Harper quickly hammers nation back into shape
The firmness and speed at which Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his cabinet members have started to turn our nation right-side-up has to give the Liberals some qualms.
First, we had a decision to end funding to the Palestinian Authority so long as its governing body, the terrorist group Hamas, refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist and also until Hamas stops its terrorist activities itself.
If Paul Martin’s Liberals had retained power, it’s pretty safe to assume we’d still be shipping the PA $25 million a year with Martin telling everyone to have patience.
That Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay acted so quickly—Canada was the first country to suspend aid—speaks for itself.
Then, basically on the same front, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day slammed the Tamil Tigers group on the banned list of terrorist organizations in Canada.
The RCMP and the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) had repeatedly asked Martin to put this group on the list.
Not only did he refuse, he actually toadied up to the Tamil Tigers—pandering for votes in the Tamil community in Canada.
The Tigers, fighting for an independent state in Sri Lanka, and using terrorism as the tool, have even been extorting money from Tamil-Canadians—$5,000 from individuals and $100,000 from businesses—to finance their activities.
Maybe now that the extortion game is over, relieved Tamils might thank Day by voting Conservative en masse come the next election.
On a far different front, Environment Minister Rona Ambrose’s admission the Kyoto protocol on so-called greenhouse gas emissions just won’t work in Canada is a breath of common-sense fresh air.
With emissions now 24% higher than in 1990, to pretend—as the Jean Chretien/Paul Martin duo did—that we can reduce them to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012 is a sham.
We’d have to close just about every industrial plant in the country down and take every car off the road to accomplish that.
Better to go the route of the U.S. and Australia and find realistic and workable solutions. Coincidentally, even without the draconian Kyoto standards, the U.S. has done a better job of cutting back emissions than has Canada.
As I said in “Kyoto U-turn” (Oct. 4) when someone such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, an early and enthusiastic backer of Kyoto, suddenly decides it’s unworkable without serious economic ramifications, one knows the mirage is playing itself out.
Blair decided he had to be “brutally honest” about the fall-out from Kyoto, and he was. We never got honesty on the issue during the Chretien and Martin years, but we are obviously going to get honesty during the Harper years.
Somewhat overshadowing all of this came the Conservatives Federal Accountability Act, a sprawling 317-section piece of legislation to put real teeth into fighting corruption in government involving politicians, bureaucrats, lobbyists, political staffers and the like.
Treasury Board President John Baird described the act as carrying a “hammer” of enforcement against those who break the rules, as in the case of AdScam.
Incidentally, in the very week the act was introduced in Parliament, one of the most infamous participants in AdScam, Paul Coffin, started to serve an 18-month jail sentence for defrauding taxpayers of $1.5 million.
Even though his company, Coffin Communications, had carefully submitted 373 invoices under the sponsorship program, Coffin’s original sentence consisted basically of making a handful of speeches on ethics in business!
Justices of the Quebec Court of Appeal thankfully disagreed and decided he needed time in the slammer. It’s hard to see how the original sentence could have been a deterrent to anyone else ripping off taxpayers.
The appeal court’s move certainly gives us more faith in the Quebec justice system.
It will surely be of interest to see how the Liberals, in particular, react to the provisions of the ethics act. It’s fairly certain Jack Layton’s New Democrats will be all for it, and hard to see how Gilles Duceppe’s Bloc Quebecois could go against it.
The Liberals and their hangers on have been at the trough for so long they hardly know right from wrong.
Fortunately, Harper’s Conservatives do.
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