It’s been a hell of a week for anyone following North American politics. The festering scandals on both sides of the border are too numerous and complex for me to summarize at the moment, so here’s a toon that tries. See how many references you can spot.

The reason I don’t have time to write a full essay for this toon is because I’m too busy getting ready for my appearance at the big fancy Vancouver Comic Arts Festival this weekend. It’s going to be my second-ever comic convention appearance, and I’m gonna have a ton of cool Filibuster-themed stuff for sale, including some cool brand new merch I designed specially for the show.

On Saturday I’m also going to be giving a talk with my good buddy Matt Bors on the future of editorial cartooning in North America. It’ll no doubt be a real fiesta of insight and cynicism.

Anyway, if it’s at all within your power, you should totally come visit me. VanCAF is completely free to attend, and it’s housed in the Roundhouse centre in scenic Yaletown. Thing runs from 10 am to 6 pm on Saturday, May 25, and then 11 am to 5 pm on Sunday the 26th.

See you there!

The Constitution of Canada is an obtuse and badly-written document, but at least one clause seems to be clear enough. When the prime minister goes around picking senators to represent Canada’s 10 provinces, declares Article IV, sec. 23 (5), they “shall be resident in the Province for which he is appointed.”

A few clauses later, however, things begin to get a bit tricky. A “Senator shall not be deemed to have ceased to be qualified in respect of Residence by reason only of his residing at the Seat of the Government of Canada while holding an Office under that Government requiring his Presence there,” clarifies 31 (5). Translated into 21st century English, the Constitution is clarifying that it’s okay if a senator from, say, Vancouver elects to purchase a condo in Ottawa rather than rack up enormous plane bills flying back-and-forth every time there’s a vote.

But despite this constitutional concession, some Senators still felt commuting was a ritual too important to concede. They need to visit their constituents and so forth, even though they don’t actually have any constituents on account of the fact that no one ever elected them. (Indeed, I question if any Canadian, anywhere, has ever even met his or her senator before. I’m not even being facetious — post in the comments if you have, because I’m genuinely curious about the context).

Anyhow, in 1985 the Senate stuck some amendments on the Parliament of Canada Act allowing the government to front “reasonable travel and living expenses” of any senator patriotic enough to maintain a “primary residence” in whatever far-away province they were appointed to represent. Many senators quickly opted-in.

There was no monitoring or enforcement to ensure senators were living where they said they were, or even a hard and fast definition of what precisely constituted a “primary residence” (as opposed to some other kind) in the first place. There was only the honour system, but that was okay since Canadian senators are all valiant men of honour. And maintaining that consistent standard of honour is why they can never be elected, see.

Late last year some journalists began to suspect the system was being abused. Near as I can tell, this was mostly the result of Prime Minister Harper’s 2008 decision to appoint noted Ottawa journalist Mike Duffy to the Senate. Duffy, who was picked to represent the tiny province of Prince Edward Island, quickly opted into the living-outside-of-Ottawa slush fund, claiming more than $33,000 in absentee living allowances, which naturally caused all his journalist buddies in the capital region to call BS. Nice try, Duffy, but we all see you at the supermarket, they said.

In February Duffy fessed up, claiming he had found the Senate’s demand he accurately state which  which province he lives in “confusing,” and promptly paid back all his ill-obtained allowances (though breaking news informs us he was only able to do this via a loan secured from the Prime Minister’s chief of staff).

The Duffy scandal (followed by a similar controversy about the living circumstances of Liberal senator Marc Harb, plus perennial tabloid darling, Senator Patrick Brazeau) prompted the Senate to stage a comprehensive audit of all contentious senatorial residency claims, and the report came back this week.

The findings? The three embattled senators had pocketed a combined total of over $200,000 in illegitimate out-of-province fees since being appointed. According to Kelly McParland in the National Post, “none of the three spent even a third of their time in the home they claimed as their main residence,” with Senator Brazeau in particular only spending 10% of the last year in his Quebec “home.”

Following the report’s release, Senator Harb was expelled from — er “quit,” Liberal Party — and has, along with Brazeau pledged to fight the charges on Duffianian grounds of confusion. The RCMP now says it will get involved, as well it should, since it’s hard to imagine any other Canadian claiming tens of thousands of dollars of work expenses on false pretenses without the cops getting involved.

But if the legal destiny of the men remains unclear, one thing that decidedly ain’t is the senators’ political futures. Unless they choose to freely resign out of shame, there’s almost no way they can be removed from office. The Prime Minister has no power to fire them, and under the rules of the Constitution, the Senate itself can only vote to expel if they get convicted of an “infamous crime,” which subsequent legislation has clarified to mean an indictable offense, as in, something extremely serious like murder or treason. As opposed to mere embezzlement.

At best, the Senate could do to Duffy and Harb what it already did to Senator Brazeau when he was arrested for pushing his girlfriend down the stairs (a non-indictable offense) last winter — namely, grant him a paid leave of absence for harming the “dignity and reputation of the Senate and public trust and confidence in Parliament.”

Yeah, that’ll do it.

If he wasn’t such an obviously intelligent and educated man, you could be excused for thinking Barack Obama was a little, well, dumb.

How else to explain his fast-accumulating pile of policy failures — not bad policies, destructive policies, or ill-conceived policies, mind you, but simply failed policies, in the most literal sense of ideas attempted, but never implemented. Rarely have we seen a president as flat-out bad at getting his will done as this one. If incompetence has any useful definition, Barack Obama is it.

Last week saw Guantanamo Bay re-enter the headlines with news that more than 100 of the prison’s 166 inmates are now engaged in some manner of hunger strike, with some so weak from protest they’ve had to be painfully force-fed. Such showy acts of passive resistance were an embarrassing reminder of the fact that four years in, the President has still failed to do the thing he originally promised to do on “day one,” namely shut the place down. But at a press conference last Tuesday, Obama seemed blasé at best. I’m gonna get my people to “examine every option that we have administratively to try to deal with this issue,” he said, which I guess begs the question as to what exactly the White House had been doing previously.

Then there’s gun control, the issue which the President used the full force of his bully pulpit to promote in the wake of the Aurora and Sandy Hook massacres, passionately extolling Congress that America’s victims “deserve a vote.” Well, on April 17 the Senate gave them a vote, and despite it being on a matter of extreme moderate inoffensiveness — expanded background checks for gun show customers and internet shoppers — it still went down. Just like the plan to avoid the draconian sequestration spending cuts went down. And the jobs bill went down. And the DREAM Act went down. And perhaps the immigration bill, too. At this point for it to go in any other direction would certainly be bucking a trend.

When Barack Obama first ran for president in 2008, the critique was frequently raised that a not-even-one-term senator was perhaps not entirely qualified to run a country of 300 million. He had zero years of executive experience and less than five as a Washington resident, and measured by lack of titles alone, you’d have to go all the way back to Dwight Eisenhower to find a president with a thinner resume in the world of government (and even Ike had that whole World War II thing).

Bah, rebutted the Obamanauts, what our guy lacks in job credits he more than makes up for in vision. If anything, a lack of Washington experience will merely make his passions less diluted, his goals less compromised by years of craggy insider cynicism.

And perhaps that’s all been true. The things Obama wants, at least, from a path to citizenship for America’s 12 million illegal immigrants to same-sex marriage to cap-and-trade, are ideas undeniably aggressive in their liberalism. When the man speaks, as he did in his sharply ideological second inaugural, it’s impossible to deny the scope of his ambition.

But politics is still the art of the possible, and achieving the possible in the capital of the world’s second-largest democracy requires more than just good intentions. It requires cutthroat strategizing, sophisticated reconnaissance, and a skillful mastery of the sausage machinery of law making that can’t easily be gained from, as Hillary Clinton used to say, “on the job training.”

Thus, while Obama is quick to blame the Congress for his government’s pronounced inability to get what it wants (I resent the implication, said the President, that “my job is to somehow get them to behave”), when we look at the most successful presidents of living memory — Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, and Johnson — all were notable for their creative strategies of legislative manoeuvring. They went to the Hill and forged alliances with individual senators and representatives. They cajoled, flattered, arm-twisted, schemed and made deals. They compromised, triangulated, and gave and took.

The Obama strategy, in contrast, is to simply run ideas up the proverbial flagpole and then take great offense when no one salutes. Of the budgets the President has submitted since taking office, two out of three received ostentatious zero votes from Congress. The White House’s instance that an assault weapons ban be part of any post-Newtown gun control bill was tone-deaf in its overreach, and helped poison the well for pro-gun legislators to seriously consider the watered-down compromise that followed. Obamacare, despite baring his name, was largely crafted by Nancy Pelosi and the congressional Democrats, who indeed actively resented the White House for its lack of leadership at the time.

Obviously, Republican obstructionism in the House and Senate bears a lot of blame for Obama’s marked record of not-doing, but it would be hardly accurate to assert that the modern GOP, Tea Party-infused or not, is really so much worse than any Congressional opposition of years past. It’s easy to forget that Republican Clinton-hate was every bit as fanatical and foaming as modern Obama-hate, complete with elaborate conspiracy theories (Vince Foster was murdered!) and diabolical allegations (the President assassinates his enemies!). Lyndon Johnson passed the most radical racial equality legislation in American history at a time when Congress still possessed a sizeable caucus of open, unapologetic racists and segregationists — and that was just in his own Democratic Party. For his part, Richard Nixon’s term didn’t overlap with a single year in which either chamber of the legislature was controlled by Republicans.

In fairness, I guess it’s true that Obama does have a strategy of sorts, it’s just the wrong one. He’s had polite dinners and lunches and summits galore with Congressional Republicans, and has uttered many-a hectoring speech on the need for everyone to mind their manners and stop being so stubborn. He’s routinely appealed to optimism and emotion, and tried to embarrass and shame those who don’t appreciate the urgency of his causes. He’s even outright surrendered now and then. But the results speak for themselves.

Many years ago, I remember reading a reporter’s summary of a video montage shown at the 2000 Democratic National Convention. It featured a chronological mashup of all the Democratic presidents of the second half of the 20th Century, beginning with Franklin Roosevelt and ending with Bill Clinton. The appearances of these liberal icons generated wild cheers from the audience, noted the story, except for Jimmy Carter, who received only “polite applause.”

That, it seems, is the way American history records its presidents. There are those whose scope of deed and action guaranteed their greatness would always be uncomplicated and self-evident, and there are those who were nice and well-meaning, but ultimately too politically incompetent or strategically unskilled to leave much of a legacy. They are the men whose textbook biographies strain to describe how rejiggering this-or-that federal agency or signing some long-forgotten treaty were accomplishments deserving to share space with world wars and moon landings.

Barack Obama will be a polite applause president.

On August 20, 2012, President Obama interrupted a routine White House press briefing with a surprise cameo appearance. Well in the midst of his re-election campaign, the prez likely figured he could benefit from some direct media facetime.

“Jay tells me that you guys have been missing me,” he joked dryly.

Much of what Obama said at the presser was partisan and forgettable; a denunciation of the infamous Todd Akin comments, an umpteenth call for Mitt Romney to release his tax returns. But then, right at the end, just before he walked off the dais, the President offered a few brief comments on the civil war in Syria.

“I have, at this point, not ordered military engagement in the situation,” he said, responding to a reporter’s question, “but the point you made about chemical and biological weapons is critical. That’s an issue that doesn’t just concern Syria, it concerns our close allies in the region, including Israel. It concerns us. We cannot have a situation where chemical or biological weapons are falling into the hands of the wrong people.”

“We have communicated in no uncertain terms to every player in the region,” he continued, “that that’s a red line for us and that there would be enormous consequences if we start seeing movement on the chemical weapons front, or the use of chemical weapons. That would change my calculations.”

At the time, it sounded like an empty threat. Perhaps just tough-talk posturing to improve the President’s national security bona fides with swing voters? Everyone knew even the world’s worst dictators never actually use chemical weapons any more; guys like Assad only keep the things around as an empty threat of their own, a “beware of dog” sign for a dog that doesn’t bite.

Well, never underestimate murderous psychopaths seems to be the lesson here. Last week reports began to slowly trickle in that the Syrian military had, in fact, used chemical weapons against rebel forces; specifically the nerve gas sarin in small battles near the cities of Damascus and Aleppo. Sarin causes severe muscle convulsions, loss of control over basic bodily functions, paralysis, respiratory failure, and a truly ghastly death. It’s the same chemical Saddam Hussein used to exterminate the Kurds, and the one that homicidal cult in Japan once went around pumping into subway cars.

His bluff having been called, Obama responded by equivocating. Though the use of sarin has been confirmed by the Israelis, British, and French — along with, according to Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Diane Feinstein, the United States “intelligence community,” on April 25 the White House released an exceedingly cautious letter offering only a nervous call for “a comprehensive United Nations investigation” to corroborate these war crimes.

This whole business — a mad dictator allegedly possessing weapons of mass destruction, supposedly ambiguous foreign intelligence, UN inspections unlikely to do much beyond waste everyone’s time — obviously evoke strong memories of the lead up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the famous “dumb war” of 2003, to quote State Senator Obama. Since liberal critics seem to have been vindicated by history in their opposition to that conflict, it’s worth recalling the underlying conclusions that motivated their opposition. If we are to avoid intervening in Syria, after all, we’ll have to make peace with similar arguments.

● Evil is not unto itself a sufficient pretext for military intervention.

● The sovereignty of independent nations is an absolute right, and no nation deserves to have theirs infringed — regardless of how odious their government may be.

● America should avoid taking sides and shedding blood (ours and theirs) in a foreign country’s domestic conflict about which we know relatively little — and have even less at stake.

● We should avoid deposing stable Middle Eastern regimes and creating chaotic post-dictator power vacuums that could emerge as breeding grounds of Islamism. Especially in conflicts where a secular dictatorship is warring with a fundamentalist-dominated opposition.

All fair concerns, and in the Syrian context, the case for non-intervention is made even starker by the the fact that no one is pushing any grandiose, George W. Bush-style schemes about turning this once-dysfunctional country into a model democracy capable of inspiring the larger neighbourhood. America’s geopolitical curiosity in the whole mess has been exceedingly limited.

Yet that limited ambition also highlights the conflict’s uncomplicated short-term urgency  for outside observers — preventing a massive loss of life at the hands of truly horrific means.

The United States could easily stop President Assad’s killings; of this there is no doubt. Syria is a third-world nation of 22 million people possessing an army of under 300,000 soldiers. There is absolutely nothing the Assad forces could do — chemical weapons or not — for which the Pentagon lacks a sophisticated and expensive method of countering.

Charity may not be a viable motive for a long-term Syrian strategy, but it seems a reasonable short-term one, as it did following the mere threat of a massacre in Libya. In that case, the Obama Administration offered the (widely disputed) figure of “100,000″ as the possible number of Libyan lives that could be saved through intervention. Well, 60,000 to 70,000 Syrians have actually died in their conflict.

To quote another bit of rhetoric the President might wish to forget at the moment — his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize speech — Obama once declared that “force can be justified on humanitarian grounds,” particularly in “places that have been scarred by war.” This, he said, was the very definition of a “just war;” one that entails the exercise of force to uphold certain universal ideals regarding the inherent dignity and sacredness of human life — values championed by every religious creed and humanist philosophy — rather than mere naked self-interest.

“We honor those ideals,” the President added later, “by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.”

And so is it now.

It seems terrorism is going to remain in the headlines for a little while longer — at least in Canada.

On Monday, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police made a surprise announcement that they had successfully foiled a potentially deadly plot to blow up a Toronto-area passenger train. Two men with apparent al-Qaeda ties were arrested, making this the first time the fundamentalist terrorist group has directly targeted Canada (or at least the first time we’ve known about it).

According to press reports, the two suspects — both recent Canadian immigrants from the Mideast — planned to kill a bunch of people traveling on a joint Amtrack-VIA Rail line from Manhattan to Toronto once they crossed the Canadian border. It’s not clear when or where exactly the attack was scheduled to occur. The train companies and law enforcement have been at pains to emphasize there was “no immediate threat” to anyone, thanks to the swift work of multiple law enforcement agencies.

This morning, the two men made their first formal court appearances to face charges of conspiracy to commit terrorism and conspiracy to murder. The older of the two, Raed Jaser a Palestinian living in Toronto with United Arab Emirates citizenship, made no plea, nor did Tunisian-born Montrealer Chiheb Esseghaier a few hours later. Both men will remain in custody until their next court appearances, which reporting suggests will come sometime in late May.

Anecdotal biographies of the two suspects are still being pieced together, but in contrast to last week’s Boston bombers, Canada’s terrorist wannabes appear to have been fairly unambiguous in their religious zealotry. Both wore long robes and beards to their hearings; Jaser with similarly conservatively-dressed relatives in tow.

Esseghaier was a foreign student attending Quebec University who classmates have claimed was constantly offended by the decadent liberalism of Canadian society he saw around him. If that’s too subtle for you, he also used the al-Qaeda flag as his profile pic on LinkedIn. Jaser’s background remains more mysterious, but early reporting makes him sound like something of a loner weirdo, who kept his blinds drawn at all hours, had no apparent job, and concealed his wife in a head-to-toe black chador.

In any case, the radicalism of the men was apparently visible enough to worry one of their imams, whose tattling to the RCMP is now considered a crucial break in bringing down their plot. The Mounties actually went out of their way to thank and brief local Muslim leaders prior to their Monday afternoon presser, lest anyone be caught off guard.

It’s the al-Qaeda dimension of the case that’s most fascinating, however. According to RCMP officials, the train bomb suspects received “direction and guidance” from “al-Qaeda elements” in Iran, an accusation that has left some lay observers scratching their heads. Isn’t Shiite Iran supposed to hate Sunni al-Qaeda — and vice-versa?

Maybe in theory, responds Bin Laden expert Peter Bergen at CNN, but in practice the two have a relationship that’s closer to “some kind of a marriage of convenience.” Ironically, Bergen had just written an insightful essay about the complex Iran-al Qaeda connection a few weeks prior, in which he noted that several key Bin Laden allies and relatives have been enjoying safe (if indifferent) haven in Iran for many years, and, in 2003, even organized a string of terrorist attacks against Saudi Arabia from the country.

While no one’s yet alleged that the Iranian government played an active role organizing the would-be Canadian train bombings — an accusation the Ahmadinejad regime has already preemptively dismissed as “hilarious” — the fact that Iran did nothing to actively stop it either is likely to only further damage Ottawa-Tehran relations.

The Harper administration (or as the Iranians call it, “the extremist Canadian government”) cut all diplomatic ties with Iran last year, and is considered to be one of the western world’s more warmongery voices against the mullahs. This, coupled with the fact that the Conservative Party was already in the process of passing a bevy of new anti-terrorism laws when the train plot was uncovered has some Canadian observers fretting that this whole episode is just ripe for political exploitation at the hands of a government still anachronistically obsessed with the War on Terror.

Personally, I’m more troubled by some of the exploitations in the other direction, whether it be Justin Trudeau’s ignorant musings on the importance of addressing the “root causes” of terrorism (root causes like “social exclusion” which, as David Frum notes, was coincidentally “one of the social ills against which he was campaigning” in his bid for Liberal boss) or the grotesque tweets of the famously anti-American Liberal Senator Céline Hervieux-Payette (or at least her staff), which blamed the Prime Minister’s “Republican policies” for provoking terrorism against Canada.

The Canadian left has too often embraced a sort of blissful denialism when it comes to Canada’s attractiveness as a terrorist target; security experts have even argued the trendy belief that Islamic radicals “only hate America” represents a significant domestic security security liability. The breaking up of an arguably worse domestic terrorist plot in 2006, the so-called Toronto 18 conspiracy to detonate a series of truck bombs at a Canadian military base, CSIS headquarters, and the Toronto Stock exchange, failed to make much of a lasting impact on the Canadian psyche, and one fears this latest plot — hashtag or not — will be much the same.

There’s not much useful commentary to be offered when tragedy strikes, particularly a tragedy as appallingly nihilistic, senseless, and evil as Monday’s bombings at the Boston Marathon. Even by the standards of terror, this was an act so utterly bereft of even the barest pretense of politics or symbolism there’s really nothing to engage with intellectually, and no emotion to express beyond sympathy for the three dead innocents and over 150 other victims.

Perhaps in time, once we have more insights about the perpetrators, there will be more to say. For now, we can only mourn.

Of all the absurd, pointless political offices in existence today, few can match the sheer dark comedy of the South Korean Ministry of Unification. Every year, South Korean citizens shill out some ungodly amount of tax dollars (someday, maybe even a special unification tax) to this painfully optimistic bureaucracy, which busies itself planning for the magical day when the Korean peninsula is peacefully reunited under a single (which is to say, the Southern) government.

The department’s existence reflects a certain deeply ingrained, ethnocentric naivete that’s all-too-prevalent in some corners of South Korean society, namely that a Korean is a Korean is a Korean, and therefore the so-called sovereign republic of North Korea (which has been independent from the South nearly as long as India has been independent from England) is really just a flash in the pan that can probably be absorbed without too much trouble.

Near as I can tell, the Unification Department’s most meaningful achievement to date was getting the North and South Korean flag-bearers to hold hands during the opening ceremonies of the 2004 summer Olympics. Most of the time they just keep their eyes peeled for any sign that the Northern government is planning to rain hell’s holy fire upon them, as on Monday, when the South Korean Unification Minister announced he had seen “indications” that the Kim Jong Un regime was planning its fourth test detonation of a nuclear weapon.

North Korea has been considerably more provocative and unhinged than usual lately, with the government’s rhetoric — hardly restrained at the best of times — escalating into what any normal person would consider an out-and-out prelude to war. On March 11, they proclaimed the 1953 Korean War-ending ceasefire with the South “invalid.” A couple weeks later, they downgraded relations further and announced the beginning of a formal “state of war” with the South. A few days after that, they warned that “merciless” nuclear attacks against the United States could come any day.

But of course when it comes to dealing with North Korea, you’re supposed to turn off the normal part of your brain — just as they have. And indeed, those equipped with North Korean-to-Human dictionaries have repeatedly cautioned that what we’re hearing right now is basically just a long, drawn-out, symbolic overreaction to the events of last winter, when the North launched a satellite and was slapped with sanctions, then detonated a nuclear weapon and was slapped with some more.

Similar cycles of provocation and scolding have occurred in the past without ever pushing the North to quite such apocalyptic language, however, leading most analysts to figure the key variable in this unprecedented pageant of muscle-flexing must be Kim Jong Un himself. Having only assumed power in December of 2011, such thinking posits that the 20-something Kim III must be uniquely eager to prove he can sable-rattle as good as his dad and grandpa, if not better. A recent psychological profile of the man commissioned by US intelligence paints a picture of an insecure, needy tyrant desperate to validate his authority in the context of the smotheringly high expectations raised by state propaganda, and fears being undermined by his vastly more experienced old-guard apparatchiks and generals. So provoking a phony crisis is a good way to get everyone to fall in line.

The only danger is that Kim’s critics within the regime might be right; if he is too young and dopey for prime time, he may not even know how to provoke properly, and might bumble into some stupid act that crosses the line — literally.

A small attack against South Korea or the United States — say, a single non-nuclear missile strike against a purely military target — could seem minor and symbolic from the North Korean perspective, but provoke a massive US-South Korean Combined Forces response. And that, worry NoKo experts Keir Lieber and Daryl Press in a provocative recent article in Foreign Affairs magazine, would almost certainly start a nuclear war, since the second the Combined Forces make any sort of move against Pyongyang, the Northerners have every incentive in the world to use nuke strikes to frighten off further attacks. Keir and Daryl point out this was actually the strategy favoured by American defence planners during the period of the Cold War when the Soviet missile gap was at its largest: strike first to scare, not necessarily to win.

Or try to talk things out beforehand, so no striking is necessary. Though Obama is unlikely to take Pat Buchanan’s advice and “pick up the phone, call North Korea and talk directly to Kim,” much has been made of his administration’s recent overtures to China — the People’s Republic being one of the few nations that keeps the Dear Leader on speed-dial.

The Chinese have seen geopolitical value in the survival of an independent North Korean regime since the Maoist era, but as a country that shares America’s desire for a nuclear-free Korean peninsula, recent reporting suggests even their patience is wearing thin. How exactly they may assert that impatience remains to be seen; personally I’m fond of the scheme, flouted by some, where the Chinese secure regime change in the North by promising a safe exile for the Kim family — on the assumption that guaranteeing the Kims’ long-term personal survival (screw their subjects, screw the country) is what this whole spat is basically about.

But no one really knows for sure. In fact, if there’s one consistent theme of North Korean diplomacy, it’s not knowing much about anything.

We don’t know when the North is going to make its next belligerent move, or what form (another nuke test? a troop movement?) said move will take. We don’t know how many nukes they have, or if they’ve perfected a missile-based delivery system. We don’t know how far these theoretical missiles might reach, and we don’t know what target’s in their sights. We don’t know what their leaders are thinking, or what motives govern their actions. We don’t know if they want peace, or are willing to risk war.

Just about the only thing we do know, in fact, is that it’s going to be another slow year at the Unification Department.

I remember a conversation with an older student in some university class a few years ago. I forget why exactly, but we’d just finished watching Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette, a 1985 British film that featured, among other things, a rather explicit man-on-man romance.

“Audiences back then must have been scandalized,” I said.

“Oh, I dunno,” my classmate replied. “I think things are actually worse today. Back then, homosexuality was just this weird, avant-garde thing. Now, it’s… political.”

This sort of logic has been used to explain the slow arrival of marriage equality in the United States. Back in 2003, when the Massachusetts Supreme Court declared gay nuptials a constitutional right and a larger national debate over the idea began, moderate supporters of the gay cause immediately began to worry if the homosexual lobby had perhaps overplayed their hand.

During the late 1990s, after all, many states had started quietly passing unambitious domestic partnership laws that granted many marriage-like rights to same-sex partners, and included homosexuality as grounds for non-discrimination in charters governing housing and employment. Had this incremental, mostly behind-the-scenes trend continued, which is to say, had the m-bomb, never been dropped, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that generous civil protections for same-gender couples would now be law in the majority of states. Even many Republicans of the era made much about how they had “no problem” with gays enjoying hospital visitation rights or the ability to draw up their own inheritance contracts and so on.

But instead marriage, that most heterosexual, historical, and emotionally cherished of institutions, became the demand. A stage was skipped, a backlash was provoked, and the result was perhaps the single most regressive decade in America’s history of gay rights.

Anti-same sex marriage amendments were affixed to three-fifths of all state constitutions. Two Democratic presidential candidates were told the issue was a loser and happily ignored it. A Republican president was told it was a winner and was rewarded a second term (at least in part) for opposing it. It all added up, in the words of some fair-weather allies, to a country clearly “not ready” for the next step in homosexual equality. Gay people were fine, but why did they have to get so… political?

In 2013, of course, the world is an entirely different place. Lawrence v. Texas universally decriminalized homosexuality. “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” has been abolished. There are openly gay mayors and senators. 60 percent of Americans say they have a homosexual friend or relative. The current president endorses gay marriage along with his cabinet and the vast majority of Congressional Democrats (and even a couple Republicans). Right-wing mainstays like Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are officially bored with the issue, and declare it inevitable. 58% of the country says they’re ready.

Against such a backdrop, it’s nearly impossible to imagine a scenario in which the Supreme Court of the United States, which began hearing two gay marriage-related cases last week, will not declare the practice legal in some form or another come ruling time.

The issue is so overwhelmingly backed by Democrats it can be completely taken for granted that the court’s four liberals will find in favor, while swing justice Anthony Kennedy’s eclectic mix of views includes, in the words of Slate‘s Emily Bazelon, a marked love of “states rights and gay rights” — which both cases have in spades. The question is simply how far the majority will go, not whether they’ll go there at all.

At the very least, few deny that same-sex marriage will be re-legalized California. Supreme Court case number one, the so-called “Prop 8″ dispute, which tests the constitutionality of a 2008 referendum that stripped California gays of their right to marry just a few months after the state Supreme Court declared it, seemed to thoroughly disinterest the judges during oral arguments. Charles Cooper, the lead lawyer backing the referendum’s results, that is, the anti-gay marriage guy, offered only the lamest defences of the Peoples’ power to deny a particular segment of themselves a right previously granted — and was happily mocked by the court’s liberal wing for even trying.

At one point, Cooper flatly denied Justice Elena Kagan’s assertion that straight, married couples over 55 could not procreate — as he had to, since procreation was one of the few coherent arguments his side could muster in the defense of keeping marriage exclusively heterosexual.

“I can just assure you if both the woman and the man are over the age of 55, there are not a lot of children coming out of that marriage,” said the Justice, to loud laughter from the gallery.

Case number two considers the constitutional validity of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, an embarrassingly dated piece of legislation that says the federal government will never recognize the validity of any state’s same-sex marriages nor grant to same-sex couples any of the over 1,000 benefits straight Americans can access by tying the knot. The sheer arbitrary vindictiveness of this one seemed to irritate the court’s liberals just as much as Prop 8, and once again it was Justice Kagan that got the soundbyte of the afternoon.

“I’m going to quote from the House Report here,” she said, reading Congress’ DOMA notes before the pro-DOMA counsel. ”‘Congress decided to reflect and honor a collective moral judgment and to express moral disapproval of homosexuality.‘”

“Is that what happened in 1996?” she asked coyly.

“If that’s enough to invalidate the statute, then you should invalidate the statute,” spluttered the flummoxed lawyer.

After two great days in court, SSM supporters were understandably giddy about their odds. But even if they “get what they want” in some narrow sense, it’s still somewhat unclear what exactly “overturning” Prop 8 and DOMA will affect in practical terms.

For instance, is Prop 8′s unconstitutionality born from the fact that it stripped rights from gay couples, or merely denied them? If its the former, the consequence of a positive ruling would be decidedly limited. Most states that have voted to ban gay marriage have done so apropos of nothing beyond a fear that some judge might impose it someday, and the Court could easily hold that’s fine, since the democratic process still allows for such bans to be overturned, as happened in Maine recently. A limited DOMA ruling could consolidate this belief even further. Sure, maybe it’s unconstitutional to say the feds will never recognize any gay marriages, but if a single state’s voted to legalize the practice within their borders, well, the feds have no right to undermine that decision.

In short, if gays can easily win their rights through politics-as-usual, surely a few years of delay isn’t such a crime. Just give the states time and eventually they’ll all come around  Everyone’s always saying it’s inevitable, right?

If marriage is found to be a right, period, however, then the Court is getting into real Roe V. Wade territory. A maximist ruling on both cases — that it’s unconstitutional to ban gay marriage and the federal government must recognize it everywhere — would theoretically invalidate all anti-gay marriage laws across the entire United States in one swift swoop, and turn all 31 anti-SSM amendments into archaic relics, like the old anti-miscegenation amendments in the Deep South, overnight.

According to the New Yorker‘s Jeffrey Toobin, this is the scenario that even a liberal justice like Ruth Bader Ginsburg worries about, since the potential for conservative backlash against such brazen judicial activism — a revival of support for the Federal Marriage Amendment perhaps? — could be so high. Is the country ready for an across-the-board imposition of a dramatic new right that languished in fringe-world obscurity a mere decade ago?

Perhaps not. But it’s an open question if that 58% is ready for a excessively cautious compromise, either.

That kind of waffling, it seems, might be just too… political.

Amid all the media hoopla surrounding this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, here’s a headline you probably missed: Stephen Harper was invited to speak but politely declined. Speaking to the National Post, an anonymous staffer later explained that the optics of Harper addressing a gang of Republicans would be just too scandalous for his delicate country to handle.

“Our whole careers, we’ve had to defend ourselves against charges of being lackeys of the American right,” he said. So why give the haters more ammo?

One really has to feel for the CPAC organizers. We all know the Republican Party isn’t exactly on the ascendancy these days, but what does it say about a group so desperate for American conservative success stories that they have to leave America altogether? Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu was apparently another gentle rejection, though I imagine he was worried about optics of a different sort.

Not that the Harper invite was entirely without merit, mind you. From the perspective of an American righty, the PM offers no shortage of reasons for respect. He’s a strong intellectual conservative. He’s won three back-to-back terms in a centre-left nation. He seems poised to balance the Canadian budget in less than a decade without resorting to tax hikes. He’s been called the most pro-Israel leader on earth. He’s pretty good at winning the nonwhite/immigrant vote. In many ways, he’s everything Republicans want to be, but can’t.

More controversially, however, the Harper precedent also offers evidence supporting the moderate-or-die school of conservative electoral strategy. Take cherished right-wing social issues. Here, Harper runs the gamut from disinterested to agnostic.

Though a staunch critic of gay marriage while still in the political wilderness, as prime minister he inherited a country that had already legalized it, and in 2006, after a hopeless parliamentary vote on revisiting the matter, he officially declared the debate “closed.” That’s different than full-throated support, but practically speaking… not really.

On abortion, the story’s much the same. My friend Jonathan Van Maren, spokesman for one of this country’s more radical pro-life groups, recently wrote an bitter editorial in which he describes Harper as a cruelly indifferent politician who’s consistently failed to offer anti-abortionists “the slightest reason to support him.”

“I will not have legislation limiting a woman’s right to choose,” Jon quotes the prime minister stating repeatedly. Again, perhaps different from saying “I’m ecstatic about said right,” but even more different from threatening it.

Canadians partial to this sort of conservative pragmatism have done their best to hype their “good example” to audiences south of the border. Following President Obama’s reelection, the Canadian papers filled with editorials lecturing Republicans to heed the Harper case study, or else get used to feeling the Democrat boot on their backsides. David Frum in particular, the dual-citizen booster of binational conservatism/exiled Republican thought criminal has constantly written editorials praising Harper as a vindicating counterexample to Tea Party extremism.

And there’s evidence powerful voices in the Republican establishment are beginning to take Harperism to heart, too. As last week’s so-called 2012 “autopsy report” from GOP Chairman Reince Priebus vividly illustrated, the Republican Party’s highest-ranking muckity-mucks are painfully aware their contemporary troubles are almost entirely rooted in damning perceptions of party dogmatism, bigotry, and intolerance among the general public. We need to get away from “universal purity” and towards “a more welcoming conservatism,” says the report. “We need to campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too.” We must become “inclusive and welcoming on social issues.” And so on.

Now, I like Stephen Harper. I’ve voted for him repeatedly. I think he’s a better prime minister than any available alternative. But I’m also prepared to admit his success as an “electable conservative” are a product of the unique weirdness of the Canadian political system as much as anything else. His ability to provide lessons to the rest of the world have to be viewed first and foremost in this context.

In the last Canadian parliamentary election Harper’s party won 39.6% of the popular vote. That’s not a lot. Granted, every other party won considerably less, and it doesn’t logically follow — as much as the Stephane Dions and Elizabeth Mays of the world might wish — that some hybrid Frankenstein Liberal-NDP-Green coalition government would be more democratically legitimate. But the Conservative Party of Canada, even in this current epoch of outreach, still only commands only a narrow plurality of public support, and it’s a plurality smaller than the one John McCain won in 2008, or even Michael Dukakis in 1988.

But that’s good enough in a parliamentary system. In many ways, Harper’s success in Canada is really more analogous to John Boehner’s ability to remain speaker of the House of Representatives even though more overall voters wanted Nancy Pelosi. A party that’s unpopular nationally can still win legislative majorities without too much difficulty because the diverse voter, party, and issue dynamics in several hundred individual races offer vastly more strategic potential (particularly when gerrymandering is involved) than the unified judgement of the national populace.

Second, it’s not clear at all whether Stephen Harper’s calculated moderation has actually improved the party’s brand in any measurable way — or at least changed any minds. Ask your average young, urbanite Canadian (a demographic that overwhelmingly supports the NDP) why she doesn’t vote Tory, and her reasons will probably echo the non-Republicans in the Priebus report: the party is too white and religious, it hates gay people, it’s full of radical anti-abortion nuts, and so on. The Canadian left certainly hasn’t moderated their rhetoric in response to their increasingly pragmatic opponents, as last year’s completely insane liberal freak-out over a non-existent Harper conspiracy against gay marriage proved, a stereotype merely has to sound plausible to be politically powerful. How much time would have to pass before accusations of Republican bigotry — no matter how moderate the candidate — stop sounding plausible? How many election cycles did it take for southern conservatives to stop voting Democrat?

Lastly, demographics. I’ll expand on this one in more detail once I finally get around to writing a proper review of The Big Shift, an important and insightful book on the influence of immigration on modern Canadian politics, but for now, suffice it to say that Canadian minority voters (who more-or-less back conservatives) and American minority voters (who don’t) don’t actually have much in common beyond an off-white skin tone.

For reasons particular to its history and geography, the United States possesses an enormous population of men and women of African and Latino descent, many of whom inhabit a depressingly stable underclass marked by poverty, discrimination, and social dysfunction. Canada’s largest minority population, in contrast, consists of east and south Asians who voluntarily journeyed to North America after the Second World War and established comfortable middle-class lifestyles in ethnic suburban enclaves.

If American minorities are disproportionately disposed to the left, in short, it’s not because of some fundamental “minority” distrust of white conservatives (though that may surely exist) but rather their logical economic disposition to favor the party of welfare, medicare, and social assistance, while Canada’s comparably better-off minorities favor the Tories because there’s a sense that it’s the party of small business and general bourgeois sensibilities.

This is a crass overgeneralization, I realize, and its blunt simplicity does not explain some of the stranger divergences in North American voter demographics (why bourgeois Asian-Americans vote Democrat for example). But it’s still truer than not. A good Canadian thought exercise is to imagine a scenario in which aboriginals comprised 25% of the Canadian electorate. Would a Tory appeal to “shared conservative values” get them anywhere?

There’s an unavoidable possibility that conservatism, in the sense it’s presently understood and offered in North America, is simply not a winning pitch on either side of the 49th parallel. It can win a majority of seats in the Canadian legislature and a majority of members in the United States Congress, but it can’t command an outright majority of popular support in either nation. That matters less in Canada, where three-party races and a badly-designed parliamentary system allow a government to seize sweeping power on a relatively thin mandate, but it also says less about the viability of Canadian conservatism than Harper-boosters want to believe.

That’s the awkward hidden subtext to Harper’s no-show at CPAC: he doesn’t have much to teach.

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty released Canada’s 2013-2014 budget yesterday, and my, what a conservative document it is.

Just not in the ideological sense.

With expenditures totalling over $250 billion, federal spending remains as high as, well, the previous six years of Conservative rule, and even with a much-vaunted decrease in the growth of spending (now .7%, the lowest since the 1990s) Ottawa is still poised to keep spending more in absolute terms than ever before. Canada’s unprecedented post-2008 spending spree, initially an ideological deviation excused by the emergency need for of recession-battlin’ stimulus, will now become a permanent part of what Minister Flaherty calls a 10-year “Building Canada Plan” where the government embraces a permanent role as a subsidizer-in-chief of infrastructure investments and make-work projects across the nation.

A few Tory principles did sneak their way into the thing, to be fair. There are $4 billion in vague, though overdue cuts to that most abused of budgetary categories, “discretionary spending,” and all revenue gains will be obtained solely through closing tax loopholes and cracking down on deadbeats. In two more years Canada’s deficit will be wiped out and a surplus will be restored, which is great because that’s when the next federal election is coincidentally scheduled.

Overall, however, Flaherty‘s was a budget liberal enough to make it hard for liberals to criticize. Watching Canadian reporters prowl the halls of parliament yesterday looking for anti-budget commentary from the various left-wing opposition parties, it was striking how mild and unideological their critiques were. Sure, the Harper government was accused of being “deceptive” and “dishonest” with some of their figures, and “gimmicky” and “superficial” with some of their cuts and kickbacks (particularly a cut-heard-round-the-world to lower the tariff on imported hockey equipment, this year’s abolished penny), but overall, one didn’t get the impression a Liberal, NDP, or even —lord help us — Green Party government would do things that differently, had they been asked.

Perhaps the most insightful commentary came from Thomas Mulcair, the NDP boss.

“There is nothing in this budget to prepare Canada for a 21st-century economy,” he fumed. “The Conservatives are leaving a huge environmental, social and fiscal debt to our children.”

Canadians need a budget that stimulates the growth of a diversified economy with a medley of industries, he continued, as opposed to Mr. Harper’s plan to keep “all our eggs in the [oil] extraction basket.”

Mulcair is a bit of a Johnny one-note on this topic. In his mind, almost everything that’s wrong with this country’s economic situation, from unemployment figures to the decline of the manufacturing sector to a shrinking base of federal revenue, can be traced back to the Albertan oil industry in one way or another. It’s an elegantly inclusive pander to the various factions of his left-wing coalition; urban yuppie greens are appeased by his hard line against the grimy “tar sands” while working class union-types in the eastern provinces are impressed by his single-cause thesis for their suffering.

As energy development steadily envelops a larger and larger chunk of the Canadian GDP, the Tories have been quick to brand such critiques as evidence that Mulcair simply hates the Canadian economy and can’t be trusted to run it, but I’m starting wonder if he might be on to something. One should always be curious about the sort of questions politicians have the least interest in answering.

A couple days before the big budget release party, Harper’s resource minister, Joe Oliver, traveled to British Columbia to announce a bold new federal initiative in the exciting realm of offshore tanker surveillance. A special fleet of spill-watching planes will constantly monitor the coast of B.C., tanker inspections will be toughened up, and you better believe there’ll be a lot more buoys.

The declaration was born more from desperation than anything else. Oil’s useless without someone to sell it to, and the Harper administration badly wants the government of British Columbia to approve a trans-provincial pipeline, known by the codename “Northern Gateway,” to flow Albertan oil to the Canadian west coast for easy export to hungry markets in Asia.

Virtually no one in the B.C. political establishment is down with this plan. The environmental risks are too high, the economic benefits to B.C. are too low, and the partisan gains practically non-existent. Last July, Christy Clark, the Liberal premier of British Columbia, created a rather absurd checklist of preconditions for approving the thing, with demands ranging from the vague (aboriginal Canadians must be “provided with the opportunities to benefit from these projects”) to the patently unconstitutional (B.C. must be given a “fair share” of Albertan royalties). Oliver’s oil tanker scheme was an admitted sop to Clark’s second precondition — “world-leading marine oil spill response, prevention and recovery systems” — but she’s yet to declare it sufficient.

Not that it even matters what she thinks, mind you. Clark is an enormously unpopular woman, and she will almost certainly lose this spring’s provincial election to the head of the provincial NDP, whose pipeline intolerance is intense and unapologetic, as is his opposition to tankers on the B.C. coast, period.

Good time for a Plan B — but unfortunately that’s exactly what Northern Gateway is. Exporting oil to Asia via British Columbia was supposed to be an alternative to sending it to the States, a prospect that’s looking steadily more dubious as the Obama administration continues to waffle on the fate of the Alberta-to-Texas Keystone XL pipeline. As we discussed previously, the President’s been giving continuous signals that he intends to make combatting climate change one of the signature causes of his second term; vetoing Keystone may be his single biggest opportunity.

Should he make that decision, one imagines Obama will emphasize recent studies claiming that oil production within the United States is advancing so quickly the nation may be energy independent by the mid-2o30s. This is one of the unsettling secrets of the burgeoning Canada petro-state; though we enjoy proudly reminding oblivious Americans that our country, and not Saudi Arabia or wherever, is Uncle Sam’s largest source of foreign oil, there’s no guarantee that’s destined to remain an impressive title.

Minister Flaherty‘s 2013-2014 budget predicts Canada’s rate of GDP growth, which has been rather low recently, will make a dramatic one-point jump in the coming year, then rise steadily at about 2.5% annually ’till at least 2017. Obviously it’s a supremely political prediction that presumes all the subsidies and job training initiatives and infrastructure investments that the finance minister says will work, will work, and that nothing big or economically destabilizing — like, say, the back-to-back rejection of two enormous trade and construction initiatives — will happen between now and the red-to-black year of 2015.

Talk about conservative.