Mr. Baird, shrugging-off critical questions in question period in attempted misdirection, claims that a fund-raising letter by Liberal Party national director Rocco Rossi is ” … raising money on the backs of our men and women in uniform by maligning Canada …”
This attack-dog tactic has no connection to reality, of course. Judge for yourself – what Mr Rossi in fact said is this:
“Canada’s reputation as a human rights champion is on the line. Let’s stop Stephen Harper before he makes Canada a place we can’t recognize.
“The Afghan detainee scandal has the government’s spin machine on overdrive. First the Conservatives called Richard Colvin, the courageous public servant who testified about prisoner abuse at a parliamentary committee last week, a Taliban ‘dupe.’ Now, we’ve learned that Mr Colvin copied the Office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs on his warnings, suggesting that those at the highest levels of government were aware of the situation.
“It’s textbook US Republican-style attack politics, except this time it’s undermining Canada’s mission to bring democracy and respect for the rule of law to Afghanistan. We owe it to our troops, our diplomats, and to Canada’s international reputation to find the truth about what happened. In times like these, no one can afford to sit on the political sidelines.”
Nowhere here is there anything untoward regarding our men and women in the military. And nowhere any maligning of Canada. There is criticism of the Harper government, of course, but despite Mr. Baird’s bewilderment on this point, the Harber government is not Canada.
There is also a deep concern that the Harper government is failing our Canadian values, and in doing so is putting our Afghanistan objectives at risk. The risk emanates from a government that looks for scapegoats and dodges and weaves when we try to find the truth, leaving us all, including our military, swinging in the wind.
We have a military complaints commission that can’t do its work because the Harper government, hiding behind a smokescreen of “national security,” is blocking a witness whose message is not to their liking. And, now, a parliamentary committee, in its own turn trying to shed light on the matter, is similarly thwarted. Yet the Harper government all while tells us to “move along – nothing to see here!”
Let’s have an end to the duck and cover, and let the truth be known.
