The most arbitrary government Canada has ever had is transforming the country into a war-mongering, arms-selling police state while the nation debates recipes and political soap opera.
Consider the coverage of the Adams and Steve parting-of-the-ways. So far, the theme has been one of almost unanimous denunciation of Justin Trudeau for accepting into his party a woman whose political ambition is not apparently constrained by any particular principles. Adams now wears the Scarlett letter — in her case, the “A” is for actress.
The Cons lustily heckled their former colleague when she floor-crossed to become a Liberal. Perhaps she got what she deserved. But don’t confuse their outrage with principle. I can’t recall much heckling when David Emerson, fresh from winning his seat as a B.C. Liberal in the 2006 election, walked straight into the Conservative cabinet at Stephen Harper’s personal invitation. Remember how Harper denounced the practice of floor-crossing as the eighth deadly sin when Belinda Stronach bolted to Paul Martin?
A familiar Harper tactic is once more on display — distracting the press and the public when weightier matters are going the wrong way. It was during the raucous Afghan detainee parliamentary committee hearings that he threw Helena Guergis under the bus in a bogus sex-and-drug scandal. Complex matters of international law were no match for allegations of Guergis snorting cocaine from a prostitute’s breast; the detainee scandal abated, while Guergis and husband Rahim Jaffer were burned at the stake by the media — matches supplied by Stephen Harper.
Now that oil prices have tanked and the petro-state economy is sputtering, Harper has the country talking about grossly inflated terrorist threat assessments, more floor-crossing blondes and Justin Trudeau’s shortcomings, both real and imagined.
Harper’s new defence minister, not a week into the job, is already bloviating about “all options” being on the table in the Ukraine crisis. Generalissimo Kenney seems to have missed the fact that the adult politicians at Minsk have agreed on a ceasefire.
So what do we stand to lose when Harper gets the country to view its politics as an extended episode of the Young and the Restless, while ignoring the big stuff that’s going down? Perhaps everything.
Where was the national debate about sloughing off a century of parliamentary tradition by putting the RCMP in charge of Parliament Hill security — an odd move when you consider that Michael Zehaf Bibeau’s attack on Centre Block occurred while the Mounties were parked on site with their motors idling? If anyone played a heroic role, it was Parliament Hill security, which is now being dumped.
And there’s this to consider: It was then-Public Safety Minister Vic Toews who ordered the RCMP not to meet with opposition MPs or senators without clearance from the government. Toews claimed that there could be “unintended consequences” from these meetings that might be “bad” for the government. (Oh no, not that!)
Toews also said he needed to know what the Mounties were doing or he couldn’t properly carry out his duty to Parliament. With the Mounties in charge of security, now every investigation that takes place on Parliament Hill will be telegraphed to current Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney before anyone else finds out. And that is a prescription for the Royal Canadian Harper Police.
While the prime minister has everyone checking under the bed for beheaders, there is no national debate on how the Conservatives have turned Canada into a multi-billion-dollar-a-year arms dealer — with a lot of that business going directly into the tinderbox of the Middle East.
One of the Harper government’s biggest customers is Saudi Arabia, a place that could teach the world a lot about beheadings. Stephen Harper has still not explained how selling $15 billion worth of military hardware to the Saudis advances the causes of freedom or women’s rights in the Kingdom — or, for that matter, in neighbouring dictatorships.
This question takes on greater urgency now that convicted al Qaida terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui has testified to U.S. authorities that prominent members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family were major donors to the terror group in the late 1990s. Former senator Bob Graham of Florida, who was co-chairman of the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11, believes there is a basis for Moussaoui’s claims: “I am convinced that there was a direct line between at least some of the terrorists who carried out 9/11 and the government of Saudi Arabia,” he told the New York Times.
And while the press giggles over the Eve Adams affair, Green Party Leader Elizabeth May has rightly pointed out that Bill C-51 will transform CSIS into a Canadian secret police. Why such a dire conclusion from a party leader who is also a lawyer?
Simple. Harper is proposing dangerously vague new powers for CSIS with no increase in oversight. What makes that even worse is that, back in 2012, Bill-38 already provided more police powers and reduced oversight. Most disturbing of all, Blaney is not interested in additional oversight for Canada’s security agencies, referring to the proposal as “needless red tape.”
It would be hard to come up with a more foolish statement. A word on the issue of oversight now: It’s always advisable, but it’s not always a guarantee of keeping the hush-hush boys on the straight and narrow. Although there was congressional oversight of the CIA, it did not prevent the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo. Why? Because the CIA lied to Congress about what was really going on there.
What the Senate Intelligence Committee learned from this debacle is that national security is only well served when the public actually knows what is going on. Knowing only what the spooks think is good for us to know is dangerous business. The U.S. experience is clear: The less discretion is left solely to the security establishment, the better.
The same applies in this country. You don’t put a person like Arthur Porter in charge of national secrets, as Stephen Harper did. It’s high time that the oversight process became far more public and involved members of Parliament. Remember, the Canadian Security Establishment’s mandate was supposed to be restricted to collecting data on foreign activities. Then we found out that CSE collects millions of records on Canadians every day under a program oddly named Project Levitation. In the U.S., the Supreme Court has already ruled that the collection of metadata violates the fourth amendment. Our spies don’t need to be unleashed — they need to be reined in and made accountable.
On the other hand, good salsa recipes are hard to come by.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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