This is the first time that I have been directly pandered to in a federal budget, and I must confess, that I can see at long last how one could come to take it for granted.

The counterintuitive truism of good governance, that displeasing everyone is a good indicator of having put the right foot forward, perhaps explains the mixed punditry.

Not to defend the government, I honestly can’t tell most of the time whether they maintain confidence of themselves to say nothing of the House, but I could do with hearing less from those who have been ambivalently navigating us to ruin all these years suddenly deciding take issue with their own complacency now.

If Andrew Cohen was right in While Canada Slept (2003), and I think most would now concede that he was, then those who have been comfortably asleep at the wheel can at least relax: all of this is now someone else’s problem.

We’ll handle it. You can go.

The best thing I heard all week belongs to gentleman historian Jon Meacham from his Friday appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher: “…patriotism is allegiance to an idea. It’s not just an allegiance to your own kind. That’s nationalism.”