It's sprawl vs. the planet, and sprawl is winning

Recent surveys that show Canadians are becoming increasingly car-dependent are not good news for the environment. According to Statistics Canada, in 2005, 74 per cent of Canadians said they made all their trips by car. This compares to 70 per cent in 1998 and 68 per cent in 1992, a slow but disturbingly sure increase. Meanwhile, the percentage travelling by foot or bicycle decreased from 26 per cent in 1992 to 19 per cent in 2005.

I am not proud to say my fellow Albertans lead this particular pollution parade, as we do others. Edmonton and Calgary top the list of people making all their trips by car. (This news coincides nicely with our premier recently announcing a "plan" to cut greenhouse gas emissions in which they don't decrease until 2020.)

Albertans are leaders in part because we continue to allow our cities to sprawl, the major reason for people choosing cars over walking, bicycling or public transit. Calgary's addiction to sprawl arose from a variety of reasons: developer's insistence they can keep house prices down only if the city annexes more land; Calgary's historic fear of fringe towns; the belief that housing should be left entirely up to the private sector; the lending policies of CMHC; the growth of malls and big box centres -- a list of decentralizing factors, many of which we share with other cities.

Most of these factors continue to work their insidious influence. Thus sprawl persists, the car culture grows, and the globe warms.

If you frighten easily ...

If you frighten easily, you may not want to read the quotation below from Pulitzer-prize winning author Tim Weiner's thought-provoking (and disturbing) book Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Weiner describes a meeting after 9/11 between the assistant director of central intelligence, James Monnier Simon, Jr., and Attorney General John Ashcroft. They discussed national identity cards for Americans. Ashcroft asked Simon what they would contain and he replied:

Well, a thumbprint. Blood type would be useful, as would a retinal scan. We would want your picture taken a special way so that we could pick your face out of a crowd even if you were wearing a disguise. We would want your voice print, because the technology is coming up that will pick your voice out of every other voice in all the cell phones on earth, and your voice is unique. In fact, we would like to have a bit of your DNA in there, so if something ever happens to you we can identify the body. By the way, we would want the chip to tell us where this card is, so that if we needed to find you we could. Then it dawned on us that if we did that, you could set the card down. So we would put the chip in your bloodstream.

The card never appeared, but the CIA was compensated with a power they had never enjoyed before: the legal right to spy on Americans.

As the British plan implementation of their national ID card system, as the watcher state closes in upon us, can one imagine, I wonder, the day when we are all embedded with a microchip at birth, rather like the one described by Assistant Director Simon? Eat your heart out, George Orwell.

Blair and bin Laden: comrades in extremism?

Having recently posted on the mad antics of George W. Bush in the Middle East, I feel I must add a comment on the recent musings of former British prime minister Tony Blair. Despite Blair being famously known as Bush's poodle, I always believed he was an intellectual cut above his master. Now, judging by a recent speech he gave in Toronto, I'm having my doubts.

Incredibly, Blair claimed in his presentation that Muslims have no legitimate grievance against the West. Muslim rage against us is, according to Tony, due to their internal contradictions, nothing to do with anything we have done. He then went on to justify making war against the Islamists.

Nothing to do with what the West has done? Nothing to do with Britain and the United States destroying the first Islamic democracy in the Middle East in Iran in the 1950s? Nothing to do with destroying the latest Islamic democracy in the Middle East in Palestine? Nothing to do with wrecking their democracies on the one hand while on the other hand supporting dictators like the Sauds who oppress them? Nothing to do with imposing Israel on them and then standing idly by while the Palestinians are ethnically cleansed and robbed of their land? Nothing to do with reducing Iraq to a bloody chaos that is costing tens of thousands of Muslim lives, creating millions of refugees and breaking and scattering the heritage of the world's oldest civilization?

I could go on at length, but it's hardly necessary. Anyone even superficially aware of the long and sordid history of Islam and the West knows the Muslims have legitimate and profound grievances. Did Blair assume his audience of 2,000 Canadians was composed of unlettered rustics? Apparently. He showed the same contempt for them he shows for history.

While pondering the extreme nature of his views, another gentleman of similarly extreme views popped into my mind. Somewhere in the wilds of Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is insisting all the troubles of Islam are due to the West, and therefore Islam is justified in using violence against the West to defend its values. And in the wilds of Toronto, Tony Blair insists none of the problems of Islam are due to the West, so we are justified in using violence against Islam to defend our values. Two extreme views. One the mirror image of the other. Both immersed in self-righteousness.

The fact that Blair is the now a "peace" envoy to the Middle East makes one despair. Is this yet another act of arrogance by the West?

Has Bush gone completely freaking crazy?

What kind of a man saunters into a neighbourhood and tries to turn neighbour against neighbour? And then provides guns to one of the neighbours? And does all this in the most volatile neighbourhood in the world? A mad man? A psychopath? This is certainly more than simple trouble-making. This is evil. Yet this is exactly what U.S. President George W. Bush has been doing in the Middle East: Encouraging the Persian Gulf Arabs to "confront" Iran while peddling a multibillion-dollar arms deal to them, including advanced weaponry for the misogynists who rule Saudi Arabia.

While Bush makes his mischief, the Gulf states attempt to improve relationships. For example, Saudi Arabia recently invited Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the annual hajj pilgrimage, an honour Ahmadinejad gracefully accepted. That old peace-maker trade continues to flourish in the area driven by merchant families with members in both Iran and Arab states, despite American efforts to discourage these age-old patterns. The United Arab Emirates are the repository of hundreds of millions of dollars of Iranian investment. Historical ethnic and economic ties between the Gulf Arabs and Iran cry out for peace in the region.

But it is not only in the interests of the residents that we have calm in the Gulf. It is in the interests of all of us.

And does the Bush administration believe that Saudi Arabia is a safe place to deposit billions of dollars worth of arms? The country is seething with extremists in government and without. Have they forgotten where most of the 9/11 bombers came from? Have they forgotten the result of arming the mujahideen in Afghanistan? Have they forgotten the result of arming America's former ally Saddam Hussein? Does the word "blowback" not resonate in their ears? Do the Americans ever learn?

They are engaged in folly. We can only hope the Arabs will show more sense and spare the world yet another blood bath in the region. We might also hope the next president of the United States will consider finally relieving his nation of the white man's burden.

Harper's Palestine policy: sucking up to the Aspers?

That the Conservatives should side strongly with the Jews over the Arabs in Palestine is to be expected. Conservatives, after all, are inclined to support the haves over the have-nots. I suspect in this case, however, there is a more immediate political reason. The most powerful media organization in this country is the Asper family's CanWest Global which owns five of the country's top ten newspapers, including one of the two national papers, as well as one of the two private TV networks. And the Aspers are aggressively pro-Israel.

It has been said that Rupert Murdoch is the world's most powerful man because of his vast global media holdings. He can make or break politicians with a flick of his rhetorical wrist. The Aspers might well be considered Canada's version of Rupert Murdoch. The prime minister may be the most powerful man in the country at any moment, but while prime ministers come and go, the Aspers' media empire goes on and on. Offending them is politically risky. Currying favour with them, particularly on an issue dear to their hearts, is politically astute. And Harper is nothing if not politically astute.

A carbon tax: responsible, moral and fair

When I was little, I was instructed at my mother's knee that if I made a mess I should clean it up. It was one of those rule of life things -- a moral imperative, if you like. I may even have been over-instructed because I confess to being somewhat anal about it. If, for example, I see someone toss candy wrappers on the street or leave their garbage in a public park, it annoys me. How dare someone show such disrespect for the property of others, for the public domain, a righteous little voice inside me complains. And yet I do the same thing myself all the time.

When I drive my car down the street, it emits a cloud of noxious vapours into the air, the very air everyone else has to breathe. My garbage may not be visible, but it is surely there and it makes a much fouler mess than candy wrappers or picnic trash. But how do I remain true to my mother's instructions and clean it up?

I could stop driving of course but seeing as I, an inveterate walker, do less than 3,000 kilometres a year in my little Honda civic, I feel that's asking rather a lot of me. And if I should rely on buses or planes ... well, they dump a similar garbage. And yet the little voice nags at me.

Fortunately there is a solution, and it doesn't involve attaching a balloon to my exhaust and dropping it in the trash bin when I get home. It is a carbon tax. If I am required to pay a tax on the gasoline I buy, and that tax is dedicated to reducing pollution, then I am, indirectly at least, cleaning up after myself.

So, I say to our governments, bring it on. Carbon tax us. Insist that I, and all the others out there littering public space with their foul gaseous messes, clean up after ourselves, or at least compensate for our behaviour. It is morally responsible and it is fair. The more you pollute, the more you pay. Mothers everywhere would approve.

Wasting precious space in The Globe and Mail

As an inveterate reader of The Globe and Mail (persevering even through the new year's 25 per cent price increase), I am struck by the contrast between two types of articles.

The first is exemplified by Stephanie Nolen, African correspondent for the Globe. Nolen's articles carry wonderful stuff. She brings Africa to your doorstep with useful information and keen insights into the continent and its peoples, the very thing discerning readers look for in attempting to understand the world they live in. A two-time national newspaper award winner for international reporting, she has been commended for her "creative brilliance, humanitarian compassion, personal courage and the relentless pursuit of truth that combine to make much of what [she] writes vivid and urgent for her readers."

And then, by contrast, another kind of article, exemplified by much of columnist Christie Blatchford's work. Here we find a writer rambling on about why her dog won't sleep with her any more, ranting petulantly against a judge she doesn't like, or indulging in maudlin pieces about how cuddly our troops are. Not that I blame Blatchford for this. She is what she is. I blame the Globe for wasting space on this fluff.

As the number of newspapers has shrunk over the years, space has become increasingly precious. There are hundreds of writers out there who are capable of writing witty, well-researched, literate material on issues of substance who would give their left arm to fill some of that space. Wasting it on shallow writers writing frivolous material is irresponsible. I realize the first priority of newspapers is not to inform, nor to provide democratic discussion, but rather to peddle advertising and maybe this fluff does that. But there's a place for stuff of that calibre and it's in the tabloids. The serious press bears the responsibility of serving as public forums in this democracy of ours, and when fluff displaces news and intelligent discussion, democracy is not served.

Not that there isn't room for lighter material in the daily paper. God knows, news, or at least what the media decides is news, is heavy enough. A good example of what works is Michael Kesterton's "Social Studies" in the Globe. The section itself isn't overly spacious and offers a variety of very short pieces, some funny, some absurd, some intriguing, spiced up with delightful mini-cartoons, for a delicious, light-hearted break from the heavy stuff. And then of course there's the cartoon page, a pleasant and perennially popular interruption of fantasy and whimsy, and not to forget John Allemang's brilliant and wickedly satiric poems in the weekend Globe. Fun does have its place in the pages of the daily press.

But the filler I'm referring to above is not fun, not funny, absurd, intriguing or creative. It is self-indulgence and little more. It is space that could be much better used. The serious news pages should be serious.

As an example of what the Globe and other papers might do, I offer for consideration one of the most popular sections they offer -- the letters-to-the-editor section. Here a bit of democracy intrudes. Ordinary citizens get an opportunity to have their say on issues of the day. What a great favour the daily press would do for democratic discourse if they dropped their weaker columnists and expanded both the space for letters and the number of words letter-writers are allowed.

No doubt the daily press could come up with other innovative ideas to set a higher standard for themselves. As for the tabloid trash, leave it to the tabloids.

Try Omar Khadr for what?

Five of Britain's top legal organizations are calling on the Canadian government to take "urgent action" to bring Omar Khadr, the young Canadian imprisoned in Guantanamo, home to Canada and afford him a fair trial. The groups accuse the Harper government of complicity in "breaches of fundamental international standards of conduct in relation to children." It is encouraging that these prestigious British legal organizations will defend this youngster's welfare when his own government won't; nonetheless, what exactly would they have Omar tried for?

Omar was captured after a battle against American forces in Afghanistan in 2002. Before succumbing to serious injuries, he threw a grenade that killed one GI and wounded others. The Americans have charged him with various offences, including murder. Although he is clearly a prisoner of war, the U.S. has declared him an "unlawful combatant," a term invented to circumvent the Geneva Convention. The American hypocrisy is exemplified by their suggestion they will hold him indefinitely even if he is acquitted of the charges, claiming he is a prisoner of the war on terror and convention allows them to hold him until the war is over. It seems that under American justice, he is not prisoner of war if they can convict him, but he is a prisoner of war if they can't.

Furthermore, he is a child soldier and child soldiers are internationally recognized as victims, not perpetrators, and offered rehabilitation, not imprisonment. The United States itself recognizes this, and is bound by it as a signatory of the United Nations Optional Protocol on the Rights of the Child, which states that people under 18 who are enlisted or conscripted into armed conflict are not adults and therefore “are entitled to special protection.”

Considering that Omar was indoctrinated from birth by fanatical parents, who raised him to believe that religious martyrdom was the highest achievement he could aspire to, and sent to Afghanistan by his father, he would seem to be a classical example of what protection for child soldiers is all about. All he was guilty of doing was what good boys are supposed to do: honour and obey their parents.

Justice demands that Omar be released immediately, compensated for the appalling brutality he has endured at the hands of the Americans, returned to Canada and offered the medical care he undoubtedly requires to minimize long-term psychological damage. If our government demands anything less they are betraying their responsibility to a young and vulnerable Canadian, a victim of first his parents and then the U.S. military.

The Mounties: reform the symbols?

While Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day deals with the much-needed administrative and structural reforms of the RCMP recommended by the Brown report (the Task Force Report on Governance and Cultural Change in the RCMP), he might also give a thought to reforming the force's symbols. Consider the name: The Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Mounted police? In the 21st century? The "Royal" might also be given some thought.

And does a modern police force need a dress uniform? Isn't this a symbol of the paramilitary nature of the Mounties that's at the root of many of their problems? At the very least, drop the riding boots (with spurs yet?) and the pseudo-cowboy hat. And do something about those breeches -- didn't they go out of style with Mussolini?

The first step in becoming a modern police force might just be looking like one.

"Star Wars" catches on

While the West has obsessed, needlessly as it turns out, with Iran developing nuclear weapons, nuclear activity elsewhere heats up. In addition to supplementing its armoury with a nuclear-capable missile with a range of 6,000 kilometres, India has announced it is developing a missile shield, capable of tracking and shooting down incoming missiles, which it hopes to have in place by 2010.

It isn't alone. Japan's parliament has authorized spending $2.5-billion to develop a missile defence system. Meanwhile, the United States continues to spend half a trillion dollars a year on its system.

Pakistani response to the Indian announcement was indicated by defence analyst Ayesha Siddiqa who observed, "The first impulse is to ask how does Pakistan get [a missile defence system]. The next will be to increase the number of missiles to make sure it has enough to evade the shield." Pakistan is rapidly building up its stock of short- and medium-range missiles and recently tested a cruise missile capable of carrying nuclear weapons.

According to K. Subrahmanyan, an Indian who writes on defence issues, India has to raise the "uncertainty levels for Pakistan." It's doing a pretty damn good job of raising the uncertainty levels for the rest of us as well.

China and the U.S.: the peaceful dictatorship vs. the belligerent democracy

The announcement this week that the Chinese had signed a multi-billion dollar deal to develop a giant oil field in Iran contrasts yet again the Chinese and American approaches to securing their supplies of natural resources, indeed if not in their approaches to international relationships generally. While the Americans threaten and bully Iran, and wage wars on that country's borders, the Chinese quietly and peacefully make a mutually beneficial oil deal.

Even though they are a great power with one of the world's fastest growing economies and an attendant need for raw materials, the Chinese have no military bases outside their country. They aren't waging war anywhere in the world, nor are they threatening to. Nor do they constantly interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.

The United States does all these things. It has a military presence on every continent, is currently waging wars in two countries while threatening to attack a third, invades another country at least once a generation if not once a decade, and constantly interferes in the affairs of other peoples around the globe.

China is accused of coddling bad guys like Iran and the Sudan, and it does. But then the U.S. counts among its close friends brutal regimes such as the Sauds of Arabia. The behaviour of both simply illustrates that in the world of realpolitik, trade tends to trump morality. On this, the Chinese are no different from the rest of us.

The whole thing is rather embarrassing for democrats. It would be nice to perceive the world's principal democracy as the paragon of progressive international relations. Yet it is totally outshone by a dictatorship. Embarrassing.

The alchemy of P3s

Governments seem forever seduced by the allure of public-private partnerships (P3s).

With traditional procurement, a government hires a private company to build a facility such as a bridge or a hospital. The government finances the project, and after the facility is built, operates it. In a typical P3, the government contracts with a private cmpany to both finance and build the facility, and then leases it back. The idea is that, by some mysterious process, the government saves money.

Lately, federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has been preaching the P3 sermon and plans to set up an office to promote the concept. "Governments ... can no longer afford to finance, build and maintain every single infrastructure project in this country," says the minister."

They can't? Let's parse Mr. Flaherty's remarks.

In the first place, there is more money floating around this country than there has ever been before in our history. Much more. And the federal government is awash, almost to the point of embarrassment, in surpluses. Of course we can afford to finance, build and maintain the infrastructure we need.

In the second place, how will P3s save us money? Private companies aren't going to finance and build our infrastructure out of the kindness of their capitalist hearts. Regardless of what legerdemain is applied to the financing, they will insist on recovering every penny they spend plus a handsome profit. Considering that governments can borrow at better rates than the private sector, projects will hardly cost less.

Big investors quite naturally love the idea. Jim Leech, incoming president of the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan, says they are encouraging Mr. Flaherty, "to have assets that have in Canada traditionally been held in government hands turned over to the private sector." And why, I wonder, does he want to get his hands on our assets? Out of concern for the public good? I doubt it. More, I suspect, to make money for his investors, and that would mean at least equalling Teachers' recent rate of return of 13.2 per cent. That would be 13.2 per cent out of our pockets.

So please, Mr. Flaherty, stop wallowing in neo-con ideology and just give the cities the money they need to build the damn infrastructure.

Iraq: If it was all about oil, it worked

In return for "guaranteed long-term security," the Iraqi government is about to grant the United States the right to station 50,000 troops in the country and provide American investors, no doubt Halliburton first among them, with preferential treatment. The Americans could hardly have hoped for a better outcome: favoured access to Iraqi oil and troops on the ground to protect its privileged status.

The deal is hardly a surprise. The Americans have all along been building massive military bases in Iraq as well as their largest embassy. This was obviously a colonial enterprise from the beginning. And now it's about to pay off.

The American empire is so much neater than the old European model. The British, French, et al., had to set up entire administrations to run their colonies while the Americans leave all that tedium to the natives. Not that it's cost-free: they will still have to station 50,000 troops in Iraq, but that's a small price to pay for preferential and protected access to the world's second largest reserves of conventional oil.

One wonders if the British will feel a little miffed if they don't get preferential treatment for their investors as well after all the help they've been -- a bone for the poodle so to speak.

Canada's foreign policy: guns over butter?

In a recent address at York University entitled "Restoring a Broadly-based Canadian Foreign Policy," Joe Clark (that's the decent, modest man who was dumped for Brian Mulroney) nicely summarized a sensible approach for Canada to take with its foreign affairs.

Included in his remarks were some numbers that bear repeating. He pointed out that National Defence now accounts for 8.7 per cent of federal program spending, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) for 1.64 per cent and Foreign Affairs and International Trade for 1.62 per cent. In other words we are spending over 2 1/2 times as much on the military as we are on foreign aid and diplomacy combined. And it's getting worse. In the next budget year, defence spending will increase substantially while CIDA's and Foreign Affairs' will both drop.

What a shabby set of priorities: the military over aid and diplomacy, guns over butter. As Joe Clark observed, "For 60 years, under Liberal and Progressive Conservative governments, we Canadians played above our weight in international affairs ... From the invention of peace-keeping, through the fight against apartheid, to the land mines treaty, we have a long, proud, bipartisan history of international initiative." And now that long, proud history is threatened, in so small part because Prime Ministers Martin and Harper have both allowed their Chief of Defence, Rick Hillier, excessive influence in setting military policy. Hillier is, after all, a soldier, and soldiers are in the business of killing people, not talking to them.

This shift in priorities seems to have taken place without public debate. Do Canadians really believe we can do more good in the world with muscle than with diplomacy or aid? Joe Clark insists, "We are quiet in the multilateral forums that we once animated ... We have become invisible on an international stage where Canada had been a consistent and constructive presence for more than half a century." Are Canadians content with subordinating our "consistent and constructive presence" to military adventurism? Or would we rather leave that approach, with its Vietnams and Iraqs, to the Americans?

I suspect so. In any case, the issue deserves a thorough public airing. And that it hasn't had.

Growth hammers Calgarians' quality of life

With Alberta's booming economy front and centre in the financial news, observers might expect Calgary's quality of life to be booming proportionately. Calgarians would beg to differ. According to the city's annual Citizen Satisfaction Survey, 61 per cent of Calgarians said their quality of life had deteriorated over the past three years, a significant increase over last year's 51 per cent.

Calgarians still appreciate their city with 67 per cent saying life in Calgary was good or very good. Nonetheless, this has dropped from 77 per cent in 2006 and 85 per cent in 2005, a precipitous decline.

Asked about the causes of the decline, residents blamed the rate of growth and issues related to growth such as transportation problems, cost of housing, homelessness and crime. Apparently, not only for hosting the greatest outdoor show on earth is Calgary known as the Stampede City.

Misogynist mates

How fitting Pope Benedict XVI and King Abdullah Bin-Abd-al-Aziz Al Saud of Arabia should sit down for a heart-to-heart. They have so much in common: they are both supreme rulers, they are both guardians of a religion and religious places, and they are both confirmed misogynists. In the Pope's domain, women are not allowed to rise to high office; they are relegated to roles as servants and supplicants. In the King's domain, they aren't even allowed to drive a bloody car!

The two old boys are said to have discussed many weighty matters: dialogue between religions and civilizations, confronting violence and terrorism, harmony between nations, and such like, agreeing naturally that the solutions to the world's problems lay through religion. They did not, apparently, discuss women's rights.

What a pair -- truly a match made in Heaven.

U.S. neither morally nor logically armed to negotiate with Iran

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice continues to insist the American administration is "fully committed to a diplomatic solution with Iran" and is prepared to negotiate the differences between the two countries. There are conditions of course. She doesn't want to sit down with them one-on-one, as they prefer, and Iran must first “fully and verifiably suspend its enrichment and reprocessing activities” and “persuasively demonstrate that it has permanently abandoned its quest for nuclear weapons.” She knows full well, of course, these conditions are unacceptable to the Iranians. So why the reluctance to talk it out?

Part of the reason may be the weakness of the American position. Consider first the demand that Iran abandon "its quest for nuclear weapons.” Iran insists it isn't engaged in any such quest. If it was, the objection would be that this was in violation of the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, to which Iran is a signatory, and the treaty says non-nuclear nations must not develop such weapons. But the United States is also a signatory and the treaty also says nuclear nations must rid themselves of their weapons. That the United States is not doing. It is rather awkward, therefore, for the Americans to demand Iran adhere to the treaty when they are violating it themselves.

Or consider the accusation the Iranians are providing arms to their Shia colleagues in Iraq. American actions have caused upwards of 600,000 deaths in Iraq, created over 4 million refugees, and broken and scattered that country's heritage, and they expect to be taken seriously when they complain about the Iranians sending some weapons across the border to assist their coreligionists? Iran cannot be expected to hold the same respect for American chutzpah that we do.

And then there's the American quibble with Iran assisting Hamas and Hezbollah. This, when the Americans provide the Israelis with billions of dollars in arms, helping them build the most formidable military in the Middle East. American bias in the Israeli/Palestinian quarrel is the major source of Arab and Muslim hostility toward the United States and a major source of Muslim extremism. How can the Americans look the Iranians in the eye and accuse them of being trouble-makers when their own behaviour sits at the root of Middle Eastern tension?

In summary, on the key issues the U.S. simply isn't in a moral or logical position to negotiate with Iran. It appears, therefore, to opt for sanctions, constant hectoring and calls to its allies to gang up on the perceived villain. Iran claims not to be interested in developing nuclear weapons, but it surely recognizes that if it wants to negotiate as an equal with the United States, there may be no other way.

Flaherty is right on corporate taxes

Much of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's tax package has been criticized, and rightly so, particularly the cut in the GST, but he is on the right track with corporate taxes. He intends to continue reducing them until they are "the lowest among the major industrialized economies."

Jack Layton refers to the cuts as "a $14.5 -billion gift to Corporate Canada." "Big banks and oil companies don't need more help right now," he adds. But Jack has it wrong. It's a gift to the Canadian economy and that will help all of us.

An important point to keep in mind about corporate taxes is that, like every other expense companies incur, they ultimately pass them along to us. We are not, therefore, shifting the revenue burden from us to them; we are simply increasing their costs and making them less efficient. And in the arena of global competition, we do not benefit from less efficient companies. The lower corporate taxes are, the more competitive Canadian companies are, and the better we do in the world economy.

The Scandinavian countries serve as a good example. They combine the world's most vibrant economies with the world's highest standards of social justice. In order to pay for the latter they maintain high tax regimes. Their overall tax rates are among the highest on the globe, yet their effective corporate tax rates are among the lowest. For example, Sweden's tax revenue, as a percentage of its GDP, is 51%, the highest in the world, yet its marginal effective tax rate on capital is a measly 12%, one of the lowest in the world. (The marginal effective tax rate measures the extent to which taxes affect investment decisions.) The figures for Norway and Denmark are 44/25 and 49/20 respectively. For Canada, they are 34% and 39%, representing a much lower overall tax regime but a much higher effective tax rate on capital.

If we lower the taxes on companies, then in order to maintain the same level of social services we must of course raise them elsewhere, as the Scandinavians have done. However, keep in mind that we pay them one way or the other in any case.

That's how I see it anyway, but hey, I'm no economist.

Britain's son of a bitch

The British have been making a lot of noise recently about a lack of human rights in Burma and Zimbabwe and have supported the U.S. sanctions against Iran. One might conclude they really don't like dictators. One might be wrong. The UK is currently entertaining Saudi King Abdullah Bin-Abd-al-Aziz Al Saud, and he is getting the red carpet treatment. He was greeted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, the Queen and an honour guard. Not bad for one of the world's more repressive despots, and almost certainly the most misogynistic.

During the Cold War, when the West supported various anti-communist dictators, the justifying phrase was "he might be a son of a bitch, but he's our son of a bitch," a phrase often attributed to Franklin Delano Roosevelt commenting on the Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Garcia.

The phrase obviously still applies. The Sauds may be autocratic sons of bitches, but they are useful sons of bitches to the Brits. They may brutally abuse human rights, they may have even have sponsored a little terrorism in their time, but they are reliable suppliers of oil and they buy large quantities of arms from the UK. Last year, British exports to Riyadh exceeded £3.5-billion; about 20,000 Britons work in Saudi Arabia; and the Sauds have just put in a massive order for Typhoon fighter jets. For that, you get the PM, the Queen and an honour guard. All sins are forgiven.

Hell, if the Sauds wanted nuclear weapons, the Brits would probably sell them a baker's dozen.

Ed Stelmach -- no Peter Lougheed, but then no Ralph Klein either

Once upon a time. long, long ago, Alberta had a premier who insisted that Albertans get a fair share of their oil and gas revenues. His name was Peter Lougheed, and he stood up to both the oil industry and the federal government, at times earning the hostility of both, to defend our interests. Then things changed. First came Don Getty, who was incompetent, then Ralph Klein, who was lazy, and "fair share" declined to the point where Klein indicated he didn't care if we reviewed royalties or not.

So what do we have with Premier Ed Stelmach, a Lougheed or a Klein? Ed certainly cares -- he trotted out the Royalty Review Panel report front and centre -- but he also compromises. He will adopt about three-quarters of the report's recommended increases in royalties, leaving the government's increased take (our take) of about $1.4-billion a year half a billion short of that envisaged by the panel.

As expected, the increases were greeted with great lamentation by the oil industry, which expressed various degrees of outrage -- "shock," "really bad," "insult to the intelligence," and so on. Ho hum. With the price of oil over $90 per barrel, and the industry making its fattest profits on record, sympathy is in short supply. Even the markets weren't impressed by the whining, with some oil stocks actually gaining value this morning.

The big question, of course, is how Albertans will accept the compromise. Will they see Ed as bold or timid? Will they reward him or punish him? Only an election will tell for sure.

What's sauce for the goose ...

Sometimes the hypocrisy of the world's greatest power is a wonderful thing to observe. When the Americans felt threatened by Saddam Hussein's Iraq, they launched an all out war and reduced the country to a state of bloody chaos. As it turned out, there really was no threat but, hey, everybody makes mistakes. When Hezbollah guerrillas from across the Lebanese border attacked an Israeli army patrol killing eight soldiers and capturing two, the U.S. wholeheartedly supported Israel's blitzkrieg against Lebanon. But when Kurdish paramilitaries raid Turkey from across the Iraq border, killing dozens of Turkish civilians and soldiers and capturing eight men, American diplomats urge caution and insist the hostilities be resolved by negotiation.

So what are the rules here? When a Christian or a Jewish nation is threatened, full scale violent retaliation is justified, but when a Muslim nation is threatened, dialogue must rule the day? If the Americans practiced what they preached to Turkey, and preached the same sermon to Israel, what a wonderful message they would send. And how much better off the Middle East would be. But asking the Turks to take the high road while they and their dearest friend take the low road sends a message that invites contempt.

You must be kidding, Tony

For a very bright guy, Tony Blair does and says some very dumb things. In a major speech in New York, he had the following to say about Muslim extremists, "There is a tendency even now, even in some of our own circles, to believe that they are as they are because we have provoked them and if we left them alone they would leave us alone. I fear this is mistaken." Really, Tony? Let us assemble the evidence:

• The West supported the imposition of Israel on the Arab world, thereby solving a European problem in true colonial style by dumping it on the Third World. Israel, on its part, has ethnically cleansed Arabs by the hundreds of thousands and oppressed the remainder while busily stealing their land. The West, particularly the United States, persists in supporting Israel despite its rogue behaviour.
  
• In the 1950s, Britain and the United States destroyed the first Muslim democracy in the Middle East in Iran. Recently, Western nations, including to our shame Canada, conspired to crush the latest Middle Eastern Muslim democracy in Palestine.
• Not content with wrecking democracy, the West staunchly supports Middle Eastern dictators, including the dreadful Sauds of Arabia, a favourite of both Britain and the U.S. This support includes massive arms sales and military training.
• And, as if waging war in two Muslim countries wasn't enough, Western militarists like Blair and Bush, with Iran in their sights, seem to be gearing up for an attack on a third.
  

In the face of all this, Tony would have us believe the West hasn't provoked and doesn't continue to provoke Islam to extremism?

I suggest the evidence is irrefutable: the West is overwhelmingly responsible for Muslim extremism. I'm not a Muslim, I'm not even religious, in fact I'm an atheist, but even I get angry listening to Blair pontificate about the West's innocence. No wonder young Muslims in Britain go off the deep end.

During Blair's speech, attended by powerful men such as New York mayor Michael Bloomberg and media baron Rupert Murdoch, he received three standing ovations. Blair's blinkered view of the West's contribution to Third World rage clearly holds sway in very influential circles. This does not bode well for peace in the Middle East or justice for the Palestinians or, for that matter, dealing with violent hostility toward the West.

The devil made me do it

Well, that's Monsignor Tommaso Stenico's story anyway. The Vatican official was caught on video tape in his office propositioning a young man with an offer for sado-masochistic sex. The young man, who had encountered the priest on an Internet chat room, had surreptitiously brought recording equipment to his appointment to expose the hypocrisy of the Church.

The Monsignor insists he isn't gay. He explains he was just posing as a homosexual to research a plot by satanists. It sounds like Satan is winning.

Following a report on TV, a spokesman for the Pope admitted the Vatican had suspended Stenico. Presumably, he will now be free to continue his research.

The folly of growth

Leafing through the pages of your local newspaper you can come to no other conclusion than that growth is good. The more the GDP is predicted to increase in the coming year, the louder the cheers. If it is predicted to be only a couple of per cent, brows furrow. Corporate CEOs burst with pride if their sales figures are dramatically up. Politicians also get into the act -- growing populations are a source of pride, shrinking populations a source of shame. Such is it faithfully recorded in our daily press.

But then, occasionally, a nugget of wisdom appears. In the Globe and Mail this week a tiny article, discreetly tucked away on page A11, provided a sensible insight into the folly of growth. The article, referring to the views of a leading Australian climate change expert, stated, "Worldwide economic growth has accelerated the level of greenhouse gas emissions to a dangerous threshold scientists had not expected for another decade." Internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer and conservationist Tim Flannery based his conclusions on reports from UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change working groups. He declared, "We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change ... It's not next year or next decade. It's now."

So what is this madness? While scientists tell us economic growth is fouling our planet, we go insanely on producing ever more stuff, consuming ever more stuff, and loudly proclaiming what a good thing it all is. Are we not exhausting the Earth's resources fast enough? Are we not polluting the planet quickly enough? Growth for the sake of growth it seems -- the philosophy of the cancer cell.

And, our scientists are telling us, we are a cancer on the Earth. Growing without direction or constraint we are strangling the life out of the celestial body that sustains us. If a cosmic physician were consulted, he might insist that Homo sapiens is the name of a disease -- for life on a planet, a possibly terminal disease.

Burma and unrealistic expectations

Any number of observers have mused about the duty of China and India to pressure Burma's military dictators into recognizing the human rights of the Burmese people. They have been scolded for not doing so, even accused of enabling the generals by maintaining cozy relationships with them.

How wonderful if they would use their considerable muscle to bend their wayward neighbour into moral shape. But how unrealistic to expect it. Great powers just don't behave that way. China and India have developed mutually beneficial relationships with Burma under the military and great powers nurture regimes that are of use to them, they don't undermine them. We in the Western hemisphere should understand that. We need only consider the behaviour of our local great power, the United States, toward oppressive regimes they find useful.

What did the Americans do when the Argentinean generals murdered tens of thousands of their citizens in the 1970s and 80s? What did they do when the Chilean military tortured and murdered thousands of its people? And what did they do when the Guatemalan military slaughtered thousands of students, workers, professionals and peasants during its 35-year reign of terror? For the most part, the answer is they enabled. They provided these militaries with arms, they trained many of the officers who carried out the atrocities, and in the case of Chile, even helped install the dictatorship. They saw these regimes as useful and acted accordingly.

Of no small importance in the Burma equation are its oil and gas reserves. China and India are not about to let human rights get in the way of obtaining energy resources any more than the United States does. The Americans supported Saddam Hussein as long as he was a reliable oil supplier and only turned on him when he no longer was. They currently support the Gulf dictators, including the execrable Sauds of Arabia, the most misogynistic regime on Earth, and recently agreed to sell them $20-billion worth of arms. As long as the oil keeps flowing west, they will no doubt get all the arms they can afford.

To expect China and India to allow the brutalizing of Burmese citizens to interfere with easy access to energy is to expect them to behave at a much higher standard than the United States. Not that that wouldn't be easy, it's just unrealistic.

Proportional representation ... it's a start

Fair Vote Canada's slogan is "make every vote count." Considering that democracy means political equality, ensuring that every citizen's vote counts the same as every other's is indeed essential to democracy. That is obviously not the case under our current first-past-the-post voting system. And that of course is why we must adopt proportionality. But is that enough?

If our goal is to have fair representation in our legislatures, it is, but if our goal is to have fair representation in our governance, it isn't. Governing would remain the prerogative of the ruling party or parties. Legislators in the opposition benches would still be shut out of the process. Our votes under proportional representation would be equal, but our participation in our governance would not. And it seems to me that is the real objective. If it is, then proportional representation is the first step, an essential step to be sure, but we have to go further. We must ensure every elected member of the legislature is involved in governing.

We might start by freeing our legislators to represent their consciences and their constituents. This would mean breaking the back of the caucus system. Caucus solidarity demands that once an issue is thrashed out in party caucus, all members of the party must vote as a bloc. Elected members owe a loyalty to their parties, simply because most people vote for the party not for the candidate, but this doesn’t justify turning them into legislative ciphers.

We might also abandon the tradition, and it is just tradition, of a government falling if defeated by a vote on a bill involving money or a matter of policy. If such a bill is defeated, the tradition insists that cabinet, chosen from the legislature, has lost the confidence of the legislature, and therefore of the people, and must resign, in accordance with the principle of responsible government. If the rule didn’t apply, members could vote freely and legislatures could provide a place of meaningful debate. Indeed, if the government were forced to come back with a revised bill, it might very well be better legislation and more in agreement with the public’s wishes.

If we are really serious about turning our legislative nobodies into somebodies we could make them, not cabinet, the source of policy and law. We could do this by instituting strong committees.

Our legislatures use committees now. The House of Commons has standing committees on everything from human resources to finance to national defence; legislative committees appointed to review bills; and special committees set up to investigate particular issues. They do a great deal of important work, however, they are ultimately subject to the whims of the executive, which is inclined to ignore any committee recommendations it frowns upon. They review bills, but they can only propose amendments, not make them, and even then only amendments that do not alter the substance of the bill. They review appointments, but they cannot veto them.

The best way to give teeth to committees would be to transfer law-making power to them. Standing committees could be responsible for initiating legislation in their areas, special committees for issues that arose outside of the regular jurisdictions. Committees could bring other appropriate government business under the rule of the legislature as well. For example, rather than having appointments made by the party in power and only reviewed by committee as is now the case, appointment committees could ensure that a host of public positions, from parole boards to governors of universities to Supreme Court judges, are filled on the basis of ability rather than patronage.

We could go even further. Committees could choose their own chairpersons, the choices to be approved by the entire legislature, and the chairpersons could then form the cabinet. Currently, the prime minister, or premier, who is chosen not by all the people but by his party, selects the cabinet, which in effect becomes the government. If cabinet ministers are to be responsible to the legislature, to the representatives of the people, they must be chosen by the legislators. The legislators could even, as they do in Germany, choose the prime minister. This prime minister would generally turn out to be the head of the main governing party, but the point is he or she would be approved by the representatives of all the people.

Legislative committees as law-making bodies would allow all parties in the legislature to participate in government and therefore allow all citizens to be represented in governing. And this, I believe, is our ultimate and proper goal.

Bringing more views into the process would result in better legislation, reduce friction, facilitate the acceptance of legislation, and create a climate more amenable to new ideas. By bringing all the political parties together, the process of creating our laws, and therefore governing ourselves, would become a much more co-operative, less adversarial, process.

These are only suggestions. The point is if we want to ensure every citizen participates equally in his or her governance, we must go beyond proportional representation. It is an essential start, but only a start.

Architecture, ego and the ROM

A recent article in the Globe and Mail about the woes of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal addition to the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto rather nicely illustrates modern architectures' sacrifice of charm, personal scale and functionality to architectural ego.

The Crystal is a brutal assault on the dignity of a heritage site. It is rather like slashing the face of a handsome old friend, an almost criminal act ... at the least, an act of vandalism.

It illustrates an underlying problem of modern architecture. Architects like to think of themselves as artists, but this isn't their role. An artist answers only to his muse, that is to say, his ego. If an audience appreciates what he does, that's icing on the cake, but he is obliged only to please himself. The architect, by contrast, must serve first the public. His principal responsibility is to the people who will have to work in his building, or live in it, or appreciate exhibits in it, or just look at the damn thing when they walk down the street. The responsible architect must submit his ego to the needs of the public, and of course to the demands of function. Unfortunately, too many modern architects ignore all this and dedicate themselves to building monuments to themselves.

The question is why we put up with this. Perhaps it's because the decision-makers, such as the ROM's selection committee, simply want to be chic, hip, with it, cutting edge ... whatever. Or perhaps it's simply a matter of scale. One of the villains of modern architecture, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, coined the phrase "less is more" to define his minimalist approach. Less may be more on the artistic scale. Drawn at 30 inches, a building of simple glass and concrete slabs, shorn of decoration, may appear quite sleek, quite arty, but built at 30 stories it will lack human scale, it will be cold and intimidating. Similarly, a crystal penetrating a cubic form may have a certain elegance as a drawing. As a full scale structure it is brutal and crude. A passer-by, confronting such a monstrosity, might believe he has happened upon a flying saucer that just crash-landed.

Whatever the administrators of the ROM were thinking of, it wasn't maintenance. The window-cleaning costs alone are expected to increase by up to $200,000 a year. What folly for an institution that depends on charity. Two hundred thousand dollars that could have been spent on collections will now be spent on scrubbing glass. The additional daylight allowed by the Crystal addition risks bleaching exhibits, so the museum has had to purchase special blinds to filter out UV rays. And then of course there's the problem with the Crystal leaking.

Nor were they thinking about their customers. With all the weird walls and corners, safety has turned out to be a major challenge. Al Shaikoli, director of capital development and facilities, admits "We didn't predict human behaviour."

Nor were they thinking about the exhibits. With no vertical walls for displaying artifacts, one artist was reduced to designing a temporary wall for his exhibition -- it cost $200,000. Director of gallery development Dan Rahimi candidly admits the architect, Daniel Libeskind, "didn't design this building based on the collections. We had to design the collections to go with the building." As one letter writer to the Globe observed, that's rather like buying a painting because it fits over the sofa.

So there you have it. Forget about the function of the building, its very purpose, and forget about the people who are to use it. It's all about the architect. Instead of form following function, function follows form ... and ego.

Calgary's rogue cops

This summer, Calgary City Council voted against allowing "support our troops" stickers on municipally-owned vehicles. The City's police commission recently reinforced that decision by voting to forbid the stickers on police cruisers. Police Chief Jack Beaton sensibly pointed out it wouldn't be right for the force to display military support decals while denying other charitable organizations the same opportunity.

The president of the police union, Al Koenig, announced that officers will defy the policy. The cops don't seem to see themselves bound by democratic process, rules that apply to other civil servants, or the wishes of their chief. They will display the decals and to hell with City Council , the Police Commission and their boss. Koenig estimates 80 per cent of Calgary police cars display the stickers on any given day, and boasts officers have backup decals to replace any that are removed.

It's very comforting to know that 80 per cent of the cops on our streets make up their own rules. But then what are you going to do, arrest them?

Imperialism is alive and well

When the Western powers shed their colonies after WWII, the world breathed a sigh of relief. The reign of imperialism seemed at an end. Half a millennia of Europeans swaggering about the globe, enslaving, murdering, conquering and stealing, in general getting in the face of everyone else on the planet, was over.

Not so. With U.S. military bases ringing the Earth, and the Brits and Americans waging a couple of wars in Islam, clearly not all Western nations have given up on running the world just yet. Now the French want to get in on the act. Maybe they're feeling left out.

French president Nicolas Sarkozy called the West's stand-off with Iran regarding its nuclear ambitions, "the greatest crisis" of recent times (not global warming, mind you), and French foreign minister Bernard Kouchner added, "We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war." The French are sounding like Bush and Cheney, and we all know how badly they want to bash Iran.

Let us hope cooler heads prevail over this imperial madness. The United Nation's chief nuclear weapons inspector, Mohamed ElBaradei, issued a timely reminder, saying, "I would hope that everybody would have gotten the lesson after the Iraq situation, where 700,000 innocent civilians have lost their lives on the suspicion that a country has nuclear weapons." Indeed.

The irony of course is that while the U.S., Britain and France complain about Iran's nuclear efforts, they violate the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty every day by not ridding themselves of nuclear weapons. They seem to feel they have the right to retain imperial power and the attendant responsibility to keep the wogs in their place.

Gaza ... the West's Darfur

While the West righteously condemns the Sudanese government for the horrific chaos in Darfur, it remains mute on Israel's destruction of a society of 1.4 million people in Gaza.

An article in Tuesday's Globe and Mail outlined how effectively Israel is crushing Gaza. In an economy where 90 per cent of households survive on less than $2.50 a day, and unemployment approaches 40 per cent, over 3,000 small factories have closed because of Israel's blockade. According to a spokesman for the World Bank, "The pillars of Gaza's economy have weakened over the years. Now, with a sustained closure on this current scale, they would be at risk of virtually irreversible collapse." Isham Al-Iwaini, chairman of of the Palestinian Wood Industries Union, and owner of a furniture factory who has seen the number of his employees drop from 45 to two, says, "If Gaza loses the private sector Gaza loses everything," and he adds, "It will be Taliban."

And this because the Palestinians had the audacity to elect a government the West disapproved of. Israel does most of the dirty work in undermining Palestinian democracy, but other Western countries, including to our shame our own, are deeply complicit.

Israel justifies its assault on Gaza by referring to the threat posed by a few militants who fire rockets across the border. But is Sudan not under threat from violent secessionists in Darfur? It is indeed -- by determined fighters who do more than fire rockets, who have killed hundreds of Sudanese troops and have fought the army to a standstill.

Of course, the social disintegration resulting from the economic blockade of Gaza does not match the widespread rape, murder and dislocation inflicted on Darfur. Nonetheless, neither the threat to Israel nor the threat to Sudan justifies the collective punishment of millions of innocent people and the destruction of their society.

And we might keep an eye to the future. As entrepreneur Isham Al-Iwaini implies, our casual dismissal of Palestinian suffering may well result in the devoutly religious Hamas being replaced by a fanatically religious Taliban. We in the West seem to never tire of creating extremists in the Middle East.

Greece on fire .... deja vu all over again

When will we ever learn?

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Plato, noticing the degradation of the land as the Greeks cut down their forests for timber and farmland, observed:

[In earlier days] Attica yielded far more abundant produce. In comparison of what then was, there are remaining only the bones of the wasted body; all the richer and softer parts of the soil having fallen away, .... But in the primitive state of the country, the mountains were high hills covered with soil, and plains were full of rich earth, and there was abundance of wood in the mountains. Of this last traces still remain, for although some of the mountains now only afford sustenance to bees, not so very long ago there were still to be seen roofs of timber cut from trees growing there, which were of such a size sufficient to cover the largest houses; and there were many other high trees, cultivated by man and bearing abundance of food for cattle. Moreover, the land reaped the benefit of the annual rainfall, not as now losing the water which flows off the bare earth into the sea ....

Now history repeats itself. Many of the fires raging in Greece today have been set by arsonists clearing the land for development.
According to Nikos Georgiadis, head forest officer for the Greek office of the World Wildlife Fund, "Most of the reasons concern changing of land use – from forest to something else [such as] construction, or building, or to grazing, or agriculture." Georgiadis adds, "But the response from the government has not been effective at all."

Georgiadis's comment reflects Greece's environmental record, one of the worst in the European Union, particularly on forest protection. Environmental groups claim development is largely unregulated and protected areas are neglected. The Greek government seems ignorant of the country's ancient history when despoliation of the environment was a major reason their civilization collapsed.

Fortunately, like Plato before them, ordinary Greek people today are becoming increasingly aware of the problem and increasingly unhappy with their government's lack of action. "Since the response that we got after the big forest fire on Parnitha mountain, there is a big change," says Dr. Georgiadis, "More and more people became sensitive on environmental matters."

The ancient Greeks taught us so much, yet we failed to learn from their folly of allowing development to overwhelm the environment. Modern Greeks seem, through trial by fire, to be catching on. The lesson is there for all of us.

Good news for Afghanistan's economy

Read that headline carefully. Note that I said Afghanistan's economy, not Afghanistan.

The good news is -- what else? -- the booming poppy crop. Consider the stats:

- The crop has increased for six straight years.
- Afghanistan now produces 95 per cent of the world's opium, up from 92 per cent in 2006.
- Opium and the heroin made from it are worth $3 billion US to the Afghan economy, a third of its gross domestic product.

Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent to defeat poppy growing and have utterly failed. The United States is giving $200 million US this year to Helmand, the major opium-producing province, as part of a strategy of financial incentives to suppress drug production while increasing co-ordination between counter-narcotics forces and the military. Christina Oguz, the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Afghanistan, says: "They use it for growing opium. This is telling the rest of the country 'grow opium and we'll give you a lot of rewards'." This failure is hardly surprising. Imagine how much success we would have with a program whose goal was to decimate a third of our GDP.

In Afghanistan the poppy rules. Those who control the poppy control the economy, and those who control the economy control the country.

Publicly fund Muslim schools? Why not Fascist schools?

The Ontario Conservatives' promise to publicly fund faith-based schools if they are elected on October 10th has rekindled an old debate. If Catholic schools are publicly funded in Ontario, as they are, why not the schools of other denominations? Or should no religious schools at all be publicly funded, not even Catholic?

One rather obvious question that never arises during this debate is, why limit the debate to faith-based schools? Why not public funding for schools based on political ideologies, say Communist schools? Or Fascist schools? Or, for that matter, why limit the debate to ideology. Why not ethnically-based schools? Why not English schools, Chinese schools or Arab schools?

Religious folk insist that religion is of special importance because it's part of them. It's part of who they are. But actually it isn't, at least not physically. There is no Christian gene, or Muslim gene, or Hindu gene. Religion is always imposed on the individual. People are indoctrinated in it.

Our political beliefs, on the other hand, are influenced very much by our genes. People who are genetically conservative will generally adopt a conservative political philosophy, and people who are genetically progressive or liberal, will adopt a socialist or liberal political philosophy. In other words, our political beliefs are truly a part of who we are. They are built into our genes. They would seem, therefore, to justify segregating children more than religious beliefs. This is also true, of course, of ethnicity.

So let us not discriminate. Politically-based schools and ethnically-based schools deserve the same consideration as faith-based schools. On with the debate.

Fighting wars we can win

The news on the war front isn't good these days: Iraq, Afghanistan, the war on terror, they all drag on and on, cost billions and billions of dollars, and seem to go nowhere.

Finally, some good news: a war to be won and to be won cheaply. It isn't a real war -- I just thought I'd borrow from the rhetoric of the day. I refer to the campaign against malaria, one of humankind's greatest enemies, a scourge that kills over a million people every year, mostly children and pregnant women. Kenya has recently announced a great victory in this campaign.

Kenya's Ministry of Health, supported by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Britain's Department for International Development, has distributed thirteen million insecticide-treated nets across the country since 2003. As a result, the number of children sleeping under a net has increased from 5 per cent to 52 per cent, and child deaths from malaria in high-risk areas have nearly halved. Peter Olumese, a medical officer with WHO's Global Malaria Programme, claimed, "Seven lives were saved for every 1,000 nets given out." The WHO recommends that the nets, which cost only $5, be used by all community members. The project is being hailed as a model for other African countries.

Extending the program across Africa would not only save millions of lives, it would go a long way toward invigorating the continent. I can't help comparing this remarkably effective "war" to Canada's war in Afghanistan where we will have spent $4.3 billion (plus another $600 million in aid) when our mission ends in 2009 for results that, so far at least, are at best questionable. One almost weeps to think how much more effectively this money could be spent, how many more lives could be saved, how many more improved -- indeed, how much better we could serve the world.

Do African leaders give a damn about their people?

Africans have good reason to distrust and dislike the West. Europeans enslaved millions of them, murdered millions and stole and exploited their continent. The memories of such atrocities cannot fade easily. However, that was then. For African leaders to allow that experience, as horrific as it was, to interfere with what is best for their people today, is simply irresponsible. And yet that's exactly what they are doing in the case of Zimbabwe and its president, Robert Mugabe.

Mugabe is a psychopathic thug who has reduced his nation to utter impoverishment. And yet, at the Southern African Development Community summit meeting this week, he received what the Guardian referred to as a "rapturous welcome" from his fellow leaders. And South African President Thabo Mbeki supports Mugabe's claim that his country's woes are due principally to UK-orchestrated sanctions.

Mugabe's claim is of course nonsense. It wasn't the UK that expropriated white-owned farms, major contributors to the Zimbabwean economy, and handed them over to his party's favourites. It wasn't the UK that drove 700,000 city-dwellers out of their homes. It isn't the UK who tortures and murders political opponents. This is all Mugabe's work, and it's vintage Mugabe.

After helping liberate his country from colonial rule, Mugabe showed his true colours. He consolidated his power by using a North-Korean trained military unit to inflict massacres on the Ndebele people, the main source of his opposition. Twenty thousand died, mostly innocent civilians.

Nonetheless, the new country showed great promise, becoming perhaps the most stable and economically successful country on the continent. But eventually people began to tire of Mugabe, serious opposition grew, and once again the real Mugabe emerged. His scapegoating of the whites and the brutal suppression of his opponents has created an economic chaos and political wasteland that would have embarrassed his colonial predecessors.

Zimbabweans face hunger, even starvation, as the shops empty of food, and inflation hits 20,000 per cent making money worthless. Thousands of business people have been arrested for failing to obey Mugabe's arbitrary economic measures. A third of workers are unemployed. Millions of Zimbabweans, a quarter of the population, have fled the country. As African leaders applaud Mugabe, Zimbabweans face the bitter reality that they were better off under the colonials. They hardly had less freedom and at least they had enough to eat.

African leaders may continue to treat the West with suspicion and scorn. History gives them the right. It doesn't give them the right to justify the rule of tyrants.

Afghanistan makes nice with its neighbours

The neighbours have been dropping in on Afghanistan lately.

On Tuesday, Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, led a high-ranking delegation to Kabul, demonstrating the growing rapport between the two countries. In this, his first visit to Afghanistan, Ahmadinejad referred to their two countries as "brother nations with common interests, cultures and histories," adding, "The present condition of the region demands more exchange and negotiations between Tehran and Kabul. In this trip economic co-operation, especially over Iran's participation in Afghan development plans, will be discussed." Iran is contributing to a number of aid projects in Afghanistan as well as co-operating in combating drug trafficking.

Earlier in the week, Pakistan's embattled president, Pervez Musharraf, flew into Kabul for the closing ceremony of a cross-border jirga, or peace conference, that discussed the Taliban insurgency. He brought an attitude that was positively Woodstock. "This will usher in a new era of love and understanding," cooed his interior minister, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, as the two leaders also spoke of "brother nations." Excessively optimistic no doubt, considering the Taliban are still knocking at the door, but a welcome change nonetheless considering the bickering Karzai and Musharraf have been known for in the past.

These blossoming relationships will hopefully be strongly encouraged and supported by the West. They will do far more for peace and stability in the region than we can with our swaggering around, attempting to impose democracy out of the barrel of a gun.

Infant mortality: America's shame

While the abortion issue remains hot in the U.S. (and lukewarm in this country), the fate of babies once they are born seems to be of much less interest. This is surprising. Surprising, because the chances of survival for newborns in the U.S. are among the worst in the developed world. An American newborn is more than twice as likely to die in its first year as a child born in Sweden.

The U.S. infant mortality rate of 6.4 deaths per 1,000 live births compares to Sweden's 2.8 (the world's lowest). Other Scandinavian countries closely follow Sweden's example with Finland at 3.5 and Norway at 3.6. France and Germany follow at 4.2 and 4.1 and we Canadians tag along at 4.6. Our rate is nothing to brag about, but America's, considering that country's great wealth, is downright shameful.

As always in the U.S., race plays a role. For African-Americans, the mortality rate is nearly double that of the United States as a whole. We might expect the lack of medical insurance for millions of Americans to also play a part.

If American pro-lifers demonstrated as much concern about babies surviving as they do about fetuses, they might be more convincing that it is life they care about, not dogma.