24 Nov Kady smells a stonewall

The CBC’s Kady O’Malley brings prescient analysis—and that rarest of journalistic qualities, a political memory—to the Conservative scheme to fabricate a dastardly opposition “refusal” to hear diplomat David Mulroney rebut fellow diplomat Richard Colvin’s account of how Canada turned a blind eye to Afghan security officials’ torture of detainees our forces turned over to them. Here’s the plan:

1. Refuse to turn over documents bearing on Colvin’s testimony. Invoke national security, of course.
2. Have Mulroney show up, uninvited, and demand to be be heard immediately, before MPs have any opportunity to prepare for his testimony, let alone see the documentary evidence bearing on his behaviour in Afghanistan.
3. Howl in phony outrage over the opposition’s refusal to let Mulroney “clear his name” after Colvin’s “completely unfounded” allegations.

O’Malley points out that this is exactly the same strategy the Harper Government used last year when a pesky Commons committee investigated illegal Conservative campaign financing.

Throughout that week of special mid-recess hearings in August 2008, a series of party-connected witnesses alternately failed to appear, citing improper service, or, in a few memorable instances, deliberately did so on days when they weren’t actually listed on the schedule, whereupon they would demand to be allowed to testify immediately. When gently but firmly rebuffed by the chair, they would storm out of the room to the waiting media throng, insisting all the way that they were being silenced by the tyrannical opposition majority.

In fact, I was sitting not more than a few inches away from the party’s then-political director, Doug Finley—now, of course, a senator—when he showed up, bright and more than a little early, three days before he was scheduled to appear. Squeezing himself in at the table alongside the scheduled witnesses, he informed the chair he was ready to take questions; after he was, entirely predictably, rebuffed, he very nearly had to be removed by Hill security when he refused to vacate the seat. When his name came up on the witness list later that week, however, he was nowhere in sight.

And how is her analysis holding up? So far Mulroney has asked to appear before the committee, and, unbidden, boarded a plane from China to Ottawa for that purpose. In the Commons yesterday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper urged MPs “not to muzzle” civil servants who want to rebut Colvin’s testimony.

Opposition members of the committee have asked to see cabinet minutes from the time, all memos to and from Colvin, and human rights reports given to the defence department. Harper says the government “has and will continue to make all legally available information available.”

Legally available. You know. The ones that don’t have to be withheld to protect national security.