It’s raining in Ottawa as I write this, and it’s cold. It’s not a great time to play chicken with the future of the country, but here we are. The budget is tomorrow, and rumblings in the press suggest the government could fall over it. The opposition parties are weighing their options. Everybody is making demands, but there’s no ideal world, no theodicy, in which all the pressures and tensions and inconsistencies may be resolved—lower and higher taxes, more and less social program spending, government intervention to address the climate crisis, and government abdication from that role....