In 1987, as the Reagan revitalization drew to an end, Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind. It has taken nearly a quarter century for books to emerge that trace the promise of re-opening the Western soul. For conservatives, it need not matter that the author of those works, Terry Eagleton, is an Irish Catholic Marxist any more than it mattered that Bloom was a Jewish liberal elitist. What matters first is that conservatives take Eagleton's eloquent savaging of morally flaccid capitalism and its attendant spiritual vacuity seriously. What matters more is that we heed with deep attentiveness the hope implied in Eagleton's call for a renewed understanding of the West's foundation in the bond between faith and reason. What matters most is his conviction that this recovery must take place not just for the reassertion of faith but also for the rescue of reason. "(I)t is only if reason can draw upon energies and resources deeper, more tenacious and less fragile than itself that it is capable of prevailing, a truth which liberal rationalism for the most part disastrously overlooks," Eagleton writes in his 2009 book Reason, Faith and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. Arguing effectively that there is a dimension of human life more tenacious and less fragile than reason is a bold move for anyone at the end of the first decade of the 21st century. For the argument to come from the pen of a leading Anglo-American scholar and cultural theorist (Eagleton holds professorships at the University of Ireland, Lancaster University and at Notre Dame; he has also been a distinguished speaker at Yale and Columbia) signals a significant cultural shift in the wind. It is a shift that that has the potential to finally lead to removal of the intellectual no exit sign that has stood steadfastly since Bloom raised it over American (read: Western) thinking more than two decades ago. Contrary to the way it was initially understood, and vigorously embraced by misapprehending conservatives, The Closing of the American Mind was not a work of prophecy. It was, in fact a lamentation for the irredeemably lost. In counterpoint to the ersatz mood of moodiness that he identified and deplored in American culture, Bloom was a genuine pessimist about the causes of the Closing. His conviction was that the American mind was not only closed to the Good, but was closed for good. The quick notes version of the book summarized it as a plaint roused by the political correctness fad just then sweeping U.S. university campuses, and a tweaking of the academic twits promoting or acquiescing to it. In fact, it was a substantive, and withering, critique of the way nihilistic 19th and 20th century philosophy had been openly welcomed ashore by unwitting American intellectuals after the Second World War. Surviving Nazis had to at least flee at great risk to South American countries, change their names, check the accent and watch out for that twitchy right hand whenever someone in military boots clicked his heels. Against that, thinkers parroting Nietzsche and especially Heidegger, who was not only a Nazi but had attached his world historical intellectual pedigree to its evil, were given first-class passage and a comfortable chair in the salon when they arrived in North America. The result, Bloom wrote, was a "particularly American way of digesting Continental despair. It is nihilism with a happy ending." Sadly, what was really ending in Bloom's mind was America's founding constitutional openness to common co-existence that required old habits to be subordinated to an understanding of natural rights and the acceptance of a fundamental basis of unity and sameness. What was being rushed in to fill the void, he saw, was official Openness based on Nietzschean values language misconstrued to mean cultural relativism and the essential equivalence of all thought no matter how bad or how antithetical to the Good. In the context of the era's raging culture war, Bloom's authentic American despair burst like twin hand grenades colliding in mid-air. The liberal left rained abuse on both the book and its author while the conservative right ran giddily around bayonetting its own. Indeed, perhaps the only thing more remarkable than the conservative embrace of the decidedly anti-conservative classics professor from the University of Chicago was the extent to which The Closing of the American Mind corresponded, in its timing at least, to the end of any pretence of conservative coherence. The staying power of electoral grasping and the weird alchemy of political nominalism led, over the ensuing years, to people being identified as conservatives who couldn't stand to be in the same ideological room together. As the writer Tom Wolfe famously said, the only thing shared by fragmented paleocons, theocons, neocons, social conservatives, fiscal conservatives, libertarians and so on was their common refusal to go along with the running gag of postmodern North American thought. As a lifelong Marxist, of course, Terry Eagleton has no personal interest in unifying conservatives. As a Catholic, however, he is intensely invested in asserting the existence of Truth. And as a gifted cultural critic, he is devoted to digging deep into what that Truth might be, and how it can be lived not only spiritually but also politically and culturally. For conservatives, his line of thought is the re-opening that Bloom convinced us was probably permanently closed. It is the opportunity to re-examine the soul of Western conservatism, albeit through a very different lens than we may be accustomed to using. Eagleton forces us to confront, first and foremost, the truth that economic liberalism and agnostic capitalism may be necessary means to unbridled affluence, but they are not even close to sufficient grounds to healthy societies or individual lives well lived. However we might have been able to muddle along for decades denying that truth, he argues, our denial simply cannot be sustained in the face of the muscular metaphysics of resurgent Islam. "Advanced capitalism is inherently agnostic. This makes it look particularly flaccid and out of shape when its paucity of belief runs up against an excess of the stuff," he writes in Reason, Faith and Revolution. "Liberalism of the economic kind rides roughshod over peoples and communities, triggering in the process just the kind of violent backlash that liberalism of the social and cultural kind is least capable of handling." Nor is the backlash a creature only of Islamist terrorists. Rather, it is the response of fundamentalism in all its forms, e.g., that 15-minutes of fame Florida yahoo who threatened to burn copies of the Koran in the name of Christianity. "The ideologues of the religious right, aware in their own way that the market is ousting metaphysics, then seek to put those values back in place, which is one of several senses in which postmodern relativism breeds a red-neck fundamentalism. Those who believe very little rub shoulders with those ready to believe almost anything." The upshot, he warns, is an undermining of the metaphysical values on which political authority depends and a reduction of politics to mere culture or, worse, multiculturalism, that throw back to the inchoate state in which the only obligation to civic life is the wearing of a traditional hat or the display of grandmother's dance steps on particular days of the calendar. Paradoxically, these are the conditions in which a surfeit of belief flourishes, but it is a shallow form of faith that constitutes not a seeking after Truth but comprises the twin evils of excessive rationalism and religious fanaticism. "A surfeit of belief is what agnostic, late capitalism itself has helped to spawn, because when reason becomes too dominative, calculative and instrumental, it ends up as too shallow a soil for a reasonable kind of faith to flourish. As a result, faith lapses into a kind of irrationalism theologians call fideism, turning its back on reason altogether. From there, it is an easy enough step to fanaticism." The resulting crude caricature of faith is precisely what anti-theists such as evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and journalistic gadfly Christopher Hitchens have seized on in their jeremiads against religion, belief and God. Conflating the two into a single entity that he dubs Ditchkins, Eagleton dismantles their claims like a wise priest dealing with a smart-aleck teen drunk on a cursory reading of the catechism. Yet he stresses that Ditchkins is merely a symptom of the deep malaise wrought by postmodernity's false assertion of the end of grand narratives and globalism's premature proclamation of the end of history, both of which required fervent belief in the impossibility of reasoned faith continuing to undergird human life. Western civilization in the throes of later modernity, or postmodernity if you prefer, has to skate by on believing as little as it decently can. In post-Nietzchean spirit, it appears to be busily undermining its own erstwhile metaphysical foundations with an unholy melange of practical materialism, political pragmatism, moral and cultural relativism and philosophical skepticism. All of this, so to speak, is the price you pay for affluence. Affluence bred from the spinning apart of faith and reason militates against the creation of loving fidelity and peaceable community (both of which lie at the core of conservative thought) and leaves us with a politics whose sole end is the bedding down of culture with power. What we end up with, Eagleton argues, is the current mutually antagonistic clash of culture and civilization or, put simply, the universal and plural against the local and customary (or, as some might translate these terms, the Germans and the French). "One of the most pressing problems of our age is that civilization can neither dispense with culture nor easily coexist with it. The more pragmatic and materialistic civilization becomes, the more culture is summoned to fulfill the emotional and psychological needs (civilization) cannot handle. The more, therefore, the two fall into mutual antagonism." Reasoned religious faith is the one human endeavor with the power to bridge this chasm. Art cannot do it because it can only render us more sensitive to what needs to be repaired without ever being able to offer full redemption. The Romantic humanism and Enlightenment rationalism of Marxism might once have held promise but, Eagleton ruefully admits, it has suffered in our time such a staggering political rebuff that its best impulses must be sought elsewhere. Eagleton warns us against being seduced by the Ditchkins cartoon of religious faith as an automatic condition for sectarian violence. "The fundamental moral values of the average Muslim dentist who migrates to Britain are much the same as those of an English-born plumber. Neither will typically maintain that lying and cheating are the soundest policy or that children are at their finest when regularly beaten to a pulp. As far as religious morality goes, it is hard to slide a cigarette paper between Allah and Jehovah. This is, indeed, what Ditchkins finds so repugnant about it." Against such revulsion, he notes, is the enormous amount of good that could come from seriously listening to the moral congruence in, say, devout Muslim critiques of Western materialism, hedonism and individualism. "A common culture in a more radical sense of the term is not one in which everyone believes the same thing, but in which everyone has equal status in cooperatively determining a common way of life." Therein lies the Good that Bloom held almost a quarter century ago had been closed to us for good. In large measure, this was because he believed in the soul and in reason but, like contemporary anti-theists, had no need for the hypothesis of God, much less for the power of reasoned faith to restore us. Eagleton's elevation of the tragic humanism at the core of all reasoned faith, the process of self-dispossession and radical remaking that faith promises, at least opens the door once more. It is a message conservatives of all kinds would do well to take to heart and mind.

Those who theorize that striking down laws surrounding prostitution will make Canada a safer place to sell sex overlook a crucial countervailing truth. While there is no doubt the so-called sex trade is fraught with physical perils, the first and unavoidable harm for prostitutes is prostitution. Normalize it as some will by calling it the world's oldest profession, prostitution remains an inherently de-humanizing activity. Prostitution is, effectively, rental slavery in that its very nature reduces human beings purely to the dollar value of their genitals or their ability to rent themselves out for sexual gratification. Laws crafted to discourage prostitution should not be dismissed because they are deemed the detritus of sexual prudery. They go the root of how we view our society and should be determined and upheld based on a democratic discussion of how we wish to protect Canadians' basic human dignity. Unfortunately, the greater harm of prostitution is the essential point Ontario Justice Susan Himel disregarded when she struck down Canadian laws against keeping a common bawdy house, living off the avails of prostitution (pimping) or communicating for the purposes of prostitution. Justice Himel accepted the claims of three women charged under those sections of the law that the first two provisions violated their charter rights to life, liberty and security of the person. The women had argued that violence against prostitutes would decrease in indoor settings such as brothels or when they can retain "managers" or security personnel. She also agreed with their challenge to the communicating provision on the basis of charter guarantees of free expression, finding that allowing communication for the purpose of prostitution enhances safety by letting prostitutes screen customers. The Ontario Court of Appeal has given the federal government until next April to counter Himel's ruling. The time given Ottawa to organize its arguments is also an opportunity for Canadians to remind ourselves of what prostitution actually entails, and to reassert Parliament's prerogative to legislate on wider social harms that outstrip overly narrow definitions of individual freedom. There is no question arguments exist from a libertarian perspective in favour of permitting prostitution. The libertarian impulse creates an antipathy toward any "morality" laws including those dealing with illicit drugs, pornography and prostitution. Perhaps most Canadians wish Canada to become like Amsterdam with its window prostitutes and Nevada with its brothels. If so, it should be for that majority to convince parliamentarians that our society should be that permissive. What all Canadians must remember is that those foundations are the reason Parliament has always chosen to combat prostitution indirectly by making most acts associated with it criminal offences, though the act itself has never been illegal. While prostitution may not be a criminal offence, the provisions impugned in this case are clearly intended to severely restrict its practice. In complex social matters involving community values, deference to Parliament's social objectives is essential. In our system, the legislative branch is better able to react to the needs of Canadians and weigh the benefits and harms of current social practices and their impact on society. These provisions are designed to limit prostitution and therefore can be expected to interfere with the business of prostitution, even to the point of making it practically impossible. In her ruling, Himel defined the legislative objectives too narrowly to such concerns as limiting nuisances in the street. Such legal narrowness makes it much easier to undermine the provisions based on the countervailing "harm" to prostitutes who engage in a "legal" business. While the courts have previously held that preventing "dirt for dirt's sake" is not a legitimate objective that would justify violating the charter, the wider social objective of limiting or eliminating prostitution is legitimate. The harm caused by prostitution is considered by many Canadians (and by Parliament) to go beyond minor issues of nuisance, and is much greater than simply the legislation of morality. This is a view previously held by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1990 Prostitution Reference. "The fact that the sale of sex for money is not a criminal act under Canadian law does not mean that Parliament must refrain from using the criminal law to express society's disapprobation of street solicitation," wrote then Chief Justice Brian Dickson. None of us lives in splendid isolation. The moral disapprobation of prostitution is connected with our society's deep beliefs pertaining to dehumanizing acts associated with the rental of bodies for sexual gratification. Focusing on the barriers to safely practising prostitution caused by prohibiting brothels, pimping and soliciting fails to weigh such "harm" against the broader legislative aims and societal benefits of limiting prostitution. A significant resulting problem is that the government's objectives and the harm it seeks to avoid are measured by different standards than the "harm" caused to prostitutes. In demanding substantial social science "proof" from the government of the harm avoided, Himel requires Parliament to prove the negative. Parliament is thus precluded from relying on its legitimate broad objective based on human dignity and is instead required to prove the benefits of the provisions in narrow and mundane "avoidance of nuisance" terms. How can Parliament prove that its laws preserve human dignity by discouraging prostitution? Parliament will need to make arguments from a social values perspective and looking at negative impacts of prostitution more generally. Before dismissing the government's expert evidence of social harms of prostitution, Justice Himel ought to have borne in mind the Supreme Court of Canada's admonition that context, deference and a flexible and realistic standard of proof are essential aspects of the constitutional analysis. There are limits on social science evidence and when it comes to issues like these, Parliament needs some leeway to determine what should be a legitimate mode of living. It cannot constitutionally justify such laws without reference to the wider social structures under which Canadians choose to live. The issues involved in this case go far beyond what regulations on an economic transaction are justifiable from a "safety" perspective. Ideas concerning the value of humans and limits on how they treat their bodies remain relevant and important to the dialogue, but that dialogue is a democratic one effectively undertaken in legislatures, which are designed to formulate perspectives on controversial social practices.

Any Canadian who remains confused about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange may find clarity in the words of Canada's only Nobel Prize winner for literature. Saul Bellow, Chicago raised but born in what he called the "paradise" of Lachine, Que., was unequivocal about those who treacherously undermine the very Western nation states that uphold freedom of speech as an inalienable right. As a just-released collection of Bellow's letters makes plain, he was ready to take on heavyweights like William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway if it kept the poet Ezra Pound locked up in the 1950s. Pound was committed to an insane asylum after the Second World War for his broadcasts from Rome that poured anti-Semitism and pro-Axis propaganda over the airwaves. A decade after the war, leading writers sought his release on the grounds that while he might have been a menace in the 1940s, he was still one of the 20th century's great poets. "In France, Pound would have been shot," Bellow snorted in a 1956 letter to Faulkner. "Free him because he is a poet? A fine mess!" Bellow's evident glee at twitchy French trigger fingers making short work of traitors might comfort U of C political scientist Tom Flanagan who, ridiculously, is under police investigation for joking that he thought the founder of WikiLeaks should be assassinated. (Among the abundant absurdities of the WikiLeaks drama is the way its majestic justifications of free expression trumping western security quickly slipped into the farce of an intellectual such as Flanagan being subjected to police scrutiny for daring to express a jocular thought. That way madness lies.) Whatever fate befalls Assange, however, the real take-away in Bellow's letter about Pound is his objection to letting vocation excuse vexation. Nothing about being a poet, he argues, justifies a get out of the booby bin free card for someone complicit in the undermining of democratic governments busily trying to stop mass murder. The very assertion that someone's status life should spare them the consequences of their active life, Bellow points out, is itself a form of complicity in their deeds. It's an appropriate reminder in the face of the WikiLeaks fiasco in which cultural icons stand complicit in abetting Assange simply because he purports to be a journalist and a crusader for free expression. From the Dead Tree Media that first published the stolen WikiLeaks documents to Amazon, which gave technical support to the website, to the pay sites that allowed Assange to fundraise to make his skulduggery financially worthwhile, no one seemed to care about what would actually be done. All appear to have been overawed by iterations of the identity he claimed for himself. Such awe let them (and many others) overlook Assange's willingness to fulfil his self-styled vocation of exposing the purported lies and deceit at the heart of western foreign policy in the following ways. 1) By engaging in massive and indiscriminate theft. 2) By vile violation of professional as well as personal privacy and property. 3) By the elevation of himself to arbiter of ends justifying any means. No one anywhere seems to have bothered to ask a variation of Bellow's rhetorical question about freeing Pound just because he was a poet, e.g.: " Profit from the theft of stolen property just because it comes from a journalist?" Failure to ask something so plain spoken represents more than a lapse of good taste, protocol or even ethics. It evokes a moral crisis that far outstrips the passing antics of a schmendrick such as Julian Assange. It is a moral crisis mired in the conviction that what we call right and wrong is purely a function of whether it is ascribed to foe or friend. And it is at the heart of the horror of history forgotten. As Bellow pointed out to the literary luminaries of his day, it leads us, again and again, into evil's confidence trick of seductive personal image and facility with language masking the most odious outcomes. "What staggers me," Bellow wrote to Faulkner, "is that you and Mr. Steinbeck, who have dealt for so many years in words, should fail to understand the import of Ezra Pound's plain and brutal statements about the "kikes" leading the "goy" to slaughter. Is this -- from (Pound's) Pisan Cantos -- the stuff of poetry? It is a call to murder. . . . "The whole world conspires to ignore what has happened, the giant wars, the colossal hatreds, the unimaginable murders, the destruction of the very image of man. Is this what we come out for, too?" There was clearly no doubt in the mind of Canada's only Nobel Prize laureate for literature (where else could he have been born but in the "paradise" of Lachine, Que.?) that the only answer was no. We can all share his moral clarity if we choose.

Ray Pennings writes on the role and end of labour unions in the international economy, in the latest issue of the Review for Faith & International Affairs. See the same issue for, "Evangelicals, Pope Benedict and the Financial Crisis" by Senior Fellow, Paul Williams. Journal online, text for subscribers only.

Dear Centre supporter, Paradox might be defined as an organization dedicated to renewal finding reason to celebrate stability. Yet as that master of the paradox, G.K. Chesterton once said, a dead thing can go with the stream; only a living thing can stand against it. This past year was one in which new life, and the resulting stability to stand against certain currents of mainstream culture, was brought to the Centre for Cultural Renewal through our strategic partnership with Cardus. As a result of that partnership, the Centre's own period of uncertainty and drift is over. Renewed as the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal we are able to resume the work for which we have been celebrated since 1993. We can return with fresh energy and focus to the vital task of explaining culture to religion and religion to culture. We can again take strong stands from a stable base to speak for freedom of faith and the need for the voices of the faithful in the public square. Indeed, resumption of that re-energized work is already well underway. During 2010, we re-established regular publication of our signature legal analysis, LexView, with a reconstituted editorial board comprising some of Canada's best lawyers and scholars. Constitutional lawyer Kevin Boonstra, our lead LexView writer, has tackled such controversies as euthanasia, the denial of full religious freedom to minorities such as the Hutterite Brethren, infringement on the rights of charities such as Christian Horizons to deal with same sex issues in their workplaces, and the errors in the recent Ontario court decision striking down Canada's prostitution laws. Beyond LexView, writings from the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal appeared in the Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Calgary Herald, the Montreal Gazette, the Victoria Times-Colonist and in the European scholarly journal Atlantide, as well as in translation on the Italian website ilsussidiario.net. And we're only getting started—perhaps re-started—raising our voice to articulate the concerns of those who have so faithfully supported us for so long. Yet the Centre has always been about more than speaking out. It has always been an active participant in the cultural and political life of this country. Our partnership with Cardus gave added impetus to that participation, most notably in the record-setting audience that turned out to hear rising academic star John von Heyking deliver this year's Hill Lecture at the Rideau Club in Ottawa. Additionally, we were active at the God and the Global Economy conference hosted by Vancouver's Regent College; co-sponsored highly successful breakfast events in Calgary with prominent politicians Danielle Smith and Ted Morton; and, internationally, lectured at the prestigious Meeting for Friendship Among Peoples, Europe's largest cultural fair. Finally, the 2010 partnership with Cardus, and our revitalization as the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal, has given us all the new and exciting tools of social networking to let us effectively communicate with you, our supporters. Our old static, out-dated website is gone. Our web presence is now fully integrated with the fresh, vital Cardus site that provides a regular infusion of thought-provoking topical information and commentary unavailable anywhere else. On a more technical but no less important level, our support database has been thoroughly overhauled to serve our supporters better. The Cardus and Centre staff have combined to make our interactions with our supporters more efficient, timely, and inclusive of the latest technologies. Such is the reward and the richness that stability brings, especially when the stabilizing results from partnership with such a dynamic, future-oriented organization as Cardus. The great baseball paradoxialist, Yogi Berra, is alleged to have said that to change you gotta change. The paradox is the strength that true renewal demands. Therein lies the future for the Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal. Please continue to support us at the highest possible level your generosity permits, so that together we can look to a future of renewed life, renewed culture, renewed faith in the Canada we love. Peter Stockland Director, Cardus Centre for Cultural Renewal pstockland@cardus.ca To make a gift to support the Centre's work, please do so online. Cardus and the Centre for Cultural Renewal are registered charities in Canada and designated exempt organizations in the US.

When Canada's university leaders meet privately in Vancouver on Thursday to talk academic freedom, headline-grabbing incidents at schools such as Carleton, York and Waterloo will doubtless drive much discussion. Abortion, Israel and aboriginal rights, not to mention arrests of yahoos locking themselves by their necks to fences, have a way of monopolizing the highest-minded conversation. In reality, however, such events are town and gown conflicts -- university spaces hijacked by external partisans. They have little to do with true academic freedom. As the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada engages in its Dialogue on Academic Freedom next week, it would do well to deal with a more egregious threat to scholarly liberty. The AUCC should take sharp note of the assault being waged from with academe itself on the independence, and even existence, of Canada's faith-based universities. Since 2006, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) has been targeting small, private, accredited, and invariably Christian, universities. Its method is to emit vague accusations that codes of conduct of such institutions somehow violate CAUT's definition of academic freedom. It then appoints its own "commissioners" to "investigate" whether the schools are guilty as charged. Last year, it used these tactics against Trinity Western University in the Fraser Valley. More recently, it has turned it sights on a Mennonite school in Manitoba, a Baptist academy in the Maritimes and similar Christian schools across Canada. What's risible about CAUT's singling out of these Christian schools is that, by its own admission, it has absolutely no legislative or administrative authority to conduct such investigations. CAUT has been around since 1951, primarily as a labour advisory body for academic staff. It also plays the role of equal opportunity foghorn on campus free-speech issues. Demonstrating classic mission creep, though, it has appointed itself Canada's guardian of academic freedom and launched its campaign to root out attempts by universities to "ensure an ideologically or religiously homogeneous staff." The meaning of academic freedom is what CAUT says it means. A CAUT document has a footnote to give authority to what it calls the "conventional understanding of academic freedom" -- and then cites itself as the authority. CAUT's campaign impugns the legal rights of faith-based institutions to require employees to conduct themselves in ways consistent with their affiliation to the organization's religious mission. Settled human rights law and religious freedom rulings from the Supreme Court of Canada entitle such organizations -- non-academic and academic alike -- to do just that. As Don Hutchinson, senior counsel for the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, said recently about the case of Heintz versus Christian Horizons: "Christian institutions ... have particular rights that permit them to engage in selective hiring, requiring their employees to agree with their mission, beliefs, and behaviours -- provided the institution adequately explains ... why they are essential to the performance of the individual's work . . . ." Such rights are not, Hutchinson stressed, special exemptions or loopholes or simply sneaky ways to impose "Christian morality" within the academy. They are legal rights, straight up. Sending unauthorized "commissioners" to snoop into entirely legal conduct is not just impudent. It offends the very fundamentals of freedom. Nor does it matter that CAUT is limited to posting the results of its snooping on its website shame list. "An allegation that a university has 'violated the commitment to academic freedom' is an extremely serious matter [that can] easily damage the reputation of a university and place a cloud over the scholarship of its faculty," Jonathan Raymond, president of Trinity Western University, wrote in response to CAUT's bid to damage his school's good name last year. It can also cost huge amounts of money if legal action is required. Every dollar spent fighting allegations is one that isn't spent for scholarship. Every such engagement, even at the more limited level of meeting the demands of self-appointed CAUT "commissioners" for all manner of documents, hearings, explanations, justifications etc., diverts time and energy from the proper pursuits of academic life. In small private institutions, time and energy are always precious commodities and increasing pressure on them can lead to the worst effect of all. It can sow seeds of self-doubt -- even self-censorship -- among Christian scholars who, by ancient tradition and current law, are entitled to organize themselves into academic institutions that permit them to freely express their faith. One legal scholar I spoke to last week put it best: "In some ways, it's easier to be a Jewish academic than a Christian academic. We've done a good job of identifying anti-Semitism and protecting ourselves from it. Christians are just learning what it means to be a minority, and they're still awkward at defending themselves." Canada's academic leaders could strike a blow for freedom by lending them a supportive hand.

If the past month has proven anything to a baby boom about to turn 65, it's this: Millennials are sending a firm message that it's time for you to move on and, just maybe, take your institutions with you. The evidence is mounting. Rumours swirl of renewed efforts to engage Quebec through a new political construct, while in Alberta Danielle Smith, 39, has the Wildrose Alliance within striking distance of dethroning that province's almost 40-year-old Progressive Conservative leadership. A week ago, another new construct, the Alberta Party, largely populated by people weary of a previous generation's definitions of progressive politics, held its first policy convention. In Calgary, statistically Canada's youngest city, the new mayor is Naheed Nenshi, 38, who represents a radical changing of the generational guard. South of the border, the midterm demise of President Barack Obama's fortunes was foretold by a Harvard Institute of Politics report released in late October. It revealed that while the majority of millennials still preferred a Democrat-controlled Congress, young independents preferred a Republican-controlled Congress (48 per cent to 43 per cent). There, it looks like a golden opportunity for old-fashioned conservatism. But it's not. Millennials have witnessed the simultaneous moral and financial bankruptcy of both private and public institutions. In the luxurious days of yore, our parents might have been able to enjoy a cathartic scrap between the market and government camps, but now we can't depend on any of those institutions, even if we wanted to. Debt-ridden states in Europe are literally failing, propped up in a laughably unsustainable pass the buck economic order. Our markets are starting to feel like they take more than they give, and our governments are shifting into new realities, which seem conservative, but are really just an inevitable working out of tapped-out treasuries. Austerity is the mask of the new conservatism. It has the feeling of financial inevitability and the weight of political apathy. Why struggle to save institutions we never believed in to begin with? Conservatism used to be about a vision of human life, the good, which had important strategic, but not ultimately foundational, disagreements with its liberal counterparts. Devolution and autonomy are conservative virtues only insofar as they are tangibly oriented toward some common goal, some public conception of the good. But millennials are self-defining good now, our footloose technology cultivates mutually reinforcing psychographic clusters that span geographies. Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, calls it the digital disruption, an eclipse of intermediaries and an increasing belief in the possibility of individuals, instead of institutions, to move culture. It is a potpourri of cult-like celebrity, built around people like U2's Bono and Hollywood's Angelina Jolie. It defaults to the local over the federal, and understands freedom not in national or ideological terms, but in private, self-actualizing ways. A postmodern potpourri of private goods might seem like good conservative pluralism, but when the system that holds it all together in productive conversation degrades, ideas about how we order those private desires for public good can take on dangerous, disillusioned tones. Respect for more traditional offices, like the presidency or the PMO, is only the first thing to go. Unless the system produces our results, it's not our system. How long until, like Iceland, we are electing people based on joke promises of free towels at public swimming pools and polar bear displays for the zoo? Will our public institutions really capture so little of our moral and social imagination? But there's good news: What Mr. Obama tapped into in 2008, what Mr. Nenshi did in Calgary and what other emergent entities aspire to connect with is the enormous energy latent in this generation for making the world a better place. So here, for those who have eyes to see it, is the real opportunity for leaders to prove that private institutions, once the bedrock of conservatism, can capture the imagination of a generation once again. As our public institutions buckle under the pressure of ideological and financial bankruptcy, there is a moral and political gap. Other institutions, especially family and faith institutions, have an opportunity to rediscover their public role: not to grab power, but to step in where public institutions and the market have failed and cast a (renewed) vision of the common good. Overlapping private institutions that work for public justice: That is change millennials will believe in.

For the degree to which it is discussed and debated, it is remarkable how little attention a significant shift in power can receive when it happens right before our eyes. The decision by federal Industry Minister Tony Clement to decline approval for Australian resource giant BHP Billiton's bid for Potash Corp. drew a lot of attention, little if any of which seemed to absorb the significance of how it vividly illustrated the nation's new political reality. Many expressed dismay that a government in the control of a party dedicated to the principle of open borders to trade would say "no" to the $38.6-billion offer. Clement's decision was ripped apart by editorialists, free market think-tanks and others of fundamentalist-libertarian views. Applause came from Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, supported by Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, and if polls are to be believed, more than 80 per cent of Saskatchewanians who were delighted that Clement was persuaded by the argument that potash constitutes a strategic national resource. Senior business leaders in Alberta such as Dick Haskayne had, after all, argued the takeover could be the thin edge of a wedge that could cost Canada to lose commercial control over other vital resource-based projects such as the oilsands. Making life easier for the government was that its federalist opponents in Parliament -- Michael Ignatieff's Liberals and Jack Layton's New Democrats -- had already identified themselves as being as opposed to the takeover, too. Political commentators offered the expected and deserved wry phrases and cynical grins concerning how the government had abandoned its principles in favour of the expediency Conservatives claimed to so disdain about Liberals. Here's what's so unique and takes this story beyond the travails of a minority government: we were not debating the bailout of the auto industry in Ontario, a province that rarely appears in political commentary without the adjective "vote-rich" attached to it. Nor were we fussing over the cultural industry in "volatile" Quebec, where the artistic collective has usurped the Catholic Church as sacred defender of the francophone language and its people. We were talking about nouveau "vote-rich" Saskatchewan and its "volatile" 14 members of Parliament (13 Conservatives and one Liberal). Think for a moment. Think for a while. Think for a long time. When do you last recall all three federal parties determining that the strongly held views of the people of Saskatchewan were powerful enough to tip the balance in a matter of national economic or any other importance? You can't, can you? This is our new reality. The dominance of the Bloc Quebecois, which holds 47 of Quebec's 75 seats in the House of Commons, is so entrenched that federal parties only have 28 MPs from that province, which is just slightly more than the total number, 26, from Manitoba and Saskatchewan which, by the way, has a bigger government caucus than Quebec. Further informing this is that as of the 2006 election, the three westernmost provinces -- B.C., Alberta and Saskatchewan -- combine to send more MPs (77) to Ottawa than Quebec, with only 75. All of this was, until last week, something that articulated itself in politics alone as the Ontario-Quebec bargain that had dominated Canada's first 130 years faded into history's rear-view mirror and the era of powerful regional interests began. Think, after all, of Newfoundland Premier Danny Williams's campaign against the Conservatives in the 2008 federal election. And now this: the BHP Billiton decision translated those politics into policy. Saskatchewan and its fraternal twin, Alberta, were provinces born in 1905 as children of a lesser god and battled throughout their youth for that which they did not have and other provinces did -- resources rights. Thus are resource issues and control permanently etched into their cultural psyches. In retrospect, and given that Britain's Margaret Thatcher was in the same years masterfully smoothing the way for privatization of Crown corporations through the creation of a single, but powerful "Golden Share" retained by the Crown, Saskatchewan perhaps should have employed that strategy when Potash Corp. was initially privatized in 1989. It didn't, however, and thus does Canada's long-standing debate over foreign ownership continue. Whether the BHP Billiton decision was a good call or a bad call, what may be most significant -- perhaps even historic -- about it is that when all is said and done it was Saskatchewan's call. And that is something very, very new.

A few weeks ago The Bow quietly slipped past the old Petro Canada (now Suncor Energy) Tower to become the tallest building in Calgary. The event, muffled as it was, may nevertheless have finally laid some of the city's ghosts to rest. It is astory I've been told many times since moving here and one that will reach its conclusion, the one that bears remembering, with the completion of The Bow next year. In 1973, David Lewis's NDP controlled the balance of power in Parliament and proposed the creation of a publicly-owned, national oil company. Pierre Trudeau's minority Liberal government happily complied and by 1975 Petro Canada had been born with a $1.5 billion public grubstake. Given the inherent unpopularity of energy companies, the new firm guided by the inscrutable Maurice Strong was reasonably popular, except in Alberta. Here, fears that the new state-owned company was a Trojan Horse for even more interventionist policies were realized when on Oct. 28, 1981, a day that lives in infamy, another Trudeau government (this time a majority that did not hold a single seat west of Manitoba) introduced the National Energy Program. Petro Canada was handed the responsibility for implementing the policy developed by, among others, senior Ottawa bureaucrat Ed Clark, known in those days as 'Red Ed.' And thus began the darkest five years in modern Alberta history. Private sector job losses were in the tens of thousands. Commercial and personal bankruptcy rates soared and housing prices plummeted. Thousands walked away from their homes or, as became popular, sold their property and its mortgage for $1. Calgary's population, for the only time in its history, declined. What was considered by many to be the final insult was that in the midst of all this, an unencumbered Petro Canada was building its new office complex smack in the middle of downtown. Its tower, at 215 metres, became the tallest building in the city. The company's offices were quickly branded Red Square, aka the Kremlin, and became an enduring symbol of Central Canada's desire to treat the West as a colony. The installation of Brian Mulroney's Tory governments brought a swift end to the NEP, but it was not until 1990 that the process of privatizing Petro-Canada got underway. That story ended when it merged with Suncor Energy. Today, the NDP's dream of 40 years ago is gone. Only the retail brand, its political legacy and the memories remain. Meanwhile, a company founded by Peter Lougheed's Alberta Tories created another story. AEC's first share offering, the province retained 50% ownership, was in 1975, roughly at the same time Petro Canada was created. It, too, became more private until by 1993 the province had sold its remaining 36% interest. Under the guidance of Gwynn Morgan, who grew up on a farm in central Alberta, AEC grew until Mr. Morgan executed a massive merger with PanCanadian Energy to create Encana, which is now among the world's leading energy firms split into two distinct companies, Encana and Cenovus. Mr. Morgan retired at the end of 2005 and handed the CEO reins to Randy Eresman, but before doing so he put in place the process that led to the construction of The Bow just east of the old Petro Canada Tower. At 1.7 million square feet, it is a massive building that encompasses an entire city block and upon completion will be 58 stories and 236 metres tall, Canada's largest office tower outside of Toronto. It is clear to most Calgarians eyes that the Bow has surpassed the Petro Canada/Suncor building as the city's dominant structure. Facebook photos and coffee shop conversations have taken notice but publicly there have been no grand celebrations of its new status. A party was held a few weeks ago involving those directly involved, but it was deemed impolitic to make too big of a splash. Lingering resentments from three decades past are subdued by the realization that Calgary (complete with a new mayor, Naheed Nenshi) has moved beyond aspiration and into the realm of genuine power on the national stage and prudence suggests the truly powerful utilize their influence discreetly. One bitter chapter has closed. History awaits authorship of the story to come. In the meantime, as the sun rises each morning in the east and casts its rays upon the city, the historic symbol of the NEP rests forever in the shadow of The Bow.