Will Harper Cut Potato Head Loose & Incur the Wrath of Nova Scotians?

I am not going to give my view on the detainee issue. I do not believe we could have honest and open discussion here.

No, why would I?

What's interesting about the lie Peter MacKay told when he promised never to join the PC's and the Alliance is that it foreshadowed the dishonest person he is today.

Wow!

Rather than admitting a mistake, or apologizing for the delay, or, better still, offering a full and honest explanation, Mr. MacKay decided instead to lead an assault on a respected public servant, who testified at a parliamentary committee that he tried to warn the government repeatedly of evidence of crimes committed by Afghan jailers. The minister was either willfully blind or incompetent in responding that there is no proof that even a single detainee apprehended by Canadian soldiers was tortured. (He has since been proven wrong by his own chief of defence.) The UN, the Red Cross, and other agencies and countries all reported on the abuse, but Mr. MacKay decided, irrationally, that none of it applied to Canada.

When he took over the defence portfolio more than two years ago, Mr. MacKay knew that the detainee question was a sensitive and important issue. He had a duty to ensure that he was fully informed on all aspects of the controversy, but he says today that he never saw any of the reports about torture by former diplomat Richard Colvin. That, in itself, is an admission of failure. The minister must step down. He is unfit to deal with the file any longer.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/opinion/editorials/mackay-must-resign-79038427.html

Poor Peter, no one likes him anymore, not even his fellow Cons it seems.

Peter MacKay seeks 'a dose of reality' back home

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/bureau-blog/peter-mackay-seeks-a-do...

Peter MacKay has never won his riding by a majority of the vote, which is interesting.

However, because of vote-splitting between the other parties in the riding, it is still going to be difficult to defeat him.

I don't like the headline Potato Head.   Does babble have a different set of guidelines if the object of ridicule is a Conservative?

 Conservative Anger Machine tactics spreading???

If the Conservatives ignore the order, as they appear poised to do, opposition parties could vote to find the government in contempt, sparking a battle that might result in the courts being asked to weigh the limits of parliamentary privilege.

Ministers or other MPs found in contempt could be admonished and embarrassed by being compelled to appear before the Bar of the House - the floor of the Commons - to face a grilling from MPs.

But this House order-to-produce is a rarely used power and one that is in potential conflict with laws - such as those concerning privacy and national security - that Parliament itself has passed.

The Commons has now adjourned and the debate will continue outside the House until it reconvenes in January.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/afghan-detainee-watchdog-wa...

Detainee issue screams coverup

On Tuesday, Gen. Walter Natynczyk, the chief of defence staff, announced he had misrepresented the facts since 2007 when he stated that Canadians had never detained the Afghan in question.

That means Mr. MacKay has repeatedly misled the House on the most controversial aspect of his portfolio.

In the House, Mr. MacKay did not apologize but pointed to the department.

"This issue came to my attention this morning after I spoke with Gen. Natynczyk," he said.

"He immediately went on the record to correct the record."

Fair enough. Mr. MacKay only knows what the department tells him, so he wasn’t knowingly misleading the House.

Nonetheless, the principle of ministerial accountability means he is responsible.

And if you look at the facts of this case, you come to see why ministers must be held accountable for misinformation, because they control what information they get.

Mr. MacKay is the second defence minister in a row to be given wrong information on this issue by his own department.

It was his job, and no one else’s, to make sure that didn’t happen.

He needed to know what was happening on the ground so he could report to the 308 members of the House of Commons, who represent the people in whose name our men and women are getting killed over there.

The pattern suggests he did not want to know the facts.

For example, Gen. Natynczyk says Mr. MacKay has never asked him about the detainee issue.

In his previous job as foreign affairs minister, Mr. MacKay sent Richard Colvin over to Kandahar to find out what was happening to the detainees.

Mr. Colvin sent him reports warning of torture, which Mr. MacKay later denied receiving.

He only acknowledged that his office received them after it was proven, beyond doubt, in public.

When Mr. Colvin was called to testify before a parliamentary committee — as was his duty — Mr. MacKay said: "We are being asked to accept testimony from people who throw acid in the faces of schoolchildren."

And Mr. MacKay complained that Mr. Colvin hadn’t mentioned detainee abuse when the two met in Afghanistan — likely because he would have been going over his bosses’ heads.

But Mr. MacKay would have been free to ask Mr. Colvin, and he didn’t.

And Mr. Colvin testified that his bosses at Foreign Affairs tried to stop him from reporting the inconvenient facts on the ground, which fits with the pattern at Defence, where the facts appear not to have been passed up the chain of command.

It also fits with the pattern at the Military Police Complaints Commission, an arm’s-length body that has been trying to examine the detainee issue since 2007.

The government is refusing to hand over documents before they are redacted by officials, who are supposed to black out facts to protect national security, not conceal information that would damage their political masters.

Here is what an unidentified sergeant with Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group, wrote about the Afghan detainee who was beaten up: "We then photographed the individual prior to handing him over, to ensure that if the ANP did assault him, as has happened in the past, we would have a visual record of his condition."

Here is the document as it was released to the Military Police Complaints Commission: "We then photographed the individual prior to handing him over (redacted)."

Stating that the Afghan National Police had previously assaulted detainees is not a threat to national security.

It is a threat to the senior officers, officials and politicians who have denied any evidence of such assaults.

This looks like a coverup.

http://thechronicleherald.ca/Opinion/1157204.html

Hopefully we can keep this going until the session break is over....unless of course  Harper goes to the GG again....

One wonders how the proroguing would play out across Canada?

Yes, unfortunately a lot of Canadians are passive by nature and don't tend to react very much.

However, I do think that if Harper prorogued Parliament for a 2nd time, he would begin to lose credibility again.

Until it was used in this thread, I had never heard of him being described in that fashion. The most common description I have heard is "hatchet faced". It is of course preferable to despise him for his actions rather than belittle him for his appearance... he has no control over the latter.

I don't think it's that they fear falling on a confidence vote.  But the Afghanistan Committee is going to keep meeting during the break.  They could vote to approve a report that was critical of the government (or even that it has lost confidence in the government).  If someone moved concurrence in that report when the Commons returned, there's an argument that such a vote would be a matter of confidence.

And just having that general issue hanging over their heads, with all the international attention in the lead up to the Olympics, could be embarrassing.  On the other hand, if you prorogue, the Committee ceases to exist.

The other possible confidence issue stems from the motion the House adopted during the Liberals' last Opposition Day (finally they used it for something worthwhile!) which was to assert the supremacy of Parliament, and call for all unredacted documents to be provided to that committee.  The government is refusing, meaning that there could be a finding of the government being in contempt of Parliament.  That could entail a confidence vote.  Meantime, the dispute could wind up in constitutional litigation between the Parliamentary Legal Counsel on behalf of the Commons vs. the Government.

I haven't been following the legal case closely, although there is a lot written about it across the blogosphere (start with cbc.ca/politics and the blogs at macleans.ca, along with Impolitical and Accidental Deliberations).  It's my sense the Liberals are not in a mood to ramp it up that far, but are certainly looking to make the government understand they mean business regardless.

The current government's fascistic tendencies are showing (and I don't use that word lightly at all, believe me).  I don't see why Harper wouldn't prorogue Parliament to get rid of embarrassing PR problems if he wanted to.

The precedent was set a year ago when Harpo asked the Conservative friendly Governor to prorogue Parliament. Should this happen, that clown Iggy would be offered the same prospect of a coalition he faced a year ago. If he were wise, he should have gone for the coalition the first time. Hindsight is 20/20 vision, they say.