I have been trying hard
to NOT turn this site into an anti Harper Regime rant but it is very
difficult given that said regime is constantly providing more
ammunition to reinforce the position that they are indeed an
antidemocratic bunch that will ignore or stall any and all rulings
that question their actions.
The last week has seen
the opposition finally bring some of these abuses of power to the
floor of the House of Commons, a long overdue move but perhaps
understandable in that given the Harpers regimes practice to make
each and every sticky issue a vote of confidence and thus force an
election.
At this point failure
of the opposition to pursue these issues through to what may well be
that very outcome can only be called antidemocratic in and off
itself.
Several vote this week
were focused upon democratic issues. There are the two rulings by the
speaker of the House that The Harper Regime is in contempt of
parliament. One for refusing to supply details of the costs and
operational requirements of the proposed F35 fighter purchase, the
cost of their cuts to corporate taxes as well as documents related to
the cost of the tough on crime proposals. The other for the
alteration of documents in the KAIROS funding fiasco.
This
is the essence of the Speaker's ruling:"However,
there is no doubt that an order to produce documents is not being
fully complied with, and this is a serious matter that goes to the
heart of the House's undoubted role in holding the government to
account... For these reasons, the Chair finds that there are
sufficient grounds for a finding of a prima facie question of
privilege in this matter."Note those words: "a serious
matter that goes to the heart of the House's undoubted role in
holding the government to account."This is a very serious
finding, by the Speaker of our Parliament, whose job is to uphold our
rights as citizens when our Parliament meets to debate our affairs
Milliken also ruled against embattled International Aid Minister Bev Oda, who is accused of lying to Parliament with a tortured explanation of a political decision to deny funding to a long-standing charitable organization, KAIROS, that often disagreed with Conservative policies. Oda first suggested bureaucrats had rejected the KAIROS application before it was revealed that someone had inserted the word “not” into funding documents after the bureaucrats had okayed the cash, in order to stop the money from flowing.
The next step: the
Speaker has given his approval to House of Commons committees to
investigate and vote out a recommendation to the full Parliament
whether in both cases the Conservative Government and Bev Oda was
indeed in contempt of Parliament.
And remember the
speakers
ruling on the afghan documents 11 months ago
arising from the refusal to comply with the previous house of commons
motion to produce said documents some months before that and the
continued lack of action on this file.
The federal government
breached parliamentary privilege with its refusal to produce
uncensored documents related to the treatment of Afghan detainees and
must provide the material to MPs within two weeks, Speaker Peter
Milliken has ruled. (April 27 2010)
House
of Commons has adopted a motion, on December 10, 2009,
ordering the production of Government documents related to the
transfer of Afghan detainees from the Canadian Forces to Afghan
authorities,
The committee
deliberations regarding which documents may be seen by our elected
representatives continue to be stalled and we wonder exactly what, if
anything, will come of this. I have said before its all very well
having rules, and getting the speaker to rule if such things should
be taken to committee but if there are no penalties for ignoring his
rulings, stalling committees charged with deciding what to do and
generally putting things off for months if not years, then why
bother?
Add to all this the
fact that two Conservative senators and some senor Conservative staff
have been now charged in the 'in and out scheme' that Harper insists
is 'just an accounting error” and his recent reply when
confronted with the fact that the Speaker has twice more ruled his
government in a prima facie case of breach of privilege, Harper
shrugs and says, “You
win some, you lose some.” And hey, isn’t
it awful what happened in that hockey game.
Prof. Ned
Franks, Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Queens University
suggests, “to put it kindly, that the government is,
at a minimum, ignorant of the rules and principles governing
parliamentary democracy and, to put it unkindly, that they don’t
give a damn and they’ll try to get away with what they can."
Then there are the
constant anti democratic attack ads using out of context and
misleading quotes from the opposition leader, that would be grounds
for legal action but for one thing, political
parties are exempt from broadcast advertising standards.
Whats with that?
There is however one
political ad that is pro democracy and points out the harm that all
this negativity is doing to our democracy by turning off voters,
check out the GPC Change
the Channel on Attack Ads video
It seems to me the the
terms 'The Harper Regime' and 'Antidemocratic' are synonymous and
that any reference to this lot and 'open and accountable is an
oxymoron. No wonder I am having trouble separating democratic issues
from partisan issues.
My thanks to the
various bloggers who I have quoted and linked to in this piece, its
getting hard to keep up without help!
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