Friday, January 29, 2010

What's Next?

I think the Anti-Prorogation rallies were successful in that they gave harper a major public-relations black-eye. But as someone wrote on some other blog's comments section somewhere, back in the day, various parliaments blithely ignored hand-written petitions with over ONE MILLION signatures, so there's no reason for harper to tremble in fear at 200,000 people on Facebook (quite a few of whom are there to troll and rationalize for harper) and tens of thousands of people standing a shouting for an afternoon.

Furthermore, the NDP and to a lesser extent the Liberals are proposing necessary reforms to limit a prime minister's recourse to prorogation in the future. I think it was actually Ignatieff who had said there weren't rules before because no prime minister was so debased and anti-democratic as to have so blatantly abused their power the way harper has. So, if they get passed these reforms will be a good thing.

But what I'd like to focus on, once again, is harper's obstruction of open inquiry into the treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan. What I want to focus on is holding harper to account for his behaviour in Afghanistan. I'm tired of the secrecy. I'm tired of the lies. I'm tired of putting up with this undemocratic imposition of an unpopular imperialist project.

Both the Liberals and the harpercons knew (and know) that full disclosure and discussion of "the Mission" (tm.) in Afghanistan would mean the end of "the Mission" and that's why the whole thing has been smothered in a blanket of obfuscation and lies. harper crossed the line though. It will be so healthy for our team to send him to prison. And everyone else who ordered these abominable practices.

2 comments:

Mark Richard Francis said...

Anything that underscores Harper's contempt of Parliament should be pursued.

Re: petitions... having them ignored by the government is showing contempt for the Canadian people. That's useful for us.

djn said...

But what were these petitions of 1 million? And were there any demonstrations associated with the demands of the petition?

I ask these questions because it is quite easy to ignore one million signatures when there isn't any evidence of that sort of sentiment on the streets.