Stephen Harper took everyone (and most especially assignment editors across the country) off-guard by taking a surprise trip to Iraq while headed to V-E commemoration ceremonies in the Netherlands. While in Iraq, he met with that country’s prime minister and announced $167 million in aid and security equipment promises ($139 million of which is actually for the region, including Lebanon and Jordan). Politically, he also gained the advantage of being in theatre, getting photos and video of him being near the front lines, and talking tough about terrorism and national security, which he sees as vote-getters and poll-movers after weeks where his messaging has been thrown off track by both the distraction that is the Duffy trial, and the pushback to the budget, which was only balanced by raiding the contingency reserve and EI fund. In other words, he needs to remind people why they should vote for him, and looking prominent in a place where we’ve sent troops is one way to do it. While there, it was also said that the investigation into the friendly fire death of Sgt. Doiron is complete, and was likely due to fatigue among Peshmerga fighters. That report is supposed to be released publicly back in Canada within a month.
Tag Archives: Omar Khadr
Roundup: Nolin’s passing a blow to the Senate
The passing of Senate Speaker Pierre-Claude Nolin leaves the institution in a pretty vulnerable place. In light of the Duffy/Wallin/Brazeau affairs, Nolin was on a mission to bring some internal reform to the Chamber, both in terms of financial controls and the like, but also with ensuring that senators themselves were better educated as to their own roles. When Nolin was first named Speaker, he invited reporters to the Chamber for a Q&A, and before he took questions, he gave us a little talk, brandishing a copy of the Supreme Court reference decision on Senate reform, and made note of some key passages about the roles of a Senator. His message to his fellow senators was pretty frank – here are some things that you’re not doing, and we need to improve on that. Long-time readers of mine will know the root of some of these problems – not just a few poor appointments by the current Prime Minister, but the fact that appointments happened in large numbers. The Chamber works best absorbing one or two new members at a time, and they can find their feet and generally get on with feeling out their sense of institutional independence. When a fifth of the chamber is brought in all at once, they are more pliant and susceptible to control from the top, which is what happened. Nolin, always an independent thinker and someone not afraid to go against the current government, whose caucus he was a member of, wanted more of that from his fellow senators, and he probably would have done a lot to get them to a better place, institutionally speaking, if he’d had more time. Now, I’m not sure who will be able to take his place. The Speaker Pro Tempore (equivalent of the Deputy Speaker in the Commons) is not exactly an independent thinker, and is part of a cabal of players around the Senate Leader’s office, who in turn are supine to the PMO for a variety of reasons. That group is not going to continue Nolin’s work of trying to make the chamber a more independent place. We’ll have to see who the PM will ultimately choose, but Nolin has set a high bar that will be difficult to match. Elsewhere, here are some highlights of Nolin’s career. On Power Play, Mercedes Stephenson spoke to the man who appointed Nolin, Brian Mulroney (and a correction to Stephenson – Nolin was not elected to the Speaker position, as it’s a prime ministerial appointment. The praise for him was unanimous, however).
https://twitter.com/dgardner/status/591589139079892993
Roundup: $3 billion or else
Rarely does a day go by that the government doesn’t like to rub the Liberals’ noses in their past on defence spending, and that line “decade of darkness” is uttered. Never mind, of course, that it was Paul Martin that started the major recapitalisation of the Forces – no, the Conservatives like to take ownership of it. The problem is that all the money they poured into the Forces was almost immediately clawed back as their own spending restraints kicked in, most of the capital projects have been for naught thanks to botched procurement process after botched procurement process, and now, they’re facing the real killer – inflation. While sure, they may have poured in a high dollar amount of money at one point, those funds are being eaten away at by inflation as it goes unspent on said aforementioned capital projects, and it buys fewer and fewer ships and planes than it might have when it was supposed to go forward. Now, the Parliamentary Budget Officer is warning that the current spending is unsustainable, and unless the government can pour at least another $3 billion every year into the Forces, that they’re going to have to start cutting capabilities within three years. It must be pretty sobering, but even when these kinds of figures have been presented in the past, the government’s response is always “DECADE OF DARKNESS! MOST MONEY INTO THE FORCES EVER!” without those figures ever really bearing out. But hey, so long as they look like the only party to care about the armed forces, right?
Roundup: The other CSIS bill gets scrutiny
The Senate heard a lot of testimony yesterday regarding Bill C-44 – the other bill to boost CSIS’ powers, in case you’d forgotten about it. Those new powers include being able to operate abroad and break laws in other countries, which might be a bit of a problem, and raises a bunch of questions when it comes to how you oversee those kinds of operations, particularly given the limitations that SIRC faces when they can only visit one CSIS foreign posting per year to look into their operations. There was also testimony from Ray Boisvert, the former assistant director at CSIS, who described the internal processes of conducting investigations and getting warrants, painting a pretty robust system of high bars to proceed with investigations or operations – but again, we have to take his word for it, because we no longer have the in-house oversight of the Inspector General’s office, and SIRC does an annual review. SIRC, incidentally, said they have enough resources to do the job they’re supposed for now, but if they’re going to need to take on new responsibilities such as overseeing a far more robust and empowered CSIS, well, they’ll also need more money, which this government seems pretty unwilling to give. Curiously, the deputy minister of Public Safety said that the Auditor General also provides oversight of CSIS operations, which is pretty wrong – he looks at value-for-money, which is not the kind of oversight that CSIS requires.
Roundup: No, it’s not media apathy
The prime minister’s former director of communications writes that it’s perfectly natural that the government wants to create their own communications channels that bypass the media because We The Media are apparently “apathetic” to what the want to tell us. You will forgive me for saying, but I’m not sure there are words enough to express how big of a load of utter horseshit that this justification actually is. His definition of “apathy” is that the media won’t act as transcriptionists for their feel-good stories, which forces them to go around us. Fair enough – it’s not our jobs to retype your press releases and make you look good. But what is utterly galling is for him to turn around and declare that the media has a challenge function that’s important for democracy and that’s why they’re needed, when the very same government that he served is doing their level best to kneecap journalists from fulfilling that role. Whether it’s frustrating Access to Information laws, closing off all avenues of communication with ministers, not returning phone calls and delivering bland statements in lieu of answers to questions being asked, or simply dragging out responding to media requests until it’s well past deadline, it all amounts to choking off necessary information from the media because it fulfils its challenge function, and that challenge function makes the government look bad. When the media does write about the government’s use of their own distribution channels, it’s not because we’re sulking that we’re not the privileged distributors of information – it’s that we’re being denied the ability to do our jobs as we’re shut out of events, not allowed to ask questions at announcements, and that our independent photographers are not allowed to even capture those events and are instead being handed a staged photo to run instead that shows what the government wants us to see instead. That’s not giving us the space to perform our necessary challenge function – it’s trying to turn us into organs of propaganda. That he ignores those legitimate complaints and frames them as “sweating over” trivialities is part of what makes his whole construction utterly farcical.
Roundup: An ignored anniversary
A very important anniversary passed yesterday that concerns our history and development as a country, but you didn’t hear a single MP remark on it in the Commons yesterday. It was the anniversary of the Statute of Westminster, which not only gave Canada full control over its foreign affairs – one of the final pieces of sovereignty from the United Kingdom that had not yet been transferred to our control – but more crucially was one of the defining moments in the independence of the Canadian Crown. The Statute helped solidify the notion that the Crown is divisible, and henceforth the same monarch would wear separate Crowns for each of the realms that he or she ruled. That’s why the Queen of Canada, the Queen of the UK and the Queen of Australia are separate legal entities even though Elizabeth II wears each hat. It’s one of the most fundamental underpinnings of our sovereignty and constitutional architecture, but not a single MP could be bothered to mention it. Well done, everyone. Also of note: Royal historian Carolyn Harris uses the discussion around the DNA of Richard III to remind us that our current Queen reigns by an Act of Parliament, not by divine right, which is a worthwhile lesson when it comes to how the modern monarchy works.
https://twitter.com/onshi/status/542685207938084864
Roundup: A funeral felt by the nation
In Hamilton, the three party leaders attended the funeral of Corporal Nathan Cirillo, the Prime Minister speaking and addressing Cirillo’s son. The city and large numbers of first responders turned out for the funeral, and lined the streets of the procession. The Queen also sent her condolences as the regiment’s Colonel-in-Chief.
Sad exchange of letters. pic.twitter.com/s57rI0qTI4
— Stephen Maher (@stphnmaher) October 28, 2014
US Secretary of State John Kerry was in town yesterday, where he paid tribute to Corporal Cirillo, before he and Baird spoke about last week’s shootings as terrorism, and he and Harper met to discuss topics such as Russia, Ukraine, and the Keystone XL Pipeline. Michael Petrou breaks down the meaning of the visit here.
Roundup: Answers in the aftermath
In the aftermath of Wednesday’s attack, it was an emotional morning on the Hill, with ovations for Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers, speeches by the party leaders, the sight of Harper hugging the opposition leaders, and then, the reconstruction of events.
The RCMP held a briefing later in the day that included surveillance footage of the events outside of the Centre Block, and it was clear how fast everything happened, from the shooting at the War Memorial, him getting into the car, pulling it around to the Elgin entrance onto the Hill, getting out, running up near East Block, hijacking a minister’s car, driving the rest of the way to the Centre Block, where he ran into the front doors, had a confrontation with a guard that resulted in that guard being shot in the leg, then with RCMP in pursuit, the shooter headed down the Hall of Honour toward his eventual demise as he and Vickers traded shots from around a pillar. All in the space of maybe four minutes.
Roundup: NATO spending commitments
As that NATO summit gets set to get underway in Wales, it looks like the face-saving final communiqué will state that the 2 percent of GDP on defence spending that they hope members will achieve will simply be “aspirational,” since it’s not going to happen with some members like Canada (which would essentially doubling our current defence budget). Stephen Saideman explores why it’s wrong for NATO to focus solely on the spending levels of member countries than it is on capabilities. It also sounds like NATO members are going to discuss making cyberwarfare as much of a threat to member nations as bombs, which is quite true of the modern era. It also sounds like the attention will be split between the threats posed by Russia and ISIS. Michael Den Tandt notes that while Harper keeps sounding tough, there is no escaping that the Canadian Forces are badly under-resourced – possibly as bad as the “Decade of Darkness” – and we can’t have it both ways of doing good work on the cheap. Katie Englehart has more on the broader context of the situation here.
@Murray_Brewster yep 1% of Canadian interoperable, reliable participation >> 2% plus Greece unreliable, sit at home effort
— Steve Saideman (@smsaideman) September 3, 2014
Roundup: A good kid
Correctional Services’ own reports show that Omar Khadr is a “good kid,” non-radicalised and highly compliant, but that hasn’t stopped the government from trying to paint him as a heinous war criminal as they continue to deny journalists’ requests to interview him in prison. It looks more and more like they are trying to protect the narrative about him that they have built up for political cover.