First the bumper sticker, now the book

There's a new book coming out in September called Wait! Don't Move to Canada: A Stay-and-Fight Strategy to Win Back America.

Damn, I think they're on to our little scheme.

Alberta's one-party state: why you should care, and why there might be hope

We've all heard it before: Alberta is a one-party state in which conservative voices are king. To be fair, this is in large part the fault of our first-past-the-post voting system, since Ralph Klein and his caucus didn't actually win the support of 50% of Alberta voters in the last election. But it's certainly true that when your party's got a full 73% of the seats in the legislature, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Including changing the start date of the legislative session so that you can go fishing. Including...well, I've written that post already.

Now, I can see some of you out there shaking your heads and thanking your lucky stars you don't live in a place like that. But the thing is, Alberta's one-party state affects you too--and that's true whether you're sitting in front of a computer in Toronto, in Boston, or even in Europe. See, Alberta has the second-largest oil reserves in the world. Since most of that oil is in the form of tar sands, removing it from the ground wreaks havoc on the environment. The immediate impact of this is most obvious in the form of damage to the landscape, but far more damaging to the planet as a whole is the sheer amount of greenhouse gases that get pumped into the air for every barrel of oil produced. You know those Kyoto targets Canada failed to meet? Alberta's doing. These effects can be felt not only in Alberta, but across Canada and across the planet--and yet nothing's being done about it because that same Alberta government that can do whatever it wants has rejected decades of scientific inquiry into the climate crisis outright. And of course, the one-party state makes sure the opposition is too weak to stop it from happening.

Depressed yet? Welcome to the Albertaverse. But one other thing we're constantly hearing about Alberta lately is the sheer number of people flocking to this province to look for work, and I have to admit, that has my attention. When we're talking about the population growing by 25,000 people in every single quarter, aren't some of those folks going to be bringing their political culture along with them? Surely not every single one of those new residents is a die-hard conservative who fits right in with Ralph and his buddies, right?

Since I have easy access to the second-largest library in Canada, I decided to do a little sleuthing to see whether the existing political science scholarship would support this theory. And to my utter astonishment, there seems to be nothing at all published on this topic. [Political science students desperately trying to come up with a topic for your MA thesis, take note! You can thank me in your acknowledgements. :-)] But evidence from the UK (McMahon, Doreen et al., 1992, "The electoral consequences of north-south migration," British Journal of Political Science 22, 4: 419-443), Australia (Charnock, David, 1994, "Internal migration and elector turnover in Australia," Australian Journal of Political Science 29: 292-301) and the U.S. (Gimpel, James et al., 2001, "Interstate migration and electoral politics," The Journal of Politics 63, 1: 207-231) certainly seems to suggest that internal migration can lead to a change in voting patterns. The changes aren't always in the direction that we on the political left would tend to like to see them go in--many political scientists credit internal migration for the realignment of the U.S.'s south toward the Republicans, for example--but they're there.

Now, there are those who will argue that Alberta's been importing people from across Canada for decades, and that's never had much of an impact on voting patterns. The Gimpel article even suggests that because the people who move are the ones who can afford to do so, internal migrants are more likely to support the parties that look after the interests of the wealthy. But Alberta's current boom is like nothing we've ever seen, which makes comparison more problematic. Up until now, most of those "new Albertans" have been coming here to work in the oil fields, which means that they've been mostly young, working-class, and very very busy--classic nonvoters. These days, though, this province is importing not just oilfield workers, but everyone. There are labour shortages in every sector, especially in Calgary and Edmonton, and the resulting astronomically high wages are attracting people who previously would have never considered moving to Alberta. I've already met one Cape Bretoner who, when faced with the prospect of having to relocate to Alberta for work, purposely chose Edmonton because of its relative political diversity (and Edmonton-Strathcona because of its propensity for voting NDP)--and where there's one, there are probably more like him. I'm only an armchair political scientist, but as an informed amateur, I think it could be a perfect storm that just might shake up Alberta's sure thing.

Whether it will happen quickly enough and decisively enough to reverse the damage being done to the planet is another story, of course. But at the very least, if I'm right, it's going to be awfully interesting to watch.

Who's Canadian enough, take two

Okay, once more, with feeling.

What do you call someone who was born in Lebanon, came to Canada as a refugee in the 1970s, adopted Canadian citizenship and built up a successful small business, and then 20 years later decided to expand that business into the now much calmer Lebanon, living part-time in Canada and part-time in Lebanon?

What do you call someone who was born in Canada to Lebanese immigrant parents, married a Lebanese man and moved to Lebanon with him in order to invest in and rebuild that country? Even if she "considers herself Lebanese" as well as Canadian?

What do you call someone born in Canada, who decided to go to university in Lebanon so as to pursue a degree in Middle Eastern Studies with some hands-on experience? Even if he didn't work or pay taxes last year in Canada, or vote in the 2006 election?

If your answer to any of those questions is anything but "a Canadian," you'd better be able to explain why. And you'd better be willing to accept the consequences of that line of reasoning, and support changing our current policies to correspond with it. Because at the moment, we have only one class of Canadian citizenship and one set of rights and responsibilities that go along with that citizenship. At the moment, if you're a Canadian, you don't have to choose between being that and being something else. At the moment, dual citizenship has no influence whatsoever on the rights afforded you as a Canadian. And at the moment, Canadian citizenship grants you the right to live in Canada; it doesn't say that if you fail to take advantage of that right, you will suddenly become less Canadian than those who currently reside somewhere between Victoria and St. John's.

The "dividedness" of the Liberal Party

Much hay has been made of how divided the Liberal Party is these days--or to put it in a somewhat more neutral way, how prominent party members and leadership candidates have taken opposing sides on various issues. These issues have ranged from the Canadian military presence in Afghanistan to the Conservative Accountability Act. The conclusion seems to be that this is yet another piece of evidence that the Liberals are in complete disarray, because they can't even come up with a common position on important issues. And Stephen Harper is some sort of political genius for exposing this Achilles heel.

Exactly why is this a problem again?

I'm aware that this is one of those Ignorant American questions that I work so hard to avoid having to ask, but I've thought and read about this for more than a month now, and I'm quite honestly flummoxed. I mean, I know this isn't the U.S., where divided votes are an everyday occurrence. I realize that it's common to toe the party line on most issues in a parliamentary democracy, and I also realize that there are actually good reasons for this. But if you're not allowed to take differing positions on various issues during a leadership race, when are you allowed to do that? They'll eventually have to prove they can unite behind their new leader, whoever that ends up being, but at a time when leadership candidates are supposed to be distinguishing themselves from each other, whipping the party into some false unity would seem unnecessarily harsh and restrictive. And wait a minute, didn't the old Reformatories--of which our new prime minister was once a proud member--think free votes/divided votes were a positive thing?

I'm also finding myself scratching my head that none of the party's PR people doing damage control on this image problem have simply said: "issue x has two sides to it, and our party is large enough that we have members who stand on either side of the line. This is a good thing!" Even in the blogosphere, where you can generally find every opinion under the sun, only Far and Wide comes close to that position. There's got to be some piece of cultural context I'm missing, some bit of tradition or some slice of history. Anybody want to take a shot at explaining it to the Silly Immigrant?

Blogging in a war zone

I haven't said anything on this blog about what's going on in Lebanon. One of the advantages of writing an "occasional in-depth commentary" blog instead of a "daily news" one is that I get to keep my mouth shut and just listen to everyone else when I don't know enough to say anything informed.

But a local friend, a Lebanese-Canadian, has directed me to the Lebanese Bloggers, a blog that's co-written by several different Lebanese citizens. The posts are moving, but it's the comments that are the truly fascinating bit of blog culture. It's being read by people in both Israel and Lebanon, and both sides are commenting on current events in real time as the missiles fly.

I wish courage to the Southerners. Is the shelling targetting residential areas? Please keep us updated, the MSM can be painfully slow.

Bush's touching cultural faux pas

As an American teenager living in Germany for the first time back in the 1980s, one of the hardest things for me to come to terms with was the fact that Germans don't touch each other very much. Oh, sure, you touched your boyfriend or girlfriend, but mostly when you were alone. And apart from the handshakes that happened whenever you greeted an acquaintance, there was essentially no casual touch--no hello or goodbye hugs, no giving someone a cuff or a gentle poke in the arm to make a point, no laying a reassuring hand on the shoulder of an emotionally distraught friend. Among the worst faux pas I made as a fifteen-year-old exchange student was reaching out to touch the necklace of one of my teachers and telling her that I liked it. Touching a teacher--someone with stature--was one of the worst things I could have possibly done.

At first all this felt cold and distant, and I resented it. But eventually I had to realize that this was no fairer on my part than the Germans' charges of Americans' "superficiality" that resulted from similar kinds of misunderstandings. It was a different culture, and they simply had different ways of expressing universal human emotions. This is the sort of lesson any American in Germany has to learn: any business executive, any diplomat, and certainly any politician. Unfortunately, it seems to be a lesson President Bush has utterly failed to wrap his mind around, given the fact that he felt perfectly justified in coming up behind Chancellor Merkel and giving her a little massage during the G8 summit in St. Petersburg.

Taylor Marsh refers to the incident as "groping," and Germany's infamous Bild-Zeitung certainly did try to make it sound titillating. Given the Germans' tendency to reserve casual touch for intimates and the sub-tabloid's tendency to sensationalize, this is perhaps unsurprising. The headline reads "Bush: Love Attack on Merkel!" and the text of the article translates as follows:

This political love is proverbially gripping! The U.S. president George W. Bush at the G8 summit in St. Petersburg. From behind he creeps impishly toward Chancellor Angela Merkel and surprises her with a quickie massage. You can see how the chancellor reacted to Bush's "love attack" here: Chancellor Angela Merkel was talking to Italy's prime minister Romano Prodi when George W. Bush came into the hall ... Merkel was having a conversation with her neighbour, without realizing the Bush was coming at her from behind ... suddenly the U.S. president laid both hands on Merkel's shoulders ... began his Texan one-second-massage ... the appalled chancellor winces and jerks her hands up, not knowing who grabbed her from behind ... and after the joke, President Bush heads for his conference table with an innocent air. Merkel sees the surprising love attack with a sense of humour, and smiles.

That's the Bild-Zeitung, though, and an editorial called "Alone among men" that appeared in the Berlin-area regional newspaper Märkische Allgemeine came much closer to nailing what really happened:

Although it was her first appearance there and although she was the only woman in the mega-macho-club of the G8, Merkel didn't let on at all that Jacques Chirac, Tony Blair and the other alpha males might have even tried to take away what was rightfully hers. Only George W. Bush didn't quite get it. While his fellow leaders were sitting at the table at the opening meeting, he came and caressed Angie's shoulders. She reacted as if it had been a natural disaster.

Nothing like that would ever have happened to Vladimir Putin. As long as you don't approach him with questions of democracy and criticism of his neoimperialistic ambitions, he abides by a strict sense of etiquette.

Far from showing his great "love" for the chancellor, what this event really illustrates is Bush's appalling insensitivity to the fact that not everybody else's culture is just like his own. In Germany, this will be perceived not as a joke, but as a man showing a woman her place. Don't look so shocked, Mr. President--there are actually places in the world where you don't get to massage the shoulders of a woman (and a fellow world leader) whom you barely know. After six long years of hobnobbing with the international elite, I'd think you might have figured that out.

(Hat tip to Majikthise.)

Update 21 July: The Berlin-based daily newspaper Der Tagesspiegel now has a column on the incident, as well as on the reaction back on Bush's side of the Atlantic:

It took a few days for the first shock to recede, for the Internet to finally fulfill its function as a trading post for pictures and to present Bush's assault in endless variety. "Bush gropes Merkel" is the catchphrase, though it's important to pronounce it the American way: "Mörkel." But was it a form of momentary sexual harrassment? Or was the President just behaving like a typical Texan uncle at a family barbecue?

Update 27 July: Willkommen, Spiegel-Leser. Eigentlich hätte ich gedacht, der Inhalt meines Beitrags wäre schon klar, aber offensichtlich zählt man automatisch zu denen, die das als sexuelle Belästigung aufgefasst haben, wenn man auf der anderen Seite des grossen Teichs steht! Als Erklärung dann also: glaube ich, Merkel hat Buschs "Blitz-Massage" als sexuelle Belästigung gesehen? Nee. Glaube ich, Merkel hat das als (wahrscheinlich unbeabsichtigtes) Zeichen davon gesehen, dass Bush sie als ein etwas minderwertiges Mitglied der G8 sieht? Das schon. Damit stehe ich eher an der Seite der Märkischen Allgemeine als an der Seite der amerikanischen Blogger (oder--um Gottes Willen--an der Seite der Bild-Zeitung, die das ganze offensichtlich ein wenig "versexen" wollte).

Aber noch wichtiger: ich sehe Bushs grossen Fehler hier nicht als den Fehler eines Frauenfeindes, sondern als den Fehler einer falsch behandelten Kulturkollision. Nach langer Auslandsaufenthalt kenne ich die deutsche Kultur sehr gut, aber ich kenne auch die texanische, und es ist schon wahr, dass jemand in Bushs Alter sich dort viel eher solche beiläufigen Berührungen erlaubt als in Deutschland. Peinlich ist es, dass der Mann, der vor seiner Präsidentschaft kaum im Ausland gewesen war und erst recht keine Fremdsprachen beherrscht, auch so unbeholfen mit den Sitten und Gebräuchen anderer Länder umgeht. Und das zu sagen war Sinn und Zweck dieses Beitrags.

The silver lining

Calgary Grit points out an interesing little tidbit from this depressing Globe and Mail article about how the Tories are planning for a majority:

Conservative nomination rules have been posted and every riding will have a nomination meeting, Mr. Plett said. Former candidates, even those who are now sitting as MPs and cabinet ministers, will have to win the right to run for the Conservatives.

Interesting--sitting MPs facing nomination battles in safe ridings? The likes of Rob Anders and Cheryl Gallant having to work to save their hides? Break out the popcorn; this is going to be fun.

Women in Parliament: unvoiced assumptions

Stephane Dion's proposals on how to get more women into Parliament have provoked a lot of buzz about just that topic in the blogosphere lately. democraticSPACE, Calgary Grit, and Jason Cherniak each take Dion's proposals one step further (in very different directions), and Vues d'ici relates the discussion to the still-palpable sexism female politicians experience. However, it's notable that none of them lay out why electing more women is important, and this is true not only of these bloggers, but also of the NDP, the Canadian Women Voters' Congress, Equal Voice, and the Research Centre on Women and Politics. It's simply taken as a given that while we might disagree about the best methods of accomplishing the goal of electing more women to Parliament, sensible people already know that the goal itself is important.

The thing is, evidence seems to suggest otherwise. In the June 18th Bloggers' Hotstove podcast, Conservative blogger Greg Staples argued the precise opposite (toward the end of the podcast):

Let me be a Pollyanna here. There's only one reason that you elect someone--they're competent. It has nothing to do with their gender, the colour of their skin, how long they've been a party hack for, whatever. None of that makes an iota of difference. [...] The day we can get past all that is the day the world is a much better place. That kind of stuff, it frustrates me.

Did this assertion meet with an immediate lynching from Staples' Liberal, NDP, and generic progressive co-panelists? Nope. Sinister Thoughts' Greg Bester even essentially agreed, attributing the interest various parties show in women and minority groups to nothing more and nothing less than the way the game is played in this country. There's clearly more than one smart, well-meaning person out there who isn't sure it's actually important to elect more women, or who thinks it's probably important but isn't quite sure why. This makes the absence of explanations from the aforementioned bloggers and organizations all the more problematic. As long as there are people in the world who say things like "the only thing we need is the right person for the job," and mean it, we need to be able to counter those assertions not just with more assertions, but with explanations.

What several of the aforementioned bloggers and organizations do offer are statistics saying that women are one half of the population but a much smaller number of politicians. But two unvoiced assumptions stand between those statistics and the conclusion that we should try to elect more women. The first is that a successful representative democracy isn't just about choosing the best person in each individual constituency, but about making sure the resulting legislative body actually comes close to reflecting the makeup of the Canadian population. The second is that a group of white men aren't going to be able to make adequate laws for a diverse population of women and minorities because they won't be able to wrap their minds around everybody's issues. Conservatives and classical liberals will often counter these assumptions by saying that it's not about Parliament as a whole, it's about each individual politician. But people aren't just individuals; they're also members of groups, whether they realize it or not. We already recognize this when we talk about geographic representation and the rural/urban split, which is why those elements are built into our electoral system. And just as we don't want western or rural Canadians represented by a government made up mostly of Torontonians, we can similarly expect a certain kind of expertise to be lost when the 50% of Canadians who are women are represented by a group that's made up mostly of men.

Research in social psychology has shown us that we all have biases we don't even know we have, and that these biases affect the decisions we make, no matter how well-meaning we are. Malcolm Gladwell's Blink details the story of how the Munich Philharmonic systematically excluded women until they started doing screened auditions, and a 1994 article in Social Psychology Quarterly showed that men tended to be biased toward job applicants with male names when distinguishing between candidates with average but slightly different academic records. A look at history tells us that the effects of these tendencies are apparent in the political arena as well: it was all-white legislative bodies that enacted the U.S.'s Jim Crow laws, and all-male, all-upper-class legislative bodies that denied the right to vote to all adults regardless of race, gender, and socioeconomic class until appallingly recently. And these findings, combined with what we already know about the demographics of Parliament, should lead us to wonder about the way some of these issues might be playing out in today's political parties. Is it really the case that the repeated choice of "the best person for the job" just happens to end up producing a group filled with white male lawyers? Isn't it possible that something else might be going on?

It should be said that none of this points to some sinister plot on the part of white male lawyers, but to simple human nature. I'd even go so far as to say that it would be unfair to expect a relatively homogeneous group to have all the information they need to make the best policies for everyone. It's not impossible for white male lawyers to be aware of the issues of groups other than their own, of course: a white male lawyer married to a female immigrant from Haiti, and who spends a lot of time listening to his wife talk about the issues that immigrants, black Canadians, and women tend to have, is almost certainly going to know an awful lot about those things. But it's undeniable that we human beings tend not to know much about the issues of groups we don't have much contact with, and while this doesn't necessarily mean we'll just willfully neglect their issues, we may simply never be aware that they exist. It only stands to reason that Parliament would do a much better job making laws for all Canadians if a proportionate number of MPs were women, immigrants, people with disabilities, and people of different religious backgrounds, socioeconomic groups, and sexual orientations.

And it's in everybody's best interest not just to do what we can to help that to happen, but also to offer explanations to those who might not yet understand why it's important. Without scorn, and above all, without unvoiced assumptions.

Trauma is "easy"?

This post is a collaboration between Idealistic Pragmatist and Respectful of Otters.

Think of the most terrified you've ever been. Heart pounding, mouth dry, sweat beading on your forehead, muscles locked rigid, violent or frightening images flooding your mind, screaming so loudly on the inside that you're barely aware of your surroundings. Now imagine being dropped randomly into that state a few times a day, every day, triggered by some innocuous thing or nothing at all.

This is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), an anxiety disorder in which a person who has experienced or come into close contact with serious trauma later experiences crippling levels of anxiety, combined with vivid re-experiencing of the traumatic event and an intense desire to avoid anything that might bring the trauma to mind or trigger anxiety symptoms. PTSD is known to have a strong biological component; severe stress causes lasting alterations in brain neurochemistry. Trauma appears to damage specific receptors responsible for regulating catecholamines, which are hormones essential to the stress response. In people with PTSD, these stress hormones are elevated, leaving them constantly on the verge of a neurochemically-induced panic. "It's not fashionable," according to Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente, to be derisive of people going through that experience. But she courageously does her best all the same.

Wente's column (accessible through the google cheat) has been attracting favourable commentary even from bloggers who are ordinarily thoughtful and intelligent. In it, she suggests that PTSD in soldiers and veterans (and especially in the Canadian forces) is exaggerated and overdiagnosed, and insinuates that servicemembers diagnosed with PTSD are either whiners ("War is hell. But life can be pretty rough, too. You don't need battle trauma to cope badly with it.") or goldbrickers out for an easy life on disability benefits ("some people will abuse the system if it is financially attractive"). Her claims demonstrate little acquaintance with the scientific literature on PTSD; instead, they are heavily based on arguments by an American psychiatrist named Sally Satel, who is affiliated with and funded by the ultra-conservative American Enterprise Institute.

Satel's--and, by extension, Wente's--claims about PTSD are baseless. Let's look at them one at a time.

Claim 1: PTSD rates among recent servicemembers are too high.

It's hard to know exactly what Wente means by this. We doubt she means that it's a terrible thing that so many servicemembers are suffering, although if she did, we would certainly agree. At times, she seems to mean that soldiers didn't used to suffer from PTSD, back in the high-moral-fibre days of World War II. She treats an elevation in rates over time as prima facie evidence that current diagnoses are overinflated. In fact, although PTSD has always been with us--previously it was called battle fatigue or shellshock--military strategists argue that aspects of the military and social context of modern wars increase the likelihood of PTSD. The increase in PTSD diagnoses is also due to changes in diagnostic criteria. Prior to the Vietnam era, psychiatric diagnosis was vague and tended to be based on Freudian theories rather than observable symptoms. Modern diagnostic systems, based in empirical research, have led to wider agreement about who has specific psychiatric illnesses, including PTSD.

Claim 1a: Therapists encourage veterans to blame everything that goes wrong in their lives on combat stress.

Wente implies that veterans who have moral or behavioural problems, such as a violent temper or an inability to hold a job, are encouraged by therapists to attribute their problems to PTSD rather than trying to fix them--thus, also, inflating PTSD diagnosis rates. But PTSD simply cannot be diagnosed without the presence of the three core symptoms listed in the second paragraph: intense anxiety, vivid and intrusive memories of trauma, and avoidance symptoms. You don't get to just go to a doctor and say "My life problems are caused by PTSD, now fork over a cheque."

Claim 1b: Servicemembers and veterans are just faking PTSD to get disability benefits.

Wente cites no evidence for this, which is probably because there is none. The Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma demolishes this claim completely:

Matthew J. Friedman, M.D., is the executive director of the National Center for PTSD, a division of the Department of Veteran's Affairs. In an e-mail to the Dart Center, Friedman said that Satel's argument was based on a "misreading or inability to appreciate the meticulous process by which personal reports of combat exposure were verified by military records" in the 1990 National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study. Friedman noted that the vast majority of veterans surveyed had not applied for medical disability because of their PTSD.

The notion of veterans falsely claiming to have PTSD is also contradicted by statistics published by the U.S. Department of Veteran's Affairs. In 2002, 65,154 Vietnam veterans claimed 100 percent disability for "Psychiatric and Neurological Diseases" (about 2.1 percent of the 3.14 million soldiers who served in Vietnam). A total of 202,183 Vietnam veterans claimed a partial level mental-health disability (about 6.4 percent of all Vietnam veterans).

The National Vietnam Veterans Readjustment Study found that 31% of Vietnam vets met full diagnostic criteria for PTSD. Given the low percentages of vets actually receiving benefits for psychiatric disability, there can hardly be an epidemic of false claims. And if Wente is going to claim that things are different in Canada, it is incumbent on her to provide proof. She hasn't. She can't.

Claim 2: Therapists are brainwashing PTSD patients into believing that they'll be disabled for life.

The vast majority of cases of PTSD either resolve on their own or are responsive to treatment. According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders--the very manual used by the mental health establishment that Wente denigrates--half of all cases of PTSD resolve within a few months. Another 20% of cases resolve within the first year after the trauma. Even among chronic cases that last for years or decades, treatment is often effective in reducing the severity of symptoms and allowing people to return to normal social functioning even if symptoms of anxiety continue. (A good overview of treatment options can be found here.)

But early identification and intervention are critical. According to the U.S. Veterans Administration:

Extensive research indicates that early distress and symptoms of PTSD are not very good predictors of a long-term prognosis. Thus, while Hoge et al. (2004) reported that 18% of soldiers newly redeployed from Iraq have PTSD--a rate that is alarmingly high--it is likely that this rate will decrease over time. Studies suggest that in the face of severe military service demands, including combat, most men and women do remarkably well across the lifespan. [...]

For those soldiers who don't recover, the most troubling aspect of military-related PTSD is its chronic course. There is evidence that once veterans develop military-related PTSD their symptoms remain chronic across the lifespan and are resistant to treatments that have been shown to work with other forms of chronic PTSD. Thus, it is vitally important to provide early intervention to reduce the risk of chronic impairment in veterans.

Unfortunately, the prejudice and derisive attitudes of Wente and her American counterparts stand in the way of these servicemembers getting the early intervention they need.

Claim 3: PTSD is just like normal worries and stresses, and sufficiently "resilient" people get over their worries and stresses without help.

Conservatives never seem to get tired of belittling severe traumas by pointing out their superficial similarities to minor traumas. (Remember the "fraternity hazing" analogies about Abu Ghraib?) There is no excuse for this kind of unconscionable dishonesty. It's as if Wente were to dismiss and minimize the consequences of blindness based on the argument that sometimes everyone has to strain their eyes to see in dim light. Even if you're heartless enough to doubt the testimony of people with PTSD, the altered neurochemistry is undeniable.

None of this information is hard to find, even without the resources of one of Canada's largest newspapers. The entire first page of Google hits for "Satel PTSD" are either articles by Satel (Wente's only "scientific" source), or articles debunking her claims about overinflated PTSD diagnoses. Wente really had to work hard to avoid evidence that Satel is not credible. Either she's so incompetent that she can't manage a Google search, or she has an agenda. We vote for the latter.

Interestingly, this column isn't the first time Wente has written about PTSD in the Canadian military. Back in May of 2005, the Globe and Mail published a different column of hers that could have been the current column's more inflammatory cousin. The arguments were identical, although the tone was even more openly derisive: there are so many cases of PTSD these days that they must all be faking it, many of those cases sound absurd on paper (especially when the paper is the Globe and Mail and the columnist describing the cases is Margaret Wente), isn't it obvious that they're all just in it for the cold hard cash. Her closing line was even "But resilence is out of fashion. Besides, it won't get you a cheque." One underresearched, ideology-laden column might be a passing fancy, but two certainly smacks of an agenda, or even an obsession. We can't help but wonder what might drive Wente to write what amounts to the same column twice--could it be that she didn't manage to convince anyone a year ago, so she decided to tone down the rhetoric and recycle her original words once the casualties in Afghanistan had started mounting and the polls had started indicating a dip in support for the mission?

Although Wente is quick to declare that doubting the validity of PTSD is "unfashionable," in fact, with her commentary, she joins a whole framework of American conservatives with close ties to the Bush Administration who are currently engaged in an effort to discredit the entire concept of PTSD--particularly the notions that it is common and frequently disabling. Why do so many conservatives in both countries want to deny the reality of PTSD? On the American side, many are motivated by a reflexive disapproval of federal spending, and a corresponding desire to decrease spending on psychiatric treatment and disability benefits for servicemembers and veterans. Others fear that honesty about the prevalence of PTSD will hurt the war effort:

Dr. Susan Mather, a former top [U.S. Veterans Administration] official who retired in January as its chief public health officer [says that] "They already have a recruitment problem...the parents of these youth, if they think their children will come back from the military experience changed forever--which they undoubtedly will be; not only changed but disabled by the experience, mentally as well as physically--they are going to be a lot less anxious to have these kids join up. And there's a feeling that if this gets too much publicity and appears to be too widespread, it will hurt recruitment."

But neither of those pragmatic reasons explains the fervor of their attacks on PTSD-disabled vets, or the contempt that drips from Wente's words as she writes about young soldiers in trouble. It seems that there are deeper ideological factors at work. Generally speaking, any argument that individuals may be helpless to escape their life circumstances is threatening to the conservative ideology of personal responsibility. Social psychology research demonstrates that conservatives are more likely to hold the implicit worldview that bad things don't happen to good people, or, conversely, that the troubles people suffer are generally deserved. Finally, conservative discomfort with PTSD is also motivated by the perceived need for aggressive support of the war effort. It's as if they believe that negative effects of war must never be acknowledged, or the case for military action will collapse. In Canada, this is currently being expressed as denial that Canadians are even engaged in war in Afghanistan--the preferred conservative terminology is "peacemaking." (Hello, Orwell!) Clearly, that case collapses if large numbers of Canadian troops engaged in such a mild, inoffensive activity are found to be suffering from major psychiatric trauma as a result.

But the hysterical denial of war's negative effects is most common among conservatives who are far removed from the actual work of combat. Lieutenant Colonel Dave Grossman--a retired U.S. Army Ranger and a professor at West Point, the eminent U.S. Army military university--paints a very different picture:

It is essential to acknowledge that good ends have been and will continue to be accomplished through combat. Many democracies owe their very existence to successful combat. Few individuals will deny the need for combat against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in World War II. And around the world the price of civilization is paid every day by military units on peacekeeping operations and domestic police forces who are forced to engage in close combat. There have been and will continue to be times and places where combat is unavoidable, but when a society requires its police and armed forces to participate in combat it is essential to fully comprehend the magnitude of the inevitable psychological toll.

Exactly so. If you believe that war is sometimes necessary, then it is your special obligation to be aware of the human cost of what you are asking your soldiers to do, and to mitigate the damage--with early treatment, when possible, and a supportive safety net for those who don't respond to treatment--to the greatest possible extent. More and more, the military recognizes that. Why don't the conservative hawks?

An open letter to the Liberals

A few weeks ago, on the Bloggers' Hotstove podcast, an audibly frustrated Jason Cherniak said that NDP voters should realize that even if we didn't like either the Liberals or the Conservatives, the Conservatives were still worse. This rhetoric is nothing new, of course--the Liberals have been making that same argument ever since there's been an NDP, and sometimes it's even worked. Unfortunately for you, though, those days are over. Poll after poll has shown that your best-case scenario is that nothing has changed since the election, and several other scenarios have been far grimmer. Perhaps more importantly, there's been nothing at all in the numbers to indicate any significant movement to the Liberals from the NDP, despite all your efforts to paint us as the source of all your problems. Bill Graham and company have failed to get through to the million and a half voters your party lost to the NDP because you've failed to take one important fact into account: when those voters look at the last two parties' records on the things they care most about, they find that both look equally bad.

It's true that the Liberals were marginally better on the environment: greenhouse gas emissions may have skyrocketed on your watch, but hey, at least you managed to come up with a couple of halfway decent programs like EnerGuide, while the Tories have produced a big fat nothing. The Conservatives, on the other hand, have been marginally better on ethics and accountability: while the Liberal government ended up embroiled in a scandal in which millions of taxpayer dollars were stolen, the Tories' own scandal "only" meant taxpayers footing the bill for a single convention, and on the other side of the coin they at least came up with a few decent provisions for the new Accountability Act. Neither party has a good record on willingness to cooperate in a minority government situation: the Conservatives were willing to make some of the suggested NDP amendments to the Accountability Act, but unwilling to compromise at all on child care or the environment, and the Liberals allowed the NDP to play a role in your budget, but only after first trying to govern as if you'd had a majority and getting your backs shoved up against a wall. On childcare, the Conservatives produced nothing but a glorified baby bonus, while the Liberals spent a dozen years promising to come up with a plan that you didn't get around to trying to implement until the final hour. The Liberals couldn't manage to do anything on the softwood lumber file, while the Conservatives could only come up with a lousy deal. Neither party has done anything significant to protect public healthcare, promote democratic and electoral reform, or reduce the cost of higher education. The list goes on.

Now, I realize that this sort of reasoning makes Liberals crazy. What you want is for NDP voters to accept at face value the assertion that Stephen Harper is going to destroy Canada as we know it, and that this should logically lead us to vote for the "only viable alternative" (which happens to be your party). But when we really look at the two parties' actual records, what we see are two governments that have been pretty equally out of synch with what we want to achieve. And here's the rub: no matter how much you disagree with us about that, if you want to win our votes, you need to use arguments that will actually appeal to us rather than recycling the same ones that work on Liberal stalwarts. We're a lot more practical than you think we are, and we actually do realize that we're not going to get our ideal government no matter what happens. Historically, those of us who live in ridings where the Liberal candidate needs our vote to defeat a Conservative have been willing to hold our nose and vote for you when you've made a case we could buy. So in the spirit of the sort of intraparty cooperation I've often preached about, here are five things you could do that might actually sway us.

1. Woo us, don't threaten us. Tell us why your guy would be so great; don't just concentrate on why the other guy is so awful. I realize that this is hard to do when you don't know yet who your guy is, but there are plenty of problems you're going to want to solve regardless of who wins the leadership race, right? Tell us what you stand for, because at this point, we honestly don't know. It may well be that you don't know, either, so work on that first, but then don't forget to come back and tell us about what you figure out. The Liberals aren't the default anymore, and you need to make a case for why your vision is a good one.

2. Distinguish yourselves not just from the current Conservative government, but from the past Liberal governments that did things we didn't like. The two biggies here are government ethics and broken promises. At this point you really can't minimize the lingering aftereffects of either your scandal-ridden past or the fact that you've continually promised things you haven't even tried to deliver, so your best bet is to convince us that the next Liberal government would be entirely different. This will be a tricky political play, since it means taking responsibility for your past while at the same time distancing yourselves from it, but choosing a new leader gives you an unprecedented opportunity to do just that. Don't squander that opportunity by trying to pretend none of it was all that important.

3. Stop painting the NDP as the reason why you guys lost the last election. We're not stupid; we know perfectly well why you guys lost the last election. Trying to pass the buck just makes you look like you're not willing to take responsibility for your own mistakes, which is exactly the image you don't want to be projecting. For that matter, when you talk about how awful the NDP is, then we--the very people whose votes you want to lure away--are the folks that you're painting as the enemy. Don't call the woman you're trying to seduce a bitch to her face. We're sick to death of Liberal vinegar, but we might respond much better to a little bit of honey.

4. Ban anything that smacks of entitlement from your collective vocabulary. It might have been the sponsorship scandal that started your slow decline, but it was your "natural governing party" strutting that slammed the final nail into your coffin. To win the next election, you do need to act confident and united behind your new leader, but at the same time, you can't appear even the slightest bit arrogant. You have to paint your new leader as a regular guy with some uncharacteristic humility, not somebody who thinks the only rational choice is the Liberal Party.

5. This one will be hard, but it might just make or break you: during the next election, send a sign that you'd be willing to work with the NDP in the case of a Liberal minority win. Yes, Jack Layton will be charging at you with all his might, but do it anyway. This may sound counter-intuitive, but think about it: it would look pretty appealing to the voters in those Conservative-Liberal swing ridings who really want to trust the All-New-Liberals, but can't quite bring themselves to do it. You might even want to throw the term 'coalition' around--you know, the word that means "both the Liberals and the NDP get to sit on the government side of the House." Yes, it's an unappealing scenario to a party that used to be able to take a majority government for granted, but times have changed. And believe me, if NDP voters had the impression that casting a vote for a Liberal could produce a cabinet that consisted of members of our team as well as yours, that'd go a long way toward making that option more attractive.

The Liberal assumption has always been that NDP voters would inevitably prefer a Liberal government to a Conservative one. It's a logical one to make, but only if you're looking at nothing but the location on a left-right spectrum of the various parties' proposed policies. The problem for you guys is that we've gotten wiser, and have started taking a lot more into consideration than election promises when casting our votes. In the last election, I actually wanted you to lose, and I certainly wasn't alone in that. But while I won't be voting Liberal myself next time (there's no convincing anybody these days that voting Liberal is the best way to oust the Tory in Edmonton-Strathcona), I genuinely hope that I can go back to hoping that you guys win. Whether or not I do, though--and more importantly for the outcome of the next election, whether or not a million and a half other NDP voters do--depends entirely on you.

Slap your national identity on your car

My goodness. There's even a bumper sticker. Who knew?

And the Tories suck too

While I'm already shamefully repackaging other people's posts as my own, I might as well add that I'm afraid I also have nothing new to add on the Conservatives' cheque-swapping scandal--but Tim at pogge, Cathie From Canada, and Right of Center Ice have it covered.

I'll be back with more original content by next week at the latest, I promise.

Has the NDP been giving the Tories a free ride?

Over the last couple of days, between the zillion and one other things I've been doing, I've been jotting down notes for a post that would repudiate the Liberal accusations that the NDP has been concentrating on attacking the Liberals and ignoring the Conservatives. I was going to use this rabble poster's analysis as a springboard, and lift relevant quotes from Question Period.

I'm scrapping plans for the post, though, because my fellow oxymoron over at Accidental Deliberations has put it much better than I would have anyway. Go read it, and then vote for it over at Progressive Bloggers. This one needs to propagate beyond the Blogging Dippers.

[Update: Apparently, the best Liberal bloggers can do to refute the Jurist's fine analysis and the data from the rabble poster is to regurgitate a Larry Zolf editorial. What, no original words at all? No facts, no specifics, no evidence? Come on, guys, you're not even trying, here. How disappointing.]

[Upperdate: The Jurist at Accidental Deliberations is back with an equally excellent debunking of the assertions in the Zolf editorial. You can move that post up in the Progressive Bloggers rankings here.]

Background noise

There's a seriously mentally ill guy who occasionally walks up and down Edmonton's now-infamous Whyte Avenue yelling "Oh, my God!" at the top of his lungs. I live, shall we say, very very close to that particular street, and whenever I've got my bedroom window open, I can hear him. I'm used to it. By now, he's just part of the background noise that makes up city life.

This afternoon, I heard him again, and it occurred to me that it had been an awfully long time since he'd been a part of my Saturday background noise. At first I wondered if he'd maybe been in the hospital or something equally worrisome. Then it hit me: it's not him that changed; it's this city. We've traded in a certain manic euphoria for a much quieter dejection. And for short but intensely enjoyable while, Mr. "Oh, My God!" just blended right in.

The party of the mainstream CEOs

Guess how much it's going to cost, per delegate, to attend the Liberal leadership convention? $995. Yep, that's right, nine HUNDRED and ninety-five dollars.

I'm so shocked by this that I actually have little to say about it. I mean, I have a steady, decently paying job, and even I couldn't afford to shell out that much on top of an expensive flight, a hotel room, and meals. I was actually concerned about the fall NDP policy convention costing $95, because I thought it might be prohibitively expensive for a lot of would-be delegates. But the Liberals are charging more than TEN TIMES that amount, and it's not even going to be a policy convention.

The Liberal party in Germany, the Free Democratic Party, once came up with a disastrous campaign slogan that translated to "the party of those who earn more." It sounds like our own Liberals are following in their footsteps.

Party like it's 1984

Let's have a look at what some Conservative cabinet ministers have been saying about the environment these days:

Under the former Liberal government we could have seen up to $600 per Canadian family in taxpayer money shipped overseas to countries like Russia and China with no accountability to the environment here at home.

-- Rona Ambrose, Minister of the Environment, May 8th Question Period

The Liberals were going to buy billions of dollars in international credits from Russia and China when we have our own air and water pollution problems right here at home.

-- Rona Ambrose, Minister of the Environment, June 8th Question Period

Not only does the old Liberal Party want to spend billions of dollars buying hot air credits in Russia, to add insult to injury it wants to impose a new carbon tax on Canadians to pay for Russia's hot air.

-- Gary Lunn, Minister of Natural Resources, June 12th Question Period

First off, let's clear up one thing: this "shipping money overseas" thing that our esteemed ministers are so hot under the collar about is nothing more and nothing less than an acknowledgement that our environment doesn't stop at our national borders. Each country that signed the Kyoto agreement has promised to limit their country's emissions to the levels described in the protocol. Realizing that countries don't always manage to keep their promises, though, the agreement also has a provision for those countries, like Canada, who screw up: they can buy "credits" from countries that managed to keep their word. The Conservatives don't like this idea. They'd rather demarcate the air over our heads along our land borders and claim responsibility for keeping only that portion of the atmosphere clean. It's a good thing we've got border guards up in the sky, working hard at keeping the riff-raff pollution out.

Now, the text of these statements is merely a bit lacking in the logic department, but the subtext is downright retro. Most developed countries have managed to meet their Kyoto targets, so there are plenty of other places that could have been held up as examples of who could buy Canada's emissions credits. The United Kingdom, for example, has already surpassed its target by 12.5%. Germany and France have overshot their targets as well, as have Iceland and New Zealand. Sweden has not only easily met its targets, but has committed itself to being entirely free of fossil fuels by 2020. Poorer countries that have managed to meet their targets include Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and the Ukraine.

Why not mention any one of those countries, instead of always demonizing China and Russia? Apparently the Conservatives not only want Canada to horde its own air, but they'd also like to take us back to the good old days of the Cold War.

IP on the Hotstove

I pinch-hitted for Sinister Greg on the Bloggers' Hotstove this week, and despite the lopsidedness of this particular week's panel (the fourth panelist, Stephen Taylor, couldn't get his microphone to work), it was a lot of fun. I'm afraid our host Greg Staples encouraged me way too much toward the end, though, when the discussion drifted toward my pet issue of proportional representation. Before they even think about having me back, they should probably make me promise to repent of my longwindedness!

For reference, here are some links to pieces that were brought up over the course of the podcast:

• Chantal Hébert on what it's like to be a Muslim today
• Paul Wells on the Joe Volpe issue
• Jay Currie calling for a temporary cessation of immigration from the Muslim world
• The contentious discussion in the comments of my "Losing John" post
• My longago post on the Balkanization of the Canadian blogosphere
  
• Paul Wells on the Liberal leadership debate

Also, if you had your curiosity piqued by the discussion at the end of the podcast about the arcane mechanics of a couple of different flavours of proportional representation, and would like to hear more, I've got a whole FAQ on the subject. (If, on the other hand, your reaction was more along the lines of: "I can't believe they let her pontificate about that for ten minutes," then for god's sake, steer clear of that link!)

Canada's left: a credo

Some things I believe:

1. Canada's left consists not of the NDP and no one else, as Jack Layton would have us believe, and not of the NDP, the Liberals, and the Greens, as Jason Townsend would have us believe, but of the NDP, a few Liberals, and some Greens. This complicates matters beyond the quick fix many leftists (of whatever stripe) are looking for.

2. The potential future in government of voices from Canada's left (as defined above) depends not on the NDP snuffing out the Liberals, as Pat Martin would have us believe, and not on the Liberals snuffing out the NDP, as Jason Cherniak would have us believe, and not on the NDP snuffing out the Greens, as Duncan Cameron would have us believe, but on learning how to find common ground within our political diversity. This complicates matters even further.

3. The best model for finding common ground isn't forming a "big tent" party, as John Ryan would have us believe, but allowing for diversity of opinion and separate political identities within temporary government coalitions. These temporary coalitions wouldn't look like the Liberal-NDP cooperation within 2005's Liberal minority government, but like coalition governments as they tend to exist in European parliaments such as Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. This model would require a change in our political culture to make it less antagonistic and more cooperative, and the surest and best way to precipitate this change would be the implementation of some form of proportional representation on the federal level.

4. The very best thing for Canada's left would be the election this fall of a Liberal leader who agrees with me about 1-3. That leader wouldn't even have to be a leftist himself, but someone who sees value in the left and is respectful of different political opinions. Unfortunately, there seems to be no one like that in the race. (For a short time I thought Gerard Kennedy might be that guy, but he isn't.)

5. Having leftist voices in government is a good goal, but having genuine leftist voices (rather than a whole slew of centrists in leftist clothing) on the federal scene at all is still more important in the long run. If--for whatever reason--this can't work out in the way I outline above, we can't let that failure lead us to succumb to the siren song of the big tent. Many laws and policies we take for granted today began as wild ideas from the left, and any big tent (whether it's called the Liberal Party of Canada, the New Democratic Party of Canada, or the Liberal Democrats of Canada) would lead to the marginalization and silencing of leftist voices. Without real leftists on the federal scene, no one would ever come to realize that many of those so-called wild ideas are actually practical and implementable. This, above all other reasons, is why I am a member of the NDP.

6. A lot of people of all political stripes think 1-5 contradict each other. These people are wrong.

Losing John

There's a guy I know named John--maybe you know him, too. Born an ordinary small-town Ontario kid, he moved into the big city for work and then ended up staying. A programmer by day, he's also a bit of a politics geek. He's never gone so far as to start his own blog, but every few days he drops by the Progressive Bloggers to see what like-minded people are saying about the state of Canada in the world. He's always voted Liberal. Okay, he was disgruntled enough with Paul Martin in 2006 that he thought about voting NDP, but at the last minute he got nervous about the Conservatives getting in and ended up giving the Liberals his X yet again. In the end his MP, Maria Minna, was reelected, and when it came right down to it, that was just fine with him.

On Saturday morning, John wakes up, makes himself a cup of coffee, and flips on his computer to skim the latest headlines from cbc.ca. A few clicks, and he lands on some news that chills his blood: the previous night, while John was asleep, about a dozen Canadian men were arrested for plotting an attack somewhere in southern Ontario. Nobody knows what the target was, but the investigation is ongoing. He flicks back and forth between online news sources and both Canadian and American 24-hour news channels, but nobody's saying what the potential targets were. He clicks through to his trusty Progressive Bloggers, but finds nothing there, either. Frustrated, he turns to the Blogging Tories and hits paydirt. It's all speculation, of course, but to John it's better than no news at all. The bomb might have been intended for the subway (John takes the subway every day!), or maybe even some area oil refineries (what would that do to the economy?!).

In the afternoon, John calls his parents, just to check in. Shocked, he learns that they don't even know what's happened. His mom actually sounds more worried about him than she does about the terrorists, and John clenches a fist around the phone in frustration. She hasn't followed things through in her mind to their inevitable conclusion. Thousands of people could have died. Maybe people John knew. Maybe even John himself. No, we didn't actually have our own 9/11 here on Canadian soil, but at least when the Americans went through this, they all banded together and did something about the problem. Guys like the ones who almost did this--they don't stop at one foiled attempt. Maybe next time, they'll succeed. And next time could be tomorrow, or next week, or when we least expect it.

For Saturday dinner, John snacks on last week's cold pizza and the dregs of chips he found in the cupboard--somehow, he's just not hungry enough to make himself a meal--and just after midnight, he finally drops off to sleep. In the middle of the night, he wakes up from a dream, sweating and shivering. In his mind, a burning CN Tower topples onto the whole of downtown Toronto and sets it ablaze as he watches in abject horror. He can't shake the image. He can't fall back asleep. He gets up, flicks on his computer again, and glances at the latest from that Tory blogger he'd been reading earlier: he's speculating about a free vote on capital punishment. John catches himself thinking that might not be such a bad thing.

On Sunday, John steps outside for the first time since first hearing the news--he wants to make sure to pick up the weekend edition of the Toronto Star in case he's missed anything by sticking to television and online news sources. At the corner store, the conversation is about the weather, about the Stanley Cup finals, about anything but the fact that a bunch of people with names like Ahhmad and Jahmaal almost blew up John's city. John finds himself frustrated all over again--why are he and a handful of Tory bloggers the only ones who care about this? Over at his ordinarily likeminded Progressive Bloggers, some folks are referring to the people who are scared as hysterical, and in the comments section of that post, a well-known, well-respected blogger is even saying that it's people like John who are letting the terrorists win. Suddenly, John's not just frustrated; he's angry. He turns back to the Blogging Tories, who are talking about the size of the potential bomb. Information is good; it makes him feel calmer.

Sunday stretches on, and turns into Monday. John goes in to work, but he feels twitchy. He can't concentrate on coding, so he keeps sneaking peeks at the news online. The latest from the Progressive Bloggers is ridicule, but the Toronto Star's Rosie DiManno and the Globe and Mail's Christie Blatchford resonate with him: The enemy within. The elephant in the room. The war on windows. Monday turns into Tuesday, and there's a bit on Warren Kinsella's blog that briefly gives John pause. Kinsella's suggesting that a bunch of people go to a Jays game--at the site of one of the potential targets--and "wave the flag, and wear a few T-shirts bearing a defiant message." John remembers his own admiration of the "we are not afraid" campaign after the London subway bombings, and he wants to join them. But the trouble is, John is afraid. And in a world of rhetoric that's been polarized into "now we Canadians finally recognize that we, too, are under siege" and "if you're scared, you're letting the terrorists win," John's finding himself increasingly aligned with the former group. He's honestly not sure whether that makes him crazy or if it makes him sane, but mostly, he doesn't care. His world has been turned upside down. He's too busy being scared.

#

I realize that we bloggers are better at sarcasm than we are at sympathy, better at fisking than we are at feeling--but without so much as a passing nod to John and his irrational yet entirely human fears, we lose him. Me, I'm not scared of the terrorists, and I'm not scared of the hard-right bloggers and columnists who are gleefully pulling out old Jack Layton quotes about security certificates, either. But the prospect of watching the Johns of this country slip further and further into the sort of reactionary thinking that's gripped my country of birth for nearly five years? That's what really scares me.

Harper's big gamble

The National Post is suggesting that Québec premier Jean Charest has turned against Harper, and has become engaged in a "your momma wears combat boots"-style war of rhetoric with the Bloc Québecois over which one of them is in bed with the Tories. On Wednesday, Bloc leader Gilles Duceppe said this:

The Charest government has no backbone. Mr. Charest is making an error. He is hitching himself to Mr. Harper's wagon at any cost to the detriment of Quebec's interests.

and on Friday, Charest countered:

[Gilles Duceppe] represents Quebecers in the House of Commons. If he believes in what he is saying, unless it is empty rhetoric, well then he will vote against the budget in the House of Commons. So we'll see who has backbone.

It's pretty clear what Duceppe's aim is here: a Québec provincial election is likely by the end of next year, and he'd clearly like to see the Parti Québecois take the reins. Charest's aim, on the other hand, is slightly more murky. Until recently, after all, he seemed to be pretty tight with Harper. On the surface of things, the falling out appears to have happened toward the end of May, and over the Kyoto Accord. It's certainly true that Charest, a former federal environment minister under Brian Mulroney, has been feeling some pressure on that front. But my fellow oxymoron from Accidental Deliberations is left wondering whether Charest's sudden chill toward Harper is all just for show, and a prelude to forcing an election now for the ultimate benefit of the Conservatives.

It sounds like a tinfoil-hat notion, but I have to wonder, myself. When I met up with Conservative blogger Greg Staples at the multipartisan Waterloo Blogstravaganza, one of the few things we agreed on was that if we were in Stephen Harper's shoes, we would be looking for the government to fall now. By the fall, the Liberals will have a new leader and almost inevitably the new momentum that goes along with that, and at the moment, Harper's own party's polling numbers are quite strong. We also agreed, however, that Canadians are nowhere near ready for another election, and if the current government seemed to be orchestrating their own demise prematurely, they might come to regret that decision come election time. An obvious strategy to deal with this, we decided, would be to goad the opposition into voting against a confidence motion that was at least superficially bad for the Tories. The Liberals would then be forced to fight an election without a real leader, and a Tory majority could result.

In order for a play like that to work, the issue the government fell on would have to be one that most Canadians tended to like, but only in a superficial sort of way, as we all like the neighbour's new puppy until we start finding our petunias dug up and rubber chew toys in their place. Recent polling about the details of Kyoto suggests that it could well be that issue, since more than two-thirds of us know little to nothing about it. The pollsters who interpreted the numbers even suggested that "the knowledge level of what is in Kyoto is so small that this government, if it plays its cards right, will have some manoeuvrability." It would be a big gamble for the Tories, but they might well decide that it would be worth the potential prize of a majority government.

For all our sakes, I sure hope I'm wrong. But if I turn out to be right, I have to admit that there's a part of me that will almost admire such shrewd and highly complex political gamesmanship. It's often said that the left should underestimate Stephen Harper at its own peril--and he may well be on the brink of proving that right.