Mercifully, the editors of Dooneyscafe.com allowed me to post it there. So here – there – it is.

That abandoned shed, for Canadians who are fond of either the Liberals or the New Democrats, is another election in which the two parties remain as distinct and independent entities. The idea of a merger, which would have been unfathomable when Paul Martin took over as leader of the Liberal Party in 2003, has gained a great deal of currency in recent months with the near-collapse of his party and the rise of the NDP. And while it’s often said that politics makes for strange bedfellows, there would be nothing strange about the NDP and Liberal Party deciding to shack up. If anything, it makes perfect sense.

Yes, there are disagreements on policy between the two parties. And yes, there are some old animosities that would have to be overcome. But as backroom strategists in both the NDP and the Liberals already understand, they’re in roughly the same place that the remnants of the Progressive Conservative Party and upstart Reform Party found themselves in almost 20 years ago: lost in the political wilderness, and with no real idea of how to find their way back to civilization.

As they learned in three successive elections, the mathematical realities of two parties vying for one side of the political spectrum in a first-past-the-post electoral system are very unforgiving. The Liberals and NDP now find themselves in exactly that situation. If anything, the road to forming government is even more treacherous for them than it was for Joe Clark’s PC rump or Stockwell Day’s Canadian Alliance. After all, the Conservatives are the uncontested masters of the only side of the political spectrum that’s poised to see organic growth for the next two or three decades, as the aging of the Canadian population will tilt the fulcrum point of Canadian politics ever more in their favour.

It’s not as easy as adding together the vote totals of the NDP and the Liberals in the last election, of course. There would be turnover – and turmoil – in the membership of a new party, one that might be called, say, the Liberal Democrats. On the left, the new party might lose some votes to the Green Party, while on the right it would lose some to the Conservatives. But this is like group of shipwreck survivors quibbling about the condition of the rescue boat that’s come to pluck them out of the water. In the end, it’s their only hope of forming a government in the foreseeable future.

Ironically, the biggest impediment to a merger between the two parties probably wouldn’t be the Liberal membership. The NDP, with its recent gains and current status as her majesty’s official opposition, might be tempted to ignore the logic of a merger because of their proximity to power. But their position right now is like that of an army that’s broken through enemy ranks and in a rush of excitement moved far ahead of its supply lines. Yes, it’s taken new ground, but it doesn’t stand much of a chance of holding it for very long, and it may ultimately be setting itself  up for greater casualties down the road. With no general and a bunch of inexperienced or under-qualified lieutenants, the NDP would be wise to beat a strategic retreat and reinforce its position. In other words, they ought to merge while they’re ahead.

The Liberals, meanwhile, would be giving up on more than a century of tradition, and there are going to be plenty of people within the party that won’t want to do that. But as the last eight years have showed time and again, the Liberal Party of Canada doesn’t stand for anything other than itself and its own preservation. Despite the varying contributions of three different leaders, it has been unable to craft a coherent identity for itself in the post-Chretien era. In truth, it’s been adrift for much longer than that – perhaps as long as former Prime Minister Trudeau has been out of office.

A merger between the Liberals and the NDP wouldn’t just be one of equals. It would be one of complimentary forces, a pairing whose whole would be greater than the sum of their constituent parts. The NDP would bring its vitality, its energy and its credibility with voters, while the Liberals would contribute their steadying influence, fiscal credibility and organizational heft. The NDP faction would force the Liberal faction to take stronger positions on issues, while the Liberals would in turn moderate the NDP’s more unrealistic ambitions.

It would be a difficult courtship process, to be sure, but it would have the potential to produce a very productive marriage, one in which the interests of progressive Canadians would be far better served than they are today. And it would also do service to Jack Layton’s view, expressed in his deathbed letter, that “we can be a better, fairer, more equal country by working together.” Surely, that’s something that members of both parties can get behind.

I was initially tempted to write off his saccharine scribblings as just another unwitting subject of Macbeth’s famous soliloquy: full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. I can’t, though, because it signifies something that deserves to be carefully identified and closely scrutinized: the utter puerility of my generation. Nagata’s blog post wasn’t the selfless act of truth-telling that so many have described it as but a love letter to his own virtue – and his vanity. His blog post amounts to the existential equivalent of a temper tantrum, and we’re not doing him any favours by giving it the attention it so plainly seeks to attract.

His complaints about Canadian politics might resonate among those who share his views – and I consider myself one of those people, for the record –  but his thoughts about journalism and how it ought to be conducted make far less sense. For example, his objections to the Harper government’s policy direction and the drift that it has charted away from what he perceives as Canada’s true values are fair, but his discomfort with being unable to express them on-air is downright bizarre: that’s the job description of a television reporter, and it hasn’t changed appreciably over the last twenty years. “As a reporter,” he writes, “I feel like I’ve been holding my breath. Every question I asked, every Tweet I posted, and even what I said to other journalists and friends had to go through a filter, where my own opinions and values were carefully strained out.”

Well, sure – that’s sort of how it works, and how it is supposed to work. Unless you’re a columnist you’re expected to bite your tongue, set aside your political views and cover the facts of the matter as best you can. Equally puzzling is the objection he registers to the superficial nature of television journalism. “I admit felt a profound discomfort working in an industry that so casually sexualizes its workforce,” he writes. Fine. Fair. But when has it ever been anything but? And has it really changed so much in the year or so that he’s worked as an on-air reporter?

If he were quitting his job because of some principled disagreement with his employer, be it over the way they were covering a certain issue or the way they were assiduously ignoring another, I’d be cheer-leading Nagai’s resignation as loudly as the next person. But there’s no tangible reason, no ethical deal-breaker, for him quitting – just some nebulous thoughts about the problems with journalism in 2011  (thoughts that I can assure you every working journalist has on a daily basis) and an apparently insatiable desire to feed his ego. It’s not even a case where he became so frustrated with the demands of his job that he just had to quit, like the hilarious (and genuinely inspiring) episode involving JetBlue flight attendant Stephen Slater. It was, instead, an act of naked – and rank – self-indulgence.

But what really bugs the shit out of me about this, and why I’m willing to stick my neck out to criticize the left’s new favourite son, is the fact that this whole production is both more cunning and more contrived than most people are willing to acknowledge.  Nagata told the CBC that he never imagined he’d get this kind of response for a blog post explaining why he was quitting his job, but I think he knew exactly what he was doing. From the design of the blog to the method of his message’s dissemination, Nagata was aiming to get noticed. Whether he wanted to score a book deal, get a column or just put his name more squarely on the media map is something that only he knows for sure, but it’s clear – to me, anyways – that he wanted something more than to simply tell the truth.  What it really comes down to, I think, is that he was in a hurry and didn’t want to take the time to grind out a career the way most journalists do. Forget the daily grind of compromises and small sacrifices in the service of something more important. No, for Kai Nagata, it was now or never. “I thought if I paid my dues and worked my way up through the ranks, I could maybe reach a position of enough influence and credibility that I could say what I truly feel,” he writes.” I’ve realized there’s no time to wait.” Indeed.

To be clear, I don’t think Kai Nagata’s a bad person. He’s an obviously intelligent guy who thinks about things in a way and with a level of seriousness that most people would do well to emulate. But like so many people my age, he’s a talented individual who insists on placing his own ego at the centre of every conversation. And while his impatient narcissism may end up advancing him further down the professional playing field than if he’d stayed in Quebec City and paid those dues he so easily dismisses, it might also ultimately do him harm over the long run. In making the most of himself, he may end up making the least of his abilities.

We don’t change the world by shouting about it, after all, or by immolating ourselves (literally or figuratively) when things don’t go our way. We change the world by changing it, one agonizing compromise after another. I think Kai Nagata could have done more good for his career, and yes, even his country, if he’d stuck around and done the dirty business of building a career. But like most people my age, he didn’t want to put in the work to do that.

The CMHC, after all, is not accustomed to being the subject of criticism, much less from a major Canadian publication. In fact, as Kirby and Soresen note in their piece, those that do speak out against the mortgage monolith often find themselves penalized for doing so. “Several other critics, including economists, realtors, lawyers and analysts contacted by Maclean’s, say they have also been the target of attack,” Kirby and Sorensen write. “One bank economist who once publicly raised fears about a housing bubble says he didn’t dare openly criticize the CMHC because of the agency’s reputation for snuffing out dissent—an allegation the CMHC denies. The economist spoke on the condition his name not be used.”

For a few years now, the idea that a housing correction was in the offing for Canadians was the sole purview of contrarians like Garth Turner. Canadians, the argument went, didn’t engage in the same risky lending practices that swamped the U.S. housing market with bad debt and even worse credit. Canadian bankers, politicians and homeowners alike became downright smug in the belief that “things were different” in Canada, and that a U.S.-style meltdown could never happen up here. Indeed, most of Canada’s major media outlets, print and otherwise, cheerfully perpetuated this argument. But in recent months there have been articles published in places like the Globe and Mail and now Maclean’s that put forward the idea that Canada’s housing market may not be as safe as it once seemed.

If a housing correction comes to Canada, we may well find ourselves blaming the CMHC in much the same way that Americans pointed the post-facto finger at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.  Both the CMHC and Fannie and Freddie are – were, for the American pair – in the business of promoting home ownership, even when it didn’t necessarily make economic sense. And while CMHC representatives continue to insist that they’ve made prudent decisions designed to make home ownership a realistic – and reasonable – option for thousands of Canadians, it’s difficult not to wonder about the credibility of those assurances when you look at the numbers behind them. As Kirby and Sorensen note, “using the CMHC’s 2010 forecasts, it insures $519.1 billion in mortgages against $9.9 billion in equity, which works out to around 1.9 per cent (although the CMHC says it has another $6.7 billion in “unearned” premiums that could be used toward future claims). By comparison, in 2007, at the peak of the bubble, Fannie Mae backed up US$2.7 trillion of mortgage-backed securities with US$40 billion of capital, or 1.5 per cent equity against its overall exposure.”

CMHC representatives insist that the rate of repayment, the equity/debt ratio and low rate of mortgage arrears all demonstrate that Canadian homeowners are still safely swimming in the shallow end of the pool. But that’s sort of like assessing the safety of a car while it’s traveling at 25 km/h. The real test of the system’s solvency will take place at speed, when interest rates rise in order to accommodate the inflationary pressure that’s building in the Canadian economy. If inflation gets away from the Bank of Canada and rates spike into the double digits, we may find that the deep end is a lot closer than we’ve been conditioned to think.

More worrisome than the potential influence of interest-rate increases is the fact that there’s little to no oversight over either CMHC’s behaviour or its balance sheet. Kirby and Sorensen point to a note that C.D. Howe researcher Finn Poschmann put in a recent report, which observed that “Parliament and the voters to whom it answers have no formal documentation of the way these exposures are calculated or managed.” Given the scale of the assurances they’re issuing on our (the taxpayer’s) behalf, that’s information that shouldn’t be held on a need-to-know basis. Perhaps pieces like the one Maclean’s published well help loosen CMHC’s tongue just a little bit.

Nobody’s had a more intimate vantage point from which to witness this grotesque daily carnage than Aaron Wherry, Maclean’s magazine’s parliamentary reporter. Evidently, he’s seen enough, judging by his recent piece in which he describes the House of Commons as a sham. His timing couldn’t have been much better, either, as the piece was published in the midst of the Conservative government’s farcical handling of Bev Oda’s decision to lie to a parliamentary committee of her colleagues. It was a display that was shameful even by the degraded ethical standards of partisan politics in 2011, one that culminated in Government House Leader John Baird’s decision to describe her colleague’s conduct – lying, remember – as “brave” and “courageous.” Kafka would have struggled to come up with a more preposterous scene.

The answer, as Wherry has written, isn’t as easy as removing the cameras from the House of Commons. “It would be, first and foremost, an admission of defeat. A concession that not only can’t our politicians behave respectably in the public sphere, but that we shouldn’t even expect them to.” Fair enough. How, then, to convince a community of (mostly) educated adults not to behave like children, never mind the braying jackasses that they transform into for 45 magical minutes every day during Question Period?

The easiest solution, and the one to which many Canadians have turned when faced with this question in the past, is blaming the media. The media, it is said, focuses only on the instances conflict and ignores those of consensus, and in so doing presents a distorted picture of political life in Canada. But isn’t that like blaming a police officer for issuing a speeding ticket? Yes, the driver may well have been travelling at the speed limit for the bulk of their trip, but it’s no more the police officer’s job to commend good behaviour on the road than it is the parliamentary reporter’s job to emphasize the good that elected officials are doing to the exclusion of identifying the bad.

Blaming the voter is no better. Yes, Canadians probably should spend more time paying attention to politics. Yes, it would be nice if they voted more frequently, and did so as informed and involved citizens. But they don’t, and they won’t if the situation doesn’t change. Expecting the average citizen to solve the problem of incivility in Ottawa is like waiting for a clock to fix itself.

What’s the solution, then? If you ask a member of parliament – a member of parliament, that is, who’s willing to concede that there even is a problem – the answer that you’ll get will have something to do with the empowerment of backbench MPs. That could mean more free votes, a less rigorous exercise of party discipline or some other expression of greater freedom and independence for the nearly 90 per cent of elected officials who aren’t part of the cabinet. Given the iron-handed way in which Stephen Harper has controlled his caucus – and even his cabinet, as the Oda-affair (in which Oda, despite being present at question period, wasn’t permitted to answer any of the questions directed at her) illustrated – such improvements would almost certainly help.

But these would be steps towards a solution, and not a solution in and of themselves. We still have a Westminster system of government, and as anybody who’s taken a first year political science class understands (or they should, anyways) it’s not one that it designed to accommodate the empowerment of individual members. As such, attempts to graft an American-style conception of political representation onto our existing parliamentary infrastructure amount to cosmetic surgery. They might make our system look a little better in the short-term, but they won’t do anything to address the underlying disease that’s really making our democratic culture sick.

What’s really required a full personality transplant. In other words, it’s the people who populate our political institutions that are at the root of the problem. Our inability to have sophisticated adult conversations about important matters of public policy is a reflection of the fact that we don’t have very many sophisticated adults participating in them. Look at the inner circle of Stephen Harper’s cabinet. It’s a blend of lifelong politicians and former lawyers, along with a rather disquieting number of people with no formal education to speak of (Chuck Strahl, for example, is a drop-out, and from Trinity Western University no less).

The recent race for the leadership of the BC Liberal Party (and, by extension, the Premiership of the province) was similarly coloured by professional mediocrity. Kevin Falcon, a longtime minister in former Premier Gordon Campbell’s cabinet, has a background in real estate and corporate communications. George Abbott, another longtime loyalist, worked previously as a political science instructor at Okanagan University College (scarcely a more reputable institution than Trinity Western) and also owns a berry farm. Mike de Jong, meanwhile, was once a lawyer in Abbotsford, a school trustee and an army reservist. Christy Clark, the eventual winner, essentially went straight from university into political life.

It’s no different in other political constituencies, either, where the ranks are invariably dominated by former political staffers and lawyers. And while they might make for good partisans,  but their inclination towards intellectual combat and reductionist or binary forms of thinking leaves them ill-equipped for what ought to be the serious and sobering work of parliament. Yes, our elected officials are capable, hard-working people. But are they remarkable? Hardly. They’re life’s B-plus students, the kind of people whose abilities are outstripped by their ambitions.

How do we get the A students involved and interested in public service? I’m tempted to suggest some form of targeted draft lottery, the political equivalent of jury duty for a specific subset of society, but I’ll have to shelve that alongside my other unrealistic political fantasies (single-transferable vote electoral system, an end to calls for the abolition of the Senate) for the time being. Instead, there’s a more prosaic solution: pay our elected officials more money.

This might seem like blasphemy in a political culture where even the slightest increase in the remuneration that elected officials receive – even those that seek to track the rate of inflation – is viewed by most Canadians as a capital offense. But there’s a chicken-and-egg dimension to that attitude, since the vitriol around pay increases is linked to the fact that the way politicians behave renders them unworthy of even there current salaries. If their conduct improved, perhaps our attitude towards their compensation would as well.

Now, the idea of luring people into public service through a more generous pay package might seem unduly cynical. After all, shouldn’t the call of public service be enough to entice even the most reluctant partisan to fulfill their civic duties? In an ideal world, it might just be. But as anyone who’s paid even a passing glance at partisan politics in Canada of late understands, idealism is a virtue that enjoys no standing in official Ottawa. In the real world, politicians are subjected to the kind of scrutiny that someone in the process of receiving a prostate exam would find uncomfortable. Equally humiliating is the treatment they’re almost sure to receive at the hands of some young and undereducated political staffer, those hyper-partisan loyalists who surround the leader of every political party (well, maybe not the Greens) and are primarily occupied with either kissing asses or covering them.

Meanwhile, the spoils of political life aren’t quite what they seem. Yes, there’s the six-figure salary and the promise of a pension whose generosity is directly proportional to time served in office – hardly an incentive for selfless behaviour, that – but neither of those compare particularly well to the pay and benefits that a senior business executive, civil servant or other type-A candidate already earns. In most cases, they’d be taking a substantial pay cut, and that’s a tough sell given both demands of the job and the professional interruption that serving in office would represent for many of these people. In public life, as in most other areas, we get what we pay for. If we want the best, we have to be prepared to offer more than ritual humiliation and a six-figure salary.

The other way we can improve the talent pool on Parliament Hill is by finding a way to attract more women. Canadian soldiers might be deployed in Afghanistan to help the women of that country, but given the fact that there are more women sitting in their parliament than our own we might want to redeploy some of those troops back home along Wellington Street in Ottawa. It’s no secret that women bring a different perspective to a given problem, and the more collaborative and co-operative strategies to which they’re more naturally inclined – this is no idle stereotype: see Carole Gilligan’s work on the subject if you’re not convinced – might be just the tonic that Parliament needs.

Anne McLellan, a former Liberal cabinet minister, travelled the country after her defeat at the hands of Laurie Hawn in 2006 searching for a way to draw more women into federal politics. Her conclusion is that any such effort won’t be easy. As the Globe and Mail’s Gloria Galloway wrote on October 12, 2010, “the women she spoke to expressed concerns about finding a balance between work and family life. They said they were discouraged by the hyper-partisan atmosphere in Ottawa and the ‘men playing silly games.’ And they were turned off by the media’s sexist depiction of female politicians.”

Creating quotas, as some have suggested, isn’t the answer to this problem. Such a measure would almost surely lead to a whole slough of other identity-based quotas, and make the House of Commons less a venue for consensus building and national discussion than an echo chamber for the grievances of an even-widening constellation of groups. Something, though, needs to be done to increase the level of participation by women in Canadian politics. More women won’t be the solution to parliament’s problems, but they certainly couldn’t make things any worse than they already are.

It’s about talent, in the end, and if we truly want to change the tone and tenor of our national political discussion we need to find a way to bring more of that to bear on the process. As it stands, politics remains the business of the B-plus students of society. Until that changes, little else of significance on Parliament Hill will either.

But if there’s one catalyst that might get things moving again in our constipated political system, it’s the issue of corporate tax cuts. The Conservative government’s desire to push corporate tax rates ever lower seems to have provided the push that Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff needed in order to finally find his missing spinal column. After backing down from every previous Conservative policy provocation, Ignatieff looks like he might actually be ready to push back on this one. “If we’re going to have a big argument here about how to create jobs, how to create a future for the Canadian economy, this is a debate that we welcome,” he told a scrum of Parliament Hill reporters last week. “You can cut corporate taxes when you’re in a surplus. Cutting it in a deficit adds to Canada’s financial woes and we think the way to create jobs is invest in post-secondary education and help small and medium enterprises to become more competitive and take on more workers.”

If the response to an article posted on the Globe and Mail’s website last weekend is any indication, Ignatieff may have picked a winning issue over which to fight the next election. In a piece published by the paper’s “economy lab,” Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives economist Armine Yalnizyan outlines the case against corporate tax cuts. Contrary to what the government and many leading economists argue, Yalnizyan argues that corporate tax cuts do not contribute significantly to job creation, has little impact on the level of capital investment by Canadian corporations and costs the federal treasury billions of dollars that could be better spent in other areas like public infrastructure. Readers, it seems, agreed overwhelmingly.

There’s obviously an element of self-selection at play here, and efforts to parse the content of online comment threads in the search for a broader trend or pattern is a fool’s errand. Still, the reaction speaks to the fact that Canadians may be waking up to the fact that a tax policy built around shoveling as much money as possible into the gaping maw of our corporation citizens may not be in everyone’s best interests. As Yalnizyan writes, “an across-the-board general corporate income tax rate cut rewards companies whether they create jobs or kill them. The primary sector of the Canadian economy is increasingly in the hands of off-shore investors, who take the profits and jobs elsewhere. That’s global capitalism, but we don’t need to reward it.”

In fact, we’ve rewarded it quite a bit already. Canada has one of the lowest corporate tax rates in the developed world. The idea that lowering it further still will serve to encourage more investment and economic activity, meanwhile, is complicated by the fact that there are plenty of other countries with rock-bottom corporate tax rates who haven’t exactly enjoyed an economic renaissance as a result. At just 10 per cent the corporate tax rates in Bulgaria and Cyprus are the lowest in Europe, and their economies are anything but admirable. Ireland might be an even better example, because while its low rate of corporate taxes (currently at 12.5 per cent) was credited with creating the so-called “Celtic Tiger” in the early part of the century, that tiger proved to be a sad and sick little kitty.

What’s even more galling about the idea of further corporate tax cuts is that it comes at a time when governments around the world – Canada included – ought to be protecting every available revenue stream. We managed to avert – for now, at least – a total breakdown of the global economy by injecting massive quantities of fiscal stimulus into it, but those billions of dollars in debt will have to be repaid, and soon. Unless scientists discover that the entire landmass of the Northwest Territories is made up of rare earth minerals, in Canada, like other western democracies, that will have to come from taxes. What’s gone down, in other words, will almost certainly have to come back up.

Politicians have never been particularly good at playing the long game, but cutting corporate taxes – taxes that are already at record-low levels, remember – in the face of an imminent deleveraging of the national balance sheet is nearly as stupid and self-destructive as somebody who’s lost in the desert using their last litre of drinking water to wash their face. And, as Yalnizyan points out, it virtually guarantees that the investments that need to be made in this country’s physical and social infrastructure won’t happen. “It is a false economy to stick the next generation with an unnecessarily high price tag for what should be happening now – rebuilding the foundation for business, family and community needs everywhere, while the cost of borrowing is at historic lows and unemployment is still high.” Once again, we’re sacrificing tomorrow’s prosperity to pay for today’s comforts.

Whether Michael Ignatieff can use this issue to win the next election will be determined in due course. That the logic behind his side of the argument should appeal most strongly to young people, those whose long-term prospects are being mortgaged to service today’s luxuries, doesn’t exactly help. After all, young people aren’t known for rushing out to the ballot boxes, and tax policy isn’t the most approachable issue. But if he’s going to make a stand, he couldn’t pick a better issue. Here, at least, he’ll be holding the high ground.

The coverage of real-estate in this country is as hysterically one-sided as the political coverage in a quasi-democratic state like, say, Tunisia. Real-estate oriented information is almost invariably filtered through a professional organization or association with a vested interest in a particular outcome, but their assertions are almost never contextualized, much less challenged, by the journalists who report on it. Most Canadians would be outraged if the Globe and Mail or the CBC treated a press release from the Prime Minister’s Office as an indisputable fact, and yet those same organizations do that on an almost daily basis when it comes to the spit-polished pressers coming from Re/Max, Royal LePage, or the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA).

Part of the problem is that there’s no official opposition, so to speak. There are no organizations releasing glossy documents about why the latest sales figures portend trouble for the housing market, or making their experts available to speak on camera about why real estate isn’t the best investment a person can make. In the absence of some formal representation on behalf of real-estate’s null hypothesis, journalists are willing to take the word of those who argue so vociferously for its rejection.

The most common manifestation of this form of intellectual laziness is the willingness to treat press releases like uncontestable fact. Take a recent Royal LePage report that predicted a “stronger-than-expected” year that will “likely see home prices steadily rise.” The report predicted that average home prices would rise 3 per cent in 2011 to $348,600. This information was parroted without qualification or condition in most major newspapers, along with the familiar narrative – one created by companies like Royal LePage – that Canada has avoided the real-estate meltdown that hammered the American middle class because of our “stable banking industry, historically low interest rates and improving consumer confidence.”

But Garth Turner, a former MP and perhaps Canada’s most outspoken real-estate refusenik, points out that all of this supposed information was drawn from Royal LePage’s own agents. “Royal LePage commissioned no research company to collect data. No potential buyers or sellers were interviewed. No public sampling was done. No economists were polled to gather a consensus view. There was, simply put, no market data. Instead the sole source for this ‘report’ was an internal survey of the company’s own sales force. That’s right. Real estate agents – who bravely live or die by commission – were asked if they thought prices would rise or fall. And guess what?”

From a professional standpoint, building a story around a highly subjective industry report without either seeking out supporting data or soliciting alternative view points is bad enough. But what the Canadian Press’s Julian Beltrame did last week might be even worse. In a story that reports on news that the Canadian market recorded the lowest number of housing starts all year in December, Beltrame frames the news in the most industry-friendly way conceivable. No, the decline didn’t reflect a decline in the demand for housing, nor did it portend further weakness during the year ahead. Instead, it was a sign that the Canadian market had avoided a crash, and would instead manage a “soft landing” in the year ahead. Beltrame quoted the appropriate authorities, from CMHC chief economist Bob Dugan, who said that “I don’t see a reasonable scenario where the housing market would crash,” to Bank of Montreal economist Robert Kavcic, who confirmed that fears of a real-estate bubble were “pretty out the window now.”

It’s not clear that there is a real-estate crash to come for Canadians, although the fact that we continue to pile up consumer debt – most of which comes in the form of mortgages – in a low-interest environment that is certain to change (if rates doubled from their current levels they’d still be well below the historical norm) should give even the most optimistic onlooker some cause for concern. But the fact that Beltrame is so willing to dismiss it as a possibility amounts to the practice of reckless journalism. The combination of once-in-a-generation house prices (according to the numbers in a recent BC real estate association report, families there are spending 7.3 times their income on their homes; the American market collapsed when it hit the 4.6 mark), once-in-a-lifetime low interest rates (which, as Governor of Canada Mark Carney warned, could rise more quickly than people are prepared for) and record high levels of personal debt is one that could very easily precipitate a significant real-estate correction. If it does, Canadians will be well within their rights to blame journalists like Julian Beltrame and the editors who republished his piece for not providing them with accurate and timely information.

Isn’t this just a minor quibble in the grand scheme of things, though? Perhaps. But there are literally hundreds of thousands of people out there in this country who are dangerously deluded about the true nature of real estate, and every time a journalist like Julian Beltrame gives something like the Royal LePage report a free pass they effectively give weight and credibility to those fantasies. I was standing in line at my local grocery store yesterday in front of three such unfortunate cases, young women – university age, most likely – who were discussing why it was always better to own than to rent, how renting constitutes “wasting” money and how real-estate always goes up. It was as though they were reading straight out of a CREA pamphlet, and it would have been funny if it weren’t so terribly sad. The housing industry has tried to pass these self-serving fables off as immutable laws on the universe, ones no more contestable than the law of gravity. I don’t blame them for it, either. But I do blame journalists who mindlessly propagate these mistruths on their behalf, free of both charge and context.

I’m not suggesting that journalists like Julian Beltrame are deliberately fudging the facts when it comes to real-estate in Canada. They may, in fact be the victims of the intellectual equivalent of the Stockholm Syndrome, in that they want their own homes to increase in value and so are willing to assign privilege to arguments that support that outcome. But their willingness to treat self-serving professional spin like fact doesn’t help an industry whose credibility is already being questioned by the average Canadian. The job of a journalist is to provide the public with the best information available. When it comes to the coverage of real-estate the overwhelming majority of journalists in this country are failing to meet that standard. If journalism is to survive as a viable profession, the people practicing it have to do – and be – better than that.

The coverage of the British Medical Journal’s highly unusual decision to formally renounce Dr. Andrew Wakefield’s study that linked vaccinations with the development of autism in children illustrates of one of contemporary journalism’s worst flaws, the reflexive search for so-called balance in coverage. After all, short of a discussion about whether the Holocaust actually happened or not, the Wakefield case is as close to a slam-dunk as the media will get. On one side, you have a few b-list celebrities, the most outspoken of which is a former Playboy Playmate, and a noisy rabble of hyper-anxious mothers with far too much time on their hands and far too little education. On the other, you have virtually the entire scientific community – a community that isn’t naturally inclined towards consensus, either – supported by an overwhelming array of scientific data and evidence.

There’s no need, in other words, to meet the Wakefield study’s ludicrous conclusion with anything other than contempt. And yet, in a January 7 CBC Radio report on the subject, reporter Erin Collins opens the piece by presenting the relationship between vaccines and autism as a debatable one. The piece even includes an interview with Calgary naturopath Jennifer Nardella, an obvious attempt to “balance” out the conclusions of the scientists in the piece with a contradictory voice.

Whether reporters like Collins do this because they’ve been taught to or because they’re simply too lazy to do it any another way isn’t clear. But the motivation behind it isn’t clear, the practice itself is maddeningly common. Most journalists try to frame any issue that emits even a passing whiff of controversy by giving equal coverage and equal space to both sides of the story. This is, we’re told, the objective approach. The journalists provide the information, and the public gets to decide where it stands.

But what about those issues on which both sides of the story don’t deserve equal coverage? Jay Rosen, a media critic and professor at New York University, notes that the media has a much harder time with these sorts of situations. “The operating system for mainstream journalism knows what to do when there’s a legitimate debate to be had. But when there’s an illegitimate debate going on (and getting louder) that same system tends to break down, especially when the culture war and partisan divide are confounded with the issue.”

The supposed relationship between vaccines and autism would seem to be an illegitimate debate if there ever was one. The 1998 paper by Dr. Wakefield and colleagues was renounced by 10 of its 13 authors, and later retracted by the medical journal Lancet, where it was published. In an editorial that accompanied the edition of the BMJ that renounced Wakefield’s study, editor Fiona Godlee described it as “an elaborate fraud,” and suggested that the doctor’s work in other journals be re-examined for similar patterns of intellectual and academic abuse. And yet, in almost all of the coverage – save for Anderson Cooper’s impressive interview with Dr. Wakefield himself – the issue is treated as contestable.

Our job as journalists, I would submit, isn’t to mindlessly present both sides of every story, as seems to be the case in most circles today. Our job is to present the reading public with the best available information so that they can in turn make the best possible decisions with or about it. We should take care to avoid imposing our prejudices on our readers and on our work, but at some point we managed to confuse opinion with bias. Being objective doesn’t mean being relentlessly – and mindlessly – neutral on all things. It means being willing to assess the available evidence without resorting to preconceived notions or passing it through ideological filters. In some cases, as with the Wakefield study and the life-and-death consequences associated with continuing to perpetuate its deliberate falsehoods, we’re obligated to take a side, to have an opinion and to tell readers the way it is. As Jay Rosen writes, “what if choosing sides is exactly what the journalist would have to do to portray things as they really are?”

But while the Alberta Party may want to make political history in the notoriously one-sided province, if its leaders aren’t careful it might instead become just another footnote to it. After all, despite last month’s policy convention, the Alberta Party remains a concept – a moderate political party that doesn’t have the word Liberal anywhere in its name – without any apparent convictions. That’s not a luxury that they can afford as a centrist party, because for all the rhetoric about it being a grassroots political movement the Alberta Party will never enjoy the benefits of actually being one.

Grassroots movements tend to come from the sides, be it the left or the right, where inflammatory rhetoric, unrealistic promises and the shared identity of the outsider can serve as enticing forms of political bait for prospective supporters. The values of the political centre, from pragmatism and common sense to mutual respect and fiscal responsibility, don’t excite the same kind of populist passions.

In order to truly excite people, then, centrist parties have to rely on their ideas, and thus far the Alberta Party has been conspicuously silent on what its ideas for the province might be. To date, it has instead been a party of process rather than one of policy, and while that commitment to transparency and accountability might earn plaudits from political science professors it has the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell of capturing the attention, much less the imagination, of the electorate.

What the Alberta Party needs, then, is an idea. It needs a single, definitive, easily communicated vision of and for the province that will capture the attention, if not yet the imaginations, of average Albertans. It’s good that they want to do politics differently, but that’s a commitment to a process rather than a product. It’s like trying to sell somebody on the merits of a car’s drivetrain system without telling them what the car looks like or how fast it can go.

The Alberta Party also needs a leader capable of embodying that vision. While Sue Huff has done a good job as the party’s interim leader, they need to make sure that the person they choose in the forthcoming leadership race clearly reflects and represents the view of Alberta that they’re articulating. It’s no time to select a placeholder or a caretaker, either. The Alberta Party might be looking to the next election cycle rather than the current one, but if they don’t choose the right person for the job they may not be around then to contest it.

Vision is a term so widely abused in politics that it deserves some sort of special protection from the state, but that’s precisely what the Alberta Party needs to find if it is to remain relevant once its new-toy shine wears off. It needs to know what it actually stands for, above and beyond a commitment to doing politics differently. Most of all, it needs to stand for something. Being different, after all, will only get you so far. Just ask the members of the Alberta Liberal Party.

With a conservative government likely to still be at the helm, and a world in thrall to austerity budgets and deficit cutting, a repeat of such a generous funding agreement on the part of the federal government is about as likely a proposition as the silly end-of-days prophesies associated with 2012 actually coming true. That’s going to force us to make some very difficult choices, given that the aging of the bloated Baby Boomer generation will make holding the line on increases to health care funding somewhere near the rate of inflation a mathematical impossibility. The addition of nearly ten million new senior citizens over the next decade and the commensurate increase in demands for additional health care funding, be it for reduced prescription drug costs or increased access to hip replacements, will amount to a death sentence for the health care system as we’ve come to know it.

Thus far, efforts to address this aging elephant in the room have been limited to searching for operational efficiencies. But while outsourcing various administrative and operational tasks or will save money, it won’t save anywhere near enough to make a difference. It’s like the crew of the Titanic dumping the deck furniture into the ocean in an effort to keep the ship afloat, an exercise in self-defeating futility. Instead, we need to find a way to steer the ship around the iceberg in the first place.

The CBC’s Don Newman, for example, argues that the solution lies in the private delivery of publicly administered services. “Let the bulk of the public money going into health care go toward insuring hospital care and procedures and doctors services,” he writes. “Let the massively expensive infrastructure costs of health care — the physical hospital plant, the MRIs, CAT scans and the like — be provided by non-government sources: non-profit organizations, religious groups and, yes, for-profit hospitals.”

The problem with such a solution is that it does little to address the fundamental problem, the ever-expanding demand for health care services. Instead, it focuses on re-arranging the dynamics of the supply side of the equation. Newman gets a little closer to what might be considered a solution in suggesting that premiums on drug costs and other areas of heavy demand could be reintroduced. There, at least, he’s tying the solution to the problem, which isn’t how services are delivered but the rate at which they’re consumed.

The real solution, it seems to me, lies in taking this idea and applying it throughout the health care system. At present, we see very little relationship between the money we spend on health care and the services we receive. Yes, we know that our taxes go into a giant pool of money, and that some of that money is then re-allocated to fund health care services and programs, but the linkage is a weak one. You might call it the tragedy of the health care commons; we have access to a shared resource, but aren’t encouraged to preserve or protect it in any way. We aren’t punished for wasting health care resources, and we aren’t rewarded for saving them. If we want to avoid living in a society where 50, 60, or even 70 per cent of the annual government budget goes towards funding health care rather than, say, education, or childcare, or any other number of programs, we need to restore the link between users and the system.

My idea – and it’s just that, an idea, one without any supporting documentation or research – is a system in which every Canadian citizen is given an annual health care stipend. Each year, the stipend would be deposited into a health care account, and these stipends could be carried forward indefinitely and transferred between family members. But whenever a person accesses the health care system, be it to see a doctor or get a hip replaced, they’d have to pay for it with those stipends. If the cost of the procedure exceeded the balance of their account, they’d have to pay for it out of pocket.

For governments, this would create instant cost predictability. They could immediately cap health care spending at a certain level, and seek to reduce in future years as it saw necessary. Health care providers, meanwhile, would be governed by the same principles that define the system today. The cost of a given service could be set by a board of independent experts, a combination of health care professionals and elected officials, who would be best able to balance the demands of providers against the interests of taxpayers.

For individuals, it would forever put an end to the idea that health care was an indefinite and inalienable right. Instead, it would be viewed as a public good, something to be accessed with care and consideration and not frittered away out of indifference. It would likely act as an incentive to healthier forms of living, from staying in shape and eating well to taking a more critical view of potentially unnecessary prescriptions and procedures.

It could also be used to expand the range of health care services to which people have access. That’d be a welcome change, given the fact that the fight to keep health care public and universally accessible has often meant a reduction in the kinds of services that fall under that definition. Orthodontics, optometry, dentistry, and a variety of services that have been pushed out of the public health care tent could once again become an option for people.

The single biggest objection to this idea would be, I suspect, that it doesn’t just introduce private delivery into the public system but also the very spirit of private enterprise, a kind of Trojan horse that would inevitably lead to the conflation of patients and profits. I’d suggest, though, that what it really introduces is a sense of responsibility and thrift, values that are conspicuously absent in any debate about health care in 2010. We all want more and better, but more and better costs money, and that something that governments don’t exactly have a lot of these days. Unless Canadian explorers discover an eleventh province made entirely out of barrels of crude oil, we’re going to need to learn how to live with less for a long time to come. That effort has to be reflected in our approach to funding health care.