I look forward to the playoffs every year, when hockey suddenly turns into a real sport again. There's nothing like it anywhere: two solid months of unrelieved national hysteria. Nor is there any championship that is as gruelling. Football? You win three games -- in three weeks -- and you're in. Basketball? Notice any playoff beards on those pampered prima donas? Baseball? Don't make me laugh. The marathon? Sure, it's tough, but it's over in two and a half hours. Now go out and do it again 27 times.

The one thing I don't look forward to is the moronic hockey commentary. Hockey commentary is always moronic, but it reaches a special intensity of moronitude at playoff time. You know what I'm talking about: the "this game is critical" analysis, sometimes phrased as a question ("Pat, how critical is it to win this game?"). Fellas, can I let you in on a secret? In a seven-game series, every game is critical. Lose that first game, and you're down 0-1: you're behind the eight-ball right off the top. Then there's the critical second game: win it, and the series is all tied up, the momentum is all yours; lose, and you're facing a 2-0 deficit, and as we know, only 35 teams in 962 series have come back from 2-0 to win (gosh: you mean teams that lose games usually lose series?).

But now we come to the critical -- I mean critical -- third game. Maybe the teams are tied going in: so whoever wins gets the all-important edge. Or one team's up 2-0: they win, and they're up 3-0, and you might as well just go home; they lose, and suddenly they're vulnerable, the momentum has shifted etc. Oh, but that's just the prelude to the critical fourth game: the clincher, or maybe the last stand, or possibly the one that ties it all up, or sometimes the one that breaks a tight series wide open.

Of course, the fifth game, now the fifth game's critical...

Never one to miss a chance to stick a shiv in the Martinites, Paul Wells shows no pity on the Pettigrew pirouette, and rightly so. It's not really a pirouette, of course: there is no practical distinction between saying you wouldn't prevent private provision of health care (Tuesday) and saying you wouldn't encourage it (Wednesday). But it's one of those non-distinction distinctions that the media seems to find endlessly confusing.

The whole Romanow report was based on this: every report had him saying the government should ban private care, but in fact it said nothing of the kind, as the great man was finally forced to admit. It just said that his personal preference was for public care. But as there is no law against private providers -- the Canada Health Act does not prohibit it, contrary to another popular impression -- you'd have to amend the Act to prohibit them. That, and nationalize all the doctors, private for-profit providers every one of them, which not even the NDP is contemplating (I think).

But if disliking private providers is not the same as banning them, allowing them is not the same as preferring them, always and everywhere. This is the distinction that eludes those countless experts who pop up at times like these to announced that "studies prove" that private care is more costly, kills people, etc. "Studies prove" nothing of the kind, of course, but in any case that would only be relevant if we were deciding whether to shift the whole system over to private providers, en masse. But we're not: the only issue is whether to allow the privates to compete with existing providers. If they can't offer better service at lower cost, they won't get the contract. That in most cases they can, even allowing for the necessity of earning a profit margin, shows what you can do with those studies.

So why was Pettigrew so anxious to correct the "impression" he had left the previous day? Because the media had misunderstood his position in precisely the way the Liberals had hoped they would misunderstand the Conservative position: namely, that because the Conservatives would allow the provinces to experiment with private care -- as the Canada Health Act does in law, as the Liberals do in practice, and as Pettigrew had just declared was the Liberal position in principle -- this somehow made them a threat to public health care; indeed, that this was somehow a change in policy. It's not: it's simply an acknowledgment of what the policy has always been.

Why is this charge -- "you're in favour of private care (because you would not prevent it)" -- so potent? Why were the Liberals so anxious to use it against the Conservatives, and why was Pettigrew so deathly pale at having thrown it away? Because of yet another distinction that no one seems to be able to keep straight in their head: between private provision and private finance. The public-sector health care unions and their proxies on the left have thrived on the false suggestion that private care equals user fees equals "two-tier" care. For that matter, too many people on the right have been all too willing to fall into that trap, thinking that the only way to reform the system is to charge consumers directly. But there's no necessary connection between the two, and certainly there is no logical equivalence between them: you can have private providers operating within a wholly publicly-financed system. As in fact we do. As in fact we have always done.

And this is where Wells is so devastating. Pettigrew is the Health minister. He is a senior minister in a government preparing to run on a pledge to "fix" health care as its main, if not only platform plank. He has had weeks to prepare for this moment, culminating in a speech, a press conference, and an appearance before a Commons committee. And he -- they -- still can't get it right, or deliver a consistent message from one day to the next.

Gosh, do you think this means they won't be able to demagogue this issue, after all? What a shame.

If Chuck Guité's testimony achieved nothing else, it forced Paul Martin's cabal of off-the-record briefers to come out into the open and for once comment under their own names.

The use of unattributed quotations from "senior officials" and "party insiders" is one of the great plagues of journalism. It's one thing to protect the identity of a whistleblower who is afraid of losing his job, or any source where the information divulged is important, factual, and can be checked against other sources. But in most cases it is little more than a vehicle for partisan political operatives to launch attacks on their opponents without having to take responsibility for them. And without having to buy an ad, which is what these stories usually are.

There's a lesson in the Clark tantrum, however, for Conservative sufferers of the nobody-here-but-us-moderates neurosis: You can do as much as you like to show off how unextreme you are, how unencumbered you are by serious policy differences with the Liberals, how desperate you are to curry favour with the CBC/Globe/Star nexus, and you will still be labelled as far-right religious wackos -- sometimes by fellow Conservatives. You do not make an accusation disappear by conceding its validity.

UPDATE: In the last few years, through various makeovers on the way from Reform through the Alliance to the "new" Conservatives (to quote the English, though strangely not the French version of the Harper ads), the right has more or less adopted the Progressive Conservative position, which is to say the Liberal position, on a host of issues: immigration, bilingualism, multiculturalism, abortion, etc. Lately it has ceased talking about referendums, serious spending cuts, or privatization. Harper now says he would not have sent troops to Iraq, but would only have offered "moral" support.

Meanwhile, the Liberals are now saying they are open to the use of private providers within the public health care system, and will not enforce the Canada Health Act upon recalcitrant provinces -- positions they had earlier denied, and had even earlier pilloried the Alliance for suggesting. Question: What distinguishes the "new" Conservatives from the Liberals? Will the Conservative platform amount to a pledge of cleaner government (trust us) and lower taxes (paid for out of the "hidden" surpluses the Liberals aren't telling us about)?

To be clear: I'm sympathetic to the Liberal consensus on a lot of these issues. In some cases I'm even to the left of them. But I don't view the conservative position as shameful, or something to be hidden from sight, and I want to see voters who hold these opinions properly represented. Quite frankly, I'd like to have to agonize before voting Conservative. If I can't have a party that embodies all of my views, I'd like the choice to be between, on the one hand, a strongly federalist, socially liberal and fiscally cautious (if not conservative) Liberal party, and on the other hand a decentralist, socially cautious (if not conservative) and strongly free-market Conservative party, with democratic reform as the wild card. Instead, it looks increasingly like a choice between a Liberal party that, because it is divided, stands on all sides of every issue, and a Conservative party that is united on precisely the same basis.

It is a mystery why the media have given so much play to Joe Clark's declaration in favour of the Liberals, given that a) he has said much the same thing before, and b) he is entirely irrelevant. Mr. Clark led the Progressive Conservatives to their worst-ever popular vote showing in 2000, just barely over 10%, where they remained, more or less, ever since. When the time came he was repudiated by 90% of his party in the vote to merge with the Canadian Alliance. So Clarkism represents, at a rough estimate, somewhere between 1% and 2% of the population.

His decision is revealing enough of the man, however. Everyone else in the two parties has had to put a large amount of water in his wine -- everyone, that is, except Mr. Clark and his followers, such as Sen. Lowell Murray, those loud exponents of compromise and tolerance who are utterly incapable of compromise and supremely intolerant of anyone's views but their own. If the party will not follow them, they will do their level best to destroy the party. Hence Clark's taxonomy: David Orchard is a great Conservative, but Stephen Harper is "dangerous."

Messrs Clark and Murray are examples of that uniquely Canadian type, the fanatical moderate (Robert Fulford's term, I believe), for whom the answer to every question is to take the middle path, regardless of whether a) there is a middle path, b) there is anything to recommend the middle path as policy, or c) today's middle path is likely to remain in the middle for long. In their vanity and illusions, their bitterness and vivid self-importance, they are the direct descendants of the Bourbons, who famously had "learned nothing and forgotten nothing."

The Liberals at least make no bones about the opportunism that underlies their lack of principle. But only the Red Tories could make lack of principle into a principle.

UPDATE: Now he's endorsing Ed Broadbent. Question: How was this man allowed to pass himself off as a Conservative all these years? Should we now conclude he was in fact a double agent?

The Adscam hearings have had what one must imagine was their desired effect: It is no longer news when Liberal cabinet ministers are caught lying or otherwise implicated in the scandal. Not even if the minister in question is the Prime Minister.

Item: Yet another senior civil servant in charge of the sponsorship program, Isabelle Roy, tells the committee that Alfonso Gagliano, contrary to his own testimony, was intimately involved in the running of the program, deciding which projects should get funding in regular meetings with Chuck Guité, the program's director. The Star runs the story page 6; the Post, page 10. The Globe runs the story off front, but leads with the RCMP telling the committee not to call certain witnesses because it might interfere with their investigation.

Item: Another memo surfaces accusing officials in Paul Martin's office at Finance of rigging the bidding on communications contracts to favour Earnscliffe Strategy group, where many of his senior advisers were -- and are -- employed. To compound the embarrassment, the scolding is at the hands of Warren Kinsella -- the conscience of the Liberal party, then executive assistant to Dave "Stonewall" Dingwall at Public Works -- in a memo to that crusader against misspending, Chuck Guité.

"I require an immediate explanation as to how the department in question was permitted to breach the guidelines in this way," Kinsella writes, listing seven contracts worth $525,900 awarded to Earnscliffe and an affiliated company. "This is simply unacceptable." Guité agrees, writing back that the situation "could become embarrassing to the government and certainly our minister." Coverage: Globe, page 4; Post, page 10, Star, page 6.

How those memos came to light is an interesting question in itself. Kinsella staunchly denies he leaked them, even feigning unfamiliarity with the one above his signature ("The memo sounds genuine, although I still haven't seen it yet. It certainly sounds like something I would say..."). Actually, I believe him. My theory is that the Martin people leaked it, in anticipation of Guité's appearance before the committee tomorrow. The theory is buttressed by Monday's Globe piece ("Guité expected to bare old feud with Finance"), which heavily quotes Martinites. The strategy is signalled by the headline: make everything Guité says seem like part of an "old feud," an obscure bit of bureaucratic rivalry mixed with partisan infighting, where everyone says things they regret later. And rely on the fact that the story has already been leaked -- twice -- to make Guité's testimony seem stale by the time it is delivered.

Here's the Star's account of that "historic" meeting summit between the Prime Minister, 20 cabinet ministers and about 70 Indian native aboriginal First Nations leaders.

Martin said the government will now:

Write a report on the summit;

Convene a meeting between the Cabinet Committee on Aboriginal Affairs and native leaders to devise a course of action;

Arrange roundtable discussions among individual ministers and aboriginal experts, provincial and territorial leaders and the private sector about developing goals.

Annually release a government report card "to tell us and all Canadians how we're doing, what progress we're making and where we simply have to do better if we are to deliver our objective of closing the gap of living conditions for aboriginal Canadians."

That's the Prime Minister's "four-point plan" for rescuing natives from the morass of dependency and bureaucracy that governments have trapped them in for many decades -- Reports, meetings, reports about meetings and meetings about reports. Oh, and several more steps in the direction of dividing Canadian society irrevocably by race: possible participation by native leaders at meetings of the premiers First Ministers Council of the Federation (the Justice minister has mused about reserving seats for aboriginals on the Supreme Court); aboriginal school boards; "the creation of an Inuit Secretariat within Indian and Northern Affairs Canada," etc. etc.

That, and a pledge to "reconsider" Louis Riel's place in Canadian history. (There's a bill before Parliament -- has it passed? -- to make him a Father of Confederation, declare a national day in his honour, etc.) Apparently, having twice raised an army against the government of Canada isn't enough to count as treason in this country, or not any more. You have to do it three times.

All of this treading water and symbolic diversions, yet at least one native leader complained that the meeting was too substantive.

Russell Diabo, a Mohawk from Kahnawake, Que., applauded Martin's willingness to talk, in contrast with his predecessor Jean Chretien, but said Martin was focusing too much on programs and services and not enough on rights.

"Maybe there will be some more houses built, maybe there will be some more money to build some schools, maybe some curriculum development, but ... without lands and resources and some clear recognition of inherent authority or sovereignty -- some degree of sovereignty internally within aboriginal groups, the freedom to make decisions and mistakes -- you're not going to see those changes to solve those other problems."

This is what passes for radical thinking within what Tom Flanagan calls the "aboriginal orthodoxy": replacing overgovernment by remote bureaucrats with overgovernment by local despots. There's your problem.

Smart column by Tom Walkom on the Khadrs says everything I would have said.

No one doubts the family's loathsomeness, not to say their gall. Maybe they should never have been given citizenship in the first place: certainly the father should not have. But having been granted it, you can't take it away purely on the basis of their views. Neither can they be denied access to what is supposed to be a universal health care system: the government cannot, in a free society, be in the business of punishing people whose opinions it doesn't like. (And yes, I would repeal existing legislation to that effect, including the hate laws. The ban on incitement to violence is quite sufficient to keep the peace.)

If they've committed a crime, charge them. Otherwise, we're just going to have to grit our teeth. Part of the price of freedom.

Since the subject seems to be of such interest, a quick update on developments in Svendscam since I last posted (or, for that matter, saw a Canadian news source -- I was in upstate New York, but I might as well have been in Uganda). For those as out of touch as me, we have since learned:

1) That the auction house reported the stolen ring to the RCMP, naming Robinson as the thief, on Easter Sunday, two days before Svend came round.

2) That Svend spoke at a public event that Saturday, where he showed no signs of the "agonizing" he said he had endured. His topic: personal ethics.

3) That Svend was shopping for a ring the previous Wednesday.

To recap: Wednesday Svend shops for an expensive diamond ring. Friday he steals one. Saturday he appears in public. Sunday the theft is reported to the police. Tuesday he turns himself in. Thursday he holds a teary press conference.

Make of it what you will. It appears Svend's riding association has.

Commentary from Colby Cosh, Ezra Levant, Roy McGregor, and Charles Adler.

I moved, or rather was dragged, kicking and screaming, back to Toronto over the weekend (hence the radio silence). Here's a loving long last look at NYC. Sniffle.

The auction house from whose premises Svend Robinson "pocketed" That Ring has said it accepts his apology and won't press charges.

I realize this has been exhaustively discussed in the previous post on the subject, so I'll just close with a couple of thoughts. It seems inconceivable to me that a person in Robinson's position would have formed a coherent plan to shoplift a ring, and scarcely more conceivable that he would have done so on impulse unless he were completely out of his head. It's not like padding your expense account or similar offences, where you could reasonably expect to avoid being caught, and if caught to justify the expense in some fashion or other. In particular, it is not something one could easily rationalize to oneself, which I think is the critical factor in many people's willingness to commit a crime.

Many of the comments on the previous post have scorned his invocation of his mental state as an "excuse." I'm assuming he's telling the truth when he says he turned himself in to the police voluntarily. (It would seem an odd thing to lie about, on national TV. Though it is worth noting that the auction house reported the theft to the RCMP last Saturday, three days before Robinson did.) This, too, seems telling to me. It's not as if he were caught after a six-week manhunt, and then showed up all teary-eyed. Granted, there are many gaps in his story. But given everything we know about Svend, the notion that he might not have been entirely in possession of his faculties doesn't seem that much of a stretch.

The question is what penalty he should pay. Theft, followed by confession and return of the stolen property, is still theft: his offence is mitigated by his subsequent behaviour, but there should still be some penalty attached. Otherwise you give an out to real thieves, who could surrender if it looked likely they would be caught, or elect to remain on the lam, and escape punishment either way.

Should he be permitted to remain an MP? He can't very well serve the public if he's serving time; remain a member of the House while a resident of the Big House. And there's a question whether, if he is as unhinged as he claims, he can properly represent his constituents (although this is BC, after all....) But on the assumption that his legal difficulties are behind him by the time of the next election, and if the good people of Burnaby-Douglas should decide, in their wisdom, to elect the tiresome self-promoter (that's tireless - ed.) yet again, that is their privilege, and his good luck.

UPDATE: Colby Cosh offers his own characteristically shrewd take on the latest affaire Svend.

Something has gone seriously wrong with the Google search function. It seems to have forgotten everything it learned in crawling this site. Or rather, the blog seems to be crowding out the columns catalogue: click on Supreme Court on the keyword search page, and it shows just 21 hits, 9 of them from the blog and only 4 of them columns. Yet I've written countless columns that mention the Supreme Court.

Anyone have any thoughts? It was working fine before.

For those of you too cheap to buy a paper, or visiting from out of town, here's a link to my Wednesday column. Gratis.

In honour of Svend Robinson's impending retirement after 25 years as an MP -- and in the hope that it is not for reasons of ill health -- a column from the archives...

UPDATE: Apparently, it is for reasons of ill health: he suffers from a rare and debilitating form of kleptomania.

UPPERDATE: On second thought, maybe we should cut the guy some slack. He did go to the cops himself, which suggests the theft probably was indicative of a disordered state of mind. An ill-judged post on my part.

Today's ultracool website: For those of you who still prefer vinyl.

First the faceless drones on the National Post editorial board get a blog. Now Tory eminence grise Norman "Looming" Spector has gone electric.

And to think I remember when this whole blog thing was just me and Colby Cosh goofing around in our parents' garage. Okay, I wasn't there -- actually, I just got into it a couple of months ago -- but Colby remembers.

"MP Carolyn Parrish says she'd be happy to sit in the Commons all summer 'to flush (Harper) out - `what do you believe in?' - because he's a fairly brutal character.'"

(Conservatives content to work quietly on election)

Improbable assertions: 1.

Thibault insisted Liberal MPs on the committee are not being driven by electoral considerations.

"I have never felt any pressure by anybody other than to get at the bottom of this matter."

Improbable assertions: 2.

Prime minister denies he is electioneering during Day 1 of Atlantic tour

...Martin has been criss-crossing the country in recent weeks, spending much of his time in Liberal-held ridings that could be vulnerable in the next federal election. But the prime minister has insisted he's not on a pre-election vote hunt.

"Until such time that an election is called, I'm going to govern," Martin said later, following a speech to soldiers gathered at Canadian Forces Base Gagetown. "That is my priority."

Improbable assertions: 3.

Prime Minister Paul Martin's strategists told Liberal MPs yesterday to ignore disappointing public-opinion polls and that they are eager for a "head-to-head contest" with the Conservatives and their "radical, far-right agenda that is consistently out-of-sync with Canadians."...

"Over the next few weeks, the Prime Minister will be expanding on his vision for the country and going to work on issues of concern to Canadians, like striking a new health-care agreement with the provinces to secure medicare for a generation," the PMO missive says.

"The Prime Minister will have to decide soon when to call an election. He will be basing his decision on the progress he and the government have made on the issues, not what he reads in newspaper polls."

It's possible that André Ouellet thinks he is dealing with fools. It's possible, with regard to the Public Accounts committee, he is. But there should be no doubt that his appearance before the committee was every bit as much of a charade as those that preceded him.

All the elements were there. There was the wounded victim routine: his life had been "a living hell" in the weeks since the Auditor General's report appeared, he told the committee. (Although Greg Weston tells a different story.) There were the usual astonishing gaps in knowledge: he was unaware of Jean Lafleur's Liberal connections, he declared, straightfaced, at the time he was funneling hundreds of thousands of dollars in public funds his way. If so, he was the only man in Quebec who was. But perhaps in twenty-odd years of running the Liberal party machine in Quebec he had never run into him. No, that can't be right: he's reported to have dined at his cottage, a lavish affair attended by such notables as Marc (Via Rail) LeFrancois, Jean (Francois Beaudoin) Carle... and Jean (strutting bantam in epaulets) Lapierre!

And there were the cagey non-denial denials. The Auditor General, Ouellet humphed, had got her facts wrong. "Some of her conclusions are incorrect." Canada Post was not part of the sponsorship program. "I want to say unequivocally that Canada Post never spent any money for that purpose."

"The auditor general report is not accurate," he told the committee. "I'm telling you, the auditor general could make mistakes and misinterpret what's taking place and . . . when I read this document, it's not the way it happened.

Except he never actually names a single instance of where she got it wrong. For example, he is at pains to point out that the Crown corporation's $1.6-million contribution to a film bio of Maurice Richard had nothing to do with the sponsorship program, but was simply intended to raise the Crown corporation's profile, there being apparently a few Maurice Richard fans in Quebec who have never heard of the post office.

But the Auditor General never said it was, or at any rate accepted Canada Post's explanation. It was the total absence of any supporting documentation -- though that was certainly consistent with everything that went on in the sponsorship program -- that worried her. Here is what her report says about the transaction:

We are concerned about a lack of documentation to support payments made by Canada Post for the Maurice Richard series. Canada Post paid L'Information essentielle $1,625,000 (plus taxes) with no signed contract. There was no signed proposal or written business case to support the decision to spend $1,625,000. Canada Post informed us that it had received a proposal from L'Information essentielle listing costs and benefits, but we found that the proposal was neither signed by L'Information essentielle nor accepted in writing by Canada Post. Canada Post also informed us that it had done a cost-benefit analysis, but it provided us with no evidence of this.

Canada Post's sponsorship policy requires that it document the objectives and budget for sponsoring an event and the results it expects to achieve for its investment. Canada Post has agreed that written documentation to support its decision to be a main advertiser on the series would have been desirable. However, Canada Post informed us that it entered into this transaction in order to achieve marketing and not sponsorship objectives. Given that Canada Post was identified as a sponsor on the series and invoices indicate that it was sponsoring the production of the series, we believe that Canada Post should have followed its sponsorship policy and maintained appropriate documentation.

Of course, the Auditor General was obliged to take Canada Post's word for a lot of things, since she was unable to conduct a full audit of the corporation's books: it was all she could do to pry them open even a crack, given the corporation's -- the Crown corporation's -- jealously-guarded immunity from public scrutiny.

Through an order-in-council, we were able to audit selected sponsorship transactions at Canada Post Corporation. However, our Office did not audit the sponsorship/marketing program of Canada Post Corporation in its entirety.

On the other major transaction involving Canada Post, a competition to design a new series of stamps, Ouellet offered even less defense, conceding that it "does not look good." Indeed it does. Here's how it worked. Canada Post received $600,000 from Public Works, ie from the sponsorship program that Ouellet insists the corporation was not a part of. Lafleur Communications took the now familiar rakeoff for transferring the cheque from one arm of the government to another. Canada Post then turned around and handed the remaining $516,000 back to Lafleur, ostensibly to run the program, without competitive tender, without a contract, indeed without supporting documentation of any kind -- in common with the corporation's original decision to enter the competition, and of Public Works to fund it. Ouellet insists that "all of the money was well spent," a and that Lafleur "worked hard for the money," but in fact he has no way of knowing. Indeed, the Auditor General found that "both Canada Post and CCSB purchased similar goods from Lafleur," ie the agency billed them twice for the same services. (Ouellet says he was unaware of the government's involvement in the transaction. Yet he told the committee it was at the government's instructions that he hired Lafleur. The firm of whose Liberal connections he was also unaware.)

And in any case, Canada Post was not eligible to receive any of the money in the first place. As a Crown corporation it was obliged to carry the Canada wordmark, without having to be paid to do so. And if, as Ouellet insists, the money was actually used to raise Canada Post's profile ("In [Canada Post's] view," the Auditor General carefully notes, "the stamp contest was not a sponsorship transaction but rather a marketing activity, a strictly commercial operation"), it was doubly ineligible for funding, since Treasury Board rules expressly forbid the use of transfer payments to support a Crown corporation's commercial operations. Confronted with this by the committee, Ouellet blithely offered to give the money back, all the while insisting he has been ill-used by the Auditor General!

I should have said it was impossible that anyone could be taken in by this tripe -- not after Alfonso Gagliano, after Dave Stonewall, after Marc LeFrancois (How could he not have known that Via was paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to Lafleur, with whom he travelled to Europe? "I don't ask questions of people"), after Jean Pelletier, and after Reg Half-cocked's intervention. But then I read this column by John Ibbitson, and I'm not so sure.