The radio appearance--my first for the CBC--went all right. I forgot how to breathe for the first five minutes of the show, and a pained perusal of the audio record shows that I need to remember not to mumble at the end of my mmmgmmrmmrmgmm. But Hill seems amenable to having me back, so I can't have made a complete jackass of myself. I cannot address rumours that, after the broadcast, the CBC's leftist pagans forced me to spear a ceremonial wild boar in the control room so the blood could be daubed on my forehead.

It looks like I'll be on the radio at 1 p.m. Mountain time for about an hour. Locals can tune up CBC Radio 1 at 740 on the AM dial; the rest of you can mess about on this page. Our host will be my old pal Don Hill, who used to live in Toronto and host the network's national spirituality show, Tapestry. Sun managing editor Mike Jenkinson and I will be discussing the election and taking abuse from callers about what the late Terry Johnson used to call "our anti-people views".

You can read

Paul Martin said last week that, if re-elected, he intends to introduce a comprehensive federal daycare program that would take Quebec's model of nearly full funding for crèches and make it national. We've heard this promise from the Chretien Liberals in the last three elections but, mercifully enough, it turned out to be eyewash three times. Coming from Mr. Martin, such a pledge must be taken more seriously, if only because practically anyone's word is more trustworthy than his predecessor's.

Children are the future, it will be said (incessantly), and while that is true enough, I cannot see how that entails nationalizing the poor little devils. I'm not sure, either, how federal day care can possibly be constitutional in spirit, or why the provincial premiers would go along with another bait-and-switch funding deal like medicare. There is so much I'm not sure of -- but I can perceive, with crystal clarity, how the future will look if Mr. Martin gets his way:

- May, 2006: Citing reports of widespread fraud in the new Canada Childcare Act claims system, including a particularly embarrassing case involving a kennel for Malamutes in Nunavut, the Liberal government sets aside $240-million to create a sophisticated computer database of registered caregivers. In the ensuing three years, expenditures will rise to more than $8-billion and the database will be found to be too error-ridden to be of any use. User fees for day care are increased from the original Quebec-inspired $7 a day to $11 to make up for the overruns.

- June, 2007: Statscan announces that unemployment has reached 14% nationally and that Canadian real wages have declined for the third straight quarter. Economists profess themselves mystified by a sudden, inexplicable upsurge in competition for traditional labour-force jobs. "It's as though thousands of people suddenly had some incentive to abandon self-employment, informal work and part-time jobs," says Finance Minister John McCallum. In passing, he adds that the revenue stresses, combined with unanticipated new demand for tax-funded day care, "may put us in a deficit position this fiscal year, purely as a temporary emergency measure."

- January, 2008: New Democrat leader Svend Robinson holds a press conference with his adopted twin sons, Fidel and Yasser, to denounce "extra billing" in federally funded day cares. In fine fettle, Mr. Robinson documents rampant outrages in the system: parental clients across Canada are being charged additional sums by caregivers for "conveniences" such as milk, sunlight, and toilet access. "When are we going to realize that profit-driven providers should never have been allowed to sink their teeth into this system?" the NDP head asks.

- October, 2008: Shortly before the federal election, talks between the emerging Alliance of Registered Daycare Practitioners and the federal government break down over demands for a 23% hike in fee schedules. Unionized day cares across the country hold a half-day wildcat strike, notifying parents that their children will be abandoned at noon as college members adjourn to the picket line. Hundreds of thousands of Canadians miss work to retrieve their kids, and the government, flooded with indignant e-mails, quickly capitulates to the salary demands.

- November, 2008: Although federal Conservative leader Bernard Lord promises to introduce daycare reform, "while, of course, honouring the tenets of the Canada Childcare Act," the Liberals win another narrow majority in the House of Commons. Ten days later, the user fee for registered day care is raised to $15 a day.

- September, 2009: Persistent NDP criticisms force Prime Minister Stephane Dion to acknowledge that Paul Martin's federal daycare program "was only half of the answer." To address the extra-billing problems created by the combination of private provision and public funding, he introduces a bill allocating $60-billion for the creation of a comprehensive network of uniform and federally staffed "KinderSpaces" across Canada. To eliminate the "discouraging growth in two-tiered day care," Mr. Dion legislates a gradual abolition of the "private" practice of preschool child care by anyone but a minor's legal guardians. He describes this as "merely a logical extension" of Mr. Martin's original system.

- July, 2010: Pointing out that the federal government is in "temporary emergency" deficit for the fourth straight year, a dynamic young Toronto lawyer founds the Empty Uterus Party. "I cherish children and acknowledge that they are our future," she says at her inaugural press conference, "but I've made the personal choice not to have any of my own. Shouldn't I be compensated for opting not to place new burdens on the public treasury?"

- April, 2011: After an EUP candidate gains a surprise win a Quebecois by-election -- carried aloft, it's said, by grumbling Baby Boomers whose child-bearing days are long past -- the Liberal government adopts elements of the EUP platform, agreeing to mail "Courage Cheques" of $1,000 to women who have abortions and $3,000 for tubal ligations and hysterectomies. Elsewhere, as the daily daycare tariff passes $25, the offices of the Fraser Institute are damaged by arson after the think-tank releases a devastatingly critical Report Card and Waiting-List Survey of KinderSpaces.And in a widely reported speech, U.S. President Hillary Clinton praises Canada's "civilized commitment to single-payer child care," promising to implement the northern model in her second term of office. (June 7, 2004)

Geitner Simmons has a brief preview of my latest American Spectator book review. If you're a subscriber, that issue should be hitting your doorstep right about now.

My Post column today--inspired by

Here's last week's column, which, conveniently enough, is on a different aspect of the same issue...

This week's most interesting political moment, so far, has been Paul Martin's defence of the Liberal ministerial hecklers who descended on Stephen Harper in Toronto on Wednesday. Martin was caught in a painfully obvious fib when he said that John McCallum and Judy Sgro "spontaneously decided," on their own, to engage simultaneously in a rumble with Mr. Harper. Almost as distasteful, though, was Mr. Martin's explanation for Ms. Sgro's behaviour:

"Judy Sgro feels very, very strongly about a woman's right to choose, and I think what she felt was that Mr. Harper kept avoiding the issue and that he should respond to it directly."

There's a Liberal for you: willing to accuse someone of "avoiding" the issue of abortion, but too chickenspit to actually say the word "abortion." Or did Mr. Martin, just this one time, mean a woman's right to choose curtains for the living room?

Stephen Harper's policy on abortion hasn't changed since before he became leader of the Canadian Alliance. It is unambiguous and well-known: He has undertaken not to alter the status quo, or put it to a referendum or a Commons vote, in the first term of a Conservative government. It's true that he has been cagey about his private position on the ethics of abortion. He describes it only as a moderate view that would probably annoy the intensely passionate of both sides. But "avoiding the issue" is a hell of a way to describe an opponent's reticence when your party has been in power for 10 years and has buried the issue in a million cubic feet of concrete.

Why, I wonder, is it valid for the Liberals to act on the principle that abortion should not be brought up in political debate, but invalid for Stephen Harper to espouse that principle explicitly? For a decade, the Liberal party has stood for what amounts to a moratorium on discussion about the lack of a law concerning therapeutic abortion. Now Stephen Harper goes along, and the Liberals almost literally bushwhack him for it. How dare he act like -- us?

Those Canadians who wax weepful about shredded embryos have been told clearly not to expect anything of Stephen Harper. For Judy Sgro, this is not enough -- not nearly. In the absence of any Canadian law governing therapeutic abortions, we are the most extreme "pro-choice" country in the Western world, practically by definition. According to Ms. Sgro, or according to Paul Martin's free interpretation of her views, explicitly supporting this status quo is not enough to qualify you as reliably pro-choice. No -- your heart must also be in the right place. You must not only be willing to permit legalized abortion: You must actively approve of it, perhaps even adore it.

By this standard, it might enhance Mr. Harper's credentials -- or those of any other party leader -- if he were to confess to having played the male part in an aborted pregnancy or two. Then we'd know what side they were really on, wouldn't we? Shouldn't it be fair -- if a leader has no right to harbour a private opinion on a subject we're perennially told is private by nature -- to challenge these gentlemen on whether they've ever gotten a woman "in trouble"?

Why, most trustworthy of all, when it comes to "choice," would be the brave soul who had actually clambered into a set of surgical scrubs and assisted with an abortion. One day that may be the sort of thing politicians do for a photo-op to reassure women who feel "very, very strongly." I find myself a little relieved, however, that Ms. Sgro has not yet pulled anything crazier than merely confronting a political opponent in public like a street-corner preacher.

To be sure, Stephen Harper could be lying about his plans; he might have intentions of putting Henry Morgentaler in front of a firing squad the minute he's elected. And then again, that devout Roman Catholic Paul Martin Jr. could be lying too -- as he must be suspected of having done, in the very act of denying culpability for the Liberal hecklers' behaviour. It comes down to whom you trust more. Go ahead -- choose the Liberal, sucker.

But if you are really eager for abortion to remain free, tax-funded and legal under all conceivable circumstances in Canada, you should remember that old Vulcan proverb: "Only Nixon could go to China." Only a Liberal prime minister could possibly tamper with a "woman's right to choose" in 21st-century Canada; only a Liberal would have anything to gain from it.

Right now, Harper has the support of earnest Christians and other religious traditionalists, despite his fudging on abortion, because he is the sole national party leader who does not seem to consider the traditional family a species of human bondage and heterosexual matrimony an outrage. To these people, despite his operationally pro-choice position, Mr. Harper will remain the least of three evils. He is as likely to do an about-face on abortion, if elected prime minister, as he is to playfully climb aboard a Jet Ski for campaign reporters in the next four weeks. (June 4, 2004)

That same day, incidentally, Dan Gardner wrote a Citizen column anticipating my argument in today's Post. Here's an excerpt:

If it's outrageous to limit a woman's autonomy by restricting her right to an abortion, it's an equal outrage that she cannot smoke what she wants or have sex under whatever circumstances she chooses. So why aren't pro-choicers furiously demanding the legalization of drugs and prostitution?

The hypocrisy of taking a libertarian line on abortion and ignoring it on other issues was sharply underlined by Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan's reaction to the suggestion of Conservative MP Rob Merrifield that women seeking abortions should be required to first have counselling on possible alternatives for dealing with an unwanted pregnancy.

"The notion of state-imposed, third-party counselling, as if we are children, as if we are not able to make our own decisions about our health and our bodies, is to me, at the beginning of the 21st century, profoundly disturbing and, dare I say it, it is very frightening," Ms. McLellan sputtered as she campaigned to retain her Edmonton West [actually now Edmonton Centre -ed.] seat for the Liberals.

Students of recent history will note that this is the same Anne McLellan who, as minister of justice, refused to even discuss the legalization of prostitution or drugs. And this is the same Anne McLellan who, as minister of health, shepherded the recently passed reproductive-technologies law, which includes a provision stating that anyone seeking to use assisted-reproduction services must first have counselling.

Now I ask you: would a man actuated by calculated self-interest break the day's biggest story in Canadian politics and then lose control of it so completely? Let's recap for those who aren't tracking the Canadian media obsessively.

Monday afternoon, I wrote a fifty-word weblog entry containing a link to a bizarre, unsettling decade-old USENET rumination about Jews and blacks by the NDP candidate in Edmonton-Strathcona. It struck me as a merely local story--but not much of one. Who could have lived in Edmonton for the past ten or fifteen years and remained unaware of Malcolm Azania's weird history as a goofball Afrocentrist college broadcaster and hard-left, Black Muslim-influenced blowhard?

The answer, apparently, is everybody. Including the people who vetted him as a candidate for the New Democratic Party, the people who promoted him as the rising star of the NDP in Alberta, and the reporters who have covered him since he discovered his political aspirations. (And, for that matter, his electoral rivals. Opposition research obviously has a long way to go in this country.) By noon Wednesday, I was seeing my own website on the CBC and reporters were phoning me up for comment.

The truth is, I did have a slight reporting advantage: I was at university at the same time as Malcolm, so I knew what to look for when I felt a passing impulse to needle him a little. My byline probably appeared near his in the Gateway a few times, and we have friends in common, though we've never met [but see below -ed.]. I'm told he's a hell of a nice guy, and I should say, by the way, that it sounds as though he is being extremely fair about me in talking to reporters (as well as patient and manful about all the media attention). He's described me as a "conservative columnist", which I can't complain about, and an "old political opponent from university days", which I suppose is true. He hasn't yet, as far as I've heard, referred to me as a "muckraking fascist turdball". I wouldn't want people to think we had engaged in personal feuding or wrote Gateway point-counterpoints or anything like that: we never did. Along with future magazine publisher Ezra Levant and future hemp warrior David Malmo-Levine, Malcolm was the big political celebrity on campus. I had--and have--all the self-promotional talent of a ham sandwich.

[CORRECTION, 1:09 pm: Somebody reminded me this morning that we did meet Malcolm once, though in a non-social setting. I had completely forgotten.]

Now that I mention it, a commenter on Rabble.ca had the last, amusing, and true word on accusations of "muckraking": "What did it take... about three minutes to dig up the article on Google? That's a pretty cursory muckraking." (It probably took more like six or seven, technically.) Accusations that I wrote those fifty words in the service of the Conservative cause won't hold up either, although that didn't stop a Journal reporter from bringing up the question most tactfully in an interview tonight. The Tory candidate in that riding, Rahim Jaffer, is probably a little pissed off with me right now for breaking up the nice, even split in Strathcona's heavy left-wing vote. [Full disclosure: I socialized with Rahim a little during the "Snack Pack" days, but we haven't happened to meet in a couple of years--probably not since his own moment of embarrassment, in fact.]

Anyway, I do have long experience with Malcolm Azania's Professor Griff act. Indeed, since before he was "Malcolm Azania", I was reading his talk of CIA crack factories, prehistoric Africans who invented the differential calculus, and the need for racially segregated public schools in Canada. (To answer The Ambler's puckish questions: he used to be plain old Malcolm Thomas. His mother was former ATA president and Alberta Liberal Nadene Thomas.) It appears that, in relatively late life, the man who used to talk so much about "being named after Malcolm X" has migrated, just like Malcolm X, from White Devil political stylings to colour-blind love for all mankind. If the reader assumes he is in earnest, which seems like the decent thing to do, Azania only needs to apologize once for what he wrote in 1994. But he's already on his second mea culpa and will be made to give many more.

The truly laughable spectacle here is Jack Layton having to "distance himself" from ten-year-old remarks made on USENET by one of his candidates; every Canadian political leader is now caught in this crazy trap of having to account for every word ever uttered by each of his 300-plus grunts. (No wonder Paul Martin chooses so many himself!--he wants people he can trust!) I wonder how Radical Jack likes the taste of the medicine Stephen Harper has to swallow twice a week.

I have very little pity for Layton; I don't honestly know whether to have any for Malcolm. It's rude to analyze someone when you've already caused him what he describes as the "worst day of his life", but I have to say that his black nationalist antics in university, and on the radio afterward, seemed dreadfully transparent psychologically. Friends always accounted for his foolishness by saying it was "all just an act", which is certainly partly true: Malcolm is, I believe, well steeped in joke-conspiracist literature like the Illuminatus! trilogy. He created a joke ideology for himself (and a second pseudonym, "Minister Faust") and rode it exactly as far as it would take him. There were obviously heavy elements of "How much can I get away with?", too. If he's truly come to terms with his past, he won't mind me saying how pitiful a figure he used to cut with his self-caricaturizing (which must have made other U of A black students cringe) and his conscious striving for authenticity.

Hell, let me mitigate this by analyzing myself in the bargain: I went from a childhood in a rural trailer park to the broad green spaces of a major university, thanks entirely to my father's lifelong work at a dirty, strenuous, outdoor working-class job--and when I arrived, what did I find? A trendy suburbanite, the son of a labour-union president, lecturing me about "Whitesupremacy" and the injustices my family was responsible for because of our skin colour. Only the ridiculousness of it--the fact that I was more embarrassed for Malcolm than angry at him--counteracted the sheer offensiveness.

And then again, what do I know about growing up black (or half black) in a city that's nearly all-white? I'm not going to tell you that Jew-baiting is an acceptable coping mechanism for racial isolation, but I don't know what it's like to be in that position, not the first thing. That's not an apology, just a gut reaction. He's the one who chose to run for office despite vulnerabilities he didn't disclose to volunteers and supporters; he ran for office on the foundation of a local profile he built largely because of the same asinine put-on that has now undercut his political candidacy. Those who knew about Malcolm's background, including the man himself, were silent until he was caught out. People ought to take care complaining about the awkward "timing" of a Weblog entry written in forty seconds by a bored dilettante nerd amidst a house full of pizza boxes.

Let me conclude by putting all the relevant links in one place for everyone's convenience, especially mine. The list will probably grow.

The infamous weblog entry
Jason Markusoff's Edmonton electionblog (which inspired my Googling)
Azania's 1994 essay "JEWS: ENEMIES? FRIENDS?"
Rabble.ca thread full of disapproval and defiance
The formal apology at Azania's website
Doug Beazley's Edmonton Sun story from Wednesday (link will rot very soon)
James Cudmore piece for the CBC, with video
Jack Layton reacts; Azania apologizes again
CTV story (same wire content as previous, but link ought to be more durable)
Cartoonist/NDP scion/ex-Gateway editor Steve Notley weighs in (scroll down)
Thursday morning pieces: Journal, Globe, Star, Sun

Paula Simons has an outstanding piece, providing background, context, and solid common sense, in Thursday's Journal. It's not online but if you live in town you might want to check it out. And be sure to read Markusoff's personal reaction to the kerfuffle, which is now up.

Coyne: Canada, land of "gotcha" stories
Nestruck: Internet-age varsity radicals at a disadvantage

From the Chronicle of Higher Education's online news section:

Doctors were shocked in 2001 to read a study from Columbia University that found that praying for women seeking to become pregnant could double their chances of success using in vitro fertilization.
Some doctors were even more shocked that the study, which they considered highly flawed, had been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Now comes the final surprise: One of the paper's three authors pleaded guilty last month to two federal charges of fraud.

And yet, curiously, I find myself not one bit surprised at all. Fancy that! (Via Julian Sanchez at Hit & Run).

Almost forgot to post

I do think -- Lord, here come the e-mails -- that left-wing media bias is real. And not just at the CBC and the Toronto Star, but in newsrooms, at wire services, and in broadcast news generally. A major theme of the federal election so far has been the absence, surprising to some, of any sign of this bias. It's early days yet: Stephen Harper may still be Stockwelled -- he may, that is, be decked with blatant cheap shots and then declared a failure despite good actual vote totals. But for the moment, it is agreed that Mr. Harper is getting a fair shake, maybe more than fair.

However, a conservative prime-ministerial candidate running from opposition faces subtler, more stubborn biases from the news media. You might even call them structural, or unconscious, biases. Mr. Harper's up against them too, so I wanted to point out a couple in as clinical and un-whiny a way as possible.

The first example we're seeing is Yes-But-Can-They-Govern. In the wake of the Adscam revelations, a lot of people have dared to suggest that the Liberal party has lost its presumptive moral right to rule the country. But many, seeking to preserve the appearance of fairness while telling unfavourable truths about the government, are quick to add that "that doesn't mean the Conservatives have earned that right, either." This is nothing new. For years -- since long before Adscam -- conservative attacks on Liberal governments, attacks universally agreed to be justified and factually accurate, were reported with the Yes-But-Can-They-Govern clause attached. "The Reform Party [or the Alliance] must do more than criticize: it has to demonstrate that it is a credible alternative government." How many times have you heard that one?

There is a kernel of truth to Yes-But. Given a choice of opposition parties, we do have to choose the one best prepared to take over. The problem is that no overt standard of readiness to govern is ever proposed. Preston Manning heard three Yes-Buts a day for his entire political life, and the minute he was out the door, everyone suddenly agreed: "What a bright, decent fellow -- might have made a heck of a prime minister." In practice, it seems the only way a conservative opposition party can prove itself to the Yes-Buttercups is to be elected, despite all the Yes-Butting. The trope forestalls -- forever, if successful -- any kind of real negative judgment on a Liberal government.

There is a related rhetorical practice out there. Let's call it Do-You-Have-A-Plan. When the Liberals promise to spend an additional $500-million a year on some area of urgent concern, no one asks for itemized fine details on how they intend to spend the money. In areas of provincial jurisdiction, like health or education, they can promise to increase transfers without even being entitled to make specific plans. They'll just hand over the cash. Who doubts that entirely worthy things will be done with it?

But when a Conservative proposes to cut taxes -- ah, well, Do-You-Have-A-Plan, Mr. Harper? Suddenly everyone wants to know exactly what existing programs will be savaged to pay for the irresponsible spree. He who wishes to shrink government is expected to inventory the havoc he intends to wreak. He who wishes to aggrandize it is permitted to be vague.

Again, there is an underlying truth to Do-You-Have-A-Plan. It is desirable, if you intend to cut program spending, to start out with ideas about where to apply the axe. But it's unwise to commit to too much before you have the copious information that is available only to the government. If you got elected, you might walk in the door and find less painful program cuts than the ones you proposed to the electorate. You would then have the horrible choice between breaking an election promise and doing the wrong, suboptimal thing for the country.

The incumbent government knows in detail where it's pouring out our money, or ought to know; it can call deputy ministers on the carpet at leisure. The opposition has to rely on spadework that is usually difficult, sometimes impossible, and always impeded by the government. In some instances -- as with Crown corporations like Export Development Canada -- the fine details of waste and error are formal state secrets. So expecting a government and its challenger to produce equally detailed budget plans amounts to a bias in favour of the former. A natural, perhaps even inevitable one -- but a bias, and a liberal one, nonetheless. (May 31, 2004)

Rex Murphy hosted a campaign debate in my old riding, Edmonton-Strathcona, last night. The Edmonton Journal's electionblogger, Jason Markusoff, has a brief report containing the puzzling sentence:

There were no clear winners, although [NDP candidate Malcolm] Azania had the least to defend against.

Wow, Malcolm didn't have anything to defend against? I guess nobody asked Edmonton's most famous Louis Farrakhan supporter for his deep thoughts on the question of whether "Jews are friends or enemies".

[UPDATE, June 9: "There is an issue that has come to light about comments I made in an Internet discussion group a decade ago. You should expect coverage of it in Wednesday's Sun and then on radio and television and in the Journal over the next two to three days... I am deeply, totally sorry for what I wrote a decade ago, and I’d like to offer a complete and unreserved apology to my Jewish and White brothers and sisters." Read Malcolm's apology. The folks at Rabble.ca also have a thread in progress.]

[UPDATE, June 10: The story continues here. To say the least.]

Like most Canadians my age I was trained to despise and fear Ronald Reagan. Like most, I came to admire him as my logic chips were implanted over the years. This will sound kind of melodramatic, but I became an anticommunist on a specific day in grade nine or thereabouts when I was first taught the basic Marxist credo. "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs." For me, this phrase is still the dividing line between the Left and sanity; millions who protest that they are not communists, and never were, are animated by this decrepit maxim.

Reagan was the man who said "No" to it. He and Margaret Thatcher pushed history in the other direction, and expanded the ambit of classical-liberal individualism outward from its Anglo-Saxon refuge. Even amidst today's chorus of encomiums, you are not likely to hear many speak the unlikely truth: that between the two of them, Reagan might have had an equal or better grounding, personally, in the literature of political freedom. Americans suppose Reagan to have been the more "instinctive" proponent of free markets and free minds, but he and Thatcher took similar paths, and Reagan did it quicker, with less help. He didn't have Hayek living round the corner, nor a Keith Joseph applying the spurs to his political program. The American public and punditariat have still not absorbed Edmund Morris's discoveries that Reagan wrote the copy for his own radio broadcasts in the 1970's and his own speeches before he arrived at the White House; that he was an aggressive and sure-handed editor of his speechwriters' work as president; and that his papers contain "page after legal page of reasoned prose" in his own hand. Even Morris is still a little mystified about where it all came from.

Canadians owe him a particular debt of gratitude for setting the continent on the path to free trade. His reflected charisma was, in some respects, responsible for the Mulroney landslide of 1984. This was a psychic reordering of Canadian politics, a sharp divide between eras: it is no coincidence that old Conservative warhorses from the '70s now find themselves well to the left of the Liberals. As far as we have drifted into the European sphere of political and geopolitical philosophy, things could have been much, much worse by now if not for Reagan. And as annoying as it is to squabble with the Americans about beef and softwood lumber, NAFTA remains the Magna Carta--the reference text and the moral ideal--of our economic relationship.

I decided not to write about President Reagan for Monday's Post, knowing that abler columnists would be weighing in. But I'm spitballing a related piece for a future edition; stay tuned.

Oh dear. In Saturday's Globe, Eric Reguly committed a rather large solecism in discussing the disconcerting possibility that water levels in lakes and rivers in the Prairie provinces may be headed for a dramatic drop.

Later this month, David Schindler, the University of Alberta biologist who is a leading expert on watershed ecosystems, will publish a paper whose working title is "The Impending Water Crisis on the Canadian Prairies."

Mr. Schindler is no pop-star professor looking for headlines, although he'll gladly take them. For 21 years, until 1989, he was the director of the federal government's Experimental Lakes Project, which conducted research on the effects of acid rain, climate change and other damaging influences on boreal ecosystems. More recently, he has worked on fresh water fisheries management and the effects of climate change on rivers and inland lakes.

...Mr. Schindler's research has uncovered [a] potential problem, this one a true biggie. Twenty centuries of data from tree rings, lake mud cores, fossils and the like suggest the 20th century was unusually wet in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In other words, drought might be the norm. The Prairies have been in drought since 1998. This could be an aberration, or it could be the start of an epically long dry period. Add global warming to the equation and you can see why Mr. Schindler fears the worst of the Prairie water shortage is ahead.

It's Leavitt who constructed an atlas of waterborne microorganisms existing at various lake salinities and used waveform analysis to build a time-series of water levels in selected Prairie lakes. His work is heavily dependent on mathematical assumptions, and Leavitt will be the first to tell you (as he told me last year) that his sampling needs to be broadened before we can be sure how often droughts really happen on the Prairies. The work is based on measurements made at exactly five Prairie lakes, all of them on the fringes of the semiarid part of the ecosystem. It is broadly consonant with the findings of other researchers who have studied the same issue using tree rings, for what that's worth; Leavitt's work has less resolving power when it comes to the fine details of Prairie climate, but can reach back into a much longer timescale. (You can't get "twenty centuries of data from tree rings", as the Globe desk maybe should have noticed.)

Dr. Schindler, like anyone else, is free to use the data to make a defence of the deader-than-Elvis Kyoto Protocol. But one notices (as Reguly acknowledges) that the hypothesis here is that water levels on the Prairies are merely reverting to their preindustrial state. Is that what Kyoto was supposed to be about?--preserving the climate in a profoundly unnatural state for the comfort of human beings?

Increasingly, this does seem to be so: as time has gone by, the case for slowing or reversing climate change has come to depend less on the postulate that the change is anthropogenic (for very good reasons) and more on a one-sided, back-of-a-stained-envelope anthropocentric cost-benefit analysis. Preserving the climate in some hypothesized Edenic state which suits the present arrangement of human society is becoming a political matter of playing regions against regions, with some of the "environmentalists" finding themselves on the opposite side of the issue from the natural environment itself. Dr. Schindler is welcome to oppose the reversion of the Prairie ecosystem to its natural water levels, but his warnings for agriculture and industry won't really be credible until he distances himself from ascientific opponents of agriculture and industry like David Suzuki. If Leavitt is right, then classic conservationists like Schindler are destined to find themselves on the opposite side of this issue from the quasireligious environmentalists. The common cause they have made for forty years against the grosser forms of pollution is doomed: Suzuki, after all, would welcome a calamitous Prairie drought that destroys Alberta's earth-raping conservative civilization. Mommy Nature's revenge.

Reguly--whose column is, on the whole, a relatively edible curate's egg--also loses points with me for describing the Alberta government's Water for Life strategy as "a good start, but only that." Part of the point of Water for Life is that the existing inventory of water supplies on the Prairies suffers from huge unknowns. The "good start" at devising a better accounting might also be described as "the only possible prelude to any sensible resolution of the issue." It's a bit like calling Tycho's astronomical observations "a good start, but only that" to Kepler's theories of planetary motion--technically true, but slightly fatuous all the same.

My Friday Post column is

a) Conservative leader Stephen Harper has the same formal policy stance on abortion that the Liberals do--he prefers to leave the status quo in place, undebated and unchallenged; and

b) the Liberals apparently consider this unforgivable, to the point of being willing to ambush Harper in the street about it.

I wish I could post the column now, because Coyne's Saturday piece is said to be on precisely the same subject, but he reproduces his stuff on the Web a day after publication, so that'll be the one everybody talks about online. Perhaps the best approach here is to offer a "fair use" taste of my Friday column. There is, after all, an election on!

[Paul Martin says that] "Judy Sgro feels very, very strongly about a woman's right to choose, and I think what she felt was that Mr. Harper kept avoiding the issue and that he should respond to it directly." There's a Liberal for you: willing to accuse someone of "avoiding" the issue of abortion, but too chickenspit to actually say the word "abortion." Or did Mr. Martin, just this one time, mean a woman's right to choose curtains for the living room?

...Those Canadians who wax weepful about shredded embryos have been told clearly not to expect anything of Stephen Harper. For Judy Sgro, this is not enough -- not nearly. In the absence of any Canadian law governing therapeutic abortions, we are the most extreme "pro-choice" country in the Western world, practically by definition. According to Ms. Sgro, or according to Paul Martin's free interpretation of her views, explicitly supporting this status quo, as Mr. Harper does, is not enough to qualify you as reliably pro-choice. No -- your heart must also be in the right place. You must not only be willing to permit legalized abortion: You must actively approve of it, perhaps even adore it.

By this standard, it might enhance Mr. Harper's credentials -- or those of any other party leader -- if he were to confess to having played the male part in an aborted pregnancy or two. ...Most trustworthy of all, when it comes to "choice," would be the brave soul who had actually clambered into a set of surgical scrubs and assisted with an abortion. One day that may be the sort of thing politicians do for a photo-op to reassure women who feel "very, very strongly."

On Wednesday, the Post printed the party leaders' answers to the question: "If you could choose any historic period in which to live, which would it be?" Ah! -- a piercing query of genuine interest amidst all the boxers-or-briefs business. Find out where in the human past a man would choose to live, and you have found out something important about how he imagines himself, and what he sees in his head when he imagines the ideal society. It seems to me these are two crucial things to know about our candidates for the first ministership.

The only theoretically airtight answer to the question, of course, is the one Jack Layton gave: that now is the best time in which to live. Anyone who really feels that he can be permanently happy without antibiotics, central heating, and e-mail can choose, in May 2004, to do without. The rest of us would be reluctant, on the whole, to give them up for as much as a month. But that's not really the spirit of the question -- it's not meant to ascertain whether you would like to die from an ear infection, live as a muck-tilling helot, or remain within five miles of your house for the rest of your days.

Yet Mr. Layton's answer seems more dishonest than not, especially the way he put it: "I can't think of any better time to live than right now -- there's [sic] so many promising opportunities!" Well, shuckaroonies and golly gee! I realize Mr. Layton is no conventional socialist, and doesn't even like it when the nasty little word comes up. All the same, it is bizarre to see a ray of sunshine penetrating through the New Democrat gloom.

Consider what the left normally has to say about the state of our world. It claims that a feral American president is cutting a genocidal swath through the species in pursuit of imperial ambitions; that a global right-wing conspiracy is in the process of positioning the Third World permanently beneath the bootheel of the First; that Canada's economic system deliberately keeps a large fraction of its children immiserated and undernourished; that the chances for Canadian working people to obtain cheap health care and education are vanishing before our eyes; and that we are all on the verge of world-transforming, murderous environmental catastrophe.

The formal spokesman of this melancholic worldview has spoken -- and it turns out that all this horror is a mere bagatelle! He thinks the bleak valley we are passing through represents the highest development of the species! Hooray for advanced industrial capitalism!

Paul Martin gave a better answer to the question. Quizzed by the Post, he imagined himself living in the 18th century, referring to the Age of Reason and the French philosophes -- Voltaire, Diderot, Montesquieu. The inferences about Mr. Martin's self-image barely require comment, but it's an admirable choice of time-travel opportunities; the Prime Minister has chosen a locus every educated man must regret not being able to visit.

In a way it's almost poignant. You wonder how a man capable of appreciating the value of pure and convivial intellectual exploration ended up as the head of a giant shipping concern, never mind Prime Minister of Canada. Mr. Martin himself has described his career, often enough, as emerging by accident. One senses that he misses kicking verbal footballs around in endless smoke-filled nights at St. Michael's College.

Mr. Martin's choice raises one's hopes, a little, that if he is re-elected he will be a less illiberal Liberal than the sort to which we've grown accustomed. But remember, dear voter, what the philosophes ultimately wrought in France: revolutionary bloodshed, Terror and Napoleonism. In this respect, Stephen Harper made a choice more in conformity with the Canadian spirit. Under the heady influence of Charlottetown, he expressed a longing for the 1860s, the heyday of the British Empire and the decade in which Canada was invented.

In some ways, the choice between Harper and Martin really does seem like a choice between 19th-century Victorian liberalism and 18th-century Gallic liberalism. The analogy isn't perfect on the one side: Voltaire would have detested the slow "Liberal" smothering of freedom of speech and the press in Canada, and would have had great fun with the aims, characteristics, and personnel of our corpulent state. We'd need ten of him just to keep up.

But one can recognize the anticlerical, feverish spirit of some of Voltaire's contemporaries and successors in our modern Liberal party. Like the French revolutionaries, the Liberals have taken British ideals of justice and equality -- passed through a distorting French lens -- as a licence to remake society. Liberal environmentalism has its roots in Rousseau's sentimentality toward the natural, and our Indian policy has never quite got free of his romanticized "noble savage."

Victorian man was, like Stephen Harper, more skeptical about the ability of policy to change the human species. Driven equally by a faith in progress and democracy, he preferred organic, incremental change. He sought to protect property and traditional institutions within the framework of a minimal state.

The political credo of one mid-19th-century Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, was this: "The whole duty of government is to prevent crime and preserve contracts." (It was Melbourne who sent Lord Durham to Canada in 1838, thus founding responsible government in British North America.) It is more or less my credo, too. Expediency has obliged Mr. Harper to run on quite a different platform, but despite my distaste for some of his Red Tory talk, I do think an 1860s sort of man is what we need nowadays at 24 Sussex. (May 28, 2004)

If the election keeps going the way it's gone so far, the "accidental", and yet profoundly calculated, rise of Paul Martin really will begin to be regarded as a tragedy. Like the young Pierre Trudeau, the young Paul Martin Jr. never seems to have imagined spending his life in the pursuit of power. But somewhere along the line, Maurice Strong--a rival to Martin's other pal, Bono, for the title of most contemptible yet sinister human alive--got his hooks into Junior and basically bullied some ambition into the young personalist dipstick with the elite bloodlines. One year ago it appeared that Canada's second Paul Martin would avoid the Shakespearean fate of the first. Now it's all too imaginable that he will re-enact it.

The Accordion Guy read that old Post education column I posted the other day and asked the dread question "Could somebody please tell me why standardized testing is supposed to be a bad thing?" There was no shortage of answers, all strangely familiar. The girlfriend spoke up first:

Standardized testing just doesn't work, because the people who write the tests are not robots and therefore any standardized test is going to be inherently biased...

...which, of course, grades given by teachers never are. Teachers, we all know, are never affected by a kid's demeanour, attitude, ethnicity, culture, income, hygiene, criminal record, or personal history. (The people who "write" the tests are not robots--does that mean teachers are? It might explain a few things.) Me, I'm amazed that this objection gets by anyone who actually went to a school, but there you have it. Another commenter pitched in with:

One more issue with standard testing hit my Mother pretty hard. She taught grade 5 and 6 English as a Second Langauge. Her kids, regardless of their time in Canada, had to complete the same test and we expected to hit the same numbers as native english speakers.

Expected by whom, I wonder, and why? Leave aside the old Soft Bigotry angle--the implicit idea that it is unreasonable to expect a school to get those poor, helpless ESL students up to the proficiency of native speakers. What we have here is also a case of seizing upon the most uninformed possible uses of data from standardized testing, and attributing them to the testing itself.

As the people at the Fraser Institute who publish the numbers point out incessantly, you can use the numbers of a school with many ESL and special-needs students to compare its current performance with its own prior performance: you don't have to compare schools to other schools if you don't want to. You can use the numbers to identify low-income or ESL-heavy schools who are doing unusually well, and apply their techniques to other schools. You can use the numbers, as I pointed out in the column Joey linked to, to get help to schools that, for whatever reason, are simply making a total fist of things. You can use them in dozens of ways--but all the opponents of testing are concerned about is that someone might feel unworthy, or pressured, because of his school's ranking.

Another commenter--another commenter who shows small evidence of following Joey's link--brings up this boogerman, "teaching to the test". The comedy here is that the purpose of standardized tests is largely to encourage "teaching to the test". We test literacy because that's the end we expect language-arts teachers to teach to. We test core-curriculum math skills for the purpose of guaranteeing that those skills are taught. The person who complains of "teaching to the test" is implicitly challenging the whole concept of a curriculum--he is complaining that expectations other than his own are entering into his work. What other profession would indulge in this? The arrogance of it is almost as astonishing, and edifying, as the criticisms of testing on the grounds of its intolerable subjectivity.

There's more in that thread, but it's Kimberly Swygert, not me, who bats down this nonsense for a living. I'm eager to see what more AG will have to say in the comments.

Here's an e-mail dispatch from Lethbridge reader Matt Fenwick about one of those "star" Liberal candidates in Alberta [pause for raucous laughter].

On the topic of door-knocking, I too came home yesterday to find some Ken Nicol campaign literature in my mailbox. It was interesting, due to a particular word being conspicuously absent from the whole brochure: "Liberal".

I find this beyond hilarious. Here in Lethbridge, Ken Nicol resigned the leadership of the provincial Liberals to run for "Team Martin", which isn't mentioned in his brochure either. Less than a week later Adscam hit the fan. Like Keith Martin, Scott Brison, and others, [he has] committed the political equivalent of buying Nortel at $125/share.

Thankfully, now I don't have to spend time campaigning for [incumbent MP and Conservative candidate] Rick Casson. Were it not for Adscam and Paul Martin's abortion of a Parliament, Nicol probably would have won. Despite being utterly invisible for more than two years in what should be the second-highest profile job in provincial politics, Nicol is popular here. I think it's the white beard--"he just seems so calm and nice".

His only chances now are the sure-to-be-increasing efforts of the Lethbridge Herald--undoubtedly the most leftist rag in the province, student newspapers notwithstanding. Its editorial in April regarding Sheila Fraser's rooting out of incompetence in Canada's security systems was titled "War On Terror Can Go Too Far". Their three regular syndicated current-affairs columnists are Gwynne Dyer, David Suzuki, and Trevor Page, former UN Director of something-or-other...

Of course, he's already done enough time as an MLA to start collecting a pension, so the opportunity cost of joining Team Martin was low. Nicol, whom I interviewed many times as a prov-gov reporter, is the model of a well-liked Alberta Liberal: a professorial man whose ideology is indistinguishable from the Conservatives', but who seems to have some deep instinctual or spiritual attraction to lost causes. If I lived in Lethbridge I'd be tempted to vote for him just to help him win back the deposit.

I'm torn on whether to praise or damn SES Research and CPAC for adding a daily tracking poll--or, as the Kausian set puts it, "crack for the weak"--to the drama of a Canadian federal election. On the one hand, I like crack as much as the next guy. To quote the classic "Lie Detector" sketch from Mr. Show, "It's crack! It's great. It gets you real high."

On the other hand, crack is reliably reputed to create certain problems, too... Until we learn to hit the pipe responsibly, and realize that SES is surveying only 200 voters a day, there's going to be a certain amount of overreaction to volatile daily numbers. I'm warning myself to get a grip here, and if others happen to overhear that warning, so much the better.

Let me get some backed-up links out of the way here. I've put Jim Elve's Political Index of Canadian weblogs in a prominent place on the sidebar for your clickthrough pleasure. Hopefully this will make up somewhat for my pusillanimity in reciprocating the traffic BlogsCanada has flowed Coshward over the past year or so. The format of the Index is useful, and I've taken to relying on it myself as I get into Election Mode. Also overdue for some traffic: Edmonton's own Alexandra Taylor, a new poli-sci grad who is rapidly contorting into that mode herself.

The National Post has introduced a feature called "Blogger's Corner" in which pieces from the b***osphere are turned loose on the paper's wider audience. Gene Smith, who has participated, and PeakTalk, who has sort of revived his site on the urging of the Post, have comments. I'm particularly glad to see PT getting off his duff: he and Smith were both on a list of weblogs I suggested that "Blogger's Corner" monitor, and if I had a nickel for the number of other sites that more or less went out of business right after I recommended them, I could go buy myself a Starbucks venti latte.

Closer to home, notionally: Kevin Grace's Chronicles piece on Lord Black of Crossharbour is now available online. It's an increasingly rare opportunity to see one of the sharpest knives in the Canadian cutlery drawer at work. Kevin Steel, I see, has left Edmonton for good without so much as inviting his mates out for a pint: good riddance, then, Mr. Sneak-Out-On-The-Greyhound.

Finally, I must congratulate whichever of Stephen Harper's speechwriters came up with "Paul Martin 2.0".

Aw--now how come none of you complained that my May 18 column about "high-stakes" standardized testing in schools didn't appear here a week later? You're not paying attention! I was asked, for some reason, to represent the accountability side in a point-counterpoint on the subject. The occasion was a special section containing the results of the Fraser Institute's report card on Ontario schools. Here's what I wrote, with some relevant hyperlinks added.

My stock witticism about standardized testing in schools is that it's a good thing for two reasons: it's standardized, and it's testing. Anything else one might say about it is unlikely to convert anybody. By their own lights, the ultra-egalitarians and teacher-union footsoldiers who oppose it are right. They have one opinion about what schools are for, and the public has another.

In the face of such a divide, one cannot honestly hope for fruitful debate or happy compromise, though I'm slightly embarrassed to have to say so in this particular context. But an argument about the design of an institution between people who do not agree on what the institution is for does seem pretty doomed. Bob thinks that schools are for giving young people the tools of self-sufficiency and citizenship: literacy, reasoning ability, civics, and whatnot. Betty talks about caring communities, enhancing self-esteem, and fostering creativity. Where is the potential common ground?

The matter is made worse by Bob and Betty's mutual suspicions of dishonesty. Bob--I think I can pretty safely speak for the fellow here--thinks of Betty as being hostile to accountability. No one likes to have the pace of their work set for them according to an externally-imposed standard of performance. Teachers object to being made to "teach to the test": their unions' position has been that no external performance standard can possibly be appropriate to their work. Ah, wouldn't we all like to think so of our own career?

Betty, for her part, possesses an elaborate theory about the control of government by a rich and influential cabal hungry to discredit public schools and, perhaps, intent on replacing them with Dickensian workhouses or religious panopticons. She is generally quite unashamed to refer to it as a "conspiracy".

Well, she might be right, after all; I can only attest that I am moved to write, not by a packet of Krugerrands delivered in an alleyway, but by my positive opinion of school life here in Alberta, where departmental testing of students is an old tradition now and, at the Grade 12 level, carries the dreaded "high stakes" for university-bound scholars. The Harris government did not dare to go so far (though the creation of the Education Quality and Accountability Office in 1996 was a step in Alberta's direction), and last month we learned that McGill University--by consensus, Canada's best--has grown tired of the absurd grade inflation in Ontario, and will now discount Ontarian applicants' grades.

Alberta--no doubt by some coincidence--generally produces the best results amongst the Canadian provinces in international comparisons of learning outcomes. As a journalist, I've reported on troubled Alberta schools that were saved by provincial interventions motivated by bad results in departmental testing. Standardized tests have been used here, and can be used in Ontario, as a lifesaving diagnostic tool. If the students come first, this must weigh heavily in the balance against any psychic pressure that performance benchmarks might bring to bear on teachers.

Initial technical criticisms of EQAO testing may have had some merit, but the only complaints we hear seem to come from those who would oppose any test. The same is largely true of the objections to the Fraser Institute's publication of the school-by-school data. Is there any individual who believes in the basic merit of the Institute's project but believes it could be done better? The more usual complaint is ideological--that what the Institute does is wrong, because it's a detailed record of this abominable thing that the education ministry is doing. Any honest critic would acknowledge, just for starters, that the Institute's "report cards" are prefaced by sensible and modest caveats, explanations, and interpretive suggestions.

There is no defending a bad test, of course. EQAO.com has samples of all the agency's tests: you may visit and make your own judgments. It seems to me that the opponents of these tests, who raise fears that thousands of public-school children cannot cut the mustard, are doing more to "discredit public education" than any actual opponent could. It seems like an admission that the premises behind EQAO are sound, unless you take the view--the formally orthodox view of the educational establishment, Betty's view--that instilling actual skills is the least important part of a teacher's job.

"Rote memorization" is the third element in the holy triptych of eduspeak scare phrases, along with "high-stakes" and "teaching to the test". I sometimes wonder, to be honest, what sort of teacher would use those words to describe the work of teaching trigonometry, poetry, or science. (May 18, 2004)

The LA Weekly is doing its damnedest, it seems, to resurrect Canadian journalism legend Nick auf der Maur (1942-1998); in a new profile of his daughter, they say he "has been a journalist, has helmed his own TV show and is now a politician." Give the fact-checkers a break--wherever Mr. auf der Maur is, it's entirely probable that he's gotten fed up and made a run for mayor by now. Bonus stupidity: Montreal is described as Melissa's "less-than-hip hometown". Why, yes, it's little more than a row of rough-hewn cabins on the slopes of a hill, really...

I thought I'd mention an interesting little campaign factoid from ground zero of Liberal Alberta. My house has received precisely one visit from a doorknocking politician so far. Last week I ducked out for a plate of eggs during the afternoon and returned to find a short note, on red Liberal paper, in my mailbox. It said something to the effect of "Called while you were out--sorry I missed you. Best regards, John Bethel." This was good for a long, hearty laugh, since I couldn't vote for John Bethel even if I wanted to.

Last month Paul Martin elbowed Edmonton lawyer Sine Chadi aside and arbitrarily declared Bethel the Liberal candidate in the riding of Edmonton East. Chadi, a former Liberal member of Alberta's legislative assembly, told the Edmonton Sun that he was offered compensation in the form of uncontested Liberal silks for a race in St. Albert against John Williams. He spurned the offer, no doubt realizing he was about as likely to beat Williams as Pee-Wee Herman is to take down Oscar de la Hoya in a bar fight.

My real point here, though, is that the boundaries of Edmonton East meet the border of Edmonton Centre in the middle of the road that passes in front of my door. But I'm on the west side, in Anne McLellan's riding. For some reason--and you may regard this as a metaphor for the Liberal campaign, if you like--Bethel was literally working the wrong side of the street.

Mystic River

"Arguably the most haunting portrait of America since American Beauty", says a commenter on the IMDB. Well, there you go: I take it from this that the population of America is divided pretty evenly between half-reformed wiseguys, dead-eyed coppers, and stunned adult survivors of kidnapping and rape.

As a rule, Clint Eastwood is praised either for the wrong movies or for the wrong reasons. His best picture since about 1980, White Hunter Black Heart, has disappeared down the memory hole; so did that wonderful, weird tone-poem, A Perfect World. Mystic River is actually characterized by the same refreshing lack of bullshit as most of his movies, but the critics insisted on treating it as much more than the excellent clockwork whodunit it is. (The mechanism by which the cops figure out who dun it is particularly good, I thought.) Compare Mystic River to Absolute Power: which one, I ask you, was the ephemeral, by-the-numbers crime movie, and which had deeper shades of meaning? Most everyone, I think, has already failed this quizlet.

Seabiscuit

Somehow it had gotten past me that Seabiscuit's usual jockey, "Red" Pollard, was from Edmonton, of all places. In the movie Tobey Maguire's family is wiped out by the 1929 stock-market crash; in real life they were ruined when the North Saskatchewan flooded out their brick factory in 1915. Here's a photo from the City of Edmonton Archives showing just how vulnerable their enterprise was: the University sits at the top of the river valley, opposite the camera, looking down on the doomed brickyard (seen up close in this poor picture). Nowadays we have more sense than to build anything important on that particular flat.

Strangely enough, George Wolff, the man who rode Seabiscuit in the famous match race with War Admiral, was also from Alberta. He hailed from Cardston, the capital of Canadian Mormonism and the birthplace of Fay Wray.

The movie? It's fine--it does what it says on the box. It was past time for a good, heart-tugging movie about thoroughbred horseracing. Unfortunately the remarkable success of Seabiscuit seems unlikely to make the sport a popular cause again. What strikes you, watching the movie, is that the Seabiscuit-War Admiral showdown which captivated the American public could not have happened in the 21st century. The big horse would have been sent out to stud with the Triple Crown in his pocket, and the little one could never have become a symbol of the rambunctious West Coast in a country united by television. One way of putting it is that commercialism has confined racing to a gamblers' ghetto; I'd say the people who run racing are simply businessmen who have forgotten their business. Thank heavens Michael Jordan didn't retire at the age of 25 to father basketball-playing babies.

From Hell

The people who said the book was unfilmable were right. Did anyone say that?--they should have. The emetic irony here is that Alan Moore, writer of the From Hell comic, is a serious believer in witchcraft. His book contained a wholly credible, magnificently interlocking account of the Ripper murders which, though it contains absolute palletloads of the "supernatural", requires absolutely no belief in it to be appreciated. The translation to the screen took the whole thing out of the hands of an earnest pagan beardie who reads chicken guts and mumbles incantations to himself--but, by some Hollywood miracle, the material became much more dependent on booga-booga folderol that would make a six-year-old child snort with contempt. Watching this movie is like sitting calmly as a Fabergé egg is smashed with a hammer in front of your eyes.

Enemy at the Gates

You have to give this movie credit for bringing out the latent Prussian in Ed Harris (somebody get this guy a remake of Cross of Iron!), and for fitting up Jude Law for the smooth planes of a Socialist-Realist poster-peasant-turned-soldier. You also have to give it credit for splicing in, however awkwardly, an anticommunist message. Joseph Fiennes (also well cast as Law's apparatchik promoter and romantic rival) exits the movie with a little non sequitur flourish, giving a brief speech about the failure of Bolshevism to exile envy from the human bosom. It felt a little like Richard Nixon's spoken epilogue to the 1955 TV version of Darkness at Noon must have.

Amistad

Spielberg is wise to seek out material that doesn't apply too much stress to his childlike moral intuition; the slave trade is about the safest territory there is. And yet he almost screwed it up by retaining sad-eyed and lovable Arliss Howard as John C. Calhoun, who has one scene as a cartoonish, croaking Southron harbinger of civil war. Since it's Arliss, you just sit there going "By god, maybe the man has a point!" (Fun fact: Hollywood legend Leslie Howard was really Leslie Stainer, but Arliss Howard was actually born Leslie Howard.)

I couldn't help feeling uncomfortable with what Spielberg's camera was up to in much of this movie: the arts undergraduate in me was piping up prissily about "Mandingo stereotypes" as the lens lingered over nude African slaves who, collectively, showed barely a trace of disease, physical wear, or even ordinary unsightliness. (Even the filed teeth on one of the slaves looked like they'd been subjected to regular flossing.) At best, what's at work here is a discredited sort of 1805 romanticism--Rousseau warmed over. Spielberg's Mendé people, living, as they have, in a state of nature, cannot possibly have suffered any defect except those inflicted by Western enslavement. John Williams' aspartame-flavoured obscenity of a musical score sits comfortably alongside Spielberg's tarted-up BDSM segments.

But it's impossible for a Canadian to thoroughly dislike this movie, in good conscience; our own imperial forebears come off singularly well. An inquisitive American mind might began to feel queasy if it honestly tried to reconcile the movie's veneration for the Founding Fathers with the fact that it's jolly Jack Tar and his lobster-coated marine chums who are actually doing something about slavery in the picture and in the corresponding historical period. (Has Niall Ferguson seen this movie?) Amistad will make it difficult for you to wholeheartedly enjoy The Patriot--with its feral Brit bozos getting slaughtered by doughty, hyperpious colonists--if you should happen to run across it again.

Mark Steyn's Canadian election contest is surely his most generous yet; you can't beat the entry fee (there isn't one), and if you were inclined to enter you'd probably find the competition less stiff than the field in his various U.S. election sweepstakeses. For life's true gamblers, item six is surely where the action is.

We'll give an autographed copy of The Face Of The Tiger if you correctly predict the name of a current Cabinet member who fails to get re-elected on June 28th. If you prefer to predict two defeated cabinet members and they turn out to be correct, we'll give you The Face Of The Tiger plus Mark Steyn From Head To Toe. If you want to predict three defeated cabinet members and they turn out to be correct, we'll give you The Face Of The Tiger and Mark Steyn From Head To Toe plus The Survival Of Culture. If you want to predict four and they're correct, we'll give you The Face Of The Tiger, Mark Steyn From Head To Toe, The Survival Of Culture plus The Future Of The European Past. If you want to predict five and they're correct, we'll give you The Face Of The Tiger, Mark Steyn From Head To Toe, The Survival Of Culture, The Future Of The European Past plus a SteynOnline travel mug. If you predict six or more correctly, we'll be so deliriously happy we'll toss in a magnum of champagne to fill your travel mug.

...in the event that two or more entrants correctly predict the answer, the winner will be the earliest entry received. Entries are not allowed to guess over--i.e., if you put two names on your list, both ministers must be defeated at the polls; if you put five names on, all five must be defeated.

Gar Knutson (Elgin-Middlesex-London), minister of state for new and emerging markets: Close, but no Gar. (Actually not all that close, but I liked the pun.) Knutson has, in the past, been one of the certifiable beneficiaries of vote-splitting in a conservative-tempered riding. In 2000 he beat the Alliance's farmer candidate by just 1,800 votes: the PC candidate had bled off 6,000. Knutson has been complaining to all and sundry, including the Globe, about the difficulty of campaigning on the Liberal record. "He said he responded by pointing to Mr. Martin's record as finance minister and asking whether voters would seriously prefer Conservative Leader Stephen Harper as prime minister. 'They didn't quarrel with that,' Mr. Knutson said." Of course they didn't quarrel, Gar--they're just going to wait, and vote against you while your back is turned. Fifteen thousand people in this riding liked Stockwell Day enough to vote for him; Knutson, barring a miracle, is a dead man walking 'n' doorknocking.

Helene Scherrer (Louis-Hebert), minister of Canadian heritage: How much do you suppose the BQ would love to knock off a sitting Heritage Minister? Scherrer was not expected to win this suburban Quebec City seat in 2000, but voter backlash over megacity merger policies fatally wounded the BQ incumbent. Scherrer's majority was a meagre 2,400, and the Bloc is now on steroids. Let's not forget that the minister has made an extravagant display of kissing off the filesharing vote; there have to be at least a couple thousand Kazaa users downloading Mitsou records in that constituency, don't there?

Andy Scott (Fredericton), minister of state for infrastructure: File under "Hey, is that guy still in cabinet?" Paul Martin tried to shore up the candidacy of Canada's most notorious airline blabbermouth with a last-minute gobbet of federal road, sewer, and highway spending. It might work--I reserve judgment on the cynicism of New Brunswick voters--but New Brunswick Conservative premier Bernard Lord is foursquare behind Harper (albeit with undoubted secret misgivings about spurning the Tory leadership himself), and the PCs and Conservatives got 20,000 votes here in 2000. Scott barely cleared 14,000. Open question: will Scott Reid's bilingualism comments tilt the N.B. field against the Tories, or will Harper's fast reaction work in their favour?

Rey Pagtakhan (Winnipeg North), minister of Western economic diversification: In English, that title translates to "In charge of Liberal showpiece programs out in the boondocks". The Winnipeg cardiologist was forced into a battle of incumbents against New Democrat Judy Wasylycia-Leis (say that five times fast) by this spring's redistricting. 17% of the voters in the new riding are, like Pagtakhan, Filipino-Canadian. But most of "Winnipeg North" consists of Wazzle-frassle-schmazzle's old Winnipeg North Centre riding, and she annihilated the Liberal there last time. Caveat: a New Democrat victory here may be a bad bet if Jack Layton continues to shove his own foot further down his gullet.

David Pratt (Nepean-Carleton), minister of defence: Another Ontarian in trouble. Pratt beat the Alliance's Michael Green by just 2,200 votes in 2000, and nearly 10,000 PC votes are in play. Now Pratt faces a telegenic young pollster/political hack, Pierre Poilievre, and having to defend Liberal defence policy may be more of a curse than blessing. Despite the Alliance-PC merger, Pratt could survive a slight swing in Ontario voter support away from the Liberals; he hasn't embarrassed himself in the defence portfolio, and Martin has had him out front in all the re-runs of Chretien-era defence-spending announcements. But if the Conservatives are going to win 30 or 40 Ontario seats--a modest estimate, given the tectonic shift the polls are suggesting--this is bound to be one of them.

Anne McLellan (Edmonton Centre), deputy prime minister and minister of public safety and emergency preparedness: In principle, she's the most vulnerable Liberal cabinet minister, having survived very close shaves against uninspiring Alliance candidates twice in a row. In practice, I'm not so sure. I live in McLellan Country, and she's certainly winning the sign war. She is a surprisingly good riding-level politician and has delivered the federal goods to the western half of this city. I don't think the Ottawa Sun's revelations about a backroom PC-Liberal deal in 2000 will hurt her. But her increasingly strident defence of the gun registry, which she used to make a show of feeling uncomfortable about, works against her. It certainly won't help her with the large soldier vote here (an anti-Liberal constituency she created herself), and to make matters worse, the Conservatives have found a retired RCAF lieutenant-colonel to oppose her. I still figure she's got a fifty-fifty chance of winning, but it's going to take guts to go get that champagne.

Why did The Door let Jeremy Lott's 2003 interview with Philip Jenkins turn stale? There's no telling, but it's a good one. It probably should be read not so much for Jeremy's sake as for Jenkins': you have to sympathize with a man who signed to do a book on terrorism in August 2001.

Today's National Post column, about

The thing that surprises me about looking back over the last few Canadian elections is that they were, for a Western right-wing voter, all pretty satisfying. It's that time in between elections, when the winners get to passing the laws and running the country, that politics becomes a depressing pantomime of bad men and worse ideas.

The greatest political event of my lifetime, I think, was the 1988 free-trade election. I was 17 years old; I didn't yet have a coalesced political world view, beyond being opposed to blatantly stupid things. But I'd read enough to be convinced that economic nationalism was one of those things. In '88, even a teenager could recognize Brian Mulroney for what he was: a horrible bastard, basically, who had staked his career on one good idea whose time had arrived. His opponents succeeded completely in framing the fight for their regional or ideological interests as a struggle for the soul of the country -- and still they lost, dividing their forces in the face of the enemy army. Watching the returns come back, and seeing the increasing greenness about the gills of the czars of the culture, was unmitigated rapture.

The triumph replayed itself in 1992, on the night of the Charlottetown Accord referendum. There was some doubt as to which way that one would go, but in the end the Mulroney Coalition rose up against its namesake, his asymmetric federalism, and his ghastly Social Charter. Again, the cause of Canadian-ness was defined for us by a self-interested elite, and again the public had the temerity to vote in the un-Canadian way. The prime minister had sown the wind and reaped the whirlwind.

The federal elections held since have been characterized, on election night, by the baffled stupor of television commentators who never did learn to anticipate the strength of the Reform Party and its successor, the Canadian Alliance. In 2000, the returns looked like a triumph for Stockwell Day, who won seats in Ontario, obtained more than three million votes and increased the spread between the CA and the Tories from less than a point to more than 13. This time, the guardians of Canadianity were smarter, waiting patiently to declare Mr. Day's palpable success a disaster after the fact.

The 1995 Quebec referendum was another great electoral drama that ended happily, with that revolting crocodilian phony Jacques Parizeau drowning publicly in his own poor grace. Deep down I think most everyone must have enjoyed it when "money and the ethnic vote" came crackling over the airwaves, even if they were very far from sharing the Liberals' naked terror at "losing Canada." In retrospect, if Canada had been "lost," Canadians might have reached the salient conclusion that the Liberals were to blame for misplacing it. As things actually transpired -- and here you have one of the great mysteries of Liberal hegemony -- almost no one actually thinks the worse of them for their imperial carelessness.

That's all ancient history now, but the core of the thing is the same as ever in 2004. The Conservatives, in their various incarnations, have to re-sell themselves anew each time out; because their support is so volatile, they have suffered Canadian politics' bloodiest massacres and achieved its greatest victories. The Liberals remain the Liberals, oscillating between 30% of the popular vote and the low forties whatever disgraces they happen to have suffered between elections. As bad as things might get for them, and things have now gotten very bad, they enjoy a solid floor of support from permanent loyalists -- those who are at the public teat in one way or another, along with Earnscliffian soul-vendors, unassimilated immigrants, minority-language communities, and young boobs for whom the party of Pearson and Trudeau still holds an adolescent romance.

That Liberal floor has been rising steadily in this country since 1960 or so. The number of people who are real net contributors to the treasury and who vote Liberal is never very great. Under Chretien, I suspect it was already quite close to zero. Do you know a lot of small businessmen, tradesmen, physicians, or farmers who vote Liberal? Study the party's candidates, and notice how, when the Grits get hold of someone who has attained anything at all in the private sector, like Ken Dryden, they can barely restrain their bladders.

In the mass, the Liberal corps is a undifferentiated gang of teachers, lawyers, "activists," "consultants," and ethnic "community leaders," seasoned with a few jumped-up backwoods mayors and former Liberal staffers eager to play boss. Even the ones who have some sort of business background normally bear the oddball stamps of Liberality. The ideal Liberal candidate would be someone who learned the stern truths of private business (by running his uncle's confectionery in Moosonee for six months) before earning a doctorate in International Meddlesomeness Studies and chairing a Multicultural Friendship Planning Commission on Environmental Sensitivity.

Of course, we are supposed to say generous things of those who have spent a life in "public service," as if the whole thing had nothing at all to do with expense accounts, subsidized travel and the plain desire for power. There are so many of these strange people from the planet of tax-funded living: It is easy for the taxpayer, on whom the whole con game rests, to feel outnumbered. As Canada is currently constituted, he may be. Just how low is the Liberal floor in the year 2004? That is the basic question in this election.

The hope for the Conservatives is this: The Liberal project rests, somewhat, on the presumption of moral superiority. The Liberals will try to spin their plethora of scandals at a million RPM -- "They're not scandals, and, anyway, it was all Chretien's fault." But if the virus of self-doubt begins to infect Liberal social circles, progress can be made.

I'm not sure you can convert a Liberal, or very many Liberals, anyway: even if Paul Martin were caught on camera humping roadkill Tom Green-fashion, it's unlikely the party's poll numbers would drop below 38% or so. But mid-term and mid-election polling usually underestimates conservative parties, who have anger on their side. In the end, an election is about getting people to skip work or miss the soap operas and go make an active gesture in your favour -- or against somebody else. So the trick is not to change Liberals into Conservatives, but to shame the Liberals into staying home. (May 31, 2004)

I will add--and here's another point made by reader William Adams, who pays close attention and always likes to hit me on the head when he can--that Stephen Harper, on the whole, probably fits my picture of the "perfect Liberal" a little better than Paul Martin does. What's true of the candidate corps is not so at the top.

And another thing: today's release from the SES tracking poll for CPAC has the Liberals well below 38%--in fact, they're leading the Conservatives 34%-31%, which is a statistical dead heat. On the other hand, the Liberals are still within the margin of error of 38%, too.

There was an amusing little scrap today, apparently, between Toronto-Danforth Liberal MP Dennis Mills and Olivia Chow, the New Democratic candidate in Trinity-Spadina. Her husband, NDP leader Jack Layton, is angling for Mills' seat.

Mills reportedly crashed Chow's event. After he left, Chow chased Mills up the street, with a group of reporters following behind, to ask him why he screamed at her.
He responded, "You're the one who screamed at me!" He laughed, then said, "Olivia, I think if anyone knows how to scream, it's you."
The Liberal MP then tried to make amends, but quickly turned the conflict back to politics, with cameras rolling.
"Well if you felt it was a scream, I apologize. But, I don't want you to talk about social housing, because your record on social housing is abysmal," Mills said. "Eventually, people are going to wake up to that."

Although the co-op was designed to have a mix of middle- and low-income tenants in the building, critics argued that the couple's combined income of more than $100,000 made their living arrangement inappropriate.

A Metro Toronto Police investigation cleared Layton of any wrongdoing or conflict of interest, but the story sparked a debate over the merits of mixed co-ops versus social housing aimed entirely for the poor.

Layton ruefully looks back on the incident as an effective political attack by his rivals, who protested outside the co-op for several weeks, but continues to defend the concept of mixed co-ops as a way to avoid "ghettos" of urban poor.

"It was a brilliantly executed smear attempt. I have admired it for years as to how it was pulled off," he said.

[UPDATE, 2:51 pm, May 30: Or then again, maybe it was a smear! (Or then again again, maybe not.) A couple of e-mails from readers encouraged me to check up on the old Ontario rules about co-op housing. Layton and Chow, it seems, occupied one of the units intended to be rented out at "market value"; taking this phrase at its meaning suggests that no sponging was involved. In practice, "market value" had nothing to do with the market. The government merely gave the co-ops the price of the mortgage and operating expenses, minus whatever rent the NDP-dominated co-op committees had managed to collect. Under the circumstances the price of the middle-income co-op units varied wildly, and was often higher than market rates (which, of course, left many of the designated middle-income units utterly unoccupied). Layton and Chow might well have been subsidizing their neighbours on collectivist principle, as Ikram Saeed suggested in an early-morning e-mail. And to be honest, that wouldn't be terribly surprising. But there were stories around the same time of politicians of other parties living in co-ops (as has happened in B.C., apparently, too), and of NDP co-ops bullying middle-income tenants to get them to make way for the ideologically pure, which is hard to account for if the rents in those particular places were above-market.

Reader William Adams had some experience, almost, with the same building Layton and Chow lived in:

The co-op itself was subsidized, in that Canada Mortgage and Housing gave low-interest mortgages to start new co-ops. This was back in the day when Canada was still flirting with socialist policies. I almost ended up living there as it was two blocks from my Cityhome [Toronto municipal-financed mixed income] apartment. My roommates and I had decided to split up and I was looking for new digs. Several years before this I had lived in a student Co-op. I had my name on the waiting list, and I was accepted, but the move-in date was a month away. It actually wasn't all that cheap and co-ops are a bit irritating in that they can take democracy too far, so I took a cheaper place farther from downtown. Note that I was never offered or ever received subsidies.

This was just months before the media frenzy over Jack and Olivia [living] there. You forget to mention that Olivia's mother was also living in the co-op at the same time. Jack did have a point in that he was a big supporter of co-ops and mixed-income housing, so living there was walking the talk to a certain extent. Also note that the co-op was on Jarvis St. [was] just one block south of the hooker half-mile, so the location was not for everyone.

Anyone who can shed more light is encouraged to drop a note as the usual e-mail address...

There's something important I almost forgot to mention about the Harper v. Canada column below.

I don't really expect Americans to have been following the various battles over Canadian election-spending law. But there is a point here that is meaningful to them, and they can appreciate it without knowing too much of the background--the important fact, if there is one, is that the new Canadian limits, which our Supreme Court has just upheld, are more stringent than the McCain-Feingold ones insofar as they apply to individuals as well as corporate entities. The Elections Act that we have now would probably not survive a free-speech test for one second in a U.S. court.

What's interesting about the Canadian dispute from an American standpoint is that the Canadian court explicitly framed the discussion of "electoral fairness" in Thomas Sowell's terms. Go back, if you like, over the part I've summarized in which the Court considers the "libertarian model" of fairness as opposed to the "egalitarian model" of fairness. This dichotomy will be amazingly familiar to anybody who's read Sowell's writings about cosmic justice.

Traditional concepts of justice or fairness, at least within the American tradition, boil down to applying the same rules and standards to everyone. [I would say that it was more rightly referred to as the "Anglo-Saxon tradition" -ed.] This is what is meant by a "level playing field"-- at least within that tradition, though the very same words mean something radically different within a framework that calls itself "social justice." Words like "fairness," "advantage" and "disadvantage" likewise have radically different meanings within the very different frameworks of traditional justice and "social justice."

John Rawls perhaps best summarized the differences when he distinguished "fair" equality of opportunity from merely "formal" equality of opportunity. Traditional justice, fairness, or equality of opportunity are merely formal in Professor Rawls' view and in the view of his many followers and comrades. For those with this view, "genuine equality of opportunity" cannot be achieved by the application of the same rules and standards to all, but requires specific interventions to equalize either prospects or results. As Rawls puts it, "undeserved inequalities call for redress."

A fight in which both boxers observe the Marquis of Queensberry rules would be a fair fight, according to traditional standards of fairness, irrespective of whether the contestants were of equal skill, strength, experience or other factors likely to affect the outcome -- and irrespective of whether that outcome was a hard-fought draw or a completely one-sided beating.

This would not, however, be a fair fight within the framework of those seeking "social justice," if the competing fighters came into the ring with very different prospects of success -- especially if these differences were due to factors beyond their control.

Presumably, the vast ranges of undeserved inequalities found everywhere are the fault of "society" and so the redressing of those inequalities is called social justice, going beyond the traditional justice of presenting each individual with the same rules and standards. However, even those who argue this way often recognize that some undeserved inequalities may arise from cultural differences, family genes, or from historical confluences of events not controlled by anybody or by any given society at any given time. For example, there was no way that Pee Wee Reese was going to hit as many home runs as Mark McGwire, or Shirley Temple run as fast as Jesse Owens. There was no way that Scandinavians or Polynesians were going to know as much about camels as the Bedouins of the Sahara -- and no way that these Bedouins were going to know as much about fishing as the Scandinavians or Polynesians.

In a sense, proponents of "social justice" are unduly modest. What they are seeking to correct are not merely the deficiencies of society, but of the cosmos. What they call social justice encompasses far more than any given society is causally responsible for. Crusaders for social justice seek to correct not merely the sins of man but the oversights of God or the accidents of history. What they are really seeking is a universe tailor-made to their vision of equality. They are seeking cosmic justice.

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