Must-reads: John Robson, Don Martin and Susan Riley on the leave-behind affair; Rosie DiManno on journalist casualties in Afghanistan.

The Bernier-Couillard Affair, Day 104
Or maybe it just feels that way…

“The only fruitful line of inquiry” for a Commons committee investigation, the Ottawa Citizen‘s Susan Riley opines, “would involve Couillard’s role, if any, in helping her former biker pals apply for a security contract at Montreal airport in 2005, presumably to facilitate their drug trafficking.” As for the whole leave-behind affair itself, she can’t imagine what Couillard could have done with the information to threaten national security. “Sell it to the Taliban? Pass it to her geo-politically astute former biker pals?” And besides, Riley quite trenchantly notes, we’ll never know what those documents contained anyway—either because the information really was that sensitive or, more likely, “because it would give rise to awkward questions about why they were declared confidential in the first place” and imperil the “‘national security’ dodge” that keeps so much in Ottawa needlessly under wraps.

John Robson, writing in the Citizen, “shed[s] no tears for Mr. Bernier,” and if Couillard is “a babe in the woods,” he says “the bears better look out.” His goal today is simply to expose the hypocrisy of Canadian politicians to “maximum ridicule.” By saying the matter has nothing to do with “the minister’s private life,” he argues, Stephen Harper is suggesting the same fracas would have erupted had he “been married to her for 15 years”—which is laughable. The claim that Bernier only found out about the bikers when the press got wind of it is “as useless as it is implausible because it tacitly admits he would have worried if he had known.” And Michael Ignatieff, meanwhile, says it’s all about the possible “link between organized crime and airport security in Montreal” and that he doesn’t care about Couillard’s past. “But the possible link with organized crime is her ‘past,’ ” Robson counters.

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