Tuesday 12 January 2010

"Everybody knows that Parliament was prorogued in order to shut down the Afghan inquiry"

It is obvious to most people that the main reason Harper prorogued parliament was to avoid answering questions about the Afghan detainee issue. It was becoming very clear that the Conservative government were/are guilty of knowingly handing over detainees who would be tortured. This is a war crime. They have refused the order to hand over the documents and they have been caught up in their lies. If parliament had of continued on, the Conservatives would have been completely exposed for what they did and the Canadian public would be crying for an end to their governing and parliament would have definitely lost confidence in the Conservative government. Here, in a recent CBC interview, Tom Flanagan, former chief of staff to Harper, says pretty much the same thing:

Flanagan lays into PM's prorogation defence - Inside Politics
In a panel interview on Power & Politics with Evan Solomon, Tom Flanagan, former chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, doesn't mince words on the prime minister's suggestion on Monday that the instability of the current minority Parliament hurts the markets.

Flanagan: "Well, you know, it actually doesn't make much sense to me. The market just in this past year had, I think, its greatest increase in a single year, and that was in, during a minority government. I don't think the antics of politicians have actually that much to do with the market, i think that's based on economic fundamentals as investors see them. So i think the prime minister is stretching a bit when he made that comment.

Solomon: "What do you think the strategy is behind that, Tom?"

Flanagan:
"Well, I don't know that there's much strategy behind it. I think his problem is that the government's talking points really don't have much credibility. Everybody knows that Parliament was prorogued in order to shut down the Afghan inquiry, and the trouble is that the government doesn't want to explain why that was necessary. Personally I think it was highly defensible action, but instead of having an adult defence of it, the government comes up with these childish talking points. So then you try and backfill with other stuff that doesn't make much sense either. So it's a self-created problem."

Flanagan, for good measure, then added: "I hope nobody thinks I'm a Harper stooge anymore."


More on this here:
McQuaig: Proroguing Less Trouble Than Sitting
And even in the, gasp!, National Post (this is old news, but to see the NP publish such a news item...) :
Scholars add their voices to prorogation protest




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