The Commons: Yelling into the abyss

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 7:07 PM - 110 Comments

The Scene. If the leaders of the opposition parties have not yet realized that it is futile to ask the Prime Minister to account for the things he says and does—what he has said so far having only passing relation to what he has done and what he did yesterday having no necessary bearing on what he might do tomorrow—Mr. Harper is perhaps beginning to understand that he is best off bringing as little attention to himself as possible. So it was this afternoon that he yawned his way through three questions from Michael Ignatieff on the government’s policies on climate change and shrugged away three questions from Jack Layton on the extension of this country’s military mission in Afghanistan. When Gilles Duceppe asked about the risks entailed in offshore oil excavation, the Prime Minister didn’t even bother to stand.

However wise of Mr. Harper this may be, it does deprive the gallery spectators of a good show—the House rarely as exciting as when the Prime Minister is up and shouting some bold declaration to which he possesses at least a fleeting commitment.

Lucky then for those who turned up to watch today that the Finance Minister has not yet learned that it is, in the long view, better to speak softly and avoid any statement that might be construed as a nod to objective reality. Continue…

Taxi driver by day, Taliban by night

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 4:58 PM - 25 Comments

For some Taliban commanders, the jihad is only a part-time gig. Dhani-Ghorri, for instance, battles NATO forces in northern Afghanistan for three months of the year, and then lives in east London for the rest, ferrying people around town in his taxi. “I work as a minicab driver,” says the mid-level Taliban commander. “I make good money there [in the UK], you know. But these people are my friends and my family and it’s my duty to come to fight the jihad with them.” He said there are many people like him in London, who collect money for the jihad all year, and then fight overseas when they can. The news confirms a long-held suspicion among intelligence officials that some U.K. Muslims spend part of the year in Afghanistan and Pakistan training with extremist groups.

The Guardian

Full disclosure

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 4:54 PM - 139 Comments

Michael Ignatieff, asked by a reporter after QP today to comment on recent concerns about airport security.

If you’re in my business, you live in an airport.  And so I have people touching my private parts all day long.

Exorcists wanted, and fast

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 102 Comments

Everett Collection; Getty Images; iStock; Illustration by Taylor Shute

Looking for work? Seeking a new challenge? Now may be the perfect time to consider a career in the exciting field of demon exorcism.

The U.S. Roman Catholic Church is in dire need of dedicated professionals with the courage and theatrical overacting required to cast out evil spirits from the bodies of the faithful. American bishops even held a conference last weekend in Baltimore to train clergy on the tactical points of coaxing a demon from its human host. That’s one souvenir conference tote bag we’d all like to have: Exorcism 2010—The power of Christ compels you . . . to support our sponsors!

The New York Times summed up the Church’s predicament: “There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.”

You can imagine the mishaps that ensue. When a newbie exorcist is pressed into action before he’s ready, it’s easy to panic and grab the wrong magical weapon. Note to rookies: a silver bullet kills a werewolf, garlic wards off vampires and a Big Mac lures Kirstie Alley down from a tree. You want the crucifix, the holy water and, if Hollywood has taught us anything about exorcisms, a few Wet-Naps to clean yourself up afterwards.

Continue…

Endlessly Repeated Words on TV

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 2:58 PM - 9 Comments

You notice how often they say “sectionals” on Glee? It occurred to me again while watching last night that it’s a word that seems to be constantly repeated whenever they need to remind us that there are Stakes: Will will, at some point, remind his brood that they need to “get ready for sectionals” so that we can segue into a number, or so the writers can break up an argument among the kids, or just so we can know that there’s a reason why they’re singing so much and that there is a competition coming. Other people started to come up with “sectionals” drinking games as early as last year.

When I mentioned this, Justin Fowler pointed out that Chuck has its own equivalent of “sectionals,” which is the word “spy.” An inordinate number of characters are in love with saying “spy,” either to set up a joke about the incongruity of Chuck being a spy (“It’s what I do. I’m a spy.” “No, Chuck, you’re not!”) or to remind us that this is, in fact, what the characters do. Also because the show is a fantasy, the generic word “spy” probably works better than most synonyms — terms that actual spies might use to describe themselves. But it’s getting a bit ridiculous to hear people telling each other what their job is so frequently. Do TV lawyers say “I’m a lawyer” every week?

This kind of buzzword is different from a catchphrase, because it’s not intended to catch on. Yet it’s a bit more of a conscious decision on the part of writers than just having Don Draper say “What?” a lot or having a character’s name repeated too often. It’s just a word that comes up in a lot of conversations, particularly expository ones. Like The Secret Life of the American Teenager has become famous for myriad repetitions of the word “sex” — it’s not a catchphrase, it’s just an extension of the show’s apparent surprise at the fact that sex exists. It’s a verbal tic that tells us something about the writers’ minds, much as a real person’s verbal tic might tell us something about him or her.

Any other expository words that you notice coming up particularly often on TV shows, past or present? There have to be some procedurals that can’t let go of certain words, if only because they have to fall back on the same explanations or the same crime-solving methods every week, with the words to accompany them. TV scripts aren’t really the place to break out the Thesaurus and start looking for new words to describe the same thing.

Deep thoughts

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 23 Comments

On Monday, several Conservative MPs were reported to be less-than-completely scornful when three former convicts appeared before the public safety committee to express concerns about the government’s recent moves to restrict pardons.

Nonetheless, so it was yesterday that a government backbencher, Phil McColeman, was sent up to report that the Liberal public safety critic had, at that committee meeting, been “quick to advocate on behalf of convicted criminals.”

And so it was that the Liberal critic, Mark Holland, stood after Question Period to complain that this was untrue.

And so it was that Mr. McColeman, the duly elected member for Brant, responded as follows. Continue…

Mailman turned salesman

By Cathy Gulli - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 1:20 PM - 5 Comments

There was a time when shopping at the post office amounted to choosing between a stamp featuring a native flower, the national flag, or some other patriotic and decidedly non-commercial emblem: the white-tailed deer, Oscar Peterson, or “masterpieces of Canadian art.”

Now, Canada Post, a Crown corporation, is fast becoming the country’s leading online retailer—hawking everything from sweaters, shoes and treadmills to coffee machines, cologne and computers. Last month, in an effort to boost its parcel shipping business (as letter mail sales continue to plummet), the company unveiled the Canada Post Comparison Shopper website, which allows consumers to find, rank and buy their choice of five million products from 500 North American retailers, including Canadian Tire and Sears. Since then, 30,000 Canadians have taken to scrolling through the offerings every day—making it the most visited comparison shopping website in the country, almost instantly.

Continue…

Jean Charest survives non-confidence motion

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 12:56 PM - 1 Comment

Parti Québécois leader Pauline Marois looked to Liberal MNAs to join her in voting for non-confidence motion in Premier Jean Charest on Wednesday. Marois wants to get rid of “a rotten system that Quebecers no longer want,” and cites her call for a public inquiry into the construction industry as her main motive. For his part, Charest dismissed the motion, saying the National Assembly is “not a people’s court.” A new election is unlikely, since the Liberals hold a majority of seats.

UPDATE: Thanks to their Parliamentary majority, the Liberals defeated the censure motion 61 to 57.

Montreal Gazette

Cyberpresse

EU stats gurus "astonished" over Canadian census controversy

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 12:54 PM - 24 Comments

Canada has disappointed the European Statistical Governance Advisory Board, an EU body that promotes the independence and accountability of statistical agencies in Europe. Harper’s July removal of the mandatory long-form census, to be replaced by a voluntary National Household Survey, has raised concerns about the integrity of the results. “We were utterly astonished, given our view of Canadian statistics. We didn’t expect it to happen in Canada, quite frankly,” said Johnny Akerholm, chair of the ESGAB. “We’ve all been full of admiration of everything that is going on in the statistical field in Canada. Canada has frequently been seen as the benchmark, the best performer.”

Ottawa Citizen

Nixon and counter-Nixon

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 12:50 PM - 36 Comments

I had an interesting companion on my recent trip to California: Poisoning the Press, Mark Feldstein’s new book about the quarter-century feud between Richard Nixon and columnist Jack Anderson. Anderson lived until 2005, but is now quite forgotten, even though he once had a near-monopoly on investigative political journalism in the United States and has (along with his mentor Drew Pearson) no conceivable rival as the creator of the form.

If scruples were a breakfast cereal, Nixon and Anderson couldn’t have come up with a spoonful between the two of them. Anderson, a pure entrepreneur who syndicated his own work and had no editor, recognized hardly any ethical limits to his professional activity. Could one say that he was not above stealing secret documents, committing blackmail, spreading sexual slurs, perpetrating bribery, and publishing unfounded speculation? That would be like saying that a surgeon is not above cutting people open. Yet Anderson probably did more good than harm until his bundle of instincts and tricks began to fail him in his fifties. To some, the Washington press still seems purblind without him.

Nixon and Anderson were both products of California, and were branded by it. Both came from dirt-poor families who belonged to religious minorities, and who found disillusionment rather than the American dream in the far West. Nixon, a Quaker, was actuated in everything he did by a superego with a terrifying, suffocating grip; he wasn’t personally a god-botherer, but the “fear of God”, an omnipresent God of correction and retribution, is a good metaphor for the dominant element in his psyche. Anderson, by contrast, was an observant Mormon of stiffly upright personal habits who used a network of powerful Saints to help get scoops.

When Nixon, as president, needed to find a job for his lazy nitwit brother Donald, his people chose to lean on Mormon hotel magnate J.W. Marriott. Nixon was soon horrified to learn that Don, whose shady dealings with Howard Hughes had landed Nixon in Pearson’s column long before and arguably cost him the presidency in 1960, had arranged for a face-to-face meeting with Anderson. Thanks to some eleventh-hour spin, Anderson’s article ended up helping to insulate the administration, representing Donald as a freelancing, happy-go-lucky goofball whose brother had washed his hands of him. I reached this point in Feldstein’s book in the lobby of the L.A. Marriott, reading the tale under the watchful eye of old J.W. himself.

The California of today endows its citizens with complacency, optimism, and tolerance; the people I rapped with around the state wouldn’t recognize Nixon, or Anderson, as belonging to their species of humanity. The pair were creatures of a cruel, barren pre-aqueduct California that turned them loose on America like rodents in a sea of cheese. Feldstein’s outstanding book makes their confrontation seem inevitable, almost Shakespearean.

Anderson was the great thorn in the side of the Nixon cause until he blew the Watergate story (despite having it virtually gift-wrapped; he knew several of the burglars, and actually bumped into them at an airport while they were en route to the break-in). One of the more notable features of Poisoning the Press is that it takes the story that Nixon ordered Special Counsel Chuck Colson to plan the assassination of Anderson more seriously than previous Nixonologists have. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, Feldstein points out, confirmed each other’s claims that they had orders from Colson to kill Anderson and that they actually put him under surveillance for the purpose. Liddy is widely seen as an absurd right-wing curio nowadays, but his testimony about the shady stuff he got up to as the leader of Nixon’s “Plumbers” has usually been borne out.

There is no tape or document that confirms Nixon’s knowledge of any plot to kill Anderson, but then, there’s no signed paper that says Hitler ordered the Holocaust. Would Colson have balked at killing a journalist? Today’s Jesus-freak Colson would be the first to admit that the answer was “no”; he’s the guy who wanted to firebomb the Brookings Institution. Could Colson have talked Nixon into giving him tacit approval to do it? Goading Nixon was practically his job description, and his skill at that job shaped American history. A full generation after Watergate, we’re still exploring the outer limits of what John Mitchell called the “White House Horrors”.

Sarkozy calls journalists 'pedophiles'

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 12:43 PM - 7 Comments

“See you tomorrow, pedophile friends!” was French President Nicolas Sarkozy’s reported farewell to reporters at the NATO conference in Lisbon, reports Radio France Internationale. Sarkozy was expressing his anger at journalists during a 10-minute briefing that his aides say was supposed to be off the record. He accused the media of reporting on allegations of bribery without any proof, despite the fact that a former defense minister is behind the allegations that during the 1995 presidential campaign of Eduoard Balladur, Sarkozy arranged for kickbacks from submarine sales to Pakistan. “Not a single one of you believes that I organized kickbacks for submarines in Pakistan. It’s incredible and it gets on television,” Sarkozy told reporters, before turning to one journalist and announcing, “You, I’ve got nothing against you. Apparently, you’re a pedophile… Can you explain yourself?” The Elysée denies the comments were made.

RFI English

N.B. to fund vein surgery for MS patients

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 12:36 PM - 30 Comments

New Brunswick Premier David Alward announced his government will create a $500,000 fund to help MS patients seeking controversial vein-opening surgery abroad. Chronic cerebrospinal venous insufficiency (CCSVI) treatment is not approved by Health Canada, nor is it funded by any provinces, so many Canadians are buying the surgery in other countries. The procedure involves opening the neck vein to allow blood to flow back to the heart that might otherwise pool in the brain. Italian researcher Dr. Paulo Zamboni believes that blood pooling in the brain is the cause MS in many people. Zamboni, who was in Ottawa Tuesday to plead for CCSVI treatment, saw impressive results in his small study of 100 patients. Many patients who were wheelchair bound could walk again and the results lasted more than a year in many cases. However, there have not yet been large or rigorous enough trials to convince the medical establishment in North America that the treatment is safe and effective. Despite their caution, Alward promised access to CCSVI treatment during his fall election campaign. The announcement that he’ll keep that promise comes just days after Canadians learned that a St. Catharines, Ont. man, Mahir Mostic, died of complications from a CCSVI treatment he received in Costa Rica. Alward said he spoke to a friend with MS since Mostic’s death, who told him “don’t give up the fight,” for access to the surgery.

CBC News

When polar bears go up against grizzlies, polar bears lose

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 12:05 PM - 4 Comments

As climate change pushes polar bears and grizzly bears into competition for food, increasingly requiring them to share a habitat, polar bears will probably lose out, according to a new study from evolutionary biologists at the University of California, Los Angeles. Using 3D computer modeling, researchers compared the skull and jaw strength of the two bear species and found polar bears aren’t suited to the tougher chewing demands of the mostly vegetarian diet that grizzlies observe. “This is one additional piece of evidence that things look pretty bleak for the polar bear, if current trends continue,” lead author Graham Slater told Reuters. Grizzlies, a subspecies of brown bears, are moving north in Canada as their habitat warms up, and polar bears are moving south as the ice melts. But the territory they’re finding themselves in is more suited to the grizzly.

Reuters

Cholera epidemic in Haiti spreading faster than initially predicted

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 12:04 PM - 0 Comments

A senior UN official says Haiti’s cholera epidemic is spreading faster than predicted and warned it could affect thousands more people before it’s over. Since it first broke in October, cholera has claimed at least 1,344 lives in the country. It has spread rapidly through crowded housing, and the camps and the makeshift shelters where earthquake victims have taken residence. Nigel Fisher, the UN’s humanitarian co-coordinator in Haiti, believes cholera will continue to spread and said the realistic death toll will be close to 2,000. The number of cases is currently at about 70,000—20,000 more than the original estimate of 50,000.

The Guardian

Berlin, and its last Jews, during wartime

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 12:00 PM - 0 Comments

The capital of the Third Reich was at once the heart of Nazi power and the least Nazi-supportive area in Germany | Bettmann/Corbis

BERLIN AT WAR
Roger Moorhouse

On Feb. 27, 1943, the final roundup of the Nazi capital’s remaining 10,000 Jews took place. Some 1,800 so-called “privileged” Jews—mostly males who had an Aryan parent, or were married to non-Jews or were decorated veterans of the Great War—were corralled in the Jewish welfare office. What followed next was one of the most astonishing spectacles of the Third Reich: arriving alone or in small groups came the men’s German wives, at times swelling the crowd to almost 1,000. For a week, in the words of a contemporary diary, the women “called for their husbands, screamed for their husbands, howled for their husbands, and stood like a wall, hour after hour, night after night.” The Gestapo threatened but in the end blinked, and released the prisoners. It was only a tiny wobble in the inexorable progress of the Holocaust—the other 8,000 Jews rounded up went straight to Auschwitz—but a striking moment in the life of a city that was at once the heart of Nazi power and the least Nazi-supportive part of Germany.

Moorhouse opens his engrossing story of life in Berlin during wartime with Hitler’s 50th birthday party in April 1939, an event marked for the 4.5 million Berliners by a public holiday, parties and a parade of military might that stretched for 100 km. It ends six years later with Stunde Null (zero hour), as survivors—including 1,400 Jews hiding in Berlin’s underground—emerged into a city reduced to rubble after relentless Western bombing, and now subject to the Red Army, which arrived in one of the most ferocious displays of fire and sword (and rape) ever recorded.

In between, Berlin at War offers tales from the black market and from the blackouts (including tales of serial murderers), and such vignettes as the air raid shelter encounter between William Shirer (the anti-Nazi American chronicler of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) and Lord Haw-Haw (the Irish pro-Nazi propaganda broadcaster). “An interesting and amusing fellow,” Shirer recorded, if you could get past him being a “scar-faced Fascist rabble-rouser.”
- BRIAN BETHUNE

Continue…

OPP visited victim’s home night of Russell Williams attack: report

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 11:44 AM - 0 Comments

An OPP officer knocked on Jessica Lloyd’s door on the night she was raped, kidnapped, and later murdered by serial killer Russell Williams, the Toronto Star reports. At that moment, Williams was hiding in his intended victim’s backyard. The female officer visited Lloyd’s home after noticing what she thought was a suspicious vehicle (Williams’s Pathfinder) parked along the highway north of Belleville, near the 27-year-old’s home. But when nobody answered, the officer left. The officer is reportedly taking it quite hard, and may have taken time off work due to the stress of believing she could have done more to help Lloyd.

Toronto Star

How to help

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 11:12 AM - 21 Comments

Stephen Gordon considers the costs and benefits of guaranteed income.

There’s a proposal being floated around Quebec policy circles that would ensure that someone who works 16 hours per week at minimum wage would still have an income that would put her above Statistics Canada’s poverty threshold for Quebec (about $12,000). These amounts are far from lavish, but the costs are surprisingly high. In this report, some of my Laval colleagues estimate that the lower bound is on the order of $2.2b. To put this in perspective, one percentage point of the Quebec TVQ (the provincial GST) generates about $1.2b in revenues. Financing even this modest proposal would require the equivalent of at least two extra percentage points to the TVQ.

The RSS tag the Globe put on Kevin’s recent Economy Lab post says “If it’s not implemented properly, a guaranteed annual income could become a very costly program”. I think it’s better to say that if it’s not costly, then the BI isn’t being isn’t being implemented properly. There’s really not much point in arguing for a BI if you’re not prepared to argue for significantly higher taxes.

When ministers of the crown tweet

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 10:06 AM - 127 Comments

Tony Clement takes on the worldwide statistical conspiracy.

dgardner So what might a professional, independent, disinterested observer think of the Harper government’s #census decision? http://bit.ly/hnzoFU

TonyClement_MP @dgardner Statisticians sticking up for fellow statisticians is your idea of “disinterested”?? You’re kidding, right?

dgardner @TonyClement_MP : No. You think professionals from another continent are biased because they share the profession? You’re kidding, right?

TonyClement_MP @dgardner If they’re from another continent, why are they sticking their noses in Canada’s business? Spare me the righteousness.

dgardner @TonyClement_MP : Oh, lord. Really? Faux populism? Rush Limbaugh territory. Don’t go there.

The royal engagement: do we still care?

By John Fraser - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 12 Comments

Harper, unlike recent predecessors, followed the Queen and Prince Philip almost everywhere on their recent trip. That famous pirouette: Trudeau did it behind the Queen’s back. | John Stillwell/Getty Images; Doug Ball/CP

So the inevitable is now official. The announcement of the engagement of Prince William and Kate Middleton—the actual proposal came last month when the two were in Kenya—has set off the predictable cascade of nutty media inanity in Britain, a chorus of “so whats” from anti-monarchists here and there, and deep satisfaction from royalists.

In Canada, the news that the second in line to the throne had done the deed and asked for the hand of the girlfriend of almost eight years standing—minus some time off to check out the field and also contemplate all the constraints that crowd his absurdly scrutinized life—was taken the way much royal news is taken in Canada these days: with a tolerant shrug. It also comes when the issue of the Crown in Canada is probably more assured than it has been in years.

The engagement itself was sealed, apparently, when William offered a ring of his mother’s to Kate, thus putting the metaphorical seal of approval of Diana, princess of Wales, to a future marriage all monarchists in Queen Elizabeth II’s 16 realms fervently pray will end up better than hers with Prince Charles. William and Kate do not need to have a “fairy-tale” marriage. They just need one that works.

Continue…

The Schröder-Bush dust-up

By Adnan R. Khan - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 7 Comments

Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images

Berlin political circles were buzzing last week after the publication of former U.S. president George W. Bush’s memoirs, in which he accuses Gerhard Schröder, Germany’s ex-chancellor, of breaking a promise to support the Iraq war. In the memoir, entitled Decision Points, Bush alleges Schröder told him in a Jan. 31, 2002 meeting in the Oval Office that, “If you make it fast and make it decisive, I will be with you.” Later, with German elections looming and public opinion strongly against the war, he turned tail and joined the anti-war camp. “I put a high premium on trust,” Bush goes on to write. “Once that trust was violated, it was hard to have a constructive relationship again.” Schröder went on to win the 2002 election on an anti-war platform, ushering in a brief period of frigidity in German-American relations that lasted until Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats ousted Schröder from office in 2005. But over that three-year period, the two leaders barely met, and their animosity became emblematic of a widening political gap between the U.S. and Europe.

Continue…

Perspective alert

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 9:06 AM - 25 Comments

Chris Selley runs the numbers on homicide.

Statistics Canada data show that in 2009, just 18.1% of “solved” homicides — meaning those in which a suspect was identified — were committed by someone unknown to the victim. That’s 82 murders, total. (If the same rate held true among unsolved homicides as well, the total number would be 110.) … There were 515 homicides in Canada in 2007. More likely ways to die included not just the traditional heart disease (50,499 deaths), suicide (3,611) and motor vehicle accidents (2,882) but such un-newsworthy occurrences as pneumonia (5,272), renal failure (3,664) falling down (2,677), poisoning (1,347) and skin cancer (875).

A romantic comedy—plus sex. Lots of it.

By Brian D. Johnson - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

The studio trailer conveniently omitted any mention of the story’s premise—Anne Hathaway’s character has Parkinson’s disease | David James/Twentieth Century Fox

Now here’s something you don’t see everyday: a romantic comedy from a Hollywood studio featuring ample nudity from two beautiful Oscar-nominated stars who perform a lot of hot-blooded sex scenes. Got your attention? The actors are Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal, who first appeared together as a sexless married couple in Brokeback Mountain but are now tearing each other’s clothes off in Love and Other Drugs.

The film presents one of the most sporting displays of sexuality between two glamourous, big-eyed A-list movie stars since . . . well, you have to go back to the 1970s to find anything like it. R-rated studio rom-coms these days are rare. And those that do come along (There’s Something About Mary, Wedding Crashers, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, It’s Complicated) tend to earn their scarlet letter “R” with jolts of gross-out profanity and flashes of shock-and-awe nudity—the male frontal variety being the latest gimmick.

Continue…

Rights and Democracy: Well thank goodness we have a take-charge minister

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 8:21 AM - 61 Comments

The very last exchange in Tuesday’s Question Period. There are a lot of ways to read Minister Cannon’s remarks (and therefore a few different ways to read my title for this post) but for now I’ll just get it on the record and wait, with limited patience, to see what happens next:

Ms. Johanne Deschamps (Laurentides—Labelle, BQ): Mr. Speaker, the board of Rights & Democracy is accountable to Parliament for its management. As parliamentarians, we have the right to know what is going on in that organization. Yet the board of Rights & Democracy still has not released the Deloitte & Touche audit report. Talk about a lack of transparency.Will the Minister of Foreign Affairs continue to put up with such questionable conduct?

Hon. Lawrence Cannon (Minister of Foreign Affairs, CPC): Mr. Speaker, I will remind the House very briefly that this is an arm’s-length organization funded by the government. However, I see that instead of taking action, the opposition has decided to ask questions. At the first opportunity, my parliamentary assistant will ask the board of Rights & Democracy to come and table the report. We will do the job the opposition does not want to do.

UPDATE: In the original French, Cannon referred to his “adjoint parlementaire” as the person who’ll be doing the asking on his behalf. In Quebec’s National Assembly, where he spent much of his career, “adjoint parlementaire” means parliamentary secretary, an MP and caucus colleague assigned to assist a minister. (In Ottawa the term is secretaire parlementaire.) Cannon seemed to be referring to Deepak Obhrai, his new parliamentary secretary. I’ll follow up with the minister’s staff. -pw

The Commons: The minister's coat

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, November 23, 2010 at 6:03 PM - 49 Comments

The Scene. The Liberal leader opened with two questions about the need to address the looming crisis of pensions in this country. Then he moved on to more relevant matters.

“Mr. Speaker,” he said, “let me raise another issue. In sworn testimony before a House of Commons committee, explosive allegations were made about how the contract was awarded for the renovation of the West Block. For a year now, we have been trying to get to the bottom of this sorry affair, and now there are lurid allegations about the minister and his cashmere coat, and the question I have is, why is the minister still in his job? When will the Prime Minister tell Canadians the truth about this affair?”

Indeed, this morning had brought another vaguely scandalous twist in the hypothetically scandalous story of Christian Paradis. It seemed the Minister of Natural Resources once owned a $5,000 coat, that he had lost this coat at a fundraising cocktail, and that a construction company owner who had obtained a government contract to renovate West Block and who had been at that party was subsequently asked to buy Mr. Paradis a new coat. Crucially, this coat was allegedly made of cashmere—a word that begs for parody.

With Michael Ignatieff’s question awaiting response, the Prime Minister stood here to address an anxious nation. “Mr. Speaker, the facts are very well known in this particular case,” he assured. “Officials have testified there is absolutely no political interference in the contracts. In fact the individual the leader of the Liberal Party is quoting is an individual who lost the contract.”

But what of the coat? What of this profoundly telling outer-garment? Continue…