I guess people are expecting me to write something about the Heatley thing? I find myself with the exact same thoughts I had after the Oilers' Nylander fiasco. If J.P. Barry's account of what transpired is at all accurate, Bryan Murray committed a fraud on the Oilers and inflicted objective harm on them, and if the NHL weren't being run by blind idiot children some recourse would presumably be available. Of course, all the evidence suggests that Barry is either unable or unwilling to provide the most rudimentary protection for Dany Heatley's reputation and marketability—I had understood this to be part of an agent's job, and indeed a particularly significant part of that job in a world of controlled salaries—so who knows whether he has the story straight. And the Oiler front office can only whine that it has been a victim of unfair dealing so many times before the fan says "You know, fellas, maybe the problem is that you're just really crappy negotiators?" (Not that there was any reason to doubt this in the first place.)

A name that, in the wake of this weekend's NHL draft, all Edmonton is suddenly trying to figure out how to pronounce. I'd like to hear a Finnish person say the word (the player is Swedish, but the name belongs to his Finnish maternal grandfather), but as far as I've been able to cobble together myself, the äs are simple short a-sounds (in terms of English phonology) like the ones in "badass"; the stress is on the first syllable; and the whole thing should probably be spoken with a four-syllable cadence, PAH-ah-yar-vee. I am hopeful some expert will instantly be along to correct me in the comments. We had it easy with Kurri and Tikkanen, guys—let's try to get this right.

Also, I don't know what "Pääjärvi" means in Finnish, but I'm hoping it translates to something like "a taller Markus Naslund".

My column for today's Post is about what went wrong with pandemic planning in northern Manitoba communities: Health Canada's internal argument about sending ethanol-based hand sanitizer to places where ethanol is (unwisely) outlawed was a legitimate one, but it should have happened in, y'know, the actual planning stage. (Tuesday's poorly-focused rant about warrantless disclosures of internet-customer information is here, if you missed it.)

One. Two.

I serve a tiny slice of Gladwellism in today's Post column about breech births. Of course I'm referring to the old, good Gladwell, before he got into the whole corporate-entertainment business.

My Tuesday National Post column is a workmanlike attempt to set context for Alberta's controversial (and inevitably Supreme Court-bound) tort reforms on soft-tissue injuries. Like much of my work, it is not a polemic for or against a particular policy, just an effort to encourage straightforward thinking about it. It is odd that when it comes to healthcare, the Canadian right has sometimes been quick to embrace the "judicial activism" it ordinarily laments, and the Canadian left often seems willing to let individual rights stand in the way of central planning for efficiency (which is the opposite of the inherent logical premise of medicare). And I'm not sure my own thinking about tort reform is any more coherent through-and-through. But as the column indicates, I am reluctant to regard the right to sue for wholly subjective pain-and-suffering damages (which, unlike pecuniary damages, could conceivably be multiplied or divided a thousandfold without impinging on their supposed rationality) as anything but a historically contingent policy choice that governments should feel free to reverse.

A disclosure note I couldn't work into the text: the lawyer for the plaintiffs is Fred Kozak, who is a dominant figure in Canadian media law and has fought on the side of press freedom in many if not most of the important recent cases, including ones to which the National Post was party. He is someone journalists should be naming their children after, and fully deserves to be on any hypothetical shortlist for "Greatest Living Edmontonian".

An observation concerning recent history from economist Scott Sumner, placed here for the benefit of readers situated within yanking range of policy levers:

What has so amazed me about the worldwide supply-side revolution is the way that it has been dismissed by the left in the US, even the moderate left. The Reagan/Thatcher tax cuts were viewed as a sort of right wing plot to help the rich. I don’t know if liberals are even aware of the fact that all countries, including Sweden, were doing the same thing at the same time. This revolution would have occurred even if Reagan and Thatcher had never been elected. Rather they reflected a change in the intellectual atmosphere surrounding public policy formation. A change in what you might call the zeitgeist. Pragmatic policymakers all over the world (on both the left and right) looked at the evidence and reached a consensus that high [marginal] tax rates for the rich were counterproductive. That they didn’t meet the utilitarian criterion. (BTW, a similar worldwide change is now occurring vis-a-vis corporate marginal tax rates, and once again many American economists seem rather oblivious to what is going on elsewhere.)

And who provided the intellectual ammunition for that policy revolution? It wasn’t economists at elite Ivy League schools, and it wasn’t even monetarists at the University of Chicago. In the late 1970s it was the supply-siders, of whom Arther Laffer was the most influential.

Sumner goes on to point out that Austan Goolsbee, an Obama economic advisor (well known to Canadians) who has been cast in the role of Great White Hope by various species of free-marketer, has been sounding an awful lot like someone who was in a coma over the last 25 years. (This palace-intrigue anecdote spotted by Tim Cavanaugh—"the government should not run a car company": no shit, guys—shows why Goolsbee has something of a popular following.)