Little minds or no, both sides in the preposterous David Levine affair, now mercifully near its end, have distinguished themselves throughout by their insistence on a foolish consistency. On the one side there are those, like the Prime Minister, for whom the controversy over the appointment of a former (or possibly current) separatist as chief of the Ottawa General hospital inspires flights of rhetoric on the virtues of liberty, equality and other good things.

"In Canada," Mr. Chretien intoned, "political considerations are not a question that we ask for employment. We look at the qualities of the person to serve." Liberal MP Mauril Belanger went further, noting "we cannot discriminate or fire someone on the basis of political beliefs. To do so puts us on a dangerously slippery slope." You just know where this line of argument is leading: shades of McCarthy, this is exactly how Hitler started, etc.

Or at least, it would have, had the opponents of Mr. Levine's appointment not beat them to it. If politics are indeed beside the point, asked The Ottawa Citizen, which has eagerly stoked the fire that has consumed Ottawa these past few weeks, would it be okay to hire a neo-Nazi for the job? "If the defenders of Mr. Levine's hiring are truly committed to the principle that political beliefs are irrelevant to employment," the newspaper declared, they must be prepared to uphold this principle in every case. To do otherwise would be, well, inconsistent.

Certainly it is nonsense to pretend that politics is never a legitimate factor in employment. For the Prime Minister, of all people, to stand upon this point is only slightly less hypocritical than Bernard Landry's assertion that the furor across the Rideau proved, yet again, that "there are two nations, ours and the other" — as if political considerations have never intruded upon appointments to, say, Hydro-Quebec. Indeed, Levine himself can hardly appeal to the spirit of nonpartisanship: if it weren't for his politics, he would never have been given his present posting, as Quebec's delegate-general in New York.

But the alternative to the Levine witchhunt is not the foolishly consistent extreme that no one should ever be disqualified from any job on account of their political views, no matter how unpopular or abhorrent their views may be. The sensible response, rather, is that some views should disqualify you for some jobs. Where and when this will be the case will depend on a) how repugnant the view, and b) how public the job is.

A job in the private sector, by virtue of its privateness, generally entitles you to hold any opinions you like, no matter how loony: less so for a chief executive, entirely so for, say, a taxi driver. But the more public the job, the higher the political quotient, until we reach the profession of politics itself, where of course it is total.

Much the same principle applies in other areas of life. The further one ventures into the public arena, the less one may insist upon the freedoms of the private sphere, the more that "community standards" come into play.

You are entitled to look at pornography in your own home, whatever the community may think; you are not entitled to plaster it on a giant billboard in the middle of downtown. You may choose a lover based on the size of their nose or the colour of their skin. You cannot hire a vice-president on that basis.

But the mere fact that something is in the public realm does not mean that the community's rule is absolute. There is still a test of reasonableness to be met. This inevitably means making judgment calls. It is reasonable, arguably, for people to be upset at confronting 50-foot high scenes of copulation on the drive to work; it is not reasonable that they should be equally upset at a billboard featuring, say, the English language.

Or to take our present example, the mere fact that Mr. Levine's separatist leanings might make him unable to command the "confidence" of the community he serves, as many commentators sugggested, is not enough to disqualify him. If the source of the community's hostility was that Mr.

Levine was a Catholic, that would surely not justify his dismissal, no matter how public the job may be. On the other hand, we're all agreed that we would not hire a Nazi, no matter how skilled a manager he may be.

So the question remains: is a hospital administrator a political appointment, like a senator, where a person's partisan affiliation is all-important, or is it an apolitical position, like janitor, where partisanship is irrelevant? To the extent that it is political, are Mr. Levine's personal views, while unpopular, relatively benign, or are they so abhorrent as to warrant comparisons with Nazism? On both counts, in my judgment he should get the job.