Mark Steyn: Da Brief is da Brief (Canadians fighting in the War on terror)

Mark, do a piece on the Khadr fiasco. Show the world what a true imbecile that Chretien is--and, for good measure--blame the people of Canada for perpetuating this one-party state! Be merciless!

If you’re tired of all those sneers about Canadians being a bunch of wussies who like to sit out the great conflicts of the age, the Khadr family provide bracing evidence that it’s not so. Indeed, the Khadr cadre is Canada’s most vigorous contribution to the war on terror. True, they’re on the side of the terrorists, but that’s one of the great benefits of multiculturalism – celebrating your distinctive cultural identity ensures that, even as our official armed forces rust away, Canada’s likely to be represented somewhere among the warring parties. And say what you will about the Khadrs but at least they’re getting our name out around the world: in the tribal lands of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier, the family patriarch, Ahmed Said Khadr, is known simply as “al Kanadi” — the Canadian.

As it happens, I wrote about Mr Khadr ten months ago, when I noted that he is “believed to be the highest-ranking Canadian citizen in al-Qaeda (at least until the late Osama’s Canadian passport is found in the ruins of one of those caves).” He's now back in the news because he and one of his offspring (Canadian born and bred) were thought to have been killed in a run-in with Pakistani forces in Waziristan the other day. It now seems that's not the case and the Canadian corps escaped to fight another day.

Three of Mr Khadr’s four sons are known to be al-Qaeda members. One is with him on the run. Two are being held at Guantanamo. In The Boston Globe this year, Colin Nickerson told how the youngest, Omar (born in Scarborough, Ontario in 1986), fell into American hands at the end of a bloody battle in the Afghan village of Ayub Kheyl:

A couple of things stand out about all this. I don’t mean the usual excuses from “moderate Muslims”: “Ahmed Khadr made his boys into his own image — a fanatic driven by hate for the West and wrong ideas of Islam,” said a Muslim cleric in Ontario. But – and you knew there was a “but” coming — “But if we blame the father, we must also be blaming the Americans, who have defiled the holy places with their tanks and smashed Afghanistan with their bombs.” Whatever, mullah dude.

But forget him and ponder instead the way Canada’s Foreign Ministry has been tireless in its efforts to save young Omar from the Yank torture camp in Gitmo, in striking contrast to their insouciance over Zahra Kazemi and Bill Sampson vis a vis the Iranians and Saudis. Even if the Government has an instinctively greater concern for prisoners of the Bush terror than of Middle Eastern despots, you’d have thought that in this case even the Liberals would be wary of going to bat for the Khadrs one mo’ time. The only reason Khadr pere is on the loose and doing such a sterling job with al-Qaeda is that in 1996 M Chretien got him sprung from the slammer in Pakistan.

ASK A WASHED-UP CANADIAN
An occasional series in which, in the absence of a column in his native land, Mark answers your questions on developments in the deranged Dominion. To suggest a topic, click here.

Da brief is da brief

Mark, do a piece on the Khadr fiasco. Show the world what a true imbecile that Chretien is--and, for good measure--blame the people of Canada for perpetuating this one-party state! Be merciless!

Alan West
Toronto

Three of Mr Khadr’s four sons are known to be al-Qaeda members. One is with him on the run. Two are being held at Guantanamo. In The Boston Globe this year, Colin Nickerson told how the youngest, Omar (born in Scarborough, Ontario in 1986), fell into American hands at the end of a bloody battle in the Afghan village of Ayub Kheyl:

Sergeant 1st Class Christopher J. Speer - a Special Forces medic who days earlier had risked his life to retrieve two injured Afghan children from a minefield - walked into the compound, seeking wounded. Suddenly a skinny figure rose from the rubble with a pistol in one hand and a grenade in the other. Omar Khadr, howling defiance, pitched the grenade.

The blast felled Speer, who would die of his wounds on Aug. 7. Omar took two bullets to the chest. He begged to be killed. ‘Shoot me,’ he screamed, according to Morris, but was instead saved from bleeding to death.

A couple of things stand out about all this. I don’t mean the usual excuses from “moderate Muslims”: “Ahmed Khadr made his boys into his own image - a fanatic driven by hate for the West and wrong ideas of Islam,” said a Muslim cleric in Ontario. But – and you knew there was a “but” coming - “But if we blame the father, we must also be blaming the Americans, who have defiled the holy places with their tanks and smashed Afghanistan with their bombs.” Whatever, mullah dude.

But forget him and ponder instead the way Canada’s Foreign Ministry has been tireless in its efforts to save young Omar from the Yank torture camp in Gitmo, in striking contrast to their insouciance over Zahra Kazemi and Bill Sampson vis a vis the Iranians and Saudis. Even if the Government has an instinctively greater concern for prisoners of the Bush terror than of Middle Eastern despots, you’d have thought that in this case even the Liberals would be wary of going to bat for the Khadrs one mo’ time. The only reason Khadr pere is on the loose and doing such a sterling job with al-Qaeda is that in 1996 M Chretien got him sprung from the slammer in Pakistan.

Mr Khadr had been arrested by the Pakistanis in connection with an embassy bombing that killed 17 people. Outraged at the detention of a Canadian “aid worker”, the Prime Minister personally intervened with the government in Islamabad, and Mr Khadr resumed his, er, “aid work”, culminating in the unfortunate events at the World Trade Center.

Understandably perhaps, M Chretien no longer regards his triumphant freeing of al Kanadi as a central part of his legacy. He now says he had “not been fully briefed” about Khadr before raising the matter with Benazir Bhutto. That sounds about right: “Waal, you know, da brief is da brief and when you get da good brief dat da brief. So I hear da Canadian been arrested and he one o’ da ethnic type dat all vote Liberal nice an’ multicultural, so, natural, he mus’ be da innocent…”

But who exactly did brief M Chretien and talk him into signing up Canada as guarantor of al Kanadi? Well, it was mostly Canadian Islamic groups and, celebrating his diversity, the Prime Minister took them at their word.

The other thing that stands out is the lack of interest by the Canadian press about the Khadrs’ terrorist activities. This is in marked contrast to the coverage old Pop Khadr got back when he was just an “aid worker”. “PM Plans To Raise Case of Aid Worker” (Canadian Press). “Caught In A Muddle: An Arrested Aid Worker Appeals For Chretien’s Help” (Maclean’s). And once he was out of his “muddle” The Toronto Star’s Rosemary Spiers hailed the Prime Minister’s intercession as evidence of a newfound Chretien commitment to human rights.

But now that Mr Khadr is no longer a quaint multicultural “aid worker” the Canadian media are curiously incurious about him. These days, you have to look south of the border to find out much about him. For example, two weeks ago Richard A Clark testified in Washington before the Senate Banking Committee:

Human Concern International (HCI) reportedly received at least $250,000 in funding from the Canadian government. The Pakistan office of HCI was headed by Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader and al Qida founder Ahmed Said Khadr. Khadr has been described by Canadian intelligence services as a close associate of Usama bin Laden and senior al Qida money man. Khadr and HCI convinced Canadian government funding agencies to sponsor "charitable projects" for "Afghan refugees" when in fact the funds were used to provide financial and operational support to Jihad forces.

I know 250,000 bucks would be chump change for the Privacy Commissioner or at the Federal Gun Registry. But, unlike the Canadian government, al-Qaeda knows how to make a quarter of a million go a long way. And, by way of comparison, when it was revealed that the Queen’s ceremonial dropping of the Golden Jubilee puck in Vancouver had cost taxpayers a hundred grand, it was a story of such outrageous fiscal irresponsibility that Canadian dailies from coast to coast put it on Page One. Happily for Mr Khadr and his network, the funding of Islamic terrorism by Canadian taxpayers doesn’t have that kind of hold-the-front-page “sexiness” (as the BBC would say).

How many cadres of Khadrs are there in Canada? Probably very few, in the sense of whole families willing to spend months in crappy camps in the Hindu Kush learning to kill infidels. But how many people are there in the west prepared to provide financial backing and employment cover and a support network to terrorists? Two years after September 11th, that’s still unknown. What we do know, though, is that, while Britain, America, Australia, France and Germany have all produced their share of western jihadi, Ahmed Said Khadr remains the only one fortunate enough to have a G7 head of government as his personal sponsor.
STEYNONLINE November 7th 2003

Chretien's handshake

So here we have President Bush who applies his values and stands squarely against what the Malaysian Prime Minister said in his rambling and distorted diatribe against Jews. Mr. Bush told him of his views on the topic in no uncertain ways. Contrast that to our feeble minded and embarrassing Prime Minister Chretien. I quote from the newspaper: "He was there and I shook hands with him like with everybody else." If it was not so pathetic, it would almost be laughable. Was it not some 2 years ago at the Francophonie Conference in Beirut Lebanon that Mr. Chretien sat just a few seats away from the Hezbollah terrorist leader, one of the world's foremost terrorists, and was seen to be communicating with him or at the least, offering a greeting? When asked about that incident he following day he responded that they were both part of the conference and he did not see a problem with that. More recently as everyone knows, Hezbollah has been put on a terrorist list.

My, my. Could one conclude that his judgment is, can we say, suspect??

John Liebman
Montreal

Actually, Dr Mahathir’s remarks weren’t at all “rambling”. They were expressed with his customary pithiness: Jews “rule the world by proxy”. The Malaysian Prime Minister is a smart guy but, like almost every other one of the 57 leaders at that Islamic summit, he has one huge blind spot. George W Bush’s response – to take him aside and tell him he was wrong – is exactly what we’ve come to expect from this President. By contrast, Jean Chretien’s response is exactly what we’ve come to expect from him: waal, you know, I shake da han’ of da leaders all da time, etc, etc. He offered Dr Mahthir no thoughts on his remarks, and, when asked whether he had any personal view of his colleague’s interesting thesis, appeared to have no opinion one way or the other.

My own theory is that, just as Canada was the only western nation afflicted by SARS, so too it may be the only western nation afflicted by Sudanese Vanishing Penis Syndrome. This ran rampant round Khartoum last month, after reports that foreigners were shaking hands with Sudanese men and causing their penises to “melt away”. I’m not a trained physician – if I were, I’d have left Montreal and be working in Houston – but, insofar as I understand it, in Khartoum what happens is that the foreigner shakes hands with the Muslim and the Muslim subsequently discovers that he has “lost his penis”. But, in this distinctively Canadian variant, what happens is that the foreigner shakes hands with the Muslim and it’s the foreigner – the Canadian – who discovers that his manhood has completely disappeared. No doubt M Chretien entered the room intending to treat Dr Mahathir to a vigorous Bush-like demonstration of moral clarity only to shake his hand and get that strange shrinking feeling.

I wish I could say that this was the first known Canadian case of the disease. But, judging from Bill Graham’s remarks whenever a Canadian gets tortured or murdered by an Islamist thug regime, it seems to have infected the entire government. In Sudan, the affliction is known as “vanishing penis”; in Canada, it’s known as the “soft power” doctrine. You’ll recall “soft power” is what Lloyd Axworthy claimed Canada was good at “projecting”. But, as those Sudanese guys would tell you, soft power is hard to project at all.

Happily, it doesn’t yet afflict Canadian officials who shake hands with British or American leaders. M Chretien is still capable of expressing moral outrage if, say, Tony Blair recommends a Canadian for a knighthood. For his part, Mr Graham can huff and puff with the best of them when the US military capture an upstanding Canadian citizen fighting for al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and have the nerve to hold him at Guantanamo. If you’re seized in Teheran and get the cattle prods wired up to your genitals, Mr Graham may be prepared to concede that it’s “unfortunate”, though, of course, the Iranian authorities have been immensely helpful in the matter. But, if you’re an al-Qaeda member currently living on welfare in Ontario and you get asked to step inside and provide proof of identity at the Windsor/Detroit crossing, this is completely “unacceptable”.

One final thought: when the Liberal Party invented “multiculturalism” as Canada’s official state religion, one sort of assumed that they were cynical enough not to fall for it themselves – that left in a room with the New Zealand Prime Minister and the Syrian President they could still tell the difference. M Chretien genuinely doesn’t seem able to. As for standing up to the Islamic world’s routinely loopy Jewish conspiracy theories, given current immigration trends in Canada, there is a certain compelling demographic logic in the Prime Minister’s reluctance to take any position one way or the other.
STEYNONLINE October 24th 2003

Rowing uphill

Mr. Steyn,

Long may the new Conservative Party in Canada prosper. I have not been this excited since Conrad Black announced he was starting a new paper.

David Frum has a good article in the National Post today. And Ann Coulter is there too defending Rush. Warms my heart.

How 'bout using your pulpit to lay down a gauntlet to conservatives in Canada? I mean for us to get off our asses and help the cause. Row a little or quit the bitching.

I think the conservative cause in Canada is at a crossroads and can use your help. Long may you prosper. God Bless.

Nathan McLeod
Whistler Wired Vacations Inc.
Whistler, British Columbia

Oh, dear, I wish I were as enthusiastic as you. We may be at a crossroads, but I’m not sure I’m ready to row, though that doesn’t mean I’m going to be abandoning ship and heading back down the street. But if I dump a huge shower of rain on your parade that's all the more reason to keep rowing.

First, if conservatism is a “cause”, is it advanced by diluting your message for those whom, whatever their qualities, do not believe in the cause? And, indeed, pride themselves (like Joe Clark) on their instinctive disdain for causes. I don't believe in ideological purity but I do think a certain philosophical consistency doesn't go amiss. The reason the Liberal Party keeps winning elections is not because the opposition is divided but because the form of their opposition is. There’s a lot of people who resent the Grits, but their resentment expresses itself differently across the country: in the west, by voting Alliance, which for all its flaws is a more or less philosophically coherent conservative party; in the east, by voting for whichever party outbids the others for the favours of the electorate; in Quebec, by voting for the world’s most inept secessionist movement; and in Ontario, by …well, opposition to the Grits doesn’t really express itself at all there.

The Liberal vote expresses itself consistently from coast to coast; the anti-Liberal vote expresses, alas, the rich diversity and many cultures of this land. If one were attempting to form a principled opposition from these various groups, it could be argued that the Alliance and the Bloc have more in common, if only as a marriage of convenience, in the sense that both are committed to strong regional autonomy. Combining the Alliance, which is what passes for red meat in Canadian politics, and the Progressive Conservatives, who are for the most part the None Of The Above vote, is a trickier business. I cannot deny that I would have preferred for the Alliance to wait another election cycle or two until the Tories had drowned in their debts. Killing off the PCs would have given the Alliance more credibility than giving them a deal.

On the other hand, the new party has a great name: the Conservative Party. Even for the squishiest Tories in the western world, “Progressive Conservatives” was a cringe-making name.

On the other other hand, the agreement-in-principle between the two parties confirms that the “progressive” bit has just been moved into the shadows, where it can operate more stealthily. As its first “founding principle” states, the Conservative Party will be guided by…

A balance between fiscal accountability, progressive social policy and individual rights and responsibilities.

The biggest issues in Canada arise from the attempt to find a “balance” between “progressive social policy” and “individual rights and responsibilities” – and, given that the fellows attempting to find the balance are the purveyors of progressive conventional wisdom, generally speaking they come down on the side of “progressive social policy” and against the individual every time, at least if the individual is a practicing Christian, gun owner, a landed immigrant who wishes to open a bookstore or buy a radio station, etc. That formulation, right up there in paragraph 1, is deeply disquieting for those who believe individual rights are in a far weaker state in Canada than they ought to be.

On the other other other hand, most of the stuff below it is surprisingly robust: a commitment to “freedom of the individual… constitutional monarchy, the institutions of Parliament… the freedom of individual Canadians to enjoy the fruits of their liberty to the greatest possible extent…” I would have liked something in there about the need for Canada, as a sovereign nation, to maintain a strong credible defence of its borders and its interests, and the absence of any such pledge suggests that a Conservative Government of Canada would cut a less risible but not substantially more impressive figure on the world stage than the current occupants.

For better or worse, Reform/Alliance was by Canadian standards a strongly defined party. When you merge it with an ideological blur, the result is bound to be, particularly for the original Reformers, a misty watercolour memory of the way we were. In this marriage, the ideologues are fainthearts and the blurrers are the fanatics.

The reality is that the Reform/Alliance component of the new party will remain an impossible sell in Quebec and the Atlantic provinces. Preston Manning, Stockwell Day, Mike Harris and Stephen Harper are as foreign to Quebeckers as Strom Thurmond, and a lot more foreign than Jacques Chirac or Gerhard Schroeder. Who can put a face on the party to sell it in the east without selling it out, and without reminding the west why they gave up on the Central Canada establishment in the first place? Mario Dumont? Given that the Bloc is fading fast, the new party has to take more seats from the Liberals in Ontario than the Liberals pick up in Quebec. They can’t do that by spring. And, if not spring, then why not have left things till after the election?

I’m not a whiner or a bitcher and I expect very little from Canadian conservatism these days, so let’s make the test a simple one: can the leaders of this new party survive the few weeks of a general election campaign without, like Jean Charest in 1997 or Stockwell Day in 2000, being dragged to the left by the media and the Liberals? If they can, it’ll be a great start.
STEYNONLINE October 18th 2003

ISRAEL ASPER

1932-2003

Izzy Asper, the man whose purchase of The National Post set off the chain of events discussed below, died suddenly on Tuesday morning. It would be foolish of me to pretend he was my favourite newspaper proprietor: I wish the Post had remained in the hands of its founder, Conrad Black, and that the team he assembled was still running it. But you can’t pick and choose your media moguls, especially in Canada, where the government’s prohibition on non-Canadian ownership has, predictably enough, driven control of the big media into an ever narrower clique of owners. When you want to sell a newspaper group in Canada, you have to find someone Canadian to buy it, and that doesn’t leave a lot of choice. If and when the Aspers want to sell the CanWest papers, there’ll be even less choice of potential owners.

None of this is Izzy’s fault. As he always said, you play the hand you’re dealt, and he played the Canadian system more shrewdly than any media man of his generation. Three decades ago, he bought a small North Dakota TV station and made it the springboard for Canada’s biggest media empire, encompassing a national TV network, a national newspaper, and the major metropolitan dailies in just about every big city except his own hometown of Winnipeg. By any standards, that’s an amazing achievement. I knew very little about him in the summer of 2000 when he bought the Canadian branch of Conrad Black’s Hollinger empire, but someone reminded me of his campaign slogan back when he was a Liberal MP in the Manitoba legislature: “Izzy clever? Izzy ever!” Hard to argue with that.

There were two things I agreed with him on: his taste in music – he loved Gershwin – and his support for Israel. I also liked the way he stayed a hometown boy. When you stroll round downtown Winnipeg, half the stuff seems to be named “the Israel Asper this” or “the Israel Asper that”, but unlike Senator Robert C Byrd in West Virginia – or Robert C Byrdistan, as I like to think of it – Izzy got his name on every building in town by using his own money, not the taxpayers’. During some stalled negotiations with The National Post, Ken Whyte said the Aspers were prepared to give me a show on Global. I said nuts to that, but I wouldn’t mind a gig at the Izzy Asper Jazz Festival. When the Toronto media elite sneered at CanWest for wanting to centralize their newspaper operations in Winnipeg, they missed the point: they’re the ones who sound hicky and parochial. Izzy saw no reason why you can’t run a business empire from wherever you want, and in his case wherever was Winnipeg.

The politics? Lloyd Axworthy, former Foreign Minister, proponent of Canada’s hilarious “soft power” doctrine and friend of Izzy, conceded on the CBC that he was more from “the liberal end” of the Liberal Party and Izzy more from “the conservative end”. Whatever. In a one-party state, the one party has to accommodate a wider range of views than parties in a functioning democratic system: no doubt there’s also a socialist end of the Liberal Party and a Wahhabi end and all kinds of other ends. I wish Izzy Asper had recognized that this was the unhealthiest aspect of life in Canada and that he would have done his country a great service had he thrown the weight of his newspaper group behind it. I suspect that, had he lived, the increasing (and electorally quite rational) Palestinianization of the ruling party would have eventually estranged him from the Liberals. A full life, over too soon. Rest in peace.
STEYNONLINE October 8th 2003

NOT MY CANADA, NOT MY POST

Three years ago I departed The American Spectator and I’ve never said a word about it. That was the way I would have left things at The National Post.

But since you ask…

First, I have no objection to owners firing editors. As a general rule, I’m all in favour of firing people. Canadian newspapers in particular would benefit from massive multiple firings. However, it only works if the guys who are fired are replaced by guys who are better. That is not the case with The National Post.

Secondly, I didn’t leave just because of that dumb ad campaign. It’s the broader problem this particular dumb ad campaign symbolises. Its feeble Sheila Copps happy-face maple-boosterism would be just as fine for promoting the CBC, The Toronto Star, the Juno Awards, or any of the other lame props of the Trudeaupian state. Canada already has a national paper for the establishment, and, given that The Globe And Mail has a century's head start, the Post by definition has to be the anti-Globe - the non-establishment paper. The Globe has sewn up the market on conventional wisdom. Therefore, the Post has to be scrappy, insurgent, provocative, livelier. This is a commercial logic as much as an ideological one. When you look at the writers who've left - me, Frum, Blatch, Wells, Coyne - we're ideologically all over the map but what we have in common is a skepticism about that reflexive Jeffrey Simpsonian Anglo-Canadian conventional smugness.

Paul Wells wrote a very fine column on the glory days of the Post in the September 8th Maclean’s, in which he drew a distinction between the paper’s right-wing ideologues and the zippy innovative exciting good writers. I was saddened to find myself lumped in the “ideologue” half of the ledger, rather than the “good writing” one, but there we are. But Paul underlines a good point: the Post was as much about tone as ideology. After all, if you’re going to sell a politics that the rest of the Canadian media thinks is nuts, you’ve got to do it by being better than they are in every other way – better design, better headlines, better ideas, better laughs. But, within 48 hours of Ken Whyte and Martin Newland’s departure, the front page of the Post died. There’s no sense from its layout and bland wire-service headlines what the paper considers important for Canadians to know. Meanwhile, the new guy’s “new” ideas are squaresville and hicky. A new weekly column “on celebrity”? Where have you been the last 20 years, man? The only thing more stunted than Gary Coleman is being the fellow who makes a living writing a column on the cultural significance of Gary Coleman.

So that prompts an obvious question: given that the paper’s lost its style and brio, can it be an effective vehicle for promoting change in Canada?

One of the most tedious aspects of Canadian life is the way Liberal Party policies are always sold as “Canadian values”: socialized health care, the gun registry, sitting out the war on terror, etc. Do you listen to CBC radio? Me neither. But, on obscure stretches of highway when nothing else comes in, I love their political discussions, in which a centre-left host moderates a panel comprising someone from the soft left, someone from the hard left and someone from the loony left, as if that’s the only range of opinion acceptable in polite society. These folks genuinely believe in Trudeaupia. But, given that they’ve cornered the market on that, there ought to be one outlet for those who want a different Canada, a Canada that doesn’t despise its own history, that recognizes that the last four decades have seen us slide from a major second-rank power to a global irrelevance, that the Trudeaupian road is a dead end, and that we need something new.

When Conrad Black sold his remaining 50% share in the Post, he gave a farewell speech to the newsroom in which he said that the paper needed a proprietor who had better connections with the Liberal Party elite - presumably because that's the way things work in Canada. I said to Conrad recently that that's the last thing the Post needs. As a Canadian whose principal assets are in the United Kingdom and the United States, he’s one of the few businessmen who doesn’t need any favours from the government. Almost every activity in the dependents’ Dominion – from books to aircraft manufacturing – obliges companies to enter into some sort of formal or informal relationship with the government. That’s bad. It would be bad enough in a functioning democracy, where at least the asses one is obliged to kiss are rotated every five years. But it’s worse in a one-party state like Canada, where it’s always the same Liberal Party posterior, no matter how saggy and mottled it gets. Canada is no longer quite a respectable democracy, and I want to write for a paper that understands that.

Instead, week by week, the editorials are slowly but surely swimming back toward the shallow end of the pool.

Iraq? The Post now argues that Washington should “accelerate plans to bring the United Nations, international NGOs and other Muslim nations on-board.” Who needs The Globe And Mail? The NGOs have fled Iraq. Say what you like about the wicked Halliburton, its murky subsidiaries and its sinister private-sector compadres, but, unlike the pussies at Oxfam, they’re still sticking it out over there.

Canada’s decrepit underfunded military? The Post argues that there’s no way we can compete - not just with America or Britain, but with Australia or France or Italy. Instead, they say that our armed forces should emulate …Norway.

Is that really “as conservative as Canada’s media get”? Is that the most Canadian conservatives can expect from a so-called conservative newspaper?

And, underneath the big issues, the ongoing Paul Martinization of the paper proceeds apace, to the point where cringe-making attempts to ingratiate pop up all over the place. A couple of weeks back, the editorial on mandatory retirement included this aside on Mr Martin: “While we would have preferred he run a livelier leadership campaign, his failure to do so has nothing to do with his age.”

So the Post has set its course. I don’t mind being the token right-wing madman at The Irish Times, anymore than I would at The Guardian or The Toronto Star. But, by staying with the Post as it relocates to the great wobbling blancmange of Canadian conventional wisdom, all I’d be doing is providing a bit of cover for the abandonment of its identity. Helping to make a Martinized Post profitable would outdo any good I'd accomplish in the column. My friend and editor Natasha Hassan still runs a better comment page than the Globe, but the news pages before it and the leader page opposite it are wimpier by the week. I don’t want to lend my name to the conversion of the Black/Whyte Post into a paper that thinks we need the UN running Iraq and aspires to the military might of Norway.

Am I giving up on my native land? No. True, when it comes to attractive offers from Canuck media, the phone hasn’t stopped not ringing. But I’ll have a book on Canada out next year and some thrilling new developments before that.

The team Ken and Conrad put together to launch The National Post is the best I’ve ever been part of, on either side of the Atlantic, and I would have been happy to stay with it for years.

But that paper’s gone.

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