O, Canada

...He wants Canada to meet the European target of giving 0.7 percent of GDP to the Third World (it sits at 0.28 percent today...

...When praising his big cities, the author underestimates the growing crime rates, especially in property crimes and in some violent crimes...

...Gun crimes in Toronto are up...

...Thankfully, Ibbitson does not forget to note that anti-Americanism is getting out of hand in Canada, and is risking "a corrosive effect on Canada-U.S...

...Several pages later Ibbitson calls for a battalion...

...To find out more about a bottom-up strategy for Canadian conservatism, there is a fascinating new book out by Tasha Kheiriddin and Adam Daifallah, Rescuing Canada's Right: Blueprint f^^r a Conservative Revolution...

...Why does Ibbitson kick these "value conservatives" so hard, except perhaps because they are a tiny minority...

...The immigrant, the modern city dweller, and the moral progressives have done this despite the "backward-looking social intolerance" of "the desiccated remnant of Canada's colonial past...

...religious conservatives as the scourge of the land...

...The best part of Ibbitson's book is about policy fixes in areas where the Liberal party left a legacy of failure...

...Ibbitson, who wrote before the current prime minister, Stephen Harper, won his minority government early in 2006, equates him with "radical ideologues in Alberta" and with giving away Canadian sovereignty to the United States...

...In response to research that older immigrants coming in the 1980s are not doing as well economically as immigrants who came in the 1960s, bring them in young and train them in Canada...

...There is no explanation...

...Yes, repressed peoples such as in North Korea and Zimbabwe need our help, but it won't come through the United Nations...

...Much of the wealth in Canada is still mined, pumped, and logged in rural areas, so it is not obvious why city folks should feel superior...

...or other schemes of peace building that basically added nothing to Canadian national security...

...This was no change of heart but a desperate attempt by then-Prime Minister Paul Martin to steal yet another policy plank from the rising Stephen Harper...

...I have been around Canadian Forces personnel for many years, and only now do I detect a new bounce in their step and a sense of real progress towards rebuilding a force that can have a strong expeditionary capacity to operate alongside key allies such as the United States...

...and he wants to institute compulsory voting...

...The solution is to provide public health insurance, but allow both public and private healthcare to mix and compete...

...But this will take a much more proactive Canadian commitment than most Canadians realize...

...Ibbitson is still taken by the Liberal idea of a "Responsibility to Protect," another U.N...

...Sensible things are proposed, such as regulatory harmonization, less border controls, and more labor mobility...

...These dynamic folk go to the three big cities, drive Canada's urban renewal, and help it stave off the graying and depopulation threats facing most other Western democracies...

...His last recommendations are on foreign and defense policy...

...There is an open season on two more species beside Christian conservatives: Albertans, and those who do not dislike and distrust Americans...

...Yawn...

...Another vignette of Canadian politics reveals itself...

...relations...

...things military are not the author's forte...

...He proposes proportional representation, but qualifies it so much that it falls flat...

...If there is no better accountability, the money would be wasted...

...Ibbitson's partisan attitude is truly overdone...

...He is also right about calling for major reforms in Canada's Communistlike health care system which prohibits private health care...

...I am sure Ibbitson does not have a fascist bone in his body, but those opposed to gay marriage, abortion, and who treasure the usual list of traditional family values are simply dismissed as not good Canadians...

...The irony is that Ibbitson actually wants to make an argument for (economic) conservative policy proposals in the core of this book, but apparently wants to make absolutely sure that no one mistakes him for a social conservative...

...In case you missed it, that was a description of Canadian conservatives...

...Fair enough...

...Ibbitson is bold and right about Canada's policies toward Native Peoples...

...More young people are religiously conservative than older people, and immigrants themselves generally dislike the moral decay the author sees as solid evidence for Canadian progress...

...Often a libertarian in his proposals, Ibbitson nevertheless remains resistant to the logic of tax cuts fueling his revolution...

...The author is also oblivious to the mountains of evidence showing that traditional official development assistance does not work...

...Ibbitson only wants to apply some prescriptions without understanding conservative philosophy, or without explaining how Canadian politics must first create the conditions for conservative policies to be implemented...

...He wants to force immigrants to live outside Canada's big cities (what about their individual rights...

...If some American heartland conservatives imply that liberal Americans are not patriotic enough, liberals in Canada regard Canadian Alexander Moens is professor of political science at Simon Fraser University...

...He offers a good idea...

...Now, provinces such as Alberta and Quebec have begun to take health care into their own hands, though Quebec depends on Ottawa's financial handouts...

...What Native People need are more individual rights, including private property rights on Native Reserves, and fewer group rights...

...Nothing much new here, but it provides a useful overview of the main themes...

...We will see...

...In contrast to Ibbitson's predictions about Harper, Canadians are now watching a very skilled and cautious new prime minister, while Ibbitson predicts Harper can never win in the cities...

...His first sound call is for the federal government to give back tax and governing powers to the provinces and to stop using regional subsidies, such as unemployment insurance, to reward inefficiency and corruption...

...and North American Free Trade Agreements that financed Ibbitson's polite revolution...

...For years, Canadians have been led down the garden paths of U.N...

...Toward the end of the book, Ibbit-son tries unconvincingly to kickstart some democratic reforms...

...The thing about modern Canada that gets the author very excited is the fact that it admits twice as many immigrants per capita as the United States...

...Many Americans may be startled to find Canada's polite revolution defined as the freedom to break the Sabbath and "smoke pot while watching an unrated movie during your same-sex honeymoon...

...After having hollowed out Canadian Forces from the 1980s onward, Ibbitson detected a "change of heart" in the last Liberal government when it promised to boost defense spending from $13 billion to $20 billion over five years...

...Liberal governments pandered to public phobias about American health care and never moved an inch...

...So far, too many Natives that do so end up on the streets...

...Greater Vancouver, for example, is suffering from epidemic levels of car theft...

...Why one brigade...

...His book wants to praise the liberals—and registered Liberals, for that matter—for bringing about a polite revolution by which Canada has been transformed from a backward dominion into a multicultural, urban, latent world power...

...What he means is that Native Peoples should leave the rural reserves and join the mixing throngs in the big cities...

...He wants more nonelected bodies, such as the Liberal-appointed Supreme Court, to make decisions that bypass self-serving political trends...

...He calls Prime Minister Brian Mulroney "a failure," even though Mulroney negotiated the Canada-U.S...

...He wishes that the Liberal party of Canada, which ruled Canada for most of the last decades—this is also the fault of those social conservatives whose values have made the Conservative party "its own worst ene-my"—could adopt some conservative ideas and, in so doing, consolidate the revolution...

...The cure is worse than the disease...

...What would that add...

...Bang on: He says the "danger is not that Canada will grow too close to the United States, but that we are growing too far apart...

...If the reader is interested in gaining insight into what Canadian conservatives—even just economic conservatives—think, this is not the right book...

...Ibbitson believes this very urban, multicultural, and morally licentious revolution may yet fulfill one of Canada's most ridiculous prognostications when, in 1904, Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier proclaimed that the 20th century would belong to Canada...

...Anyhow, given Canada's economic size and its stake in world trade and peace, Canada's defense budget should really be in the neighborhood of $40 billion...

...they are wasteful and ineffective...

...Ibbitson rightly argues for breaking the public monopoly on Canadian universities, but he does not go far enough...

...But Ibbitson's conclusion that the "ultimate solution to ending the aboriginal disadvantage within Canada might lie in integra-tion—not as a matter of policy, but as a matter of destiny" is rather glib...

...Not only are Canadian public universities not reinvesting, they are also (at least in the social sciences) dependent on government research grants that pander to left-wing and politically correct research programs...

...Having missed that target, Ibbitson feels we have a good shot at the 21st century...

...Canadian small town folks do not generally have racist attitudes towards newcomers, just less contact and less knowledge...

...pledge for which the author wants to have one Canadian brigade ready at all times...

...The author advances the myth that crime rates in Canada are falling, but the opposite is happening, as recent research has shown...