Andrew Coyne will soon be posting his Wednesday Post column, which is a probe of the weird cosmos of the Globe and Mail's pages. I had myself hoped to write something on Kirk Makin's astonishing Wednesday story about how terrified the "legal world" is of a Conservative victory June 28. Coyne, however, is already on the case, which is just as well, since I'm surrounded by deadlines. There's actually not so much wrong with Makin's reporting, and I admire his work--the only comment I'd make of that sort is to ask why the profession of law is always referred to as the "legal world" (or the "legal community"), and almost never as the "legal business".

But consider this quote, doubtless representative of legal-world terrors, from constitutional expert David Stratas:

This is the first time in its 129-year history that the Supreme Court has been an election campaign issue. If Mr. Harper is too overt about this, there will be a whole host of people concerned about court-packing. Until now, Supreme Court appointments are seen to have been made entirely on merit. Court-packing is alien to our culture. It would backfire.

Got that? The very act of replacing the judges retiring in the normal course of aging would be deemed "court-packing" by the Stratasphere. Prime Minister Stephen Harper can't be "overt" about looking for ideologically sympathetic judges: Stratas, staggeringly, seems unaware that Jean Chretien put almost nothing but Martian left-liberals on the Court, and that among his "merit"-driven choices have been the unknown and unheralded wife of a former Quebec Liberal cabinet minister (Deschamps), the national "Yes" chairman from the 1992 Charlottetown Accord referendum (Bastarache), and a former anti-sovereignty strategist from the Quebec Liberal party in the '70s (LeBel). He also turned a former president of the national Liberals into the Chief Justice of the Quebec Court of Appeal last year. Question for Stratas: isn't this court-packing? Pardon my French, but I'd say it's practically fudge-packing.

Ever want to see the inside of a newspaper columnist's inbox? I warn you, sometimes opening it up is a bit like unwittingly following that Goatse link we've all seen...

Sent : June 16, 2004 9:36:58 PM
To : colbycosh@hotmail.com
Subject : EXTREMIST!!!

SO YOU BY YOUR COMMENTS IN THE NATIONAL POST JUNE11 WOULD ADVOCATE THE SELLING OF BABIES??? HAVE YOU NOT HEARD OF THE CASE OF BABY SELLING IN OKLAHOMA INVOLVING A CANADIAN MOTHER??? THE HENDERSON CASE. I CANNOT BELIEVE THERE ARE PEOPLE RUNNING AROUNBD LOOSE LIKE YOU ARE.. YOU AND YOUR HENCHMAN STEVE HARPER.

YOU ARE BOTH FUCKING ASSHOLES WHO SHOULKD BE SHOT IN THE FACE WITH A BALL OF YOUR OWN SHIT !!! BECAUSE THATS WHAT YOU ARE... SHIT!!! LOOSE STINCKIN COW SHIT!!! YOU KNOW THE KIND OF STENCH THAT KEEPS EMANATING OUT OF TORONTO??? YAH THAT STENCH OF DECREPID JOURNALISTS WHO WOULD MANUFACTURE CONSENT AND PUT CANADA INTO HARM BY ADVOCATING THE LIKES OF HARPER TO GOVERN..

YOU HAVE YOUR JOURNALISTIC AGENDA AND PROFIT MOTIVE.. HARPER AND HIS BAND OF ASSHOLES WILL MAKE MORE SCANDOLOUS AND CORRUPT GOVERNMENT AND RIGHT WING EXTREMISM THAT YOU THE MEDIA WILL EVER HANDLE NOW THAT YOU HAVE BUILT THEM UP TO BE LIGITIMATE.. WHAT FUCKIN TURDS YOU ALL ARE!!!

LIARS!!! CHARLATANS!!! ASSHOLES... PISS DRINKERS!!!!
BRIAN RANVILLE
BRANDON, MB.
[phone number deleted] IF YOU WANNA KISS MY ASS OR EAT MY SHIT!!!

Here is that

Wondering what I have to say about tonight's English-language federal chefferie? The traffic seemed to undergo a suspicious spike right around 10 p.m. Eastern. You'll have to wait a few hours: the Nashville Toast had me do a post-debate wrapup for the front page of Ontario editions. I'm told it will be available on the Web for benefit of the rest of us, and I'll link to it then. In the meantime, I recommend Paul Wells' postmortem, whose sheer nastiness is--using the word in its primary English meaning--awesome. Actually, there's a useful style comparison here. Wells asks, with delightful directness,

Who taught Paul Martin to put his hand in another man's face to shut him up?

But Daddy was busy pouring the foundations of the welfare state!

I'm going through a rococo Johnsonian phase right now, so I put the same idea more pompously:

Someone has equipped [Martin] with an affable smile-cum-dismissive wave that he uses when interrupted; it makes the temptation to slap the man's face resistible only by the saving grace of great geographical distance.

There have been a couple of snarky replies to my Monday column about proportional representation, and the usual diffident e-mails of support have so far been largely absent. I'd like to address a couple of the objections, as they are perhaps widely shared.

One puzzling, finger-wagging letter from a Post reader suggested that I had deviously cast PR in the most negative possible light by failing to mention the transferrable ballot and the old practice of having multiple seats in single ridings. I wrote back with the modest riposte that these are not proportional representation, are not logically conjoined with proportional representation, and would not necessarily make representation any more proportional. I could be persuaded to favour the transferrable ballot with a simple 50% majority requirement for election, but PR wonks have invented a plethora of bizarre alternative formulas which have the dubious twin merits of (1) making the vote-counting process incomprehensible and (2) not yielding just results even according to PR norms. Whoops.

The proportionality of STV can be controversial, especially in close elections such as the 1981 election in Malta. In this election the Maltese Labour Party won a majority of seats despite the Nationalist Party winning a majority of first preference votes. This caused a constitutional crisis, leading to provision for the possibility of bonus seats. These bonus seats were used in 1987 and again in 1996. Similarly, the Northern Ireland elections in 1998 led to the Ulster Unionists winning more seats than the SDLP, despite winning a smaller share of the vote.

There are a whole lot of people, I guess, who lack the barest acquaintance with Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Something to do with archery, surely?

Functional PR, in the real world, is compatible only with party-picked national slates of candidates--and such slates are themselves incompatible with basic features of our democracy. I consider local accountability for every elected parliamentarian to be such a feature, at any rate. It is wise to require that every MP should command the certifiable support of some specific geographical community.

Another reader laughs at my "weak arguments" and says simply that "First-past-the-post is sort of limited democracy." Whatever "limited democracy" might mean, it seems as though that is exactly the sort of democracy we live in, and I thank heaven for it. I know of no unlimited one--no perfect, crystalline method of translating collective will to action; if there were one, I think we should rue the results soon enough. Democracy is not a primary principle of our constitutional monarchy. If it were, we should have, at the least, separate elections for each federal ministry; or no Parliament at all, with federal referenda on every federal bill. We should have no fixed constitution, written or otherwise, and perhaps no judiciary (let us vote on whether to set the cute murderer free!). Some of us appear to have attained adulthood without learning that democracy, in Canada, is merely a method of choosing parliamentary representatives and, by extension, ministers. It is the best such method if not promoted to the status of a god.

Some--and I am thinking of the majority of my Alberta compatriots--believe that while democracy may not be an end in itself, more of it would be desirable, as a check on the unexpected growth in the power of the Prime Minister's Office. For years now Westerners, including those at the old Alberta Report magazine, have favoured citizens' initiatives, binding federal referenda on particular matters of urgent concern, an elected Senate, the right of recall, and other procedural reforms designed to purify our constitution by injecting a heady speedball of democracy into it. For years, Westerners' advocacy of these ideas has fallen on deaf ears--been mocked, to some degree, and actively spurned without really offending anyone, in the case of Senate reform.¹ Similarly, Alberta has complained that its representation in the number of overall House of Commons seats has never caught up with its share of the Canadian population, and never can, under the current distribution formulas. In this last instance, the cries for "proportional representation"--in the most basic sense of the phrase--have been little heard outside Alberta. If PR is coming, as I am assured confidently by my correspondents, let it come here to my doorstep first.

I have never joined too eagerly in the constant chanting for Democracy here in my home province. But I do find it droll that so many people have suddenly been converted to the particular cause of PR, rather than the dizzying universe of alternative reforms which might be adopted sooner. Can it possibly have anything do with the fact that a charming little left-wing Green Party full of apple-cheeked young idealists is now being ill-treated by the cruel logic of first-past-the-post, as the Reform Party was at one time in its existence? Can the fact that the Conservatives might now win a majority government with about 40% of the federal vote, as the Liberals have so often of late, be related?

¹The Alberta legislature demanded the right to elect senators as the price of its support for the Meech Lake Accord, and received it, electing Stan Waters. Jean Chretien's refusal to follow this precedent bothered approximately no one outside this province. In fact, some columnists have a noxious habit of pretending that the original exercise never took place and that provincial elections for senators would require an active change--impossible under current political circumstances--to the Constitution. It requires only a prime minister willing to play along, as Brian Mulroney was, and a public willing to hold the prime minister to the principle until it becomes entrenched by custom.
Nobody, after all, had to change the Constitution to create the office of "Prime Minister", a phrase which is not found at all in the British North America Act of 1867, but which magically appears--without being anywhere defined or ever having been formally created--in the Constitution Act of 1982.

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 comment 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.

Find ANY word Find ALL words  Find EXACT phrase    Help