Rebecca Walberg

If American elections and the primaries that precede them are like soap operas, with convoluted plots, large casts, and an ability to consume the lives of fans and followers, elections and leadership conventions in Canada are more akin to a sitcom: shorter, frivolous, and usually forgotten the day after. I can see why the age of the permanent campaign is exhausting for those involved in American politics, but it’s fascinating viewing from the outside.

The Washington Times had an editorial over the weekend painting Obama as a Canadian politician.  The column makes some good points about the substance of Obama’s platform.  Inspired in part by Sean Wilentz’ new history of Reagan, though, I see a striking congruence between Obama in 2008 and Ronald Reagan in 1980.  Their policies, platforms and ideals could scarcely be more different, but their positions relative to the electorate and the rest of their parties are very similar.  The smart money never makes firm predictions with this long to go until the general election.  Nonetheless, I see a lot of potential for Obama to win big, and then to make changes that would stay with us for a generation, as Reagan did.  My column on this is up at Pajamas Media today.

The central conceit of Barack Obama’s candidacy is that he is a new kind of politician. His race aside, there is little about him that is genuinely refreshing; although he is young, there have been younger candidates, and he would not be the youngest president, if elected. His much heralded moderate status is entirely fictitious, and his most clearly elucidated positions, such as on foreign policy and taxation, are simply left-liberal orthodoxy.

The most insightful comparison of this election season may have come from Obama himself , who proposed, to howls of outrage from Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, that he was a politician in the mold of Reagan. Obama was, with the self-flattering hyperbole that has become the hallmark of his speeches, suggesting that he might make the same lasting impression on America and the world that Reagan did. In reality, the most salient parallels between the two men lie in the appeal they have within and beyond their parties, their position relative to members of their own parties, and the break they represent from recent history.

For the rest of the column, click here to go Pajamas Media.

While I have hope that the current Tory government (or possibly a Tory majority in the near future) will make and encourage substantive change to healthcare, so far the national debate has been along the lines of “should we keep everything the same and boost health spending by 10%, or should be keep everything the same and boost health spending by 20%?”  It seems to have escaped most people’s notice that all this extra money is buying us very little.  I have a column in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix today looking at specific changes that might pay off.

Juggling small children and work is a challenge for everybody, single or married, solidly middle class or just scraping by.  The economics of it are only one factor; the emotional, social and physical needs of the kids are of utmost concern, but it’s also important that both parents be happy with the arrangement they choose.  We often hear of the benefits of Scandinavian daycare schemes, and Quebec’s $7 a day plan; on closer inspection, such universal daycare is bad economically, harms children, and increases stress on parents.  Here’s the introduction of a column I wrote for Sun Media on Quebec’s daycare:

Proponents of universal day care often claim that institutional care is good for children, and meets the needs of parents. Further, they argue it makes good fiscal sense because it gets parents back in the paid workforce sooner and grows the economy.

A decade after Quebec instituted universal, heavily subsidized care, costing parents $7 a day (originally $5), a paper by Massachusetts Institute of Technology economists makes clear that none of these assertions stand up to reality.

Read the rest here.

The amusingly named head of the WHO’s AIDS department issues the following words of wisdom, confirming what a lot of people have known for a while, but weren’t allowed to say:

Kevin de Cock, who has headed the global battle against Aids, said at the weekend that, outside very poor African countries, Aids is confined to “high-risk groups”, including men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, and sex workers. And even in these communities it remains quite rare. “It is very unlikely there will be a heterosexual epidemic in countries [outside sub-Saharan Africa]“, he said. In other words? All that hysterical fearmongering about Aids spreading among sexed-up western youth was a pack of lies.

The sad reality is that it will take a long time to undo the damage that’s been done by a couple of decades of AIDS hysteria. Public health educators put a tremendous emphasis on condoms as the best way to minimize risk of AIDS, leaving untold numbers of teens and young adults unaware of the diseases that can be sexually transmitted even with a condom, including HPV, a precursor to cancer. This emphasis on condoms and AIDS avoidance is also in no small part responsible for the increasing perception that only vaginal intercourse is sex (well, partial credit also to Bill Clinton) and the escalation of other forms of sexual activity amongst ever younger kids.

In a more abstract sense, the preoccupation with AIDS, condoms, and physical safety led to the increased commodification of sex, and an emphasis on sex as a physical act. It’s not a coincidence that a generation who was taught all about the physical details of sex, and almost nothing about the emotional or moral implications of it, proceeded to create the hook-up culture. By all means, let’s do everything we can to minimize unplanned pregnancy, STDs, and non-consensual sex. But if we’re serious about making more responsible choices, we have to ask people to consider their hearts, minds and souls, and not only their bodies.

We should also learn from this the folly of directing healthcare spending according to fads and crazes. AIDS kills far fewer people than cancer, heart attacks, and car accidents, as well as suicides, and for those under 35, homicides. An honest evaluation of who is actually at risk for AIDS would enable us to focus education and prevention where it will help the most, give kids in health class accurate and helpful information, and avoid needlessly scaring people who were never at risk to begin with.

Crossposted to ProWomanProLife.

(Cross-posted to ProWomanProLife. )

Just as the racial grievance industry in the US traces any and all dysfunctions in the black community to the legacy of slavery and racism, rather than culture, social disintegration, and poor choices in general, so does the clamour over residential schools crowd out any honest discussion of why so many Canadian aboriginals live in poverty, suffer ill health, child abuse and neglect, and abuse substances in much higher proportions than other Canadians.  If Harper’s apology allows us to move beyond this and into a substantive attempt to give natives the same rights and responsibilities as their countrymen, maybe it was worth it.  (But I’m not holding my breath.)

The most heart-breaking consequence of the widespread pathologies in many aboriginal communities is the way native children are almost preordained to repeat their parents’ mistakes, if they survive to adulthood.  Too often, they don’t.  A culture that tells an entire group of people that they cannot support themselves without government help, cannot integrate into a thriving and functional society, and cannot compete on equal terms does nothing to promote individual responsibility, whether in terms of employment, law-braking, or parenting.  After two aboriginal children in Saskatchewan froze to death when their drunken father took them outside, undressed, in -50 weather, I wondered if perhaps a tipping point had been reached, and now natives and non-natives alike would finally recognize that constantly blaming the government, the Church, or whites in general was never going to fix this sort of negligence, and we could turn our attention to a real solution.

I concluded at the time:

Aboriginals on reserve are trapped by poverty because they cannot own a home the way the rest of us can. Instead, the Indian Act creates a situation in which home ownership, as well as access to other higher education and other services, is at the mercy of undemocratic band councils. Aboriginals are told again and again, by the federal government that administers to them, that they are not the same as other Canadians, that they cannot handle the same responsibilities, that they need special privileges simply to achieve the same goals as non-natives. Gross neglect is horrifying, but when the people in question have been told, all their lives, that they are dependent, unequal, and without real hope of improvement, we cannot be truly surprised.

It is time to give aboriginals a shot at real equality, so they can share in the tremendous good fortune enjoyed by the rest of Canada. They are capable of handling the responsibilities borne by all other Canadians. When reserve residents are granted the same rights, offered the same opportunities, and treated with the respect due to autonomous adults, perhaps their weakest members, defenseless children, will be treated with care and protection, instead of being the heirs to generations of dysfunction.

The full column is here.

Stylish, but nonetheless hard, leftism pervades the New York Review of Books.  This isn’t surprising, given the weltanschauung of many of its regular contributors.  It remains not only a good read - the quality of the writing is excellent - but also a helpful one.  For every book that I manage to read, there are five or six that I’d love to, but don’t have time for, and so a 2500 word essay on an important book (or more often, two or three on the same theme) is invaluable, even considering the built-in bias.

The June 12 issue has a review by Michael Tomasky, editor of The Guardian’s American website, of three recent books on John McCain.  There are some interesting points made, and a useful recap of the Republican candidate’s earlier years in politics, before his Presidential aspirations became clear.  Of course, any changes in McCain’s positions are dismissed as political opportunism, and while this is undoubtedly the case some of the time, there is no reason to suppose that conviction and principle have no role in McCain’s changing views.  Unlike some politicians, when the facts change, he changes his opinions.

One line early in the essay, though, is breathtaking in its bad faith.  After establishing his conviction that, however admirable a man McCain had once been, he is motivated entirely by his own ambition, Tomasky suggests that “in doing what he had to do to become the nominee of a party of orthodox conservatives, he has so sublimated his honorable instincts that they have all but atrophied.”  Staggering, isn’t it?  Clearly there is no possible way that honorable instincts could lead one to agree with orthodox conservatism.

Like so much high-brow popular culture these days, NYRB is, it seems, best enjoyed if one can maintain a certain anthropological detachment.  The natives of Manhattan editorial offices do produce some fascinating art, but we can’t allow our appreciation of it to obscure the fact that their socially constructed reality is about as rational as the Greek pantheon, but far less awe-inspiring.

I’ve written about HRCs, and particularly their treatment of Mark Steyn and Maclean’s magazine before, on NRO for example.  While I think we would somehow muddle through without them, it seems unlikely that they’ll vanish any time soon.  So how can they be made less intrusive, and more appropriate for a free democracy?  A handful of reforms could return the HRCs to their original mandate.