Thursday, December 10, 2009

Who here believes in parliamentary democracy?

Come on - hands up.
Yes, quite a few of us actually.
Yet judging from the vote in the House today on a motion demanding the release of uncensored government documents to the Special Committee on Afghanistan charged with oversight of the 'mission', almost half of our elected MPs do not. The motion passed by a mere 2 votes - 145 to 143. I find that quite astonishing.

The docs, already made available to journos and committee witnesses sympathetic to the Cons but not released to the committee, would not be disclosed to you, me, and the national press. The docs could remain in camera. Yet even that amount of parliamentary oversight is too much for the almost half of the people we elected to represent us who apparently do not much care for the concept of parliamentary privilege.

So I have to ask - what do they think they doing there?
.

4 comments:

thwap said...

Yikes! I'd assumed MPs voted down party lines.

I'll go check out the voting results in more detail later today.

"National Security" indeed.

Anonymous said...

Yikes indeed. Our minority government is going for operating outside parliamentary law.
Unfortunately the number of people in Canada who think this matters would not fill the Saddledome.

Ian

Alison said...

Thwap, I think the vote was exactly along party lines with all Cons in place and 20 odd Libs, Bloc and Dippers either missing or paired.

Ian, sad but true and Steve knows this all too well. It seems to us that they repeat their simplistic bs like morons but they're really just getting their 5 sec sound bite out.

opit said...

10-4 on that 5 sec sound byte.
. Did you pick up on the Harperites being prepped by Rove-style consultants prior to elections a few years back ? They were to curb their religious bigotry and spew so as not to interfere with the advertising campaign.
I've followed BradBlog down south of the border to keep tabs on the department of dirty tricks' techniques. But we inherited many from across the puddle as well.
Here's my ongoing collection of sundry commentaries and sources on the topic
http://opitslinkfest.blogspot.com/2009/07/perception-alteration.html
If you think you'd rather find people monitoring the situation, you can check the index at my.opera.com/oldephartte/links/

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