Month: May 2007

In the last election campaign, Prime Minister Paul Martin spent the last few days of the campaign suggesting that a Harper government would move to restrict abortion access rights. Harper, for his part, said the grassroots of his party had voted in March, 2005 to preserve the status quo on abortion access rights — and Harper agreed with that position.

I can recall pointing out in some reports at the time the hypocrisy of Martin’s attacks because many members of the Liberal caucus then and now would, if they had the chance, vote to roll back abortion access rights.

And indeed, it is a Liberal that has a bill before the current Parliament that would restrict abortion access. Paul Steckle — who celebrates his birthday today, by the way — introduced Bill C-338 last June, a private members bill that, if passed into law, would make abortion illegal after the 20th week of pregnancy.

Steckle, I suspect, may speak about this at today’s March For Life demonstration on Parliament Hill.

His leader, Stephane Dion, was asked by reporters about that bill after Question Period yesterday:

Reporter:   One of your MPs, Paul Steckle, has Bill C-338.  It's a private member's bill to restrict abortion … I want to ask you about that.  [Thursday]'s the big March for Life.  Today the Pope was saying any Catholic that votes in favour of abortion is automatically excommunicated.  In light of that is 338 the type of bill you'd give a free vote to or —

Hon. Stéphane Dion: No, the party doesn't want to revisit this issue. 

Reporter:   But would it be a whipped vote then?  I mean it's one of your MPs that brought it forward.  Would you just tell your caucus to vote against it?

Hon. Stéphane Dion: I just want to say the point of view of the party is that we don't revisit this issue.

 

Dion is essentially responding to a hypothetical question here because private members bills almost never get passed. This bill, like similar bills before it over the last decade, may wither and die on the order paper or in committee.

But I point this out because, so far as I know,  Dion has not yet said how he or his party would handle a vote in the House on abortion access rights. If you’ve got a link or other information about Dion’s position on this issue, I’d be pleased to be corrected. Would he whip MPs? Whip his cabinet as Martin did on the same-sex marriage vote? Would he allow Liberals to vote their conscience?

This issue may come up again today for, if last year’s event was any indication, there will likely be several hundred people on Parliament Hill today to demonstrate in support of legislation like Steckle’s (I counted 2,200 last year; organizers said there were many times more than that). Last year at the March for Life event, many Conservative MPs — including Jason Kenney who would later become Secretary of State — joined three Liberal MPs on the speaker’s platform at this event. Those three Liberals were Steckle, Paul Szabo and Tom Wappel.

Harper is on the record that he would allow all Conservative MPs, including cabinet members, to vote as they see fit.

NDP leader Jack Layton and Bloc Quebecois Gilles Duceppe see the issue differently and would whip their MPs to vote to protect abortion access rights.

Green Party leader Elizabeth May, to my knowledge, has not said what she would do if she led a party in the House with MPs and such a vote came up but, when she ran in a by-election last year in London, she sounded personally uncomfortable with the issue of abortion though she she promised to fight for and defend her party’s platform which calls for the protection of abortion access rights.

The Canadian Press just moved this story:

OTTAWA (CP) _ A red-faced Tory MP is apologizing after his assistant impersonated him _ and provided false information _ in an e-mail exchange with a constituent over the hot-button issue of Afghan detainees.

An e-mail from Gord Brown's parliamentary office, dated May 2, claimed that every alleged case of abuse involving Afghan detainees had been investigated and proven to be unfounded. That despite the fact the Afghan government has yet to finish an investigation into the torture claims.

The e-mail to Randi Davidson, obtained by The Canadian Press, was signed by Brown, the member for Leeds-Grenville. But Brown says the note was written by his assistant, Mark King, without his knowledge.

“Those are not my views. They don't reflect my view. That staff member has been reprimanded for sending that out,'' Brown (left) said in an interview.

“He shouldn't have sent it out to begin with and he shouldn't have sent it out with my name it on. I'm not very happy about it.''

And here is the letter Brown’s constituent received :

From: Brown, Gord – M.P. [mailto:Brown.G@parl.gc.ca]

Sent: May 2, 2007 11:32 AM

To: Randi Davidson’

Subject: RE: disgusting

Randi,

Thank you for this email.

My assistant Mark King showed me your previous correspondence along with his response and the only thing I can do is confirm what he has written to you.

Let me try to explain by responding to your latest email step by step.

Neither Mark nor the Prime Minister are in the habit of telling lies.

Every report of abuse, upon investigation, has been found to have originated with the Taliban. It may arrive here via different channels, but the originating source is always the same.

The key to this is that the complaints are investigated.

The second key to this is the fact that the people who are making the complaints to westerners are the same people who rape, kill and jail women and female children, who conscript male children into their “army” and who blow up aid workers and kill our soldiers. The soldiers and the aid workers have been invited to Afghanistan by the now democratically elected government to help the country recover from decades of abuse at the hands of these same people who are now saying they are being abused.

There are 60 countries involved in this UN sanctioned mission and every one of them is hearing the same thing from the Taliban. They have been hearing it from the very first day of the mission. The Liberals heard it when they were in government. We heard it when they were in government.

It has only been in the past three weeks that the Liberals have decided to bring this to the House of Commons – where they have privilege by the way – and make these allegations public. They are doing this strictly for political gain. If they truly believed any of these allegations they would have acted a long time ago. They, after all, publicly sent our soldiers and aid workers to Afghanistan in 2002.

The Maher Arar case did not occur under our watch. This was a Liberal issue.

The final issue you address is the Prime Minister's staff. The Prime Minister – and other government officials – are allotted a budget for staff each year. They are free to allocate it as they see fit. I will forward your comments to him.

Jennifer Ditchburn's story is what is called in journalism a “sidebar.” Journalists are trained to take any news story and stretch it out in as many ways as they possibly can. Think of a spider's web. The story is at the centre of the web and there are many spokes reaching out in many different directions. It can be like following a family tree. What is at the end can have little resemblance to the initial story.

Journalists have also not been able to find any evidence of abuse so they are “growing” the story to keep it alive.

If you use the Arar story as a comparison, as Jennifer is doing, there they were able to find evidence of abuse. Here they can not.

My assistant Mark is a journalist by profession. He has many contacts in the industry including one of the international producers at CNN. He is in contact with him about what journalists in Afghanistan are turning up on this story. It is exactly the same information. The Taliban has a well-rehearsed on-going campaign directed at the westerners.

There is little else to say about this issue.

Gord

Gord Brown, Member of Parliament

Leeds-Grenville

810 Justi <<image001.jpg>> ce Building

Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6

Tel: 613-992-8756

Fax: 613-996-9171

The latest voter intentions survey from Nik Nanos’ firm SES Research has the federal Conservatives and Liberals in a dead heat with the Green Party gaining ground. In fact, for the first time in the polling history of SES, the Green Party has more “national” support than the Bloc Quebecois.

“A combination of factors have been at play in the past month including focus on the new Conservative Environmental Plan and a greater focus on the Afghanistan Mission. This all adds up to a political stalement. What has also been interesting in the past few months is the steady decline of the BQ and the major voter swings in Quebec between the Liberals and the Conservatives,” Nanos says on his blog.

Here’s the numbers (the number in brackets is the percentage point change from the pollsters’s last foray in the field with this question, on April 5)  :

For those parties you would consider voting for federally, could you please rank your top two current local preferences? (Committed Voters Only – First Choice)

1. Liberal 33% (0)
2. Conservative Party 32% (-4)
3. NDP 17% (+1)
4. Green Party 10% (+4)
5. BQ 9%(-1)

The survey of 1,000 voters was done between April 26 and May 1. The pollster says the results are accurate to within 3.4 percentage points 19 times out of 20.