How many Montreal Municipal Court judges does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

Only an arch-libertarian would argue that rights such as freedom of expression are absolute, and determining their application is often a very tricky balancing act. On the other hand, sometimes it's not, and the authorities still get it wrong.

I'm all about restoring the principle of representation by population...

...at least, to the maximum extent practicable (Northerners are always going to be represented proportionally more than the rest of us, and I don't begrudge them this), but I sort of have a problem with this being the top story on the Government of Canada's web page. This page should be for information relating to the government's executive functions; information related to bills its members are moving in the House of Commons should be confined to caucus home pages (except for that covered as a matter of course by the parliamentary website).

This isn't a new complaint, nor is it one specific to the Conservatives. I just chose this moment to make it.

Senate referendum: the fallout

This is a crock of shit, and as good a reason as any I've seen not to let political science majors gain control of the country. This idea that Canadians are too stupid to make a simple decision about whether they want any legislative bodies other than elected ones constituted on an approximate representation by population basis mirrors what we saw in the aftermath of the Ontario MMP referendum, when Fair Vote representatives told any media outlet that would listen (which was, unfortunately, a great many) that the reason their favoured perversion of democracy had been rejected was that Elections Ontario hadn't done enough to extol its virtues. The minutiae of policy may not be within the sphere of competence of ordinary voters, but Canadians are at least as qualified to vote on Senate abolition as they are to elect MPs (consider this praise to be as damning in its faintness as you like).

This is more interesting. Would Dion really use his majority in the unelected Senate to block a referendum on the Senate? That would be pretty awful from an optics perspective. But during his tenure as Liberal leader, Dion has exhibited the affinity for shrewd optical moves that an antelope shows for a crocodile.

Nice to see that Harper's at least somewhat on board, though; we may get a chance to eliminate this anachronism yet.

On Afghanistan

It will come as no surprise to any of you that I consider Paul Wells to be Canada's best political commentator (the best one prominent enough for me to be aware of him, anyway). There are a few reasons for this: he's a great writer, he's insightful, he's funny, and he doesn't bother couching his commentary in false modesty (or modesty of any other kind). But one of his greatest traits is his relative open-mindedness - not the hippy kind that requires him to abstain from value judgments, but the kind that lets him evaluate each issue as free of prejudice as an informed person can be, which provides the novel virtue of unpredictability. When I write this blog, I'm probably trying unconsciously to be Paul Wells (sometimes I try consciously to be Paul Wells, too).

Paul Wells recently came back from Afghanistan and, as is his wont, filed a four thousand word report. There probably isn't much ground-breaking in there, but what isn't groundbreaking we're at least getting from a pretty trustworthy source. And what we're getting doesn't much convince me that I'm wrong in my cautious support of the mission.

The Afghanistan mission has always puzzled me a little. Not that I have trouble understanding why we're there - we went in in the first place with broad international backing because of the real threat to national security posed by the government of the day, and we're there now to prevent that government or a reasonable facsimile from coming back and to try to turn the country into a self-functioning democracy. What puzzles me is that my usual bedfellows on the left are almost united in their opposition to the mission - having my position represented by the Conservatives and more or less nobody else is not a situation to which I'm accustomed.

A New Democrat friend of mine came back from some sort of party event a while ago and told me that he'd heard the youngest member of Afghanistan's national assembly, Malalai Joya, speak about the failings of the Afghan mission, and that this had hardened his resolve against the mission. I got him to send me the speech (I have both its text and the MP3, if anybody's interested in reading/hearing it), thinking that this might be what pushes me over to the most conventionally leftist side. It didn't.

Her complaints basically amounted too i. Afghanistan is still a remarkably shitty place to live, and ii. there are some Very Bad People in positions of power in Afghanistan. I have no doubt that this is true. My impression at the time, since reinforced, is that there are Very Bad People in positions of power because, at the time of the Taliban's collapse, Very Bad People had most of the guns and soldiers, and taking control of the country in opposition to these guns and soldiers was probably impossible, and certainly impossible without a bloody civil war.

As for the suggestion that Afghanistan is still a miserable place, that is true by all accounts of which I am aware. Wells highlights in particular the lack of law and order and the corruption of the police force, but then goes on to say something very revealing:

There is no tradition of impartial, professional policing in Afghanistan to begin with. Police were local bullies, doling out intimidation, extortion, revenge and occasionally even rough justice in the manner of Gene Hackman's sheriff in the Clint Eastwood western film Unforgiven.

This is one example of why the west has to be in there long-term: to bring representative democracy to a country whose tradition of governance alternates between powerful dictators and violent factionalism, you need to create cultural change, and cultural change does not happen by the conclusion of Canada's current commitment to Kandahar. Cultural change seems to be pretty slow in coming even now, but there seems to be some slow improvement.

What is more, not only do I not agree with the conventional leftist position on Afghanistan, I don't even understand it. I am usually quite good at understanding people who have different political beliefs than I do (for example, I understand that people who oppose abortion do so on the basis that life obviously begins at conception, and that abortion is therefore terminating a life, and I understand that people who oppose gay marriage on the grounds that an imaginary being who they're obligated to love more than their own friends and family is quoted in a book as being against it), but I have yet to hear anybody provide any reasonable explanation for why the west should pull out its troops in the immediate future.

The Afghani government - sort of democratically-elected, and by all accounts sort of well-intentioned (even as it's impotent against the substantially less well-intentioned regional governors) - wants foreign troops to stay there. Ordinary Afghanis want the troops to stay. On whose behalf would we be pulling out? Well, maybe our troops'. Canadians who aren't me or anybody I know are dying over there, and it seems awfully easy for me to say that they need to keep doing so when I'm not offering up my own life. Except they too overwhelmingly support the continuation of the mission. I just don't understand the left on this point. I am absolutely befuddled as to what the left's reasoning is.

The only answer I can come up with is rabid isolationism. If that's it, fine. Support pulling out the troops. But don't complain in the next breath that the west didn't do enough to stop the Rwandan genocide (it didn't), or that World War II was significantly different from most wars in that it was a just one (it was).

I don't know whether Afghanistan's on the road towards being a pluralistic democracy or, if it is, when it will arrive. The best evidence seems to suggest that it won't be soon. But I can't find any interpretation of the facts that makes the left's position to be anything other than a convenient excuse to oppose men with guns.

The Socialist and the Senate

Jack Layton's out of blue proposal for a referendum on the existence of the Canadian Senate is probably the most interesting thing to happen in federal politics since the end of the Liberal leadership convention.

My first thought is "why?". I mean, you don't need to tell me why from a public policy standpoint: the Senate serves no purpose, and neither the government's current Senate reform plan nor any other one will justify its existence. Moreover, given the difficulty of a constitutional amendment - such an amendment would obviously have to clear the Senate, which tends to have an inflated sense of its own raison d'être, and would also need the unanimous support of the provinces, a good number of which are hoping that a "reformed" Senate would boost their clout - a clear majority of Canadians in all provinces voting to abolish the Senate is about the only way that the Senate would have any chance of being abolished. So I'm entirely on board this idea of a referendum. What I don't really get is why the New Democrats are.

The NDs, especially under Layton, have been all about "working people"'s interests (rather, they've been all about spinning themselves as being about "working people"'s interests - as opposed, presumably, to the interests of the unemployed which, now that I think about it, they also purport to champion). They handled the Martin government very well - Martin came out of that episode looking like a guy who'd do anything to keep his job, while Layton looked like a guy who was able to insert meaningful priorities into a Parliament that was otherwise a giant masturbatory press match. But can you really picture Lunchbucket Joe coming home from work and sitting down for dinner with his wife (who just picked the kids up from the daycare program that the Conservatives are giving them a hundred bucks a month to help pay for) and saying "Boy, I'm glad to have Layton in there pushing for Senate abolition when if Harper had his way the whole session would be about tax cuts and making streets safer"?

I have a few hypothesis, some of which contradict others and none of which is all together satisfying:

1. The NDs are trying to challenge the Conservatives to act like conservatives, in the same way that they spent the last Parliament challenging Liberals to act like liberals. "Look," they're saying, "you claim to be all about saving money, an end to institutionalized patronage, and letting the people decide - here's an opportunity to do all three at once." On the other hand, Conservatives have never been about Senate abolition (one of the few regards in which the NDP is superior to them on democratic reform issues) so, unlike the Liberals, they can oppose the NDP motion with a clear conscience and a consistent position. Besides that, the Conservatives are actually doing something to implement their consistent position (introducing legislation requiring Senators to be elected), which was never really true of the Liberals.

2. The NDs are gambling that the other opposition parties will band with them and pass the motion, thereby embarrassing the government. Even writing it, I know it can't be right. Why would the Liberals give the Conservatives a free ride on the GST cuts, absurd sentencing bills, and the environment but decide to confront them on an issue on which their own record over a million and a half years of government has been non-existent?

3. The NDs are gambling that this is an issue on which the public will agree with them. And, for what it's worth, I think the public *will* agree with them. I suspect that, if the general public ever got mobilized on the Senate, a pretty solid plurality - and probably a majority - would favour abolition (in general, the public's response to the question "Do you want fewer politicians?" is going to be yes). But still, hands up who thinks the next election will be fought on Senate reform.

4. The NDs simply want to see the Senate eliminated, for opportunistic reasons. A Liberal apologist acquaintance of mine is fond of mentioning, whenever the idea of proportional representation is brought up, that the NDs only favour it because it would boost their seat count so much (this acquaintance is, as a matter of course, pretty fond of the old ad hominem). For what it's worth, I don't think that's quite true: I think the NDs have a sincere intellectual commitment to the idea of each MP being little more than a number in a party's column, but that's neither here nor anywhere near here. The NDP doesn't get to appoint Senators, so doesn't it make sense on that basis alone that the NDP would want to turf the Senate? Sort of, I guess. But on the list of things preventing the federal NDs from implementing their agenda, the Senate ranks four hundred and eighteenth, just behind the now-defunct Western Standard. It just doesn't make sense to prioritize it at the level that the NDP has.

5. It's a purely principled move. I'm loathe to believe this, but, of the explanations I can think of, it's the only one that really makes much sense. If that's it, kudos to the NDP, and I hope it's successful.

But I'm still confused.

...but for now, Mulroney!

I've got a bunch to blog about - Afghanistan, Paul Wells (back from Afghanistan), the NDP's surprising call for a referendum on the Senate's existence - some of which I'll hopefully get to this evening. For now, though, mosey over to read Mulroney-era PC MP Garth Turner's bang-on comments about the Liberals' current strategy of going after Mulroney.

(Incidentally, I've always thought that Stephen Harper was, for a successful politician, a pretty honest and forthright guy - way more so than, for example, Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin, Stockwell Day, or Jack Layton. Or Brian Mulroney. But his frequent praise of Mulroney seems to be very slightly at odds with his record of being a major builder of a party whose initial raison d'etre was dissatisfaction with the Mulroney government.)

The limits to playing politics

The limit ought to be when people's lives hang in the balance. Canada's New Government appears not to agree.