Trump-et blasts, Senate reform, the sounds of election phoney war

Snicker at the political foolishness south of the border if you wish. That's the point. At least it's fun.

Donald Trump is having a blast staging a summer clown show, dropping howlers, hogging up far-right love in a jingoistic baseball cap.

Ant Man, a movie about an insect-sized superhero, is leading at the box office, and the loudmouth with the comb-over is leading his party's polls. Nobody is taking any of it seriously.

Here in Canada, I'm discovering after a couple of weeks back, the political discourse is really no more substantive. It's just more earnest.

While America's political elite has been hotly defending Senator John McCain's war record, Canada's seems to be consumed with the equally irrelevant question of whether the federal government is, three and a half months into the fiscal year, a dollar in deficit or a dollar in surplus.

This is a distraction. It plays on the old government-as-a-household-with-credit-card-debt trope, which is economically fatuous.

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The Conservative government, of course, created this debate by vowing it will run a surplus in fiscal 2015-16, and the opposition parties are eagerly playing along, stoutly determined to hold Stephen Harper to a largely meaningless promise.

Here's the answer: No one knows whether the government will spend more than it takes in this fiscal year, and no one will know until next summer.

And any macroeconomist will tell you that, in the big picture, it doesn't amount to a hill of beans anyway.

The far more important reality, which no party seems anxious to explore, is that Canada's economy is staggering, and, by the conventional definition, is probably in recession.

Economies ebb and flow as reliably as tides. King Canute couldn't order them to change, and neither can a prime minister.

Slumps starve governments of revenue. Most government spending is structurally fixed. The government may well have to borrow this year to meet its obligations.

So what? Such things are largely beyond any finance minister's control.

A more sensible discussion is whether Canada's social entitlements are sustainable as the baby boom generation retires.

We might also want to discuss whether anything can be done to cushion Canadians, millions of whom are at nosebleed debt levels and living in housing bubbles, from an economic correction.

The Bank of Canada has twice now lowered interest rates. Mortgages here now cost half what Americans pay.

The most visible effects so far are tumbling stock markets and a tanking Canadian dollar.

In this context, the question of a small federal deficit or surplus is about as meaningful as an endlessly repeated, American-style, blunt-force attack ad.

The poor old Senate

Another shibboleth: Senate reform.

As I understand it, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in 2004 that he would not appoint a single unelected senator, and then proceeded to appoint 56 of them (some of whom were politicians who had been explicitly repudiated by voters), and now says he won't appoint another senator.

This of course plays to public disgust over the entitled shenanigans of certain senators, most of whom were appointed by Stephen Harper.

But the prime minister's latest declaration is legally the equivalent of Barack Obama announcing he will henceforth not appoint any more judges.

The Constitution demands it. The courts will certainly ensure it happens.

Reforming the Constitution requires a constitutional amendment, which is, um, problematic. Remember Meech Lake? I do.

Anyone who thinks the Senate will shrivel and die because Stephen Harper says he won't appoint senators would believe thunder curdles milk.

And yet this was all widely reported as an actual policy alternative. The National Post managed a sensible headline: "It may be unconstitutional, but at least Harper has a Senate policy for the election."

Terrifying terror

Canadians, I see, are also being told, again, that they face an unprecedented threat of what the prime minister calls "jihadi terror."

Common crime and even texting while driving kill a lot more Canadians, but never mind.

So clear and present and overwhelming is this terror threat that Canada's foreign affairs minister has instructed his staff to submit at least three examples of terror each week that he can include in speeches warning of the terror threat.

The terror doesn't even have to be in Canada to qualify as an example; the slaughters and beheadings and bombings of innocents in the Levant and parts of Africa, apparently, work fine for the minister's purposes.

This country still seems pretty safe, though. I say that as someone who spent five years in Jerusalem, working in places like Gaza and Lebanon and Iraq and Syria.

It might be worth asking whether our participation in the U.S.-led bombing campaign against ISIS, which was largely created by the U.S. invasion of Iraq, is going to change anything there, or is even in Canada's national interest.

But the opposition parties, clearly, would rather stick with the deficit-or-surplus question. It's easier.

More than a quarter of a century ago, Brian Mulroney ran for re-election, having flip-flopped and signed a radical free trade agreement with the U.S. that would realign the Canadian economy.

The debate was ferocious. So hungry were Canadians for information on which to base their choice that a little pamphlet on the free trade's implications written by an obscure judge from Alberta became a national bestseller.

The left and the right argued bitterly, and then voters decided.

That was democracy at its most vital. What's happening this year is what John Turner, whom Mulroney trounced, used to call "bullshit theatre."

There. I said it. I, of all reporters, miss Brian Mulroney.