What the pundits have missed, partly because Team Trudeau's initial ham-handed responses obscured it, is a defense that remains open to the PMO....
Just after Christmas, I noted an angry denunciation of Chief Theresa Spence and the Idle No More movement by a Harper-friendly journalist. I took it as an early sign that Spence holds "outsized potential to cause trouble for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government." Toronto Star columnist Chantal Hébert seems to agree, albeit somewhat convolutedly: On the societal role of government, the gap between the various non-Conservative constituencies in this country has always been smaller than the gap between those who support the current government and those who don’t. The ranks of those who sympathize with the activist goals of the Idle No More movement stretch...
Chantal Hébert makes a good point. Canadians only got to hear Richard Colvin's testimony because we have a minority Parliament. The Conservatives had previously used a national security clause in the Canada Evidence Act to prevent Colvin from testifying to a Military Police Complaints Tribunal hearing. But not having a Parliamentary majority, they were powerless to prevent him from testifying to the Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan. Hébert is skeptical of claims the government was out of the loop: [T]the government could not have been in the dark about the potential prevalence of torture unless the country's top civil...