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Not even in China, though the state news agency did respond to the latest choking pollution cloud over much of northern China by publishing undated photos of clean air. And certainly not in the free world, including Canada, where it has been all over the newspapers, which, one trusts, an aspiring prime minister takes time to read.

Trudeau’s apparent inability to grasp that dictatorships are not efficient in their methods, benign in their goals or responsive to public priorities raises the disturbing question of what else he doesn’t know. And in the immortal words of Yes Minister’s arch-bureaucrat Sir Humphrey Appleby, “it could be almost anything.”

He didn’t know the Harper Tories were distorting their budget projections during the election campaign, surely among the most obvious facts about the whole fiscal debate. He didn’t know his tax hike on the rich wouldn’t pay for his tax cut for the middle class. He didn’t know budgets don’t balance themselves. He didn’t know how to implement his promises on aboriginal affairs or what exactly they were. He didn’t know he couldn’t bring in 25,000 Syrian refugees by year’s end at all, let alone safely.

The Liberals are now up a stump because of the things they said while on it. They risk retreating piecemeal from their various ambitious commitments in political and intellectual disarray. To avoid such a fate, they need to do more than recognize that their promises are crumbling one by one. They need to grasp that they had given far too little thought to how public affairs works generally, including the tendency of ambitious politicians to make ill-considered pledges.

It is very hard to study these things in office because you are extremely busy, buffeted by events and frequently boxed in by prior commitments articulated far more precisely than they were thought through. The Liberals would have been wise to think about fundamentals, and details, before running for office on a lavishly unstudied platform. It is essential that they do so now that the platform is collapsing beneath their feet.

Lesson One: China is badly polluted because it is a dictatorship, not despite being one.

National Post