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Canadian taxpayers paid eight thousand bucks for Jennifer Lynch, QC, Chief Commissar of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, to fly first class to Dublin to whine about me, Ezra Levant and "reverse chill" in a speech she'd already given in Montreal.

Incidentally, when I testified to the House of Commons Select Committee on Justice, Miriam Burke, the clerk to the committee, invited me to claim hotel and travel expenses for the trip. I declined, on the grounds that the Canadian taxpayer, already groaning under Commissar Lynch's tab, should not have to bear additional burdens.

THE FORT HOOD MASSACRE
THE FATAL FLAW
The hole in our strategy - plus a first reaction from Mark and Hugh Hewitt 

MARK ON THE MEDIA
TEA AND SYMPATHY
More nothing to see here - plus Shooting raises fears for sanity of entire western world

THE RUSH LIMBAUGH SHOW
THE HOPE INDEX
A few moments from Mark's guest-hosting stint today - with an alternative view from the tippy-tappy fingers of George Soros' hardworking stenographers

CANADA vs HUMAN RIGHTS
THE CLAIMING OF THE GREEN
The Chief Censor and expensor

Steyn This Week

I’m always appreciative when a fellow says what he really means. Tim Flannery, the jet-setting doomsaying global warm-monger from down under, was in Ottawa the other day promoting his latest eco-tract, and offered a few thoughts on “Copenhagen”—which is transnational-speak for December’s UN Convention on Climate Change. “We all too often mistake the nature of those negotiations in Copenhagen,” remarked professor Flannery. “We think of them as being concerned with some sort of environmental treaty. That is far from the case. The negotiations now ongoing toward the Copenhagen agreement are in effect diplomacy at the most profound global level. They deal with every aspect of our life and they will influence every aspect of our life, our economy, our society.”

Hold that thought: “They deal with every aspect of our life.” Did you know every aspect of your life was being negotiated at Copenhagen? But in a good way! So no need to worry. After all, we all care about the environment, don’t we? So we ought to do something about it, right? And, since “the environment” isn’t just in your town or county but spreads across the entire planet, we can only really do something at the planetary level. But what to do? According to paragraph 38 on page 18 of the latest negotiating text, the convention will set up a “government” to manage the “new funds” and the “related facilitative processes.”

Tim Flannery’s disarmingly honest characterization passed almost without notice, reported as far as I can tell only by Brian Lilley of CFRB Toronto and CJAD Montreal. But professor Flannery has it right. Government transport policy is about transport, and government education policy is about education, but environmental policy is about everything, because everything’s part of “the environment”: your town, your county, your planet—and you. “We are the environment. There is no distinction,” declared another renowned expert, David Suzuki, last year. And just as the government now monitors air and water quality so it’s increasingly happy to regulate your quality.

In the name of “the environment,” the state gets to regulate everything you do. The cap-and-trade bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives, for example, is a bold assault on property rights: in order to sell your home—whether built in 2006 or 1772—you would have to bring it into compliance with whimsical, eternally evolving national “energy efficiency” standards, starting with a 50 per cent reduction in energy use by 2018. Fail to do so and it would be illegal for you to enter into a private contract with a willing buyer.

Hey, but who would ever find out?

Don’t be so sure. In 2006, to comply with the “European Landfill Directive,” various municipal councils in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland introduced “smart” trash cans—“wheelie bins” with a penny-sized electronic chip embedded within that helpfully monitors and records your garbage as it’s tossed into the truck. Once upon a time, you had to be a double-0 agent with Her Majesty’s Secret Service to be able to install that level of high-tech spy gadgetry. But now any old low-level apparatchik from the municipal council can do it, all in the cause of a sustainable planet. So where’s the harm?

And once Big Brother’s in your trash can, why stop there? Our wheelie-bin sensors are detecting an awful lot of junk-food packaging in your garbage. Maybe you should be eating healthier. In Tokyo, Matsushita engineers have created a “smart toilet”: you sit down, and the seat sends a mild electric charge through your bottom that calculates your body/fat ratio, and then transmits the information to your doctors. Japan has a fast-aging population imposing unsustainable costs on its health system, so the state has an interest in tracking your looming health problems, and nipping them in the butt. In England, meanwhile, Twyford’s, whose founder invented the modern ceramic toilet in the 19th century, has developed an advanced model—the VIP (Versatile Interactive Pan)—that examines your urine and stools for medical problems and dietary content: if you’re not getting enough roughage, it automatically sends a signal to the nearest supermarket requesting a delivery of beans. All you have to do is sit there as your VIP toilet orders à la carte and prescribes your medication.

But think of the environmental benefits: readers may recall Sheryl Crow’s brief campaign to get people to use only one sheet of toilet paper (I recommended an all-star consciousness-raising single—“All we are saying is give one piece a chance”). Last month, the Washington Post reported a new front in this war. Two-ply bathroom tissue, according to Allen Hershkowitz of the Natural Resources Defense Council, “is the Hummer of the paper industry.” Oh, and blame Canada, as that’s where most American two-ply comes from: this decadent Dominion is apparently the House of Saud of toilet paper. In Britain, where closed-circuit cameras monitor you to check you’re not eating a sandwich while driving, is it such a stretch to foresee those toilet sensors that wire your stool analysis to the government health centre also snitching on your two-ply Cottonelle? Or perhaps, if it’s a Matsushita toilet, a few extra volts from the buttock-zapper will be enough of a warning.

“The environment” is the most ingenious cover story for Big Government ever devised. You float a rumour that George W. Bush is checking up on what library books you’re reading, and everyone goes bananas. But announce that a government monitoring device has been placed in every citizen’s trash can in the cause of “saving the planet,” and the world loves you.

In 1785, the British philosopher Jeremy Bentham began working on his famous “Pan-opticon”—a radial prison in which a central “inspector” could see all the prisoners, but they could never see him. In the computer age, we now have not merely panopticon buildings, but panopticon societies, like modern London—and soon perhaps, excepting a few redoubts such as Waziristan and the livelier precincts of the Horn of Africa, a panopticon planet.

Yet high-tech statism still needs an overarching narrative. In the new school of panoptic fiction—such as John Twelve Hawks’s recently completed Fourth Realm trilogy—the justification for round-the-clock surveillance is usually “security.” But the “security state” is a tough sell: if you tell people the government is compiling data on them for national security purposes, the left instinctively recoils. But, if you explain that you’re doing it to “lower emissions,” starry-eyed coeds across the land will coo their approval. And the middle-class masochists of the developed world will whimper in orgasmic ecstasy as you tighten the screws, pausing only to demand that you do it to them harder and faster.

Consider a recent British plan for each citizen to be given an official travel allowance. If you take one flight a year, you’ll pay just the standard amount of tax on the journey. But, if you travel more frequently, if you take a second or third flight, you’ll be subject to additional levies—all in the interest of saving the planet for Al Gore’s polar bear documentaries and that carbon-offset palace he lives in in Tennessee. The Soviets restricted freedom of movement through the bureaucratic apparatus of “exit visas.” The British favoured the bureaucratic apparatus of exit taxes: the movement’s still free; it’s just that there’ll be a government processing fee of £412.95. And, in a revealing glimpse of the universal belief in enviro-statism, this proposal came not from Gordon Brown’s Labour Party but from the allegedly Conservative Party.

At their Monday night poker game in hell, I’ll bet Stalin, Hitler and Mao are kicking themselves: “ ‘It’s about leaving a better planet to our children?’ Why didn’t I think of that?” This is Two-Ply Totalitarianism—no jackboots, no goose steps, just soft and gentle all the way. Nevertheless, occasionally the mask drops and the totalitarian underpinnings become explicit. Take Elizabeth May’s latest promotional poster: “Your parents f*cked up the planet. It’s time to do something about it. Live Green. Vote Green.” As Saskatchewan blogger Kate McMillan pointed out, the tactic of “convincing youth to reject their parents in favour of The Party” is a time-honoured tradition.

The problem, alas, is that, for the moment, there’s still more than one party. But why? Last year, David Suzuki suggested that denialist politicians should be thrown in jail. And only last month the New York Times’s Great Thinker Thomas Friedman channelled his inner Walter Duranty and decided that democracy has f*cked up the planet. Why, in Beijing, where they don’t have that disadvantage, they banned the environmentally destructive plastic bag! In one day! Just like that! “One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks,” wrote Friedman. “But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.”

Forward to where?

Well, fortunately the Copenhagen convention’s embryo “government” appears immune to such outmoded concepts as democratic accountability.

Don’t take my word. Listen to what the activists are saying: it’s about every aspect of your life.

PS: Just to be safe, after reading this column, tear into pieces and flush down your toilet.

Oh, no, wait, don’t…
Maclean's, November 2009

Dear Mark,
     The Lisbon Treaty looks like a done deal. As we say goodbye to national sovereignty in Europe, it might be a good time to reprint one of your columns from their first attempt to force this on us, as a "European Constitution".

Gillian Andrews

MARK SAYS: I wrote a lot about the EU Constitution four or five years ago, usually after running into M Giscard somewhere along the way, claiming to be Europe's Jefferson. And it was always clear to me, as I write below, that they'd shove it down your throat one way or the other. Don't forget, the SteynOnline Request Of The Week appears each Thursday, so do drop a line requesting a favorite column or even a favourite column here.

A stitch-up in time
from The Daily Telegraph, May 24th 2005

The Eurovision Song Contest is not always a reliable guide to the broader political currents coursing through the Continent. One recalls the 1990 finals in Zagreb, when the charming hostess, Helga Vlahovic, presented her own fair country as the perfect Eurometaphor: "Yugoslavia is very much like an orchestra," she cooed. "The string section and the wood section all sit together." Alas, barely were the words out of her mouth before the wood section was torching the string section's dressing rooms, and the hills were alive only with the ancient siren songs of ethnic cleansing and genital severing. Lurching into its final movement, Yugoslavia was no longer the orchestra, only the pits.

But this year's winner, Miss Helena Paparizou of Greece, was a shrewder analyst of the geopolitical scene. Her triumphant My Number One is an eerily perceptive summation of the EU establishment's view of its ingrate electorates this pre-referendum week:

With the new constitution flailing in most polls, the Dutch government is being rather vicious already. Bernard Bot, the foreign minister, dismisses the electorate's objections as "a lot of irrational reaction". Piet-Hein Donner, the justice minister, warns that Europe will go the way of Helga's orchestra if the constitution is rejected. "Yugoslavia was more integrated than the Union is now," he points out, "but bad will and the inability to stifle hidden irritations and rivalry led in a short time to war."

Scornful of such piffling analogies, the prime minister, Jan-Peter Balkenende, thinks a Balkan end is the least of their worries. "I've been in Auschwitz and Yad Vashem," he says. "The images haunt me every day. It is supremely important for us to avoid such things in Europe."

At the Theresienstadt (or Terezin) concentration camp in what's now the Czech Republic, Sweden's European Commissioner, Margot Wallstrom, declared: "There are those who want to scrap the supranational idea. They want the European Union to go back to the old purely inter-governmental way of doing things. I say those people should come to Terezin and see where that old road leads."

Golly. So the choice for voters on the Euro-ballot is apparently: yes to the European Constitution, or yes to a new Holocaust. If there's a neither-of-the-above box, the EU's rulers are keeping quiet about it. The notion that the Continent's peoples are basically a bunch of genocidal whackoes champing at the bit for a new bloodbath is one I'm not unsympathetic to. But it's a curious rationale to pitch to one's electorate: vote for us; we're the straitjacket on your own worst instincts. Or as the cute but gloomy Omar Naber, the Slovenian Eurovision entrant, put it in his Naberly way:

And, insofar as the past 60 years in Europe have been comparatively non-bloody, that's surely due to Nato and the American military presence, both of which your average EU apparatchik would scrap in an instant without worrying about Theresienstadts looming round the corner. The nearest to a latterday Theresienstadt was Yugoslavia and that didn't exactly reflect well on the EU. Jacques Poos, foreign minister of Luxembourg and as the holder of the rotating Euro-Presidency the Union's chief negotiator with the disintegrating Yugoslavia, told the Americans to butt out and declared: "The hour of Europe has come!" The hour of Europe came and went, and a couple hundred thousand corpses later the EU was only too grateful for the Americans to butt back in again.

Why does so much of the continental governing class carry on like the sinister Mitteleuropean shrink from a 1940s melodrama, insisting that you're far too unstable to be allowed to leave the sanatorium? Well, either they're the loopy ones or they're desperate, and they'd rather talk about a new Holocaust than any of the more pressing questions - Turkey, the unsustainable euro, unemployment, over-regulation, deathbed demographics. Or maybe they talk about the Second World War because that's the only genuine pan-European topic.

Whatever the answer, the concentration-camps-around-the-corner argument is at least a useful glimpse into how the Eurocrats regard the citizenry. However the French and Dutch votes go, it seems unlikely that the EU's rulers will allow anything as footling as the will of the people to derail the project at this late stage. In Euro-referendums, there's only one correct answer; it's just that sometimes you have to have two votes before the people figure out which one it is. My sense is that the French will vote narrowly for the constitution and the Dutch will narrowly reject it, but either way the EU will figure out a way to inflict it on the Continent. A stitch-up in time saves, nein?

At least Saggy Hussein has his Y-fronts: "Look upon my briefs, ye Mighty, and despair!" as Shelley wrote. By contrast, the EU Emperors have no clothes other than their magic invisible Holocaust-repelling cloaks. They may win the vote, but the way they've conducted the campaign suggests that they know they've lost the argument. Perhaps that explains the markedly elegiac quality to so many Eurovision songs this year, to which the Cypriot entry was a notable exception:

Messrs Chirac and Balkanende may claim to feel around them the desire for their bloated statist constitution. But for more and more Europeans the fire's long gone out. If ever anyone needed a real Euro-vision, it's the tired scaremongers of the Continent's political class.

I met Flemming Rose, the editor at Jyllands-Posten who commissioned the Mohammed cartoons, in London last year, so I was interested to know the kind of people who want to kill him:

In crime-ridden England, Her Majesty's Constabulary nevertheless have time to send two coppers round to the home of a 67-year old wife of a Baptist minister who made the mistake of complaining about the Gay Pride parade:

Can't have that, can we? As John O'Sullivan likes to say, the British police are now the paramilitary wing of the Guardian.

As to "an intention of hate," strange how the "pre-crime" language of Philip K. Dick's sci-fi dystopia now passes almost without notice. In my testimony to the Canadian House of Commons the other week, I said: