Well, Paul Martin's corrective lenses have finally fallen out and he's started looking at the trees again, the forest be damned.

When we first got to know Paul Martin, he was the myopic Clark Kent of politics, busy sorting out the country's accounts, a gosh-oh-golly-gee bookkeeper that Bay Street came to love and the rest of us tried to avoid lest we catch his eye and suffer the red pen of budget cuts. Then one day, he suddenly popped out of his phone booth, red cape flowing in the wind, and became the world's new Superman, able to leap tall Presidents in a single bound and wrap a new foreign policy around the world.

He was Paul Martin, Super Prime Minister.

After a year and a half of promises and platitudes, he ended up being about as substantial as a sheet of comic book paper, all talk and little action except for when it came to saving his own hide. While he spent most of his first year in office making like the new century's first prophet, a modern Moses who was going to lead the world to the Promised Land, Premiers and mayors alike took advantage of his apparent distraction and picked his pockets clean. Trying to keep up with his pledge count was a bit like following an out-of-control football game, the score escalating in disturbing lurches and jumps with no end in sight, while the stuttering man on a not-so-well-thought-out mission ran the country like a befuddled senior too busy talking to the television set to notice the smoke coming out of the kitchen.

With home-grown musicians having spent Saturday demanding that Martin step up and follow through with that good old, Canadian-inspired goal to allocate 0.7 per cent of GDP in goodies for the world's poor, including impoverished Africa (well, more likely goodies for not-so-impoverished African leaders, anyway), and Bob Geldof having threatened to cancel his plane ticket unless Martin stands up at the G8 meetings and does more than take orders for coffee, our PM has started talking like the Martin of old, considered and conservative, and suggested that there is no sense making long-term promises you can't keep, and that it's better to set shorter term goals that are achievable, if about as inspiring as a seminar on tax code revisions.

This was the man jumping up and down with the enthusiasm of a sugar-crazed three year old at Christmas talking about a "Leaders-20" initiative only last November at the APEC summit, and also the same man who, last September, boldly said that Canada and the rest of the UN had a "Responsibility to Protect." Now we hear that it's time to take cautious, reasonable baby steps, be prudent, and be honest about what we as a nation, and as a world community, can really do.

Has the man finally switched to decaf?

Unlike the man of vision and ideas a mere few months ago, armed with an agenda thicker than a first edition copy of War and Peace, he will not be bringing any new proposals to the G8 summit this time around. He plans on asking for a clarification from George Bush on what sort of climate agreement the US can live with (the answer, of course, being that everyone else stop polluting and make cleaner air for the US to fill with smog), but certainly nothing like the fervent lobbying for an L20 organization that Bush rather prophetically responded to with a blunt and dismissive "show me what good it will do."

And the supposedly greatest day in the history of modern man, when three billion people tuned in to witness the sight of Paris Hilton admiring Scott Weiland's scrawny torso gyrating in Hyde Park amongst other world-shaking images, seems to have lead G8 leaders in the opposite direction of the great call initiated by our own Lester B. Pearson, towards a much less substantial commitment to double their aid by 2010, with our now fiscally prudent Prime Minister in full agreement.

And why shouldn't he be? A recent Decima poll found that an overwhelming 76 per cent of Canadians, despite the warbling of Tom Cochran and Neil Young, back the idea of not committing to a fixed commitment, but to what we can afford. So once we've paid for health care, daycare, transit and municipal infrastructure, along with lower taxes and a trip to never-never land, we'll be more than happy to help out the impoverished of the world.

All of which makes good, fiscal, short-sighted sense, with no need for vision or the disturbing future it helps us see, a state of affairs the Prime Minister now seems to prefer.