Well,
that didn’t take long – anonymous New Democrats are going to the media,
slagging off Nycole Turmel saying she lacks “fire” and will be overshadowed by
Bob Rae, while the Conservatives recycled a four-year old story about Thomas
Mulcair negotiating with the Harper government to join them after he left
Quebec politics. But hey – they’re not going to be like the Liberals at all.
Oh, wait – they went to Bob Fife instead of Jane Taber, so I suppose that was
different from the Liberals (although, to be fair, it does appear that Taber is
on holidays).
Meanwhile,
here’s a great piece about the trial by fire that the new NDP MPs are going to
face in Layton’s absence, and it also reveals a few truths about some of those
Quebec MPs – like how Charmaine Borg spent most of the campaign working for
Mulcair in Montreal and only spent a few hours in the riding she was running
in, while the NDP comms people blatantly lied to the press saying things like “Oh,
she’s busy campaigning but doesn’t have a cell phone.” Nice to see that they’re
finally owning up to the truth.
Vic
Toews wants to weaken privacy laws so that the government can name and post
pictures of more people they deem a “threat to public safety,” like those
supposed “suspected war criminals” they’re currently all over. They needed to
get ministerial exemptions to post that information, and government lawyers
were not happy about it, but Toews keeps up this wide-eyed ploy of asking, as
if innocently “I don’t understand how the privacy act would overrule the public
interest.” It’s the sign of a slippery slope, where if kept unchecked, a
government could demand further privacy breaches “in the public interest,” of
course. Not a good precedent to set.
The
family of one of those “suspected war criminals” is threatening to sue the government
for defamation, saying the supposed allegations wouldn’t stand up in court.
Which is of course why the government is using an immigration process with a
lower burden of proof.
John
Geddes at Maclean’s looks into the
shadowy anonymous financing of the Canadian Parliamentary Coalition to Combat
Anti-Semitism, and the one-sided report that came out at the end.
And the
government has “blacklisted” a Canadian artist who dared to be critical about
the government’s environmental record, ensuring that her funding to show her
work in Europe has been withdrawn – including from private sponsors. What were
we saying about this government’s capacity to tolerate dissent?
