe. Ronald Reagan’s easy ways and expansiveness were the California version of Buckley’s mid-Atlantic sophistication and winsomeness. Buckley made conservatism “cool!”

While I obviously disagree with Burkean's characterization of Rand's belief's as "radical individualism," at least in the pejorative sense implied, the central point of the article is dead on:  WFB made conservatism fun and attractive.

"Deserve Neither and Lose Both"

Lorne Gunter on the impracticality of video surveillance:

Cameras aren't even all that good at helping prosecutors convict criminals after the fact. In Britain, where there are nearly five-million security cameras — almost as many as in the rest of the world combined — the Home Office admits that in 80% of cases where camera evidence is available, it is of too poor quality even to be accepted by the courts, much less have any impact on the outcome of a trial.

A test of cameras in the Berlin subway two years ago convinced the German government to suspend plans to install them throughout the subway system. Of thousands of criminal incidents committed on the monitored lines, video footage was available in only 78 cases. In only a third of those was the footage of usable quality, and in most of those the crime was minor, such as turnstile jumping.

In the 1990s, New York City made great strides in cleaning up its subway system and streets. But it did so by putting more officers on platforms and trains. Police can see what cameras cannot, and they can respond immediately, rather than waiting to be summoned by those monitoring cameras.

Cameras are a sop, a symbolic reaction that merely enables timid politicians to say, "Look. See? We're doing something."

And, or course, they subject law-abiding citizens to scrutiny by the government when they have given the government no probable cause to warrant such watching.

Cameras are expensive and intrusive and, worst of all, ineffective.

The point about visual quality in court cases is a weak one.  Why not spend billions more upgrading the technology?  It makes little difference if you try to create a panopticon society, only to refuse to punish actual criminals.  As Sir Robert Peel, the father of modern policing, among many other things, observed in established the London police force, fighting crimes requires a combination of tough but fair sentencing matched with an effective system of detection and apprehension.  If you can't catch them, and won't punish them, it makes little sense in taking digital photos of what the Victorians called the criminal classes. 

Assorted Links: April 21, 2008

"Rudyard Kipling unburdened"

Roger Kimball in April's New Criterion:

Today, I suspect, Kipling is regarded chiefly as that most anodyne of literary practitioners: a children’s author, creator of the boy Mowgli, Kaa the python, and Shere Khan the Tiger, the genial-looking, pipe-puffing genius who wrote Kim and populated the imaginations of boys and girls with the sultry weather of the Raj, explained how the elephant got its trunk, and decorated it all with fastidious (little) poems that rhymed and scanned. Kipling was picturesque. He was born in romantic-sounding Bombay, and he got his precocious literary start in India after a decade of schooling in England. (His parents chose “Rudyard,” by the way, after a lake in Staffordshire where they courted.) If his stories are exotic, even scary at times, they are nonetheless wholesome or at least susceptible to Disneyfication.

How different it once was. Around the turn of the last century, at the apogee of Kipling’s fame, Mark Twain wrote that he was “the only living person not head of a nation, whose voice is heard around the world the moment it drops a remark, the only such voice in existence that does not go by slow ship and rail but always travels first-class by cable.” In Kipling, the zeitgeist briefly found its impresario. For a time, his authority was as much political as literary. Kipling gave speeches advocating British supremacy in India and South Africa. He opposed the suffragettes and home rule for Ireland. He could be downright strident. It was Kipling, one of his biographers speculates, who popularized the metonymy “Huns” (actually, he insisted on “huns” with a small “h”) for “Germans,” a subject on which he grew increasingly ferocious. By 1915, Kipling was insisting that there were “only two divisions in the world … human beings and Germans.” Kipling consistently refused state honors (a knighthood, the Order of Merit, the post of poet laureate) but by the late 1890s he was the undisputed if unofficial laureate—but also, which is sometimes forgotten, the Jeremiah—of Imperial Britain.

Which is another reason why I've never found Kipling uncouth, I thought Imperial Britain was a very good thing.  Warts and all.  The deeper reason why Kipling annoys most modern liberals is touched upon by Kimball later on in the piece:

The key word is “civilization.” Kipling was above all the laureate not of Empire, but of civilization, especially civilization under siege. Henry James once sniffed that there was only one strain absent in Kipling: that of “the civilized man.” It’s a frequent refrain. But in a deeper sense, Kipling was about almost nothing else—not the civilization of elegant drawing rooms, but something more primeval and without which those drawing rooms would soon be smashed and occupied by weeds. Kipling, Evelyn Waugh wrote toward the end of his life, “believed civilization to be something laboriously achieved which was only precariously defended. He wanted to see the defenses fully manned and he hated the liberals because he thought them gullible and feeble, believing in the easy perfectibility of man and ready to abandon the work of centuries for sentimental qualms.” Kipling endeavored to man those defenses partly through his political oratory, but more importantly through a literary corpus that taught the explicit lessons and the implicit rhythms of emotional continence and restraint.

Poets, by nature, are a pretty ethereal lot.  Romanticism only confirmed this impression, both in the general public and within the "profession" itself.  Kipling, with his rhythmic precision and earthy topics - can we imagine Coleridge writing paeans to businessmen, soldiers and engineers? - violated the impression and seemed therefore unpoetical as well as uncouth and impolitic.  He was the poet who belonged on earth.

Barbara Hall - Intellectual Thug

Having failed to regain political power, the former Toronto mayor has been appointed head of the Ontario Human Rights Commission.  She has gotten off to a roaring start, making an audacious bid to expand the powers of her office and the commission.  Ezra Levant, a famous victim of these commissions, gives the story the mainstream media is ignoring:

Which brings us to Barbara Hall, the awful new boss of the Ontario Human Rights Commission. She's the one who issued the guilty verdict against Maclean's magazine, without going through the trouble of having a trial of the matter. And, according to this interview with the National Post's Joseph Brean, she's just getting warmed up.

"I would say that for a province as large and as diverse as Ontario, to have 2,500 formal complaints a year, that that's a very low level," the activist lawyer and former mayor of Toronto said. In the long term she would like to see human rights complaints decrease, but in the interim they "may have to spike."

People aren't unhappy enough in Czarina Hall's Ontario. She will change that.

...she stood firmly by her position that media have a responsibility to put their writings through a "human rights filter" before publication, and said the commission is keen to call out those who do not, jurisdiction be damned.

What this cretin is implicitly, for now, asking for is the power of review over ever bit of journalistic writing in the country.  A "human rights filter" would probably mean a human rights "adviser" approved, if not actually selected by the commission, telling editors what can or cannot be published, much as a lawyer might advise on issues of libel and defamation.  The point is not whether the commission exercises direct control, for Hall's purposes self censorship is cheaper and less obviously interventionist, it's that these commissions, by the implicit threat of force, have the ability to shape the climate of opinion. 

This is done, of course, under the holy rubric that if we don't think unpleasant thoughts, unpleasant things won't happen.  Years ago when Hall was mayor of Toronto she, or one of her underlings, banned from Nathan Phillips square, the city's main public square in front of city hall, the music group Bare Naked Ladies.  This was before the Toronto based group achieved international stardom and many awards.  Ms Hall, or the underling, believed that the group's name was offensive to women.  This humourless puritanism made Hall look like a fool and the group, rightly, refused an apology.  Imagine such a creature having influence over the media of this country, which is already deep in the grips of political correctness.

Correction:  It seems that June Rowlands, not Barbara Hall, banned the Bare Naked Ladies.  So difficult to tell these statists apart...

How Darwin Killed the Jews

This piece in NRO is both obscene and preposterous.

There’s already been a volley of advance attacks on a new film’s suggestion of a link between Darwinism and Nazi ideology. The movie is Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, opening this weekend, a cheeky documentary that is not primarily about evolutionism in prewar Germany. Reviewers in Time, Scientific American, Variety, Fox News, and elsewhere have denounced the filmmakers for suggesting that Hitlerism without the contribution of Darwinism would be hard to imagine.

This movie is, in fact, about the professional ostracism visited today on American scientists who doubt that undirected natural selection can fully explain life’s development. They are academics at places like the Smithsonian Institution, Iowa State University, and Baylor University. Droll comic-actor Ben Stein stars, interviewing the researchers.

But for about ten minutes, Expelled touches on Darwinism’s historical social costs, notably the unintended contribution to Nazi racial theories. That part packs an emotional wallop. It also happens to be based on impeccable scholarship.

The Darwin-Hitler connection is no recent discovery. In her classic 1951 work The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote: “Underlying the Nazis’ belief in race laws as the expression of the law of nature in man, is Darwin’s idea of man as the product of a natural development which does not necessarily stop with the present species of human being.”

Like Hitler, Charles Darwin saw natural processes as setting moral standards. It’s all in The Descent of Man, where he explains that, had we evolved differently, we would have different moral ideas. On a particularly delicate moral topic, for example, he wrote: “We may, therefore, reject the belief, lately insisted on by some writers, that the abhorrence of incest is due to our possessing a special God-implanted conscience.”

In the same book, he compared the evolution of people to the breeding of animals and drew a chilling conclusion regarding what he saw as the undesirable consequences of allowing the unfit to breed:

“Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.” In this desacralized picture of existence, to speak of life as possessing any kind of holiness is to introduce an alien note.

Without God we are all murderers?  Unless man is the end product of some divinely ordained processes then men, it seems, will no longer regard human life as sacred?  I don't try to tag modern Christianity with the atrocities of the Inquisition, the persecution of the Jews, toleration of slavery by many Christian sects and the various crimes committed in the name of God.  This is because it is grossly unfair to compare modern Christians with the mystic thugs and witch doctors who have assumed that name in the past.  It is just as unfair to argue that because science seeks natural explanations it leads to a devaluation of human life. 

What does lead, and has through out history, to a denial of the sanctity of human life is a rejection of individualism and man's physical nature.  The slaughters engaged in lightly because God would know his own.  The burnings at the stake to destroy the flesh and purify the soul.  The murderous creed of the Nazis, the Communists and the Fascists had at it's center collectivism and its own form of mysticism, albeit in secular garb.  Whether it was the pseudo-science of eugenics, or the pseudo-economic jargon of the Marxists preaching the dialectic process - something even more logically absurd than the Trinity - fanaticism is fanaticism.  A modern age seeks modern rationalizations and facades, the essential madness remains the same. 

What's a Trillion?

C.D. Howe, mid-twentieth century Canadian liberalism's technocrat par excellent, never said "What's a million?"  This was one of Dief's bits of oratorical legerdemain, taking an off hand remark C.D. had made in the Commons, about how a government spending billions in wartime was bound to lose track of an odd million or two.  It was the sort of thing, however, that Pierre Trudeau should have said, it summed up the fiscal profligacy of his reign perfectly.  This stands in sharp contrast to the Liberalism of Howe and his two nominal political masters, Mackenzie King and Louis St. Laurent, men who consistently balanced, or nearly balanced, their peace time budgets. 

Until Trudeau the Liberal Party was a byword for fiscal prudence and economical restraint.  The early Trudeau years followed in this pattern until about 1975.  Usually the blame for the spree that followed, for which my generation will be paying for long into the future, goes to the informal 1972-74 coalition between the Trudeau Liberals and the NDP.  There is an element of truth to this but the binge continued long after Trudeau won his second majority.  The link that failed was John Turner.  Sensing that the philosopher king wasn't resigning anytime soon, and likely to leave one hell of mess after he left office, Turner quit his post as Minister of Finance and went off to practice corporate law on Bay Street. 

Popular imagination has Turner as something of Red Grit, due to his opposition to Free Trade, nothing could be further from the truth.  He stood fair square in the King-St. Laurent tradition of fiscally prudent social democracy, he was a Blue Liberal in short. He was also the last major figure in cabinet capable of seriously opposing Trudeau's plans, with his own base of support and different ideas.  As I have said before in this space, if John Turner was not the right man for 1984 or 1988, he or Robert Winters was the right man in 1968.  Conservatives often bemoan how Trudeau lead the nation to fiscal ruin. Don't blame Trudeau completely, that's too neat and historically unfair.  There were better, or at least less worse, politicians available in the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet Canadians kept voting for Trudeau.  Lorne Gunter on the Red Madness of that Age:

Of course, the finest minds inside the federal bureaucracy had told the Trudeau government to spend without concern for the consequences. It was what the Liberals wanted to hear in the mid-'70s, just as it was what bureaucrats wanted to tell them. Both loved the idea of radically expanded government, especially if they didn't have to charge taxpayers the full cost.

Throughout the late '60s and early '70s, university economics professors, politicians and policymakers were seized by two complementary ideas: There was no limit to the problems governments could solve given enough money to spend on social programs, and there was no reason government shouldn't borrow all the money it needed.

The dominant fiscal theory was that so long as governments paid the annual interest on any money they owed, inflation would whittle the principal down to meaninglessness. All their social-program dreams would cost them was the debt-servicing costs, which would take up a smaller percentage of annual budgets than paying the full cost for the programs up front. After 10 or 20 years, the principal would have been reduced by inflation to a fraction of its original face value. Paying it back would then involve a mere hiccup on the government's ledgers.

That might have worked if the borrowing had gone on for only a year or two. But after the 1974 edition, Canada went another 21 years without a balanced budget.

The validation of deficit spending to fund the growth of government was Canada's biggest public policy mistake. Not only did it ramp up our national debt to frightening proportions -- for which we are still paying the consequences in over-high taxes and slowed economic growth -- it also addicted Canadians to the idea that every time they have a problem, Ottawa will rush to their rescue with a cheque.

Milton Friedman got it half right when he said that inflation was essentially a monetary phenomenon.  Fundamentally inflation is the product of immorality.  In Faust Goethe, scarcely an expert on economics, has Meph play a prank on a very greedy little kingdom, promising boomtimes if only they would adopt a paper fiat currency.  Meph, it should be noted, was in disguise.  Our modern Canadian Mephs, ensconced deeply within the Federal Public Service and armed with PhDs from the finest schools, made the same offer to men perfectly willing to listen, a socialist (Trudeau) and opportunistic lackey (Chretien).  Notice, beneath the economic nomenclature, the wickedness of this phrase:

The dominant fiscal theory was that so long as governments paid the annual interest on any money they owed, inflation would whittle the principal down to meaninglessness.

Government debt is a pledge, people loan the state money to be repaid at a certain date and rate of interest.  To contract a debt knowing its real value will decrease in time, while the other party does not, is an act of fraud.  To use the power of the state to reduce the real value of the currency is a form of theft and an obvious abuse of power and authority.  I won't speculate on what kind of education Chretien received, but we all know Trudeau went to one of the finest Jesuit schools in North America.  Surely the Ten Commandments were taught and surely, being so apt a pupil, committed to memory by Trudeau.  One does not do good works by engaging in theft and dishonesty, the Jesuits would have mentioned that at some point too.

"Death by Blogging"

You may rest assured, dear readers, that Publius, with his blistering one post per week publishing rate, will not be dropping dead from exhaustion anytime soon.  Slate on the NYT making up a trend.

The symptoms of toxic blogging, Richtel informs the concerned reader, include "sleep disorders," "exhaustion," and—heads I win, tails you lose—"weight loss or gain." The number affected is "unclear," but "surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands." Richtel, a salaried employee at the Times, is particularly flummoxed that bloggers are often paid based on how much they write and whether anyone reads them. He likens this to a "sales commission," a comparison that evokes Alec Baldwin chalking "ALWAYS BE CLOSING" onto a blackboard in the movie version of Glengarry Glen Ross. ("First prize is a Cadillac Eldorado*. Anybody want to see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.") A less lurid but more accurate comparison would be to freelance writing, an occupation I've held from time to time. It is not, I promise you, a hazardous occupation, unless you report from a war zone.

Which reminds me, I need to give Brutus a copy of Glengarry, Glenn Ross for his birthday.  ABB - Always be Blogging.  Hits are for posters.

"I feel sorry for the 48."

On the canonization of Mrs Thatcher.

Mr Blair said he could not, as his press aide Alistair Campbell once put it, "do God" or stress the role of religion while in Number 10 because he might be "considered weird" and that "in our culture it would have led to a whole series of suppositions, none of which are very helpful to the practicing politician". This misses the point. Either he held these principles strongly or he didn't. To set them to one side while prime minister for the sake of a quiet life and then to invite plaudits for parading them afterwards is the opposite of what Margaret Thatcher did. She could not care less if she was considered weird, or was out of step with the prevailing orthodoxy if she felt she was right.

In fact she relished it. I remember attending a Commonwealth summit many years ago when the issue of sanctions against apartheid South Africa was causing huge ructions in the organisation. Almost all the Commonwealth was in favour of sanctions; Mrs Thatcher alone took the position that sanctions would harm ordinary South Africans. She was working assiduously behind the scenes to persuade the regime in South Africa to dismantle apartheid and to secure the release of Nelson Mandela, and felt that Commonwealth grandstanding was making that more difficult.

After issuing her own communique opposing sanctions, she was asked at the final press conference what it felt like to be the only leader of 49 member states out on a limb, and replied: "I feel sorry for the 48."

The YouGov poll credits the Thatcher years with forcing Labour to give up socialism by moving the country permanently away from excessive respect for the power of the state towards a preference for the free market. But whereas the Left has had to accept that the state cannot any longer own the means of production, it seeks instead to interfere in our lives in so many other ways, from telling us what to eat, when to play (witness Messrs Balls and Burnham making chumps of themselves in a playground last week), how to spend our own money, where our children can go to school, what sort of medical treatment we should have and, coming soon, when and how we should register our identity on a database before being issued with an ID number.

We have moved from a command economy to a controlled existence because the Left, as Lady Thatcher recognised, simply does not understand the concept of individual choice and freedom, even if it has had to adopt the language to survive. Worst of all, it manages to exercise its centralised control in a hamfisted, inefficient way that wastes our time and pours our money down the drain. It should do less but make a far better job of what it must do.

In short, we need a non-economic brand of Thatcherism.  This was always implicit in her reforms, but she was so busy fixing the economic mess of socialism "with a human face," that she didn't have enough time to fix or stop the creeping nanny statism.

Unionized Blackmail in the Imperial Capital

There is nothing that quite so puts other Canadians to sleep as news about Toronto.  The Imperial Capital is well enough known for its smugness and provinciality, a trait somewhat common to all big cities.  The "X-factor" which "the Largest City in Canada" adds to the equation is its desperate eagerness to be something else.  It must be better than other Canadian cities for it aspires to that ultimate ambition, to be American.  Long ago it aspired to be British, more British than Britain could possible have been.  The British Empire collapsed - a fact noticed by Torontonians around 1968 - so the second handers looked elsewhere.  New York, it's psychic model, sees itself as a city apart, not wholly American but some idealized America, that mere other Americans might aspire or envy but can never be.  It's contempt for "flyover country" is of a feudal lord over his serfs.  Toronto's contempt for the Rest of Canada of a middle class house wife for her working class relatives.  This attitude, which pervades every aspect of the city's being and is in many ways a crucial part of Torontoness, is so perfectly off putting.  On and on she goes about her new dress, how expensive and how it was on sale too, utterly oblivious that its in last year's colour and cut.

Patience is asked of the gentle reader then.  The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC), the capital's state controlled public transit monopoly, is faced with a crippling strike.  The union is grieved, as unions often are, that the management, here the city fathers and the odd mother, wish that newer employees make less than their more established co-workers.  A manifest injustice!  Indeed.  As noted in a post a few weeks back fare collectors - glorified cashiers - command a starting salary of about $54,000 per year, several times the market rate for their services.  In the hopes of staving off municipal bankruptcy Mayor David Miller, a confirmed socialist, and his almost as left-wing ally TTC chairman Adam Giambrone, are trying to dim down the lavish pay and benefits.  The head of the union, Bob Kinnear noted that:

"...[w]e regret that this step is necessary and we do not delude ourselves that the public will be on our side. But our alternative is to continue to accept second class treatment in what the mayor says is a world class city."

"We can no longer accept second-class status as public sector workers in Toronto," Kinnear told the media conference in Richmond Hill this morning. "The Mayor has said that this contract is a time for fairness and we take him at his word. It's time to stop treating TTC workers worse than City of Toronto workers when it comes to job injuries, benefits and pensions."

Mr. Kinnear said that TTC operators make less in wages and benefits than in neighbouring municipalities. "Driving a streetcar on Queen Street in Toronto takes a lot more skill than driving a bus on Queen Street in Brampton. A TTC subway operator now makes less than a Mississauga bus operator. Is that fair?"

The angels weep.  Perhaps it is unfair that subway operators in Toronto make less than a Mississauga bus operator, then again it is a subway.  Does Mr Kinnear wish his subway operators to earn a premium for never getting lost?  It does take more skill to drive a bus in downtown Toronto than in whatever passes for a business district in Brampton, a suburb whose sole distinction is having given to Ontario the figure of Bill Davis.  Yet how is this a justification for a salary increase?  On what basis is a Brampton bus driver paid?  For decades public sector employees have fought a race to the top.  One bunch would obtain a wage increase, a fact used by other PS unions to argue for an increase for their members.  This cycle is seen in the private sector too, with one important caveat: productivity.  In layman's terms: You can't make more than you make.  If you create so much wealth, you cannot be paid more than that, otherwise someone else needs to foot the difference.

Mr. Davis, Brampton Billy as he was once known, gave public sector employees the right to strike, the most expensive "civil liberty" in this province's history.  Mr. Davis was fond of saying that the buck stopped with him, even if he never got around to explaining exactly how the buck was being stopped and at what price to the taxpayers.  The buck has now stopped at David Miller's desk - the current Premier, a Norman Bates look-alike with Bill Davis pretensions , is of course evading the issue.  The Mayor is to be applauded for not immediately caving into union demands.  Possessing a well known sense of drama, Mr. Miller is perhaps waiting for Sunday morning, the union's deadline, to cave in. 

The TTC, for those who dwell in the land beyond Steeles, is not simply the public transit system of Toronto, it is the city's respiratory system.  1.5 millions of the city's 2.5 million residents use it everyday.  There is no alternative for most.  A week long strike would literally slow the economic growth of the entire country.  Knowing this the unions knows the strike will last, if it comes, a day or two, and then either they will give or be forced back to work by the province as an "essential service."  This is kabuki theater without the grace and elegance imparted by the Japanese.  The solution?  Let time run back.  The TTC was created in 1921 by the city government purchasing several private transit companies, companies that had served the city well for over seventy years, on the grounds of aiding the common good.  A state owned transit system would be cheaper and more efficient than a private sector system, so the argument went.  The new entity almost immediately hiked rates and cut service.  It is a tradition it carries down to this day, as bits of roof fall onto subway tracks and fare collectors collect sky-high salaries with their tokens.

Our Honoured Dead

However dark the cultural wars appear in the Elder Dominion, we may take bleak solace that other parts of the Commonwealth have fared worse. One of these places, we are grieved to note, is Mother England herself. After nearly a half century of increasing jacobin tendencies (note I say jacobin not jacobite) many of Her Majesty's Loyal Canadian subjects (though since 1947 we are technically "citizens," that hateful republican word) feared for the soul of Our Lady of the Snows, as Kipling called her. Our recent efforts in Afghanistan have put paid to these fears. Our leaders are weak but "...the blood a hero sire hath spent, still nerves a hero son." The people themselves have not been lacking. As this article in the Daily Mirror notes, the returning bodies of the fallen are meet with honour guards of citizens and soldiers. A portion of one of Toronto's main highways has been renamed the "Highway of Heroes," which is a touch bland and sentimental but expresses a genuine wish among Canadians to honour our soldiers. This same honour is not being shown in Thames Valley.

The spectacle was so striking that the highway, part of which was known as the Queen Elizabeth Way, has now been renamed the Highway of Heroes. Since then, every body travelling along the Highway of Heroes has been greeted by hundreds of ordinary Canadians who often wait for hours in the bitter Ontario winter to show their respect and support. Lieutenant Colonel Jim Legere, Provost Marshal for the 1st Canadian Air Division Headquarters, wrote of one such journey in a letter to a Toronto newspaper. He said: "Although words cannot possibly do justice to this heart-wrenching experience, I thought it important for you to be aware of the overwhelming – and I mean overwhelming – support provided by law enforcement, fire services, ambulance services and, indeed, the public at large, for this very solemn occasion. "I could not believe my eyes as we made the solemn journey from Trenton to the coroner's office in Toronto. Every on-ramp had a police vehicle blocking traffic, with members standing by the vehicles saluting. Entire police detachments stood along the route, saluting in front of their vehicles. "

[...]

Highways for Heroes have been designated in other Canadian cities and many people pay their respects when a fallen soldier returns. Police escorts are the norm. The spectacle contrasts strongly with the progress of a British cortege which The Mail on Sunday was given special permission to follow earlier this month. Lieutenant John Thornton, 22, and Marine David Marsh, 23, both of 40 Commando Royal Marines, were killed in a vehicle explosion while patrolling in Helmand Province. Their two black hearses and an empty spare hearse accompanying them were initially escorted by Wiltshire Police. The cortege first passed through the village of Wootton Bassett where locals, forewarned by the RAF base, gather at the war memorial to pay their respects.

But for much of the rest of the trip to Oxford – where the bodies undergo post mortems before being returned to their families – the hearses are on their own, led only by an undertaker's car. They were cut up by impatient motorists at roundabouts, stuck in traffic and generally ignored by the public, their significance lost because of a lack of the gravitas that a police escort would provide.

The problem has arisen because the Wiltshire Constabulary escort – normally three motorcycle outriders and two patrol cars which stop other traffic along the route – has to "peel off" at the Oxfordshire border where the Thames Valley force area begins. The corteges then have to fend for themselves on Oxford's notorious ring road. Inspector Mark Levitt of Wiltshire Police has taken up the matter with Thames Valley

[...]

But Thames Valley Police defended their failure to provide an escort. They say that even before April last year, when RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire rather than Lyneham was used for repatriating war dead, the force provided escorts only if there was an "operational need", such as large numbers of vehicles, families or people involved. Assistant Chief Constable Brian Langston claimed that "most of the time" escorts were not required or requested.

"I've spoken to my counterpart at Wiltshire Police and I understand they provide escorts because of the people involved at the Wootton Bassett events. We try to provide what people say are their priorities, and so far that's been to focus on community safety rather than ceremonial roles."

The fertile imagination of Dante Alighieri would falter in devising an appropriate punishment for this bureaucratic entity. "Ceremonial roles," does he imagine he's escorting the President of Bulgaria for a bit of hunting in Berkshire? How bereft of spirit does a man have to become, not merely to dishonour the men who defend his realm, but to imagine that the ceremonial is not vital to life, to life as men. The Thames Valley police are notoriously incompetent at maintaining "community safety," and the great increase in crime in Britain in recent decades stems, in part, from these utilitarian tendencies. Communities that honour the good and right, that perform ceremonies to remind the people of their allegiances and values, are ones that tend to keep themselves safe.

Assorted Links: April 5, 2008

Remembering WFB

On the occasion of his memorial service this Friday.

The Magnanimous Man

He knew that as an interpreter of the Declaration of Independence, and of the Gettysburg Address, I was concerned with subjects far more consequential than any treaty with the Soviet Union. At bottom, the disagreements concerning the American political tradition were disagreements concerning the nature of the human soul. And it did not take any argument to convince Bill Buckley that, when you came to the human soul, you did not fool around. Bill never forgot that my first book was on Aristotle and Aquinas.

[...]

One final note. In 1974 my younger son — the same who had driven Bill from Riverside to Claremont — graduated from Yale. To see him through, we had scraped the bottom of the family barrel until there was no bottom to the barrel. We simply had no money to go to the graduation. How Bill found out about this, I have no idea. But his check for one thousand dollars arrived, with instructions to go to the graduation, and later to stop at his New York home for dinner! I cannot begin to express how moving the experience was to attend my son’s graduation from Yale, thirty five years after my own.

All At Sea

In those non-refrigerated, pre-microwave days, a lot of our food came in tins. These were stored below the floorboards in the ship’s bilges. The bilges invariably filled with oily seawater, causing the labels to decompose. As a result, we never knew what, exactly, we’d be having for dinner on any given night. If we were lucky, Dinty Moore beef stew. If not, we might well dine exclusively on Harvard beets and creamed corn. Some tins contained crêpes suzette. My father, not a cook himself, loved to douse them in copious amounts of Grand Marnier. At the climactic moment, he would drop a match into the skillet, causing a Hiroshima of flame to lick the cabin top. Again, my mother’s voice was heard: “Bill, why are you trying to set fire to the boat?”

Some afternoons, my father might say, “Shall we have lobster tonight?” He’d steer for the nearest lobster pot. As a child, I found this thrilling beyond belief, for it was established lore that a Maine lobsterman could legally shoot you on sight if he caught you plundering his livelihood.

After laborious heavings on the line, the trap would come up, suddenly alive with frantic, jackknifing lobsters. The trick was getting them out without having them clamp down on your fingers. My father would then put two bottles of whisky into the lobster pot as payment. I always wondered what the lobsterman thought upon bringing up his trap to find two fifths of Johnnie Walker Black inside. Did he scratch his head and say, “Reckon Mr. Buckley’s back”?

A Founding Father

At about age 13 I became mesmerized by Bill Buckley’s column in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. His intellect and good humor literally created my desire to learn. But in my first year of college I flunked Speech 101 (I refused to outline). At age 20 I told my dad the worst news he could hear: “I’m quitting school.” Having come through the Great Depression, he believed that without a college degree I had no chance of getting a good job.

“I want to be like Bill Buckley,” I told him. “I want to be able to sit around and write and think.”

My dad, perhaps the most brilliant man I ever knew intimately, gave me a two-hour lecture on how hard and time-consuming achievement is: “When you see someone’s output but don’t see what goes into it, you can make the mistake of assuming it comes easy to them, especially those who are great at what they do. They make it look so easy you think you can do it, too.” My dad was right about that.

Disturber of the Peace

It is one of Jane Austen’s universally acknowledged truths that Bill Buckley developed a fusionist conservatism by uniting libertarians, traditionalists, and foreign-policy hawks around the common standard of anti-Communism. There is truth in that, but it is not the whole truth. And it is certainly not how people saw it at the time. The new conservatism of WFB, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, et al. was thought by many to be an exotic European import, Burkean in a Lockean liberal society, and romantically opposed to the kind of historical change that Americans naturally embraced.

In 1957 Samuel Huntington, provoked by this new conservatism, wrote an important article in the American Political Science Review in which he defined conservatism as the system of ideas that was employed to defend established institutions whenever they came under fundamental attack. “When the foundations of society are threatened,” he wrote, “the conservative ideology reminds men of the necessity of some institutions and the desirability of the existing ones.”

[...]

Bill knew that if conservatism had any future, it had to be a hard political movement as well as a soft intellectual one. It also had to have appeal to people other than NR subscribers. And it had to succeed — or at least be protected from failure. So WFB launched a serious bid for the New York mayoralty disguised as a lark.

The New Criterion on WFB

As Scruton stresses, this removal is not an abrogation but rather a triumph of politics, a triumph threatened wherever the preferments of individual freedom are besieged by collectivist zeal. Bill Buckley touched and improved countless lives. He created and nurtured a score of important institutions. He was part of the tonic that revitalized the appetite for ordered liberty and helped defeat one of the most monstrous tyrannies in history. It speaks less to the irony than to the amplitude of Bill’s vision that he undertook these initiatives not to further a political agenda but to rescue us from one.

The Cell Phone at 35

One of the things that Bill Buckley made possible was the cell phone.  You jest, surely Publius.  He was a history major, not an engineer.  Well, dear friends, you engineers need us history majors from time to time.  It's the history majors that remind people that:

...there are those who recognize that when all is said and done, the market place depends for a license to operate freely on the men who issue licenses — on the politicians. They recognize, therefore, that efficient getting and spending is itself impossible except in an atmosphere that encourages efficient getting and spending.

It took the genius of a group of engineers to create the cell phone and the intellectual genius of men like WFB to maintain a political environment allowing such men to operate. 

On his way to a New York City news conference on April 3, 1973, Martin Cooper just couldn't help himself.

The then-project manager at Motorola was proud of what his crew of engineers and developers had managed to create and felt the need to brag about the accomplishment.

At the corner of 56th Street and Lexington Avenue, Cooper took the wrapping off the first cellular phone ever created and placed the world's first cellphone call to his rival, Joel Engel, then head of Bell Labs research department (which has since been acquired by AT&T Inc.) to inform Engel of the upcoming announcement.

He then walked into the news conference to tell the rest of the world.

While he had dreams of seeing a cellphone in everyone's hands, even Cooper could not have imagined the impact the creation would have on society.

The C-Word

A Conservative cabinet minister, in a moment of eccentricity or weakness, we hope, has uttered the most dreaded word in the vocabulary of English speaking Canadians:  Constitution.

Meech Lake, "the night of the long knives," Charlottetown, so-called unilateral patriation of the constitution, the 1995 referendum squeaker - have the Conservatives forgotten all the searing, gut-wrenching anxiety and turmoil of those events in Canadian history? Or, worse, are they cavalier enough to resurrect, for partisan electoral purposes, all the risks that inevitably pop up whenever the phrase "Quebec and the constitution" rears its ugly head?

Neither, we hope, and so we want to believe that there's really nothing to a recent story, in another newspaper, saying that Stephen Harper's government has been suggesting to the Quebec government that it might soon be time to re-open the constitution to address Quebec's "historical demands." The necessary pre-condition, reportedly, would be a Conservative majority government.

One reason not to take this business to seriously is that it came not from Harper but from Labour Minister Jean-Pierre Blackburn, who said it would be nice to give a broader context to the notion of Quebecers as "a nation" - to, in Blackburn's phrase, "put some meat on it."

Having dispensed with monarchy the Americans, needful as all men are for sacred things, deified their constitution and the men who made it.  We agree, as we often do, with Gladstone's opinion that the efforts of Madison, Hamilton and Jefferson were "the most wonderful work ever struck off at a given time by the brain and purpose of man."  To have raised the Fathers of the American Republic to such a great height is well deserved, but the elevation was product not only of their genius but of the desire to build a national myth.  Every nations needs a founding and founders, luckily the Romulus and Remus of America were real and great.  Canada has always lacked so powerful a founding myth, or more accurately we have developed several myths only to see them compete and undercut each other. 

Beyond and beneath the convoluted legal rhetoric over the division of powers, provincial and languages rights lies the essence of our constitutional debates, the symbolic nature of a document that failed to serve its spiritual purpose.  The British North America Act - renamed in 1982 the Constitution Act (1867) under the Jacobin conceits of late Trudeaupia - was indeed a curiously flawed document in how it poorly defined the respective powers of the two senior levels of government, leading to interminable jurisdictional turf wars.  This was, historically, an accident.  The BNA Act was essentially written by two men in a hotel room, one of whom had too much to drink.  The identity of the drinker is well enough known, Sir John A Macdonald, the brilliant, if too pragmatic, impresario of Confederation and our first PM. 

The second gentleman is less well known, the inscrutable Oliver Mowatt.  One of Canada's leading lawyers at the time Mowatt was also the right-hand man of George Brown,  head of the Liberal Party and the dominant political force in what became the province of Ontario.  As Brown was a journalist by occupation and had little legal background, it was Mowatt who represented the Liberal Party as legal expert.  Macdonald's Quebec allies, Alexander Galt and D'Arcy McGee were not lawyers and left the legal work to John A.  George Etienne Cartier, the then French Canadian chef, was more a gentleman than a jurist and preferred to deal with patronage issues.  This left Macdonald and Mowatt as the legal fathers of the document.  Both men despised each other, the latter having at one point been apprenticed to the former, and were working at cross purposes. 

Mowatt believed in a decentralized federation, Macdonald wanted a constitutional arrangement as close as politically possibly to a British style unitary state.  Macdonald won the initial battle, drafting about half of the BNA's articles, but Mowatt won the war.  After leaving federal politics Mowatt served as Premier of Ontario for 23 years, spending most of that time waging a legal battle to expand provincial rights.  This legal to and fro laid out the precedents by which Canada has largely been governed since.  The wrangling of the 1970s and 1980s had less to do with real disagreements over jurisdictional authority, than awkward and halting attempts to appease the wounded pride of the French Canadians, without rendering Canada a mere geographic expression.  Faced with the unedifying prospect of once again singing, in the style of the nuns in The Sound of Music, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Quebec?" the Prime Minister has backed away from constitution talk.  Perhaps he dimly remembers the last Conservative Prime Minister who did so, and the young policy wonk from Calgary, by way of Leaside, who helped overthrow him.

The Metis Mullah Speaks

We here at the Gods listen:

Qasira Shaheen, Robina Butt and Shugufta Iftikhar have recently filed Human Rights complaints against Calgary Imam Syed Soharwardy and so far their efforts have resulted in either physical assaults or a little firebomb party at their place. Syed Soharwardy has brushed off the allegations of abuse by proclaiming that "We are Sufi, they are Wahabbi" and so therefore one must assume that he feels they are less then he is because of their beliefs even though he continues to claim in public statements that he represents all Muslims. The media should take note of that before they run up to kiss his pointy shoes and get his views on the next honour killing and quote him as the founder of Muslims against Terror and make him representative of the entire community. Syed Soharwardy has never been one to  complain about being called a radical which is just fine in my books as I can poke at him all I want as long as I stick to the truth and I think he has given up on me. I am my own Imam Syed and there is a reason for it.

Liberal party cheerleader Warren Kinsella stated in his book titled the Web of Hate that "The ARA [Anti-Racist Action]  is a collection of Trotskyites, Marxists and other left-wingers who insist that force should be used to deal with fascist groups." but in recent events denounces only one side even though both groups are equally despicable. The leader of this past weekends anti-fascist and 'peace' party Jason Devine even used talking points from the pro-violence plagued ARA Toronto faction while talking to the media. I have pointed this out in previous articles and my reward has been to be called a fascist by said person and have been accused of being a member of the neo-Nazi website community Stormfront.

Having met both Darcy and Warren Kinsella, let me say that my money is on Darcy if this gets ugly....

Sir Ralph

"For God's sake, speak English."

France's ambassador to Canada was in Calgary on Wednesday night to present Klein with the Legion of Honour for his role in nurturing ties between Alberta and France, which invests in the province's oilsands.

"The Ralph Klein years have been happy years for the relation and partnership between Alberta and France," said Ambassador Daniel Jouanneau in naming Klein a chevalier, or knight, of the order.

Created by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1802, the award is France's highest honour. Klein joins the ranks of Queen Elizabeth II, U.S. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower and comedian Jerry Lewis.

"C'est un grand plaisir. Merci, merci. Thank you. Enough of my Diefenbaker French," Klein said to laughter from the audience.

The former premier told CBC News the award recognizes his commitment to French culture in Alberta: "The reason is I enjoy the French community. My uncle was French …. He had a son and a daughter.

"Their names were Romeo and Juliet — totally French — and they spoke French all the time, and I was so mad at them for speaking French that I used to say, 'For God's sake, speak English.'

"And of course, they would continue to speak French just to annoy me," he chuckled

"This is like receiving the Order of Canada — only from a foreign country," said Klein.

Whether many Albertans will admit it publicly, they miss this guy.

Audits Are Racism

Auditors are bigots.

Canada's largest native organization is accusing Conservatives of spreading falsehoods about aboriginals as Ottawa steps up audits of reserves and vows to publicize its findings.

The Assembly of First Nations issued a terse statement yesterday criticizing a new Indian Affairs policy that begins July 1. Under the policy, all transfers to band and tribal councils will contain a clause allowing the department to audit the money later to determine whether it was well spent.

According to the AFN, the announcement from Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl "plays on the false impression that has been spread about first nations and accountability. Those who believe the myths might like the idea that 'something is finally being done,' but they would be wrong again."

In the spirit of the Liberals' controversial First Nations Governance Act, which was abandoned in 2003 after fierce AFN opposition, the audits will also report on whether bands have appropriate management, financial and administrative controls.

There are times when I wonder, honestly, whether the most humane thing is just to scrap the Indian Act and stop all funding to aboriginal reserves immediately.  However wrenching the cutting off of funds, it would end the welfare traps that these reserves have become.  Is cold hard indifference really worse than a compassion so corrupt it resists the merest scrutiny?

The Mob Killed Sonny Bono?

It did seem just a little too convenient that an experienced skier would fly right into a tree, didn't it?

Ted Gunderson, now a private investigator, has told the US Globe tabloid that Bono, who served as mayor of Palm Springs for four years, did not die after hitting a tree on a Nevada ski slope in January 1998 as everyone believed.

"It's nonsense for anyone to now try to suggest that Bono died after crashing into a tree. There's zero evidence in this autopsy report... to show such an accident happened. Instead, there's powerful proof he was assassinated.

"This was an evil plot that was carried out to almost perfection by ruthless assassins," Mr Gunderson told the paper.

The former agent, who has been researching Bono's accident for the past decade, said top officials linked to an international drug and weapons ring feared the singer-turned-politician was about to expose their crimes - so they had him killed on the slopes.

Bono, an experienced skiier, was ambushed on the slopes by hired hitmen, who beat him to death and then staged a tree collision, Mr Gunderson said.

From hippiedom to hitmen, the sad trajectory of a minor Sixties icon.

The Empire Buys Back

Tata to buy Jaguar and Land Rover.

India's Tata Group, in fact, wants to take off Ford's hands not only Jaguar but Land Rover, the British matron of sport utility vehicles in which Queen Elizabeth II has been known to flog through the gardens behind Windsor Castle.

The importance of one of India's muscular conglomerates riding to the rescue of British legends -- and paying as much as $2 billion to do so -- isn't lost on either side of the ex-empire.

The Tata deal, which could be sealed next week, "has made us all proud," said Debashis Chakraborty, a government official in Kolkata, the onetime capital of the British Raj.

Neither Indians nor Brits have failed to appreciate the historical ironies involved. In Britain, though, the reaction has been more mixed, with optimism that Tata Chief Executive Ratan Tata will be able to help restore the brand to its former glory spiked with faint regret that it took an Indian giant to do the job.

"I think Sir William Lyons would be turning in his grave, quite frankly," said Barrie Birkin, a longtime Jaguar owner from Matlock, in the Derbyshire Dales, referring to the legendary co-founder of the company who presided over the marque's preeminence in world motor sports and luxury car design through 1972.

Given the rapid decay of British cultural values in Britain, the Indian elite is probably more British - in the best sense of the word - than most Britishers.  This century will be dominated by India and China.  We know that the Chinese don't know cricket.  From this we should understand that one of the central goals of Anglo-American foreign policy over the next thirty years is to prepare and support India to assume its role as the dominant English speaking power of this century.  There is always the possibility that the neo-Madarins governing China will lose power or reform themselves into liberal democrats.  Just as likely is that a powerful strain of nationalism will re-assert itself, transforming the PRC into a modern version of Wilhelmine Germany.  A strong India is not merely a good thing, but a vital thing for the survival of basic western values.

"Mugabe: I will quit, as long as I do not face prosecution"

Like Che cowering before the Bolivian Army in 1967.

Robert Mugabe's aides have told Zimbabwe's opposition leaders that he is prepared to give up power in return for guarantees, including immunity from prosecution for past crimes.

But the aides have warned that if the Movement for Democratic Change does not agree then Mugabe is threatening to declare emergency rule and force another presidential election in 90 days, according to senior opposition sources.

The opposition said the MDC leadership is in direct talks with the highest levels of the army but it is treating the approach with caution because they are distrustful of the individuals involved and calling for direct contact with the president, fearing delaying tactics.

Those fears were reinforced last night when at one point Zimbabwe's election commission abruptly halted the release of official results from the Saturday's election for "logistical reasons" and the police raided opposition offices.

I don't recall Ian Smith asking for immunity.  Then again he was a gentleman and not a megalomaniac thug.

He Still Annoys Us

A mash note to Pierre Trudeau.

It takes incredible charm to win the trust of a younger generation, and far more charm to marry a member of that younger generation - Trudeau, 52, wed Margaret Sinclair, 22, in 1971 - without being classified as a pervert. To my parents and others, that marriage only confirmed their belief that Trudeau was one of their own.

But if that generational feat was impressive, what about Trudeau's resonance with my generation, we who s