The Daily Pulse, Tuesday, March 29.

"We just don't do whole things anymore. We don't read complete books — just excerpts. We don't listen to whole CDs — just samplings. We don't sit through whole baseball games — just a few innings. Don't even write whole sentences. Or read whole stories like this one. We care more about the parts and less about the entire. We are into snippets and smidgens and clips and tweets. We are not only a fragmented society, but a fragment society. And the result: What we gain is the knowledge — or the illusion of knowledge — of many new, different and variegated aspects of life. What we lose is still being understood." -Linton Woods, "We Are Just Not Digging the Whole Anymore" (NPR)

 
Obama delivering an address last night at the National Defense University in Washington. (AP) 

The Obama Doctrine

U.S. will intervene abroad selectively but more often to prevent genocide. It will form coalitions to do so, not acting unilaterally. U.S. will take the lead, as only it can do as world's leading military power, but hand off to coalition ASAP. Regime change must be the will of a foreign people, not of the U.S., and it's for them to accomplish. America has a moral and practical interest in stepping up its global humanitarianism. Transcript of Obama address here. Video here.

Reax

Michael Crowley: Doctrine is clear, but the mission isn't. (Time)

Lexington: Birth of an Obama doctrine. (Economist)

Andrew Sullivan: Obama's most important words: "America is different." (Atlantic)

Tom Ricks: A remarkable join-the-dots Obama speech. (Foreign Policy)

Steve Hallock: Yet another blow to Congress' war powers. (Philadelphia Inquirer)

William Kristol: Obama has come a long way. (Weakly Standard)

David Frum: Obama's "Mission Accomplished" moment. (FrumForum)

News from a distant planet

Donald Trump, born-again birther, produces "birth certificate" that isn't really his birth certificate. (Ben Smith, Politico) * Gingrich fears rise of "Islamist-aetheists" - a contradiction in terms. (Justin Elliott, Salon) Sixties stand-up Woody Allen on the cause of a break-up: "We couldn't decide which religion not to raise the kids in." * GOP, severely in need of ear dewaxing, accuse Obama of being "timid" and "passive" on Libya, just now being blown to smithereens by U.S. cruise missles. (Stephanie Condon, CBS)

Arab uprisings

Entire Syrian cabinet resigns, latest effort by increasingly desperate Assad to placate forces of dissent. (Zeina Karam, AP) Israeli Syrian expert says Assad regime fighting for its life. (Linda Gradstein, AOL News) Gadhafi still in breach of UN resolution, David Cameron points out. (Nicholas Watt, Guardian) Qatar first Arab nation to recognize Syrian rebels as legitimate rulers of the nation. (Regan Doherty, Reuters)

Japan update

 
Firefighters carry the body of Kotomi Murakami, 85, from her collapsed home in Rikozentakata city, Iwate prefecture, on Monday. (Getty Images)

Government declares "Maximum alert" as leaked radiation spreads as far south as Tokyo. (Mari Yamaguchi and Yuri Murakami, AP) Leaked plutonium discovered outside Fukushima reactor. (Alok Jha, Guardian) Advice of Chernobyl clean-up worker: "Run away as quickly as possible." (Dana Kennedy, AOL News) 

Oh, goodies

 
Layton rally in Surrey, B.C. (Reuters)

Layton promises cap on credit card interest rates. (Joanna Smith, Toronto Star) Class-action suit claims Visa, MasterCard and banks are fixing prices. (Toronto Star)

Ignatieff promises $1 billion in student assistance. (Les Whittington, Toronto Star)

The Gaggle

Aaron Wherry: Harper's belief a coalition of losers can take 24 Sussex dates from 1997. (Maclean's)

Warren Kinsella: Race will tighten, Tories will regret their pre-writ anti-Iggy ads. (QMI/Toronto Sun)

Andrew Coyne: Is Iggy befuddled or shameless in pandering to Quebec nationalists? (Maclean's)

Thomas Walkom: Harper's curious "hidden agenda" talk. (Toronto Star)

William Watson: Iggy wouldn't need a formal coalition to govern. (Ottawa Citizen)

Colby Cash: Stop whinging about the"coalition" talk. It's important to get this right. (Maclean's) 

Gillian Steward: "Battleground Alberta" is pretty small. (Toronto Star)

Margaret Wente: The only question is how many seats the Liberals will lose. (Globe and Mail)

Edward Greenspon: Most interesting C-word of campaign, "centralist" (Toronto Star)

Emerging scientific superpowers

China and other big developing nations seek U.S. crown in scientific-discovery leadership. (Kate Kelland, Reuters)

Annals of commerce

Oil will be gone in 50 years, HSBC economist asserts. (Patrick Allen, CNBC)

The top 10 dying industries, none of which is nail parlors, and one of which is newspapers. (Phil Izzo, WSJ)

Vox

 
Demonstrating against Wal-Mart in Utah in 2005, five years after as many as one million women, current and former employees of the firm, joined the biggest class-action suit in history, alleging gender bias by the retailer. The landmark case finally reached the U.S. Supreme Court today. (Wikipedia Commons) 

Barbara Ehrenreich: Wal-Mart in the dock, at last! (American Prospect)

Michael Lind: The failure of Western capitalism. (Salon)

Chris Hedges: The collapse of globalization. (TruthDig)

Monica Potts: Liberal urbanites are wrong that rural voters have undue sway. (American Prospect)

How's your health?

Pain and social rejection (i.e. being dumped) have similar effect on your brain. (Jennifer Warner, WebMD)

The secret of fighting infections - if only more hospitals would adopt it. (Laura Landro, WSJ)

How Western diets are making the world sick. (Kevin Patterson, NPR)

Social studies

 
Women cyclists in Paris, 1896.

The untold story of how the bicycle empowered women. (Maria Popova, Atlantic)

Top 10 dirty words, by gender, in U.K. and East Coast U.S. (Andrew Sullivan, Atlantic)

30% of U.S. poll respondents say Justin Bieber will be in celeb rehab by age 30. (National Post)

 

 

Enjoy your day.

 
(Getty Images)

 

 

Leafs Agonistes.

The Star's Mark Zwolinski has a terrific read today on how every Leaf team since 1998 has had at least one late-season surge that brought Leafs Nation close to the playoffs or, less frequently, earned them a playoff berth.

 
(Toronto Star photo)

A bad habit, obviously, to let a ton of games go down the rathole, hoping to make it up later. Fatal, you might expect, save that Leaf Nation keeps showing up to suffer the complacent blue and white, season after dismal season. Only a boycott will hammer the point home to MLSE, and more important the players, that we deserve better. Otherwise, they've not had an incentive to "play up," as Baden-Powell exhorted his Boy Scouts. The Indians of the 1980s had to play to "crowds" of 5,000 at home in their "mistake by the lake" stadium (since replaced, of course) before they decided to become proficient in this game called baseball.

Some eternal rules of most if not all sports.

1. On any given day, any team can beat any other team, regardless of where each is in the standings.

2. Bet on the team that has a winning record at home.

3. Ditto the team that feasts on teams below it in the standings.

4. And the team that wins most of its games settled by one goal, run or point.

5. And that wins most of its overtime games.

6. Every game counts. 

It's the last point that's explored today by Zwolinski.

All those October matches in which the Leafs mailed it in, how they've wished in the past month they  could have do-overs of just a handful of those winnable games. 

I don't know if sports "is a euphemism for life," as one of the Jays announcers told me days before the 2004 strike. It is a metaphor, certainly.

 

 

Harper's bad start.

Day Four of the campaign and the topic is still Harper's real or alleged hypocrisy over a coalition agreement with his then-fellow opposition parties seven years ago to bring down the government of Paul Martin.

I don't know how long that fateful 2004 document signed by Harper, Duceppe and Layton will be the gift that keeps on giving. 

But for now it's sucking the oxygen out of the Harper campaign.

 
Harper and his wife, Laureen, campaigning yesterday in Beaumont, Alta. (CP)

As long as the PM feels it necessary to defend his honour, he's is playing the opposition's game. He's on the defensive. And he isn't getting the Tories' message out.

Coalition talk has trampled all over the Tories' first campaign goodie, an income-splitting tax break. Which in any case turns out to be an empty Christmas stocking since it may or may not take effect four or five years from now when the books are balanced, on second-day elaboration by Harper. Your vote today for the possibility of a tax break half a decade hence. This is the Wimpy principle taken to chutpah lengths.

Finally, Harper's pained coalition talk reminds us of his career-long habit of signing documents that later blow up in his face. (Harper's 2000 "firewall" letter calling for Alberta's de facto sovereignty will suffice by way of example.) Which episodes Harper has characteristically refused to acknowledge, or reinvented the intent of, or tried to explain away, as in 2004 coalition case, of being somehow justified by the "context" of those times.

He dissembles, in other words, just like any pol.

It takes some doing for a generally competent leader of a G-7 nation to render himself ordinary, but this always has come naturally to Harper. That's why no party he's led has cracked 40% at the polls. He's our Nixon, competent but unable to shake our sense there's something untrustworthy about him.  

Coming out of the gate, a majority-bound Harper should have been talking of little else than having successfully navigated Canada through the Great Recession, restoring before any G-7 nation all of the 400,000 jobs our country lost during the economic meltdown. 

Instead, Harper's trademark mean streak compelled him to launch the Tory campaign by demonizing the opposition as engaged in a conspiracy to steal his premiership from him. Which finds him coming across as a whiny child, anything but the thick-skinned visionary demanded by these tough times at home abroad.

Some of us remember how Trudeau dealt with this stuff. With a shrug. Yes, at times that seemed contemptuous. But what we know of him now, many biographies later, is that for him life was too short to get bogged down in the trivialities of the political game. So he lost an election and won four, and governed for about 15 years.

Aside 1: Layton has played this card best, choosing merely to clarify the 2004 episode, rather than depict Harper as a out-of-control power seeker (Iggy) or a "liar" (Duceppe).

Aside 2: While Harper was in Beaumont, Alta. yesterday whinging to supporters about a coalition-minded cabal, Obama, who enjoys an 80% approval rating in Canada, was giving one of his typical speeches of a lifetime. This one outlined what will come to be called the Obama Doctrine of a new way of communally intervening to prevent genocide in Libya and elsewhere. It doesn't help Harper (or Iggy) that the most commanding figure on the world stage just now puts on a clinic, as they say of unhittable baseball pitchers, in statesmanship.

 

 

Enjoy your day.

 

Pileated woodpeckers near the village of Kagawong on Manitoulin Island. Rare in Southern Ontario, these largest members of the woodpecker family, measuring 15"-18" in height, require at least 200 acres of uncleared forest for sustenance. Photo by EB contributor Paul Darlaston.

 

 

The Daily Pulse, Mon. March 28.

 "I have always said, heard, that it would not be strange that there had been civilization on Mars, but maybe capitalism arrived there, imperialism arrived and finished off the planet." -Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan president.

 
Libyan rebels celebrate after recapturing the town of Ras Lanuf from pro-Gadhafi forces. (Reuters)

Arab uprisings

Lt.-Gen. Charles Bouchard, Canadian compromise candidate to head NATO forces in anti-Gadhafi mission, must finesse a quarrelsome coalition. (editorial, Toronto Star) UN forces are targeting Libya with pinpoint accuracy. (Gareth Evans, Sydney Morning Herald) Majority of Americans now support Libyan intervention, but also see Obama as weak military leader. (Arshad Mohammed, Reuters) Yemeni regime says deal to transfer power to dissidents is imminent. (Cynthia Johnston and Ghobari Muhammed, Reuters)

In memoriam

 
Montreal native Cpl. Yannick Scherrer, 24, was killed yesterday in Afghanistan by an IED. (DND)

Cpl. Yannick Scherrer, 24, a Montreal native, is the 155th Canadian soldier to die in Canada's nine-year-long Afghan mission. Cpl. Yannick was killed while on foot patrol with an Afghan National Army unit when he stepped on a roadside IED near Nakhonay, southwest of Kandahar city. (CP)

 
 
Roger Abbott, veteran of Royal Canadian Air Farce, loses long battle with leukemia, at age 64. (CP)

Geraldine Ferraro, first woman chosen as US VP nominee by a major party, died yesterday. (Christian Science Monitor)

Rock 'em, sock 'em

 
Stephen Harper campaigning yesterday in Brampton, where he fudged questions about his own plotting of a coalition to topple the government of the day that included Bloc separatists. (CP)

Layton excepted, leaders make unedifying sight in Canadian federal election's earliest days. Harper ducks hypocrisy in his scarems over a Grit-led coalition that includes Bloc sovereigntists when Harper himself plotted the very same thing against then PM Paul Martin in 2004. (Bruce Campion-Smith, Toronto Star) (Warren Kinsella has the 2004 smoking-gun document sent to then G-G Adrienne Clarkson and signed by Harper, Duceppe and Layton here.) Duceppe, citing the same PM coalition scare tactics, calls Harper a liar, which would have had the Bloc leader kicked out of the Commons. (Kevin Doughtery, Montreal Gazette) Iggy says Harper is "out of touch and out of control." (Les Whittington, Toronto Star) Iggy's own erratic behaviour is apparently of the controlled-experiment variety. Harper rumoured to be hatching an income-splitting tax break for families. (Theophilos Argitis, Reuters)

 
What little remains of the Unit 3 reactor at the Fukushima Daichi Nuclear Station. (Reuters)

Japan nightmare

Radiation levels reach new highs as conditions worsen for workers trying to repair crippled reactors. (Chico Harlan and Brian Vastag, LAT) Quandary for Japanese officials in reporting scary radiation levels that turn out to be overstated. (Julie Makinen and Kenji Hall, LAT)

Instability on the Continent

Merkel's party suffers huge loss in a state her party held for more than half a century. (AP)

Portugal struggling to avoid bailout fate of Greece, Ireland and Iceland. (Axel Bugge and Sergio Concalves, Reuters)

The kill team

 
U.S. Cpl. Jeremy Morlock of Bravo Company, stationed near Kandahar, posing with a trophy of war, the murdered Gul Mudin, 15, an Afghan civilian, in January 2010. One of the boy's fingers has been sliced off, apparently as a gift to another soldier for his first Afghan "kill," another soldier has testified. Morlock was part of a rogue platoon alleged to have killed Afghan civilians and moved their bodies to make it appear the U.S. troops had been attacked. This and other photos taken by platoon members was suppressed by the U.S. Armed Forces.  

Sordid inside story of rogue Bravo Company platoon in Afghan that killed innocent civilians for fun, and now facing trial. (Mark Boal, Rolling Stone) Some of the grisly photos suppressed by U.S. Armed Forces are here. (Warning: graphic images.)  

Sleepy skies

FAA orders nationwide review of control-tower practices after incident last week in which the sole air-traffic controller on duty at Washington's Reagan National Airport fell asleep, requiring that landings be coordinated by controllers at distant airports. (John Hughes and Heather Burke, Bloomberg News) The location is fitting, since you can trace this phenomenon of under-staffed and overworked controllers to Reagan's breaking the air-traffic controllers union back in 1981.

Vox

George Monbiot: How Fukushima disaster has turned me pro-nukes. (Sydney Morning Herald)

Stephen Bede Scharper: Is Libyan intervention a "just war" or just a war? (Toronto Star)

Gordon G. Chang: Maybe we need a no-fly zone over Syria, too? (Forbes)

Mark Steyn: Why can't America win wars anymore? (National Review)

Annals of Commerce

 
A new ad for Chevrolet features addled seniors. (AP) This is neither Chev's 18-34 demographic, nor in good taste. More proof that the entrenched pre-bankruptcy culture at GM will impede the needed overhaul of an automaker only gradually on the mend.

What's with marketers returning to "dumb and dumber" ad themes? (Michael Esposito, Chicago Tribune)

RIM has much to prove after its own damning weak forecast Friday triggered stock plunge. (Reuters)

Wal-Mart in court tomorow, finally, over landmark case in which 1.5 million women employees allege discrimination by world's biggest retailer. (Andrew Cohen, Atlantic)

A&E wire

Arcade Fire captures two Junos, including best-group prize. (CP) Reese Witherspoon weds Hollywood agent Jim Toth. (Bang Showbiz) Amy Adams cast as next Lois Lane. (LAT)

Milestones

 
Karen Kain in in the National Ballet of Canada's 1971 production of Swan Lake. (Toronto Star)

Karen Kain, arguably the greatest dancer in Canadian history, celebrates her 60th b-day today with her husband of 28 years, actor-producer Ross Petty. Artistic director of the National Ballet, Canada's biggest classical dance troupe, since 2005, Kain first joined the company's corps de ballet in 1969. Within two years Kain was cast in solo roles by founding artistic director Celia Franca, including the gruelling Swan Lake. Despite many offers to the Nureyev-tutored prima and longtime partner of Frank Augustyn to join other companies, Kain remained loyal to the National Ballet and Canada.

Social studies

 
On orders from Silvio Berlusconi, Venus's arm and Mars' penis were restored in the famous sculpture that adorns the Italian PM's offices. (Getty Images)

As long suspected, there may well be an inverse relationship between IQ and penis size. (Rice Bowl Asian blog) Or so these world maps, one each of brainpower and member size, aim to prove. Member sizes vary from 3.8 inches (South Korea) to 7.1 inches (Congo). Top three IQ nations, Singapore (108), South Korea (106) and Japan (105), have among the worlds most modest member sizes. Canada and U.S., by contrast, measure 5.5 and 5.1 inches, respectively, but rank only 9th and 10th, respectively in IQ, at 99 and 98. Emerging economic superpowers China and India are a dimunitive 4.3 and 4.0 inches, respectively, yet are taking over the world. It might then seem that a discrete inquiry regarding this matter be a first-date question if you seek a partner expert in quantam physics, Restoration dramas, and ideal soil conditions for raising houseplants. But I let you draw your own conclusions.

 

 

 

The latest Earth Hour bust.

   
Spot the difference: The Toronto skyline last night at 8:27, and during the first Earth Hour, in 2008. (Toronto Star) 

The lights went off for an hour last night - well, some of them did, anyway - and Toronto's power consumption plummeted, fell off a cliff, nose-dived, by, er, 5%.  

So that was the impact of EH 4. In last year's EH, power consumption dropped 10%. In Toronto inaugural EH, in 2008, power consumption dropped 15%.

At this rate of reduced reductions in power usage during Earth Hour, our power consumption will actually rise 5% during 2013's EH. Needless to say, I feel more strongly than ever about thoughts expressed here.

Update

Why I won't be turning any lights off this Earth Hour. (Ben Jervais, GOOD Environment) 

 

Scott Feschuk and the vanguard of satiric truth-tellers.

Now it's true that Scott Feschuk once submitted to the thankless task of writing speeches for then-PM Paul Martin. So his partisanship may well be suspect. But Scott was a legit journo for many moons before that, widely envied by peers including me for bringing memorable wit to the most prosaic assignments. Easily mistaken for a refugee from "The Daily Show," Feschuk is part of that vanguard of political satirists whose apparent mirth thinly veils overdue truth-telling. But more on that after Scott's latest conceit - finding commonality between our PM and a typical 7-year-old:

- Generally, he is rigid, negative, demanding; he exibits tantrums.

Okay, this is starting to get uncanny.

- He begins to place his name on everything to demonstrate ownership and exert control.

For decades, civil servants stubbornly insisted on referring to the government of Canada by the unclear term 'the government of Canada.' But now, thanks to Harper's decree that it must be called 'the Harper government,' we will no longer get the government of Canada mixed up with all the other Canadian federal governments out there.

Of course, at this rate, it's just a matter of time until government expense accounts are replaced with Harperdiems and bureaucrats are forced to buy their snacks from a Stephending machine. Little-known fact: when you lift up Industry Minister Tony Clement, you can see the name 'Stephen' written in Sharpie on the bottom of his shoe. ...

In some imagined past, the Walter Lippmanns and Bruce Hutchisons of the world cut to the essence of political means and motives, and the electorate was properly informed by it. In reality, Lippmann was an espouser of conventional wisdom, a scribe of slighting genuine utility to the informed voter. He actually was bested in that less-than-noble calling by the recently departed WaPo stenographer David Broder. And Hutchison wrote speeches for PMs while filing "unbiased" news reports to his paper. There were times in his editorship of the rabidly Grit Manitoba (later Winnipeg) Free Press that John W. Dafoe, then the most powerful journalist in the country, was a de facto member of Laurier's cabinet.

Amid the MSM's by now smothering groupthink, it's to ostenisble comedians that I, at least, look to for something approaching the satire required to maintain some semblance of personal sanity in a national conversation, especially to the south, so polluted with lies and distortions.  

Apart from delivering straight news, there's not much use for the Anderson Coopers of the world. They follow an agenda largely set for them by the powers that be. Which doesn't mean they toe a company line - even if they so frequently do - it's that they let the White House or Exxon or Planned Parenthood or Greenpeace determine what is news and therefore what to impart to us. Going "off-line" - deciding that certain of the outrages of organized religion, for instance, should be on the public agenda - is for the MSM's chroniclers of news bearing the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.

Not to be mistaken for latter-day Voltaires, it is to the likes of political comedians Bill Maher, Lewis Black, David Cross, Jon Stewart and so on to whom I turn to determine what that press conference this morning was really about. These truth-tellers were inspired in the craft by the late George Carlin, and he by the Montreal-born Mort Sahl, thankfully still with us.

So Mr. Feschuk to my mind shares distinguished company.

I hope and expect that, in fairness, Scott finds similar conceits with the other leaders. Mr. Duceppe's hair-net days are rather too far behind us, but Ms. May's disappearance between elections holds promise. A parallel between Iggy's convictions and our famously mercurial weather could work, and perhaps also a day in the life of Layton's moustache.

 

Photo illustration: Getty Images/Reuters/Maclean's.

 

I'm so glad today not to be editor of The Walrus.

For fun, an editor friend of mine at the Globe in the 1990s would begin lunch with a toast, "Death to our enemies!"

There's a delightful family history of court intrigue in among ancestors of European royal stock on her mom's side, hence the now-harmless expression.

I was thinking of it as I read Gerry Caplan's ease in recently gutting our PM with a halibut at the end of the dock, riffing on "the sheer unadulterated meanness that has characterized every moment of Stephen Harper's entire career."

An exaggeration, to be sure. But the signal attribute of the Reform/NAC/Alliance/CPC veteran's career has surely been his a mean streak - notable exceptions though there have been. And to we need to be clear about that, in contrast to the mind-numbing attempts at balance and fairness in MSM coverage. .

Actually, the principal victim of this immensely readable column by Caplan, former NDP strategist in the fondly recalled days of Stephen Lewis at Queen's Park, is The Walrus, subjected here to a deserved knife job done with such precision I expect it will be some time before that journal of self-styled progressivism appreciates the savagery inflicted:

All eyes must be on how different the Conservative Leader's campaign will be this time thanks to Nigel Wright, his latest chief of staff. I learn from a remarkable love letter to Mr. Wright in The Walrus magazine, of all places, that Mr. Wright is a paragon of virtually endless virtue. Indeed the very title of this no-warts article is "Mr. Right," and it's not meant ideologically. Everything that so many Canadians loathe and fear about Stephen Harper finds its opposite in Mr. Wright. How do we know this? Because The Walrus tells us so. How does The Walrus know? Because the writer asked Mr. Wright's Conservative Party pals and his closest business associates (and only them, curiously), and they all agreed on his splendid qualifications.

It gets better. Much better, but fair-use doctrine precludes me from quoting more.

Here's the thing. Because Wright's Onex Corp. colleague Gerry Schwartz was Ontario bagman for the Ontario wing of the federal Grits for, like, forever, until a break over Israel policy, the MSM assumption was that Wright could be a sort of Grit fifth column in the PMO.

Alas, no one in the Ottawa press corp bothered following up on that.

Wright in fact has presided over the early and personal attack ads on Iggy, confirming the Tea Partyesque ideological kinship among Wright, Harper and Mean Mike Harris (an earlier Wright swoon). And that would have made a compelling story for The Walrus in place of the one it chose to publish in its current edition.

Caplan, who's actually a gentle soul, has been on the money for years with his too-infrequent op-eds. But this masterful takedown is one for the ages, as they say.

Just now I'm wondering if Caplan elected to withhold the Wright profiler's name - a rather prominent one - out of kindness or because Caplan holds him in sufficient contempt to feel his name doesn't merit mentioning.

 

 

 

Harper's economic report card...

...is better than his counterparts in insolvent Ireland and Iceland, to be sure. But not as good as he makes out. And I just know the war rooms of the opposition parties haven't crunched the numbers to take some of the glow off a mythical "Harper economic miracle."

I wouldn't be posting this except that it's Mr. Harper who says a mere election, never mind, the prospect of his being replaced, would jeopardize the remarkable progess his government has made. Which (a) makes me wonder about his memory, since Harper himself plunged us into a 2008 election when roof of the global economy was crashing down, solely to try for a majority government. And (b) the Harper economic stewardship has been outperformed by many others.

Some stats on our actual vs. rhetorical performance:

Jobless rate (as of January 2011, source: OECD)

1. South Korea, 3.6%

2. Netherlands, 4.3%

-   Austria, 4.3%

3. Luxembourg, 4.7%

4. Japan, 4.9%

5. Mexico, 5.2%

6. Australia, 5%

7. Germany, 6.5%

8. Czech Republic, 7.5%

9. Canada, 7.8%

That's right, Mexico has outperformed us on joblessness, along with our G-7 peers Japan and Germany.

 

Inflation (as of February 2011, source: OECD)

1. Switzerland, 0.5%

2. Norway, 1.2%

3. Slovenia, 1.4%

4. France, 1.7%

5. Czech Republic, 1.8%

6. Netherlands, 1.9%

7. Germany, 2.1%

-   United States, 2.1%

8. Canada, 2.2%

That's right, G-7 peers France, Germany and the U.S., among others, have been outperforming us in keeping the cost of living as low as possible.

 

GDP per capita (for 2010, source: IMF)

This is the chief measure of standard of living.

1. Qatar, $88,000

2. Luxembourg, $80,304

3. Singapore, $57,238

4. Norway, $52,238

5. Brunei, $47,200

6. U.S., $47,123

7. Switzerland, $41,765

8. Netherlands, $40,777

9. Australia, $39,692

10. Canada, $39,033

 

Projected economic growth, 2010-2015 (source: IMF)

Projected average annual GDP growth rate to mid-decade.

1. Slovak Republic, 4.2%

2. South Korea, 4.0%

3. Israel, 3.7%

4. Czech Republic, 3.5%

5. Sweden, 3.4%

6. Australia, 3.2%

7. U.S., 2.6%

-  Britain, 2.6%

-  New Zealand, 2.6%

-  Switzerland, 2.6%

8. Slovenia, 2.5%

9. France, 2.1%

10. Canada, 2.0%

 

Canada's score on the U.N.'s Human Development Index (source: UN)

A broad measure of quality of living, accounting for social, economic, crime and other factors. For seven consecutive years, Canada was ranked among the world's nations as the best in which to live. That's history. It's not just that Norway has supplanted us in the last several years for the coveted top spot, it's that Canada has slipped far down the ranks.

1994: Canada ranked 1st.

1995: Canada, 1st

1996: Canada, 1st

1997: Canada, 1st

1998: Canada, 1st

1999: Canada, 1st

2000: Canada, 1st

---

2007, Canada, 4th

2008, Canada, 3rd

2009, Canada, 4th

2010, Canada, 8th

 

What's to be said - we can do better. Sad to say, we have done better. We've been slipping.