Thursday was a busy day for the Harper government. Consider just some of what went on:
• There was the continuing fallout over the revelation that officials in the Prime Minister’s Office had posted two videos online, taken during Stephen Harper’s recent visit to Iraq, that showed the faces of Canadian special forces soldiers — in violation of security protocols. When brought to light, the PMO first insisted protocols had not been violated, then claimed the videos had been vetted by defence officials, then issued a slippery half-apology that was evasive and insincere even by their own standards. Thursday, the Toronto Star reported the PMO officials, who had promised to “review” the protocols, had been briefed on them, twice, before the trip.
Fred Chartrand/CP
Paul Calandra answering questions on May 8,
• There was the entry into evidence at the Mike Duffy trial of emails, previously unreleased, spelling out how officials in the PMO, together with Conservative senators, conspired to tamper with an audit into the disgraced senator’s expenses, the better to encourage his silence. (In one email the prime minister’s then chief of staff, Nigel Wright, explains the rationale as being to “prevent him from going squirrelly in a bunch of weekend panel shows.”)
The emails, leaked to the press the day before, dominated Question Period, where virtually every question was answered, not by any responsible minister, but by Paul Calandra, MP. When last in the news, Calandra was sobbing in shame over the performance he had put on some days earlier in Question Period, when he had answered serious questions about serious matters — in that case, the military mission against ISIL — with personal attacks and irrelevant asides. He has apparently recovered.
• There was the similar performance by Pierre Poilievre, insisting — on the slimmest possible grounds — that the Liberal plan to cut taxes on the middle class was in fact a plan to raise taxes on the middle class. The minister followed it up with a fundraising email that scaled new heights of dishonesty. Not content with warning that Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau would roll back higher limits on Tax Free Savings Accounts and cancel income-splitting for couples with children — Tory election promises the Liberals have indeed promised to repeal — it flatly declared that “he will cancel income-splitting for seniors,” and “take away Tax Free Savings Accounts altogether.”
• There was the laying of charges under the Canada Elections Act against Reg Bowers, official agent for former Conservative cabinet minister Peter Penashue during his 2011 election campaign. It was the controversy over that campaign that caused Penashue to step down from cabinet and run, unsuccessfully, in a byelection two years later.
• There was the release of Omar Khadr from jail, an event as inevitable as it was predicted, but against which the Harper government has battled, futilely, for years. Governments of both parties, Liberal and Conservative, conspired in his interrogation, prosecution and incarceration at Guantanamo, as a juvenile, long after every other of its Western inmates had been released, in splendid disregard of his rights under either the Canadian or American constitution.
But it is the Harper government that has been the most eager to politicize the matter. With its case collapsed and Khadr released on bail, the Public Safety Minister, Steven Blaney, was careful to issue a statement noting that Trudeau had “refused to rule out special compensation for this convicted terrorist” while “the NDP actively tries to force Canadian taxpayers to compensate him.”
• There was the introduction of yet another omnibus budget bill, this one a comparatively slender 157 pages — a third the length of some of its predecessors — but packed as usual with many disparate pieces of legislation, 27 in all, only some of which were remotely budget-related. The current bill would authorize the government, inter alia, to take away the passports of suspected terrorists, to create a new police force for Parliament Hill, and to impose changes to the sick-leave provisions of public sector unions’ contracts, theoretically still being negotiated.
Ian Lindsay/Vancouver Sun/Files
Benjamin Perrin
• There was the publication of a report by the prime minister’s former lawyer, Benjamin Perrin, attacking another piece of government legislation, the proposed Life Means Life Act, with its prescription of a mandatory minimum sentence for certain types of murder of life in prison without possibility of parole, ever. As written, the law would give neither judges nor parole boards any discretion in such cases, a provision Perrin argued was likely to be struck down by the courts as unconstitutional.
There was also the passage in the Commons on Wednesday night of Bill C-51, the Anti-Terrorism Act, 2015, a bill whose manifest overbreadth and potential for abuse has been flagged by scores of legal experts, some of whom were permitted to testify in the brief round of hearings allowed before the Commons public safety committee (following even briefer debate in the House), where as often as not they were subjected to lengthy harangues by Conservative MPs in place of questions.
The point is, this was all in the space of 24 hours. If one were to draw up an indictment of this government’s approach to politics and the public purpose, one might mention its wholesale contempt for Parliament, its disdain for the Charter of Rights and the courts’ role in upholding it, its penchant for secrecy, its chronic deceitfulness, its deepening ethical problems, its insistence on taking, at all times, the lowest, crudest path to its ends, its relentless politicization of everything.
But you’d think you would need to look back over its record over several years to find examples. You wouldn’t think to see them all spread before you in the course of a single day.
Original Article
Source: news.nationalpost.com/
Author: Andrew Coyne
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