Who would want it?
There are still eight candidates walking -- some of them staggering -- as the Liberal Party of Canada comes into this city to choose its new leader.
Four have a good chance, four have no chance, but all eight see themselves as potential leaders of a major national party and dream of being prime minister of a country that much prefers putting the boot to politicians than putting them in office.
It is a most unusual ambition, wherever it is found these days.
A recent survey in Australia found that politics is the job least respected -- even lower than the used-car salesman or the real estate agent.
A Reader's Digest poll in New Zealand found politicians ranked 30th out of 30 professions when it came to respect and admiration.
And one in the United Kingdom found the only profession held in lower esteem than politicians was . . . ahhhh . . . journalists -- surely the exception that merely proves the rule:
No one is considered lower than those who choose to enter public life.
Whoever it was -- Socrates? -- who first said "The unexamined life is not worth living" could not possibly have seen what public life in Ottawa would one day be like.
It was another great philosopher, Brian Mulroney, who said, "This place is sick."
And it was his wife, Mila, who made the very intriguing comment that the examined life for the Mulroneys in Ottawa was unlike any political life that had gone before.
She was speaking of her trials over Giovanni Mowinckel and the long-ago "scandal" over extensive renovations at 24 Sussex.
"Because there was no access to information prior to us," she told Peter C. Newman in The Secret Mulroney Tapes, "any amount that we spent was too much."
Much worse than access to information, of course, is being examined under the forensic microscope of the Auditor-General's department, which happens periodically to those who choose to serve the public.
It is difficult to imagine anyone with a more stellar image than Ronnie Stewart, the little Canadian Football League superstar who seemed an inspired choice to be named federal correctional investigator, a job he left two years ago with that treasured reputation seemingly intact.
Now, instead of facing a happy retirement, he may be facing charges, as the RCMP says it is looking into various "irregularities" raised by Auditor-General Sheila Fraser over Stewart's tenure.
The allegations include taxpayer-paid trips to Grey Cup games, "improper" payments totalling $198,000, "questionable" payments of another $127,000, unauthorized purchase of computers for family use and claims for never taking holiday time, despite spending most of April through October on an island retreat with no telephone connection.
(Just to show that journalists are not as sleazy as that British study claimed, I will be returning those extra pens I took to get the kids through school.)
Very little passes unnoticed now in the nation's capital. You can get nailed for too many lunches or too many meals in a day for one person -- or the public -- to swallow. The media will want to know if the leader paid for those Grey Cup tickets, who exactly was on the government plane that day and what you ordered from room service during that hotel stay last July. . . .
Part of the problem is that there's so little real matter going on in Ottawa these years that it has created a situation where Parliament Hill is as over-covered as the National Hockey League is over-coached.
The Ottawa of 2006 is hardly the Ottawa of 1976, or 1986, or even 1996. It's largely become the national ATM where the premiers take turns with the PIN. Yet the media presence remains huge.
The consequence of all this is that news is so thin in Ottawa that it creates an unnatural world where there essentially are two ways in which so much media presence can break through. One is to break real news -- which most assuredly does happen from time to time, though not often; another is pure mischief.
Mischief will get you on the front and high up in the news just as surely as will a great news break, so mischief, largely by default, becomes a key player in the political scene.
And yet, still they want to serve.
Well, for that the rest of us should be thankful. Surveys may argue that the public impression of politicians is as low as it is for used-car salesmen, but this is grossly unfair to both professions. It's the stereotype that gets stomped.
For every politician in it to fill his or her pockets, there are hundreds in it because they actually do wish to change things for the better. There is no survey that suggests politicians are more naive than the rest of the population, but naiveté can be a useful quality.
Who needs a cynic deciding what needs to be done in the coming years to fix this sorry planet?
Who would want it?
Don't know.
But do know, absolutely, we are going to need someone.
Roy MacGregor