It's June 1

Do you know where your Afghan detainee files are?

Update: The Hill Times speculates.

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Saturday Evening Pondering

Can you really call yourself "Supreme" if someone else gets to make the final decision? Do we have responsible government if an unelected body has a veto over what our elected representatives can see? I don't think we do. Our country is in a mess and there is sweet diddly I can do to help it. So, I think I will get up AND MAMBO!

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The Agreed Upon Narrative

Here is the new agreed upon narrative by our overlords, nicely summed up by the Winnipeg Free Press:

The all-party agreement tabled Friday implicitly recognizes that both sides of this war of words have real merit. The agreement is that an all-party committee of four MPs -- one for each party in Parliament -- and four designates will be sworn to secrecy and given access to some 10,000 pages of documents. They will review them and decide which should be released to a parliamentary committee and which remain secret. Where disputes occur, disputed documents will be submitted to a panel of three jurists, to be agreed among the parties, who will then make a final decision.

The opposition, of course, could have demanded absolute control of the review and releases -- Jack Layton, in fact, blustered that he would settle for nothing less -- but they didn't. That they didn't was a sign that, more than anything, they didn't want to be seen as overplaying their hand and triggering an election that nobody wants.

Both sides of the argument have merit, regardless of what the Speaker's ruling said. The opposition parties were wise to back down from the position of the Speaker's ruling and bend to the will of the government. Everyone is happy there is no election over something as stupid as the idea of Parliamentary supremacy. These are now the official truths of our betters. Anyone who disagrees with this narrative does so at the peril of being ridiculed as "not serious".

Update: Another lonely voice suggesting that the emperor has no clothes, joins in. My only disagreement with him is his blaming of the Liberals. I see it as a joint failure by all of the opposition parties.

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The Most Unintentionally Funny Headline Of The Day

Goes to the Globe and Mail for its Parliament takes another step toward being a true arm of government masterpiece for John Ibbitson's achingly wet kiss to the geniuses behind today's deal.

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The Dry Turkey

I am a bit dismayed by this paragraph:

The Harper government and opposition parties have agreed in principle to use a panel of outside experts to referee disputes over whether secret Afghan detainee records can be made public after being shown to select MPs.

How much do you want to bet the Harperites will challenge every document that comes before them, as a means to drag this process out for, well, forever? It is their way. They will live up to the letter of the agreement. Period (and only if they feel it gives them political advantage). With the Harperites, there is no such thing as the "spirit" of anything. Opposition beware, you are being suckered, again.

Update: If what Kady is saying is true, then it is a win for the good guys. But, I will keep my powder dry until the details emerge. The bottom line, I don't trust the Harperites as far as I can throw them.

Update 2: After reading this, it is much harder to say it is a win for democracy. Again, it is the details that matter. Can the government simply say that everything needs to be referred to the panel of experts? If so, the opposition has signed on to a slow motion cover-up. The next few days will tell.

Update 3: Ok, this section is really troubling:

Where the Committee determines that such information is both relevant and necessary, or upon the request of any member of the Committee, it will refer the document to a Panel of Arbiters who will determine how that relevant and necessary information will be made available to Members of Parliament and the public without compromising national security - either by redaction or the writing of summaries or such techniques as the Panel find appropriate, hearing in mind the basic objectives of maximizing disclosure and transparency.(italics mine)

It seems to me that the opposition has given the government a suspensive veto (which it will use with wild abandon, mark my words) and has allowed the government the opportunity to move the final decision away from elected members to an unelected "panel of experts". This is a shocking capitulation by the opposition.

Update 4: Ok, in looking at the text again, I have it wrong. It looks to me as if the "panel of arbiters" gets to see all the documents and it is they and not the committee of MPs who get to decide what is redacted. The single member clause is there to allow MPs to appeal to this body in the case where the committee does not agree with them about whether a document should be released. Still an unelected body is going to have the final say as to what the Parliament and the public as a whole get to see unredacted. To my mind this is just plain wrong and a loss for our democracy.

Update 5: The fact that Stephen Harper is happy with this deal tells me all I need to know about it.

Update 6: Curiosity Cat agrees this stinks like dead fish. I watched Power and Politics and the talking heads all basically framed this as a way for the opposition to avoid an election. So, how do you feel about Canadian democracy tonight? Me, I think it has been sold out by a bunch of cowards, to a bunch of authoritarian thugs.

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Negotiating With The Harperites

A quote from Homer Simpson illustrates the problem. If you remember, on one of the Halloween episodes, Homer had the ill fortune to be granted some wishes, but each wish did not turn out to his liking. In fact, he kept getting screwed. So, in frustration and with his last wish, Homer says:

I wish for a turkey sandwich on rye bread with lettuce and mustard. And... and I don't want any zombie turkeys, I don't want to turn into a turkey myself, and I don't want any other weird surprises, you got it?

And so it appeared that Homer got his way, but upon tasting it, he found the turkey was dry! Homer was screwed again. That is what I imagine the opposition is up against during their negotiations with the Harperites. You just know that the opposition will come out with what they think is a agreement from the government to disclose the documents, only to discover that the Harperites have found a loophole allowing them to screw them again. With the Harperites, there are no "good faith negotiations", only battles of wits. I just hope the opposition has the sense to see that.

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Opposition Poison Pill

Amir Attaran offers an interesting way of forcing Harper's hand:

And what if the Harper government rejects both of these options? Simple: the opposition should bring a motion holding it in contempt of Parliament and Canada's Constitution. Since that could trigger an election, the opposition needs to design its contempt motion to benefit at the polls, while communicating the government's untrustworthiness and incompetence in the war itself.

In March 2008, Harper sought Parliament's conditional consent to extend the Afghanistan combat mission to 2011. Parliament gave consent, but only because Harper's motion contained a requirement that "the government must commit to a policy of greater transparency with respect to its policy on ... detainees."

Now, with Harper breaking his own condition and hiding the detainee documents from Parliament, he is inviting Parliament to place the combat mission back on the table. Thus when the opposition introduces a motion finding the government in contempt, that should also recall Harper's March 2008 motion, and revoke Parliament's consent to the combat mission extending through 2011. Harper will howl, but he linked "greater transparency" to the combat mission's continuance in the first place.

Done this way, Harper will fear making the contempt motion a confidence matter, because if he precipitated an election, the Conservatives would be isolated as the only party backing an unpopular war. This they cannot afford: over half of Canadians polled oppose the war. And more will soon oppose it, once the summer fighting resumes, bloodier this year because of more aggressive American tactics in Kandahar.

Not that Harper cares about breaking his word. The man is a pathological word breaker, but it would be interesting to see how he would handle the idea that since he did not live up to his word on the mission in Afghanistan, the agreement is null and void.

Attaran also does a nice job of summing up a coherent opposition strategy:

In sum: negotiate, as the Speaker asked. Aim for compromise on a public inquiry or secret House session, but rule out lesser options, because the underlying issues -- Canada's Constitution, and mismanagement of the war -- are too serious. If negotiation fails, bring on the contempt motion, and tie it to Harper violating his own conditions for extending the combat mission. If that triggers an election, fine, then confront Harper on his record of risking Canadian soldiers' lives, under an appalling detainee policy he stubbornly defends.

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The "Legal Obligations" Smokescreen

The Conservatives have no intention of complying with the Speaker's order. Coyne lays it all out for us here. Parliament has the constitution on its side. If one part of Parliament wants to see documents and they are not categorically excluded from seeing them in legislation they themselves passed (which they are not), then the government has no choice but to comply. This whole "legal obligations" nonsense is nothing more than a framing device for an upcoming election Harper will call if the opposition doesn't bend to his will. The bottom line, Harper is stretching the truth to beyond the breaking point and we would be better off as a country if he was retired and writing papers about flat tax schemes at the Fraser Institute.

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The Wrong Question

The MSM seems seized with the question "What is the opposition's proposal to get the Afghan documents?" That is the wrong question. It is the question the Harperites want the press to be obsessed with. The real question is and should be, when will the government obey the ruling of the Speaker and give the documents to the House?

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Christ On A Crutch

Read Norm Spector and his comments section. Do you still believe the government is cooperating? If you answered yes, I have swamp land in Arizona you might be interested in.

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Of Lights And Roaches

Stephen Harper, always the bully, is trying to cow the opposition by holding an election over their heads. Jack Layton, for once, was having none of it:

So when NDP Leader Jack Layton pursued a similar line of questioning to Mr. Ignatieff, Mr. Harper seemed to dare the opposition parties to force an election on the issue.

“We are seeking to respect the decision as well as our legal obligations,” he replied. “... It is still the case that the government depends on the confidence of the House” – a phrase he repeated for emphasis when Mr. Layton asked a follow-up question on the same topic.

The NDP Leader demanded a clarification. “Is the Prime Minister telling us today that he is going to defy the ruling of the Speaker and the will of the House in order to go to an election? Is that what he is saying he is going to do? Is he going to defy the will of the House and go to the people on a vote? Is that what he is putting forward today?”
Only then did Mr. Harper appear to soften.

“I do not think I said any of those things,” he said. “In fact, I think I said quite the contrary. The government seeks at all times to respect all of its obligations. To the extent that some of those obligations may be in conflict, there are reasonable ways to accommodate that and we are open to reasonable suggestions in that regard.”

Layton's "Hold on a minute" moment needs to be the approach taken by the opposition as a whole. They all need to bluntly ask the PM if he is going to continue his games playing rather than seriously attempt to follow the will of the House. Harper knows that if he is seen as the one who refused to cooperate and instead forced an election, the people of this country will crucify him. The opposition must consistently shine a bright spotlight on Harper's intentions so as to limit them to cooperation. Otherwise, like any good cockroach, Harper will make his play, in the dark.

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Dear Jack And Michael

This is what those close to the PM think of you:

At the end of the day, Iggy & Layton are a couple spineless wets. Want to go to the polls on Taliban prisoners? Not likely. --Kory Tenyeke from Twitter

Oh, and Michael, he really thinks you are a pussy. The question for both of you is this, is he right?

H/t to Buckdog

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Well, Tomorrow May Suck And The PM May Call Out The Army

But it is a beautiful day here in Canada today.

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