Some day, there will come a time when the early 1960s will be a very long time ago.”

In 2013 the world will note the 50th anniversary of Kennedy’s death — November 22, 1963 — and today, the early 1960s are truly a very long time ago.

And people still ask: What would the world be like today if Kennedy has escaped death on that fateful day in Dallas?

Writers of “virtual history” – where the what ifs of history are examined to find alternative outcomes to real events – have produced books envisioning a world where the Nazis won World War II, and an America where the South won the Civil War.

On the wall of my office hangs the papier-mâché matrix from which the front page of The Toronto Telegram was printed the day of the assassination. The headline reads, KENNEDY SHOT, DIES. Each time I glance at this now historic artifact the thought is renewed in my mind: “What if Kennedy had lived?”

The pursuit of this thought led me into the arena of virtual history, and has resulted in my new, short e-book, “Kennedy After Dallas: JFK’s Return to the White House for an Epochal 2^nd Term.”

While I am admirer of John F. Kennedy and revere his memory, I have not attempted to portray an idealized version of the man, free of faults and absent of mistakes.

In speculating on what might have transpired had Kennedy not been killed, I have built on the historical record of his administration to project the logical outcome of policies set in motion by JFK before Dallas.

For example. JFK had shown considerable skepticism about the wisdom of U.S. military policy and had expressed his apprehension about the consequences of another Bay of Pigs or Cuban missile  crisis.

For example, there was the time when he walked out of a meeting of his National Security Council as it debated the merits of a preemptive first strike on the Soviet Union. “And we call ourselves the human race,” he said later to his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk.

If Kennedy had lived, history would have unfolded differently. Our narrative sets out the alternative reality that would almost assuredly come to pass had fate allowed JFK to return to the White House after Dallas.

Across a range of areas — foreign policy, civil rights, civil liberties, outer space — JFK set in motion attitude and ideas that would after his death come to be accepted as conventional wisdom.

“The fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city.” he says in Years of Lightning/Day of Drums. It was a recognition of an unwelcome truth in a demonstration of realpolitic that has been unmatched by any succeeding president.

Vietnam, of course, was the greatest challenge of the Kennedy years and those that followed. Would he have done things differently if he had lived?

Vietnam was already a divided country when Kennedy took office in 1961. The old French colony of Indochina had been cut in half – communist and non-communist – at the Geneva peace conference of 1954.

In a debate in the Senate that year, young Senator Kennedy set out the view that would guide his future presidency. It would be “dangerously futile and self-destructive,” he declared, “to pour money, materials and men into the jungles of Indochina without at least a remote prospect of victory.”

Less than three  months before his death, Kennedy told newscaster Walter Cronkite: “In the final analysis it’s their war. They’re the ones who have to win it or lose it. We can help them, we can give them equipment, we can send our men out there as advisors but they have to win it. The people of Vietnam against the communists … I don’t think the war can be won unless the people support the effort …”

There was a quicker and cheaper way out of Vietnam than that which was finally followed by the United states. I am convinced JFK would have found it, and Kennedy After Dallas describes how it might have come about.

A reviewer of my book has challenged me on what Kennedy would have done to inquire into the attempt on his death. The reviewer suggests he would have gone all out to find out who was behind the actions of Lee Oswald Harvey, and suggests it might have been Lyndon B. Johnson. I do not accept that judgement, not because I think Johnson incapable of leading such a murderous mission, but because I believe Kennedy’s commitment to the sanctity of the American political system would have deterred him from seeking such an earth-shaking explanation.

Kennedy had a strong fatalistic streak. On the day after the settlement of the Cuban missile crisis, he told his brother, “This is the night I should go to the theater.” He left on his desk a slip of paper on which he had written a line from a prayer of Abraham Lincoln: “I know there is a God – and I see a storm coming. If he has a place for me, I believe that I am ready.”

“Kennedy After Dallas” is downloadable as an e-book for $3.03 from Amazon.com. In the U.S. here and in Canada, here.

The question arises in the wake of two developments that are disturbing to Canadian writers and independent book publishers: The slide toward bankruptcy of the leading independent Canadian publisher, Douglas & McIntyre, and the merger of two of the world’s largest publishers, Penguin and Random House into a single entity owned by Germany’s Bertelsmann & Company.

Vancouver-based D&M, facing a debt load of $6 million, has taken the first step to file for bankruptcy protection. The prospects of finding an independent buyer to pick up this debt, or of working out a settlement of a few cents on the dollar with creditors, are slim, in my opinion. Sadly, the company’s creditors include many writers, one of whom is owed more than $50,000 in unpaid royalties.

Penguin and Random House have operated competitively in Canada for many years. They’ve been prestigious outlets for many Canadian writers, while also distributing in Canada the lists of their parent companies. Together, they own 40 per cent of the Canadian book market.

The worry is that the merger, even if it leaves the imprints standing, is likely to result in the publication of fewer books by Canadian authors.

The merger also raises serious questions about Canada’s existing policy on foreign investment in the book publishing industry. The Harper government is known to favor a more open approach to foreign investment generally. Its a fundamental of conservative thinking that such investment creates jobs and stimulates the economy. That’s why the test for a foreign buyer — in every other industry — is to show that the transaction will bring a “net benefit” to Canada.

That’s not the case of the cultural industries. They were intentionally left out of the U.S.-Canada free trade agreement, and its follow=-up, NAFTA. Too important to allow the sector to be swallowed up by foreign buyers, the thinking went. But now, there’s growing pressure to allow foreign publishers — like U.S.-based Simon & Schuster — to buy out or set up their own Canadian publishing companies.

Then came the Internet, and behemoths like Amazon, offering instant access to book buyers all over the globe, including Canada. A turning point may have come when Ottawa allowed Amazon to set up its own distribution centre in Mississauga, Ont., to better serve Canadian buyers.

While more book  buying shifted to the Internet, the advent of the e-reader further undercut traditional book stores, especially the dwindling number of independent book dealers. The Chapters-Indigo chain fought back with its own online presence, and by launching its own e-reader, Kobo, since sold off to a major buyer.

As a consequence of all of this, you’ve got observers like The Globe and Mail’s John Barber declaring that the “phoenix (of Canadian publishing) is now officially extinct.”

Consolidation at both the publishing and the retail levels is nothing new — every other industry has gone through it in the past few decades. The economics that drive monopoly practices — low profitability and stagnant sales — are even more obvious in book publishing than in, say yoga making or hardware retailing.

For authors and publishers, three realities are clear:

1. People seem to be reading less, distracted as they are by social media and web surfing.
2. The shift to e-reading shouldn’t hurt that much – authors are still needed to create the content.
3. The printed book is still the basis of literary life – the indispensable building block for public recognition , author success, and publisher survival.

So how do we avoid suicide and decomposition in Canadian letters?

Writers will write and readers will read. How to connect the two is the question. The Awards programs — Giller, Writers’ Trust , BC Non-Fiction, Taylor — are fantastic because in additional to their cash value, they draw attention to the winners and boost sales. It’s great to see the Giller go to an unconventional choice, Will Ferguson’s thriller 419. But the key, I think, is more effective promotion and marketing by publishers. Too many books are published unheralded, shipped off to the stores unaccompanied, and little or nothing is done by the publisher to make the public aware of their existence. Publishers are leaning too much on authors to do this job. This has to change. Readers have to be made aware of a book before they’ll buy it.

No book should be published unless the publisher (and the author) have a clear, effective, and unique marketing plan to support it. It’s not just a matter of dollars. Example: My recent book, Joey Smallwood: Schemer and Dreamer, has joined the hundreds of other biographies on the book shelves, without any extraordinary effort being made by the publisher, Dundurn, to sell it.  Memorial University in St. John’s might have been talked into putting on a seminar on the Smallwood legacy – a reappraisal of his life, 21 years after his death. Every book has something unique about it, and that uniqueness needs to be better exploited.

An online voice, Andrew Losowsky of the Huffington Post, recently asked why  is it that we like to take books on vacation? Because “we read to be transported away from ourselves.” Adds Losowsky: “A great book is the very definition of a de-stress tool. It says, ‘Let me take you away from this for a while,’ and then, like a mystical masseuse for the mind, it does so.”

And don’t people need this now, more than ever?

A little background. I’ve studied French on and off for years, but never with much discipline, nor with the opportunity to use what little I’d learned. Deborah speaks French from having worked there on leaving school, but there was no way I could keep up with her. The fact I want to write a book with a French setting – one I’ve been researching for years – gives me added motivation. So I made the decision to go to Paris. With Deb’s enthusiastic support, I’m delighted to add.

I signed up for the course and for the housing arrangement that Alliance Francaise offers. It’s a great deal – a month of classes five afternoons a week, plus breakfast and dinner with a French host. All for less than $100 a day Canadian. My hosts, in an interesting neighborhood on the right bank, are Michel, a security engineer, and Violette, un avocat.

Apprehensions? I had plenty. Would I be able to keep up with the bright young kids that I’d undoubtedly be thrown in with? Can an old guy like me learn something new? Did I have the energy to make it to school every day – plus enjoy at least a few of the delights Paris has to offer?

Now that I’m about to start my fourth and final week, I can answer “oui” to all of the above. My class is largely mid-30s to 40s adults, with just a few youngsters added in. Many are immigrants to France – from Turkey, Poland, Bulgaria and other European countries. Cleber, a Brazilian bar tender. Liliani, a pretty Cuban dancer. Tjouba, a Turkish book editor. Robert Blake, an American writer-illustrator whose wife has been posted to Paris by Nissan. He’s sold over four million of his children’s books. Our youngest student, an 18-year-old Australian girl. And a bright young Italian man who is studying science po, speaks pretty good English, wants to be a politician. At break, he grabs our professor’s computer and throws up You Tube videos of soccer games and Latin rock. That’s what set Liliani and Yolande to dancing, as you see here. We have fun, and we learn.

And our teacher? Mademoiselle la professeur, Sarah. Bright, vibrant, tres francaise! Also, pregnant, and wants the world to know it.

Of course, one of the delights of being in Paris is the food. And no more expensive than back home — sometimes less so. Amusing sight: Standing outside a restaurant at noon, waiting for it to open (along with a half dozen others) I saw a motorcyclist arrive, park on the sidewalk, and go to the door. Producing a key, he opened it, took off his helmet, and became the matrie ‘d! A gracious one, too, and host of un bon restaurant grec.

How’m I getting along? Conjugations, nouns masculine et feminine, verbes falling out of my Bescherelle, pluriel and singular, dance in my head all night long. I think I’m doing okay, better on written French than aural. That’s fine, as my main interest is in reading French for research. But it’s great to travel around Paris and be mistaken for a native!

I first became aware of the term from the work of Fred Herzog, the famed photographer of Vancouver street scenes. He entitled his shot of an untroubled gentleman staring at passers-by, The Flaneur. My English-French dictionary defines only the verb: flaner – to stroll.

I would like to think of myself as a flaneur, but I am not. I do, however, have a regular stroll that I enjoy very much. It begins (or ends) at the Edgar Quinet metro station one stop before Gare Montparnesse.  In the morning,  I go up rue Delambre to the corner of Monparnasse and boulevard Raspail (site of Le Dome and Le Rotonde, across the street from each other), and proceed up Raspail to Alliance Francaise. On that route, I see Paris in miniature: there is no shortage of boulangeries with their baguettes and croissants, la poissonnerie with Scottish salmon at E20 per k, small hotels that promise rooms “tout confort,”several sandwich shops, and numerous restaurants and bars. As well as une epicerie, un nettoyage, and the other necessities of everyday life.

According to Stephen Scobie of Edmonton, author of “The Measure of Paris,” there is no satisfactory English translation for flaneur. The character probably emerged in mid 19^th century Paris, at a time when the streets had been cleaned up and sewer systems put in. Before that, Scobie observes, one would have hardly wished to walk the streets for pleasure: “narrow, unmapped and filthy, often with open sewers.”

Those who idly contemplated the true character of the flaneur have concluded that he (and only a man can be a true flaneur) must wander without a specific destination, being both present and detached from his surroundings, and without regard for urgent business that might require his presence elsewhere. “Unlike Hemingway hurrying to work,” Scobie says, “the flaneur has nowhere to go.” The reference is to Hemingway’s having written of choosing streets that would lead “back fastest to where you worked.”

Presence among, but detachment from the crowd is apparently the key to flaneur life. In 1863, Baudelaire wrote:

“The crowd is his domain, just as the air is the bird’s, and water that of the fish. His passion and his profession is to merge with the crowd … The observer (flaneur) is a prince enjoying his incognito wherever he goes.”

The problem is we all have somewhere to go. The masses of workers hurrying from the Metro in the morning suggest to me the work ethic lives on in France, despite what we may hear otherwise.

Working on that principle, let me tell how I found 44 rue du Four, what that address is important for, and how I worked my way back to my hotel before taking a taxi to meet my new French friends, Michael and Violette Lefi.

On May 27, 1942, 44 rue du Four was the scene of a secret meeting called by Jean Moulin. It was to organize a unified resistance movement against the German occupation. Moulin had been the prefect of Chartres and had escaped to England after being arrested by the Nazis. While in Gestapo hands he had tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat. He would rather have died than given away his comrades while under torture.

Moulin was sent back into France by General de Gaulle with instructions to unify the quarrelsome splinter resistance movements that were springing up. Out of that meeting at 44 rue du Four came the National Council of Resistance. Later, Moulin was betrayed (no one knows by whom). He died in German captivity.

I left the Hotel Voltaire and walked along the Seine in the Sunday morning sun as far as rue Bonaparte. There, I turned south toward Saint Germain-des-Pres. My walk took me to the famous old church and the landmark Café des deux Magots and onto rue des Rennes. In two short blocks I was at rue du Four, even at that hour jammed with parked cars.

Why so many cars? Because, as I discovered when I turned to go along rue de Grenelle, a busy flea market was catering to hundreds of customers. From there, I went back to rue des Rennes and returned to boulevard Saint Germain.  I followed Saint Germain east through the thickening crowd of strollers to rue des Saints Peres. That led back up to the Seine and my hotel. Rue des Saints Peres is a street that Ernest Hemingway wrote of taking in The Sun Also Rises: “We came out of theTuileries in the light and crossed the Seine and then turned up the rue des Saints Peres.”

You could walk the width of Paris in a day without too much trouble, so taxi rides never last very long. A 20-minute drive along the right bank carried me to the 12th arrondisement where at 5 rue du Colonel Oudet I at last found what awaits when you go through those large, dark doors you see on urban French dwellings. In this case a courtyard, and entrances to several buildings. The Lefis have a large and rather grand place that is akin to a Toronto loft. It fills the top two floors of a three story building plus a rooftop, a toit ouvret, which has much greenery, beautiful outdoor furniture, and a glassed in area with a  comfortable sofa and chairs in case of rain. That’s what we’re having today — nous avons une pluie fine.

When one dines alone, one must try to compensate by closing observing the neighboring diners. Two men at nearby tables with their ladies intrigued me. One, a balding, bespectacled fellow wearing a jacket, sweater, shirt and tie, stood out from the rest of the men in the room, most of them dressed ultra-casually. This man did something I’ve not seen in years. He drew from his pocket a cloth handkerchief and dabbed at his face. I didn’t know they made those things anymore! I put him down for a retired insurance company adjuster, perhaps a throwback to the ancien bourgeoisie. The other gentlemen looked precisely like a Quebec politician, now dead, who I once knew.  Genes do tell.

Forgive me if I sound touristy, but all travelers have to walk, eat, sleep and see the sights. I did my gawking in the morning when, true to my research needs, I wandered along Quai d’Orsay to a stark five-story sandstone building on rue Saint-Dominique that now houses the Ministry of Defense. It is where Gen. Charles de Gaulle had his office before the German occupation, and to which he returned on Liberation Day to find not a thing out of place.  On the way, I encountered one of those delights for which Paris is so famous – a tiny square called Place Samuel Rousseau (I think this Rousseau was a composer), behind which stands the Basilica of Saint Clotilde. Enjoy the picture!

Two touristy encounters: A new dodge is for street people (Algerians, apparently) to bend over a few feet from you and feign picking up a gold ring. It happened twice to me. The first time, the woman pretended it would not fit her, then offered it to me. Next, she asked for coffee money. I gave her a few coins but declined the ring, which she quickly pocketed. A little later, a young man tried the same thing.

Alliance Francaise handled my registration with dispatch, and I soon possessed a “student” card which will give me entry to a month of French classes starting Monday (Oct. 1). This is the real reason for my trip to Paris – to fulfill a long denied ambition to better speak and read French as an aid to my tesearch for various projects.

Also on Monday, I’ll be buying my month’s pass on the Metro for 62 Euros ($80), compared to the $115 the TTC charges Toronto commuters. Before that, I’ll find my way to the 12^th Arrondisement where I’ll be staying with a French couple, the Lefis, for the extent of my visit. More later.

First, the Harper government’s decision to quit backing asbestos mining, which occurs only in Quebec.

Second, the withdrawal by Lowe’s, the American hardware giant, in its bid to take over Quebec-based Rona Inc.

The new Premier, Mme. Marois had promised to withdraw the guarantee the provincial Liberals had offered for a $50 million loan to start up asbestos mining again at Asbestos, Que. (The name says it all.) And she made it clear the PQ government would do everything in its power to stop the take-over of Rona.

If you agree it is time that Canada stopped exporting asbestos to third-world countries (having banned its use in  our own construction), you will be pleased with Ottawa’s action to no longer oppose adding asbestos to the global list of hazardous substances. Also, if you believe boards of directors should have the power to reject unwanted takeovers, then you’ll take comfort in Lowe’s withdrawal of its cash-rich take-over bid.

Neither of these things would have come to pass without a PQ government in power.The fact they did adds further weight, I think, to the argument that Quebecers chose exceedingly well when they voted on September 4.

They clearly had no wish to go down the sovereignist path, and so accordingly made sure the PQ did not get a majority. But they did want change, and the social democratic policies of the PQ met with the same high level of support that New Democratic candidates enjoyed in the last federal election.

In both the asbestos and Rona cases, it’s significant that the Quebec government had no real power to stop either of the projects. What Ottawa says in foreign affairs is solely Ottawa’s business. And the Rona take-over, if it had proceeded, would have been determined by federal authorities under Canada’s federal investment review policies.

During the election campaign, Mme. Marois promised to pick fights with Ottawa. Her strategy was that Quebec couldn’t lose. If Ottawa gave in, that would prove the heft of the sovereignist threat. If Ottawa didn’t buckle, that would show there’s no place for Quebec in Canada.

We can take comfort in the fact that the first two big consequences of the election go against both these stratagems. Instead, they demonstrate that practical realities — and policies that are responsive to the public good — will usually achieve the desired results. Any Quebec government could have taken the stance the PQ did in these instances, and the outcome would have been the same. Proving once again the irrelevance of separatism.

It is difficult for most Canadians to link our sense of modern Canada with this two hundred year old conflict and the encounters between ragtag regiments that took place at that time. Only if the Americans had been able to drive the British completely out of North America, would Canada have not come into being. This has not lessened the zeal of the Harper government to embellish an event that accords nicely with its attempt, according to the authors of a new book, to “rebrand” our image of a peaceful past into that of a nation “created by war, defended by soldiers, and kept free by patriotic support of military virtues.”

Canada a nation of peacekeepers, a working multicultural example for a fractious world, an accomplished political partnership of two founding races? This is hardly the vision of Canada held by Stephen Harper, the Conservative party, or Canada’s military establishment, as set out in Warrior Nation: Rebranding Canada in an Age of Anxiety.

By exploring Canada’s involvement in  the “Anglosphere” of British-American-Canadian geopolitical partnering from the Boer War at the end of the 19th century to the Afghanistan conflict at the beginning of the 21st, Ian McKay and Jamie Swift present convincing evidence that Canada has always been willing to align itself on the side of military force rather than commit to international conciliation and peace-building. Perhaps, given the litany of examples they unearth, the “rebranding” undertaken by Harper & Co. may not be all that tenuous.

Among the many strengths of the book is the way it has cast Canadian policy-making in a global context. Lester Pearson’s Cold War strategy, according to Warrior Nation, was to be a Cold Warrior par excellence, fighting Communism at home and abroad. The peacekeeping accolades earned by Pearson, this line of reasoning argues, came from more than a wish to stop a nasty colonial-type military incursion. He “saved the British and the French from their own failure to realize that the sun was setting on their geriatric empires.” A decade later, our membership in the International Control Commission, created to facilitate a peaceful settlement in Vietnam and Southeast Asia, “had Canada working as an accomplice to U.S. crimes” in our role as an intelligence agent for Washington.

Our involvement in Afghanistan, undertaken as partial recompense for our refusal to join the U.S. attack on Iraq, is seen by McKay and Swift as “an exercise in imperial overreach, a tragic waste of life, a misuse of resources … and, given the history of foreign interventions … doomed to failure.”

Warrior Nation, however, is no mere polemic on a misguided foreign policy. It examines Canada’s record through the personalities that shaped our decisions and fashioned our policies. There is the swashbuckling graduate of Canada’s Royal Military College, William Stairs, who became an accomplice in King Leopold’s rapacious reign over the Belgian Congo; Governor General John Buchan, glorifier of war and designer of the death-dealing concentration camps the British ran in South Africa after the Boer War (and incidentally held out as a leadership example in Canada’s new Citizenship Guide); and First World War veteran Tommy Burns, who rose to become leader of the UN’s first major peacekeeping operation, who thought of imperialism as “the monster of the age.”

This book does not argue that Canada should have no military establishment or that it should never seek to influence global politics. Rather, it signals a warning against a warriors’ world of a North America as a gated community in which “the need for security — and for the armed forces necessary to provide it — becomes a dominant worry.”

In such a world, this book reminds us, there is no room for effective environmental protection but there is room for a military with the capacity to bomb lesser states to freedom.Toward which destiny should Canadians aspire?

Before you conclude that I’ve gone over the top, consider these facts:

Excluding the random acts of violence that have occurred (never acceptable in a law-abiding society), Quebec students have been resolute and proper in their resistance to their government’s intention to raise tuition. Their opposition is based, in part, on a historic decision made by the Jean Lesage government during the 1960s Quiet Revolution. Quebec had just come off a repressive, church-ridden regime where barely half the population had achieved even Grade 6. To advance beyond third world status, Quebec realized it had to rear a generation of educated, competent, and productive young people able to compete in every aspect of business, science, and the arts.

While Quebec’s decision to hike tuition fees by $254 a year over seven years seems reasonable — especially when compared to the higher fees of other provinces — such a decision represents a backward step.

The argument against the students is that they must give up their “entitlement” to low-cost post-secondary education. I would argue that rather than young people having an entitlement to an affordable education, they actually bear an obligation to educate themselves for tomorrow’s increasingly technical and complex world. Doesn’t every politician praise the benefits of education, putting an “educated work force” among the top priorities of Canada or any other country? And if that’s so, isn’t it to society’s advantage to see that every individual is educated to the extent of their capabilities?

Quebec has funded its modest — up to now — university tuition fees with a tax structure that is the heaviest in Canada. People have been paying for the benefits they’ve enjoyed. That’s the way it should be.

While doing research for my forthcoming book on Joey Smallwood, the first premier of Newfoundland and Canada’s last “Father of Confederation,” (Joey Smallwood, Schemer and Dreamer) I found out more about how he had not only abolished tuition in the 1960s, but for a time actually paid students to go to university. Both schemes had to be abandoned in the face of financial pressures Newfoundland faced as a “have-not” province. But ever since, Newfoundland has managed to keep its tuition fees the second-lowest in the country, next to Quebec.

Only North America and Australia force their young people to pay a king’s ransom for an education. It puts them in debt for at least the first ten years of their working life. Today, these debt-burdened students begin their work careers facing uncertain job prospects, sky-high housing costs, and devastating government cutbacks in social benefits. They’ll have to work longer to retire on less. What a horrible legacy we’re handing them, all for the sake of a conservative economic agenda calculated to benefit the rich with tax reductions and reward corporations (owned mostly by higher income Canadians) with larger subsidies and lower taxes.

Most European countries charge only modest enrollment fees for university registration: 165 euros in France ($214); 500 euros ($650) in Belgium, 1,000 euros ($1300) in Germany, about the same in Holland and Italy. Britain maxes out tuition at 3,145 pounds ($5032). EU countries must limit their deficits to 3 per cent of GDP — the failure of Greece to do so is what’s behind the current euro crisis. It will be overcome, but that’s another story.

While Canadians bemoan the advantages Quebec students enjoy, they should look to their own provincial governments and ask why they haven’t done better in facing up to the task of preparing the country for the future. Today, the booming resource revenues of the West primarily involve the transfer of public wealth to private hands as a result of absurdly low exploration fees and royalties. The proceeds of these non-renewable resources should be  directed more to the public good and less to private gain. Why did the last but one Conservative premier of Alberta have to back off from his efforts to charge higher royalties to the oil industry, an attempt that played a big part in Ed Stelmach’s having to resign as Premier?

Equally damning is the counter-productive tactic adopted by the Charest government to try to quiet the student protest. Opening the way to cost-cutting in universities by having students share in budget decisions means only one thing: that money will be pried out of essential budgets like research to fund tuition costs. This approach ducks the really important issue — that of adequate funding for all university operations.

Ontario is equally culpable for having forced universities to raise tuition, followed in turn by reductions in provincial support. In my days as a trustee of a Toronto School Board, I learned that the prospect of being able to go to university is one of the strongest motivations for students to stay in school.

Canada has the capability to maintain one of the world’s best educational systems. It is one that should be open to all who can meet a demanding standard of academic quality. Abolishing tuition and paying students to educate themselves may seem like a utopian fantasy, but the countries that pursue this goal are the ones that will lead the world tomorrow.

Harper, followed by Foreign Affairs minister John Baird, used Woodsworth’s reluctance to enter World War II as an excuse to avoid answering the NDP on whether Canada may stay in Afghanistan  after our scheduled 2014 departure date.

“Unlike the NDP, we are not going to ideologically have a position regardless of circumstances,” Harper told the Commons. ” The leader of the NDP, in 1939, did not even want to support war against Hitler.”

Of course, Woodsworth wasn’t the leader of the NDP. It didn’t even come into existence until 1962, as opposition MPs loudly reminded the Prime Minister across the floor of the Commons. “Okay, it was the CCF, same difference,” he replied. “Parties do change their names from time to time.”

I don’t recall any single comment by Mr. Harper ever setting off such a flurry of condemnation. NDP MPs, to their credit, reacted shrewdly. They suggested it would be fair game to raise Reform party policies. I’d go back further. What about the time Conservative leader John Diefenbaker voted against Canada’s adoption of the Maple Leaf flag?

Perhaps Mr. Harper would benefit from a history lesson.J.S. Woodsworth is universally recognized as one of the great figures of Canadian public life, a man revered for his commitment to improving the lives of Canadians during the difficult 1920s and 1930, when social welfare measures such as employment insurance and pensions were virtually non existent. Mr. Harper would be well advised to read Kenneth McNaught’s biography of Mr. Woodsworth, A Prophet in Politics (University of Toronto Press).

Mr. Woodsworth was a Methodist minister, a Christian pacificist, whose moral code prevented him from supporting armed conflict. He told the CCF National Council that he could not support going to war, and offered to resign. His offer was refused, but every CCF MP but he voted to accept the government’s Throne Speech, an act tantamount to agreeing to going to war. Woodsworth’s successor, M. J. Coldwell, made it clear that the anti-war stance had been a personal view of Mr. Woodsworth, and did not reflect the position of the party. (There was no actual vote on a declaration of war.) The CCF pushed for all-out prosecution of the war effort, and supported conscription.

In his speech on the war, Mr. Woodsworth made clear his respect for democratic rights.

“I rejoice that it is possible to say these things in a Canadian parliament under British institutions. It would not be possible in Germany.”

At the time, Mr. Woodsworth was seriously ill. He had suffered a stroke and his wife had to write out his remarks for him on cards, which he could barely read. He managed to hold his seat in the 1940 election, but died in 1942.

Here is what Prime Minister Mackenzie King said of Mr. Woodsworth, when some Liberal MPs heckled the CCF leader during his speech opposing Canada’s entry into the war:

There are few men in this Parliament for whom I have greater respect than the leader of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. I admire him in my heart, because time and again he has had the courage to say what lays on his conscience, regardless of what the world might think of him. A man of that calibre is an ornament to Parliament.

This week’s Tory attacks set off a uproar on the web. The Globe and Mail’s story drew some 4,000 comments — the vast majority highly critical of Mr. Harper. I can’t recall a single case of so much public outrage. A Twitter site, #Harperhistory, quickly sprang to life.

Is it these kinds of unprincipled attacks that are at the root of Mr. Harper’s decline in the polls? Or are they a reaction to his evident loss of public support? (Latest polls show his trustworthiness rating down from 32 to 20 per cent, and put the Tories and the NDP in a statistical tie in voter support, both in the 32-34 per cent range.)

Mr. Harper’s cheap attempt to manipulate history as a means of avoiding a straight-up answer to a matter of current public concern, is yet another example of the kind of extremist politics that has no place in  a respectful democratic dialogue. It is to be hoped Canadian voters will someday send him that message.