It's Political Correctness Gone Mad I Tell You.

Far be it from me to say that Industry Minister Christian Paradis misled the House of Commons last week. Perhaps we might say he misinformed the House, by mistake, because he is himself misinformed about what’s in his own job description. Last night in the House, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Industry, Mike Lake, shed further light on this preposterous state of affairs. And it's just like I've been saying.

I set out the facts in the Ottawa Citizen today as a sort of prelude to my column, which will appear in Saturday's editions. Saturday's column will give you some idea about the repercussions of a kind of experiment Ottawa began in September, 2009, in the matter of how to deal with oilsands acquisitions and the takeover of Canada's economic assets, by, say, the grueseome acquisitions arms of the vast military-industrial complex known as the Government of the People's Republic of China.

Ottawa's experiment was basically this: Gee, I wonder how much we could get away with if we tried to run Canada like one of those postmodernist dystopias where "national security” is whatever Dear Leader says it is? That's what today's piece is about. It's about how Dear Leader gets to decide these things all by himself, and how Dear Leader (in this case Christian Paradis, who either doesn't know what's in his job description or isn't telling) was unburdened of annoying legal “definitions” and criteria in making his decisions, because that would “limit the government’s flexibility.”

I mean, be serious. The next thing you’ll want is a “Criminal Code” with bothersome definitions encumbering the “flexibility” of the Attorney-General of Canada and the Public Safety Minister and CSIS and the RCMP. Then you'll want foreign-power takeovers subjected to national security reviews conducted according to "concrete, objective and transparent criteria.” Before you're finished you'll be demanding courtrooms and then fair trials and rules of evidence and habeas corpus. It’s political correctness gone mad I tell you.

Another teaser about Saturday's column. It builds on this. It's specifically about this. It's about how the clever little experiment the Einsteins and the Pavlovs around the federal cabinet took to the Investment Canada Act is now fatally undermining the Special Economic Measures Act - which is the statute that enforces Canada's sanctions against the nuke-wanting ayatollahs in Tehran.