C’mon, Canada. I thought you were on the side of the angels, with your sensible health-care system, your clean and polite cities, your excellent comedy chops. (I’ll even forgive you poutine.) And then I see this in your National Post.

The writer, Diane Francis, begins by making the easy-to-swallow argument that all discussion of global warming comes down to population growth. She is basically correct about that: If we keep adding people to the globe, and if developing countries continue to industrialize and consume like their First World brethren, we’re all sunk. She goes on to suggest (as Bill McKibben does in his book Maybe One) that fewer children per family are a good idea. And then she makes the giant eugenicist leap from “this would save us” to “the world needs a one-child policy like China’s.”

What do we know about China’s one-child policy, enacted under Mao to fight starvation? It has slowed, but not stopped, population growth. (Some sources say the lion’s share of the slowdown happened before the rules took effect.) It has thrown the male-female ratio, especially in rural areas, wildly out of whack, because families seeking sons abort or abandon their girls. (Historically, societies with too few women are not just unhappy; they breed violence among their pissed-off  young men. And they potentially live with weak economies as those men age and each become the sole supporters to two parents and four grandparents. As of the year 2000, 117 Chinese boys were being born for every 100 girls.) Forced sterilization was not uncommon in China until a few years ago, and still happens; so were coerced abortions.

It is, like so many idealist societal manipulations, the kind of rule that only a dictator could love. And, apparently, one dopey Canadian.