What if Northern Ontario had a Premier?

• Position: PRESIDENT'S NOTE

The other day a guy named Evan Bayh, a 54-year-old Indiana Democratic Senator in the United States quite polities. A former popular governor of the state and 12-year veteran of Congress who still led all his competitors in the polls said, "I do not love Congress." As recently as a year ago he was short-listed for the job of vice-president of the United States.

This is unusual. Americans will do almost anything to become a United States senator and interest groups will do almost anything to influence them.

The last straw for him appears to have been his proposal to set up a bi-partisan commission to tackle the United States' federal deficit, which is bankrupting the country. It had the support of Democratic and Republican senators.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The Republicans dropped their support when they thought the commission might give political cover to the Democrats in year of deficit.

well, you have every right to wonder what a frustrated political star in the U.S. has to do with Northern Ontario.

The answer is the growing in ability of democracies and institutions to act, or even want to act in the public interest.

Currently the most telling local case in point, although by no means singular example, is the strike at Vale Inco.

The bitterness grows. The parties who cannot find a way to sit down together are bickering in the press. They are in court fighting about who, if anyone, is negotiating in good or bad faith. The rank and file are increasingly restless, perhaps desperate, and are upping the ante with sporadic closure of picket line. The company's security guards and their cameras continue to stalk. The rhetoric in the blogosphere is ugly.

The company continues to operate, or claims to maintaining operational status with a message to the picketers that "we will do this with or without you."

The local politicians are throwing mud at one another without a thought of putting polities as usual aside and coming together to influence sanity.

For the first time since the strike began someone with a senior job title at the company has responded to the union's taunting of their public relations spokes-man who has been carrying the communications load through the strike. It was not calming nor was it meant to be. The message in short was, "we own the company and well do what we want, when we want and how we want." The...