Saturday column

"Israel has a right to defend itself, so long as it does not use its army."

A disproportionate response. ADDENDA: A tip of the hat to Maderblog, or rather to Maderblog's mother (MotherMader?), who was the "constituent" mentioned in the piece. HAD THERE BEEN SPACE: It is not enough, I should have mentioned, merely to refrain from deliberately targeting civilians. You also can't bomb indiscriminately, and you have to weigh the military value of the target against the risk of civilian casualties.

But the point stands: provided Israel adheres to these guidelines, the mere loss of civilian life is not evidence of war crimes, least of all in numbers that, to date, are historically low. Whereas Hezbollah is clearly in violation.

For more on the laws of war as they apply to civilians in this conflict, read this very balanced assessment by Human Rights Watch.

Also cited:

The First Protocol to the Geneva Conventions. Deaths in Wars and Conflicts Between 1945 and 2000.

Against "nuance"

My Wednesday column departs from my traditional balanced approach and puts at risk my hard-won reputation as an honest broker in the Middle East.

Two words: Article XII

What was being negotiated here was essentially the terms of our capitulation. That was always the issue, under the previous government as much as this one. And, as capitulations go, this one’s pretty good. I return to the softwood file in my Saturday column.

Twice as right

Suppose, rather than cut the GST by 1%, the Tories had increased it by the same amount. Would the press and opposition be dismissing the resulting rise in prices as trivial? Or would we be hip-deep in stories that began: “A dollar more on the price of a child’s snowsuit might not seem like much to most people, but to a single mom like Deedee Smythe, it’s the difference between...” My column as it appears in today's National Post contains an embarrassing error: owing to a mysterious brain cramp, I used the half-year figures for the cost of a 1% GST cut, rather than the full year. So I cost it at $2.5-billion, rather than $5-billion. (It appears here in corrected form.)

Yeesh. But since the point of the column is that a 1% GST cut, whatever its failings as policy, is still a lot of money, the argument stands a fortiori.

Oh, and for those readers who may have missed my previous writings on the subject, the "pasty-faced columnist" is me.

Pickeled Grits

My Saturday column.

Nickel nationalism

My Wednesday column is on the strange outburst of economic nationalism on Bay Street, owing to the giant Phelps Dodge bid for Inco and Falconbridge. Terry Corcoran has another take. He notes that there are just 200 jobs in Inco's head office -- the putative cause of all this shirt-rending, though Phelps Dodge has stated publicly that Inco's head office will stay in Toronto. Let's say there's another 200 at Falconbridge. Round the total up to 500. By my calculations, the Phelps offer is worth about $5-billion more to shareholders than the Teck and Xstrata offers combined. So blocking the Phelps deal would amount to forcibly redistributing $5-billion from shareholders in Inco/Falconbridge to shareholders in Teck and (foreign-owned) Xstrata. All to keep at most 500 head office jobs in Canada. That's $10-million a job! And, of course, that's just the gross figure. How many more jobs could that $5-billion create if left to Inco/Falconbridge shareholders to reinvest? ADDENDUM: How much "hollowing out" is going on? Foreign-controlled corporations accounted for 21.9% of all corporate assets held in Canada in 2004. That was down from 22.8% in 2001. About two-thirds of all foreign ownership is US. UPDATE: This research paper shows (p. 3) the trend of US ownership of the Canadian economy from 1965 to 2000. At 12% of all economic assets, the US share by 2000 was nearly one-third below its early 1970s peak.

Over the years, Ontario has adopted or considered every conceivable method of assessing property taxes. We’ve had market value assessment, unit value assessment, and actual value assessment, among others. Each one has tried to address the inequities of the one before, only to throw up even worse injustices of its own. At some point the thought may occur to someone: This is not accidental. My Canada Dominion Day column is on the festive theme of property tax reform abolition.