Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s refusal to join Tony Blair in a chorus of jingoism over the events of September 11 has been giving the Ottawa press corps fits.

The PM’s measured response embodies everything the mullahs of the media right detest about Canada: our modest army, our porous borders; our gentle treatment of refugees; our aversion to patriotic excess; our jaundiced view of America.

National Post columnist Mark Steyn captured this sentiment aptly, if unwittingly, when he wrote: “Watching Mr. Chrétien stumble around  shopworn, smug, complacent, platitudinous, self-absorbed, unable to recognize a grand cause when it stares him in the face  the sad thought arises that maybe he’s an all too apt embodiment of ‘Canadian values. ’ ”

In the horror of the World Trade Center attacks, media scolds like Steyn saw an opportunity to put much of this right. Overnight, and without deliberation, they urged Ottawa to turn border policy over to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service and join in the creation of a Fortress America. The PM demurred and the columnists fumed, their thirst for bombast unslaked. Globe and Mail columnist Edward Greenspon declared that Canada “comes up short” in the war on terrorism, that Chrétien “plays below his weight on the diplomatic front,” that our response was “passive.”

This diatribe segued into a gushing paean to Brian Mulroney’s vastly superior handling of the Gulf War crisis, in which our PM-of-the-day sped off to Washington in time to slip through the White House gates hot on Margaret Thatcher’s heels. There followed some bunkum about how much Mulroney’s clever advice impressed George W.’s father, which mostly proves that in the campaign to rehabilitate Mulroney’s reputation, The Globe and Mail takes well to bottle feeding.

In case the message didn’t transmit, The Globe and Mail ran a column by former Mulroney advisor Stanley Hartt reiterating the same theme.

To judge from the public opinion polls, it was, as usual, Chrétien who correctly read the mood of the Canadian public. Approval of the prime minister’s cautious handling of the terrorist crisis runs in the high sixities.

The public shares the universal revulsion at the terrorist attacks, but doesn’t see it as an occasion to abandon caution or national sovereignty.

Especially in the first days after the attacks, when overheated rhetoric threatened to propel the U.S. into an indiscriminate response, there was a need for calming voices. It is not an unfriendly act to warn the United States against actions that would cause massive civilian casualties, create a backlash and undo the united front against terror.

It is a truer measure of friendship than the sycophancy advised by some columnists.

Americans love unqualified adulation, whether it comes from Gordon Sinclair or Tony Blair. But to everyones surprise, the voices of restraint seem to be gaining the upper hand.

A month ago, George W. Bush was a president without mandate, widely reviled as too stupid to hold high office. He had surrounded himself with the most right-wing advisors of any president in history. Then the terrorist atrocities gave him a blank cheque for military reprisals.

And yet, so far, caution has prevailed. The limited strategic advantage, and the enormous diplomatic cost, of launching massive military strikes on Afghanistan appear to have impressed themselves upon the White House.

So far, Bush and his advisors have avoided the trap. Bush has been scrupuloU.S.ly consistent in condemning intolerance towards Islam. New York’s newly minted hero-mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, a key Bush ally, spoke to the United Nations where he invoked the UN Charter, a text not highly rated in American conservative iconography. You have to wonder how different things might have been had all the votes in Florida been counted and Al Gore been elected president. Would a Democratic president have had as much leeway as Bush to proceed this slowly? It took Richard Nixon, the virulent anti-Communist, to recognize Red China.

The best hope of containing and eliminating terrorism is the growing isolation of the Taliban. The one thing that could disrupt the all-but-unanimoU.S. world consensus that emerged in the wake of September 11 is a military misadventure that kills innocent civilians. The intelligent restraint urged by Chrétien will do a lot more toward winning this campaign than cheap rhetoric.