One thing you have to say for the mullahs who run Iran: They have some nerve. Not much brains. But a lot of nerve. How else do you explain their recent war of words against the United States over the Strait of Hormuz? If you exclude pleading not guilty for reason of insanity, I mean?

The nastiness started just before Christmas, when the Iranian authorities decided their “navy” – a collection of little boats and a few small submarines, would stage a massive exercise in the Persian Gulf and tell everyone else in the area to buzz off.

In case that behaviour wasn’t obnoxious enough, the Iranian regime decided to show how strong it thinks it is by firing a few missiles. Then it threatened Western countries who might be tempted to impose more sanctions on the regime that it would feel entitled to shutting down the Strait in response, before telling the US Navy not to dare bring back its ships into the Persian Gulf.

Somehow this bluster failed to make the desired impression on the United States. As a U.S. Navy spokesperson explained yesterday, “The United States is committed to ensuring the safe flow of maritime traffic in waterways critical to global commerce.” So Uncle Sam will continue to operate in the region, and made it crystal clear that nobody would get away with shutting down the Strait of Hormuz. So of course the Iranians threatened the U.S. some more.

What the mullahs think they can accomplish by threatening the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet with their ragtag collection of tinfoil runabouts, I don’t know. Look up the Fifth Fleet, and ask yourself how long you think you’d last in armed combat against those dudes, even if everybody in your navy was determined to fight to the death. Eight minutes?

You can see why nobody with an ounce of common sense wants to see the Iranian mullahs get their hands on a nuclear bomb. They’re not exactly showing good judgment, are they. But they do have some nerve…

Today is the beginning of the political season in the United States, with the Iowa caucuses. And I’m extremely uninspired.

Seriously: The last couple of weeks we saw a battle between serial flip-flopper Mitt Romney, radical Libertarian crank Ron Paul and… Newt Gingrich. Now the latest polls tell us Mitt Romney is a wee bit ahead, but there’s a chance Rick Santorum, a decent chap with zero hope of exciting anybody anywhere ever, might be surging past Newt Gingrich, who himself says he’s not going to win. Even the out-there candidates – Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry – are kinda tame these days. As for Jon Huntsman, you’re probably wondering what he’s doing in that race in the first place. Me, too. He’s so devoid of royal jelly he might as well have dishwater running through his veins. Blah.

I am particularly annoyed because I would like to see a candidate who understands what the biggest problem facing America is (spending way too much on unsustainable social programs like health care and public pension plans), has some kind of half-decent plan for weaning people off those programs, and who’s as close to a normal person as can reasonably be expected under the circumstances. And we don’t have that at all in this race – just like in 2008.

The most principled candidate, by far, is Ron Paul. On many domestic issues he’s actually quite sensible, most notably the need to reduce the size of government and to lower taxes. He’s also strongly pro-life. But he’s dangerously unorthodox on foreign policy – he doesn’t think Iran is a threat, and seems to believe that if America stopped trying to play world policeman terrorists would stop trying to attack America.

The fact that so many people are willing to throw their support behind Ron Paul anyway tells you something about the state of the Republican party. And it’s not brilliant. So we’re looking at a Mitt Romney nomination because he’s the only one with a reasonable chance of defeating Barack Obama. The same reason the party picked John McCain last time around. And we all remember how uninspiring that was… Come on, GOP – surprise us. Please?

Maybe this will make me sound terribly heartless, but my sympathy for the plight of the people of Attawapiskat is in danger of drying up.

First of all, as plenty of us noticed at the beginning of this saga, it’s not like the reserve never had access to money. 90 millions from the federal government alone in the last five years. But that money somehow never seemed to be enough to ensure that all the 1,800 or so residents of Attawapiskat to have things like heated buildings, running water, bathrooms – you know, basic necessities.

Why not? Well, if you listen to the NDP and the UN, it’s because the government of Stephen Harper doesn’t care enough.

The UN Special Rapporteur on Indigenous Peoples yesterday expressed “deep concern” over the crisis in Attawapiskat and criticized the government for it. NPD MP Charlie Angus added: “This crisis has been going on for months. Families will be spending winter in tents in Attawapiskat and the Conservatives just don’t seem to care. Conservative inaction is a disgrace and giving Canada a black eye in front of the world.”

Wow. This after tens of millions of dollars were sent by that awful Conservative government – which, by the way, is now scrambling to get immediate relief, and which will be shipping 22 modular houses to the reserve in mid-January.

Oh, and as our own Ezra Levant pointed out earlier this month, not every money problem the reserve has is the fault of the feds. At some point, the people directly in charge of that reserve – the chief and band council – have to take some responsibility, too.

I’m all for criticizing the federal government – I do a fair bit of that myself. But on this file in the last few weeks they’ve been doing a pretty decent job trying to bring emergency relief to those who are freezing.

Time for the UN to buzz off and the NDP to get a grip.

They say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, and they’re usually right. But there are exceptions, and Kim Jong-il was one of them.

The North Korean leader died this weekend. From a heart attack, or so we are told. It may be true or not, like many other things that were said about him. Such as the claim that he’d shot a 34 in his first ever game of golf. Or that his hair was naturally bouffant and certainly not grey. Or that his birth was foretold by a swallow and heralded by a new star appearing in the heavens.

Anyhow, it doesn’t really matter how he died. He’s gone. And when I heard about it, I wasn’t sad. One fewer tyrant – hey, I’ll take it, even though I know his death won’t make much difference to the poor oppressed people of North Korea.

I found official reactions to his death interesting. You had Chinese, Russian and Iranian representatives expressing sorrow and even sadness at the passing of the famous comrade. Most decent countries – such as the US, Britain, France, and Australia, issued sober statements saying they were monitoring the situation and hoping that the country would choose a different and better path.

Canada had a different – and better – reaction. Prime Minister Stephen Harper said: “Kim Jong-il will be remembered as the leader of a totalitarian regime who violated the basic rights of the North Korean people for nearly two decades. We hope his passing brings positive change allowing the people of North Korea to emerge from six decades of isolation, oppression and misery. The regime’s reckless decisions have resulted in North Korea being an impoverished nation and a country isolated from the international community because of its dangerous nuclear proliferation and ballistic missile programs.”

Well! That’s no beating about the bush! Kim Jong-il was a tyrant of the worst sort, and he’s no doubt rotting in hell as we speak. It would be – perhaps – a bit much to dance on his grave. But Stephen Harper’s statement came as close to doing so as could be done by a prime minister, and I for one was very happy to see that. Nicely done!

If there’s one thing I hate, it’s a government that thinks I’m ignorant, stupid, and constantly in need of help.

I was on vacation in Florida last week. I took a flight down to catch some rays and – of course – spend a few days at Disney World. Yes, obviously, I enjoy living dangerously.

At least, that’s the impression I got when I read reports that a Conservative MP had tabled a private member’s bill that would ban the use of tanning booths for anyone under 18. It would also require beds to carry visible warning labels showing that they can cause cancer. “Canadians, before they shoot off to the sunny south, like to get a base tan,” the MP, James Bezan, said. “But I want to be sure Canadians are aware of the health risks related to artificial tanning.”

Oh please. This bill assumes Canadians are too dumb to know overexposure to artificial sunlight isn’t exactly awesome for their skin yet be smart enough to read, understand, and abide by a warning label.

The other story that caught my attention was the one about how the government would force airlines to include all those hidden surprise fees and taxes in their advertised flight price. “This will allow consumers to easily determine the full cost of airfares in order to make informed choices,” Steven Fletcher, the minister of state for transport, explained in a statement.

Listen, there is a reason why Dave Barry’s joke about how airlines set their prices is funny. He said it was all decided by Rudy the Fare Chicken, pecking at a keyboard sprinkled with corn. It all seems so random, right? But here’s the thing: When you see a price that seem too good to be true, it’s a good idea to go read the fine print. That’s what reasonably intelligent consumers do. They don’t wait for the government to regulate everything.

You’ve heard the expression “The mountain gave birth to a mouse”? It’s used to describe a huge endeavour that produces insignificant results. Such as the border agreement unveiled by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and President Barack Obama at the White House yesterday. I’m afraid we all got excited over not much.

To be sure, the deal announced yesterday does contain excellent intentions – especially if you’re interested in easier travel between Canada and the United States, and even more so if you’re involved in the shipment of goods or services between the two countries.

For instance, shipments going to the US from Canada might be pre-inspected and “pre-cleared” so as to speed up border crossing. There is also talk of doing away with double inspections, so that goods destined to the US but arriving by sea at, say, Halifax, could be screened only once in Halifax, which would reduce compliance costs – in time, money, and paperwork.

We also expect to see an automatic Entry-Exit information sharing system at land crossings, which would see information about when and where you leave Canada or come back home shared between the two countries. It’s not clear yet exactly what personal information will be collected and shared – this is something that gets critics anxious because of privacy concerns, and you can expect to hear more about that.

Business people and Canadians who are interested in being able to travel to the United States without having to jump through all kinds of security hoops at the border will no doubt welcome yesterday’s announcement. But as usual, the devil is in the details. And those details haven’t been fleshed out just yet. And there is an outside chance they may not be for a while, especially as US lawmakers get busy with the election next year… Easier border crossing is a priority for a lot of Canadians, but it doesn’t rank nearly as high in the minds of most Americans.

Yesterday’s announcement sounded great, but I worry we’ll find ourselves holding a pretty mangy mouse…

Yesterday marked the 22nd anniversary of the Polytechnique massacre, which took the lives of 14 innocent women. It was also an occasion for politicians and other activists to use the victims of this massacre to score cheap political points. They ought to be ashamed of themselves.

First of all, it’s not true that the anniversary symbolizes violence against women, like Quebec’s council on the status of women said. The anniversary symbolizes nothing other than the fact that 22 years have passed since Marc Lepine, who was a crazy man, shot and killed those women.

Well, maybe there’s one other thing – yesterday’s anniversary marked 22 years of deliberately downplaying certain inconvenient facts about the Polytechnique events that aren’t useful to left-wing politicians.

Starting with the fact that Marc Lepine’s real name was Gamil Gharbi, that he was the son of an Algerian immigrant who was himself violent and held remarkably non-liberal ideas about the place of women in society. Or the fact that when he got into the classroom, there were 60 students in it – 51 men and 9 women. He told the men to leave and they did – nobody tried to rush the lone gunman or in any way try to do something – anything – to protect their female classmates.

One of those men, Sarto Blais, hanged himself 8 months later. In the suicide note he left behind, he explained that he couldn’t live with the fact that as a man, he had done nothing. Eleven months after his suicide, his parents took their own lives. You do not hear this part of the story very often, do you. Neither do you hear much about how the killer had purchased his weapon legally, had no criminal record, and would not have been stopped, or even slowed down, by the gun registry had it been in place.

The Polytechnique massacre was the isolated act of a madman. Let’s mourn the victims, be grateful that we live in a country where those events are exceedingly rare, and let’s stop using December 6 every year to score cheap political points.

I never thought I’d see the day… but it appears Canadians are feeling better about their country’s politics than Americans. And yes, this includes Canadian conservatives.

We’re so used to looking with envy at our southern neighbours and wish we had conservative politicians, too. Not quite as much anymore. Isn’t that weird.

A recent opinion poll by Nanos research shows that fully 63% of Canadians believe the country is moving in the right direction, up from 52% in 2010. Wow… Meanwhile, the latest Rasmussen poll in America shows that only 16% of likely US voters think their country is headed in the right direction.

Canadians’ feelings about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservative government have also improved, with 40% of Canadians rating its performance as “good” or “very good,” up 10 points from last year, while 24% said the government’s performance was “poor” or “very poor,” four points down from 2010. Meanwhile, the latest Gallup showed 43% of Americans approved of the job President Obama is doing, compared to a scary – well, scary for Mr. Obama, at any rate – 49% who disapprove…

But more important than those numbers is the difference between the two countries when it comes to conservative politics. While I have my reservations about the Harper government (mostly on the economy – it’s spending way too much on unsustainable social programs), I must say there have been a few marked improvements of late, starting with the crackdown on suspected war criminals, the end of the long-gun registry, the end of the wheat board, the phasing out of the $2 per vote subsidy to political parties… Yep, the government has been throwing a few bits of red meat our way, and that’s good.

By contrast, the race for the Republican presidential nomination is, at the moment, between old stale career politician and flip-flopper Newt Gingrich and slightly less old yet still stale career politician and flip-flopper Mitt Romney. Neither of whom is very strongly conservative in the first place. Who would have thought that American conservatives would be looking north with envy? Not me…

Those of you who’ve been following my work over the years will know that I am not known for being nice to Quebec Premier Jean Charest. So it’s extra special when his government does something good, like it just did last week.

On Friday the National Assembly unanimously voted in favour of Bill 33, a bill to eliminate union placement on construction sites in the province. I told you about it in late October – especially the part where unions were fighting the bill with wildcat strikes, threats of violence, and even some incidents that were actually violent.

There were even threats against the Labour Minister, a woman, to break her legs if the bill wasn’t withdrawn. To her great credit, the minister in question, Lise Theriault, didn’t back down. And the bill went through. With the support of the Parti Quebecois, a traditional ally of unions in the province – they deserve some credit, too.

What does this mean? It means that it will no longer be the unions deciding how many workers are required, and which workers get jobs on Quebec’s construction sites. It will be the Quebec Construction Commission doing it, based on demand by employers.

It’s not nearly as good as letting employers hire workers themselves, like people in other industries do. But understand: It’s a great deal better than having the unions be in charge of everything. It will greatly reduce union power in the province, increase freedom for construction workers, and it should lead to a marked reduction in corruption, threats and violence on construction sites.

Of course, the unions aren’t happy. The two biggest ones threatened to create a worker shortage by sending their members work in other provinces. Minister Theriault isn’t worried about it. She said last Friday was a historical day, since the new law gives construction workers the right to choose which union they want to join and where they want to work. They are unlikely to pick Alberta.

So there. Well done, Mr. Charest.

There are several things that go through your mind when you see images like the ones we showed you all day yesterday from the Attawapiskat reserve in northern Ontario.

First, there’s visceral shock, horror. To see young children living in such squalid conditions – in unheated buildings, no running water, no facilities, dirty mattresses on the floor, no school, no future, no hope… That this much squalor exists in such a rich country as Canada defies belief.

But then, you hear about all the money that was sent to this particular reserve – $90 million in the last five years just from the federal government – and your reaction turns to anger. Somebody, somewhere, is getting their grubby hands on that money with no regards for their fellows. And that’s a much bigger outrage.

Nobody can say for sure where that money went. An audit done by an outside accounting firm suggests the band has huge problems keeping track of its money. Receipts are missing, the accounting is incomplete, there are unauthorized transfers, etc.

Doesn’t take an investigative genius to put two and two together. Someone is stealing that money, driving around in shiny 4x4s while children live in unheated shacks. So finally yesterday the government decided to hand over management of the reserve to a third party, and provide emergency assistance to those in need.

This seems to have annoyed NDP MP Charlie Angus, who asked why the government isn’t responding to this crisis the way it responds to disasters in non-aboriginal communities. “Why is it that when it’s a first-nation community in distress, this government’s response is contempt?” Mr. Angus ought to be ashamed of himself.

You can blame the Tories for not insisting on accountability from band councils nearly as much as they should have. They didn’t, and neither did other governments that preceded them. Some people were allowed to steal while others froze. That should make us all angry.