Same-sex Monday, part one

Heeeelllp!--Lesbians ate my newspaper! For some reason, all the items that have built up in my queue over the Christmas weekend seem to have a homosexuality angle. (Send the "Only his hairdresser knows for sure" jokes to the usual address, Mary.) First up is my Dec. 16 Post column, which analyzed a little-noted aspect of Canada's gay-marriage debate--namely, that Alberta, the most notable provincial holdout on the issue, has already eliminated most of the exceptional privileges attached to marriage.

EDMONTON - Is Alberta a bastion of tranquility and freedom for same-sex relationships? If it's true, it's certainly the country's best-kept secret. But when local reporters challenged Ralph Klein about his government's stance against gay marriage on Monday, the Premier made a surprising defence of the path the provincial Conservatives have chosen. "Alberta has never looked backwards," he said: "We have probably the most advanced and forward-thinking legislation in the country as it affects gays and lesbians." Surely some mistake?

Klein actually has a point, sort of. His government tried awfully hard to devise a compromise on the gay-marriage issue. In 1998 it became apparent, with the Supreme Court's decision in the Vriend v. Alberta Charter case, that the province could no longer ignore the claims of gays and lesbians to protection under various species of equality legislation. Premier Klein outraged social conservatives by suggesting that the resulting public clamour against the court was motivated by hatred, and by declaring that he was not going to use the "notwithstanding" clause to counter Vriend's effects. His promise was that he was going to, instead, put semantic "fences" around certain extremely sensitive institutions -- notably marriage.

The "marriage fence" took the form of the Adult Interdependent Relationships Act, which was passed into law in June, 2003. The AIRA is basically an implementation of the "civil union" concept; it allows partners in "committed" cohabitation to sign an unregistered contract that gives them access to a wide array of privileges previously reserved for married couples. "Adult interdependent partners" can claim "spousal" insurance benefits, "spousal" support in the event of a separation, "spousal" privileges relating to wills and inheritances, and even court-mandated protection orders in the event of domestic violence. It's designed to be marriage in all but name.

The unique Albertan quirk was that the new "interdependent" relationships don't have to be conjugal. Unmarried platonic "life partners" -- even a pair of old bachelor brothers in a tin shed --can sign on the dotted line and get the benefits once reserved for heterosexual spouses. In that sense, Alberta's law has leapfrogged beyond mere gay marriage and is arguably more "progressive" in its recognition of non-sexual life couplings. Supporters of same-sex marriage, however, feel that Alberta's expansion of spousal rights was merely a coded insult to their aspirations. For better or worse, they now insist on nothing short of the real thing by its proper name. You could argue that they're tacitly arguing for the sanctity of marriage by insisting on access to it -- and that Alberta's radical response actually cheapened the coin of marriage somewhat.

It's not quite true that Alberta was particularly far ahead of the curve in extending the social benefits of marriage to gays and lesbians. Other provinces acted faster. But it wasn't especially far behind, either. AIRA isn't too well known even within Alberta, and no one knows how many Albertans, if any, have signed partnership agreements. What's interesting is how quickly the debate moved, and how fast the courts acted to ruin Klein's attempted compromise; by the time Alberta was ready to introduce civil unions, civil unions were no longer good enough.

His heart, I think, was in the right place. Sure, Klein's protestations of sympathy are tin-eared. ("I have friends who are gay and friends who are lesbian and they are wonderful people," he said on Monday.) But it must not be forgotten that he started out as a liberal journalist, an earthy bon vivant among Calgary's most marginalized and downtrodden downtown-dwellers. When he senses that someone is being picked on, as he did in the post-Vriend deluge of Bible-quoting faxes and e-mails, his hackles rise.

Did he really think AIRA would succeed in creating stable social peace on the marriage question? His government gives the appearance of having been surprised by the result of the gay-marriage reference to the Supreme Court, as it ponders the outright elimination of marriage licences and tries to devise a response that will satisfy the Tory rank and file. (It's probably just a wacky coincidence that the Supreme Court's decision was delivered at the peak of post-election chaos in Alberta's assembly, cabinet and senior government staff.) Although Klein has been speaking all the familiar social-conservative phrases about the great antiquity and singularity of traditional marriage, his language, closely examined, suggests that the fight has more to do with the "feelings of [his] caucus" than with his own passion for heterosexual exceptionalism. Alberta may not be same-sex paradise, but its premier is a pretty live-and-let-live kind of guy.

CJC Reloaded: a couple of weeks ago the National Post asked me to provide some Western-made editorial content for a couple of brewing features about the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund, a $12B Lougheed-era "rainy day" bank account formerly used to convert oil revenue into permanent cultural and social legacy projects. Today the Heritage Fund is just sort of sitting there, doing nothing. Liberal leader Kevin Taft tried, with some success, to make this an issue in the election campaign just completed here. The short piece I sent the Post--suggesting, more or less, that the only thing sillier than leaving the fund dormant might be reviving it--ended up appearing opposite a piece by Taft himself. I'd had to cut a lot of stuff out of my first draft, and although the article was probably improved as a result--and may not be of much interest to non-Albertans either way--I'm presenting my edit of the long version here. Watch for my latest in the Post's comment section today or tomorrow...

EDMONTON - Albertans have a comical tendency to leave provincial governments in charge forever at home while knocking voters in the rest of Canada for behaving the same way toward federal governments. In truth, we are superstitious and stubborn about some things. The two in particular that come to mind, if you live here, are provincial sales taxes and the Alberta Heritage Savings Trust Fund.

In the former case, we have always eschewed sales tax as a means of raising income for the treasury. We are annoyed by PST when travelling to other provinces, and we felt doubly victimized by the introduction of the GST, which imposed an unfamiliar nuisance on our retailers and our shopping lives. No politician could win here if he seriously proposed a provincial sales tax, even if income taxes were lowered to make the change revenue-neutral. Yet an overwhelming consensus of economists--especially the conservative ones--holds that such a change would be, on net, fair, sensible, and conducive to economic growth. Consumption taxes punish savings and investment less harshly than income taxes, yet they're no more regressive. The government of free-enterprise, ultracapitalist Alberta should, to all appearances, rely on sales taxes more than its neighbours do.

But--we're agin it. I have no good explanation for this, even though I share the same instinct. Suboptimal or not, that's just our way.

The passion for the Heritage Fund is vaguer, yet perhaps equally intense. The Fund, established in 1976 at the outset of Alberta's champagne-and-cocaine phase, is tied up in our minds with Depression-era thoughts of saving for a "rainy day"; with motherhood notions of diversifying the economy before the oil "runs out"; and, for Albertans of my generation, with the texture of the personal past. I entered university on a Heritage Scholarship, took classes in buildings purchased with Heritage Fund interest, and sampled from libraries whose holdings were stamped with Heritage Fund bookplates.

Much of this spending happened in the 1980s, when a mild summer shower had broken out over Alberta's economy. The Conservative government stopped topping up the Fund in 1987, and has let the principal float, without further contributions, ever since. After a brief spurt of social endowments, the government stopped making showpiece purchases with the interest, and in 1997 formally started ploughing it into the treasury's general revenue stream.

So even though Albertans still express strong support for the Fund--well, what the hell is the thing for at this point, really? If we're saving for that rainy day, spending the income immediately, at a time of whopping huge budget surpluses, seems like a hell of a silly way to go about it. The magic of compound interest is a notion that seems to have eluded our czarist Tory government. As far as diversifying the economy goes, it's hard for me to see how steering capital away from its most high-return uses is anything but a synonym for wasting money. And, anyway, the economic figures suggest that Alberta's economy has diversified markedly away from energy since Ralph Klein got into office and stopped trying so hard to diversify it. (Funny how often that sort of thing happens with governments.)

While I appreciate the visceral terror we all feel about running out of oil and having nothing to do when it's gone, I find the opposing argument--that the oil should be extracted and sold while people are still willing to pay for it--much more convincing. Not that it's ever made, mind you. But for every region that ever ran clean out of a non-renewable resource, there's another that simply found better uses for its capital and labour than resource extraction. England didn't run out of coal--it ran out of people who cared to mine coal for the world price, and ran into a politician (Margaret Thatcher) who wasn't willing to subsidize the business any longer. The long-term trend of real commodity prices is downward, ever downward; the people who have forecast the advent of permanent petroleum shortages have been wrong so many times over, it's a wonder they weren't asked to take their act to the street corner.

Right now the prices of oil and gas have spiked because of a unusual confluence of political events, and because of a ruinous quarter-century taboo about the development of nuclear energy. These things will pass--particularly the latter, as the dopey greens gradually realize that nukes are the most earth-friendly bet, watt for watt. In the meantime, what's wrong with the old proverb "Make hay while the sun shines"? Alberta is sitting on oil reserves approximately the size of Saudi Arabia's, and while they are "non-conventional", that's a distinction which makes less difference all the time. We have, literally, barely scraped the surface of the tar sands.

If people are still willing to pay us $40 a barrel for this stuff when we finally do run out, the last thing we shall have to worry about is money. The real doomsday scenario is the one where some prat in a lab discovers practical cold fusion and the whole hydrocarbon economy goes the way of the candlemaking business. You could be reading about this over tomorrow's breakfast; there has already been one false alarm. For us to be worrying about the alternate scenario, 50 or 100 years down the road, is simply mind-boggling.

Either way, the Heritage Fund should either be liquidated--and Alberta's future left to shift for its own damn self, as its present has largely had to--or it should be made what most Albertans have been deliberately deluded into thinking it still is: a method of retiring future obligations of the provincial government. Unfortunately this gets us into the business of trying to foretell the day-to-day priorities of governments that same 50 or 100 years hence. It is senseless to pretend we can do that. Go back to 1900, and look how grotesquely inaccurate even the best mental images of the year 2000 were. Do we want to endow hospitals for a future in which disease is conquered by genetic engineering, or injury by nanotechnology? Libraries, for a time when one e-book on everyone's shelf contains the entire collected wisdom of humankind? I do not predict; I merely suggest that the future is, in principle, unpredictable.

Ambitious politicians should not necessarily be permitted to throw our good money away on things that may be useless to our grandchildren. If we must spend the money, perhaps we should be biased towards the things we lack which are most valuable by virtue of being "useless": institutions of pure research, notable public buildings, traditional graphic and narrative arts, and the like. Sadly--this being Alberta--the money would inevitably flow into the pockets of local mediocrities, which is, after all, somewhat defensible. Foreign geniuses don't need the help. (November 19, 2004)

The Liberal success in last night's Alberta election was less surprising to me than it was to most. But as I peruse the casualty lists this morning, I see still more marginal surprises and occasions for comment. The Liberals took some really startling Conservative scalps; there is nothing very special about their seat count, but the particular chairs they've occupied are weird. Conventional wisdom would probably have suggested that if the Liberals won anywhere in solid-Tory Calgary, it would be in their traditional beachhead, Calgary-Buffalo. Instead they won three Calgary seats--including Murray Smith's old Varsity riding, whose loss Ralph Klein admitted to being baffled by--without winning Buffalo. In retrospect, Klein might have cost the party that Varsity seat by naming retiring pal Smith as Alberta's high-paid official agent in Washington, D.C.

The Liberals also seem to have accidentally run over some high-profile Conservative moderates who were out on the skirmishing lines in Northern Alberta. They are practically apologizing this morning for having trounced former Reform MP Ian McClelland in Edmonton-Rutherford. McClelland had been the author and federalist guiding spirit of the government's lukewarm official response to the "firewall" agenda. Mary O'Neill, one of the reddest Tories in the caucus, also went down to an unexpected defeat in St. Albert. Tony Vandermeer ran openly against Klein's go-slow policy on income support for the disabled* and got edged out in Edmonton's northeast corner. Most importantly, the Liberals snuffed out the career of the most talked-about Edmonton candidate to succeed Klein, Mark Norris.

Norris was never likely to get anywhere in a leadership fight; that anyone was mentioning his name was nothing but a sign of the pathetic Conservative bench strength in northern Alberta. His humiliation leaves Iris Evans as the last semi-papabile northern Conservative, so one supposes it's good, in theory, for her. It's more likely that the ouster of Norris will work in favour of Jim Dinning, who can probably now add the support of Edmonton's Cooper-Mini-sized business elite to his control of Calgary's fleet of Lexuses (Lexi?). The general massacre of Conservative moderates, however, may help the cause of Dinning's most visible potential challenger, firewall theorist Ted Morton. Even if Morton doesn't run this time, the loss of the Edmonton caucus will, overall, reposition the Tory caucus as a more ideological instrument that is tougher on the treasurer (and on tax-hiking nitwits like Health Minister Gary Mar). Right-wing sentiment within the party has been looking for an articulate leader with a separate power base for a long time. That's Morton, even if he's not interested in being premier yet--and everything I've heard suggests he is. The media has largely failed to notice that he is following the same playbook Klein did in 1992.

The New Democrats' doubling of seats from two to four was an embarrassment in disguise; their caucus contains current leader Brian Mason, a former Edmonton alderman and bus driver who is admittedly good at playing the "little guy" card, and two popular former leaders--gentlemanly party mascot Raj Pannu and '80s nostalgia figure Ray Martin. Factor that lot out and you're left with just one guy who actually ran to victory under the party banner proper--David Eggen in my own riding, Edmonton-Calder.

On the opposite side, Alberta Alliance candidate Paul Hinman pulled off an upset in Cardston-Taber-Warner. Canada's Mormon capital was a natural enough place for such an event, seeing as AAP leader Randy Thorsteinson had stormed out of Social Credit claiming that he and his leadership clique were being bullied for their Latter-Day Saint beliefs. But the utterly unknown Hinman doesn't seem to make a very promising candidate for a right-wing flank charge against the Conservatives. This account of a local candidate's debate has him "continually saying the Conservative government serves big business, not the interests of the Albertan people" and proposing what sounds like a stealth nationalization of the beef-packing industry. (The Alliance will at least have the pleasure of wrong-footing the morning papers Truman-Dewey-style: early editions of the Calgary Herald contain the headline "Greens, Alliance upbeat despite coming up empty".)

The papers are also putting forward (as fact) the hypothesis that Klein faces pressure for an early exit, despite his signed promise that he will remain in the saddle for another 3¾ years. I'm not so sure about a quick parachute jump anymore. The race to succeed Klein is the party's ace in the hole; the leadership contest will attract hundreds of thousands of new members, and although some will go away disappointed, the Tories may wish to conduct the convention as close to the next election as they can decently manage. Klein still has a certain amount of political capital to burn, and the Liberals are 25% of the way to being a credible opposition, not 75%. I imagine the Conservatives will watch the weathercock closely, hope oil prices remain high, and try very hard not too move too soon. And for the moment Klein's possible successors are cooperating.

*Incidentally, far, far too much is being made of the "gaffe" Klein committed in complaining of being badgered by "handicapped" welfare recipients who seemed able-bodied and clear-minded. One must revert here to Michael Kinsley's definition of a "gaffe"--it's when a politician says something true that isn't polite to mention. Such "gaffes" are inherent to Ralph's style, and are probably crucial even when they do him minor damage. Klein occasionally drags his ass downtown in Alberta's large cities, into neighbourhoods like mine; I don't know whether most of his critics do the same. Many times I've heard the complaints Ralph has about AISH (Alberta Income Support for the Handicapped) from people who were well enough to, say, spend the day hanging around in an ice-cold bus station bumming cigarettes. (Surely it would be more comfortable behind the counter of a 7-11?) AISH payments are long overdue for an increase for the people who genuinely need them--and a hike is now inevitable, especially with the Tories suffering electoral setbacks in the metro areas--but one cannot entirely escape the suspicion that bureaucrats have used AISH as a waste dump for welfare lifers who could no longer qualify for payments to the able-bodied under Klein's U.S.-style reforms.

Matt Fenwick makes a good case for holding one's nose and voting for Klein one last time. I'm almost convinced. One guy I do have zero problem endorsing is former Yellowhead MP Cliff Breitkreuz, who is on the Senate ballot as a Progressive Conservative.

You may remember that I was supposed to do CBC Radio One's national Commentary segment the morning after the federal election. The electoral balance shifted slightly in the wee hours of the morning, and the monologue I'd taped was deep-sixed. We're going to give it another shot for the Alberta vote, so if you're up early Tuesday morning and you know what time Commentary runs on your affiliate, you can listen for that.

Here's last week's Post column about Air Canada and WestJet. Part of it is given over to rebuttal of

Be sure to check out Tuesday's Post for my semi-informed thoughts about SpaceShipOne, the Ansari X Prize, and the dead hand of Newton. [UPDATE, Oct. 5: Huh. Wednesday, maybe, then.]

EDMONTON - The Calgary-based discount airline WestJet made its first foray into the United States last week, ferrying 120 beaming Canucks clad in Mickey Mouse ears from Calgary to Los Angeles. I almost called it the "beloved Calgary-based discount airline," but that's not quite right. People heap praise on WestJet -- the families on the first L.A. flight seem to have booked tickets as much for the ride as anything -- but there's a certain set to the jaw, a certain undertone of bloody-mindedness, that is perceptible when they do it. Are they really praising WestJet, or are they perhaps just revelling in the slow-motion comeuppance of Air Canada?

Either way, the goodwill toward the Western upstart still lingers. It's stronger amongst Albertans, though not exclusive to us. When I rode Air Canada to Toronto earlier this month and took WestJet back, I got the distinct feeling I was being eyeballed suspiciously by locals who heard of my travel plans. Was I 50% traitor?

The truth is, all things being equal, I'd probably pay a little more to be relieved of the slightly oppressive comedy stylings of the WestJet flight crews, and, as a morbid connoisseur of aviation accidents, to fly Airbus rather than Boeing. But all things were not equal in my controlled experiment. Air Canada jumped the gun during boarding and left passengers loitering in the jetway for what seemed like hours. In 10 years' time my knees won't be able to tolerate such foolishness. Big Red served one of its Play-Doh-and-roughage inflight meals for free, whereas WestJet was selling excellent sandwiches for cash on the barrel. Even as a consumer-cum-hostage, I'll take good food over free food every time.

I was plunked down near fussing infants on both flights (of course); the Air Canada stews clucked with helpless sympathy, but the chief attendant on the WestJet flight borrowed the child from its grateful mom and used some weird magic -- possibly transdermal heroin? -- to quiet it instantly. I'd have given that woman a kidney right then if she'd asked.

Air Canada, of course, still has fans. Two weeks ago Jim Stanford, an economist for the Canadian Auto Workers, found a perfect occasion to chortle over the temporary misfortunes of non-unionized WestJet in a CAW newsletter. The airline had just finished second in KPMG's annual CEO poll of Canada's most respected corporations. Stanford professed confusion at this, pointing to WestJet's lower profit margins for 2004: WestJet, of course, has never failed to turn a quarterly profit and is reinvesting in route expansion, while Air Canada is swaddled in bankruptcy protection. He accused WestJet, whose employee participation in ownership would plaster a smile on a bust of Marx, of perpetuating "income distribution practices [from] the Industrial Revolution." And he professed mock-indignation over the airline's "corporate espionage" dispute with Air Canada.

That stab was especially priceless, I thought. The lawsuit has put a small dent in WestJet employees' stock options, though the effect is hard to separate from those of high fuel prices and failed experiments on some Eastern routes. If you're determined, you can spin the espionage case as a matter of the little guy suffering from mismanagement at the top. But remember, WestJet is accused of using a former Air Canada employee's password to access and compile private Air Canada data on passenger loads. This may not have been cricket, but I suppose WestJet employee-shareholders would rather see errors made out of hypercompetitiveness rather than carelessness.

And if anyone should be embarrassed here, surely it's the goofballs that haven't learned the rudiments of network security? Air Canada emphasizes stridently that its site was hit a quarter of a million times, possibly by means of data-harvesting software, while the barn door was open. They think this will make WestJet look evil, instead of themselves stupid. In the meantime, they have admitted to hiring private investigators to retrieve and reconstruct shredded documents from the trash of WestJet cofounder Mark Hill, which seems at least as questionable and espionage-y as eyeballing a competitor's intranet when you've happened upon a password.

Stanford did get one thing right: He pointed out that WestJet is "squeezed" on both sides as Air Canada regroups and new regional airlines copy its Southwest-inspired methods. For him, the incessant churn of brands in the aviation business is a morality play depicting the myopic cruelties of capitalism. Perhaps, but even if WestJet folded up tomorrow, the changes it has brought to Canadian travel would remain intact among the new minnow airlines. The middle-class traveller can only, I think, be grateful. (October 4, 2004)

Here's the

EDMONTON - The provincial enumerators have just been by my hovel this week, and I must say it was pleasant to have two young women inquiring into my continued existence, if only for 40 seconds. The visit signifies, if one needed another sign, that an Alberta election is coming this icy fall. Last week Premier Ralph Klein narrowed the dates down to two late-November Mondays. The vote won't be close -- this is Alberta, after all -- but there are always sources of interest, for the experienced punter, aside from the overall outcome.

Edmonton, marooned in a sea of conservatism, always makes an unpredictable spectacle at ballot time. Like all cities, it contains an army of beneficiaries of the state -- health care workers, teachers, welfare recipients -- but when you throw in a corps of provincial bureaucrats, the balance between taxpayers and rent-seekers is decisively tipped. Edmonton is also much more blue-collar than white, and labour union loyalties count. In the rest of Alberta, you get Conservative blowouts, with the Liberals and NDP battling for silver against the Heavily Armed Anarchists for Jesus. In Edmonton, almost every constituency features a three-sided brawl.

Right now, there are eight non-Tory members of the legislature, and all are Edmontonians. (Lethbridge's soft-spoken Liberal MLA, Ken Nicol, injudiciously defected to Team Martin in January to seek a federal seat.) If there is any Opposition left in Alberta after the upcoming vote, or even if it grows, it is likely to retain its all-Edmonton character. But no one can foretell its makeup. Strong NDP candidates -- there is at least one, in the person of former Alberta Teachers' Association president Larry Booi -- often merely split the vote for Conservative functionaries. The Liberals, for their part, are a glum and undifferentiated lot struggling with $900,000 in debt.

Their new leader, Kevin Taft, is a bristling, hard-left, detail-oriented former civil servant who advances a view of Alberta as a wasteland of robber barons, crumbling hospitals and environmental toxins. In fairness to Mr. Taft, the newspapers -- by quoting him a sentence at a time -- encourage the view that he is only in politics to oppose, automaton-fashion, every single policy of the Conservatives. Then again, I cannot name one Conservative policy that Mr. Taft does endorse. If Mr. Klein announced publicly that "ice cream is yummy," Mr. Taft would denounce both Ben and Jerry with his next breath. He is everything you want in an Opposition legislator, and nothing you want in a premier.

Which is not to say there is much love left for Ralph Klein. Anger persists over auto insurance, energy deregulation, cigarette taxes and rising health premiums. In general, one can feel sand in the gears. Mr. Klein privatized provincial registry offices early in his administration, and soon you could replace a drivers' licence, miraculously, in about 20 minutes. This year, the system was made more "secure" and fortunes were wasted advertising the changes to a captive market. After the "Hooray for Big Brother" billboards came and went, the credentials required to obtain a licence were much as before, but now one's data must be sent to Ottawa for laser engraving. It takes two weeks.

Unfortunately for the disgruntled, Premier Klein stands all but unopposed. The right-wing protest parties remain disorganized, underfunded and uninspiring. Anti-Confederation sentiment is near an all-time high, and people remain irate with the Premier for dropping a Canada Health Act stink bomb at Stephen Harper's feet during the federal election. But there is no respectable, unified outlet for protest. Unless -- and this is the really intriguing subplot -- one appears in the Senate election being held concurrently with the legislature balloting.

There are three Alberta Senate seats open, and turnout should be low. 130,000 or so votes ought to win the trick. The odds are against Paul Martin accepting any of the Senate-election winners, but attention should be paid to the candidates as they declare. If prestigious Conservatives jump on to the ballot with the implied permission of the party, it may suggest that Mr. Klein has made a deal with Mr. Martin to have the "elected Senators" appointed if they're the right people, or that he thinks he can make such a deal. Mr. Klein insists that Mr. Martin has left the possibility open in private discussions. If partisan Conservatives stay out, as they did in both previous Senate elections, and they leave the field to the cranky independents, so much the more exciting. What will Canada say if Alberta chooses to elect a separatist Senator-in-Waiting? (September 13, 2004)

What have we learned since last Monday? PC MLA Ian McClelland, who authored the tepid summer "firewall report" but cares a great deal about the credibility of the senatorial elections, has talked about leaving his Legislative Assembly seat and running. He hasn't yet closed the door, but it is getting awfully close to November and Edmonton-Rutherford's constituency board would have to find another candidate. However, one must remember that the Senator-in-Waiting prize may never be as tempting as it is now, with a Stephen Harper-led federal Conservative party hovering within striking distance of the prime ministership (and the Liberals needing every populist weapon they can find). I still see a possibility of quasi-establishment candidates emerging at the behest of Reform elements in the provincial Conservative party. On the right flank, the Alberta Alliance party became, on the day this column was published, the first registered Alberta party ever to declare the intention of choosing a formal slate for the Senate race. The Alberta Liberals, being Alberta Liberals, are likely to overlook their one reasonable chance to get some encouraging news out of this election and sneak someone into the top three. Ken Nicol could probably turn the trick if he's not too shell-shocked.

Incidentally, I've met with widespread confusion amongst Albertans who don't quite understand why this vote is happening now. I didn't give it much thought until I sniffed around either. Most of us were not aware that the Senators-in-Waiting were elected to fixed, six-year terms which have been extended slightly to make balloting coincide comfortably with the general election. Under the Senatorial Selection Act, current S.I.W. Ted Morton is forbidden--as a candidate in the general election--from putting his name on the ballot again. The other incumbent S.I.W., Bert Brown, is stepping aside.

CHICAGO (AFP) -- General Motors Corp.'s uber-sport utility, the Hummer, has been the biggest and baddest passenger truck on the US market to date, but it may soon be getting some outsized competition in the form of the CXT.

The brainchild of International Truck and Engine Corp., a manufacturer of commercial trucks and mid-range diesel engines, the CXT has been conceived of as a industry-worthy truck with some of the consumer comforts of passenger pick-ups. The CXT combines towing, dumping and tilt bed capability with 220 hp and 540 lb.-ft. of torque. At six tons, its hauling capability is three times the payload of consumer pick-up trucks.

The company plans to build between 600 and 1,000 units next year at its plant in Garland, Texas and it's hoping that the vehicle will find customers among tradesmen like landscapers, carpenters, and brick or stone contractors, and home builders. "The International CXT is a truck for businesses that want to promote themselves as much as perform," said Rob Swim, a spokesman for International Truck and Engine Corporation. "If you brought this truck to the playground, you'd be king of the dirt pile." (þ: NullDev)

Absolutely all I'll have to say about the outcome of the first ministers' meeting this week: nobody should be surprised that the Prime Minister yielded so precipitously to the premiers' demands for money. The key to this meeting, which was clear enough before it started, was not the personalities involved or the particular state of the federation. It was that it is Martin's first such conference. The premiers, in essence, always have a gun to a new prime minister's head. Any failure to get what they want from Ottawa only accrues to their political benefit. (Barely showing up at all, as Ralph Klein did, will be perceived by Albertans as the coolest stunt he's pulled in years, pace Adam Radwanski.) The incentives at such a conference all point in the same direction--towards abject surrender for the central government. It was thus with Mulroney, who ladled out so much no-strings cash at his first summit that even Rene Levesque came out of it singing his praises, and it was thus with Chretien, who shook hands, gave the premiers enough simoleons to pave the land surface of the entire country, and declared quick victory. It's imperative for a prime minister to emerge from that first meeting able to claim a triumph credibly--the more so because his relations with the premiers are only going to get worse as things go along.

Former internet journalist Andrew Coyne blasted the new health accord in a column this morning (subscriber-only), denouncing it as an absurdity--and the numbers involved are unquestionably absurd:

At one go, the Prime Minister has surrendered control over much of the federal budget, vitiated any pretense of national standards in health care, and tilted the federation still further toward special status for Quebec. That he has also, by bailing out the provinces, removed any incentive for substantive reform of the health care system -- for a generation? -- is almost an afterthought.

...When the premiers say "give and take," they mean the federal government gives and they take. And so it has. Under the agreement the first ministers have just signed, Ottawa will give the provinces another $41-billion over 10 years: $18-billion over six, plus a 6% annual cost escalator, on top of the massive increases already in the pipeline. As it is, the federal government transfers one dollar to the provinces for every three it spends itself. Twenty years ago, the ratio was one to four. At this rate, before long it will be one to two. And in return?

You can tell there's an election coming up in Alberta: the provincial Tories are playing hardball with Ottawa. First Ralph Klein cocks an asteroid-sized snook at Paul Martin's Healthcare Summit and Travelling Medicare Show, saying he'd rather be in Lloydminster than attend. This has generally caused the federal ministry to start kowtowing like mad, and, speaking as someone who's spent time in Lloyd, it's no wonder: the shock must have been grievous. Then, yesterday, outgoing Treasurer Pat Nelson played Alberta's best-loved national hymn of rage:

Alberta's finance minister warned Ottawa to keep its fingers out of the province's resource revenue pie Tuesday as she forecast a budget surplus of nearly $3 billion.

Pat Nelson said the Tories will be watching for any attempt by the federal government to introduce measures such as the national energy program, which led to a massive shutdown in Alberta's oilpatch in the 1980s. "If they come after us like they did in the early '80s... that hurts the whole country," said Nelson as she released the government's first-quarter fiscal update.

..."Are we cautious? You bet. Because some of us have memories and we haven't forgotten what they did to us."

Nelson said eliminating the debt will provide a lasting benefit to Albertans and all Canadians, who share in Alberta wealth through a national equalization program.

Liberal Opposition Leader Kevin Taft, however, said the Tories should stop patting themselves on the back for paying off the debt. "The Tories didn't put the oil in the ground. None of us put the oil in the ground. It's a gift."

Alberta's NDP said that even though the government is rolling in money, the plight of average Albertans has not improved greatly. "With oil and gas wealth we should be the envy of the country and we're not," said the NDP's Raj Pannu. "Alberta has amongst the longest health-care waiting lists and among the largest class sizes in the country."

It's Taft's statement that is more interesting from the standpoint of this website's perennial obsession with the Dumb Luck Hypothesis. Though, in actuality, it's not very interesting at all: Taft utters this exact line just as often as the Klein government sends some minister into a scrum to repeat a fiscal announcement already made eleven separate times. Which is about once a week (seasonally adjusted).

Do you suppose Taft ever wonders why the Conservatives feel obliged to engage him in this dreary, unending minuet? Could it be that... they somehow consider it politically advantageous when Taft squares himself up to the cameras and tells Albertans that nobody here deserves any credit for our relative prosperity? Doesn't this remind you of when you were a kid and your older brother, or a larger neighbour boy, would hold you down and grab your wrists and steer your hands into your face over and over again while saying Stop hitting yourself! Why are you hitting yourself? Stop hitting yourself, stupid! Stop it!

Usually, the Dumb Luck Hypothesis is inflicted on Albertans by people from outside Alberta. Perhaps Taft is satisfied that his ordained role in political life is to aggressively represent the fundamental attitudes of non-Albertans to Albertans. If he ever wants to actually win, he will have to work out which end of that shotgun is supposed to point at the enemy. But I digress. Before I read Nelson's war cry I had already been reminded, this week, of the DLH. It happened when I called my mother on her birthday a few days ago and she mentioned something about Saskatchewan diamonds.

Saskatchewan diamonds? Did I hear that right?

Yeah, Saskatchewan diamonds. It so happens that the Fort à la Corne area, east of Prince Albert--which has an intriguing history already--contains what is thought to be the world's largest accretion of kimberlite, the characteristic geological marker for the presence of diamonds. This seems to have been known since the 1960s--magnetic surveys of the province conducted from the air make it blindingly obvious--and now de Beers is working with Canadian mining companies to begin preliminary exploration in the area.

FALC's productive capacity is suspected, or hoped, to ultimately be much larger than that of the mines in the Northwest Territories which are already flooding premium-priced Canadian diamonds onto world markets. By "much larger", I mean "an order of magnitude larger". But any profitable extraction of the glittery stuff is still years away--five to eight, at least. Why did it take so long for serious exploration to get underway, when the financing for it has only been a matter of a few million dollars? One could propose many reasons (an obvious one being that de Beers only recently has lost its monopoly on the diamond trade), but it has been pointed out that Saskatchewan layers a delightful and unique resource surcharge on top of its corporate tax. The surcharge is levied on resource producers' gross annual sales, irrespective of profits; from what I can decipher from the news clippings, the phrase "they get you coming and going" would seem to apply here, as would certain terms of art from the pornography business. Relief arrived only in 2001, in the form of a Mineral Exploration Tax Credit. And suddenly the cry went up: Saskatchewan gots diamonds!

The Dumb Luck Hypothesis, as it applies to Alberta, is terribly popular with people in Saskatchewan. They love to tell me, personally, how lucky Alberta has been to find itself sitting on top of all that oil. (They are generally unfazed when I explain that my parents and an army of kinfolk took the trouble to move here from Saskatchewan, many years ago, precisely because hardworking people were needed to help locate and extract all that oil.) Now I can simply point out that those who stayed behind have suddenly been revealed to be, almost literally, sitting on an assload of gems that has been left unprobed for decades. Luck ain't something you get: it's something you make.

Today's Post column about the 9/11 Commission report is

EDMONTON - I've been following, with keen interest, the provincial and national reactions to Ralph Klein's announcement last week that Alberta will shortly become "debt-free." They have ranged from the incisive to the eccentric.

Most welcome were the many forensic dissections of Ralph's opportunistic proclamation. They added a welcome note of skepticism to an act that, over the years, Premier Klein has milked for more than it's worth. When the net debt was polished off in 1997, and provincial assets became larger than liabilities, there was a similar outpouring of joy about our "freedom from debt." Yet even now, the last of the debt hasn't been totally licked: There will be paper coming due for years to come. All the latest announcement means is that enough cash has been put away to meet future repayments.

Inside Alberta, everyone is lining up for his share of the newly unencumbered provincial surplus. Seniors are shrieking, public-sector workers are pleading, and, miraculously, even a few voices in favour of the taxpayer are heard. Some of these cries have verged on the delusional: While Klein was basking in glory at the Calgary Stampede, a self-described "person living in poverty" accused him of shucking Alberta's debt at the expense of the poor. "How many people have been killed? How many people have been mutilated?" she bellowed. Mutilated? Holy frijoles! After all these years, somebody finally found a completely new accusation to throw at the Tories.

Outside Alberta, there was some restrained praise, and a certain amount of self-questioning in provinces that have tamed debt less well. But mostly what you heard was the old tune: It's all because Alberta is so lucky, so very lucky. It's our oil, you see, that guarantees us wealth and government surpluses. All we need do is turn on the big faucet.

Murray Mandryk of the Regina Leader-Post, who snarked that "evidently, oil wealth is [Albertans'] birthright," raised hackles here by joking: "It's enough to cause you [to] clamour for the good ol' days of Pierre Trudeau's National Energy Policy." But one must admit that the dismissive tone is struck as often within Alberta as it is elsewhere. Paul Haavardsrud lectured us in the Calgary Herald about the fate of Houston, which congratulated itself often on its free-enterprise rectitude only to suffer bad karma when Texan oil production passed its peak in the 1970s. And New Democrat MLA Brian Mason reacted crankily to Klein's pre-emptive mortgage-burning, insisting that "oil and gas price increases guaranteed ... surpluses regardless of how the Tories steered the economy."

As it happens, there's something of a lab experiment available to teach us the relative importance of resources and sound policymaking to an economy. Venezuela has an oil industry, and tar-sands deposits, roughly equal in extent to Alberta's. That country is run much as Brian Mason's party would like Alberta to be -- but the socialized Venezuelan oil industry has failed to deliver automatic prosperity. Its strike-ridden economy shrank a horrific 9% in 2002 and another 9% in 2003, just as petroleum prices peaked. Unemployment is in the high teens and the government is incurring heavy deficits. If oil were such an unfailing divine gift, this state of affairs would be impossible.

Without doubt, Alberta has benefitted from the war premium on oil and gas prices. But the sheer shortsightedness of the chatterboxes' "dumb luck" view boggles the mind. Thousands went broke in the Alberta oilpatch over 30 years or more before Leduc No. 1 hit it big in 1947. For the next 20 years, E.C. Manning's Socred government built a trusted, universally imitated royalty regime that walked the line between bending over for U.S. capital and driving it out (as other provinces chose to). And in the '70s, the Lougheed government invested heavily in tar-sands exploration and research, which has now given Alberta technically realizable oil reserves greater than Saudi Arabia's. Forget Houston: Our oil production may not pass its peak in my lifetime.

If Alberta has been lucky, it has not been in possessing resources, but in having sensible leaders and a curiously stiffnecked public that voted for them. Premier Klein may have succumbed to the temptations of runaway public spending, but he has never wavered from the swift pace of debt repayment Albertans demanded. Our reduced debt-servicing costs have been a big part of the "windfall" of late, too. Still, I wouldn't object so much to the taunts of "dumb luck" -- if I didn't suspect that they made certain dumb clucks awfully eager to cook Canada's golden goose. (July 26, 2004)

Today's National Post column about the CRTC is

Stephen Harper, it now appears, is going to hang in as leader of the federal Conservatives. And it appears, too, that he is going to take the advice he has received from all quarters, and particularly from Ontarians hoping to be saved from eternal Liberal government: make the party "centrist" and bring some diehard Progressive Conservatives into the circle of power. All he has to do is centre-ize the party without destroying it, and actually locate PCs willing to enter the sanctum.

Simple, right?

What I've heard since the election is a disguised universal clamour from Eastern Canadian Conservatives for another Brian Mulroney--someone who can build a coalition including the West while keeping the West in its place. You should notice that this tacit longing is being expressed mostly by advocates of the PC-Alliance merger, which lost a net 45% of the Ontario PC vote from 2000 and was hence a near-total failure. But advocates of the New Mulroney strategy will not apologize: the merger is merely a foundation for the future, they'll say.

The strategy seems to be predicated on the idea--I am dignifying a psychological defence mechanism here with the term "idea"--that Harper's Alberta origins (as a politician) had nothing to do with his failure to fulfill the promise of his campaign's first days. It also tacitly proposes that a Calgarian will serve just as well to reconstruct the Conservative Party in Quebec (and Ontario) as a boy from Baie Comeau. Shucks, who'd ever think otherwise?

It's charming, really, to witness how far central Canadians--and brilliant ones at that--will press these points. Andrew Coyne insists that the cultural separation between Ontario and Alberta is a "myth" even as his compatriots (comprovinciots?) chastise us on our redneck rage and make envenomed jokes about cowboys. Diane Francis attempts a judo throw, arguing that it was Albertans--I damn near shot half a Coke out my nose reading this--who really failed to "deliver the goods" electorally, having given just 26 of 28 seats to the Conservatives.

Well, surely we can agree that there is some non-zero number of Ontario and Quebec voters who will find it difficult to contemplate any Prime Minister of Canada from Calgary. This means that to credibly drop his "regional baggage", so-called, Harper will have to be more ruthless about suppressing socially conservative dissent and blurtcrimes than a leader from outside Alberta would.

I don't know exactly what people want when they demand, like Ms. Francis, that Harper "boot out" certain people from the party. But I know imposing order on these elements will be harder for Harper than it would be for, say, Peter MacKay. Mulroney never had to strait-jacket his caucus's "social conservative" elements; when Westerners blew up his party, it was asymmetric federalism, not gay marriage or abortion, that lit the fuse. MacKay himself escaped criticism for being joined at the hip to queerbashing granny Elsie Wayne throughout the Conservative leadership race.

Only a fool (or a Liberal) could really want Harper to tear up the membership cards of popular so-con MPs--but he may have to go that far. In the Conservative party, candidates are chosen by the members in each riding: to give Harper the necessary control, the party may need to adopt the autocratic Liberal style of candidate selection. This "booting" business, examined closely, begins to look like a secret plan for reviving the Reform Party.

Albertans and other Westerners are not, contrary to popular belief, especially "conservative" on social issues: Alberta's level of church attendance, to choose one obvious indicator, is lower than Ontario's. There are an awful lot of us pro-weed, pro-sodomy, pro-abortion unbelievers out here (and we have our share--yes!--of abortion clinics, gay hangouts, and feminist bookstores). But many of us acquiesce in being represented politically by religious politicians, who are more likely to develop an altruistic interest in public service and who possess ready-made social networks upon which to base a candidacy. We share the Christian's devotion to Western civilization and Anglo-Canadian traditions. We may even sense that our Christian fellow-citizens are increasingly beleaguered by an elite for whom perpetual revolution constitutes its own unpalatable religion.

And, yeah, we dislike the Supreme Court's habit of reading the Charter to us like the Riot Act, only backwards and upside-down. If you were to toss out everybody in the present Conservative caucus who agrees with Randy White about our courts, the remainder would easily be outnumbered by the exiles. If Harper weren't engaged in a ploy for the prime ministership, he'd probably be one of the ejectees.

As it is, he will have to behave cruelly to impose his vision of a "moderate" Tory party on a caucus that is, a priori, immoderate. However well he succeeds in this Stalinist task, the exercise will still be insincere. Ontarians are smarter than Ontario Conservatives think: they won't forget Harper's political history (or his home address) overnight. He has already tried, doing minimum violence to his own principles, to steer close to the Liberals on abortion, gay marriage, bilingualism, the "notwithstanding" clause, and other matters. He tried to play the moderate, and was vilified as a radical.

If he tries harder, will he win people over, or just encourage the belief that he's a bullshooter with a "secret agenda"? As an Albertan who supports the Conservatives, I fear that it's the latter, and that Harper's decision to cling to the leadership may hurt both province and party. (July 9, 2004)

Monday's National Post column (subscriber-only) is about

Colby Cosh should read Chantal Hébert: who cares whether the momentum in Alberta is behind the firewall? After all, equalization is and would remain a federal program.

Which is, of course, true, but equalization is hardly graven in granite, as Spector well knows; it is tweaked nearly every year on the basis of "consultations" with the provinces--or with the "have-not" provinces, anyway. It's all the more reason to lay the necessary foundations for a strengthening of Alberta's bargaining position within Confederation. The issue is whether it accomplishes that, and not just what it creates or accomplishes in itself.

Though that, too, is worth considering. Hébert makes a couple of points about the cost Quebec pays for having its bags forever packed to flee Confederation, and while she is one of my three or four favourite columnists, bringing health care into a discussion of firewalls seems like deliberately confusing the issue. The main relevant things she wishes to call to the attention of Western intellectuals are twofold: (a) Quebec's dual tax collection makes life harder for Quebec taxpayers by making them fill out two forms and creating two compliance structures; (b) Quebeckers don't gain anything financially from having their own pension system, the main difference being that QPP contributions are invested within Quebec.

(A) is an important point, and dual taxation must qualify as a real cost, though in the long run who the hell knows if (newly debt-free) Alberta will even bother with personal income tax. There has already been semi-serious talk of scrapping it down the road (but there is a cultural prejudice here--probably an irrational one, if the economists can be believed--against the consumption taxes that would have to replace it in the short term). (B), however, has exactly the wrong end of the stick. Because Alberta's labour force is so young, the CPP is (like most other federal social programs) a giant monetary black hole for this province; leaving the CPP would immediately force contribution rates up in the rest of Canada (except Quebec), and would allow the Alberta government to either drop the rates noticeably for Albertans or increase the payout down the road.

It has been most instructive this week to see central Canadians trying to explain away Stephen Harper's electoral failure in Ontario by means of anything -- anything at all -- but the anti-Alberta prejudice Paul Martin used openly to rally swing voters toward the end of the campaign. "Ignore what you saw," seems to be the message from Ontario.

We have heard it said that Harper's "radical" conservative ideas, and not his person, were rejected by voters. But normally Harper's "regional baggage" is mentioned in practically the same breath, and how he might dispose of it is never made clear. As to the ideas, Ontario gave 45% of its vote to Mike Harris twice; Harper got just 31% of the province's federal vote. The difference might be attributable to the troubled Harris "legacy," but until the election's eve, Ontarians seemed a good deal more angry at their current Liberal government.

We have heard it said that Harper failed to stomp on the nefarious "social conservatives" in his party hard enough. But he stomped harder and was vastly more credible on the subject than the young-Earth creationist Stockwell Day, yet the negligible gains suggest that the men have been dismissed as indistinguishable cowboys. We have heard it said that Harper was unreliable on the Charter of Rights, having been willing to exercise the "notwithstanding clause" which is, under this view, a less sacred part of the document. But nothing is ever mentioned about Liberal-appointed judges who invent exceptions to the Charter wide enough to drive a bus through.

One could go on, but this is old news. Scott Brison denounced the Conservative party as a gang of "rednecks" before a national television audience in his victory speech. One doesn't suppose it will keep him out of Paul Martin's Cabinet; it didn't even make the newspapers. But he'd have been pre-emptively expelled from the new Liberal caucus if he'd used a word like "frogs." Albertans -- particularly Albertans living in Ontario -- know that one, and only one, acceptable regional prejudice exists in this country.

The issue for Harper is what to do about it. Some have suggested that his post-election talk about reconsidering his future is mere posturing. He ran the best campaign he could, and his right to lead the Conservatives into another election is conceded on all sides. But he must ask himself whether having an Alberta leader is too much for the federal Conservatives to overcome, considering the other structural factors the party always faces, such as the unguarded self-interest of Canada's welfare sinks and the Liberals' near-monopoly on the votes of new citizens.

Already there are emerging signs of a "Stephen Come Home" movement. If having an Alberta leader is hard for the federal Conservatives, having an Alberta premier shooting them in the back during elections is doubly tough. Ralph Klein's fatal intervention in the campaign has Conservative Albertans -- which is loosely to say "Albertans," period -- eyeing their dubious generalissimo. One MLA has already walked out of Klein's caucus in a huff.

It hasn't registered much on the national scene, but the Premier's approval ratings stand at all-time lows here. Klein eagerly set the pace for a nationwide cigarette-tax increase -- a nanny-state move that has exhausted the budgets of the poor and depressed -- and has waddled slowly along with a "health care reform" that amounts to nothing but increased spending and premiums. His scary "defiance" of the Canada Health Act turned out to be more of the same when it was announced on Thursday, and the federal Liberals promptly expressed complete satisfaction with the plan. There was no "Harper-Klein" deal on health care; it looks rather like there was some sort of Pettigrew-Klein deal.

Klein has backed down from every major fight with the federal Liberals, is visibly impatient with the "firewall" strategies once espoused by Harper, and has bullied the (very large, if timid) quasi-separatist element in his own party. He is known to be a former Trudeau Liberal, and in practice he has continued to be the Liberals' best friend here. It is for Klein's MLAs to decide whether they can judge and execute the Premier, Paul Martin-style, before a credible alternative party appears and wipes them all out. It is not impossible that the Alberta premiership could end up in Stephen Harper's hands within the next year.

It's not the most likely outcome, either. Klein would fight like a wolverine to remain in office through the provincial centennial in September, 2005. But if it happened, it would solve two problems at once. It would allow the federal Conservatives to locate some "trustworthy" leader with no "regional baggage" -- fortunately, no one but us Albertans seems to possess any such baggage -- and it would allow Albertans to concentrate on bargaining with Confederation in the dispassionate, unrelenting way Quebec does. Albertans love Canada, but after a while even the sturdiest unrequited love starts to turn bitter. (July 3, 2004)

While casting about for a suitable subject for Friday's Post column, I ran across a strange Canada Day piece in the Edmonton Journal's business section by Gary Lamphier. It's about how Alberta needs to revisit those ruined '80s dreams of heavy public spending on "economic diversification".

I'm a business writer, not a politico. But for all its economic success--and it is undeniable, thanks to high commodity prices and a dynamic oil and gas sector--Alberta can be a curiously unsophisticated place otherwise.

Other than paying off the debt and supporting current and future oilsands developments, the Tories have yet to unveil any cohesive economic development plan for what is still largely a one-industry province. The budget slashers don't seem to know how to build a diversified economy.

I built this from a Statistics Canada table. One finds, to one's enormous surprise, that Alberta's energy dependence peaked precisely at the end of the Getty administration, during which the Alberta government had invested billions--was it trillions?--on failed diversification efforts. Since Lamphier's "budget-cutters" took over in 1993, the trend is unmistakeable... but, mysteriously, the mathematical sign he assigns to it is the wrong one. Alberta is rapidly getting less dependent on energy, not more.

In a way Lamphier isn't wrong. Alberta can still be described as something of a one-industry province, if you are willing to cram oil and gas and the dozens of spinoff businesses into one Black-Hole-of-Calcutta category. As long as the rate of return on capital in that one industry remains high, and the economy isn't trifled with by some future premier's fantasy of a Great Leap Forward, Alberta is likely to remain a one-industry province--one which is funding its educational institutions fairly well (particularly on the research side), attracting the best minds from other parts of Confederation, creating more homegrown multimillionaires every year, and building the most aggressive economic counterweight in Canada to that strip along the St. Lawrence. If this is a lack of "sophistication", then I'd say sophistication (seemingly a synonym for central economic planning) can go piss up a rope...

Andrew Coyne's column in Wednesday's Post is an impassioned defence of hybridized proportional representation against, er, me (among others). You can read my own Post column on the subject and the weblog entry that provided more detail. Has Andrew addressed all these concerns with PR? It may be unfair to cite it, but the comment thread below his column at AndrewCoyne.com would suggest otherwise. His readers still seem to lean towards my position by about a two-to-one margin, if I can be permitted a casual estimate. Good objections to PR are made by "Jerry Aldini", Paul, Dennis, "Jerry" again, and SD.

Then again, you don't have to be especially clever to recognize the weakness of Andrew's either-or dichotomy between "autocracy" and "democracy". Incidentally, I'd like to remind people that I'm not opposed to the use of transferrable ballot within ridings. Such a change would be pushing the limits of the simplicity that is needed to protect the electoral system's credibility, which is one of the most important elements of first-past-the-post. I think it is arguably within those limits, because we have some experience of multiple rounds of balloting in leadership races (though many moderately well-informed people don't quite know how that works, either). Unfortunately, the net effect of the transferrable ballot, on its own, might be to hurt proportionality. Parties with broad but shallow national appeal, which are the ones hurt most by first-past-the-post, would have to get 50% of the transferrable vote somewhere to get a seat, rather than a mere plurality somewhere.

The various formulae used to implement PR in foreign countries stand at a whole other level of complexity, well above the ideas behind the transferrable ballot. It's possible Andrew can deliver a diatribe on the merits and demerits of the Sainte-Laguë formula, but I wouldn't expect too many of us to be able to follow it. If we were to introduce a system whereby the way that certain MPs "won" their seats became incomprehensible to the great mass of voters, you'd end up destabilizing democracy in the name of purifying it. The system of "whoever gets the most votes wins" is obviously just from at least one standpoint. It can be considered an "impure" principle of democratic choice only if you are especially concerned with a species of proportional "justice" to parties--which have no constitutional standing at all in our system of government, and which are generally conceded to have acquired too much extraconstitutional authority in the actual function of our House of Commons.

There is a sad side note to be made here. There was a paragraph in my June 14 Post column that stressed the importance of MPs being subject to local accountability:

Canadians know that the personal rebuke of a political leader by home voters can serve as a useful signal. In Alberta, we remember the 1989 election, in which the Conservatives won but premier Don Getty lost his Edmonton-Whitemud seat. Albertans weren't ready to support a non-Conservative government (and still aren't), but they were exasperated by billions of dollars in losses from bad loan guarantees to businesses, made with the aim of "economic diversification." What Albertans wanted was a Conservative government based on actual conservative principles. It came about quickly because the Whitemud voters were able to wound Mr. Getty and spare his party.

Wickman, a Liberal MLA and an Edmonton city councillor during his 25-year political career, was best known for using a toy chicken to defeat then-premier Don Getty in 1989. Getty, who represented Edmonton Whitemud, refused to take part in an all-candidates debate, former Liberal leader Nick Taylor said. "[Wickman] put a rubber chicken in the seat that Getty was to occupy. That seemed to really catch on with the media, and Getty went down the drain," Taylor recalled

Andrew Coyne in the Saturday Post: the cultural divide between the West and Ontario is "a myth, a phantasm". (A mirage, a spectre...)

Ian Brown in the Saturday Globe: Dear "Hothead" "cowboys" out there in "Ranchland"... [etc., etc.] ...so screw you, whiners.

Brown's brilliant theory is that Randy White's comments about judge-made law cost the Conservatives the election. As Paul Wells--no hothead cowboy--pointed out at the time, the reaction was illogical and unfounded on its face whether White's comments are regarded as having been right or wrong. Brown might also have cited Ralph Klein's "secret health care deal" with Stephen Harper, an invention which has already been comprehensively falsified and which was arguably only relevant in Alberta even if true. (Klein never proposed to violate the portability requirement of the Canada Health Act--which, by the way, Quebec craps all over routinely, assuming anyone cares.)

The whole point is that is awfully easy for a comment from