John Robson Online

This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 18:

So what’s your opinion of the new head of Canada’s Communications Security Establishment? (a) who’s that? (b) what’s that? (c) I hope he’s good at his job or (d) all of the above. I’m pretty much a (d) man but with an emphasis on “I hope he’s good at his job” for two reasons.

First, in a world dependent on high-tech communications for everything from banking to warfare it really matters that the agency in charge of protecting that stuff (which is the answer to “(b) what’s that?”) do a good job. Second, I’m very worried about the way we choose senior public servants.

I know bureaucracy is a boring topic and it’s more interesting to worry about celebrity divorces or Tim Tebow getting “Bradied” in the NFL playoffs. But the fact is that our lives are dominated by government and government is dominated by bureaucrats who now increasingly write the rules, implement them and act as judge in their own case if you fight back.

In short, when they mess up you pay so you can’t afford to ignore them. This particular appointment even made the newspapers because the CSE spies on foreigners by listening in on their electronic chatter and tries to keep them from doing it to us, and in its spare time help out law enforcement and security agencies. And now we have a spy scandal to remind us that this stuff matters.

Of course Canada continues to have a high-quality public service by world standards and I’m not suggesting they pick names out of a hat or choose their cronies. Quite the reverse: We seem to pick top bureaucrats according to the highest standards of contemporary management theory. But that’s the problem.

What happened in this case (yes, I’ve been hitting the government press releases again) is the Associate Deputy Minister of Infrastructure got put in charge of the CSE. So here’s the question: What does an Infrastructure guy know about signals intelligence?

I mean, you might get lucky and it’s his hobby. Or you might not and he knows as much about it as I do. (Or less: I have, as a hobby, read Simon Singh’s The Code Book, R.V. Jones’s Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945, Anthony Brown’s Bodyguard of Lies and Jack Nissen and A.W. Cockerill’s Winning the Radar War.)

After all, the government probably didn’t pick him for his subject matter expertise. I say that not because I’m jaded, although I may be, but because I get these “PRIME MINISTER STEPHEN HARPER ANNOUNCES CHANGES IN THE SENIOR RANKS OF THE PUBLIC SERVICE” press releases fairly regularly and they frequently show senior public servants moving between essentially unrelated departments (like the July 2010 shuffle of the DM of Environment to HRSD, a guy from Industry to Environment and so on).

It reflects the modern technocratic dogma is that “management” is a skill separate from the grubby details of what’s being managed. (If it weren’t, there wouldn’t be such things as MBA programs.) This dogma, derived from the Enlightenment idea that mathematics is the language in which truth is written, dates back at least to the 19th century, when Walter Bagehot said because “at the summit all mountains are very much the same” ministers should be chosen for political and administrative skill rather than expertise in any given department. Hence, for instance, John Baird is suddenly foreign minister, having excelled at Transport, Environment and Treasury Board at least in the political sense.

Unfortunately as soon as I read Bagehot’s claim I was reminded of a warning line from an outdoor survival manual (unless I am much mistaken, the classic Mountaineering: Freedom of the Hills) to the effect that mountains are always topologically more complex than they seem from a distance. So even though basic mountain climbing skills work on pretty much all mountains, no experienced climber would dream of setting foot on one before making a detailed study of its peculiarities while hikers and other amateurs should never go up them at all. Likewise, departments are complex and so are the substantive policies, like defence or infrastructure, they deal with. Indeed, people who actually take security seriously were long bothered by the fact that at one point Canada had had 22 ministers of defence in less than 30 years.

One might be partly reassured by the thought that ministers don’t really run departments anyway. They are so big and complicated that things like the federal budget or infrastructure have such intricate momentum that the minister’s job is to smile and bob and make it look as though whatever happened was (a) good (b) intentional (c) his or her doing. But if senior bureaucrats are also not really running their departments, only “managing” whatever is generic like compensation and disability plans, who’s minding the store?

In short, the science of management has reduced us to hoping the people in charge of government know how to do their jobs… without giving us any reason to believe they even know what they are.

This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 17:

For all modernity’s horrors, from the Blitzkrieg and death camps to genocidal famine, moral relativism, drug-resistant diseases, atomic weapons and terrorism, at least we haven’t yet seen effective biological warfare. So what sort of reckless idiot would consider publishing the recipe for a devastating man-made flu? My answer is, a wise and responsible one.

This story begins, as a news story, last September, when word began trickling out in scientific publications that researchers in Wisconsin and the Netherlands had created a strain of H5N1 that passes easily among ferrets. Why should you care unless you’re one of those odd people who keeps a ferret? Because H5N1 is an avian flu that rarely infects people but, when it does, kills nearly 60% of those who catch it, and because for reasons best known to scientists ferrets are similar to humans when it comes to flu.

How did the scientists do it? We don’t yet know (those who could understand it, I mean) and if the U.S. government has its way we won’t. They’ve asked scientific journals not to publish key details for fear that it will fall into the wrong hands. And unlikely as it sounds, this is a mistake.

My reason for taking that view has nothing to do with flu, or any sort of science. It’s because of a very basic security principle I first encountered in my teens reading magician John Scarne’s classic Scarne on Cards, which explains how to play every popular card game except Bridge. But first it explains how to cheat at cards, for the same reason that during World War II the U.S. military let Scarne explain it to GIs and sailors. Namely the bad guys already know.

To be sure, some would-be card cheats don’t know all the tricks, at least not yet, so explaining them may add a little bit to the arsenal of the villains. But it does way more for the good guys, because most of them know nothing about cheating. And once even a handful of honest soldiers in boot camp recognize the “mechanic’s grip” or the “second deal” it makes life much more difficult for the cheaters.

The same principle applies to biological warfare research. If it’s easy to make H5N1 that spreads readily among humans, bad guys will figure it out soon enough anyway. After all, that’s what they do. Virtuous medical researchers, or ones who are simply selfish and greedy, pursue all kinds of things from pure knowledge to pure profit. Bad guys relentlessly explore how to kill. And if some honest peaceful researchers have worked it out, it probably means the general state of science on the subject has brought it within range of other scientists including the evil kind.

So if good guys have stumbled on it first, be glad. And hope other good guys get the key information so they can learn to detect tell-tale signs that someone else is working on the problem, find ways to block the virus’s replication process or develop an effective vaccine.

If you’ve seen the movie Snakes on a Plane, by the way, you’ll understand why it’s important to get working on the issue right away: It’s little use asking the expert for advice once the vipers are loose because he’s sitting gruesomely dead in row 15.

In the face of any such deadly pandemic, we want the good guys working on it before it spreads, not only because of how many of us it will otherwise kill before they hit on a solution but because of how many of them it will kill so they never do hit on one. And when it comes to diseases, remember, natural as well as laboratory mutations can unleash pandemics and it would be a tragic mistake to keep knowledge of the problem from people who might devise a cure to foil mad scientists only to have Mother Nature go rogue on us on a Spanish flu or even Black Death scale.

It is of course true that loose lips sink ships. But they also sink U-boats. Free discussion is a potent weapon and, moreover, one available only to open societies. Having lots of smart, dedicated people tackling a problem from lots of angles is a really good way of solving it fast. And while it’s tempting to keep the public in the dark and let only experts share the secrets, an additional major benefit of free discussion is to keep expert orthodoxy from stifling innovation, and keep governments from hiding a problem from citizens until it’s too late.

In this case the academic motto “Publish or perish” is likely to be literally true. So tell us how the Frankenflu was made.

This was my opening monologue guest-hosting The Arena on Jan. 16:

The Federal Liberals just wrapped up their Biennial Convention in Ottawa with visions of renewal dancing in their heads. Renewal being a word here meaning “winning elections, you know, the way we used to”. Their web site declares “The Liberal Party is Canada’s Bold New Party!” But without underestimating the importance of organization (or wanting to see the Liberals triumph) I must remind them that ideas matter more and so does honesty. And they won’t be serious contenders again until they apply some of the latter to the former.

Outgoing party president Alfred Apps just wrote “The Liberal Party sees itself as the party of progress and reform, the voice of the people…. it’s now estranged from its base.” But, he added, “Canadians have sent Liberals to the political woodshed on three previous occasions – 1930, 1958 and 1984…. Liberals bounced back from defeat by … reaching out to new people with new ideas, and modernizing their organization.”

Fine. So where are these new ideas?

Liberals returned from the woodshed in the 1960s by promising to protect people from the alleged ravages of the market and the supposedly pervasive intolerance of their fellows and in the 1990s by promising to balance the budget without fundamentally reforming the welfare state. I do not say either was a good idea. But each was an idea and a big one. And they won’t get anywhere this time by cranking out these decades-old hits like some aging rock band on a reunion tour.

Today, unless you’re committed to protecting the unborn or find international affairs acutely terrifying, the top public agenda item must be reining in spending in the face of demographic crisis, especially given the drumbeat of bad financial news out of Europe. And you need a real idea: Not just a wish that the problem go away or a slogan (like Stephane Dion’s “Green Shift”) but an explanation of why it’s happening and a comprehensive plan to set things right. Chretien-Martin trimming and squeezing won’t work this time.

That doesn’t mean a boutique policy like legalizing marijuana is necessarily bad. The problem is, it doesn’t seem to be connected to any coherent political philosophy.

I say “doesn’t seem to be” because modern Liberals stand for permissive social policy generally and perhaps want to legalize pot for the same reason they favour gay marriage, abortion on demand and so on. But what is that reason?

It’s certainly not libertarianism. Where someone like Ron Paul would legalize drugs because he opposes government meddling in your life for your own good even with majority support, the Liberals seem to stand for your right to do anything you want while the swollen state stands by to protect you from any consequences financial, medical or even social. They proudly support human rights tribunals and hate speech laws that punish us severely not only for exercising our freedom of association but simply for criticizing someone or something.

Even if this nagging nanny state were a good idea, which it’s not, it isn’t a new one. Bold and exciting in 1968, it’s stale and mouldy now. Worse, while a state that made sure your life worked out regardless of your choices was a dream for 1960s radicals, it’s a nightmare for 2012 finance ministers. And if the Liberals haven’t got some idea how to make it affordable, or rein it in, they are not going to win power except briefly and accidentally, the way Tories did when they didn’t seem to know who they were or why they hated Liberals so much.

Whatever the Harper Tories have done well, or badly, they have not been fiscally responsible. From fy 2006 through 2010, they hiked program spending 40%. It’s not a partisan problem; the McGuinty liberals have been no better. But it’s a partisan vulnerability, to anyone willing to talk frankly about it and their own position.

Here federal Liberal weakness for smug self-satisfaction is a major danger. Sure, there are blatherskites everywhere. But in Britain, the shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, Rachel Reeves, just admitted her own Labour party is not ready to govern. “If there was a general election tomorrow, of course we haven’t got enough flesh on the bones,” she told the Daily Telegraph, and their leader “does need more time”. Furthermore, “I don’t think that every pound of money spent under the last government was spent as wisely as it could have been. Look at what happened to the pay of those people at the top of the civil service, in local government, or in quangos. Look at the contract for GPs.”

Until federal Liberals can admit what they did wrong during their long political dominance, where they spent too much, which ideas they would now repudiate, they better hope the political woodshed is cozy. Because the only way out of it is to think your way out.