"What a wonderful day with wonderful people! I'm so glad to be here! What a great town this is! It's the greatest town in the greatest country in the world!"

"Woo!" the crowd shouts. "Woo!"

Bored, yet? I'm falling asleep writing this. Nothing is more stultifying than a politician mouthing platitudes.

And yet, when Stephen Harper, member of Parliament for Calgary Southwest, gave essentially that same utterly banal little speech at the Calgary Stampede, he was widely criticized, and not for wearing a cowboy hat and one of those big silver belt buckles that men of a certain age and girth never should.

No, he was criticized for saying Calgary is "the greatest city in the greatest country in the world."

To be sure, some of the "criticism" was the product of bored reporters calling up public figures around the country and asking them if they would please be offended, or pretend to be. "Sometimes politicians get cities mixed up, saying 'Calgary' instead of 'Vancouver', " said Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson, who will be performing at Yuk Yuk's all this week, don't forget to tip the waiter.

But then there was Thomas "Tom" Mulcair grumping that "'I'm better than the rest of you' is not the best way to get results." And that peevishness was far from unique. It was all over social media. When I tweeted that Harper's comment was the political equivalent of "nobody rocks like Springfield!" and should be taken just as seriously, I was pelted with electronic tomatoes.

This reveals the prime minister's divisiveness, people said. His arrogance. His insensitivity. Why, it's yet more evidence that Stephen Harper is the worst prime minister. Ever. The word "fascist" may even have slipped in there somewhere. It usually does.

Now, as regular readers of this space will know, your correspondent has made pointed criticisms of the prime minister from time to time as circumstances warrant. Some would go further and describe those criticisms as pungent. Others vituperative. In any event, I believe I have established that I am not Stephen Harper's biggest fan, except perhaps in the KathyBateswithasledgehammer sense.

But still I am amazed at how many people despise Stephen Harper so much that they would endorse a mass songbird slaugh-ter if the prime minister were photographed smiling at a chickadee.

Consider the War of 1812 commemorations, which the government has enthusiastically supported. There are many reasonable grounds for criticism. That we shouldn't spend millions at a time of cutbacks. That they turn a complex reality into a cartoon. That the cartoon amounts to political propaganda. All legitimate points of discussion.

But in the anti-Conservative fever swamps, there's no discussion. There is rage. These commemorations are a travesty! The War of 1812 has absolutely nothing to do with Canada! Stephen Harper is trying to change our history!

Yes, really. It's actually a common theme. "The War of 1812 is not a Canadian war," wrote one blogger. "Indeed it occurred generations before Canada even existed."

That makes sense, of a very narrow, pedantic sort. And it might not be evidence of derangement if it were applied consistently.

But it's not. Remember the 500th anniversary of John Cabot's voyage to Newfoundland? It was in 1997. The feds spent a million dollars promoting it, Newfoundland considerably more. The Royal Canadian Mint struck a commemorative dime. And no one was enraged that the government marked an anniversary that occurred 370 years before Confederation.

The other day on Twitter, I actually found myself defending the suggestion that the history of the War of 1812 is Canadian history. It was surreal. I would have summoned the ghost of Pierre Berton if I'd had a ouija board. It was that weird.

Of course, there have always been people driven to distraction by the guy in power. And I am well aware of the effects of hindsight bias. But I can't help feeling that this sort of mania has become more widespread in recent years. I have no quantification to support that belief. I don't even know how it could be quantified. But it sure feels true.

Naturally, I blame Stephen Harper.

No, really. He politicizes everything. To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which any reasonable person would say is a big deal, the government issued a terse press release.

After all, if the prime minister had given a speech he would have had to say something nice about Pierre Trudeau, which was unacceptable to this most partisan of politicians.

When the prime minister politicizes everything, everything is politicized. Even the War of 1812 becomes something to get furious about. The same thing is hap-pening with the monarchy. It has always been above partisan politics. That's its raison d'être. But Harper has so plainly used the promotion of the monarchy for partisan ends that he has politicized it and made it yet another reason to get all red-faced and shouty. (When Stephen Harper goes to his great reward, he's going to get such a tongue-lashing from Eugene Forsey.)

Then there's Stephen Harper's modus operandi. Attack. Hard. Never stop. Do I have to elaborate? At this point I don't think even Conservatives would deny that Stephen Harper does not abide by Marquess of Queensberry rules.

But I suspect there's something else at work. Something for which Stephen Harper is not responsible.

It's the rise of social media. When like-minded people discuss what they believe in common, their beliefs tend to coalesce, as one would expect. But they tend not to coalesce around the average of the group, as one would expect. They coalesce around a more extreme point. Psychologists call this "group polarization." Very simply, connecting like-minded people is a great way to radicalize their views.

And what does social media do? It connects like-minded people. On a massive scale.

This suggests that at least some of the crazy over-reactions to Stephen Harper are the product of a broader phenomenon that will outlive the prime minister.

The fever swamps will get more feverish. And spread. And politics will get even more irrational.

As president of the Treasury Board, Clement is responsible for paying the public service. And that job has him handling a very hot file these days.

For many decades, civil servants were entitled to severance pay with-out severance: If they quit voluntarily, or retired, the government handed them a substantial cheque just as if they had been laid off. This was odd. Such a valuable perk essentially doesn't exist in the private sector. And it costs the government an estimated $500 million a year.

So the government has decided to get rid of it, a move widely sup-ported because, really, severance pay without severance is pretty much in-defensible. But there's a problem.

The government can't simply wash its hands and walk away. "Severance pay" is a benefit in the employment contracts which the government negotiated, accepted, and signed. It is on the hook.

And then there's the matter of outstanding debt. Current employees are owed a lot of "severance pay." The latest estimates suggest it's in range of $6 billion.

So, for the government to be rid of this system, it had to get the unions to agree to the change, which meant giving them some-thing in exchange. And it had to start sending out big "severance pay" cheques to civil servants who will keep showing up for work as al-ways.

That is what it did. Civil servants got a special 0.75-per-cent wage in-crease over three years as compensation for scrapping the "severance pay" system, while cheques for tens of thousands of dollars each have been landing in mailboxes. It's like Christmas for civil servants. And the taxpayer is Santa Claus.

The reaction was predictable.

"To spend billions of dollars in severance package for people that are not losing their jobs, people that have the best form of job security in the country, that have gold-plated pensions to leave to, just seems nuts," fumed Dan Kelly, head of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business. Of course Kelly agreed that the "severance pay" perk should be taken away from civil servants. Everyone does, apparently. But he and many others just don't think civil servants should be compensated for the loss.

The government should have just told its employees to "forget it," Kelly McParland wrote in the Nation-al Post, even though this would "undoubtedly run into some legal issues."

Ah, yes. "Legal issues." Isn't the rule of law annoying? Sure it sounds great in principle. But this is ridiculous. Couldn't the government just send the damned thing to the junkyard?

It could, actually. With legislation, the government can do pretty much whatever it wants. In this case, all it had to do was pass a bill that changes the contracts without compensation.

Governments occasionally do that sort of thing. Remember the Pearson airport deal?

Shortly before being ousted from power, the Progressive Conservative government signed a contract to have a consortium run Pearson air-port. The Liberals said it was crony-ism and promised to get out of it if elected. They won. But backing out of the contract would have incurred massive penalties, as prescribed in the contract. So the Liberals introduced legislation that scrapped the contract without compensation.

The bill passed the House of Commons. But in the chamber of sober second thought, many senators believed this was a matter of great principle.

The rule of law is the foundation of a modern, free society, they said. If the government can change the law retroactively whenever it wishes it is not truly bound by the laws that bind all others. It is above the law. And government above the law is a frightening thing.

The Senate blocked the legislation. The government ultimately paid up, as required by its contractual obligations.

Yes, there was also politics involved. The Senate was heavily PC at the time. But there really was a fundamental principle at stake, and it was upheld, even though doing so was very expensive and it would have been so much easier to take the principle and the contract to the junkyard.

In scrapping the "severance pay" benefit the Conservative government is doing what previous Liberal and Conservative governments should have done long ago, as even Liberal critic John McCallum graciously agreed in a recent interview. But, just as importantly, the government is doing it the right way: by honouring its contractual obligations and thus, implicitly, honouring the rule of law.

And it's doing that despite the cost and the yowling from people who don't understand or appreciate that an essential principle is at stake.

Of course, that's where my metaphor with the 1960s-era Jaguar breaks down like a 1960s-era Jaguar. The rule of law isn't just cool in the showroom, expensive on the road. It's also of inestimable value, practical value. It's not like a sport car. It's not a luxury. We need it.

Sending it to the junkyard is not, and should never be, an option.

For those of us who think the hyper-centralization of power is both undemocratic and a horrible way to run an organization - no matter who the prime minister is - this is all very depressing. For years, we've watched centralization get worse and thought, "this is it. It can't get any worse." And it got worse.

Now it has reached its apex. Or maybe not. Maybe it will get worse.

But could it get better? We can dream of a different political reality, of course. But is there any rational reason to hope? Perhaps.

The power in the prime minister's office "is unprecedented," says political scientist Bruce Hicks. "But I also think it's temporary." To understand why, says Hicks, we first have to understand why Stephen Harper is the most powerful prime minister ever.

As far back as William Lyon Mackenzie King, PMs have been drawing power into the Prime Minister's Office. Pierre Trudeau accelerated the process. Brian Mulroney and Jean Chrétien kept it up. Stephen Harper pushed it further.

But this is only part of the story, says Hicks, who compared prime ministerial power in Canada with that in our Westminster cousins - the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand - in a paper recently published in the Canadian Parliamentary Review.

"We follow party discipline far more loyally than any of the other Westminster models," Hicks notes. In these other countries, there's an expectation that MPs will sometimes vote against their government."

In part, Hicks suggests, this reflects Canada's culture of deference to authority. It also stems from advanced "presidentialization" of Canadian politics, in which elections are all about party leaders. Also contributing is the bloated size of the Canadian cabinet relative to the number of MPs, because backbenchers who hope to get into cabinet one day won't question orders from the PMO, and with so many spots in the cabinet, that includes most backbenchers.

Unfortunately, there's no reason to expect any of that will change. But another critical factor may not last.

In the past, parties in power always had factions, and ministers with their own political clout, and these provided at least a modest check on the power of the prime minister. "In the old Progressive Conservative (party), you had Flora MacDonald who ran for the leadership and had her own base of support. You had Joe Clark, who was a former prime minister," Hicks says. When Mulroney said he was going to cut foreign aid, Clark threatened to resign. Mulroney backed down. That's inconceivable today.

There's nothing like this in the Conservative party because it is new and Stephen Harper built it from the ground up. "It's a corporation in which one person controls all the mechanisms for fundraising, for distribution, for marketing, for organizing nomination contests in everybody's riding. It's all centralized. That's unique to this party."

Harper has never had to deal with ministers who wield their own political clout. "The closest one you had was Peter MacKay," thanks to his leadership of the Progressive Conservative party. But when the PMO told MacKay he couldn't hire the man he wanted to be his chief of staff, MacKay bit his lip and did as he was told. Ever since, he's been a loyal soldier. Today, he has the political stature of a hobbit.

Next to the prime minister, all the cabinet ministers do. That's not an accident. Napoleon suffers no rivals.

But Stephen Harper cannot be prime minister forever and while it's possible that there could be a transition from one Emperor to another - if Harper could anoint an unchallenged successor and hand over the status quo exactly as is - that's unlikely. By keeping his ministers weak, Harper has ensured there is no one with the presence to pull that off.

Which means there will be a fight for the leadership. Which means factions. Which means ministers with their own power bases. And a prime minister who must listen to them. It wouldn't be a strong check on the PMO, but it would be a check, and that's more than there is now.

Of course there are many other proposals for curtailing the PMO. Many are suggested in the Donner Prize-winning Democratizing the Constitution. Political scientist Peter Russell and others are particularly keen on the creation of a "Cabinet manual," which would spell out constitutional conventions.

But nothing will change unless the prime minister wants it to. And he manifestly does not. Hicks even worries that a cabinet manual produced under the current circumstances wouldn't be an accurate and respected document, as the new U.K. and New Zealand cabinet manuals are. The prime minister would control its development, he says. And he would ensure that it retroactively validates his false claims about coalitions and the Constitution.

"Stephen Harper went to England, stood next to (British prime minister) David Cameron, who leads a coalition government, and told the press that the only reason Cameron could form a government is that he won the most seats in the previous election," Hicks marvels. "Well, their cabinet manual states the complete opposite. But there's the prime minister, standing next to a colleague, re-writing their constitution for them, even after they've gone to the trouble of defining it."

So what are reformers left with? We'll have to wait - for the Emperor to meet his Waterloo in 2015, or to retire when it pleases him.

But at least we can be reasonably confident that after Stephen Harper, there will not another quite like him.

Of course I don't know who made this little icon but there's a good chance it was a farmer, or at least someone who had more skill in his hands than money in his pocket. I can see him carefully folding the page to size, cutting the cedar, staining the wood, nailing the pieces together. He hangs the portrait of the beautiful young Queen on the wall and smiles. He is satisfied with his work. And satisfied that the order he has always known, that his parents knew, and grandparents, will continue, with a new monarch as its symbolic head.

That was 60 years ago. He is likely long dead.

Does any of this matter in current debates about the monarchy? Does age count? Is there inherent value in an institution, or tradition, that has survived through decades and centuries?

Does that long-forgotten man and his small act of citizenship matter?

It often seems not. Most of those who call for the abolition of the monarchy that is the cornerstone of the Canadian constitutional order, and has been for as long as anything that looks remotely like Canada has existed, don't even mention history.

Yes, they say, Queen Elizabeth is lovely. But when she dies, let's junk the whole business and replace it with something or other. Make the governor general head of state. Whatever. People who talk this way seldom think carefully about the implications of what they're proposing, which are far more profound than they realize, nor do they give any weight to history. All that has been, all that would be severed and discarded, goes unmentioned, or is dismissed casually, with a shrug.

So it's old. Who cares?

We've seen that attitude expressed at other times, in other ways.

There was a period, after the Second World War, when "new" meant plastic, Formica and all things shiny and wonderful. "Old" was simply in the way. The result was a wave of destruction as old buildings were reduced to rubble and replaced without the slightest consideration for what would be lost. We have regretted that mania ever since.

Today, it's hard to imagine that mentality, at least in our built environment. We protect heritage architecture. We know that age has inherent value.

Anyone can see that by taking a careful look at the Stanley Cup. Donated by an English nobleman to the winner of the "Dominion Hockey Challenge," everything about it is archaic, right down to its curlicue decorations, but its very visible age doesn't diminish its value. It is its value. Its age makes it a symbol of continuity, stitching together decades and generations. It is the history of hockey in one object.

Of course age alone does not place venerable things or institutions beyond all other considerations. Old trees are still cut, old buildings torn down. Change continues, as it must, always. The Stanley Cup has been reshaped and altered countless times. The monarchy itself is the product of a thousand years of constant revision.

But today we only make these changes after careful consideration of what would be gained and lost - with history weighing heavily on the latter side of the scales.

That's what's missing in glib calls to junk Canada's monarchy. There's no appreciation that the monarchy is this nation's oldest institution, no weight given to history, no respect for age.

For me, this year's celebration of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee brought back vivid memories of the Silver Jubilee. It was 1977. I was a nine-year-old boy growing up in a tiny town in northern Ontario. At school, Mrs. Gillett led us in the singing of God Save the Queen.

Even way back then, the Queen had reigned for more years than a little boy can fathom. A quartercentury earlier, when that farmer was framing a page from the Toronto Star, Queen Elizabeth's first Canadian prime minister was Louis St. Laurent. Her first British prime minister was Winston Churchill.

These were names buried deep in the history books, but the lady on the stamps and coins knew them well, and connected us all to them.

And the Queen is herself just one ring in the old tree's trunk.

At my cottage, I have a framed portrait of the Queen's great-great grandmother, Victoria. The fine print at the bottom reads "Published with The Montreal Witness by John Dougall & Son, Year of Jubilee, 1867." The painting is a classic, the same one that appears on bottles of Bombay Sapphire gin. I got it at an antique store in Eastern Ontario. The owner had recently moved from Montreal. She bought it at a Westmount estate sale. Judging by the layers of grime that came off the glass, it hadn't been cleaned since the 19th century.

Aside from giving posterity the image that would adorn gin bottles forever, Victoria reigned over the evolution of responsible government, signed Canada into existence, made Ottawa the capital, and had her name scattered across the landscape from sea unto sea. Her birthday is one of this country's oldest traditions, having been officially celebrated as Victoria Day, on the 24th of May, since 1845.

The combined reign of Victoria and her great-great granddaughter covers 94 of this country's 145 years of existence - so far - making Canada one of the only countries in the world that can say its head of state has been a woman for most of its history.

It's hard to imagine anything more Canadian than the portrait in my cottage. John Dougall & Son even had the good sense to decorate it with maple leaves.

I think this is all worth something. And I think its value will only grow.

We live very long lives in a world that changes with astonishing speed. Even now, little of what we know as children survives as long as we do, and even less remains to stitch together decades, generations, and centuries. If the pace of change continues to accelerate, and lifespans continue to lengthen, that will steadily become all the more true. And the threads that remain will become all the more precious.

Of course, as I said, there's much more to the debate about monarchy than history and tradition. But surely it's incumbent on those who would do away with the Crown to acknowledge what we would lose and explain why we should suffer that loss.

To understand why, we have to take a look at a basic assumption almost everyone makes.

Why do we eat and drink? Be-cause we are thirsty and hungry. It's obvious, isn't it? We drink when we're thirsty, eat when we're hungry, and stop when we these needs have been satisfied.

If that is true, Bloomberg's ban is both paternalistic and silly. Not only is this a politician treating citizens like children ("No more pop for you, Johnny! If you're still thirsty, drink some water.") he's doing it in a way that cannot possibly work. Ban KFC's popular 64-ounce "mega jug" and people will simply suck down four 16-ounce containers. And get just as fat. If that assumption is true.

But it's not.

A small mountain of research has shown that hunger and thirst have surprisingly little to do with the choices we constantly make about what to consume and how much. Far more influential are environmental cues, including seemingly trivial factors such as the size of a soft-drink cup.

In a study that bore a family re-semblance to an episode of Candid Camera, researchers asked university students to sit down at a big bowl of tomato soup and eat as much as they wanted.

For some students, that was all there was to the experiment. They consumed an average of nine ounces of soup.

But other students unknowingly sat down to a "bottomless bowl," which constantly refilled with soup via a hidden hose. They consumed an average of 15 ounces of soup.

The dramatic difference lay in the environmental cues. The first group of students watched the contents of the bowl decline, which told them how much they had consumed. This information was crucial to their decision to say "enough." The second group lacked that information and so they kept spooning it up.

The "bottomless bowl" experiment was conducted by Brian Wansink, a Cornell University marketing professor and leading researcher in the field. He calls this behaviour "mindless eating," but it's not literally mind-less. As always, the mind is hard at work. It's processing lots of information. It's making decisions. But most of that activity occurs outside conscious awareness, and while we can consciously re-view the conclusions the mind draws unconsciously, and modify or overturn them, most often we don't. So a more accurate term would be "unconscious eating."

The results of "unconscious eating" can be startling. In one experiment, Wansink invited people to a theatre to watch a movie. Naturally, popcorn was handed out. But some people were given medium-sized bags, while others got large bags.

After the movie, the researchers snatched back the bags and weighed what remained. The result? People given the large bags ate on average 53 per cent more.

You might think that's because this was tasty popcorn so people who had the opportunity to experience more pleasure took it. Or maybe the people who got the large bags were simply hungrier. Wansink's team thought of these objections, and others, and repeated the experiment in various forms, including one in which the popcorn was left out for five days to make it so stale it tasted like chips of Styrofoam. And they always got the same result. "People eat more when you give them a bigger container. Period. It doesn't matter whether the popcorn is fresh or 14 days old or whether they were hungry or full when they sat down for the movie," Wansink wrote.

And that's not only true of pre-pared foods. When people are asked to make spaghetti or other foods in a kitchen, the size of packages they get ingredients from makes a big difference to how much food they prepare. With spaghetti, Wansink wrote, "we found that people who were given the large package of pasta, sauce, and meat typically pre-pared 23 per cent more - around 150 extra calories - than those given the medium packages."

This is why portion sizes are a critical component of the obesity epidemic.

During the Second World War, Coca-Cola set up 64 bottling plants around the world to serve the U.S. military. We all know the bottles that came out of those plants. They are elegant and iconic. They are also small. They contained 6.4 ounces.

In recent decades, prosperity and abundance - plus massive U.S. government subsidies for agribusiness that make corn syrup ridiculously cheap - produced a spectacular increase in container sizes. It takes 10 classic Coke bottles to fill one of those KFC "mega jugs." And it isn't a Marine slogging through the jungles of the South Pacific who's drinking the mega jug. It's a grossly overweight, sedentary teenager, whose risk of diabetes and a shorter life goes up with every slurp.

In a sane world, corporations that sold such a grotesque product to adults would be considered shady and irresponsible; corporations that sold it to minors would be scorned and vilified like they were tobacco companies. These corporations would suffer, and change their ways. There would be no need to even consider government regulation.

But we don't live in that world. In this world, most people don't know, or refuse to accept, that something as simple as portion size can have a major impact on their behaviour and health. And corporations don't suffer for heaping crap on kids.

So we're left with government regulation.

Here, I think reasonable people can disagree. The sort of thing Bloomberg is proposing restricts the liberty of both sellers and consumers. That's a serious concern that should carry a lot of weight, pardon the awful pun. But, as Bloomberg notes, it's a very modest restriction. You wouldn't be able to buy a "mega jug," but you could buy four 16-ounce drinks. You could even pour those four 16-ounce drinks into your own 64-ounce cup and continue the slow degradation of your health, if you insist.

As I said, reasonable people can disagree. But, on balance, I think Michael Bloomberg is right.

All that being said, it's import-ant to note that Bloomberg has cited Wansink's research, and others, as the basis for his proposal, and Wansink responded that Bloomberg was misguided. Writing on The Atlantic web-site Thursday, Wansink noted that other research showed that, when people were overtly denied the portions they were used to, they tended to rebel, consuming more later, for example. Rather than banning giant cups, Wansink wants the mayor to talk with food companies to "discover new ways to better promote lower-calorie options."

I admire Wansink's work, but I think his conclusion is dubious. True, people will likely re-act badly to the disappearance of "mega jugs" at first. But portion norms are not fixed.

It wasn't so long ago, remember, that no one expected to be able to buy 64-ounce soft drinks. Or even conceived of such a thing. If "mega jugs" were to go the way of leaded gasoline, the banning of which was also fought and resented, they would some day be forgotten. Like leaded gasoline.

And don't forget that Bloomberg now has the undivided attention of the food corporations precisely because the world's most prominent mayor has threatened them with a big stick. They're scared. And far more likely make real, voluntary concessions than they would have if the mayor had gone to them, cap in hand, and begged.

Unlike Brian Wansink, Michael Bloomberg understands politics.

There couldn't be a better symbol of irrelevance, which seems fitting. May is the sole MP from the Green party, which lacks official standing in the House. In effect, she is an independent. She has few resources, fewer privileges. She has no place at the table of parliamentary commit-tees. At a time when most MPs no longer have to travel 50 yards from Parliament Hill to become "nobodies," as Pierre Trudeau famously observed, Elizabeth May should be utterly, hopelessly, spectacularly irrelevant.

And, yet, look around the House. One of the most prominent and effective MPs occupies seat number 309.

"I always say to school kids that it's like platform 93/4," May laughs about her strange seat number, referring to the famous invisible train platform in the Harry Potter books. It's 10: 30 Monday morning. She got back to Ottawa from the West Coast at 1 a.m., she has been up for hours doing interviews, she and her staff are rushing around her cramped office pre-paring for a very big day, and yet she's as bright and chirpy and eager to talk as if your correspondent were a neighbour dropping by for coffee on a quiet Sunday.

That's one explanation for May's surprising prominence: She's exhaustingly enthusiastic and ridiculously gregarious. She hugs people. Big hugs. Like Barney the Dinosaur. She, like Barney, isn't partisan with her affections. May is notorious for saying nice things about people in other parties, even praising their policies and wishing them well. In politics, this is eccentric behaviour. Pundits have criticized her for it.

"It would ruin my life not to have friends," she says with un-abashed sincerity. "Probably I'd be a better politician if I didn't care what people thought about me, but I actually want to keep the respect of people on all sides of the House. I don't want politics to make me an awful per-son." Happily for May, she has friends on all sides of the House, and, while that may not be as politically useful as the unflinching willingness to stick a shiv in opponents, it is very handy when you occupy seat number 309.

But there's more to May than a purple felt exterior. She's also a sharp lawyer, a fact that was critical to the dramatic events in Parliament this week.

"This is my new Bible," she says, lifting the House of Commons "Procedure and Practice" rule book, which is 1,400 of the most boring pages ever print-ed. May expected to enter a minority Parliament where horse-trading was the main action.

But it was a majority, so she decided "the only thing I can do to make a difference is to know the rules really well."

May was familiar with parliamentary procedure from her time working as an aide to a Conservative minister in the Mulroney years. But careful study of her new Bible revealed import-ant changes. One had been made in the Chrétien years: If you have a seat on a parliamentary committee and you have the right to introduce substantive amendments at that stage of review, you no longer have the right to bring substantive amendments at re-port stage. The Liberals made this change in response to an Alliance attempt to slow the pas-sage of legislation. It was, in other words, yet another restriction of the opposition's ability to oppose.

May saw an opening. She didn't belong to a party with official standing. She didn't have a seat on committees. So she, un-like Liberals and New Democrats, had the right to bring substantive amendments at report stage.

That is how she became the eye of the C-38 storm this week.

May expects the Conservatives will change the rules to stop a repeat performance (thus completing the work begun by the Chrétien Liberals and demonstrating yet again that the Conservatives have be-come what they once opposed). But that won't change a fundamental fact that often gets lost, May says. "There are far more powers to each individual member of Parliament than most Canadians would ever imagine."

The word "powerful" does not fit comfortably alongside "member of Parliament." But May is right. All MPs are powerful. She is proof of what even the most disadvantaged MP can do, if they are not muzzled and leashed by a party leader.

But almost every MP is muzzled and leashed. They are told how to vote. They are told what to say. And most obey because obedience is rewarded and in-dependence punished. Even cabinet ministers have been reduced to ventriloquist's dummies, mouthing words chosen by the prime minister's office.

May finds it astonishing. "I worked for (Mulroney-era environment minister) Tom McMillan, who was a very red Tory. I wrote speeches for him. We never checked his speeches with the PMO. He'd get up to answer in Question Period. He didn't have a script for how to answer. Brian Mulroney was not telling his cabinet members what to say, syllable by syllable," she says. "I look at Peter Kent and I think, 'My God, man, you had a great reputation. You were a great journalist. You won the Robert Kennedy Prize for journalism. And you're going to stand up in the House and read the lines?' "

Traditionally, in the Westminister system, all MPs are equals, each having been selected by the voters of a riding to represent them in Parliament. Even the prime minister is merely "first among equals," having been elected to Parliament in the same way as the others and depending on their continued support to re-main head of government.

Of course, this picture is complicated by parties, which have always existed in the West-minister system, in one form or another, and have always exerted control over MPs, of varying degree. But the existence of parties doesn't change the fundamentals, which is why, traditionally, party affiliation didn't appear on ballots next to the candidates' names.

That changed in the late 1960s. And that change meant Elections Canada needed to con-firm that a candidate actually is the party's representative. So it required party leaders to sign nomination papers.

It seemed like a minor procedural change. It wasn't. "That was the first bludgeon party leaders got to use to keep his or her party members in line," May notes. The decades since have seen a steady decline in the ability of MPs to think and speak freely, leading to the current reality where mindless obedience and witless partisanship are the norm and a member of Parliament who simply exercises her judgment, as she was elected to do, is a startling aberration.

May plans to introduce a private member's bill that would re-place the party leader's signature on candidates' nomination papers with those of the local riding executive. It's wildly unlikely it will pass. The party leaders will see to that. But the fact that May, herself a party leader, would try to curtail the power of party leaders, at least offers a flicker of hope that the Westminster sys-tem may not be entirely dead.

Which is an impressive accomplishment for someone in seat number 309.

Both takes were true, though not in equal proportions. Obama led, to a modest extent. But mostly he followed.

That's not a criticism. In fact, what Obama did - getting out in front a little, but mostly following - is what leadership usually amounts to.

Of course we tend to think of leadership in grander terms. Leaders have unique visions. They inspire others to share their visions. Collective action is taken. The vision is made real. In short, leaders decide what change will happen and make it so.

This is the Great Man theory of history. In formal terms, it was popular in the 19th century but soon fell out of favour among historians who looked seriously at how and why change happens. Less formally, it lived on. And it thrives today.

Prime ministers and presidents have little ability to control free-market economies, especially over the short term, and yet they are routinely credited or blamed for the performance of the economy. That's Great Man thinking. Nor do leaders have much control over the intellectual climate, or social mores, or cultural trends, or developments in science and technology. But when change happens we routinely personalize these impersonal forces and imagine it happened because a Great Man - a Ronald Reagan, maybe, or a Steve Jobs - grabbed History by its shirt collar and dragged it along, kicking and screaming.

And that is simply wrong.

Consider the British election of 1945, when Winston Churchill and the Conservatives warned that a victory for Clement Attlee's Labour would mean the implementation of a socialist welfare state and Britain's ruin. Attlee won. And he implemented the ambitious program he had promised. It's easy to see that as a moment when Great Men decided the fate of a nation's future: Surely, if Churchill had won, history would have taken a very different course.

But in the 1930s, Conservatives had taken tentative steps in the same direction. And the blueprint for Labour's post-war welfare state was the Beveridge Report, published in 1942 by a prominent Liberal. The reality is that the post-1945 changes were the culmination of long-developing political, economic, and cultural trends that transcended parties and had little or nothing to do with the individual politicians. "If the Tories had been returned to office in 1945," observed historian David Kynaston, "they almost certainly would have created a welfare state not unrecognizably different from the one that Labour actually did create."

Or consider the 1968 decriminalization of homosexual sex in Canada by then-justice minister Pierre Trudeau. Trudeau's leadership has been hailed ever since, but he was no more acting in advance of the times than Barack Obama did last week. Poland decriminalized homosexual sex in 1932, Denmark in 1933, Sweden in 1944. Countries all over the Western world followed. The first American state to decriminalize was Illinois, in 1961. England started seriously considering decriminalization in 1957 and actually did it a year before Trudeau introduced his bill. (Trudeau himself was modest about the change. In the same statement in which he famously declared "there's no place for the state in the bedrooms of the nation," Trudeau said the bill "is bringing the laws of the land up to contemporary society.") It's not simply a matter of the times making the man, to use the old saw. It's that the times convince the man to do what he might never have imagined doing. The times may even grab the man by his shirt collar and drag him along, kicking and screaming.

Look at Richard Nixon's domestic policy legacy. One liberal landmark after another. This, from a lifelong conservative who worried that the Beatles were spreading socialism. Why? The times insisted.

Or consider Winston Churchill again. "I have not become the King's first minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire," declared the proud old imperialist in 1942, not many years before he presided over the liquidation of the British Empire. Not even the last lion could defy the tectonic forces at work.

Or think back to 1999, when the House of Commons passed a motion declaring that marriage "is and should remain the union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others." Jean Chrétien voted in favour. So did Paul Martin. Liberals today sometimes claim their party led on same-sex marriage but in reality the courts led, and they followed, until it became clear that the tide had turned - and they scrambled to keep their feet dry.

But as I said about Barack Obama's support for same-sex marriage, that alone does not amount to criticism. Political leadership routinely involves sensing when change is coming, and then, when the time is judged to be right, getting out in front of it, assisting it, and guiding it, to a happy conclusion. Politicians are like midwives: They are useful, sometimes even essential, and they can justifiably take pride when the job is done well. But they cannot take credit for the existence of the baby.

In the beginning, the Conservatives said nothing. Climate change wasn't even mentioned in the 2006 election platform.

In 2007, though, climate change became a top public priority and Stephen Harper became very concerned. Climate change is "perhaps the biggest threat to confront the future of humanity today," the Prime Minister declared. And yes, the Conservatives had plans. Big plans. Unlike the Liberals, who talked lots, but accomplished little, the Conservatives were going to get the job done.

In early 2008, the government promised to work with the United States to put a price on carbon dioxide emissions by creating a North American cap-and-trade system. When Stéphane Dion's Liberals also promised to put a price on carbon emissions, but with a carbon tax instead, the Conservatives savaged it as a "tax on everything" and vilified Dion as the man who would destroy the economy.

When the global economy melted down, public concern about climate change plunged. At the same time, and to the same extent, the prominence of climate change in government communications also plunged.

In December 2009, in Copenhagen, the government met with others from around the world and agreed to cut Canada's emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020. It later formally scrapped Canada's commitment to the Kyoto Protocol, which had committed this country to much steeper reductions. The government said Canada couldn't possibly meet the Kyoto targets without damaging the economy, which was probably true since it, and its predecessors, had spent so many years doing nothing. But, anyway, Peter Kent said when he became environment minister, the government was fiercely committed to the Copenhagen targets.

In 2011, after the Conservatives won their long-desired majority, the government delivered a Throne Speech. Climate change wasn't mentioned. Same for the 2012 budget.

The budget did, however, scrap the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, a body created by the Mulroney government to provide expert policy advice to the government. It's not needed any more, Kent said. There's lots of policy advice out there. Just Google it.

Last week, the environment commissioner, who works within the auditor general's office, reported on the government's climate change plan. There isn't one, he said. Or rather, there isn't anything sufficiently coherent and developed to be worthy of the name. Rather than putting a price on carbon emissions - either by a cap-and-trade system or by a carbon tax - the government went with command-and-control regulations and the commissioner's report noted that the government doesn't know what the costs of its regulations will be, or whether they will do any good. The commissioner also reported that, if current trends persist, Canada's emissions in 2020 will be 7.5 per cent higher than they were in 2005, not 17 per cent lower, as the government had committed.

That takes us to Monday, when John Baird - foreign affairs minister and former environment minister - defended the government's decision to scrap the NR-TEE in the House of Commons.

"Why should taxpayers have to pay for more than 10 reports promoting a carbon tax, something that the people of Canada have repeatedly rejected?" Baird fumed. "That is a message the Liberal party just will not accept. It should agree with Canadians. It should agree with the government to no discussion of a carbon tax that would kill and hurt Canadian families."

Presumably, Baird meant "kill jobs," not Canadian families, however, given the government's penchant for rhetorical excess we can't be sure. But let's leave that aside.

Baird confirmed that the government scrapped NRTEE because it didn't like the advice its (Conservative-appointed) members were giving. This is the Soviet approach to research: Politics and ideology determine the correct answer, and it is the researchers' job to prove that the correct answer is correct. Failure means Siberia.

Baird's references to "a carbon tax" are also misleading. The NR-TEE insisted that putting a price on carbon emissions was by far the most effective way to reduce emissions (as virtually all experts in this field agree). But that could be done with a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, like the one the Conservatives promised to set up back in 2008.

But that was 2008. This is now. Back then, public support for action was at an all-time high, and now it's low: Goodbye, price on emissions. Farewell, NRTEE.

So what can we make of all this? There are two possibilities.

First, Stephen Harper and Company may be sincere about tackling climate change. In that case, they are grossly incompetent. Their policy is a mess. They have accomplished little or nothing. And there's no reason to think they will do any better in the future.

The other possibility is that Stephen Harper and Company are lying. They do not have any intention of tackling climate change. They never did. Their only real goal is to manage the file so it doesn't become a political liability, which they have done with considerable success.

When I've raised these possible explanations in the past, the response has been curious.

Unsurprisingly, critics of the prime minister write to say, in effect, "hell yeah he's lying!" But so do many conservatives. Climate change is a fraud, they say, but the government has to pretend it believes in it, and is doing something about it, to satisfy the gullible. It's a lie, they say. But it's a noble lie. Hooray for the prime minister.

That strange argument has even made the august pages of Policy Options, where Michael Hart - a Carleton University professor who apparently believes anthropogenic climate change is some sort of socialist plot - praised the Prime Minister. "Harper has successfully ridden the climate change juggernaut to its inevitable end," Hart wrote.

"By not directly confronting an inherited policy that he found distasteful, he has been able to manage it to a conclusion that has alienated fewer and satisfied more Canadians. In the years to come, as the international climate change file gradually fades into obscurity, similar to many other such utopian initiatives, he can look back with satisfaction at a job well done."

That's how professors say, "Hell yeah he's lying!"

The hardcore right. All year long, the Conservative marching band stayed in lockstep behind the drum major.

Conservative pundits remained seated politely in the reviewing stand. And the conservative base cheered and clapped on the sidewalks. Oh, there was a little grumbling here and there, but it was barely noticeable and quickly forgotten, and there was nothing that could be called dissent or alienation. And not a whisper of rebellion against the man leading the parade.

Which is astonishing. For five long years, True Believers had consoled themselves by reciting a mantra. "He has to because it's a minority," they would say. "Wait until the majority."

Stephen Harper accepted gay marriage and refused to even discuss abortion. "Wait until the majority," social conservatives sighed. "Wait until the majority."

He increased federal government spending 19 per cent even before embracing Keynesian stimulus spending with the fervour of a convert. He expanded the federal civil service by 13 per cent. He supported supply management, expanded regional development agencies, interfered with foreign investment and implemented a series of tax reforms that made economists cringe.

"Wait until the majority," tearful fiscal conservatives whispered to themselves. "Wait until the majority."

Then came the majority, and not much changed.

At the beginning of 2012, when the government was accused of trying to quietly roll back gay marriage, it responded with strong support of gay marriage in both word and legislative substance.

Last week, when a private member's motion prompted accusations that the government was trying to quietly raise the abortion issue, the Conservative whip condemned the motion, declared the government would never do a thing to restrict abortion rights, and, for good measure, made a pro-choice speech as powerful and emphatic as any ever heard in the House of Commons.

Fiscal conservatives did a little better than social conservatives in the first year of the Harper majority, but the emphasis must be on the word "little." The budget which had been touted as "transformational" was nothing of the kind. Yes, there were modest cuts, but orthodox Keynesianism calls for spending to be curtailed after a recession passes and the economy is moving up the business cycle, so there was nothing particularly radical about that. The simple truth is that the prime minister's first budget with the free hand of a majority could have been delivered by a Liberal government led by John Manley or Paul Martin.

Conservatives know that, but don't take my word for it. "I haven't spoken to a single Conservative who's satisfied with the budget Jim Flaherty brought down last month," noted Paul Wells of Maclean's.

So why haven't we heard more of that disappointment in public? Where's the alienation and dissent, the hint of rebellion in the ranks?

Why doesn't that dog bark? There are many factors at work. For one, Stephen Harper essentially created his party and has managed it to ensure there are no Paul Martins with prominence and power of their own.

Other prime ministers, especially Conservatives, could not have dreamed of the control Harper has.

There's also the sense that, however much Harper may compromise conservative principles he is, at heart, a conservative, and so he is cut far more slack than the young Stephen Harper and his Reform colleagues gave Brian Mulroney, who was never seen as "one of us."

But there's another factor at work. It's seldom recognized. And it's critical to keeping the right quiet.

It's Stephen Harper's leftist critics.

Last spring, Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick described Canada after a Harper majority. "Guns on the streets, gated communities, rampant drug use, unlimited anonymous corporate political donations, no government safety standards for food and medicine, classrooms that resemble holding pens more than civilized safe rooms for the young to learn. -" Deep breath.

"Women's rights would retreat, including abortion rights, access to medical advances and the right to go to court to protest inequality. Everything would be up for privatization, from roads, parks, and parking meters to schools and hospitals." There's more, but you get the idea.

Hardcore conservatives love hearing stuff like that. It means Stephen Harper is hated to the point of loopiness by people they loathe, and so they conclude that the prime minister must be doing something right. Even if they can't identify what it is.

In this way, the more unhinged warriors of the left and right mirror and reinforce each other.

When Stephen Harper was in opposition, the left insisted he had a secret agenda he would implement if he ever took power.

The right hoped that was true.

Harper took power and there was no secret agenda. The left said that was only because he was restrained by minority government. "Wait until the majority," they said. Nothing cheered up the right like hearing the words they whispered to themselves coming from the left.

Then came the majority. Still no secret agenda.

No matter. The zealots are sure it's coming. Slowly. Very slowly.

"Stephen Harper is remaking the country," Star columnist Thomas Walkom wrote after the budget was tabled. "It is not a convulsive remake. Like the prime minister himself, it is slow, relentless, inexorable."

Evidence? There isn't much. Or any. Now. But there will be. Just wait. It's all part of his master strategy. He's "boiling the frog," the left insists. It's incremental.

We won't recognize the country when he's done.

The right wipes away a tear, smiles and keeps marching in lockstep.

"I can confirm that as a member of the Conservative caucus for nearly eight years, the prime minister has been consistent with his position on abortion," O'Connor said. "As early as 2005 at the Montreal convention, and in every federal election platform since, he has stated that the Conservative government will not support any legislation to regulate abortion. While the issue may be debated by some, as in the private member's motion here tonight, I state again that the government's position is clear: It will not reopen this debate."

It was a surprisingly sweeping and categorical pledge. And we can be sure it was crafted in the prime minister's office, or at a minimum, personally approved by the boss.

But that was just the beginning of the surprises.

"The decision of whether or not to terminate a pregnancy is essentially a moral decision," O'Connor declared, "and in a free and democratic society, the conscience of the individual must be paramount and take precedence over that of the state."

It was a genuinely shocking moment. In effect, the government engaged the debate it said it didn't want to discuss, but rather than siding with Woodworth and the social conservatives who want abortion restricted, it came out swinging for the other side.

"I cannot understand why those who are adamantly opposed to abortion want to impose their beliefs on others by way of the Criminal Code," O'Connor said. "There is no law that says that a woman must have an abortion. No one is forcing those who oppose abortion to have one."

O'Connor also appealed to practical realities. "Whether one accepts it or not, abortion is and always will be part of society. There will always be dire situations in which some women may have to choose the option of abortion. No matter how many laws some people may want government to institute against abortion, abortion cannot be eliminated. It is part of the human condition."

In closing, O'Connor went further still, channelling the spirit of J.S. Mill. "I am sure we all recognize that the issue of abortion raises strongly held and divergent views within and outside Parliament. However, I firmly believe that each of us should be able to pursue our lifestyle as long as it is within the boundaries of law and does not interfere with the actions of others."

With that, the government repudiated Woodworth and social conservatives who want abortion restricted.

It also repudiated a big chunk of its own agenda.

By coincidence, the same day O'Connor spoke those stirring words in the House of Commons, the government announced it would appeal an Ontario Court of Appeal ruling that had struck down key anti-prostitution laws. This was expected. The Conservatives have vociferously opposed any suggestion that the prostitution laws - which do not forbid prostitution per se but effectively make it impossible to do it without committing a crime - should be curtailed in any way.

So how does that square with the government's declarations on abortion? Try replacing the word "abortion" in any part of Gordon O'Connor's statement with "prostitution."

"Whether one accepts it or not, prostitution is and always will be part of society. There will always be dire situations in which some women may have to choose the option of prostitution. No matter how many laws some people may want government to institute against prostitution, prostitution cannot be eliminated. It is part of the human condition."

Fits rather nicely, doesn't it? Notice also that in O'Connor's statement he declined to answer the question of what constitutes personhood, which is the question raised by Woodworth's private member's bill. That's important. If you believe the fetus is a person (I don't, for the record) the issues of autonomy and liberty become more complicated. Not so in the matter of prostitution, which makes O'Connor's words even more apt.

Then there's marijuana and the other illicit drugs the government is making war on. Try plugging them into O'Connor's statement.

"I cannot understand why those who are adamantly opposed to drug use want to impose their beliefs on others by way of the Criminal Code. There is no law that says a person must use drugs. No one is forcing those who oppose drugs to use them." Again, the fit is close to perfect.

Of course, whenever someone raises J.S. Mill's "harm principle" - that people should be free to do what they wish provided they don't harm others - those who want to restrict liberty insist they don't disagree. Theirs isn't a moral objection, they say. They want the activity banned because it harms others.

These claims are often disingenuous and easily disproven. But the simplest way to respond is to take them at face value and ask "but does criminalization actually protect others from harm?" The answer is clearly no. It even inflicts harms on others that would not otherwise exist (the only reason why street prostitutes blight residential streets, for example, is that they can't conduct their business legally elsewhere). So if harm to third parties is really the concern, the answer is not criminalization but regulation - to ensure that only informed and consenting adults are involved.

So what's left? Why does the government think its ringing words apply to abortion but not to other moral choices? Simple. In O'Connor's statement, he objects to "new laws" that curtail personal freedom but says that the exercise of that freedom must respect "current law."

Today, there is no law banning abortion. But there are laws banning prostitution and drugs.

Thus, what looks like a highly principled statement about the relationship between morality and liberty in a pluralistic society is actually something less grand: It is a lazy and weak defence of the status quo.