That’s when I considered starting the year with a resolution to stop procrastinating, which I am still considering.

It’s not that I don’t have lots of things to work on; it’s just that other people’s flaws are so much more annoying than mine. In fact, I think we can all agree that my shortcomings are not so much annoying flaws as they are endearing eccentricities.

Anyway, for that entirely terrific reason, I have decided to help others improve themselves by making resolutions for them.

My wish for certain climate scientists is that they resolve to admit into their theory even the tiniest speck of doubt. To make me happy, this skeptical speck need not be any bigger than a dust mote, but it does need to be big enough to give these scientists pause in the face of evidence that confounds their theory.

Besides, what a winsome social grace to be able to sincerely and humbly admit the possibility of being wrong on a subject so layered with complexity. Why on occasion I myself have been wrong, but why dwell on that.

It’s just that the acid test for scientific theories is that if they are true, then you should be able to use them to accurately make predictions. The fact that average temperatures peaked 10 years ago and have yet to reach that former record high is not only something that climate scientists didn’t predict, it’s something that at least some tried to cover up. Why not take a heroic stance and admit with a sheepish grin that their theory needs revising.

Recently, Europe has been a solid block of ice. The southern U.S. has been in the grip of record cold with horrifying reports of frozen iguanas falling dead from the trees and with who knows what implications for the iguana harvest.

To be sure, this does not disprove the theory that humankind is destroying the Earth because of our incessant emitting, though it does make a spirited argument against it.

The 2007 International Panel on Climate Change declared that our catastrophic future had now arrived.

Sure that doesn’t mean that we won’t get lots of bone-chilling cold even if the planet is warming. I also suspect that in no way did these same climate scientists anticipate cold that would shatter decades-old records across vast swaths of the northern hemisphere.

My resolution for certain environmental activists is that they tell the truth about the impact of the Alberta oil sands. Last Tuesday, the Conference Board of Canada released a report pointing out that Canadians' use of planes, trains and automobiles creates a carbon footprint that is three-and-a-half times bigger than that of the oil sands.

This is a horribly inconvenient fact for people who like to wag a righteous finger at Alberta. Now, so armed with the truth, they can direct their indignation at the car in their driveway and their lamentable habit of driving to work in the morning.

Apparently this was a big mistake because I missed hearing that Parliament would prorogue until after the Olympics, meaning the House and Senate wouldn't sit in February as scheduled. Apparently it's much worse than that. According to some media friends, it means that the prime minister has now established a dictatorship!

Sure the opposition parties can force an election as soon as the House returns, and yes the people of Canada can vote out the Conservatives if they choose, and no there aren't soldiers in the streets, and yes opposition MPs can still criticize the government, and yes the media can and do freely criticize the government, and yes the people still have free speech and all their rights, and yes all the rules of Parliament have been followed, so no it's not a dictatorship in the sense of usurping power and limiting freedom.

It's only a dictatorship in the sense that the democratically elected prime minister is operating within his constitutionally granted powers to take the country in a different direction than his unelected critics would like.

For instance, a big media priority is to get to the bottom of the allegations regarding Taliban prisoners. The government on the other hand believes it's a waste of time and money and a bizarre witch hunt of the very ministers and bureaucrats who, seeing deficiencies in the old prisoner transfer system, strengthened it. Whatever might have happened in an isolated case, the Conservatives argue that they dramatically improved the inadequate system inherited from the Liberals.

Senate is important

So we have a disagreement about how important this is and the government is content to let Canadians decide in the next election. In the meantime, the government's priorities include fighting a recession, prosecuting a war and setting sensible environmental policies, and that makes the Senate important.

In order for the soon to be new Conservative majority in the Senate to have control of the committees, the rules say Parliament must prorogue so that the committees can be reconstituted.

Without prorogation, the Liberals would still have a majority of committee seats in the Senate even though they would have fewer seats overall. That would be a terribly anti-democratic situation on at least two levels and should be an outrage to the media if saving democracy was their real concern. That's a big if, however.

Remember that this is the PM who has given up power to Parliament on vetting Supreme Court nominees and going to war. He has tried mightily to elect the Senate. Calling him a dictator is so embarrassingly over the top that it says more about his critics than it does him.

We get it, you don't like him, but that doesn't grant you licence to lump him together with Stalin in the dictator's club. Most likely this means the PM has committed the unpardonable sin of ignoring his press gallery critics except to wink at them as he speaks over their heads directly to Canadians while pulling Canada back to its conservative roots.

"Oh my God, did you hear what Lisa Raitt said?"

This is said in a breathless, wide-eyed way followed by tittering that you might hear in a junior high washroom, or in a few sad corners of the Ottawa press gallery.

Yes the minister said that isotopes are a politically sexy issue because they involve radioactive leaks and cancer.

Beat me with a stick if you want, but yes when it comes to politics and the media Raitt is right.

Health issues are always sexy to the media, which is why a study about the health benefits of oatmeal will lead the news ahead of the latest Third World natural disaster as long as casualties are under, say, 300 people and there is no dramatic footage to show on TV.

But if there is good footage, look out. As many of my journalist friends would say, if it bleeds it leads. Lucky for them they just haven't had the bad fortune of being accidentally recorded when they say these things.

All I know is that if I was secretly tape recorded in a bad moment, and it was subsequently reported without any context, I may very well have to go live in a cave for 20 or 30 years.

In the case of minister Raitt the context is that she is a nice, decent and smart person who was having a private chat with an aide about the media interest in this kind of story, and how she was looking forward to tackling the issue.

Compassion

Based on this single comment, and against the evidence of her entire life, the suggestion is that she somehow lacks compassion for people who are battling cancer. Yeesh, if only we held ourselves to the same standards that we hold everyone else to.

Ordinary hypocrisy is one thing. Then there is that whole class of people who constantly scan the horizon for some issue to be outraged by.

We all know these gloomy thin-lipped people. Every verbal misstep, no matter how well intended, is interpreted to mean the worst that it could mean. Every joke is an outrage.

These joyless people are the black holes of humanity. No warmth or light escapes their dark centre.

Mostly they hang out around human rights commissions, go into politics, head off to journalism school or, I am sad to say, are regular but not popular members of their church. They are the perpetually incensed. Thank goodness this bitter remnant makes up a very small but inordinately depressing part of the population.

There is a bright side to all of this. I have discovered that I am not alone in saying things privately that I wouldn't say publicly. In fact I am told by a leading science guy that just over 33 million Canadians are guilty of the same horrid behaviour.

That said it's still fun to pretend that we never admit things to a friend behind closed doors that we would never say to the media. Goodness knows that we never crab about our friends the way our stupid friends crab about us!

Seriously though, if you disagree with the essence of this extraordinarily sexy column please know that I will think bad thoughts about you. But that's just the way I am.

After spending all that time composting with family and friends, a little peace and quiet is just what the doctor ordered.

As we all know, the Earth Day season begins with Earth Hour, that magical hour when everyone turns on their televisions to watch live CBC coverage of some people turning off their lights.

It's the time of year when we gather together to remember the true meaning of Earth. It's a time to recognize that without Earth we would just be floating around in space. In fact without Earth we wouldn't have anywhere to bury our garbage.

My mind recycles back through the years, and memories of Earth Days past flood my mind.

There are the childhood memories of running down the stairs on Earth Day morning and being overjoyed at the sight of nothing under the tree except a pine cone, which I was darn happy to have.

Anyway, for me every day is Earth Day. I happen to like the Earth so much that I'm capitalizing the word Earth in this column. The Earth is where it's all happening. It's where I have chosen to live.

There is a gravity about the Earth that draws me to it.

But make no mistake, we are not alone on Earth, and I'm not just talking about the intergalactic little green men that Justin Trudeau speculated have visited Earth before. I'm talking about Earth's seductively pretty friend: Nature.

According to my research team at Wikipedia, Earth Day is a lot about celebrating the gift of nature, and that of course is natural. So, if you want to honour nature and the spirit of the Earth Day season what do you do? As one of Canada's leading environmentalists, here is my practical guide.

First, take the environment seriously but take yourself lightly. Nothing turns people off the issue of the environment more quickly than some of the dour and angry people associated with it. But enough about the NDP.

Second, cooperate with business. Like the public in general, as businesspeople become more aware of the issues they have cleaned up their act a lot and actually want to do more. Often they develop and then sell new technologies to do the cleaning up. But business wants to work with reasonable people who understand things like the need for companies to make money so people can have jobs.

Third, do the stuff you understand and like. If you are tired of moralizing do-gooders harassing you about the size of your carbon footprint, then go build a bluebird house and then take the scrap lumber and threaten to burn it in your backyard unless they leave you alone.

Finally join cool and practical groups like the Nature Conservancy of Canada and Ducks Unlimited who educate the public, and preserve and enhance habitat.

If you follow this practical guide you will be a friend to nature and the Earth, with the side benefit that your friends won't hide from you when you come to the door.

Happy Earth Day to you!

There is no word yet on whether any parrots were injured when U.S. Navy Seal snipers sent the pirates on a one-way trip to Davy Jones' Locker.

Recent research has revealed pirates are just not very nice people. To give Canadians some context, these pirates are exactly the type of pirates whom if they were marauding the cottagers of Lake Winnipeg, or Lake Simcoe would be so brazen as to actually ignore the law that says they should register their rocket propelled grenade launchers.

I am also told they may not always carry the required number of life-jackets and I am willing to bet they are pretty careless with environmental laws regarding the proper disposal of their onboard waste. Clearly our foreign aid is really not having the desired effect within the world's pirate communities.

Like me, you are probably wondering where this important analysis of pirate behaviour is heading.

My point is this past week in Cambridge, Ont., Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff said if the Liberals were in charge they would raise taxes, which is exactly what pirates would do. Liberals and pirates love to shakedown defenceless regular people, though not even a pirate would propose this during a recession.

THE SECRET'S OUT

Anyway, now we know why Michael Ignatieff is not allowed to talk about ideas. He is not allowed to talk about ideas because his ideas are really quite awful.

Raising taxes is never a good idea, but raising taxes during a recession would be like taking a ball peen hammer to the knees of the economy. Michael, if this is your best thinking on the economy, I for one yearn for the old days when you spoke in platitudes, supported by cliches, all laid down on a foundation of empty rhetoric.

I note that while the Liberals are a tad short on solid policy ideas they do have strategies. For instance the Liberals have publicly announced they have a strategy to win the support of women by acting nicer during question period. Pirates also have a superficial strategy to try to attract the support of women, but they aren't so naive as to tell everyone about it.

So my point is Canada is not immune to a pirate infestation. For instance, has anyone seen Jack Layton lately? I haven't seen him for days. Could it be that Jack was captured by pirates?

Actually in this case the answer is no. After a couple of days of being cooped up with Jack on a ship listening to him go on about the UN, the '70s and how the crew should form a union, he'd be tossed back ashore and the pirates would need many new barrels of rum to help them get over their brush with the NDP.

Canadians can therefore breathe a huge sigh of relief knowing Jack Layton is not wearing daringly short cut-off blue jeans while serving as a captive cabin boy to homesick Somali pirates.

Clearly pirates are not, in this case at least, responsible for Jack's mysterious disappearance, and I join with you in praying for his safe return.

We read about it. We get mad. Then we put on our ball cap, and head to the coffee shop so that we can pass on the gift of anger and cynicism to our friends.

Then after we complain for a week about how dumb the government is for letting that happen, we move on to the next outrage and our original complaint is forgotten.

This is an important cultural tradition in Canada that has the added benefit of keeping thousands of waitresses employed across our country.

But what I am here to tell you today is that there are some stories that shouldn't be forgotten after a week. As satisfying as it is to complain, sometimes the situation is serious enough that actual action is required. This is one of those situations.

Six months ago I left my 15-year career as a member of Parliament, including close to three years as a cabinet minister in the Conservative government. During that time I followed the story of my friend Ezra Levant as he battled the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission over his right to publish the controversial Danish cartoons that depicted Muhammad as a terrorist.

Bizarre antics

At the time I was proud of Levant for not backing down, but mostly I was too busy as a minister to pay attention to the bizarre antics of the commission.

Nor, did I understand the degree to which the same and worse abuses were taking place at the Canadian Human Rights Commission, pretty much right under the noses of me and my colleagues in the federal cabinet.

Thanks to Levant's terrific new book, Shakedown, at least now I have a full understanding of how bad things really were, and I suspect still are.

Levant's book is well documented non-fiction, but some of the cases are so loopy you'd think you were reading fantasy. There's the story of the McDonald's employee who has a right to not wash her hands to meet hygiene standards. There's the one about the witch from Yellowknife who has the right to dictate the music policy in the local Boston Pizza. There's the guy in Burlington, Ont., who has a right to smoke medical marijuana at the door of another guy's pub.

But then what do we expect. This is always what happens when you give sweeping authority to a person with no sense along with a cool title like "human rights commissioner."

But not everything in Shakedown reads like fantasy. His story of the terrible abuse of power at the Canadian Human Rights Commission is a bone-chilling horror story. God help you if you get caught in its crosshairs, because if it investigates you, the ordinary rules of justice don't apply, including the normal legal protections for the accused.

After reading Shakedown I am embarrassed for not doing nearly enough to take up this cause when I was in government.

Secondly, I'm angry. Now that all has been laid bare I hope current federal and provincial cabinet ministers are also embarrassed at this outrage, embarrassed enough to rein in human rights commissions who long ago quit caring about real human rights.

I know that being positive is so 2007, but let's face it, being out of step with the times is what conservatives are known for. It also happens to be our duty when the times themselves have broken away from their sensible moorings.

What is my inspiration to be positive? Why, it's the CBC of course.

No it's not something that I heard on the news. The news is unfailingly about what is allegedly wrong with Canada.

For instance the Federal Court has ruled that the Canada Border Services Agency was correct in barring George Galloway from coming to Canada.

Border Services holds that Galloway overtly supports the banned terrorist organization Hamas and therefore under our law is not permitted to enter Canada.

Sadly the officials weren't able to find the clause in the law that exempts Galloway on the grounds that he is a swell guy in other ways, that he's entertaining, that he's elected, that he has a cool accent, or that he's a snappy dresser.

Apparently it is especially rude to uphold our anti-terrorism laws when left wing people want to come to Canada.

So what if Galloway is bringing comfort to the enemy, he is a merry Marxist. Thus what begins as a story about government officials enforcing our anti-terrorism laws morphs into both a phony free speech issue, and a great national pity party for the desperate plight of poor Mr. Galloway, all played out on the evening news.

Rights not absolute

Is it really necessary to point out that rights can't be absolute or we have a tyranny of another kind?

I suppose I'm also being rude when I point out that I didn't notice Galloway was advocating free speech in the Palestinian territories where Hamas officials will deftly and ironically cut out your tongue for speaking too freely.

Anyway, there is nothing positive in the news, nor can I drink the feel good treacle of Little Mosque on the Prairie. The real positive news comes from the old places. It comes from tradition and ancient virtues, and there is no better spokesman for that point of view than Don Cherry on Hockey Night in Canada's Coach's Corner.

On one recent segment, Cherry broke down as he spoke about four young soldiers who were killed in Afghanistan. His voice breaking, he spoke simply about what marks Canada as a great nation: courageous men and women.

When Don Cherry talks about the code in hockey fights, he's talking about a code of honour. When he takes aim at visors, he's advocating self-discipline and responsibility. When he tells hockey players not to hotdog after a goal he's preaching humility.

Recently on Coach's Corner he played a clip showing dozens of volunteers participating in an arena raising on Wolfe Island near Cherry's hometown of Kingston, Ont. In just two weeks a volunteer army gave that community their first ever indoor hockey rink. Here his message was co-operation, self-reliance and charity.

On wintry Saturday nights, in a gloomy and self-absorbed world, Don Cherry stands at the pulpit of hockey and encourages us to be better people, and he reminds us all of what is good and right and just.

However, when you hear it from them it feels more like a horrible depression. Or perhaps it's just that they have the unique ability to trigger depression in normally healthy people. Warning! Do not go to this site if you are anywhere near the ledge of a building.

Because their website is named "On Probation" you could be forgiven for assuming that it lays out their plan to deal with violent criminals. The Liberals claim that it's about holding the Conservatives to account. Actually it's not about anything.

If it was about something it would be about Marshal Michael Ignatieff swaggering into town with his sidekick Festus McCallum and telling the government to come clean on how the Stephen Harper government is spending stimulus money ... or else!

As I recall the historical Liberal definition of acceptable spending includes building a long gun registry that sort of operates as long as taxpayers keep feeding it with bundles of thousand dollar bills. Think of it as a $2-billion placebo designed to give urban voters the impression of action against gun violence, but without the awful burden of having to actually chase down and arrest criminals.

Firearms

Apparently violent gangs are expected to register their illegal firearms, and then wait for police to knock down the door of their crack house and arrest them.

Whatever the question, it seems that the Liberal answer is to create a bureaucracy. That's the kind of spending that gets the red seal stamp of approval in Liberal-land.

The real motivation for all of this is that the Liberals desperately want to hold the Harper Conservatives to account in the hope that everyone forgets to hold the Ignatieff Liberals to account.

I mean what does Ignatieff's "government in waiting" stand for? When I check out its website and look under the drop-down menu, "Great Liberal Ideas" all I find are a few tumbleweeds, some chirping crickets, and through a thick mat of cobwebs I can barely make out the word, "Greenshift." They should have a website called, the-dog-ate-our-ideas.ca.

But to be fair they do have that one idea, the one about accountability, however even that one has hit the ditch, rolled over and exploded. A few weeks ago Ignatieff said, "I am not writing a blank cheque on $3 billion. No Canadian would respect me if I did,"

I hope it's not unkind of me to point out that this week Ignatieff did write that $3-billion blank cheque for the Conservative government and he received no commitments in exchange, not even a commitment that the Conservatives would respect him in the morning, though I hope they at least gave him cab fare home.

Cracks show

The problem that the Liberals have is that the moment they take a detailed position on anything the cracks in their party start to show, and they don't have the discipline of being in power to hold their caucus together.

That's why even Liberals are calling their upcoming convention in Vancouver the Seinfeld convention, a convention about nothing. No leadership race, no policy debates, and apparently no accountability.

Lately he has been outraged that the federal government wants a moratorium on federal environmental reviews on smaller projects where the provinces have already done a review. Jack says that this shows that the Harper Conservatives are trying to stimulate the economy on the back of the environment. Actually what the government is trying to do is slash red tape so that it can get more people working right away.

Does Jack know that even if the municipalities have done an environmental review on a project, and the provinces have done another, the federal government has to do yet another if the project receives even one dollar in federal spending?

Last year the feds did over 7,000 environmental reviews, almost all of which duplicated reviews done by other levels of government. Quick, someone call the Department of Redundancy Department!

Here is what my friend Jack needs to understand. When the government considers situations like this one, they use a type of thinking that conservatives call "logic" or "reason." Then we apply this "reason" to the problem of having overlapping environmental reviews and we conclude that the dozens of tests, the analysis and the scrutiny that is part of every environmental review is enough to tell us if there are problems with a particular project.

We also conclude that this will allow projects to move forward more quickly, which is important if the goal is to help workers find jobs in tough times.

Jack uses a different and interesting kind of thinking, which assumes that if one environmental review is good, then two is better and three is better yet. Apparently we are to forget about quality, it's the quantity that matters.

The Mackenzie Valley pipeline must be the NDP ideal because it has been reviewed right up the pipeline for over 30 years and it never has been approved, nor has it been denied, it just get studied, assessed and analyzed and one generation of bureaucrats passes the torch and buck to the next, and every generation of bureaucrat passes the bill to taxpayers.

It's like that wonderful opening chapter of Dickens' Bleak House where he writes about the lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce that has droned on for generations, "Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it."

While Jack and the NDP seem to think that the Bleak House approach is the path of progress, conservatives see that approach as, well, bleak.

CONSERVATIVE CURSE

Jack and his team see each well-intentioned and indecipherable form, fee, rule and regulation in isolation from each other. But it is the conservative curse to see with an awful clarity the whole of connected reality, and we look on with horror as countless tendrils of rules bind together with endless tangles of regulation, and together they move relentlessly to smother ideas, crush dreams and strangle entrepreneurial spirit.

Time to move your bike off the road, Jack, you're blocking progress. The government couldn't act soon enough.

Although this was first announced almost a year ago we are supposed to be shocked at the Conservative government's callousness all over again.

Predictably a petition popped up protesting the cut arguing that the fund supports lifelong learning, which is sort of funny because the petition is still addressed to Heritage Minister Josee Verner even though James Moore has been the minister of Canadian heritage since the last election. Apparently lifelong learning isn't for everyone.

I suspect that a major reason for axing the fund is that there were already numerous other sources of funds for documentaries including the Canada Council for the Arts, the National Film Board, Telefilm Canada, the Canadian Television Fund, a dozen or so provincial funding bodies, and private sector sources who receive lucrative tax credits for investing in Canadian productions.

On top of it the Conservative government completely removed the need for donors to pay any capital gains on gifts of publicly traded shares that they donate to registered charities. This has helped create an important new stream of giving to the very artists and organizations that routinely denounce the Conservatives for their anti-arts agenda.

Never acknowledged

Naturally those who protest these cuts to their particular program would never acknowledge that increased funding for other arts programs has more than made up those reductions. For example in 2007 the Stephen Harper-led Conservative government increased the base funding of the Canada Council for the Arts by $30 million a year -- an increase of 25%. Clearly this wasn't done to win the acclaim of people in the arts community, or if it was I'm pretty sure it isn't working.

That's because many if not most artists long ago took up their berets, capes and ascots to settle on that far left and exotic fringe of the fabled Canadian cultural tapestry where they can make artistic statements about the boorishness of conservatives, the gullibility of Christians and of course the horrors of free markets.

In fact the CIFVF makes a big deal out of the fact that they helped fund the documentary, The Corporation, a lefty take on corporate greed starring Americans like the extraordinarily wealthy Michael Moore (Moore of course could never be called greedy because that would suggest that he takes more than he needs, and Moore would never do that. Think of him as a larger version of Gandhi, but in a ball cap!)

My point is that the CIFVF mandate reads like it's all about learning, Canadian stories, wheat fields and Mounties, but its star project is a left wing rant against evil corporations featuring big name American political activists and academics.

Naturally, like all Canadians, I wake up every day hoping to hear more about the evilness of corporations even as we accept our jobs from them, the very jobs that give us our enormously high standard of living. But don't worry; the evil corporation message will get out even without that particular taxpayer subsidy to the CIFVF.

After all the NDP can use its taxpayer subsidy to devote itself full time to running down corporations, but that's a horror story for another day.