I think it’s great that the Ontario government is fighting smoking by promoting innumeracy.

Chris Zelkovich: “But the real problem is the NHL culture, which promotes teamwork over individuality.”

Urban Dictionary threatens to bring down a Texas A.D.A.:

Trent wrote of the prosecutor in a 2003 email: “He overcame a subversively good defence by Matt Hennessey that had some Canadians on the jury feeling sorry for the defendant and forced them to do the right thing.”

Trent’s email remained unchallenged by colleagues who received the email, despite there being no actual Canadians on the jury.

If memory serves, “Canadian” means something else yet again in New York…

This seems a little specific for my last will and testament, so I’ll say it here. If by some mischance I’m ever struck down by a stray bullet, I hereby demand that my surviving friends and family keep Jack Layton the hell away from my funeral. And if he insists on mugging for the cameras outside, and says something like, “We’ve got to make this kind of thing a very, very rare thing in Toronto, instead of a weekly occurrence,” I hereby demand … well, I’ll leave the punishment up to the assembled mourners. A pie in the face at the absolute minimum.

From a breathless Los Angeles Times article on the growing numbers of “post-abortive men” gathering themselves into support groups and in some cases aligning themselves with pro-life uglies:

Even abortion rights supporters acknowledge that men may benefit from counseling when they and their partners face an unwanted pregnancy.

So, hang on. Back it up, doc. I’ve impregnated this woman. There’s a thing growing in her belly that with a modicum of care will turn into my son or daughter, whom neither I nor the woman in question would even dream of… you know, killing. And you’re telling me if she goes in that room there and has that thing that would become my son or daughter vacuumed out of her and quickly disposed of, I might suffer some sort of psychological consequences? Nagging doubt, perhaps? Grief, even? You think I might want to talk to someone about it? Nah, get bent. You must be some kind of anti-women’s rights nut or something.

In non-sarcastic English: When it’s considered remarkable that either side of a given debate concedes something that’s self-evident to anyone who’s not terribly over-invested in that debate, then it’s almost certainly not a debate worth having. You’re not likely to get anywhere more logical, and you’re likely to have given a lot of dishonest and/or crazed people an inordinate amount of publicity in the meantime.

My friend EMG goes after the Star for some recent crimes against sobriety and concludes, on the topic of the 90,000 Torontonian families purportedly living in poverty, thusly: “I couldn’t be less convinced by this figure—given my understanding of what poverty is—if they had said a million-gazillion families.” They might as well. I deplore poverty as much as the next guy, but I’m hard-pressed to give statistics-fiddling doom-mongers the steam off my piss no matter how virtuous their goals.

The problem is beautifully illustrated by Campaign 2000, an organization whose stated goal is to belatedly realize the House of Commons’ 1989 resolution to wipe out child poverty by the millennium. Ed Broadbent, who authored said resolution, referred then to “one in four” children living in poverty. In its latest report, Campaign 2000 says (a) that 11.7 per cent of children live in poverty, and (b) that “the child poverty rate is exactly the same as it was in 1989.”

This is not an isolated discrepancy by a long shot, as Peter Shawn Taylor’s darkly comical piece in the November 28 Maclean’s illustrated. Note in particular the following, on UNICEF’s recent child poverty report, which was equally portentous as Campaign 2000’s despite using different methodology:

[A] line graph purports to show child poverty in Canada rising from 14.4 per cent in 1989 to 17.7 per cent in 2007. None of these numbers are right. The figure for 1989 was changed after Maclean’s pointed out an error. And StatsCan has not yet published 2007 figures, so where did that come from? Lisa Wolff, UNICEF Canada’s director of advocacy, explains that she inserted a 2005 figure for 2007 in order to make the graph appear up-to-date. But this too is wrong — 17.7 per cent is actually the 2003 number. Presented with the evidence, Wolff claims she’d rather not be “quibbling over numbers.” The chart in question is designed to tell a story, she says. “The line is not a precise calibration. It is supposed to be a picture of intransigence . . . [in] child poverty rates. The story is valid.”

Like fun it is. The numbers are the story. And it is an undeniable fact that the low-income cut-offs (LICO) are not measurements of poverty—Statistics Canada, those fascists, practically begs people not to use them as such—but of equality. They simply do not assess any Canadian’s access to the necessities of life, the lack of which is… well, it’s poverty. And what’s more, as Taylor points out, UNICEF elected to use the before-tax LICO, which makes it even less useful. Why would they do such a thing? Again from Taylor’s piece: “Wolff says she uses before-tax LICOs in spite of the warnings because StatsCan is comprised of statisticians, and not child development experts.” Convenient, since “her story of growing child poverty in Canada depends entirely on before-tax figures. After-tax LICO rates reveal no increase at all in child poverty since 1989.” Indeed, the rate is 11.7 per cent for both years. Or, as Broadbent put it, “one in four.”

There is real poverty in Canada, and there absolutely shouldn’t be. If anything makes us a “rogue state,” with apologies to Michael Byers’ righteous indignation over our performance in Bali, it’s the unspeakably deplorable state of our worst-off native reserves. And that should be a highly instructive cautionary example for poverty organizations convinced that adopting whichever statistical measurement produces the direst looking outcome is the quickest path to public outcry and political action. We’ve been throwing money at the First Nations for generations, and appalling conditions persist. The result is apathy, enlivened only by brief outbursts of anguished disgust.

Nobody wants to hear that his society has been frantically pursuing a cause for two decades and has made negative progress. It’s utterly demoralizing, and a pretty convincing argument to immediately halt efforts to ameliorate the situation in question, pending a wholesale rethink. If we’ve made progress on child poverty, Canadians need to hear about it. The least activists could do is pick a definition of poverty that’s based on a family’s ability to provide the necessities of life, and stick with it even if it shows improvement. Improvement is good. Remember? It motivates people to push for more.

Hauling every last Canadian child out of poverty would be worth a few white lies, but that’s begging the question. I’m less worried about the ends justifying the means than whether the means will beget the ends. Generally speaking, human beings don’t dig on wretched defeat. I just wish I could say the activist class was misreading the media and Canadians at large when it assumes we’re fundamentally uninterested in the truth.