Appointment notice

This is to tell everyone who hasn’t heard that I am leaving the National Post to become National Editor of Maclean’s magazine. I start next week.

I leave the Post with great reluctance, and not a little heartache. I was one of the original “Posties,” and anyone who was there at the beginning will know what emotions well up at the thought of those times....

More »This is to tell everyone who hasn’t heard that I am leaving the National Post to become National Editor of Maclean’s magazine. I start next week.

I leave the Post with great reluctance, and not a little heartache. I was one of the original “Posties,” and anyone who was there at the beginning will know what emotions well up at the thought of those times. We were all unspeakably young (well, some younger than others), all hand-picked for the job, and all of us unable to believe our good fortune: to work with the best writers and the best editors and the best designers, to be allowed to break all the rules of what a newspaper should do and say and look like, and to get away with it -- to put out a paper that was as good as anything anywhere in the world, and to do it here.

Then, as everyone knows, things went south for a time: Sept. 11, and the economic uncertainty it brought in its wake, compounded by Conrad’s mounting business woes, leading to changes in ownership and, regrettably but perhaps inevitably, in management. It’s fair to say the Post wobbled a bit. But in recent years, under the steady and assured leadership of Doug Kelly, Steve Meurice and their team, the paper has found its footing again. On its day, it is still the best, sharpest, wittiest paper in the country -- Jon Kay’s and Terry Corcoran’s comment pages are a particular highlight, though I’m biased -- combining the innovation and flair of its youth with a professionalism born of having come through hard times and survived. It has an amazing stable of writers, a devoted readership, and rock solid support from the Asper family. It will still be publishing when the rest of us are dust, and it will be a part of me always.

But every now and then you have to shake things up, and try something new, and the opportunity Maclean’s presented was simply too good to pass up. I have always wanted to try my hand at editing, and having only ever worked in newspapers, am eager to see what the magazine side of the business looks like. And what a place to start: Maclean’s is an established title, with all the strength that brings, and yet one that is in the process of reinventing itself, with the fluidity that suggests. Under my old boss Ken Whyte, it has put together a first-rate bunch of writers and editors, and it just sounds like something that would be a lot of fun to be involved in.

Not that I’ll be any less busy on the writing side. In addition to a weekly column, I’ll be writing longer-form pieces for the magazine, as well as blogging for the macleans.ca website (at last, paid to blog!). And yes, I’ll still be doing my CBC gig. Plus -- well, stay tuned.

Proud? Not much, I'm not

Gemini Awards last night:

Best dramatic series: Slings and Arrows (second season in a row)

Best actor in a dramatic series: Paul Gross, Slings and Arrows

Best actress in a dramatic series: Martha Burns, Slings and Arrows

Best writing in a dramatic series: Susan Coyne, Bob Martin, Mark McKinney, Slings and Arrows (second season in a row)

Also:

Best supporting actor in a dramatic series: Stephen Ouimette, Slings and Arrows (awarded two weeks ago)

Susie was also nominated for best actress, losing to Martha. In all the series had 15 nominations.

Yeah, I'm bragging on my sister. You wanna make something of it?

Royalty check

Even now, perhaps, Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach is on TV explaining how much he plans to jack up royalty rates on Alberta oil. (UPDATE: Or not. He didn't announce much of anything -- though details are promised for tomorrow.) He pretty much has to raise them some, in the wake of the Alberta Royalty Review Panel's report demanding the oil companies pay higher royalties on the grounds that "the oil belongs to the people."

To which my friend Terry Corcoran has already written a trenchant reply: Maybe the oil belongs to the government, but not the people. And it belongs to the government not by some divine right, but because, well, "they took it." In which case, they should presumably give it back....

Or, if that's too radical, then sell it -- instead of charging a royalty to drill on crown lands, the state could simply sell the land itself, capitalizing the discounted stream of future royalties into the sale price.

Well, that's not going to happen. But it does suggest a better way of setting royalty rates than at present.

Terry takes issue with the panel's claim that royalties are different from taxes, but let's say they are. What are they, then? They're a price. A tax is the government's way of saying, "you've got money and we want it." A royalty is the oil companies saying, "you've got oil and we want to drill it."

As the owner of something, I have two ways of putting a price on it. I can just pick a number, and tell everybody to take it or leave it. That's more or less what the premier has just done. Or I can put it up for auction. Why has this option not been considered?

If I set the price by fiat, I always have to worry about whether I've set the "right" price. Too low, and I'm giving it away (the Panel's argument.) Too high, and I scare off potential buyers (the oil companies' argument). The situation's even worse in a political setting, where uncertainty is compounded by demagoguery. Which is precisely where Alberta is at now.

But in an auction, you always extract the most that a buyer -- any buyer -- is willing to pay. No more and no less. There's no sense getting in a political argument about it, and no need: the highest bidder determines the "right" price.

So if Stelmach really wants to be sure of getting full value for the people's oil, without killing the goose that laid the golden egg, why not auction it off?

Strife

Anyone who thought I was making up or exaggerating Dalton McGuinty's careful, coded appeals to Islamophobia might be interested in the following verbatim quote from the Sept. 20 televised debate. I had to go on memory in my election-night column, since the transcript is unavailable -- or was, until my friend Dan Gardner, the Ottawa Citizen columnist, did some digging around. Anyway, here it is, in all its malevolent glory:

When I travel the world on behalf of Ontarians, and I tell folks in China, India, Japan and Pakistan that 27 per cent of people living in this province were born outside of the country, and 52 per cent of people living in the GTA were born outside the country, the first thing they say is why have I not seen on your television screens what I have seen on the streets of London, Germany, Paris, the Netherlands? Why is there not more strife, struggle and controversy? It's because we bring our kids together in the same classrooms.

As Dan says, it's even better than I remembered. McGuinty might have chosen any number of examples from around the world of strife in the streets. But all of the examples cited -- London, Germany, Paris, the Netherlands -- are places with significant Muslim populations, and significant Muslim unrest -- not to say terrorism. The only thing standing between them and us, McGuinty suggests, is our public school system.

Leaving aside the uncomfortable fact that our own accused Muslim terrorists were all products of that same system, what is he saying? That these other countries don't have public school systems? Or, that ours is somehow in jeopardy? (Otherwise, why bring it up?) And what threatens ours? Why of course: the Conservative proposal to extend public funding to 50,000 kids in religious schools. Not the 650,000 kids already in publicly-funded religious schools -- Catholic schools. After all, if Mr. McGuinty thought that he wouldn't have sent his own kids there. Just the new ones.

Connect the dots: if the Conservatives are elected, Ontario's streets will be filled with violent Muslims -- just like London, Germany, Paris, the Netherlands. Nice.

ADDENDUM: Just to be clear -- it probably is true that having kids of different backgrounds mix together at school contributes to greater social harmony. It's also fair, in light of experience, to worry about what might be taught at the odd madrassa. What's wrong is to draw a straight line from funding a few religious schools, with appropriate safeguards, to a total breakdown in social cohesion. What's wrong is to whip this up into the single central issue of the campaign, as if there were some enormous crisis at hand. It's the difference between legitimate concern and fearmongering -- especially fearmongering directed, explicitly or implicitly, at a vulnerable minority. It's the difference between statesmanship and demagoguery.

"... permanent leftward tilt ..."

From the Fraser Institute's 2007 rankings of economic freedom around the world:

3. New Zealand (PR:MMP) 4. Switzerland (PR) 8. Estonia (PR) 9. Ireland (PR:STV) 9. Australia (Preferential/STV) 11. Finland (PR) 11. Luxembourg (PR) 11. Iceland (PR) 11. Chile (PR) 15. Denmark (PR) 15. Netherlands (PR) 18. Germany (PR:MMP) 18. El Salvador (PR) 18. Austria (PR) 22. Cyprus (PR) 22. Hungary (PR) 22. Lithuania (PR) 22. Sweden (PR) 22. Latvia (PR) 22. Norway (PR) 22. Japan (PR)

etc etc. Indeed, outside of Canada, the US, and the UK, you have to go all the way down to 38th place on the list -- Jamaica, Botswana -- to find a democracy that doesn't use some form of PR (depending on whether you count Singapore as a democracy. UPDATE: Also Mauritius?) On the other hand, first past the post offers us such paragons of economic liberty as Zambia (67th), Uganda (76th), Ethiopia (101st), Bangladesh (101st), Pakistan (101st), Nigeria (117th), Malawi (122nd) and Zimbabwe (141st and last).

"... hordes of extremists... "

Parties currently represented in the German Bundestag:

Christian Democratic Union (centre-right): 180 seats Christian Social Union (centre-right, so-con): 46 Free Democratic Party, (centre-right, free-market): 61 Social Democratic Party (centre-left): 222 seats The Left (left-socialist): 54 Alliance '90/Greens (left-environmentalist): 51

Current representation in New Zealand House of Representatives:

Labour (centre-left): 50 seats National (centre-right): 48 New Zealand First (populist): 7 Green Party (left-environmentalist): 6 Maori Party (aboriginal): 4* United Future (centrist-Christian): 3 ACT (centre-right, free-market): 2 Progressive Party (left): 1 *NB: 7 seats are constitutionally reserved for Maori voters.

The situation is even worse in countries with pure PR systems. Get a load of the Swedish Rikstag:

Social Democrats: 130 seats Moderates: 97 Centre Party: 29 Liberal People's Party: 28 Christian Democrats: 24 Left Party: 22 Greens: 19

Aiieee!! Or what about those crazy Dutch:

Christian Democrats: 41 Labour: 33 Socialists: 25 People's Party for Freedom and Democracy (liberal free-market): 22 Party for Freedom (conservative free-market): 9 GreenLeft: 7 ChristianUnion (so-con): 6 Democrats 66 (social-liberal): 3 Reformed (so-con): 2 Party for the Animals: 2

At last! A single-issue party. But there were supposed to be dozens... MORE: And don't even mention Ireland, with that cockamamie STV system. Why they must have hundreds of parties. Well, six, anyway:

Fianna Fail (centre-right): 77 Fine Gael (centre-left): 51 Labour: 20 Green: 6 Sinn Fein: 4 Progressive Democrats: 2

So there you have it. Go PR, and it means Sinn Fein will get in.

"... unstable governments... "

No. of elections 1945 - 1998

PR: MMP Germany 14 PR: party list Italy 14 Norway 14 Finland 14 Netherlands 16 Belgium 17 Sweden 17 Denmark 22 Plurality (first past the post) United Kingdom 15 Canada 17

"Parties breeding like rabbits"

Average number of parties, 1945-1996

PR: party list Switzerland 5.24 Finland 5.03 Italy 4.91 Netherlands 4.65 Denmark 4.51 Belgium 4.32 Norway 3.35 Sweden 3.33 PR: MMP Germany 2.93 Plurality (first past the post) United State 2.40 Canada 2.37 United Kingdom 2.11

Source: Dennis Pilon, The Politics of Voting (2007). Adapted from Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy (1999).

Yes!

If this pans out, this will be a truly historic Throne Speech:

Even before the Throne Speech has come down, critics are lining up to take aim at Stephen Harper for giving away the store with his plans to limit federal spending in areas of provincial jurisdiction...

But speculation swirling in Ottawa suggests that this is only half the story: While the feds may retreat on social programs, they may become more assertive in areas such as interprovincial trade and commerce -- including setting up a national securities regulator...

If this pans out, this will be a truly historic Throne Speech:

Even before the Throne Speech has come down, critics are lining up to take aim at Stephen Harper for giving away the store with his plans to limit federal spending in areas of provincial jurisdiction...

But speculation swirling in Ottawa suggests that this is only half the story: While the feds may retreat on social programs, they may become more assertive in areas such as interprovincial trade and commerce -- including setting up a national securities regulator...

In particular, Ottawa is keen to assume the role of traffic cop ensuring the free flow of inter-provincial trade and commerce...

One discussion currently taking place inside government is whether to refer the Trade and Commerce clause in the Constitution to the Supreme Court of Canada to get legal guidance on how far the government can act unilaterally in imposing solutions...

This is very exciting. (Well, to me, anyway.) It's much like the Grand Bargain I proposed in a piece last spring. It's also in keeping with the Tories' 2006 election pledge of "aggressive" action to strengthen the economic union.

A trade of spending power for economic union would be a huge net win for the federation. It would also be a political master stroke for the Tories: at one bound, they would overtake the Liberals as the Canada Party, rather than the devolutionist "headwaiter to the provinces."

And as an issue to fight an election on? They'd mop the floor with the opposition. The NDP would probably oppose it, so would the Bloc: good luck to them. And the Liberals? I don't know how they could oppose it.

As for the provinces, B.C. and Alberta have already signed a free trade treaty between themselves, and Ontario has talked about coming on board. That leaves Quebec as the wild card. Perhaps Jean Charest might be tempted to oppose it -- had he not proposed exactly the same thing when he was federal Conservative leader. Look it up: it was called the Canadian Covenant. Federal transfers to be converted into tax points, on condition that provinces sign on to national standards -- and in exchange for a federal Inter-Provincial Trade Commission.

Very interesting...

O to be in England, where ideas are still allowed

Meanwhile, while Ontario goes into hysterics over a proposal to extend public funding to 50,000 kids -- 2% of the total -- in private schools, Britain continues with ambitious plans to "break down the historic divide between the state and private sectors in education..."," making public schools more like private, and private more like public. That's in Lobour-governed Britain:

The big guns of education's private sector have thrown their weight behind the Government's academies programme, paving the way for their biggest ever stake in the running of state schools. Lord Adonis, the Schools minister, announced plans yesterday for three more academies to be backed by private schools – bringing the total number sponsored by private schools to 47. Lancing, Hurstpierpoint and Ardingley, all fee-paying schools in West Sussex, are to sponsor three new academies in the county. In addition, Birkenhead High School for Girls, in Merseyside, a top performing school in private school league tables, announced it was planning to join the state sector as an academy. It will be the fifth private school to do so since the Government offered an olive branch to the sector to join.

What the British call "academies" we call charter schools (to be eligible for funding, Birkenhead has to "give up selection" ie accept all comers). That's if anyone in Ontario were talking about charter schools.

And another thing...

Lines I didn't manage to work in, in four columns on proportional representation...

PR wouldn't mean the end of majority governments, but the beginning.

For goodness sake, until comparatively lately Italian legislators voted by secret ballot.

No longer would “splitting” the vote be of such concern: with their second X, if not their first, voters could actually choose the party they prefer. If your party’s local candidate was a dud, you could vote for another, and still support your party.

Even Italy and Israel are not as unstable as supposed. Fun fact: which country has had the most national elections since 1945, Israel, Italy or Canada? Answer: Canada.

...

Too many politicians? In fact, Ontario is notably under-represented, compared to every other province. Even with the expansion to 129 MPPs proposed by the Citizens Assembly, Ontario would have have roughly one MPP for every 94,000 citizens (versus 1:113,647 today). Quebec has one for every 60,000, and it has the next fewest.

A lot of people seem to find the notion of electing anyone other than the person who finishes first perplexing. But just because it always has been done that way doesn't mean it always must be done that way. Fundamentally, the choice comes down to this: What is an election for? Is it just to find out who wins? Or is it to find out what people want? If the former, then you will favour first past the post. If the latter, then you will be more open to the idea that everyone deserves to be represented in Parliament, not just the party with the most votes. Especially when the "winner" only gets 30% of the vote!

Poste libre

In Europe -- you know, where gridlock prevails and everywhere is socialist stagnation, and all because of proportional representation -- they have just agreed to abolish 27 state postal monopolies, creating a continentwide free market for mail delivery. Paul Wells reminds us where it all began...