It’s now more than five hours since Benazir Bhutto was assassinated.
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has already done a live televised statement calling for calm in his country. Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, who was meeting with Bhutto hours before she was killed, did a televised press conference, to express his horror. From Crawford, Texas where is on holiday, U.S. President George Bush gave a brief televised address to condemn the killings and urge Musharraf to press ahead with elections. From Scotland where he was holiday, UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown chimed in.
Here in Canada, the Bloc Quebecois issued a press release. The NDP’s foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar was quick to put out his party’s position and do some television interviews about the subject. Liberal Foreign Affairs Critics Bob Rae has done several one-on-one interviews and is now holding a press conference in Toronto. Liberal MP Jim Karygiannis even organized a town hall meeting in his Toronto-area riding with the local Pakistani community.
And, now, as I look up, there are a steady stream of briefings at the U.S. State Department to help citizens of that country understand how Bhutto’s death will affect that country’s relationship with Pakistan and the entire region.
So how about our government?
Nothing. Bupkus. Nada. No Harper. Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier is MIA. Nothing from his junior minister, Helen Guergis. Nothing from his Parliamentary Secretary Deepak Obhrai. We are told that someone at PMO or the Department of Foreign Affairs is working on a statement.
Here at CTV, we did manage to track down Liberal-turned-Conservative MP Wajid Khan (a former member of the Pakistani Air Force) who was in Jedda, Saudi Arabia, and talk to him by phone.
Conservatives sometimes wonder why they can’t seem to connect with so-called “ethnic” voters. Well, here’s a clue: Their political opponents are already out in force today supporting the Pakistani community in Canada; talking to them; trying to understand how events in that country have now changed Canada and the world we live in. That’s called “getting it”. How tough is to write up a couple of paragraphs telling the world that Canada, too, condemns these attacks?